taking the dérive to the void

by Michael Templeton

I am not a retail person. I do not shop to unwind or relax. In fact, I find the world of retail and selling to be extremely stressful. Even a trip to the grocery can be overwhelming to me. I don’t know why this is. I am not shy or fearful. I just do not like these spaces filled with people voraciously consuming. Even if they are buying what they need, it all just makes me feel anxious. As a result of all this, I rarely find myself in those suburban sprawling nightmares that are the contemporary version of malls. I believe they are now called “lifestyle centers.” These places are nightmares to me. Usually right off the highway, access is only available via a complex miasma of lanes that lead in multiple directions at the same time, confusing and terrifying spaces of flimsy separation in the service of what Paul Virilio called a “dromology” of life: a logic and administration of pure speed in which we are doing nothing but overcoming the void before us toward a destination that is itself another void to be overcome. The secondary void for all of us in the retail world is the parking lot which dwarfs the actual space of the shopping destination. In any case, I, like everyone else, occasionally find myself in places like this. In our current age, if you need certain kinds of things, you have to go to places like this to get them. Unless you buy online, which of course is the most likely option for most folks, to get clothing, or bedding, or something durable like a vacuum cleaner, you have no choice but some big box retailer in the great retail spaces that now all come with a name that indicates a “Towne Center.” The old-timey spelling lets us know it is a welcoming spot, although the concept of a center is utterly lost in these spaces.

One of the striking features of retail-land is that I really cannot walk anywhere. It is true that I can walk the distance of one set of stores on one side of the road, but to cross the road is a suicidal proposition. First, there is no sidewalk, and second, even though there are walk lights, crossing in front of almost 100 automobiles that only seconds ago were traveling at 70 MPH (at minimum) is a ridiculously stupid prospect. In short, these worlds are not made for the pedestrian. What is more, people who live around these spaces, in the surrounding suburban land that stretches out over all of America, are not in the habit of thinking about pedestrian culture. They drive everywhere, and this is evidenced by the presence of massive multi-acre parking lots everywhere in these parts of the country. Even high schools now have parking lots that are second only to major league sports stadia. To be a pedestrian in contemporary America is a foreign practice. The United States has forgotten what it is like to walk around and to build your life on foot.

We could take this in a few directions, the growing epidemic of morbid obesity and the set of deadly medical conditions that come with it stands out. The destruction of the environment from fossil fuel is another. Yet, I wonder if there are other issues that attend the loss of the pedestrian in American life and culture. I spent about a decade on foot in a midwestern city that has no reliable mass transit. I know what it is like to spend an hour and half to travel the distance of a 20-minute drive by relying on the bus. I also know what it is like to stand at bus stops that are in extremely dangerous locations, next to busy roads with nothing to protect you from the rush of cars whizzing past you at 50-60-70 miles an hour. I also know what it is like to walk around a contemporary American city dodging drivers who never think to look for a pedestrian crossing a road. I have almost gotten into fist fights with people who thought I was violating their civil rights by making them slow down while I cross in a crosswalk with a walk light. They just cannot comprehend the notion that someone would walk and get in the fucking way. Anyway, I have lived the pedestrian life, and it ain’t easy.

At the same time, being a pedestrian is a magnificent way to experience the world. Stop and think about what is on the ground at any corner in America when you fly by it in your car. There are stories to be told from the contemporary artifacts of litter. The lone shoe, of course, but also the hair weave blown against the fence by the sidewalk. What kind of horrible fight led to that? What child ended up crying over the Beanie Baby sitting in the gutter on a city street? Who drank that 40 ouncer at the bus stop? Who wrote for Anna to call Josh on the pillar of the highway overpass? What became of them? On and on... There is a modern archaeology just waiting to be studied and written in the detritus of the street that is only available to the person traveling on foot. What is more, the plight of the modern pedestrian reveals much about our country and our culture. That so much of our world is simply not walkable tells us a lot. It is no secret or accident that ours is a culture addicted to the automobile and fossil fuel. The fact that the solution to all the problems of fossil fuel has been to just invent another automobile that doesn’t use fossil fuel is another symptom of what we are. There are a lot of ways of dealing with climate change, and switching to electric cars is little more than a distraction as the problem persists and intensifies. Besides, electric cars are still whizzing around at insane speeds in dromotological voids which provide nothing but more voids. Why not think about getting rid of automobiles altogether? That is unthinkable in America where having access to our isolated singular speed-pods is a God-given right, just like guns, I guess.

