Rethinking the Dérive

I would like to dedicate this essay to the memory of the innovative Scottish theatre maker and writer Kenneth Davidson who passed away as this edition was going to press.

One need not wander the streets forever. The dérive, raised to the level of the concept, can now be practised in almost any kind of time-space whatsoever. (Wark 2008: 18)

LOGICS

‘To drift’ is a verb with multiple and contested meanings, some of which are literal, others metaphorical. To address such a heterogeneous concept, to do it justice, one may say, necessitates a drifting text, one in which not all of the meanings are accounted for in the main body of writing, but, on the contrary, fold back into it via ‘deposits’ left in footnotes, evocative of an ‘alluvial’, meandering type of thinking characterized by flow and sedimentation, stoppage and movement, ‘nature’ and culture. We talk, for instance, of how a river, snow or continents ‘drift’, of ‘getting someone’s drift’, or of ‘drifting apart from someone or something’. Other phrases and words come to mind, too, such as ‘to be cast or set adrift’, or ‘to let the mind drift’. And, then, there are related nouns like ‘driftwood’, or the US term ‘drifter’, a vagrant who refuses the solid bourgeois values of work, family and nation. With its emphasis on rêverie, randomness and rootlessness, it comes as no surprise to find that, in what Gilles Deleuze terms ‘control societies’ (1992),¹ there is a decidedly negative sense attached to the idea of drifting, a nineteenth-century Puritan admonishment of a refusal to perform productively. Where capital’s political economy is predicated on ‘driven’, entrepreneurial subjects² – the ‘cognitariat’ (Berardi 2009: 35) – the drift, by contrast, complicates the intentional rectitude of agency, expressing a tendency to be diverted from one’s immediate task, to let things slide, a predilection to be led astray. All of these competing meanings, as well as some jarring others, are apparent in both the English and French definitions of the word.

This is the English etymology:

drift (n.)

c. 1300, literally ‘a being driven’ (of snow, etc.); not recorded in Old English; either a suffixed form of drive (v.) (compare thrift/thrive) or borrowed from Old Norse drift ‘snow drift’, or Middle Dutch drift ‘pasturage, drove, flock’, both from Proto-Germanic *driftiz (source also of Danish and Swedish drift, German Trift), from PIE root *dhreibh- ‘to drive, push’. Sense of ‘what one is getting at’ is from 1520s. Meaning ‘controlled slide of a sports car’ attested by 1955.

drift (v.).

late 16c., from drift (n.). Figurative sense of ‘be passive and listless’ is from 1822. Related: Drifted; drifting. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

And this is the French one, the verbal form of which is dériver:

Dériver: divert water (13th cent., job; gramm. fig. etc.), derivation (1377, L.) -atif (15th cent.), from Latin derivare, -atio, -ativus, in a proper and fig. sense (from rivus stream).

Dériver: remove from the water’s edge (14th cent. B), comp. of rive (water’s edge).

Dériver: (mar.) drift (16th cent., A. D’Aubigné, var. of driver), infl. by Eng. Drive (push). Der: derive, -atio (1690, Furitière).

Dériver: undo what is riveted. See river. (Lettrist International 1996 [1956]: 11).

What unites these disparate, sometimes warring etymologies is how the drift (la dérive) describes a complex, entangled relation, an ontology we might say, in which subjects and objects are acted upon by external forces.³ Simultaneously, we seem powerless to withstand drifting, and yet always tempted to give in to its movement, to be caught in its rhythms, its compelling grooves. As Bron Szerszynksi explains so eloquently in his contribution to this edition, drifting is grammatically ambivalent, an instance of the ‘middle voice’ in which ‘we are not driving – and neither are we being driven’ (see pp: 140–1). Drifting is a condition full of hope and terror, pleasure and pain, possibility and danger, and different subjects undergo it in different ways. There is something inherently equivocal about drifting, a suspensive and undecided relationship in which agency is perturbed by multiplicities, some of which are violently coercive, as in being made homeless or stateless, and others politically liberating, as in, say, being able to escape capital’s temporal regime.⁴ As Jean-François Lyotard puts it, albeit from a largely positive perspective:

Drift works in the plural, for the question is not of leaving one shore, but several simultaneously; what is at work is not one current, pushing and tugging, but different drives and tractions … The plural, the collection of singularities, are precisely what power, kapital (sic), the law of value, personal identity, the ID card, responsibility, the family and the hospital are bent on repressing. (1984: 10)

In its original use, the drift is elemental, a process that exposes the body – ‘any body whatever’, to reconfigure a phrase from Deleuze’s work on cinema (2005: xi) – to water, entangling it in a universe of chaotic currents and unpredictable speeds. To drift, then, is not simply to flow without friction like the electronic currents of finance capital or the abstracted transmissions of the barcode that disembody the world; it is to be a part of a sticky universe of staggered movement, syncopated rhythms, fizzes and schisms.⁵ In its irregularities and contingencies, drift – at least in its hopeful or affirmative mode – is characterized by what the Stoic philosophers called the play of the clinamen, a dynamic ricochet effect that, on an atomic or molecular level, has the capacity to produce new worlds.⁶ To drift, then, is to be radically temporalized, to live exposed to the ‘touch’ of the outside, to affirm what Nicolas Bourriaud, in his recent revision of Louis Althusser’s late texts, terms ‘aleatory materialism’ – that is, a ‘war machine’ against ‘defensive illusionism’ that, as Bourriaud has it, seeks always to ‘proclaim that the order of things stems from their ineluctable fatalism’ (2016: 37).

Figure 1 Cemented Feet.

Photo © Julia-Kristina Bauer

While not everyone has the same capacity and/ or possibility for moving or letting oneself go, as Ana Ribero, Petra Kuppers and Jack Parlett among others all adumbrate in this issue, this ecstatic, politicized notion of the drift certainly resonates with how it was conceptualized and practised by the Situationist International (SI), an avant-garde collective that, from 1957 through to its auto- dissolution in 1972, did so much to reconfigure everyday life as a material site of ideological combat and political struggle. For the SI, drifting was advanced as a critically informed walking practice, a collective device for infusing life ‘with a superior passional quality’ (1981 [1957]: 22), something that if practised en masse would ‘leave the twentieth century’ – the century of spectacle and commodity exchange – behind (1981 [1964]: 138).⁷ While such aspirations may seem derisory now, an instance of juvenile hubris, if we are to believe contemporary Leftist-thinkers such as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, who critique the SI as proponents of ‘folk politics’ (2016: 5–24),⁸ this does not mean that we ought to abandon the radical energy of the dérive – the very opposite, in fact. For what the dérive still allows for – and this relates, precisely, to its wildest claims and most utopian impulses – is possibility, the sense in which, to return to Bourriaud, life could be reimagined differently from how it is currently constructed, and the historical energy of the avant-garde rescued from its supposed ‘theory death’ (Mann 1991):

