Art historian Lori Waxman’s Keep Walking Intently: The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus, is an important book about three avant-garde art movements of the twentieth century in which walking played a central role. Part I, “Surrealism’s Ambulatory Dreams,” begins, though, with the Dadaists, on a rainy afternoon in April 1921, when a dozen men (one carrying a dictionary) led a group of 50 spectators “around the muddy, foggy grounds of a decrepit churchyard in Paris’s 5th arrondissement” (9). “The attendees endured taunts and insults, the shouting of nonsense words and phrases, an announcement of the intention to stand for political office, and random readings from the dictionary,” Waxman writes (9). After about 90 minutes, the audience began to disperse, “whereupon they were offered envelopes containing items such as phrases, portraits, cartes de visite, landscapes, and five-franc notes covered in erotic sketches” (9). The organizers “retreated to a nearby café, lamenting the outing’s failure” (9). 

“This rather sad group excursion marks a turning point in the history of vanguard twentieth-century art, an initial stirring of the Surrealist spirit, a foundational moment in the rapprochement of art and everyday life, and one of the first attempts to marshal walking as an artistic device,” Waxman tells us (9). The brainchild of André Breton and the Littérature group of the Grande Saison Dada of 1921, “the outing was meant to counter the boredom of Dada actions and publications, and as a rejoinder to an audience that had come to expect the shock of Dada productions” (9). Breton’s idea was “a series of visites in and around Paris to various sites of no particular historical or aesthetic importance, at least not to him and his compatriots” (9). The places Breton proposed visiting, according to a poster announcing the event, “really have no reason to exist” (11). While several trips were promised, only the one to the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre took place (11). 

“But if Breton, Jacques Baron, Roger Vitrac, and Louis Aragon, among others, all deemed the adventure a failure of one sort or another—due to the weather, the public’s total lack of reaction, ‘the laborious nullity of the speeches’ that strove too hard to be provocative, or an inability to break with the ‘Dada cliché’ despite having moved from the auditorium to the open air—the event should by no means be dismissed as inconsequential,” Waxman contends. “Though Surrealism would not officially be announced until the fall of 1924, when Breton would publish his manifesto a few months after returning from another failed outing, the church visit nevertheless revealed distinct desires of a sort that would come to preoccupy the group for years” (12). The public notice of the excursion to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre indicated its organizers wanted to create “a new interpretation of nature applied this time not to art but to life” (qtd. 12). “In these words glimmer the Surrealist proposal for finding the marvelous in the banal, in the spaces of everyday life, spaces overlooked and underappreciated, sometimes to the extent of being outmoded or even ruined”: spaces like the empty streets of the city that Breton would write about in Nadja (1928) and L’amour fou (1937), or the arcades Aragon would write about in Le paysan de Paris (1926) (12). According to Waxman:

To chance upon the unexpected and extraordinary in these places is to protest against their nullity and to offer a potentially powerful resistance to a cycle of consumerist decay, to the speed of fashion and of technology, to the need to be productive and economic. That this re-enchantment depends not on the representation of motion or place but on actual experience, the traversing of real space by real bodies in real time, finds its initial proposal in the journey to and around Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. The future Surrealists did not find anything extraordinary there—too rainy, too many people, too encumbered by Dadaist antagonism—but they made a first effort to re-enchant the quotidian pathways and places of the city by walking through them. (13)

“It was an excursion that portended miles and miles more to come,” she concludes (13).

The Surrealists were walkers: the city was “the central place where many of them claimed for themselves this everyday mobility in their poems, essays, memoirs, novels, photographs, and, most importantly, their lives” (13). Walking might have been a fundamental, definitive human activity, pervasive, commonplace, and beneath notice, “yet it formed a core practice of the Surrealists, giving shape and possibility to so many of their experiments” (13). Of course the Surrealists walked for practical purposes, like other Parisians, “but they mostly ambulated about town for reasons that departed from such pragmatic necessities, even when they involved them,” Waxman notes. “They walked to go on journeys, to travel within the confines of their own city, to be on the familiar street but also to leave it for the unfamiliar hidden in plain sight. They walked to encounter the unknown and the mysterious, the dreamlike and the uncanny, be it in the form of an astonishing prostitute, a hallucinatory shop window, or a disfiguring shadow. They walked with one another and they walked alone, and they also observed how others walked, sometimes following at a distance” (13-14). 

“When something commonplace is appropriated for purposes that exceed convention, it bears paying special attention to how and why this is done. Walking is no exception,” Waxman continues (14). “Various memoirists and scholars have noted the central importance of walking to the Surrealist enterprise. Often the term ‘flânerie’ is used to describe their practice” (16). The idea of the flâneur dates back to the July Monarchy (1830-1949), but it is usually traced back to Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” which portrayed the flâneur as a “‘passionate spectator’” (qtd. 16) who finds interest and newness everywhere, “who roams independently but is also at one with the crowd, electrified by its energy” (16). The flâneur was later taken up by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s; he saw the flâneur as a more complex figure, “one who looked on the city and the crowd with an estranged gaze, energized by it but also critical, fascinated yet never completely immersed, always somewhat out of place” (16). “With Benjamin, the figure of the flâneur began to resemble that cut by the Surrealists, who at the time he was writing had been roaming about Paris for a decade,” Waxman writes (16).

Other art historians note the importance of the walk to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre as a gesture. Francesco Careri, in his book Walkscapes, which I read in preparation for my comprehensive examinations, “introduces the notion of the ‘anti-walk,’ positing the proto-Surrealist visite to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre and the subsequent Surrealist deambulations . . . as a kind of anti-art, a radical means of breaking with traditional notions of the art object” (16-17). The Surrealists, according to Roger Cardinal, elevated walking to the status of a creative act, “one which allowed for the dominant influence of Paris itself” on walks that were poetic (17). Indeed, George Melly, in his 1991 book Paris and the Surrealists, recalls his first visit to Paris as a young man, in 1949: “He spent the week wandering the unfamiliar city, feeling invisible, alone. It was, he realized forty-two years later, after a lifetime devoted to the movement, the closest he had ever felt to the Surrealist spirit” (17). According to Waxman, “Melly’s retrospective clarity points to a salient feature of Surrealist walking, the art of getting lost, and not simply on account of territorial unfamiliarity” (17).

