The Northwest Passage

He was speaking again of its smallest version, where the desire to take over the world was first the desire to be in the world, a desire driven by the conviction that one cannot truly be in the world until the alienation of each from all has been vanquished, until necessity has been banished, until the world has been changed. Trocchi was talking again about the derive - there, he said, for as long as it lasted, you were in the world as if you were changing it, and there were intimations of utopia everywhere you looked. "The difficulties of the derive are those of freedom," Debord wrote in 1956 in "Theory of the Derive." "It all rests on the belief that the future will precipitate an irreversible change in the behaviour and the decor of present-day society. One day, we will construct cities for drifting ... but with light retouching, one can utilize certain zones which already exist. One can utilize certain persons who already exist." Even if he had been used, that was what Trocchi remembered most sweetly, so he talked about getting drunk, chasing oblivion into the black hole, the way out, the Northwest Passage.

From an interview with Alexander Trocchi in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard, 1989).

Mastery of a new game

Today, we consider psychogeography and the derive to be provisional disciplines, methodically defined, with which to experiment on some aspects of the construction of ambiance and new situationist comportments. We think that the transmission of the results, even those apparently derisory, is the capital problem of psychogeography and that, through this transmission alone, it will be in relation with the architecture that we must invent. I believe that, at the moment in which we have begun to experiment with the derive, this activity has for many of us a meaning that is more directly moving. Perhaps there exists a more irrational tendency, a tendency to expect the discovery of a kind of psychogeographical Great Passage, beyond which we will attain mastery of a new game: the adventures of our lives themselves.

From Guy Debord's preface to Ralph Rumney, Psychogeographical Venice (Paris, 1957).

Refugee Tales

... For all that the Tales focused attention on traumatic and unjust events, the walk itself was charged with relief. For those of us who had been detained, this sense of relief came from being freely out and about, a way of being in space that for some hadn't been available for several years. For others the relief came of ocupying a space in a way that was not governed by the prevailing discourse.

The walking itself was the key. As the environment altered day by day, so the project's shared reality itself became dynamic. With each new situation - each new formation of people or landscape - new possibilities of conversation emerged. Other forms of conduct were not just theoretically possible but were, however temporarily, actually the case ...

From David Herd on Refugee Tales in Resurgence 295, March/April 2016.