One of the essential elements of contemporary art’s political programme is that of bringing the world into a precarious state – in other words, constantly affirming the transitory and circumstantial nature of the institutions that structure social life, the rules governing individual and collective behaviour. (Bourriaud 2016: 43)

Irrespective of our desire to stress the contemporaneity of the dérive – in particular its always ‘embodied utopianism’ – such a return is not without precedent. Despite the seemingly unstoppable onslaught of neoliberal economics from the mid-1970s onwards, the dérive has stubbornly refused to disappear from the historical landscape, even if some of the usages to which it has been put have tended to stress its resistant qualities rather than its revolutionary ones. Geographers, for instance, have used drifting to think through new forms of democratic mapping from below; architects for researching the effects of the urban environment on bodies; artists, filmmakers and writers for creating spatially inflected artworks; and theatre makers for constructing various forms of site- based performance that muddy distinctions between actor and spectator, theatricality and life, and human and non-human. As Thierry Davila (2002) has recognized, the SI’s dérive has greatly informed the practice of ‘walking as performance’, an emergent field that has grown in popularity over the past thirty years or so, and which is found in the work of (among others) Wrights & Sites, Stalker, Erwin Wurm, Simon Whitehead, Graeme Miller, Janet Cardiff, Bradby and Townley, Francis Alÿs, Clare Qualmann, Claire Hind, Lone Twin, Dee Heddon and Misha Myers, Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes, Laura Grace Ford and Amy Sharrocks (some of whom are included in this volume).

EXPANDING THE DRIFT

While walking as performance occupies a central place in this issue of Performance Research, our interest in drifting is not merely confined to pedestrianism alone. Rather, as editors we wanted to use drift as a device for instigating a larger and hopefully more generative dialogue between theatre and performance studies and the Situationist International (SI) than has been witnessed to date. For while it would be erroneous to claim that theatre and performance scholars have ignored the SI completely – some examples include the writings of White (1993), Megson (2004), Puchner (2004), Lavery (2010), Apostolidès and Pecorari (2011), Turner (2015) – the fact remains that there is nothing in these disciplines to compare with the work of (to refer to only a selection from other disciplines): T. J. Clark (1984), Tom McDonough (2002) and Frances Stracey (2014) in art history; Sadie Plant (1992), Anselm Jappe (1999), Patrick Marcolini (2013), Anna Trespeuch-Berthelot (2015) and McKenzie Wark (2011, 2013) in critical theory and philosophy; Simon Sadler (1999) and Anthony Vidler (2011) in architecture; Alastair Bonnett (1989), Andy Merrifield (2005) and David Pinder (1996, 2005) in geography; and Tom Y. Levin (2002), Fabien Danesi (2011) and Jason Smith (2013) in film studies. The aim – the ambition – behind our return to the drift, then, is to allow for new affinities and discoveries to emerge between the SI and theatre and performance studies, to show what each can glean from the other aesthetically as well as politically. The drift, of course, is only one way of doing that, and one could also think about the affordances of returning to other practices such as, say, ‘situation’ or ‘détournement’, as Clare Finburgh does in a forthcoming essay that complements the concerns of this issue (2019).

As a way of establishing the grounds for that dialogue – and building on the work of film scholars such as Leo Charney (1998) and Véronique Fabbri (2008) – we approach the drift as a paradigm for composing, experiencing and theorizing heterogeneous forms of performance from writing to drawing, cruising to cinema, cars to rocks, photography to balloons, bird watching to writing. For us, then, drifting, not only transcends the SI’s attempts to identify it as a theory of walking; it also escapes their desire to police its meanings, to see it as the simultaneous realization and end of art and aesthetics. Rather drifting, as Charney reminds us, offers an aesthetics of non-productive behaviour, a mode of art making, defined by ‘empty moments’, that, precisely because it serves no purpose, contests capitalism’s attempt to financialize perception.⁹ The more that capital seeks to institute an ‘attention economy’ (Beller 2006), to erect a ‘deterritorialized factory’ in our very ‘souls’ (Berardi 2009), the more crucial the aesthetics of drifting becomes, reminding us that there is a life beyond work. Charney is at pains to stress the dissensual and liberatory potential of drifting:

Control.

Everyone wants it.

It’s what everything’s finally about.

Control things hard enough and maybe you can control death too.

But it could be so much easier. The answer’s right in front of you.

There it is. There it was. There it is again. Let it control you.

Let yourself drift. (1998: 21)

Charney’s comments highlight the necessity of simultaneously affirming and critiquing the SI’s original notion of the dérive, the refusal to abandon art altogether. Alienation in 2018 is not the same as alienation in 1955. And no one can deny that the SI’s somewhat crude, if understandable, concern with overcoming passivity – the very cornerstone of their Marxian philosophy –appears outdated at a time when capitalism, as Jonathan Crary has recently argued in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2015), refuses to let people rest, and when digital culture insists on the permanent performance of subjectivity. In a world where everyone is compelled to be creative, the everyday artist that the SI championed in the 1950s and 1960s has ironically become a privileged figure in the neoliberal creative economy, as Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski (2005) and Richard Florida (2002) have pointed out, albeit from very different perspectives. Criticism, too, must be made of the SI’s attachment in the drift to what they termed ‘rapid passage’ through urban spaces. In a culture of electronic flows, big data and invisible algorithms, and where speed, as Paul Virilio argues (2006), is the privileged condition par excellence, the SI’s commitment to movement needs to be rethought. Likewise the development of low-budget airlines, weekend tourism, along with the phenomenal success of the ‘Airbnb’, has added a very different perspective to what rapid passage means, to the point that cities such as Barcelona have now passed laws against the infrastructural damage – the hollowing out of certain neighbourhoods – done to urban areas by absent landlords and transient populations.¹⁰ Equally, while the SI were more aware than many give them credit for of how alienation is undergone in different ways by different subjectivities, the SI are nevertheless silent in the majority of their publications about how gender, sexuality, race, disability, nationality, economic status and geographical position constrict and prevent movement – a phenomenon that many contributors to this volume are keenly aware of, attuned, as they are, to living in a world where more walls have been built than at any period in history and where the immigrant, along with the refugee and homeless, have become, as Bourriaud notes, new figures of proletarian struggle, emblems of the excluded (2016: viii).

