Walking in the Drift

​“Under the paving stones, the beach!” – French graffito 

Greetings and welcome back to Cheap Thrills, your source for speculation on the spectacle of modern living, and how to sidestep it by downshifting into a lifestyle less reliant on the systems of media entertainment pushed by McGovCorp. In this edition I’m going to head out on an excursion to extol the many virtues of taking a stroll and how the simple act of walking in this world can become a profound pastime. To that rambling end I will examine the tradition of the flâneur, the concept and practice of the dérive, and psychogeography. Along the way I’ll look at how industrial culture reordered traditional notions of space and time, and how the nascent topology of deindustrial culture might in turn cause new flows in time and space. 

            Walking is the most perfect exercise. It stretches and strengthens the body as it eases and expands the mind.  As the industrial revolution transformed the cities of the world, walking around the city also became a chance to observe the ways society was changing.

             Enter the flâneur .

            The word is derived from the Old Norse flana, which translates as “to wander aimlessly.”[1] The word found its way to France in the late 19th century, where flânerie gained currency to describe people wandering about without apparent direction, rhyme or reason; the people who engaged in this pastime were called flâneurs.[2] These were the idlers, people of leisure who transformed the mere act of taking a walk into an artful practice.  Observing the rhythms of the city, the flâneur is a passerby, just one of many, a person lost in the faceless crowd. Mesmerized by his or her own thoughts, the flâneur sifts through the secret strata of the city and comes to know its many mysteries.

            The practice of flânerie materialized at time when factories spewed coal smoke from their snouts like dragons of iron, when industrialization vivisected the streets with strangling traffic, when forge and foundry vomited pollutants into air and stream, when the labyrinthine passages and glass arcades of Paris were turned into homogeneous boulevards. The flâneur was there to explore the metamorphosis of urban renewal amidst the defilement of the old. Walking, they soaked in the modern metropolis as a spectacle: they were inside of it, yet through the act of watchful observation, they remained detached and apart.
       
     The word and concept may be French, but the literary origins of the concept came first from American writer Edgar Allan Poe and his short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1840). The story centers on a man living in London who has just recovered from a long illness and who is finally able to get outside and onto the streets of the city again. Still fragile, he parks himself in a coffee shop and is enraptured by watching the coming and going of the passing crowds. First he sees them as a swarm of humanity. Then his view zooms in closer to observe different classes and occupations of people: the aristocrats, lawyers, merchants and clerks, common drunkards, pickpockets, ragamuffins and riffraff.  The narrator neatly categorizes each person, until an old man comes into view whose countenance grabs his “whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression.” He becomes obsessed by this figure and thinks this man has a hidden power inside him, some kind of secret knowledge or history. He becomes so obsessed he can’t let him out of sight. So he follows him out onto the street, and it becomes a story of one man walking in a meandering circumambulation through byzantine thoroughfares following another walker. In his compulsion he follows the man until daybreak, then again all the next day until the sun disappears into night, finally acquiescing to the fact that however much he observes this person, he will never truly know the man of the crowd.[3] 

      French poet, essayist and philosopher Charles Baudelaire was a big fan of Poe, and a translator of Poe’s works into French. He was rather taken by the ideas Poe presented in his story and built on the idea of the restless city observer in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” In one crucial section of Baudelaire’s peregrinating essay he draws a comparison between Poe’s protagonist and the artist Constantin Guys, and then uses Guys as a template to flesh out his vision of the flâneur:[4]

 The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amidst the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of those slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life who makes his whole world his family […] thus the lover of universal life enters the crowd as if it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy.