“But getting lost, meaningfully, mysteriously, fabulously lost, is no easy task. It is not all the same as not knowing where one is,” she continues (18). Benjamin compares the goal of getting lost in a city to the much easier task of getting lost in a forest, a comparison which suggests that the city is a living, breathing, growing thing, “full of man-made elements that speak their own language, as birds and flowers do to the pastoral wanderer. The city as a place not just of functional mobility but the kind of noninstrumental, inspiring movement otherwise associated with more natural settings” (18). Losing oneself in a city like Paris, Waxman suggests, 

demands not only the confidence and ability to do so, but also a willing urban setting—just the kind of city that Baudelaire first recognized Paris to be in his lyric poetry of the mid-nineteenth century. Paris arguably possesses, or possessed, qualities more encouraging to the wanderer than other urban settings, qualities sometimes linked to her feminine gender and the desiring ways in which one might therefore cross the city; her plethora of plazas and monuments, open to re-imagination and haunting; her warrens of streets and arcades, which cut through the city with an organic randomness. But those aspects of the urban environment that challenge the straying body and spirit existed in Paris as well, and increasingly so: vehicular traffic, which bodily threatens the pedestrian, especially one who is lost in reverie, and administrative rationalization, such as directional signage, building numbers, and broad thoroughfares, which make of the city an unpoetic machine. (18-19)

Losing oneself in Paris, then, “constituted an art to be deliberately practiced” (19).

That art could be either a collective or an individual practice. The Surrealists often walked with others; “the potential for encounter and discovery . . . increased with the presence of a walking companion or two. Friendships formed on walks, ideas were debated and disseminated, discoveries were made”—of “uncanny landscapes” and “potent objects” (19). Walking with men led to friendship and discussion, but walking with women was different: for the Surrealists, women were media “through which to tap the unconscious, the uncanny, the mysterious, and even hysterical aspects of the city and oneself” (21-22)—particularly the prostitutes they followed and wrote about (22-23). “For one does not just go on a walk, one does not simply stroll, one must be taken by a mysterious force, giving oneself over to it, to chance, to the phenomenal,” Waxman notes. “Walking alone did not necessarily curtail these forces, but walking with a companionable and like-minded soul, or following in the footsteps of the other’s uncontrolled passions, promised even more” (23). 

During the 1920s, the Parisian cityscape was changing; it was becoming more friendly to automobiles and relegating pedestrians to second-class status; these changes led to a need to alter one’s walking to avoid accidents and injury (24-25). “Traffic avoidance, if not a determining factor in the where and when of Surrealist promenading, nevertheless resulted from some such decisions,” Waxman writes. “They often walked at night, while the city and most of its inhabitants slept and vehicular and human traffic subsided. They walked far from the elite and touristic crowds of the Left Bank and the Grands Boulevards, preferring the pedestrian zones of the flea market or the arcades” (25). The majority of the Surrealists’ journeys were taken on foot, which Waxman argues was important: “For the experience of riding in a car, even in a congested city, is one of speed and of being cut off from the exchanges made possible among the people, monuments, and shopfronts of the street” (26). There are few hallucinatory details in a taxi ride, compared to walking (26). Surrealists used trains, too, endlessly riding “the rails that looped around the city’s outskirts through the desolate landscape of the zone until falling into a kind of mental trance that gave itself over to automatism,” thus using the transportation system against the grain, “to explore the unconscious by moving through the landscape as if sleepwalking” (27). However, walking was the central Surrealist practice of mobility. Their “deambulation moves as a form of revolt against the stultifying regulation, logic, and efficiency of modern urban life, a life they believed deadened the spirit under the pretense of civilization and progress,” Waxman states. “To walk as a meaningful practice within the modernizing city is to act both bodily and spiritually against the imperatives of utility, functionalism, and work, imperatives deeply tied to a changing technological and transportation structure” (27-28).

In a 1922 poem, Breton called upon artists to leave Dada and start walking as a form of experience and encounter (28). “But how? The excursion the year before to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre failed dismally, despite its engagement with real time, space, and action. It was too theatrical, too focused on shocking a passive audience,” Waxman points out. “To really take to the highways would mean giving oneself over to whatever might be encountered there, including oneself” (28). So, four artists—Breton, Aragon, Max Morise, and Roger Vitrac—set off on a 10 day walk in 1924 (28). “Wandering without a goal was their goal, and over the course of the journey they encountered a few phantoms, came close to fisticuffs, and eventually decided to cut the trip short on account of mounting hostility, fatigue, and disorientation,” Waxman tells us (28-29). However, for Breton the journey was not disappointing, “‘because it probed the boundaries between waking life and dream life’” (qtd. 29). He wrote his “Manifesto of Surrealism” shortly afterwards (29). “The lessons of the countryside would be transferred to the far more fertile territory of the city, where one needed only be receptive to the ‘absolute reality’ that was already there, lurking in common and forgotten places,” Waxman writes. “Certain locales resonated more than others, pulsing with a potent magnetism hidden beneath an exterior banality” (29). Those places included the flea market, the arcades, outmoded monuments, and working-class neighbourhoods on the Right Bank (29): “The very lack of culture in these places appealed, for being undigested, unprocessed and unplanned, empty of expectation but full of unpredictable promise. What was found there would therefore be all the more moving” (29).