With these caveats in mind, the question that poses itself now is the following: in what ways may we expand drifting in a manner that would be generative for theatre and performance studies today? Perhaps by making three interrelated moves. First, to outline a doubled-edged historiography that would remain attuned to contemporary convergences and departures; second, to explain in greater detail what the dérive actually was for the SI and to highlight its unexpected parallels with expanded notions of theatricality; and third, and following on from this point, to reflect on how it has been theorized by theatre and performance scholars before attempting to outline some new avenues for future exploration.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

If theatre and performance studies are to engage productively with the SI, a different kind of historiography is required, one that does not castigate them, unfairly, for remaining trapped within the political assumptions of their historical moment and yet, at the same time, refuses to downplay their contemporary shortcomings. One way to proceed, as the Retort Collective have done, is to pay attention to the current conflation of what they term the ‘New-Old’ and ‘Old-New’. In a 2006 exchange with art historian Hal Foster about their text Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2005), the Retort Collective cites Brecht, Benjamin and Debord, to show how the state of quasi-permanent war that has haunted the world since the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, 2001 is not a new development. On the contrary, it is atavistic, a symptom of capitalist modernity’s ‘unsublimated’ primitivism – something that Enlightenment models of progressive thought from Hegel to Freud have been unable to account for:

Atavism is modernity’s truth. Modernity is a mutation of the old. Its newness is not structural. Everything about the basic furnishing of human oppression and misery has remained unchanged in the last 150 years – except that the machinery of the same has been speeded up, and various ameliorations painted in on top. (2006: 4)

The Retort Collective’s critique of contemporary capitalism – what Debord identified as the ‘integrated spectacle’ in Comments on the Society of Spectacle (1990 [1988]: 9) – underscores the need to think past and future together, to make them compatible in such a way that theoretical differences and historical tensions are not elided.¹¹ To cite Peter Wollen, one of the first critics to engage in a serious Marxian contextualization of the SI, such compatibility allows for the resurgence of radical politics:

We need to remember that compatibility is sufficient grounds for solidarity, without the need to erase difference and totalise protean forms of desire. … We need not persist in seeking a unique condition for revolution, but neither need we forget the desire for liberation. We move from place to place and from time to time. (Wollen 1989: 95)

But how to cultivate these historical compatibilities today, these ways of affirming the SI’s relevance to contemporary struggles that they could neither predict nor perhaps be willing to endorse fully? Art historian Frances Stracey offers a way forwards when she proposes that ‘the task is to avoid being an archivist of Situationism … and instead to become a Situationist archivist, or a Situationist in the archive’ (2014: 29). For Stracey, the key thing is not to imprison the SI in history, to bury them in what Jacques Derrida has called the ‘archa’ (the coffin) of the archive (Derrida 1998: 23), but to put their ideas to use in the present, to make ‘the drift drift’, so to speak. This from McKenzie Wark:

Perhaps the problem is not the recuperation of ‘situationism’ in the fifty years since the inception of the Situationist International, but that the recuperation is partial and incomplete. After all of the variables of the movement are accounted for, they might lend themselves again to an agency that is at once critical and creative. … The Situationists are nobody’s property. They belong now to the very ‘literary communism’ that Debord and company announced before the movement had even really begun. (Wark 2008: 44)

Responding to Stracey’s and Wark’s pragmatic irreverence, their refusal to suffer any kind of stultifying academicism, our aim, to borrow from Walter Benjamin, that ‘rag picker’ of a historian (Bourriaud 2016: xi), is, quite simply, to ‘blast [the SI’s drift] out of its historical continuum’ (Benjamin 1969: 262; citation modified). Like its enemy, spectacular capitalism, the dérive does not – and cannot – sit still, historically. If it is to retain its critical purchase, it is imperative that drifting responds, in its own ways, to the contemporary spectacle’s destructive and contradictory impulses. In line with this two-way movement, this double historiography, the next section seeks to move forwards by taking a step backwards, and exploring how the SI defined the drift.

DRIFTING WITH THE SI

Although it would be a mistake to claim that the drift ever disappeared from the SI’s purview – as David Archibald and Carl Lavery argue in these pages, all of Debord’s films from 1959 to 1978 transpose the dérive from street to screen, in one form or another – the bulk of the work on the dérive was published in the 1950s.¹² This is the period when the SI was committed to revolution through art, and when founding members and artists such as Asger Jorn and Constant Nieuwenhuys, both of whom joined the SI having previously been members of the CoBrA collective, played a prominent role in determining the ethos and direction of the movement.¹³ In fact, as many have said before us, to trace the origins of drift is actually to return to the pre-history of the SI, and to concentrate on the practices of the Lettrist International, an artistic avant-garde initiated by Debord and Gil J. Wolman when they broke with Isidore Isou, the founder of Lettrism, in 1952.¹⁴ In a series of articles, documents, alternative maps and artworks, initially published in the Lettrist review Potlatch and the Belgian Surrealist publication Les Lèvres nues (some of which were later reissued in early editions of the journal Internationale situationniste in the late 1950s), the drift is posited as a mode of ‘experimental behaviour’, related to and impossible to separate from a constellation of other concepts such as ‘psychogeography’, ‘unitary urbanism’ and ‘détournement’ (creative hijacking).¹⁵

In contrast to ‘official’ post-war urbanism, which, in the 1950s, sought to remake the war-damaged cityscapes of Europe into a space for the easy circulation of commodities, ‘unitary urbanism’, instead, looked to create a ludic, labyrinthine city, one that was fit for human purposes. As Tom McDonough remarks, ‘the city’, for the SI, was a quasi-Hegelian entity, ‘figured as a space of possible recognition – of the self, of the other, and, at its limit, of the collectivity in its revolutionary becoming’ (2010: 3). To create this humanist milieu, the Situationists used the dérive to combat the destruction of everyday life by a new-fangled spectacular urbanism, grounded in the functionalism of Le Corbusier’s cité radieuse, with its hierarchical ‘verticalism’, technological fetishism, and predilection for ring-roads and motorways. Where Le Corbusier, in line with the modernist ideology of the French Minister of Housing, Pierre Sudreau, and Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, attempted to replace the street with vast housing complexes (HLMs) built in the sky, the SI wanted to return to ground level, to rediscover an urban territory that would allow for new, non-alienated modes of being together.¹⁶ As Debord’s friend and collaborator Ivan Chtcheglov puts it in his visionary text ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ (1953):¹⁷ ‘we are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. […] The Hacienda must be built’ (1981 [1953]: 1).

While Chtcheglov never tells the reader what the Hacienda is, he nevertheless knows what it is not. In a language close to that of dissident Surrealist artist Antonin Artaud, Chtcheglov exclaims that:¹⁸

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences – sewage system, elevator, bathroom, washing machines. This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal – the liberation of man from material cares – and become an obsessive image hanging over the present. Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. (2-3)

Figure 2 Ocean Rock.

