"What
meaning can there be in the
freedom to
walk at night, through the
Paris of the mid 1950s, the curfew of the occupation lifted and the curfew of the Algerian war not yet descended? The
dérive appears almost as if it is a direct
answer to this question. The
dérive is the experimental
mapping of a
situation, the
trace of the probabilities of realizing a
desire. There is still the
police to contend with, and delinquent Letterists and their
friends would occasionally end up in jail for the
night. But the dérive is more than the no-man's-land
between consciousness and facticity, for-itself and in-itself, freedom and
constraint. It is rather the flux, the monist dialectic, which produces as one of its effects the
experience of the gap
between in-itself and for-itself in the first
place."
McKenzie Wark,
The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of The Situationist International, London & NY: Verso 2011, page 57-58.