“The evidence of these findings and of the perambulations that led to them exists primarily in Surrealist writing and secondarily in Surrealist photography,” Waxman notes (30). “Full of sometimes unbelievable coincidences, happenstance, and strangeness, the Surrealists’ strings of words are tied inextricably with what happened to their bodies and minds in space. Their texts are based on fact, not fiction” (31). She provides a long discussion of Breton’s book Nadja, which I haven’t read, particularly its use of images (including drawings and photographs) (31-33); he commissioned the photographs from the young Surrealist photographer Jacques-André Boiffard (33). The text of Breton’s L’amour fou also contained photographs; these, according to Waxman, are “more explicitly surrealist in that the extraordinary is visible within their frame” (33). Those photographs were commissioned from Brassaï, whose “entire artistic practice” depended on walking in the city at night (35). “Just as Brassaï crossed Paris each night, the Surrealist poets rambled about the city on quests of their own. They wandered to experience, feel, and dream, to see—not to be seen. How others viewed them goes unrepresented,” she states (36). 

Breton was looking for an obscure “it” in Nadja, opposing the mysteriousness of that pronoun to the cages of rationalism, common sense, the predictable, the familiar, the dull (37). That mystery was central to Surrealist practice. For instance, in a chapter of Dernières nuits, Phillippe Soupault imagines meeting himself while walking on the street (39-40). “That would be a startling encounter, an improbable and potentially revelatory confluence that could be triggered on an aimless walk,” Waxman states (40). “Nadja blooms with similarly ripe encounters” which resist rational explanations (40). Breton used the phrase “objective chance” (qtd. 42) to describe such strange coincidences (42). For him, “[c]hance was not mystical but an objective possibility, something to be happened upon with the right attitude” (42). Soupault also believed in chance, but he saw it as treacherous and potentially malicious, although he continued to seek it out; in Dernières nuits, however, he writes about making his peace with it (43). 

For the Surrealists, this activity was intended to be revolutionary, even though walking is itself banal:

Walking is not in and of itself a revolutionary or polemical act. If anything it is the very opposite: conventional, non-threatening, pedestrian, neutral. One foot in front of the other takes one to work and home again. All humans walk, regardless of political stripe. And yet walking gives bodily form and force to insurrection, as people take to the streets in protest of injustice and against corrupt leaders. Paris manifests a long, storied history of such urban revolutions—the years 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, and 1968 foremost among them—and yet these were decidedly not the kind of revolution Surrealism would wage on the city’s streets. (44-45)

Yet Surrealist walking was hardly unaware of that history:  “Nadja is haunted by the ghosts of this insurrectionist past throughout. Various sites that Breton finds himself drawn to and where he experiences uncanny sensations are locations, symbolic or literal, or revolutionary activity” (45). “The historical memory that sticks to these locations, and which would have been familiar to Breton’s contemporaries and readers, is notably of failed scenarios,” Waxman continues. “The Surrealist endeavor does not fuse with revolutions past but rather rejects them, calling attention to the impossibility of a successful insurrection based on violent, popular, and political uprising. Theirs would be a different revolution” (45).

The Surrealist movement called itself revolutionary from the outset (45). However, the rights it demanded were not social or political: 

Theirs was not a revolution for the masses but for the individual, not about social conditions but the human condition. They wished to liberate man from the invisible oppressors of the imagination, the mind, the senses, desire. They called for freedom from closed rationalism, deadening functionalism, reigning moral laws, and stultifying common sense; not for better working conditions but for no work at all. Like their revolutionary forebears, they too claimed this liberty through walking the streets of Paris, though not by marching or mounting barricades or shouting radical slogans. On the contrary, they walked not in pragmatic solidarity but imaginative solitude, seizing the anarchic possibility of the most commonplace of actions. (45-46)

Waxman refers to Benjamin’s memoir, “A Berlin Chronicle” (1932), which sees walking in the city as an individual act of rebellion (46), even though he was not a Surrealist, as an example of the revolutionary possibilities in walking. “In their revolt against functionalism and modernization, against utility and work,” the Surrealists proceeded “at a unique pace unimpeded by such mundane obligations” (46-47). 

Breton believed that the imperative to work crushed most of the people he saw during his urban walks (47)—except Nadja, who somehow escaped the yoke of functionalism (48).  According to Waxman, “the act of walking provided a consistent tactic for the Surrealist rejection of workaday life—walking at night all the more so” (48). The Surrealists left home at dusk and walked until sunrise, the opposite of the worker’s daily walking habit (48). In his photographs, “Brassaï pictured this fusion of revolution, nighttime journeys, and the refusal to work in his multiple series depicting the sights and citizens of the other world that was nocturnal Paris” (49). Waxman wonders what Brassaï’s subjects would have thought of his “surrealistic idealization of their nighttime lives”: “Would it have struck them as celebratory or strange, concerned or voyeuristic?” (49).

The Surrealists were not a homogenous group, though. Aragon’s revolution was different from Breton’s: “Where the former commits his oneiric driftings to the political and social cause of the threatened passages, the latter devotes his to the personal, using that which he encounters along the way toward a greater understanding and expansion of the self” (50). For Aragon, the old-fashioned arcades were important “in a revolutionary way, by exposing the relentless machine of modernization that threatens to tear down whatever stands in the way of progress and consumption. Capitalism can be resisted not just by exposing these outmoded objects and places but by re-enchanting them” (51). Aragon creates “a startling mythology” out of these places, “slipping from careful observation to hallucinatory vision” (51). 

“Many of the Surrealist excursions can be understood through this framework of revolutionary re-enchantment,” Waxman writes (51). The visite to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, a place with “little appeal in terms of fashion,” had “something left to be discovered”; other places in the writing of the Surrealists, such as the Saint-Ouen flea market, were passé and decrepit, but in their encounters, “charged with an explosive atmosphere” as they discovered “the marvelous in those objects fallen out of capitalist circulation” (51). “Like Aragon’s re-enchantment of the arcades or Breton’s of the flea market,” Brassaï’s photographs of demolished buildings accomplish “his magic of resistance on foot. The photographic print proves to the viewer the possibility of achieving something similar through his or her own peregrinations” (53).