Photo © Julia-Kristina Bauer

To counter the banalization of the garbage unit, the SI proposed the drift as an activity deliberately attuned to the affective, bodily play of surfaces, textures and atmospheres. Through this decidedly materialist method of enquiry in which, as in Artaud’s theatre, the city reveals its ‘secrets through the skin’, the SI were part a counter-tradition of French geography – one that was grounded in the minoritarian methods of Communard geographer Élisée Reclus and later developed by Marxist spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre. For both Reclus and Lefebvre, space is a performative, dynamic process whose transformations and relation ought to allow for solidarity, passion and equality – the very opposite of the abstract, separated city produced by capitalist modernity in which space is a mere backdrop against which economic forces can play out. As well as drawing on Reclus and anticipating Lefebvre, the dérive has its roots in the Surrealist walking practices represented in Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926) and André Breton’s Nadja (1928).¹⁹ But, as Bandini (1996) points out, where the Surrealists were largely concerned with individuated and heterosexual eroticism, the SI were committed to provoking collective passions, making the city a political field, ‘an incendiary beacon heralding a greater game’ (Debord 1981 [1958b]: 44).²⁰ Not only did Debord suggest in ‘Theory of the Dérive’ (1958) that drifting should be undertaken as a group – ‘the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of two or three who have reached the same awakening of consciousness’ (1981 [1958a]: 51) – but drifting, as Abdelhafid Khatib proposes in ‘Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles’, looks to establish itself as a form of objective knowledge, a new type of urban science:²¹

The dérive is a form of experimental behaviour in an urban society. At the same time as being a form of action, it is a means of knowledge, particular to the notions of psychogeography and unitary urbanism. … Thanks to them we can arrive at a first representation of the environment under study. (1996 [1958]: 73)

This focus that Khatib places on objectivity, in trying to ascertain, with some accuracy, ‘unities of ambience’ and ‘psychogeographical pivotal points’, gets to the dialectical core of the SI’s theory and practice of the dérive (73). Drifting is not conceived by the SI as a random activity, a matter of mere chance. On the contrary, it is scored in such a way that the unexpected can be prepared for and thus acted upon when it explodes into view. Debord notes how

Chance plays an important role in dérives precisely because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to an alternation between a limited number of variants, and to habit. Progress is nothing other than breaking through a field where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favourable to our purposes. (1981 [1958a]: 51)

Like theatre in many ways, the drift is an essentially open-ended practice, something ephemeral, affective and predicated on a script or score whose repetition is always with a difference.²² The aim is to effect permanent change through transient acts that can be performed again and again, but always differently. This analogy with theatricality is not without irony. For with the exception of some positive comments made about Brecht and Pirandello as well as an early but short-lived attempt at creating a Situationist Theatre,²³ the SI purported to despise theatre and performance, positing these cultural practices as the very acme of spectacle – a word that in French, tellingly, translates as theatre. Consider, for instance, the following suite of comments taken from Debord’s writing:

The more I think about it, the more I find that everything performed in the theatre is not brought closer to you but taken away (Debord in Apostolidès and Pecorari 2011 [1960]: 84).

The construction of situations begins on the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see to what extent the very principle of spectacle – non-intervention – is tied to the alienation of the old world. (1981 [1957]): 25)

The construction of situations will replace the theatre in the same sense that the real construction of life has tended more and more to replace religion (1981 [1958b]: 44)

Despite Debord’s attempts to oppose the drift to theatre – drifting is a game for ‘livers’, not spectators, he writes at one point (44) – there is, nevertheless, an inherent and inescapable theatricality to the dérive. This somewhat provocative statement merits further scrutiny: for it is here, in this unexpected analogy, that a productive dialogue between theatre and performance studies and the SI can take place along the lines that we have suggested (see p. 4). As Samuel Weber explains in Theatricality as Medium (2004), theatricality always exceeds its relationship with drama, while nevertheless remaining tied to it.²⁴ Theatricality, for Weber, is best understood as an epistemological and ontological category, a way of being that insists on inhabiting the impossible space of the present participle, a mode of temporality that is essentially ‘unfinishable’ and in constant process. Like the dérive, theatricality exposes what Walter Benjamin terms ‘the exhibition value’ of reality, the sense in which what is real is always constructed, inherently provisional. Theatricality, then, places solid notions of place and time under erasure; it ‘de-creates’ or dissolves what appears natural and self-coincident, allying itself with suspension and ellipsis.

The disturbance that drifting and theatricality wreak upon spectacular concepts of time and space is, perhaps, made most explicit in Weber’s reading of Franz Kakfa’s description of riding on a horse in the short story ‘The Wish to Become an Indian’ (1912). Anticipating the ways in which contemporary artists such as Simon Whitehead and Mike Pearson partake in non-human dérives in this issue, Kafka’s horse ride is defined by Weber as ‘a suspension of the journey as a change of place, as locomotion, as goal directed and defined’ (2004:74). In its place, Weber says, ‘another kind of movement’ emerges, one that is less linear, no longer couched in the present indicative or the past particle, but in the iterability of the present participle’ (74). In the syncopated rhythms of drifting and theatricality, the subject is able to escape from fixed notions of identity, work and behaviour, and instead to discover the dissipative, delinquent pleasures and terrors of what Charney terms ‘empty moments’, these intervals and experiences that throw the neoliberal notions of disciplinarity and control into crisis. For as much as capitalism depends upon flows and circulations of desire, it is nevertheless horrified by the senseless drifting – the empty theatricality, the non-teleological history – subtending the subjectivities that it has produced: hence, its predilection to control and measure everything that comes into its purview, to shore up the abyss on which it is built. Here, then, drifting offers theatricality a type of elliptical, ontological politics that is very different from the issue-driven and efficacious claims generally made for performance by critics, artists and funding bodies alike; at the same time, theatricality allows drifting to escape from the streets and to attain a larger aesthetic remit, one in which words, images and gestures are able to disturb perception and to allow for alternative ways of existing in the world to haunt the dominant ideology. To cite McKenzie Wark in the epigraph to this ‘Introduction’, theatricality infuses the drift with the important and necessary possibility of being ‘practicised in almost any kind of time-space whatsoever’.

THE DRIFT IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

The theatricalized reconceptualization of the drift that we proffer here raises questions about why it has been largely ignored by scholars (if not practitioners) in theatre and performance studies. The reason for such continued neglect stems, no doubt, from an engrained tendency within theatre and performance studies to perpetuate a mistaken assumption: namely that the SI’s supposed rejection of spectacle is coterminous with an absolute rejection of theatre. As Branislav Jakovljevic puts it: ‘psychogeography and theatregoing [are] polar opposites. Because of its neutrality of space, limitation of movement, and uniformity of environment, theatre seems to be the site of utmost resistance to psychogeography’ (2005: 96). While he goes on to argue that site- specific performance is ‘animated, at least in part, by the impulse to depart from the neutrality of the theatre habitus’ (96), it is telling that he never examines the work he focuses on – Skewed Visions’ The City Itself – through the theatrical vocabulary that the SI’s drift could have offered him.