Cleveland's Crystal Palace Arcade

Baudelaire’s figure who walked and strolled through the lanes of life, often decked out as a dandy, as Guys was, became crucial to his understanding of the complex relationships between the individual and the masses inside the industrialized metropolis. A transformation in the consciousness of the city dweller coincided with urban economic transformation. The pressing in of people on all sides, the stratification and striation of the social classes, enterprise and business always on the go, twenty-four hours a day in full swing: all of this is enough to set anyone’s nerves on edge. Walking became a coping mechanism for those citizens who had what might now be called sensory processing disorder, a way to remain invisible by blending in with the swarm; and yet also a way to maintain autonomy from the swarm by cultivating the habit of detached observation and contemplation as an individual distinct from the concrete anthills of humanity. Walking remains a way to cope as industrial society breaks. Mind and body have a chance to reintegrate away from the fragmentation of spectacular digital life, while reassessing the possibilities of a disintegrated built environment.

As the habit of flânerie was taken up by the bohemian set, it worked its way from Symbolist poets, exemplified by Arthur Rimbaud’s precocious and prodigious tramping, on to the early modernists such as Walter Benjamin, who was the next to stamp his impressions on the term. For him the flâneur became an investigator of the city, a kind of journalist and amateur detective who made connections between the clue of a street sign, the evidence of architecture, and the forensics of local events and current conditions. These coalesced inside the mind of the observant walker until the code of modern life was cracked.

Benjamin also thought the flâneur was “a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism.” In building on Baudelaire’s work Benjamin formulated two terms to describe opposite ways of reacting to the modern city. Erlebnis described the stress brought on by the sensory overload. To cope with Erlebnis he saw people retreating into a numbed-out, anesthetized life. On the other end of the spectrum was Erfahrung, which represented the enjoyment of mobility and the multitude of sensory textures the city had to offer.  

I see the deindustrial urban walker existing in a third point, triangulating the two ends of Benjamin’s spectrum, and mixing in with them the crucial element of imagination. As the walker’s feet wander, so the mind wonders on its own meandering paths. As the feet traverse the layered history of a neighborhood, so memories from a person’s past are also elicited. Interwoven with these come stray thoughts from the astral static, ruminations, and other glints from subtle and diaphanous realms. Discursive meditations are assisted in this ambulatory mode. The clues gleaned are insights that help resolve the mystery of how best to live in the days of decline. 

The artistic potential of walking gained further recognition from Guy Debord during his time in the Lettrist International (LI) and then the Situationist International (SI), whose members included sound and visual poets, filmmakers, political revolutionaries, and a cadre of bohemians just hanging around for the party.  When they weren’t drinking and talking in bars, they drifted around the city on long walks, and these walks became a major theme for the groups. Debord dubbed this practice the dérive, which literally means drifting, and he differentiated this from the classic notion of a walk or stroll by placing further emphasis on the way geography affects psychology and psychology affects geography. It’s not an original idea, but he was able to express it in an artistic and political language that was rather catching:

In a dérive 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. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than 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.

​On the one hand the drift was a way for them to cope with the spectacle of the city. It allowed them to discover a new city within the old, by studying it at different times in different lights and alternate points view. It was also a major tool for escaping boredom and the banality of workaday life. The drifts aroused their passions, their love for adventure and discovery. 

Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.

Those who share these adventurous predilections may find their peripatations also take them into the underworld of urban spelunking and the exploration of abandoned buildings that litter the world’s decayed urban landscapes. Those who become adept at this skill may even be able to parlay it into a way of earning a living. I can see a role for guides versed in the practice of urban exploration paid to retrieve objects or people from dangerous and poisoned locations of the deindustrial future.

            One of the psychogeographical games played by members of the LI and SI was called the possible rendezvous. A person is invited to go alone to a square, café, park, or other location at a preordained time. With no one to meet and no one to wait for, the player of this game is freed from keeping up small talk, or listening to a friend’s impressions, and so has more mental space to allow the surroundings to seep in. The possible rendezvous was also used to encourage a person to think of new ways to use time: in conversations with a stranger, in staring at a sidewalk, in witnessing something unexpected. The person who set the appointment may even turn up. If these rendezvous are organized by a large enough pool of participants, the parties may not even know each other. It’s a game that can help mix up the habits and routines of daily life. Games such as these can help a person become more agile and antifragile. As futures become more uncertain in terms of resource availability and unpredictable catastrophes, the ability to engage situations and people with a spontaneous awareness becomes an asset.