Automatism was central to the Surrealist project of tapping into the unconscious—it was a tactic (54)—and walking was a form of automatism, like writing: the experimental country walk from Blois to Romorantin in May 1924 “can be understood as an expanded kind of automatic writing, one written with the body in space rather than words on a page. The act of walking itself becomes a means of achieving psychic automatism, an undirected articulation of thought both triggered and expressed via the equally unstructured movement of the body down a dirt road” (55). The streets of Paris as well dissolved “under the wandering footsteps of the Surrealists, washed by their imagination to the point of becoming the location of the astonishing metamorphoses generated in a poetic text like ‘Soluble Fish,’” Breton’s 1924 automatic text recounting a walk through the city (55). “Moving through the city becomes a means of accessing the self, as the mind and body together rewrite a traversed territory according to desires, histories, connections, recollections,” Waxman writes. “The directions in which the otherwise undirected body drifts reveal a psychic undertow of attraction and repulsion, which, if carefully observed, could provide a veritable psychoanalysis of the subject” (55). Breton wrote of the “magnetic poles” which drew or repelled him in Paris; “they point to the automatic nature of wandering and the access it offers to the wanderer’s unconscious” (55). In a 1950 essay, “Breton even imagined a global experiment along these lines, one that anticipated by a few years the Situationist study of psychogeography. Breton proposed drawing a map for every individual that recorded their sensations while walking along a single street of sufficient length and variety,” a map which would enable those walkers to encounter themselves (57).

This search for the individual unconscious was serious, one that Breton “sets out to accomplish from the very first lines of Nadja” (57). Although Breton follows Nadja throughout the book, “in the end it is not a woman whom Breton pursues but his own authentic self. By walking in the city, it becomes his double, mirroring the geography of his unconscious” (57). “If wandering the streets of Paris offers Breton a means of discovering his own unconscious drives, for others it meant uncovering the city herself”: Soupault, in Dernières nuits, for instance, proclaims that he has discovered the “‘inviolable secret’” of Paris (58). Both Breton and Soupault sense invisible changes in the city, spectres or hauntings of the people they met during their nocturnal ramblings (58-59). Aragon, in Paysan de Paris, states “that it is both the mysteries of the city and of himself that he seeks,” mysteries that “reveal themselves to the observer of urban material” (59). Walking in the arcades enhanced Aragon’s powers of observation, gave him “access to both the city’s unconscious and his own” (59-60). 

Not all Surrealist responses to the city, of course, were literary. Brassaï’s photographs present Paris as a dreamscape, as “a picture of reality that simultaneously points to something else,” as a landscape of doubling, of shadows (60-61). Surrealist painters saw Paris “as a city of signs, of words imprinted on advertising posters, billboards, street panels, shop windows, and building facades”: the city “encountered everywhere by the pedestrian” (65). Thus the city became a concrete poetry “both written and read by the walking body, composed as it moves past this and that unrelated sign, taking found verbal forms not as useful information, but for their material, visual, and poetic possibilities” (65). According to Waxman, “the Surrealists find themselves being pushed and pulled by the names announced on the signboards of the city—not by their proper meaning, but rather by the special ability of these words to outlive their original definition and become available to other significations” (68). In his important essay, “Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau describes something similar: city strollers drift down streets based on their unconscious attraction to their names, articulating sentences composed unknowingly by their own steps (68). This creates a poetic geography on top of the literal one that officially maps the city (68). For Breton, the city is a “‘forest of symbols’” (69). Brassaï’s photographs of graffiti depict “markings found by chance while wandering the backstreets of Paris taking other kind of pictures” (70); he believed they were representations of “repressed voices by way of primal and peripheral marks left forcibly on the surface of the city, to be read by passersby,” unconscious elements of mythology (70).

It’s important to acknowledge the way the Surrealists gendered the city, and their walking. While they gave women “a potent place at the center of existence,” that place limited the capacity of women to be independent, active subjects; instead, they mediated between men and nature, the unconscious, and were objects of desire and emblems of revolution (71). The women the Surrealists followed were often “streetwalkers, prostitutes who ply their trade on the street,” an “ambulatory object of desire” (73); “the pedestrian who roams the city in search of her is one whose actions are propelled by the drive for an amorous encounter” (73). “On other promenades it was not an individual woman but the city itself—herself—that drove the Surrealists’ desirous footsteps,” Waxman points out (74). “Elsewhere are examples where no individual woman is evoked but rather a perception of the city, or part of the city, as female” (75). 

The Surrealists’ written accounts of walking in Paris could serve as guidebooks, although “they do not in fact offer paths that can be literally followed” (76). Waxman suggests they are anti-guidebooks (76). “Ultimately each of these Surrealists walks to discover himself—not the city traversed nor the woman pursued,” she concludes. “Although their walking, and their verbal or visual representations of their walking, powerfully rewrite and re-vision the well-trodden paths of the commercialized, workaday city, reimagining it as a dreamscape right with encounter and possibility, those dreamscapes are, finally, private ones” (77). Despite their collective intentions and tactics, “the task of using walking to achieve something beyond the individual would ultimately need to wait for a later generation: the Situationist International” (77).

Not surprisingly, the book’s second part, “Drifting toward a Situationist Revolution,” focuses on the Lettrist International and its successors, the Situationist International. In the spring of 1953, group of friends walk to an opening of Surrealist art in Saint-Germain-des-Prés; instead of looking at the art and having a glass of wine, though, they “turned what should have been a brief dash into a marauding adventure with visits to some two dozen bars, where they became progressively drunker and drunker” until they were arrested and spent the night in jail (85). That group had “set out on their excursion with the intention of disrupting the opening” because they “loathed what Surrealism had become and took frequent opportunity to define themselves in opposition to what they perceived as its descent into a doctrinal, formalist, and spiritualist position, one that betrayed the movement’s original aims of revolutionizing the totality of life, and of doing so by moving beyond the art object” (85). They called themselves the Lettrist International; they were Jean-Louis Brau, Jean-Michel Mension, Pierre-Joël Berlé, Gill J Wolman, and Guy Debord, and they “theorized and practiced an updated version of the Surrealist goal, one that also sought to radically change everyday life, but without relying on chance, the unconscious, or the marvelous” (85-86). The LI thought “these Surrealist tactics smacked of a reactionary flight from reality,” and instead they “focused resolutely on the present, concerned less with themselves than with the city they lived in and the lives lived there” (86).