Two notable exceptions to this general trend are found in the writings of Phil Smith and Simone Hancox, both of whom, along with Cathy Turner (2015), offer the most detailed analyses of how the drift functions in contemporary performance practice, if not necessarily in theatre per se.²⁵ As with much recent writing on the SI, neither Smith nor Hancox are concerned with remaining faithful to the SI’s initial concept of drifting. Smith, for instance, contends that his ‘critical journey resumes with a desire to allow the dérive to wander from its theoretical roots and to find in the trajectory of “walking as art” an escape clause from its self-negation’ (2010: 106).²⁶

Hancox’s approach is somewhat different. Less interested than Smith in providing an overview of contemporary practice, her concern is to contest Debord’s Hegelian rejection of art – its sublation into politics – by drawing on the ideas of Jacques Rancière, especially his idea of the ‘redistribution of the sensible’. By insisting, like Rancière, that reality is structured aesthetically – a matter of signs, images and gestures, and not something that exists beyond representation, as Debord sometimes seemed to suggest – Hancox is able to tease out the political significance of the contemporary dérive in the work of the two companies she focuses on: Wrights & Sites and Townley and Bradby.²⁷ For Hancox, it is precisely because they eschew the totalizing, pre-figurative utopianism of the SI that the urban walking performances of Wrights & Sites and Townley and Bradby are so politically resonant. As she puts it, their ‘framing of the city as art or performance … helps to uncover how the city’s spaces may be constructed with multiple and hidden meanings’ (2012:244).

Ironically, while Smith and Hancox have done much to illuminate the performative politics of the contemporary dérive, because they do not return to the SI’s writings in any detailed, analytical sense, an opportunity is missed to rethink the politics of drifting. Ultimately, there is no such thing as the drift. It is an activity that is only experienced – quite literally made sense of – in terms of the gender, sexuality, race, class or degree of ‘able-bodiedness’ that one may or may not possess. That the SI themselves were aware of the need to recognize such differences is apparent by reflecting on the significance of the following statement made by Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti in the 1972 text La Véritable scission dans l’Internationale (The Real Scission in The International):

Youth, workers, people of color, homosexuals, women, and children start to want everything that has been denied them; at the same time, they also refuse, in the main, the miserable results that the old organization of class society demanded to be perpetuated and supported. They want no more leaders, family or State. They criticize architecture and they are beginning to learn how to speak to each other. (2006: 1096, my translation)

If we are to grasp, fully, the ‘affordances’ of the SI’s drift today, it seems necessary, as we do in this issue, to return to comments such as these, and to place them in greater proximity to more detailed, theoretical work on identity politics, queering and the overall interrogation of ‘unmarked’ privilege that theatre and performance scholars have been conspicuously good at doing since the early 1990s. In this turn to identity, however, it is essential that the SI’s critiques of ‘alienation’, ‘class politics’, ‘exchange value’, ‘reification’ and ‘political economy’ are not abandoned in the process. These latter concepts are ones with which, with the notable exception of some scholars – Ridout (2013), Harvie (2013), Wickstrom (2012), McKinnie (2007), Neveux (2007), for instance – the disciplines of theatre and performance studies are only now beginning to re-engage en masse after a hiatus of three decades or so. Confronted with widespread ‘precarity’, indebtedness and austerity, it is no longer enough to remain focused on singular models of identity, as intersectional analyses of feminism, ‘race’, ‘class’ and ‘sexuality’ have been arguing since the late 1980s (see Crenshaw 1989). The more pressing imperative is to find ways of remaining attuned to differences without abandoning a total critique that would leave capitalism’s base structure intact. As former members of the English section of the SI, T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith observe, this concern with totality is where the contemporary leverage of the movement resides:

The history of the SI will someday be of use in a new project of resistance. What that project will be like is guesswork. It will certainly have to struggle to reconceive the tentacular unity of its enemy, and hence will need to articulate the grounds of a unity capable of contesting it. The word totality will not put it at panic stations. (2004: 486)

For ‘totality’ to attain its contemporary purchase in theatre and performance studies, there is an urgent need to reject accepted notions of individual emancipation that remain central – at least implicitly – in Jacques Rancière’s notion of the spectator (2008).²⁸ Rather the key point is to find ways of being open to what Félix Guattari calls transversalité (2013: 51–3), the oblique angle that establishes non-synchronized connections, entanglements and enfoldings between otherwise isolated identities and subject positions, individualities and collectivities, economics and ontologies in ways that build on and complicate the work carried out by intersectional analyses of identity. If we are to embark on such lines of generative, entangled flight it is important to return to the SI’s original writings on the dérive and to tease out what remains unarticulated within them and/or to recover what has yet to be commented upon. To borrow from Giorgio Agamben’s and Boris Groys’ writings on contemporaneity, this is precisely what the historiographical model we advanced on pp. 4–5 seeks to do – namely to rummage in the wreckage, to create unlikely assemblages, to resuscitate abandoned futures that would have real political and aesthetic traction for theatre and performance studies in terms of an overarching thematics of critique.²⁹

In parallel with this intersectional and transversal rummaging, one thinks, for instance, of what it might mean for theatre and performance studies to reflect on the emphasis the SI’s drift places on indolence, laziness and pleasure at a time when the spectre of mass unemployment looms large through the development of robots and smart machines.³⁰ Or of how their concern to create an embodied ecology of the city might be reconfigured by theatre and performance scholars in ways that are alert to how the body is not only policed in terms of gender, sexuality and race, but also beset by the type of literal and metaphorical pollution that Debord discussed in the sadly neglected essay Sick Planet (2008 [1971]). Or indeed of how the drift might be repurposed by critics and practitioners to provide an expressive and conceptual language better able to express the ontological and epistemological upheavals that arise when we realize that we now exist on an unstable and volatile planet that undoes all distinctions between nature and culture, and where the very notion of a ‘natural disaster’ has lost all credence. In the Anthropocene, an ironically named era in which human agency is undone by the ‘feedback’ from the earth itself, drifting not only provides an accurate description of our planetary state – the sense in which anthropogenically induced climate change has cut us adrift from a stable, permanent idea of ‘nature’ – but, just as importantly, it offers, as Dixon, Donald and Millar, and Szerszynski show in their contributions to this issue, a complex vocabulary able to acknowledge our lack of control and simultaneous need to act. These examples are not meant to be exhaustive or definitive, they are merely proposed as possibilities that arise when one unmoors the SI’s notion of the dérive from its historical context and places it in conjunction with emergent and residual themes in theatre and performance studies. Other areas that would also merit consideration may include ‘fugitivity’, ‘animality’, ‘decolonization’, ‘immigration’, ‘corporeality’, ‘game theory’, ‘stillness’, ‘affect’ and ‘atmospheres’.