Tours became detours in this milieu. Going the long way around, or going the wrong way altogether, turned out to be a road into new places and psychological situations. Detouring cleared the path for one of the key strategies of the SI: détournement, a word that means “rerouting” or “hijacking.” It is shorthand for the phrase “détournement of preexisting aesthetic elements.” The practice involved taking preexisting works of literature, art, maps, sound, film and whatever else they could get their hands on, and reworking it into something new. Détournement treats all of culture as a common property for the artist to make creative reuse of. It actively encouraged all modification and transformation derived from old works into new works; it incited the deformation and reformation of cultural materials as an active position of agency and challenge. From highbrow to lowlife, from posh to pulp, all are fair game for fair use in a grand mash-up. In my mind détournement represents an early technique for cultural synthesis, beneficial as a way of retrofitting existing cultural artifacts into forms more useful for a world wracked by extreme weather events and energy shortages. Détournement could also be further developed as an art of combinations, potentially as one component towards a real-life Glass Bead Game.

To return from this meandering sidetrack, the Situationists took old city maps, cut them up and collaged them into new maps as part of their work. These détourned cartographies were used to reach places that didn’t exist before. Instead of looking for lines that made borders they looked for lines that made connections, pasted these together and attempted to follow them into imaginal territories. Cutting up a map and rearranging it cuts through time as well as space. Following such a détourned map gives odds to overlooked potentials. 

            To walk in 21st-century America is to have the experience of a schizophrenic. The psychological state of our cities is as split and cracked as its concrete and asphalt. Past the crumbling plazas with their succession of empty shops, past the gas stations with their promises of high-speed travel and convenience, another mental state of the union exists. This reality is waiting to be touched by a new breed of deindustrial flâneurs. It can be found underneath the bridges, where mini neighborhoods of tents and cardboard are set up to escape the rain, past the fringe dwellers who wait for derelict metro buses as the fumes of the frenzied motorcade sift into the dust-colored sky, past the rusted-out, broken-down vehicles of an exhausted country.

      As the phantom existence of the metaverse disappears into a mess of tangled wires, the streets will need to be revived.  Walking allows a person to see the world at a natural pace. Car travel rushes over the terrain, while on slow, observant strolls, details erupt from the landscape.

     Where the 19th-century flâneur was a spy on assignment in the world of consumption, the 21st-century flâneur is a vagabond fleeing the boredom of McGovCorp’s televised internment couch, looking to see what might remain and become of the city as the post-industrial marketplace shudders and shutters its doors, as the age of fossil fuels sputters and convulses. The deindustrial flâneur is an advance scout reporting on how the remaining detritus might be rearranged and combined into more useful arrangements.

      “Far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape,” Benjamin said. Layers of history are present in the parade of architecture. Walking is a visceral way to learn local histories. Deindustrial flâneurs can become repositories for local lore that becomes the connective tissue between time and place.

     My wife Audrey and I have always enjoyed walking around our hometown and surrounding areas. It’s helped me to internally map the land I dwell on. Since 2019 we have been exploring the region a bit more systematically with the help of a guidebook (Walking Cincinnati). It’s a nice guide; it lays out walking routes for over thirty different neighborhoods; interspliced amidst the directions are choice tidbits of history that have given us have a greater appreciation for the heritage in our hometown. On one walk in the neighborhood of Glendale we stopped by the Swedenborgian Church where Johnny Appleseed was a congregant during his time in the area, and it imparted a sense of wonder to know that legacy is still with us.