However, as with the Surrealists, walking “was a central method of the Lettrist program. The members of the group have made it a strategic part of their lives to drift for hours, days, or even longer,” rambling unpopular streets in unfashionable neighbourhoods (86). “For them, wandering was at once a game, a form of study, and a revolutionary device: a playful and passionate means of engaging with the urban landscape; a direct means of acquiring knowledge about it; and a rejection of the obligation to live a life limited by work, consumption, and passivity,” Waxman writes (86). They called this activity “la dérive, meaning ‘the drift’—and eventually published a series of texts and artist books theorizing its practice and recorded related findings” (86). 

“Why isolate everyday urban life as the locus for stimulating social change? What did they want to change? And how could walking figure as a transformative mechanism for doing so?” Waxman asks (86). The LI and its successor, the Sl, left lots of material offering answers to those questions, but in a 1959 film about la dérive, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps, Debord, in a voiceover, said, “Everyone unthinkingly followed the paths learned once and for all, to their work and homes, to their predictable future. For them, duty had already become a habit, and habit a duty. They did not see the deficiency of their city. They thought the deficiency of their life was natural. We wanted to break out of this conditioning, in quest of another use of the urban landscape, in quest of new passions” (86-87). Then the voiceover laments, “Once again, morning in the same streets. Once again the fatigue of so many similarly passed nights. It is a walk that has lasted a long time. Really hard to drink more” (87). “Debauched rambling for days on end through the streets of bohemian and immigrant Paris did not, in fact, make the revolution happen,” Waxman acknowledges. “But it was the start” (87).

The SI laid out its revolutionary program in its journal, Internationale situationniste, between 1957 and 1972; it “arose out of the fragmentation and radicalization of a number of earlier vanguard art groups” (Waxman presents a long list of such groups, including the LI) (87-88). The facts of its origins “hardly give a sense of how or why these diverse movements—diverse in terms of geography but more notably in terms of artistic practice—were drawn together to form the SI, one of the more radical cultural factions of the twentieth century” (88). Simon Sadler, in his 1998 book The Situationist City, suggests that these groups came together because they were all political at a time when other vanguard movements were apolitical (88). In addition, “they held a common critical focus against the rationalism and functionalism that had come to dominate architecture, design, and urban planning under the ideals of such modernist figures as Le Corbusier” (88). The radical call of such vanguard groups to wipe out the most spectacular structures of everyday life put them “at odds with the more accommodating conclusions of colleagues like the artists, critics, and architects gathered around the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, who were more interested in coming to terms with the spectacle than destroying it” (88-89). 

At a 1961 presentation at a conference of the Group for Research on Everyday Life, organized by the sociologist Henri Lefebvre, Debord argued that everyday life needed not to be studied, but changed: 

As Debord put it, “Everyday life is not everything [. . .]. But to use a facile spatial image, we still have to place everyday life at the center of everything. Every project begins from it and every realization returns to it to acquire its real significance. Everyday life is the measure of all things: of the fulfillment or rather the nonfulfillment of human relations; of the use of lived time; of artistic experimentation; of revolutionary politics.” (qtd. 89)

“Debord was deeply critical of the status quo,” Waxman notes. “The average person, he claimed, exerts no control over his or her everyday life, living it passively and under various kinds of unquestioned, utilitarian obligations: to work and to consume foremost among them.” (89). Meanwhile, “these lives grow increasingly atomized and privatized, as the subsistence and leisure activities that make them up become ever more specialized and compartmentalized, separating banal office jobs in the city from isolated prefab homes in the suburbs via lengthy, dull commutes on the metro” (89). For the Situationists, awareness of “the inferiority and narrowness of everyday life must . . . lead to a critique of this situation, one that acknowledges how these two insights are inseparable: to recognize the former is to admit a gross dissatisfaction with it, and to do so is to demand a better life. The poverty of everyday life thus poses a political question,” and for Debord, the answer to that question would “‘lead to nothing less than a reinvention of the revolution’” (91).

From the start, “everyday life had been the focus of the SI’s energy,” the goal that united the groups that came together to form the Situationists (91). Debord’s goal was to expand life beyond its current state: 

The expansion of life would . . . take place via the discovery and invention of new modes of desire, behavior, and environmental design. These would become known via such methods as the dérive and détournement, and be propagated through ventures like the Internationale situationniste journal, the distribution of political pamphlets, the mounting (and sometimes dismantling) of exhibitions, and the graffitiing of radical slogans on Parisian streets. (92)

A central guiding principle “for these experimental activities and radical demands was the idea of the game, of play as an integral component of everyday life—in place of more common objectives like profit or utility” (92). This insistence on the centrality of play was rooted in the work of Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and his 1938 book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (92). Huizinga distinguished between game playing and ordinary life, but the Lettrists and Situationists sought to bring those activities together, 

to enhance the festive and spontaneous component of everyday life. In this, they radicalized Huizinga’s theory into a revolutionary ethics that abolished the difference between play and seriousness, art and everyday life. And they redefined the notion of what a game could be: instead of functioning on a competitive basis, like contemporary sports or chess, the SI argued for games whose goal was the collective creation of “choice ludic ambiances,” ambiances that would help turn everyday life into less of a preprogrammed, bureaucratic repetition of métro, boulot, métro, dodo, and more of an unpredictable, inspiring series of situations and encounters. (93)

Huizinga’s ideas influenced Henri Lefebvre, who was a supporter of the SI in its early years (93). Lefebvre was committed to transforming contemporary life, “to working against what he saw as a prodigious loss of diversity in the modern everyday, a worldwide tendency toward uniformity, rationality, functionalism, sign-making, systematization, repetition, and passivity at every level, from housing and fashion to eating, drinking, and living” (94). Debord was difficult to deal with, though, and like many members of the Situationists, Lefebvre’s relationship with him ended badly, partly because Debord wanted total revolution and Lefebvre sought more modest, achievable goals (94). 