In addition to these large and urgent themes, a more circumscribed but no less generative convergence between the SI and theatre and performance studies emerges when we shift the focus away from theory and politics and highlight, instead, how the drift was documented textually and visually. The UK artist Ralph Rumney, for instance, used photographic stills and text boxes to create a visual narrative of his drift through Venice in the late 1950s; and Debord’s collaborations with Asger Jorn in the late 1950s – The Naked City (1957), Guide Psychogéographique of Paris (1957), Fin de Copenhague (1957) and Mémoires (1959) – are effectively driftmaps of Copenhagen and Paris. In the latter two texts, the spectator is confronted with a riot of colour, a type of visual chaos without any apparent plan or regularity. The chromatic anarchy is shot through with detourned images from adverts, comic strips, maps, academic primers and photographs of accomplices and lovers. In these passionate maps or cartes de tendres, to use a phrase that Debord borrows from the seventeenth-century writer Madame de Scudéry, experience is depicted and transmitted as something corporeal, transversal and affective, what Deleuze and Guattari would come to call, in their work on Franz Kafka (1986:81–8), an assemblage of ‘percepts and affects’, and what Guiliana Bruno names a ‘voyage of emotions’ (2002:264).

To encounter these maps – these ‘blocks of intensity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 78) – is not to petrify what has been lived. Rather, it is to prolong and transpose the ‘motility’ of affect in ways that chime with attempts by contemporary performance artists and scholars to document and write about performance dynamically.³¹ In the SI’s work, the dérive is not to be represented as a mere index of a spatial performance that has happened, but as something that demands creative expression. The key, in other words, is to articulate the singularity of an embodied encounter through the discovery of a sensate style, something that allows the reader/ spectator to drift, to embark on new lines of flight that undo easy distinctions between passivity and activity. As we have suggested, to inhabit this interstitial space between experience and documentation, the street and the page is to rethink the dérive as a theatrical device for enlarging our understanding of what it means to make, compose and experience theatre and performance today. It is also to posit the dialogue between the SI and theatre and performance studies as one based on a form of reciprocity, a double movement in which both parties are subject to a process of mutual capture and generous transformation – the best sort of drifting, then, drifting that may help us to coexist better and to escape the static ‘loops’ of neoliberal capital that, as Hito Steyerl points out, have, for too long, defined our present (2017: 2).

Figure 3 Ocean.

Photo © Julia-Kristina Bauer

STRUCTURE

In keeping with the heteroclite qualities of drifting and its capacity to make things err, the contributions we have assembled seek to interrogate the ‘afterlives’ of drift by adopting a deliberately expanded sense of theatre, theatricality and performance – a strategy that explains, on the one hand, why we have commissioned so many artists’ pages, and, on the other, why there are so many contributions by scholars from a number of different fields (geography, sociology, cinema, visual arts and literature). For those readers who may prefer a more direct investigation of the SI’s relationship with theatre as a medium, we would encourage them to consult the French journal Théâtre Publique’s contemporaneous issue on the legacy of the Situationists that was conceived to act as a companion to this one.³² In this edition of Performance Research, though, drifting, as explained above, is always presented as an intermediate performance, something that blurs boundaries, that exists in the middle of things.

Although there are inevitable overlaps and slidings between both themes and practices (mapping, drawing, writing, photography, collage), we have divided the issue into the following sections: Cities, Identities, and Worlds. These sections should not be seen as definitive or fixed, but rather as moments of pause and stoppage, intervals that leak. In keeping with Debord’s call for structure in the ‘Theory of the Dérive’, their function is to give a sense of shape to this critical drift, to provide stations that allow for errant readings and collisions between what is past (in this essay) and what is to come (in the main body of the text). Some sense of this porosity, this roiling turbidity, is expressed in Julia-Kristina Bauer’s ‘Drift Map World’. In this homage to Debord and Jorn’s driftmaps, Bauer provides a sensate cartography for the edition as a whole by moving through and borrowing ideas, fragments and words from other contributors, while simultaneously combining these with personal memories, creative insights and shards of previous works. By navigating through a sea of words and visuals, and balancing past and present, this text and image piece draws attention to similarities whilst also stressing differences, an ambition which explains the lack of commas in the title. The gaps in the sentence are little voids that allow ideas to encounter each other in a relationship of non-relationship and where proximity becomes a kind of departure.

We open the journal with a section on Cities, echoing the SI’s desire to reconfigure the urban field through drifting. The first essay, by David Pinder ‘Transforming Cities: On the Passage of Situationist Dérive’, provides a detailed overview of the drift, examining its histories and legacies, and celebrating its contemporary relevance in an age of saturated surveillance and digital recuperations. Nick Whybrow, Cathy Turner, Stephen Hodge, Dee Heddon and Misha Myers, and Laura Grace Ford’s contributions all echo Pinder’s call. Whybrow’s mysterious text and image piece ‘Road Drift’ reinserts the body of the pedestrian back into the concrete fabric of Coventry’s infamous ring-road, and, by doing so, highlights the disjunctions between the modernist utopia envisaged in the 1950s and the reality of a city predicated on the environmentally damaging circulation of the car. There is a palpable mood of disorientation, too, in Cathy Turner’s ‘Drawing, Adrift: Bengaluru – Mumbai – St Ives’. In the opening sections of the essay, Turner attempts to rethink the Eurocentrism of the drift by practising it as a white, UK woman on the streets of Bengaluru and Mumbai. Unsettled by her visibility and overwhelmed by what she calls ‘a torrent’ of unfamiliar images, Turner resorts to drawing as a way of gaining her bearings in her collaborations with local artists Ranjit Kandalgaonkar and Shrikant Agawane – a device that ultimately leads to unexpected links with the Cornish town of St Ives, and, in particular, with the painter Winifred Nicholson. As Turner explains it, Nicholson’s ‘Indian Notebooks’, while dense with the privilege of Empire, nevertheless express a more open-ended, fragile and provisional experience caused by the shock of encounter with an ‘alien culture’. Like Whybrow and Turner, Steven Hodge is also aware of disorientation. Only on this occasion, the focus is on how Exeter, the regional capital of Devon in the South-West of England, may become submerged by flooding, as a result of anthropogenic climate change. To counter this possibility, Hodge, in ‘Where to build the walls that protect us’ provides a deliberately playful account of a post-Situationist walking intervention in Exeter and Leeds where participants were asked to engage, creatively, with their cities, to imagine different futures for their infrastructures. In the most recent iteration of their project ‘The Walking Library’ Dee Heddon and Misha Myers also rethink the drift in environmental terms. In ‘Walking Library for a Wild City’, they document how the walking library was used to stimulate reflections about how best to re-wild Glasgow, previously one of the UK’s most intensely industrial cities. Where today some might see some areas of Glasgow as an urban wasteland, Heddon’s and Myer’s literary walks reposition the city as a vibrant space teeming with the traces and explosions of urban nature. If Hodge, Heddon and Myers respond to the environmentalism of Whybrow’s text in a direct sense, then Laura Grace Ford’s ‘Radiant Futures’ does so in a more oblique manner, tuning into a kind of dystopian pathos, and expressing a clawing feeling of alienation that is nevertheless shot through with possibilities and pleasures. Reflecting, in certain ways, the SI’s early strategies for creating ambiguous driftmaps or counter-cartographies (see p. 10), Ford’s words and images evoke an unsettling, atmospheric dérive through Glasgow and its satellite towns, with the city existing as an ambivalent and troubling site of wreckage and memory, a place to get lost in, a disorientating dreamscape whose narrator remains anonymous, fugitive and floating. Looking back to what we mentioned on p. 11 as well as anticipating – as Turner’s does, too – many of the essays in the ‘Identities’ section, Jack Parlett’s text ‘New York Drifters’ investigates the forgotten ‘drift’ of homelessness and statelessness in the work of queer photographer and writer David Wojnarowicz and performance artist Tehching Hsieh, both of whom were making work on and from the streets of New York during the Aids tragedy of the 1980s. In Parlett’s complex account, drifting is not only specific to the history and spatial practices of individual cities; it also refuses a straightforward aesthetics. As Parlett reminds us, the dérive is not always a game, a matter of choice, for it is often inflicted on subjects who have no home to return to and, consequently, ‘little choice but to keep on walking’ (p. 62).

