Sadler, Simon. The situationist city. 1998
As its name implied, psychogeography
attempted to combine subjective and objective
modes of study. On the one hand it recognized that
the self cannot be divorced from the urban environ
ment; on the other hand, it had to pertain to more
than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be
useful in the collective rethinking of the city. The
reader senses Debord’s desperation to negotiate
this paradox in his “Theorie de la dérive” (Theory of
the derive), a key document first published in the
Belgian surrealist journal Les levres nues in 1956
and republished in Internationale Situationniste in
1958. The drift, Debord explained, entailed the
sort of “ playful-constructive behavior” that had
always distinguished situationist activities from
mere pastimes. The drift should not be confused,
then, with “classical notions of the journey and the
stroll”; drifters weren’t like tadpoles in a tank,
“stripped . . . of intelligence, sociability and sexu
ality,” but were people alert to “the attractions of
the terrain and the encounters they find there,”
capable as a group of agreeing upon distinct, spon
taneous preferences for routes through the city.23
Psychogeography thus produced a social
geography of the city, especially important at a
time when social geography was still struggling to
emerge from the shadow of academic geography.
Against academic geography’s “scientific” taxono
my of the physical factors that supposedly deter
mine the character of a space, social geography
theorized space as the product of society84 It was
an approach pioneered in the late nineteenth cen
tury by the former Communard [Elysée] Reclus, who recog
nized in geography “nothing but history in
space.”85 Situationists were naturally inclined
toward the goals of social geography, which opposed
academic geography’s reduction of the city to “the
undifferentiated state o f the visible-readable realm “
(to use Lefebvre’s d is dainful phrase) and to the
homogenization o f the conflicts that produce capi
talist space 86 Fragmented yet tied together by their
arrows, situationist maps explored the very same
“three orders of facts”— “class struggle, the quest
for equilibrium , and the sovereign decision of the
individual”— that Reclus claimed were revealed by
the pursuit of social geography. 87
The experiments in detournement that
situationists carried out on literature, political the
ory, and film (all of Debord’s films were built
around detournement) were intended as just the
start. The situationists aimed to eventually
“detourn” bits of city.
This inclination to transgress the boundaries
found in culture and cities also characterized the
work o f Henri Lefebvre, which was so seamlessly
assimilated by situationism , and vice versa, that for
the purposes of this discussion it is hardly possible
or useful to distinguish the two.
Above all, they sought to understand that
moment when people gain insight into the rational
ized and alienated patterns o f their everyday lives.
Lefebvre’s interpretation of the eruptive “moment”
as embodying “fleetin g but decisive sensations (of
delight, surrender, disguise, surprise, horror or out
rage) which were somehow revelatory of the totality
of possibilities contained in daily existence” could
stand just as well for the situationists’ notion of the
“situation.”88 Both Lefebvre and the situationists
looked to the declaration of the Paris Commune as
history’s sublime “moment” and “situation,” when
ordinary citizens decided to become self-governing.
“The Commune was the biggest festival o f the
nineteenth century,” the second situationist thesis
on the Paris Commune declared. “Underlying the
events of that spring of 1871 one can see the
insurgents’ feeling that they had become masters
of their own history, not so much on the level of
‘governmental’ politics as on the level of their
everyday life.”
