The Art of the Dérive: Walking With Borges in Buenos Aires

French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire describes modernity as "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent." The alienation and transience of modern life, a lack of paying attention, or perhaps having lost capacity to notice, is an effect of what philosopher Guy Debord calls "the spectacle": the tendency of mass capitalist production to confuse “signs of the dominant system of production” for “the ultimate end-products of that system," for life to lose it's connection to the past and the real and dissolve into the elusive never-there of capitalist modernity's "present" which never arrives.

"The real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth."

To Debord, this disturbing consequence of industrial capitalist development is inherently tied to topography and geography, our relationship to spatial environments. He writes in The Society of the Spectacle -- "capitalist production has unified space, breaking down the boundaries between one society and the next. This unification is at the same time an extensive and intensive process of banalization.”

Our modern human-ness, or lack thereof, is negotiated within the contours of our built topographical environment. James Howard Kunstler pinpoints the fleeting not-there-ness of modernity in his book The Geography of Nowhere, which explains how American geography deteriorated from original places to identical suburbs, shopping malls, cliche main streets and industrial sprawls, in which any place is nowhere in particular.

For many philosophers such as Debord, revolution against a modernity where, as Marx and Engles put it, "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned" is necessarily located in reinventing and recreating our relationships to space. Relationships to spatial environments directly relate to the temporality of modernity. Degrading what Debord calls "the autonomy and quality of places" maintains a stagnating modern temporality. He describes this as a suspension between modern time (a time of always living the future of human progress) and mythic cyclical time (which maintains the faith that moments of the real are only a bit of the future away) that secure the stability and banality of capitalist society.

However, these time regimes are not so easily enforced - places are not stripped of their geography without history haunting “modern society like a specter," as Debord puts it. Though urbanism and the homogenization of spaces try to enforce a “frozen time” in which the ideological foundations of our reality are naturalized, in truth “a federation of independent times” always coexist for the people of the revolution. A remaking of space, to Debord, is also a remaking, or rather a reclaiming, of time in which revolution is possible.

Debord's conception of historical hauntings that occur through spatial environments, even in their homogenized states, is reminiscent of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, who meditates on time and space in one of his most famous short stories, "The Garden of Forking Paths": "This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not." As for Debord, to Borges time is not necessarily linear. Every possibility of the past and the present remains accessible to every person at any moment in the labyrinth of time and space, potentially allowing for revolutionary actions through a re-interpretation of material space.

Solvitar Ambulando: it is solved by walking.

One solution to this banalization of space that stagnates any hope of revolutionary change within society is embodied by what Guy Debord calls a dérive. The Dérive is an aimless, anarchic drift through a space, during which the participant seeks to surrender to the "psychogeographical contours" of a city, "fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”

To Debord and other contemporary adopters of the dérive, the drift, intentionally aimless, subverts the rationalization of urban space. Instead of going where one ought to go, seeing the things one is supposed to see during travel or daily life, a hidden consciousness of the streets emerges through treating walking as both play, art, and mapping. It is walking as a form of reinterprative noticing, creating what dérive practitioners call a psychogeographical map -- a map based on emotional observations, random sightings, careful observations, rather than cartographical accuracy. The dérive is a practice of what anthropologist Wade Davis might call "bearing witness" to the world, one in which disorientation and unconventionality help to re-create one's relationship to urban space.

Buenos Aires emerged as a useful comparative frame for what Karen O'Rourke calls the "low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible" of American suburbia. The historicism of Buenos Aires is embedded in its very space. The city is post-colonial, modeled after the construction of Paris. Rather than the relatively new character of American cities, Buenos Aires has a deep and rich history that is built into its physical space. Argentinian society is still wrestling with the aftermath of an oppressive fascist government in the 1980s. It was a central intellectual hub during the “Boom Latino-Americano”  – a contemporary renaissance of Latin American literature, philosophy, and art. The unique character of Buenos Aires as a city in which life, art, politics, and history are directly and inescapably intertwined makes it an extremely appealing option for practicing a pedagogy diverging from the hegemonic capitalist scientific rationalism of the United States.

I decided to travel to Buenos Aires in order to preform a series of my own dérives seeking to answer the following questions: What interpretations does one gain about a new place through practicing a form of embodied research designed to disorient and reconstruct a stereo-typical understanding of urban space? How can this experience in a new, culturally and historically rich city, be applied to change the routine physical experience of American cities, particularly considering Colorado Springs? 

To assist in the planning and place-based framing of my dérive, I read Karen O'Rourke's book "Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers" along with excerpts from Jorge Luis Borge's short story collection "Labyrinths." I completed three dérives: one using mixed methods of transportation (subway, walking, taxi), one only walking, and one "static" derive in which I sat an observed a classic Buenos Aires Café for several hours.