Building on the need to differentiate the drift, the ‘Identities’ section starts with Stephen Greer’s essay ‘Gender Drift: Testo Junkie, Queer performativity and Molecular becoming’, in which the concern is with how queer and trans performers are able to re-perform the city as a site of molecular pleasure and political resistance. In Greer’s piece, all subject positions and simultaneously affirmed and troubled. Marielle Pelissero’s poetic and elemental reflection on drifting follows a parallel, molecular path. For Pelissero, drifting, like its homologues – theatre and the sea – undoes the fixity of Western philosophy and so opens up the possibility for different kinds of sociality, in which formlessness and form are no longer opposed but part of the same generative ‘afformance’. In ‘Drifting and Cruising’, an essay that focuses on gay artist Touko Valio Laaksonen, Glyn Davis continues the theme instigated by Greer by investigating the under-theorized relationship between the spatial practices of the SI and gay men in order to show how the ‘empty moments’ of the drift and cruising possess the capacity to reconfigure the world, politically, sexually and ontologically. Although she is not perhaps as overtly focused as Greer and Davis on sexuality, Joanne Brueton offers a related reading of the drift in the writing of ‘gay outlaw’ Jean Genet. As with Greer and Davis, moreover, Genet’s queerness is not predicated on a desire for identity per se; rather, his sexuality forms part of a larger aesthetico-political practice of drifting in which what matters is the escape from capitalism’s insatiable desire for performances that produce and reproduce the world as it is. In the final two essays of this section, Petra Kuppers and Ana Ribero provide two very different concepts of how the drift is reconfigured by theatre and performance scholars today. In her amusing but profound reflection ‘Queer Spiritual Drifting: Not at Home in the Beguinage’, Petra Kuppers documents her difficulty in drifting through the landscapes of Belgium and the Netherlands in a wheelchair, as she sought to visit defunct beguinages – women- only spaces that date from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century – as part of a project on queer spiritual asylum space. Tellingly, Kuppers finds herself drifting back to her childhood and musing on drifting as a mode of spatio-temporal suspension, a disruption of the ‘straightness’ of linear time, perhaps. In the final essay of the section Ana Ribero in a timely piece, ‘Drifting Across the Border: On the Radical Potential of Undocumented Im/migrant Activism in the US’ draws attention to the Dream 9 action, an activist event in which nine previously deported or ‘self- deported’ Latinx youth attempted to cross the border back into the US by asking to be allowed to ‘return home’’ (p. 95). In detailing the inevitable but paradoxical ‘failure’ of the Dream 9 action, Ribero highlights the complex nature of the dérive today, its constrictions in a world with walls and where migrants are unable to drift freely.

The final section on ‘Worlds’ expands drifting beyond its urban context by thinking of how it might be practised in different sites, with different materials, and in ways that transgress the binary oppositions that, all too often, aggressively and unhelpfully separate human and non-human worlds. The section commences with Amy Sharrock’s photo-essay ‘Invitation to drift’ documenting her drifts with and through water. This is followed by musician and artist Bob Hardy’s piece ‘Indexing the Drift’, in which he provides a sample of an epic photographic project committed to documenting all the hotel rooms he has stayed in, as he has travelled the world in the past two decades as bassist for the band Franz Ferdinand. David Archibald’s and Carl Lavery’s essay ‘From Street to Screen: Debord’s Drifting Cinema’ reconfigures the drift as a celluloid process, a device for interrupting neoliberalism’s economy of attention, and, as such, an aesthetic strategy for creating new rhythmic worlds. The next sequence of essays marks a radical shift in our understanding of what it means to drift. Mike Pearson’s ‘Field Guides’ describes a non-human dérive in the countryside, a journey to find the Nightjar, one of northern Europe’s most elusive and reticent of birds. Simon Whitehead’s ‘Louphole: Drifting with Wolves’ adopts a similar method of drifting. Only here the animal is an extinct one – the UK wolf – and the drift operates as a kind of border crossing. Such crossing is not only imagined as a move into absence, but as a return to the body, a corporeal site of blood, bone and tissue. Where Pearson and Whitehead focus on animals, Minty Donald and Nick Millar, Deborah Dixon and Bron Szerszynski are concerned with the planet’s inorganic life. In ‘Erratic Drift: Notes towards human-geological drifting’, Donald and Millar provide a series of performance scores for how humans might drift with rocks; in ‘The Perturbations of Drift in a Stratified World’, conceived in dialogue with Donald’s and Millar’s piece, Dixon proposes the drift as a concept for thinking through what it might mean ‘to do geology’ in the Anthropocene; and in ‘Drifting as Planetary Phenomenon’, Szerszynski, in a poetic reflection on the etymology of drifting, contends that the interstitial and indeterminate nature of the dérive affords a resonant vocabulary for thinking through how all things on the planet (human and non-human alike) are engaged in a process of dynamic, relational and, ultimately, entangled movement – a mediation that, for us, provides an apposite expansion of the drift as the edition itself comes to a tentative, elliptical end that encourages the reader to raise their eyes from the page and to float free through the world.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the AHRC/LABEX for funding this research and for all discussions with members of the research team, especially Clare Finburgh and Christian Biet for leading the project so well. A final thanks to Cristina Delgado- García, Clare Finburgh, David Williams, and David Pinder for their comments on this text.

Notes

1 A very different meaning of drifting pertains to the refugee or migrant boats that are tragically allowed to ‘drift’ endlessly for weeks off the coasts of Europe and Australia without food or water. In this context, see Caroline Bergvall’s stunning text Drift (2014).

2 See Gerard Raunig et al. for an excoriating critique of neoliberalist creativity in contemporary arts practices (2011).

