Becoming Strangers: Travel, Trust, and the

Everyday

Day 19: Drift

Some Useful “Posthuman” Ideas

JOHN CAGE. Stop worrying about your problems, wake up, and attend to the things around you as if you were always living in the middle world.

MICHEL FOUCAULT. You’re not the center of the universe. Think big, if you are to understand how the world works.

KIMSOOJA. Keep moving. You might never learn who you are—but you do weave yourself into the world, and thereby give the world shape and form.

TOM PHILLIPS. Drift, turn, return.

Situationist International

Avant-garde movement based chiefly in France. Founded 1957, disbanded 1972.

Chief figures include Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, and Asger Jorn.

United Western Marxist politics with formal experimentation in the visual and literary arts.

The Problem (according to the S.I.)

The old Marxist distinction between the infrastructure (the economy) and superstructure (culture) no longer obtains.

We live in the “Society of the Spectacle.” We no longer buy & consume things. We buy & display images.

In other words: we want what we see on TV or at the movies. And what we see are “spectacles.” Not any shoe, it must be Air Jordans! We seek “The Good Life”: enough $$$ to pour Cristal on the carpet! Hair like Jennifer! Pecs like Brad!

Our lives are entirely shaped & guided by the mass media. There is no escape: even “Nature” has become a commodified spectacle. Don’t forget to stop at REI !

The Solution (according to the S.I.)

(1) DE’TOURNEMENT. French for “un-turning.” The strategic defacement, meddling, or transformation of “spectacles” in order to expose their falsity and absurdity and thereby deprive them of their authority, naturalness, and inevitability.

(2) DE’RIVE. French for “drift.” Walking or otherwise acting without predetermined aim or goal. Cut across, ignore, or transgress all artitificial barries, physical or conceptual.

Examples of De’tournement

Marcel Duchamp, LHOOQ (1919)

Image from Vancouver-based AdBusters magazine

GOOGLE BOMBING. Activists exploited Google’ssearch protocol hierarchies so that anyone searching for “miserable failure” would be directed to a biography of George W. Bush. (Still works.)

Examples of De’rive

What is a book?

From Scroll to Codex

Roman wax tablet diptych (ca. 50 CE)

Egyptian papyrusscroll (ca. 1000 BCE)

Coptic codex (ca. 200 CE)

Codex Sinaiticus, Greek biblical codex

(ca. 350 CE)

Convergent Evolution?

Dresden Codex. Mayan treatise on astronomy, 11th century CE copy of 8th century original

Whyusespaces?

Early manuscript copy of Virgil’s Aeneid

Book of Kells (ca. 800 CE)In the Classical world, scribes did not put spaces between words.

The first people to put spaces between words were Irish monks (6-8th centuries CE). They did so because their Latin was too poor to read texts aloud without help.

Take Nothing for Granted!

All of the following had to be invented and popularized:

• Upper & lower case letters.

• Page numbering.• Table of contents.• Index.• Paragraph divisions.• Quotation marks.• Italics.

Not until the 16th century did the basic “look of the book” emerge. It did not become standard until the 19th century.

Aldine Press publication, designed by Aldus Manutius.

(ca. 1500 CE)

Tom Phillips

Contemporary British avant-garde visual artist and poet.

Born in 1937 and educated at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Best known for A Humument, a “treated novel” that is an ongoing work in progress.

For more information and an extraordinary number of images, visit his site http://www.humument.com.

A Humument: Origins

Inspired in part by John Cage, one Saturday in 1966 Tom Phillips went for a walk with the intent to base an artwork on the first affordable book he came across.

He ended up purchasing a Victorian novel, A Human Document (1892) by W.H. Mallock.

He began by crossing out selected words and typing up what was left.

Then he realized that the pages full of cross-outs and doodles were interesting works of art.

A Humument: An Overview

Phillips overpaints each page in a different manner. Selected words are left legible.

He retains the hero and heroine in Mallock’s original novel: Robert Grenville and Irma Schilizzi.

He adds, though, another character, Bill Toge, who can only appear when the words “together” and “altogether” appear in Mallock’s text.

Adventures in De’tournement and De’rive

Further Adventures

Some Lessons of A Humument

Movement & travel can take place “in” and “through” a cultural artifact, not only through 3-D space.

Travel through and in despite of boundaries can both disrupt those boundaries and bring unforeseen things to light.

Such travel produces effects by creating new “spaces” in De Certeau’s sense.