“Nevertheless, the sympathetic and mutually productive discussions between Lefebvre and the SI, for as long as they lasted, fit as a radical node within the broader context of French postwar culture and its sustained interest in the everyday” Waxman writes. “But if the quotidian is to be studied and, more importantly, transformed, then the question of where the quotidian happens becomes foremost. In their answer to this question, which centered on the urban environment and more specifically the street, the Lettrists and the Situationists were in good historical company” (94). “The street has long had a privileged place in French popular culture, as a site that ‘unites the quotidian and the festive’ and is opposed to the ‘allegedly stifling, pompous, and enclosed world of high culture,’” Waxman continues, citing Brian Rigby (94-95). Generations of revolutionaries and avant-gardists had looked to the street 

for signs of life as it existed in the present and as they hoped it might in the future: more modern, more free, more full of adventure and mystery. But the SI were arguably the most radical and insistent of this loose historical group in their demand for the right to create utopia in the space of their own streets, a right that Lefebvre termed le droit à la ville (the right to the city) in his 1968 book of that title, and which more recently has been taken up by the social geographer David Harvey, who describes it as “not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire.” (95)

“The idea of change, of the right to change the city in which one lives, might usefully be compared to artistic practice itself,” Waxman continues. Painters or sculptors take material and turn it into a desired form, but if artists were to replace paint or stone with life itself—“actions such as walking, drinking, and conversing, spaces such as streets, plazas, and buildings”—then “suddenly the possibility of creating not art but life begins to take shape. This, essentially, is what the Situationists demanded: the right to construct life out of one’s own desires, as artists have always done with art” (95). 

This comparison enables an understanding of Situationist ideas and practices within the artistic context of the time: 

Though the SI’s status as an artistic movement was and continues to be contested—by 1962 all of the more artistically inclined members and affiliates of the group had either resigned or been excluded—nevertheless it owed its origins, as well as many of the tactics that sustained it at least through the early ‘60s, to the vanguard art groups CoBrA, the IMIB, and the Lettrists. Lineage aside, even more fundamental is the way in which the SI, as the above metaphor suggests, took the creative and constructive principles of art making and applied them to life making. (95-96)

Debord, in the first issue of Internationale situationniste, wrote: “Art can cease to be a report on sensations and become a direct organization of higher sensations. It is a matter of producing ourselves, and not the things that enslave us” (qtd. 96). Such statements point to a radical redefinition of what art could be, “away from objects and toward action, away from high culture and toward a social and politicized one” (96). In this way, “the Dadaist and Surrealist excursions . . . can be seen not just as historical precursors to SI adventures but as failed projects given new life by the SI” (97).

Of course, other movements claimed to be the successors of Dada and Surrealism, such as Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, which the SI condemned as mere “‘artistic spectacle’” constructed “‘on the basis of poverty (material poverty, poverty of human contact)’” (qtd. 97). The Situationists’ “constructions” were “never theatrically separated from real life by gallery walls or predetermined scripts” and so the SI argued that those events “directly implicated the lives involved” (97). Debord argued for a peripatetic theatre that would take place in the streets (97-98). “As passionate as they were about the need to revolutionize daily life, the Situationists were equally insistent on the geography of that life being urban, and urban life known through the direct experience of the moving body on the street,” Waxman continues (99). Not just life, the the city itself was their artistic medium (99). Not the entire city, though: “The Left Bank neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés lay at the heart of Situationist Paris, or rather just to the left of it”: they focused on “an area delimited by the down-and-out drinking establishments that they daily made their way between” (99). 

Play was central to the Lettrists’ and Situationists’ take on the city. The Lettrists made “a series of idiosyncratic proposals that recognized the power of urbanism and sought to reclaim it for a playful citizenry”: they called for the metro to run at night; for the stations to be poorly lit “and thus adventurous”; for public gardens to remain open all night long and to be dimly lit (if at all); for the departure information at train stations to be “scrambled or absent,” which they claimed would promote drifting, unpredictable journeys; and that streetlights be operated by pedestrians via switches (101-02). Other suggestions “dealt with the psychological and sensory impact of building design, both for inhabitants and, even more so, passersby”: for a “passionate” architecture that was poetic rather than functional, with façades that would promote “‘a playful environment worth exploring on foot’” (qtd. 102). “For the Lettrists and the Situationists, no aspect of the city could be left unexamined or unaltered—least of all its verbal components,” Waxman writes. “The words that order the streets through signage, illegal inscription, and advertising were reclaimed for something less bland, commercial, and staid” (103). They wanted street names changed, especially the ones that referenced saints, for instance (103). “Street names comprised the most official aspect of the city’s verbal order, but they weren’t the only words posted there,” Waxman continues (105). “Perhaps the most recognizable Situationist slogan of all—NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS (NEVER WORK)—first appeared on a wall in the rue de Seine in early 1953, scrawled by the young Lettrist Guy Debord, who left it there for all to see, taunting passersby on their way to work” (105). Lettrist graffiti was “chalked on the city’s walls with programmatic intention” (105). “Chalked slogans were not the only means by which they hoped to radicalize and alter the pedestrian’s experience of walking through a particular part of the city”: the Lettrists also advocated collecting placards at their headquarters and pasting them on walls throughout the city (106). “The city was not a blank slate for the Lettrists, but it was a slate nonetheless, to be used whenever possible as a means via which to change Paris and the lives of all those who passed through it unquestioningly every day,” Waxman states (106).

