Last week I had one of the most enjoyable and educational days I can remember. It came by inversion of fate that became fate itself, a seizing of a warm autumn day. The night before, I was disgusted by my return to an existence fenced-in by full-time manual labor for a meager wage. I arranged to meet a friend at the old abandoned library in the morning. It would be a perfect day for a derive.

A derive? Translated from French, it means an “aimless walk” or “drift” — but in the context of our motive, it referred to the practice developed by Guy Debord, the leader of the Situationist International, a small group of avant-garde radicals in 1960s Europe. Sadie Plant, in The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Post-modern Age, offers a good definition of this practice: to derive is “to notice the way in which certain areas, streets or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which the environment was designed. It [is] very much a matter of using an environment for one’s own ends, seeking not only the marvelous beloved by surrealism but bringing an inverted perspective to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world.”

The “spectacular world” is the target of Debord’s criticism of modern society. Though the “spectacle” dodges concise definition (Debord spends many pages in The Society of the Spectacle unraveling the idea), it can be roughly understood as the interface, mediated by images, between people, each other, and their environment, brought about by the economy of the commodity. Debord believed that the psychology of consumption, which is projected onto the structure of our reality, has the effect of fragmenting our perception and ossifying our creativity and freedom.

To derive, then, is to challenge the limits that our environment imposes on us as a result of pervasive appropriation by our economy. It is a subtle, intellectual challenge – not throwing bricks through shop windows. It is an observation of the social and physical contours that define our everyday surroundings, recognition of the choice to follow or invert them, and exploration of the consequences and potentials of each — a playing with the route that one might otherwise follow without second thought.

In this way, the derive is linked to “Unitary Urbanism,” another idea developed by the Situationists. Unitary Urbanism criticized the stifling functionality of urban spaces and the compartmentalization and commoditization of art within them. The Situationists envisioned spaces that would still fulfill basic needs, but would dissolve the separation between function and leisure in an atmosphere that encouraged engagement with and between individuals. The derive serves as an exploration of how such an environment might look.

Our derive began amid the graffiti of the newly abandoned library. We slipped trough a breach in the brick wall upstream to the back alley along one-way street parallel Main same_way_as_traffic past huge hOle-new parking garage-three blocks—which way?—right to North Big white building but underneath pink [distinct neighborhood of small houses/(one facing sideways)] thru vacant field back entrance of K-MART WAL-MART {cameras} (tea break)…on and on.

Our route flowed through our surroundings, traversing and transecting heavily-trodden and barely-perceptible paths navigating the social landscape. Playful insights embraced an entire neighborhood or the smallest crack in the pavement. Our rage boiled in the empty concrete seas of the Big Box strip—though we wondered at the parking spaces, a huge board of multiplayer Backgammon. In the old industrial sector of town, we chanced upon an Italian bakery, tucked away in a garage, and ate pastries.

I don’t understand, much less endorse, all of Situationist philosophy. Some of it will make you cynical. Some of it will make you feverish with revolution. Some of it is tedious and almost self-indulgently abstract. But the derive is one aspect of Situationist thought I can really recommend. You might start to see your surroundings in a whole new way, to see beyond the structure imposed by forces which we don’t take time to comprehend. If nothing else, you’ll become more familiar with your neighborhood, your suburb, your city. You might get out of a day of work.

The Situationists were instrumental in the May 1968 uprising in Paris. Among the graffiti remembered from those days is this one, which I think speaks more than any theoretical explanation: Sous les paves, la plage! — “Beneath the paving stones, the beach!”