In the late 1950s Paris was quite a different place than it is today.
Still reeling from the devastating effects of the previous decade’s world war the future of French society was torn between the communist totalitarianism of the U.S.S.R. and the United States’ model of individualist laissez-faire capitalism. Amid this backdrop a group called Situationist International emerged to criticize both and to reclaim culture from both dictator and monopoly alike.
Heavily influenced by Marxist philosophy they strongly believed in the playful construction of situations that leads to awareness and subsequent transformation of society. Think of it as re-creating those imaginary adventures you had when you were a child only now amplified by your greater intellectual maturity and imbued with purpose.
Though the Situationists’ constructive efforts were ultimately unsuccessful in revolutionizing France (though they did culminate in the student protests of May 1968 that irreversibly changed French society) at least one of their creative ideas can be implemented during your time here at Pepperdine: the “dérive which literally translates to English as the drift.” Rather than spending one’s free time trapped in some sort of structured activity the Situationists advocated engaging in the discipline of psychogeography or drifting through a geographic area with the intent of experientially studying the impact of society on the emotions and behavior of individuals.
Guy Debord one of the most prominent founding members of Situationist International writes in “The Theory of the Dérive” that such drifts “involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.” Such travel is ultimately transformative as it forces us to expand our awareness of distinct psychic zones within a given geographical area. The political writer Hakim Bey in his landmark essay “Overcoming Tourism” (which I highly recommend to any students going abroad) explains that the Situationists were “disgusted with themselves for never leaving the usual ruts and pathways of their habit driven lives; they realized they’d never even seen Paris.”
The group determined “to carry out structureless random expeditions through the city hiking or sauntering by day drinking by night opening up their own tight little world into a terra incognita of slums suburbs gardens and adventures.” (Note to Pepperdine students who feel stuck on campus: L.A. is absolutely ripe for drifting.) As Bey describes “They became revolutionary versions of Baudelaire’s famous flaneur the idle stroller the displaced subject of urban capitalism. Their aimless wandering became insurrectionary praxis.”
The Situationists’ drifts were thus designed above all to self-induce liberation from “urban capitalism” and its accompanying displacement and isolation. At first glance it may seem unthinkable to need freedom from a system that has brought so much material prosperity to our lives. It is important to remember however that positing wealth (and the supposed utility it brings) as the road to true happiness clouds our vision. Indeed it often blinds us to the way that the current capitalist system often simplifies the dignity of human labor as mere economic input. And when labor is reduced to a simple mechanical task with the end of generating profit individuals often become both emotionally and physically isolated from their communities.
Debord offers a solution to this isolation in another Situationist treatise stating “We must publicize desirable alternatives to the spectacle of the capitalist way of life so as to destroy the bourgeois idea of happiness.” The act of drifting destroys the capitalist distinction between spectator and spectacle recreating a union between the individual the environment and the community. Only by consciously integrating with our physical and social surroundings can we experience contentment that is far beyond the delusions of material individualistic utility.
So Pepperdine drift away.