Paris in the 1950s and 1960s was experiencing immense pressures related to population growth and rapid modernization, “changes in everyday life that explain the intellectual and artistic focus developed at the time by the Lettrists and the Situationists, as well as academics like Lefebvre”: migration from rural areas to the city, and from North Africa, Spain, and Portugal; increasing density; a housing crisis; and shifts in consumer behaviour, with new appliances for sale (106-07). “Amid this immense influx of people and objects, the spatial structure of the city itself underwent radical and abrupt changes equivalent in scale to those enacted by Haussmann in the nineteenth century”: a quarter of the city was demolished or reconstructed, including parkland that was deemed to be insufficiently used; more and more automobiles that needed to be accommodated (107). In 1955, Debord wrote, “Today’s urbanism’s main problem is ensuring the smooth circulation of a rapidly increasing quantity of motor vehicles” (109). “Huge amounts of time, money, and space went toward making Paris a more car-friendly city, even though, despite its vast increase in numbers, the car was mostly a social symbol rather than a necessary commodity,” Waxman states (109). These investments included the construction of the boulevard Périphérique, an expressway, along the route of the city’s old fortifications; highways built on the river quays, replacing the promenades that had been there previously; and the elimination of sidewalks on some streets, another “erasure of the city’s vanguard past,” since those sidewalks had been the site of Surrealist peregrinations (109). “The result was less space for pedestrians, fewer trees, and no more sidewalks in the old sense, just a pragmatic strip of raised pavement,” Waxman writes. “Meanwhile, whatever surfaces weren’t being given over to car circulation became devoted to car storage: beginning in 1949, parking was allowed on public thoroughfares despite public laws expressly forbidding it” (109-11).

This situation was “anticipated and virulently condemned by the Lettrists and Situationists from the early ‘50s onward, as they not only claimed walking as a revolutionary tactic but raised serious protests against what they believed to be the alienating and spectacularizing effect of a city given over to the needs of cars rather than those of people, to functionalism rather than a more complex and playful life” (111). They saw the promotion of cars as capitalist market propaganda and commuting as an extension of work, and they “promoted popular ‘resistances’ as political acts against the spectacle and the ‘machines of consumption’” (113). The new, car-centred Paris was a city “of decreasing adventure and difference,” for the Lettrists and Situationists (113). However, the Lettrists liked taxis, because they promised freedom of movement and allowed participants in a dérive “to suddenly shift the terrain of exploration or go directly to a specific location” (113). “Thus it wasn’t the car per se the Lettrists and the Situationists revolted against, but rather its role in the streamlining and compartmentalizing of urban life, and the way in which its particular form of isolated displacement had come to symbolize modern mobility,” Waxman suggests (114).

The car-oriented city was a “dystopian, totalizing reality” (114); Debord tended to walk only in a limited area of the city that was friendly to pedestrians (114-15). “Devotion to one’s neighborhood, idealization of nomadism, and rejection of urban and vehicular modernity—how to make sense of the Situationist intersection of these seemingly conflicting ideas?” Waxman asks:

One way of understanding this convergence is in terms of nostalgia, though not the kind of nostalgia that mourns for a picturesque past that never really existed and wishes to turn the clock back to that lost time only to freeze it. On the contrary, the critical nostalgia that social geographer Alastair Bonnett recognizes as Situationist is one deeply rooted in reflexive thinking, acting not as a conservative standstill but a catalyst for action against the status quo. (115)

In other words, they desired a better future, not a return to the past (115). “And if they turned to the age-old notion of walking as a means of reclaiming and remaking modern Paris, it was not because they wished to live in a preindustrial town, or fancied themselves itinerant nomads,” Waxman argues. “Walking, especially in the form of the dérive, forced one intimately into contact with the city as it was being lived and as it could be lived, absent the refrain of métro, boulot, métro, dodo” (115).

For Waxman, a summary of the Situationist project, buried in Michèle Bernstein’s 1960 novel, Tous les cheveaux du roi, states, “reification plus walking. Or, more expansively: to see through the smooth facade of functionalist capitalism, it is necessary to move beyond the university and a reliance on books, to get out from behind the table and go out into the world, and the simplest way to do this is to walk” (116). For the Lettrists, walking was part of life before it was theorized as a revolutionary tactic (117). The dérive was “admirable for its playful wandering, its belief in the marvelous voyage, its love of speed, and its relative geography” (117). A definition of the term “dérive” did not appear until November 1956, three years after it was first used, in Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive,” where he sets out “the two-part nature of drifting” and establishes “a basic series of instructions for the novice dériviste to follow (118). For Debord, the dérive “has two overlapping goals: ‘emotional disorientation’ via ambulatory play, and ‘studying a terrain’ in terms of its psychological influence” (118). Waxman notes that those are the basics, but that the practice is more complex (118). 

For instance, the Lettrists and the Situationists “rejected everything considered decent and necessary to bourgeois society: they didn’t work, didn’t study, had no money, rarely knew where they were going to sleep, and mostly got by through thieving, conning, or hitting people up” (118-19). They drank immense amounts, smoked hashish or took ether, which was legal; some “were downright thuggish, verbally and physically attacking strangers and enemies alike in the street” (119). “The place of walking in this debauched milieu was as might be expected. Forbidden places held a deep appeal for being off-limits to the general public and consequently forgotten by them,” she states. “Sneaking in and wandering around meant the breaking of rules and the possibility of knowledge recuperation” (119). Dérivistes explored houses undergoing demolition and snuck into the catacombs (119), but mostly, “they moved from café to café becoming progressively drunker, making scenes, taking detours, wandering off to the Chinese or Spanish neighborhood for cheap food or a change of environment, and getting lost on the long journey home. Inebriation led the way” (119). 

Because extreme intoxication was central to the practice, it’s not surprising that “most scholarly mentions of the dérive rarely give a sense of what actually happened on those journeys” (119-20). However, Debord, in “Two Accounts,” offers an important primary document describing one dérive (120). Debord considered the dérivistes’ most important precursor to be Thomas de Quincey, particularly that writer’s “discussion of his own condition in terms of endless wandering through London, making him a forefather of the dérive not just in terms of walking under the influence but of being attuned to the effects of the city simultaneously” (121). Perhaps the most extensive known account of a dérive is Les bouteilles se couchent, a novel written by Patrick Straram circa 1953, and until recently believed to be lost (126). It is an account of drunken walking (126). While “the notion of a ‘continuous dérive’ was promoted by Ivan Chtcheglov in his ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism,’ a legendary text written in 1953 but not published until 1958, when it was considered significant enough to be included in the first issue of Internationale situationniste” (127), later Chtcheglov repudiated this idea because it would be too dangerous for its participants (127-28). 