I am by no means the first person to address this issue, and it was Lewis Mumford years ago, in his colossal work, The City in History, who explained that the origins of nearly all the problems that stem from the modern suburb are due to the fact that it never considered the needs of the pedestrian. It was formed in the complete absence of thought for walking. Mumford explained that “as long as the railroad stop and walking distances controlled suburban growth, the suburb had a form” (506). Now, the contemporary suburb is a formless viral movement that overtakes more and more of the earth year after year, and it can only exist due to the endless expanse of interstate highway which feeds it like a needle and a spoon of cultural existence. The interstate is nothing but a void of pure speed in which, as I said above, there is no real destination, and the vacuous culture of the contemporary sprawling suburb exists as the outgrowth of the void. It is a culture of the void. The logic of suburban life, built on and tethered to the interstate, functions according to the logic of speed, and “speed, by its violence, becomes a destiny at the same time as being a destination” (Virilio. Negative Horizon, 40). The reason there are no sidewalks in suburban retail-land is because walking is not amenable to the ethos of speed. Walking, by definition, is antithetical to speed. Walking is slow, it is inefficient with respect to the destiny of the void, and it is simply not possible to cover the distances between Target and the suburban driveway in a single day. They are literally miles apart. Walking cannot be assimilated to contemporary culture. We cannot exist without our voids.

Given that walking is somehow antithetical to contemporary American life and culture, walking now appears to have something subversive about it. There is something downright countercultural about walking around, especially if you are not going anywhere in particular. Walking for the pure sake of walking is not part of the great work ethic, and even though it does count as exercise, it remains lazy, nevertheless. Plus, you do not need any expensive equipment, so you are not feeding the retail consumer economy. Just out there walking, like a goddamn terrorist. The Situationist International understood the subversive properties of walking and even created a subversive practice they called “the dérive.” Guy Debord explained the dérive as a practice of walking in which “one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (“Theory of the Dérive.” From Situationist International Anthology, 62). Debord tells us to have no other intention but to walk toward the discovery of whatever it is we encounter along the way. From these discoveries, we can begin to make meaningful observations and draw provisional conclusions about the motives and meanings of everyday life in the modern city. What is revealed is the psychology of the geography, and it is all quite deliberate: “Chance is a less important factor in this activity that one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones” (62). The psychogeography of the city, or the suburb, as the case may be, tells us certain details about these places. That access and exit to and from certain areas is regulated is in some sense a given. We cannot enter private property, certain places like police stations and courthouses are strictly regulated, but other places control entrance and access in other ways. We cannot access certain parts of public parks with an automobile. It is difficult to enter some spaces except on foot. Economically exclusive areas of any city maintain high security and surveillance, and on that note we can begin to learn much about the psychogeography of the modern city by walking around in the form of the dérive.

Just given what I have written so far, we can see that the contemporary suburban space is not amenable to the dérive at all. While it is possible to walk in some parts of the suburban spaces, these areas a rigidly designated. They are accessible only through a parking lot, and nearly all of them are under complete surveillance at all times. There are cameras on every square inch of the contemporary suburb, and most of those cameras are privately owned. It would be fun to start talking about Big Brother, but the government is not behind this surveillance, at least not all of it—maybe not even most of it. Individuals with their Ring cameras, housing developments with private security systems, public spaces monitored by private security systems—it goes on forever. Anything you do outside in the modern suburban space is on camera. And I should not single out the suburbs on this topic, the contemporary city is just as surveilled, if not more. In the suburban areas, though, access is rigorously monitored and controlled as well as watched. We are free to move around the city (for the most part. This is changing), but not in the suburban areas. I am not allowed to drive onto other parking spaces other than to use the businesses that are attached to these parking spaces. Lots are monitored, and the Target lot is for Target, not for you to walk over to Chili’s and knock back some margs. In any case, perhaps the most important psychogeographical lesson we can draw from the suburban dérive is that no one wants you to engage in a dérive, and if you do, they will be watching every move you make, recording it, and preparing to use it as evidence against you.