While guidebooks like these don’t ever go too deep into details, they do serve as a point of introduction to the layers of the past still present. Building, street, and neighborhood names come alive when you know something of the biography of the people they honor. Another way to soak up local history from the ground up is to take frequent walks in graveyards, noting the names on stones of interest. The bits I’ve found really exciting often call for further research, another cheap thrill that can occupy hours of time inside libraries and archives and at the meetings of historical societies. These venues also provide opportunities to make friends with new people who share common interests. As the industrial age continues to unravel and once commonly agreed-upon understandings of history fall apart, all this research stands to become fodder for the propagation of new histories by which the future might better understand its past.

     If you happen to be lucky enough to live in a place where the buildings aren’t all brutal, where there is more brick, wood or stucco than siding, where the roofs are gabled and the windows are Folk Victorian style, then you may also benefit from an architectural guidebook, which adds another layer of enjoyment to an urban hike. Learning about the various types of houses (Italianate, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival…) gives a greater appreciation for the design of diverse domiciles. Knowing something of domestic and traditional architecture brings an awareness of the psychological effects of various buildings, often in counterpoint to the obloid shapes the architects of more recent structures have wrought on the landscape. The go-to book in my household is A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia Savage MacAlester.
             
            In all this talk of walking I’ve barely even mentioned the rural, the stretches between the towns which are perfect for rambling, for scrambling down ravines and up to high lookouts. While the flâneur remains the iconic literary walker of the urban wild, there is a class of wayfarers more at home along the brakes of creeks and down old country lanes adorned with unmortared stone walls where the mullein and mugwort bloom. Here the example of such writers as John Clare, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson may be of inspiration.

            When we drift, the spaces we inhabit are not just traveled through, but are experienced. When we invest them with time spent walking and learning they become invested with meaning. No matter where one lives, whatever the size of one’s income or lack thereof, the act of heading out for a walk opens the door to new zones of perception, to mental and physical liberty.

.:. .:. .:.

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FURTHER RE/SOURCES:
Here are just a few books to stuff into your backpack for reading on a bench next time you head out into the urban wilds.

Baudelaire, Charles. 1992. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Jonathan Mayne, trans., ed. Rochester, Vt.: Phaidon Books.

Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 

Cameron, Julia. 2003. Walking in this World: The Practical Art of Creativity. New York, N.Y. Penguin.
• This book is a sequel to Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and focuses on exercises and thoughts on manifesting creativity centered around the practice of walking. She encourages writers, musicians and artists of all stripes to take a weekly walk and this book is filled with a multitude of suggestions for sustaining the imagination.
Debord, Guy. “Definitions,” “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” “The Theory of the Dérive,” “Two Accounts of the Dérive.” Situationist International Online.  <https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html>

McAlester , Virginia Savage. 2019. A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture. New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf.

McDonough, Tom. 2002. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Several of the essays in this collection by Debord and others get into ideas about cities, urbanism, and architecture.

​Ninjalicious. 2005. Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration. [ See infiltration.org ]

• This is the guidebook for getting into places you are not supposed to be. From behind-the-scenes areas of in-use buildings, to abandoned sites, to drainage systems and other urban underground areas. Explore at your own risk.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1987. Tales of Mystery and Imagination. New York, N.Y.: Mystic Press.

Wark, McKenzie. 2011. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Verso.
• This book is the best I’ve come across for putting Guy Debord, the Situationists, and their whole milieu into a social and historical context.

​
[1]      https://www.etymonline.com/word/flaneur

[2]      While the word flâneur historically implied the masculine, modern advocates recognize it as something that can be applied equally to women as well as men. In French the word passante was used as female equivalent, particularly in the works of Marcel Proust. Twenty-first-century academics have used the word flâneuse to designate the female version. For the purpose of this column I’ll be using the word flâneur as something applicable to all sexes. 

[3]     Poe’s story is great. The main character is also a bit stalky. I’m not advocating people go out and follow strangers around.

[4]     It was also in this essay that Baudelaire coined the term “modernity.”

This essay originally appeared in New Maps, Volume 2, Issue 1 from the Winter of 2022