Separate from my three attempts at the dérive, I also visited the Borges Cultural Center, the Latin American Art Museum in Buenos Aires, El Museo de Belles Artes, and the Museo de Arte Decorativo in order to expand my understanding of Argentinian culture and history which helped add context to my observations on my dérive.

"Bothersome and trivial details have no place in my spirit, which is prepared for all that is vast and grand."

In keeping with the anarchic nature of the dérive, I am going to present the results of my walking only derive in a version of a psychogeographical map, in which my physical tracing of my purely walking derive is represented on the map, but in which my observations do and do not correlate with the physical place where they occurred.

Artists who preform derives as preformance art or in order to create maps generally create a walking protocol to help structure the drift. My walking protocol was as follows:

• Begin at the apartment I was staying at.
• Use no walking "algorithm" or pattern of walking.
• Stop whenever you feel interested in a place/don't say no to an impulse.
• Trace the derive with GPS, but do not use that to orient or guide yourself.
• Record anything of interest using a camera or journal.

11/21/23, 11:22 AM, Palermo, Buenos Aires, Varela Varelita Cafe - Static Derive Notes from my journal:

"Since I was jut in Paris, I'm viewing everything in BA through a compaative lens, which I wish I wasn't. The city itself is already explicitly modeled after Paris, it ought be experienced in its own right, of value without comparison. But maybe that is impossible. I feel like I haven't seen enough of the world to say anything about what makes a place different. They sell liter sized beers here. There are cameras all over this cafe, without turning around I can see four."

"Some walking protocols have simple premises, but the walks they offer are not easily identifiable... Even though they have been carried out -- often more than once -- they remain unresolved and await new interpretations to bring them to life again."

"The older women at the long table are still talking, they were alive during the dictatorship. The napkin holders have stickers on them which say Argentina Si, Milei no -- Milei is the right-wing anarcho-capatalist who won the general election here two days ago."

Reflection

In Borges' story "  Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius  ," a fictional world made up by a cult-like group of elite scientific and political authorities begins to bleed into the real world. The "fake" maps language, dictionaries of the fictional land of Tlon created by crazed academics and government officials become actually real evidence of an existing place. Artifacts (objects of spatial orientation, such as compasses) transcend the temporal ordering of Tlon's invention and are are "discovered." The story frames our world as one that is merely constructed, linguistic, and which is permeable to other ideal constructions of memory no more "real" than the space we presently understand.

One fascinating feature of the "fabricated" Tlonic language is that "nouns" are a compilation of ephemeral adjectives or verbs, which can only be uttered once, as time does not exist in the land of Tlon. All things are as they are now but have no essential or eternal essence, constantly open to re-interpretation. For example, the word for moon might roughly translates to "the moon moonates," describing the act of being the moon, except of course, this is only a temporary verb to describe a thing which has loose basis of actually existing in Tlon, as the world is merely "a heterogenous series of independent acts." My attempt at walking and mapping Buenos Aires was an attempt to live this different vision of a noun, a collection of possible fragments of verbs, possibly transcending the bounds of what how language limits and also illuminates the capacity to remake the world.

Lingiustic and physical reminders of memory were present throughout the City. The Recoleta cemetery, in which plants terrifyingly emerged from within coffins, also houses the long-coveted corpse of Eva Peron, the wife of left political leader and quasi-folk hero who is highly popular with average citizens. Built into sidewalks next to art museums and cultural centers were small reminders of the horror of the dictatorship -- ornate tiles giving the time and place people were last scene before being "disappeared" by the violent government. Or, spray painted and faded on the concrete, the words: "It was thirty thousand," a response to a propaganda campaign that far less than thirty thousand people were disappeared by the dictatorship.

Buenos Aires is the neo-colonial capital of Argentina, where the local elites overtook the economic hegemony of the Spanish government, recreating a regional center to exploit the periphery -- the indigenous population throughout Argentina. An exhibit in a small Borges museum hidden within a shopping mall says that "another" Buenos Aires emerges in his writing. In part, this is a Buenos Aires in which nouns are defined by their infinite possibility to be other, and where time and memory is "that labyrinth, consisting of a single line which is invisible and unceasing" and therefore constantly accessible.

Without falsely claiming to "know" Argentina or Buenos Aires, this series of entirely disorienting derives was an essential lesson in practicing how to begin to re-interpret urban geographies.

Practicing this way of existing in a new space makes it clear that the derive is perhaps best suited to known environments, one's that are less inherently exotic to me than Buenos Aires, areas which have become overly familiar and demand a re-knowing. Central to the concept of the derive is the French term bricolage, which loosely means the re-purposing of found, pre-existing objects for new purposes. I hope to use what I have learned through the practice of my Buenos Aires derives to derive at home, in Colorado Springs, to sift through the streets with as much wonder as I did in a foreign country, because, as Karen O'Rourke notes, walking is remarkable as art of the everyday, which "itself rearranges the landscape and show us things that from force of habit we have forgotten how to see."