3 It is interesting that dérive is a homophone of the English ‘derive’. It is as if the word itself is split from the very beginning, already full of disparate possibilities and contradictory meanings – a signifier without origin or end.

4 One thinks, for instance, of those refugees, migrants, displaced people, the homeless and unemployed who have been forced to drift.

5 There are many people globally who are unable to drift. Not only because they are prevented from moving across borders, but also because they are tethered to factories and fields through poverty.

6 Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is based on a similar idea. For more on this, see Elizabeth Grosz (2011).

7 This is taken as the title of a celebrated, early collection of SI texts by Chris Gray (1998 [1974]).

8 ‘Folk politics’ for Srnicek and Williams is a type of Leftist politics, characterized by a radical anti-Statism – petitions, marches, workers councils, squatting, etc. – which, as they argue, is now out of joint with ‘the actual mechanisms of power’ (2016: 10)

9 See the work of Jonathan Crary (1999) and Mary Ann Doanne (2002) on attention and disciplinarity. Although it relates primarily to the nineteenth century and modernity, their analyses of how cultural forms, such as film, were used to police perception retain their relevance today. See also Crary’s writing on the SI (2002).

10 Although one ought not to forget, here, Debord’s comments on tourism and urban spectacles in The Society of the Spectacle (thesis 168).

11 In the 1967 text The Society of the Spectacle, Debord distinguished between the ‘concentrated’ and ‘diffuse spectacle’. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, however, he contended that the ‘integrated spectacle’ had superseded them both. The prescience of Comments is proved historically by the fact that it was published one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Theoretically, the text is contemporaneous, more or less, with Deleuze’s work on ‘control societies’. In Comments, Debord is quick to point out that spectacle is not to be equated with mass mediatized representation, but rather with a worldview, founded on technology, economy, secrecy, unanswerability and the production of ‘an eternal present’ (1990 [1988]: 12).

12 Interestingly, Debord was still creating driftmaps of Paris (Paris Habité) in the late 1980s.

13 CoBrA is an amalgam of the cities Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. The other groups who joined the Lettrist International to form the SI in 1957 were the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and the London Psychogeographical Society.

14 Overviews of drifting are de rigueur in most academic studies of the SI, and there are multiple examples to choose from. Perhaps the most informative text remains Tom McDonough’s excellent essay on ‘Situationist Space’ (2002). See also Sadler (1999).

15 For precise definitions of these terms, see the article ‘Definitions’ in the inaugural 1958 edition of Internationale situationniste 1 (in Knabb 1981: 45–6).

16 For an excellent account of the politics involved in the urbanization of Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, see Kristin Ross (1995).

17 For an illuminating analysis of Chtcheglov’s place in SI history, see Apostolidès and Donné (2006). Debord returns obsessively to Chtcheglov in his late films and writings. The attempt is to pay a debt to his friend, to acknowledge his influence.

18 The influence of Artaud on the Lettristes and, then later, Situationists is brilliantly explored by Cristina de Simone in Proféractions (2018). Many of Artaud’s ideas are also visible in the ecstatic and sensate thought of two other leading SI thinkers and practitioners: Raoul Vaneigem and Asger Jorn.

19 Donné (2008) traces a much closer affinity between SI and Surrealism than is usually admitted by commentators who, being too concerned to take the SI at its word, have perpetuated what Anna Trespeuch-Berthelot contends is its ‘mythology’ (2015).

20 For more on SI and Surrealism, see Ffrench (1997).

21 Khatib’s drifts during the curfew imposed on Algerians in Paris during the Algerian War are well documented by Soyoung Yoon’ (2013).

22 Even classical theatre’s mode of operation is inherently open-ended, in the extent to which it only exists on the stage as something that is being constantly performed differently.

23 See, for instance, André Frankin’s ‘Préface à l’unité scénique, “Personne et les autres”’, published in Internationale situationniste 5 in 1960. Apostolidès and Pecorari (2011) offer the best account of the SI’s flirtation with theatre.

24 It is ironic to note that Weber mistakenly (and like so many others) sees Debord as a Platonist (2004: 10–13). What Weber fails to see, however, is that Debord’s criticism of spectacle as false appearance does not mean that he is committed to a philosophy of authenticity or self- presence. Rather, Debord is interested in the same interval or impossibility as Weber. It is simply that he accuses the society of the spectacle of inauthenticity and the production of an alienated reality. For more on this, see Véronique Fabbri’s critique of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Hegelian reading of Debord (2008: 1–7)

25 See especially Turner’s chapter ‘Situation (Un)building the Hacienda’ (2015: 144–69).

26 In general terms, scholarship on the SI has tended to come in three waves. The first wave, spanning the 1970s through to the 1980s, was mostly concerned to inoculate the militant politics of the movement from any infection by ‘art’ and constructed faithful histories, assembled from the SI’s own archive; the second wave, influenced in 1989 by the important exhibition and catalogue On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment of Time: The Situationist International 1957–72 and the concurrent release of Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, placed the SI’s ideas within avant-garde histories and Marxist theoretical contexts, and ran until the late 1990s; the third wave, which started in the early to mid-2000s and continues to unfold today, has been more concerned to think through the larger aesthetic and political ramifications of their legacy. In this wave, there is less concern with issues of fidelity as well as a desire to undo the somewhat partisan distinction between SI theory and post- structuralism that Sadie Plant advanced in The Most RadicalGesture:The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (1992).

27 It is well known that Rancière has criticized Debord for wanting active spectators, and not emancipated ones (2008).

28 Although Rancière talks of a community of spectators, it is difficult to grasp how this community is able to impact on the distribution of the sensible beyond the theatre event, since the theatrical event is necessary temporally and spatially delimited. Ultimately, spectatorship remains a largely private matter for Rancière, something that individuals may certainly do together but which nevertheless appears to lack concrete channels or methods for creating extra-theatrical collectives.

29 For both Agamben (2009) and Groys (2009), to be contemporary is to be untimely, always too early or too late for one’s historical appointment.

30 Perhaps the possibilities of theatricality today are more useful, in some instances, than the possibilities of performance. Where performance tends to want to be efficacious, to bring something into being, theatricality does not have to create anything external to itself, but, on the contrary, affirms the necessity of an ‘undoing’ that, at least to some extent, brings the virtual into play. In other words, theatricality may allow the ‘workaholic consciousness’ that prevails today to find some respite from its compulsion to equate existence with productivity and actualization.

31 This resonates with recent work of Sack (2017) and Hilevaara and Orley (2018) on the ‘creative critic’ in theatre and performance studies.

32 Both of these issues are outcomes of an AHRC/ LABEX funded project on the Situationist International (SI), which ran between 2015 and 2017. The project was entitled Reviewing Spectacle, and its aim was to consider the legacy of the SI for theatre and performance studies today.