The city is just as instructive. Walking around the contemporary city is a strange experience. To begin, there is hardly a single space that does not come with its own soundtrack. Even as open and free a space as urban parks have a speaker system overhead blasting music over everything you do. Each business plays their own music in front of the doors, and some use music to deliberately drive people away. Convenience stores blast classical music to repel young people in order to cut down on loitering in front of the store. It is difficult to find a space in the city that does not have some kind of sound system playing over the outdoor areas. On the topic of urban parks, a dérive through one of the largest urban parks in the city where I grew up takes you through the brand new dog park, the separated and cordoned off (and heavily monitored) children’s play area, up through the open field that has a schedule of daily events going on nearly all year-round. Then up to the amphitheater area. Finally, back around to the other side, there is a working bar. The point is that the park is not a park; it is a huge urban daycare center with scheduled activities, and it is a space that is rigorously controlled at all times. One does not go to the park to stroll around the park. One goes to the park to perform life for the patrons of life’s performance. No one goes to the park to listen to the birds.

Other parts of the modern city are also revealing. The urban alley is something of a cliché. Shady deals are done in back alleys, and that kind of thing. Alleys have always been a part of urban geography because the spaces that run behind buildings always allowed egress to residents and business owners. The have always been the place for garbage cans and other unsightly realities of life, and it is true, alleys have always been great places to do things you did not want anyone to see. Consequently, alleys have historically been some dodgy parts of the city. The alley is where you would find graffiti. Most graffiti is the common foolishness that is not worth repeating. Other forms of graffiti were genuine art, and this is why the graffiti artist eventually became somewhat legendary. Revs and Cost in New York City where institutions before the graffiti artist became respectable with Banksy and others. In any case, graffiti was both problem and urban street art, and much of it was in alleys. The contemporary city has closed off alleys. New forms of ownership, the engines of gentrification, and the contemporary security state have closed alleys to public access. It is increasingly difficult to wander through urban alleys now except in areas that are now designated as urban art sites as part of the gentrified retail and hospitality areas of the city. Designated artists now paint murals on behalf of the city, and the areas that have been filled with restaurants and high-end bars now host events built around the urban art exhibits. They do this now that they have displaced everyone who once lived in these areas and made way for wealthy occupants who are protected by the same levels of surveillance and security we find in the suburban sprawl. The city has taken on the logic of the suburb to adjust itself to a population of people who grew up in the suburb. Instead of massive parking lots, there are massive parking garages that contain retail and grocery stores, bars and restaurants, and apartments, like a big concentration camp with cocktails.

But you can walk in the city. I will give it that much. It is not as much fun as it was when you could cut through the alleys, but the city still belongs to the pedestrian, at least provisionally. Walking is different in the modern city. It does not serve the same purposes. Just taking the description of the urban park above, people do not walk in the park to walk aimlessly or to just burn up the energy of life. They walk to perform walking. They walk to document their walk snapping photos of everything they see along the way. The huge urban murals provide endless photo opportunities. People go to the park for the sole purpose of taking photos of themselves and their friends in the park. They pose in ways that are meant to appear spontaneous, chasing a frisbee or stretched on a mat in a yoga pose. Pose is the operative term, and all of it is posted online. People enact and perform life in the city to be observed as performers of life in the city, and walking is part of that performance. The city and its pedestrians are now that mass of empty souls who form what the Invisible Committee describe as living in the grip of a specific kind of mood of distance, a mood best named in the Nietzschean term of the Stimmung, a void mood of the void soul.  Bloom is that “spectral, distracted, supremely vacant humanity that no longer accesses any other content than the Stimmung in which it ex-ists, the twilight being for whom there is no longer any real or any self but only Stimmungs (The Theory of the Bloom, 19). There is no real, either for the self or the world in which we walk; there is only the absence, the void of being that has now merged with the void of speed. Unable to disengage ourselves with our void, we now carry the void in ourselves as we enact a self even on a walk around the contemporary city or the suburban lifestyle center. Snapping iPhone photos and posting them on “Insta.”

Works Cited

Knabb, Ken, Editor and Translator. Situationist International Anthology. Revised and Expanded

Edition. Berkely: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.

Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. San

Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989.

Tiqqun. The Theory of the Bloom. Translated by Robert Hurley Creative Commons. 2012.

Virilio, Paul. Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy. Translated by Michael Degener. New

York: Continuum, 2008.

-Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromodology. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Pasadena:

Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2006.

Click here to read Michael’s bio.