by sleep; a pattern most archival researchers will have experienced during their archival plundering. Debord also accounts for the necessity of cutting across large sections of the city in order to resume one’s dérive from another point, and he explains that the use of a taxi cab can provide such a clear separation and thus help the wanderer in his or her effort to change the scene and become destabilized. Similarly, the archival researcher should switch series or sub-series entirely and abruptly — like, say, going from Correspondence to Photographs — or, alternatively, take the pedestrian’s winding road to the new locale by looking intently at every single folder of every single box you request. One can spend an entire day in the same neighborhood, the same box. All this navigating naturally requires that a bit of homework be done beforehand. Debord insists on the study of maps, old and new, of the terrain about to be scoured, just as the researcher must carefully study the finding aid prepared by the archivist, perhaps even contacting the archivist directly if the psychogeographic arrangement of the collection demands deeper insight into its secret machinations. Maps and finding aids are works in progress, and here citizen and architect, researcher and archivist, can collaborate to create even greater traveling. Just as one can get lost within neighborhoods one has already scoured countless times, the power of the archive consists in rejuvenating known avenues of knowledge, taking unpredictable turns, creating an encounter one can never truly plan for. It is a rendezvous, and as such, has all the potentialities of the encounter, with its pleasures and, above all, its dangers. Once initiated into the dérive, you will suddenly be able to measure and assess corresponding intellectual adjacencies that had once looked so distant or worse, separated by abysses — for example, the fact that Ralph Ellison took comic books seriously, or that a literary pariah like Samuel Roth hired Claude McKay to ghostwrite a novel in the early 1940s. These miraculous correspondences, waiting for the synthesizing human brain in the archive, can topple paradigms, and alter a discipline’s urban grid. One day, Debord declares, we will construct cities merely to derive. 1
Fortunately, we’ve already built archives precisely for that purpose. Naturally, one can only push this détournement so far; at some point it breaks down. Where it breaks down, however, is in the realm of the practical. One might say that the détournement from dérive to archive works through a process of ‘pataphysical equivalency. 1 As a conceptual aid to the cognition of the archival encounter, it fits superbly; where it fails is in the exact details of procedure. Perhaps surprisingly again, an unlikely thinker offers a possible answer to this predicament; American novelist and essayist Ralph Waldo Ellison. Ellison develops a careful — yet fragmented — technique for surviving with style in the face of unpredictable encounters, turn of events, situations, ambushes, performances, transforning the blunder into a method. Ellison tells us that he “blundered into writing,” and thus blundered into mastering his craft. His stories are peppered with myriad cases of “blundering”: his blunder with the trumpet forced the little man at Chehaw station to come out of hiding; his blundering extravagance of laughter during a representation of Tobacco Road led him to some of his most incisive reflections on American racism and the human condition as a whole; or the blunder of his famous invisible protagonist who accidentally falls into that Harlem manhole only to land in that “place of power.” In other words, Ellison turns stumbling and blundering, perhaps the most natural, universal human activities, into another kind of “hurried passage” toward transcendence and the creation of new knowledge. Every turn, every move, undertaken during an archival dérive is a form of Ellisonian blunder in that it has the potential to provide an unpredictable transcendence. As Ellison puts it, “it is a playing upon possibility” (Ellison), and is thus an “affirmation of a ludic-constructive behavior” (Debord). One can think through Debord’s theory of the dérive as an archival technique, while Ellison can teach us to how to be psychologically and emotionally nimble, poised and ready for the archival encounter when you come to it (or it comes to you). k
See Boris Vian on ‘pataphysics as a science that functions through equivalency.
83 Dérivateur