How Avant-garde can Help us Reimagine Space after Lockdown
Dérive, or the French avant-gardist way to unplug, recharge, and find peace in nature, is painfully crucial to bring back to the debate table. As we move into our second year of the pandemic, and with many of us stuck at home with limited spaces to move, I wonder how many of us got used to strolling around our living rooms and hallways like they can replace the outdoor sprints we pride ourselves for finishing. So little space, so many steps to count still, and our smart devices are stuck on step 200; classic. The fury, and sometimes guilt, that accompanies our lockdown morning routines might be stemming from something more fundamental than pandemic burnout.
In creative philosophy, Dérive stands for the creative resistance movement that started around the mid 1950s by French avant-garde groups. Specifically, French letterist and situationist Guy Debord, creator of “the theory of Dérive”, asked artists to join the move to detour, to praise an alternative, so as to present a playful behavioral and cultural opposition. In the geographical sense, and as with the case with situationism thought and psychology, Dérive asks us to adopt an awareness devoid of individuality and rather located in ‘the situation’. Debord popularized theories around psychogeography and invited other artists to reimagine space in the city by refusing to follow streets and roads but rather creating new streets to follow. So, quite literally, a situationist would ignore outdoor signs and direction boards and choose to take on different routes, crossing streets with cars and going around lamp posts.
Psychogeography; sounds cool. The locus of the situationists’ movement was to drift, to swift, to find replacements for the physical — and metaphysical — roads that a supposed authority has outlined for the public. I’m assuming this one sentence raised twelve different connotations in your mind, but that’s the point. Even if the situationists thought their work revolutionary, over time, their ideologies continue to compile new readings in a quite overwhelming manner. Take that sentence for example: if we want to dissect it to really understand its relevance and effect today, we’ll have to place the words drift and swift in both geographical contexts and creative or philosophical endeavors. Then, we’ll define the concept of dispensability in order to understand what it means to “find replacements”, before bringing that concept back to geographical tangibility. After, of course, we’ll distinguish between physical reality and metaphysical existence to be able to find the “space” in between both concepts, and which the theory of Dérive is based on. Finally, vocabularies like “authority” and “public” will have to be contextualized too according to regional and/or global specificity, relevance to capitalism, and time period.
It’s not easy to bring back avant-gardist thought into our realities; not only because of their marginality outside of creative circles or their absurdity and oftentimes perverse exploitation of individuality, dignity, and ethics; but also because the implications of simple theories like psychogeography might expand eternally onto numerous examples and with no clear goal. But to be frank, Dérive has never been more relevant to us. As we stay at home for the hundredth day in a row, how can we not daydream about playfully strolling down those forbidden, empty, streets with no real desire to go back to being locked inside our mini apartments. It sounds attractive, and exciting, and so desirable — that’s what avant-garde sounds like at first, before it quickly declines into a dark, melancholic, abyss of exploitative behavior.
To bring back rationality, the concept of Dérive revolves around the idea of trespassing — trespassing the state, trespassing regional limitations, trespassing geographic plans — and which has been an increasingly popular concept in decolonial thought. If we take the act of trespassing and rid it from all cultural, ethnic, intellectual, and geographical offense, the action itself might end up sounding familiar and even tempting. That is because the act is in fact familiar, and it can be easy for our minds to find resonance with the simple idea of intrusion if we connect it back to Dérive. At the end of the day, and given our constant desire to find newness in the ordinary, we can somewhat sympathize with little red riding hood who just wanted to test out a new seemingly harmless and fun route to her grandmother’s house.
Stories like red riding hood didn’t come out of distorted or forced imaginations. Instead, our human need to fetch new roads continues to drive both our actions and imaginations even when our realities can (over)satisfy our necessary needs. It’s like getting excited about unlocking new levels in a video game where you get to experience a new land for the first time. The feeling is so familiar and so satisfying.
So, why do we continuously desire to trespass? Why is there so much pleasure in thinking about untouched lands?
The notion of occupying the sky is unthinkable, and just as grotesquely bizarre as the idea of colonizing space or entire galaxies. And yet, our ears are used to hearing phrases like “reach for the sky”, “the sky’s the limit, and “expanding one’s horizon”. We are so used to comprehending such expressions as metaphors even when the vocabularies they hold are slightly suggestive of land exploitation. By setting our focus on taking over the sky, we are quite literally redirecting our minds to accept trespassing as an entrepreneurial, innovative, successful, and creative way to excel as social and economic citizens. The creativity that this method entails is particularly connected to the concept of Dérive, and which brings us back to the main ‘situation’: lockdown.
Quarantine makes it hard for us to reimagine that we have control over space. The same park that we used to stroll past and around is out of touch now, and the streets that connected us through the city are no longer memorable or tangible. And to be contextual, there are only a few things more avant-gardist than a global pandemic — I bet the situationists are rolling in their graves as they watch us reach our five hundredth step going back to the kitchen for another pre-lunch snack, walking back and forth through the same exact hallway. Imagine what Debord would be doing locked alone at home. Still, when we go back to being outdoors, are we going to return to our playful exploitations of space?
I want to invite us all to rethink our relationship to space. The frustration that we carry today as we stay at home must not guide our acts against land tomorrow but instead fuel our desires to respect this land and its natural routes. Land is nature, and as such, it needs us to form a relationship and a friendship with it through which both partners can thrive.