“If the debauched beginnings of the dérive still seem somewhat predictably bohemian, an unconvincing origin for one of the central tactics of a vanguard movement, the SI offered their own account of the relationship between their theories and their way of life”: they supported “‘all forms of liberated mores, everything that the bourgeois or bureaucratic scum call debauchery’” (qtd. 128). “Apart from the general ruckus they caused when drunk and rowdy and moving through the streets,” Waxman continues, “easy enough to imagine but also testified to continuously and with pride, there was in addition the scandal of white French youths cavorting in North African and other immigrant and ethnic neighborhoods, a rupture with bourgeois norms that would later find more coherent expression in the anti-colonialist tracts published regularly in their journals” (128-19). “Nevertheless, the dérive’s revolutionary aspect only begins with its debauched origins,” she suggests. “As the dérive continued to be refined alongside its practitioners’ ideas, its radical possibilities were more consciously recognized, articulated, and expanded” (129). Looking back in 1978, Debord reflected, “We did not seek the formula for overturning the world in books, but in wandering. Ceaselessly drifting for days on end, none resembling the one before. Astonishing encounters, remarkable obstacles, grandiose betrayals, perilous enchantments—nothing was lacking in this quest for a different, more sinister Grail, which no one else had ever sought” (qtd. 129). The dérive’s capacities included play, despectacularization, confrontation with racism and sexism, and détournement; it needs to be understood in terms of agency: “Remaking the world was only possible by being an active participant, and the dérive was one of the most accessible means for doing so” (129). 

The dérive put its participants into the world as if they were changing it, giving them intimations of utopia, Waxman suggests, paraphrasing Greil Marcus (129). “That one could hope to accomplish this as a mere pedestrian was radical, but one could not be just any pedestrians”: instead, one had to be an adventurer (129-30). How could one become an adventurer? Start with play: “The playfulness of drifting was of the utmost seriousness, important enough for Debord to describe the dérive as the ‘application of the will to playful creation’” (130). The Situationists “proposed games that anyone might play”: games that were intended to induce behavioural disorientation, adventure, a rejection of social norms (130). For instance, one could use a map of one city to navigate another (131). One of the greatest game players was Ralph Rumney, the sole member of the London Psychogeographical Society; see his account of a dérive in Venice, for instance, a photo essay in which he documented the trajectory his friend, the Beat writer Alan Ansen, made through that city (131). “Rumney’s Venetian experiment exemplified not just the ideal of play but also the goal of de-spectularization,” Waxman argues (133). For Debord, the spectacle, “a primary cause of alienation, relies on nonintervention,” and so any attempt at destroying it “would therefore need to provoke people into action, to turn them from passive actors into active ‘livers’” (133). “Rumney achieved this by showing areas of Venice where tourists never went and by suggesting unknown routes through the city,” Waxman writes. “Once learned, this tactic could conceivably have been applied by anyone anywhere, and thus its import was not just limited to one man’s games in Venice and the psychogeographical data gathered therewith” (133).

“Just as the Lettrists and Situationists walked through the marginal parts of cities, some of them also did so as marginal bodies,” Waxman writes. “Drifting freely through Paris was not a tactic that could be unconditionally practiced by the groups’ Moroccan and Algerian members, or, under a different set of circumstances, their few female associates” (133-34). Abdelhafid Khatib’s “Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles,” published in Internationale Situationniste in 1958, for instance, “underlined the oppositional nature of any dérive taken by one of these marginal bodies, for daring to stake a claim on the white, patriarchal city of Paris by making a dark self visible as an active, creative, and defiant presence” (134). Khatib, in fact, ended up in jail because his dérive violated the curfew affecting Arabs in Paris. Women dérivistes were also vulnerable on the streets at night: “For a woman to drift, then, was to reclaim the street and take back the night—long before either of those phrases would become standard cries of the women’s movement” (134). 

“A final way in which to understand how the world can be overturned through the playful-constructive aspects of drifting considers the dérive in relation to the concept of détournement (rerouting),” Waxman writes. “As developed by the LI and later refined by the SI, détournement is a method for taking preexisting cultural products and transforming them into something superior.” (135). Old, traditional, conservative books, clothing, paintings movies: all could be reinvented (135). Such reinvention both “endless and inherently critical—much more so than with production from scratch—because détournement always also acts as a testament to the inadequacy of past forms” (135). The dérive is an “architectural détournement, a remaking of urban space not by building it from the ground up but by drifting through the city with the goal of adventure, transforming it through action and perception from a workaday place to one of encounters,” but the dérive is also “a détournement of walking itself” (135), because it is nonfunctional walking, walking as a cultural act (135-36). According to Waxman, “the way that the LI and the SI walked—not knowing where they were going, under the influence of stimulants, following the invisible forces of the city, according to the rules of a game—was nothing less than a détournement” (136).

However, the dérive wasn’t just playful: the Lettrists saw the street “as a place for observing the effect of the city on its inhabitants. They dubbed this type of investigation ‘psychogeography,’” (139). Debord gave one of the first definitions of psychogeography in 1955: “Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (139). The environmental factors that might condition a dérive are the subject of psychogeography (140). For Debord, those factors “could include ‘the sudden change of ambivalence in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places’” (140). Nevertheless, “psychogeography is neither an easy nor a stable subject for study. As the city inevitably changes, so do its effects. The information gathered on a dérive is always dated; often it becomes obsolete” (141). Psychogeographic scholarship continues—for instance, Kyong Park’s studies of Detroit’s population shifts over the past 30 years (141). 

Because of the speed of change in Paris in the 1950s, “[t]he psychogeographer had no choice but to dérive rigorously and often, taking no data for granted” (142). “Given these and other observational challenges, certain directives were recommended.” Waxman writes: 

If the more playful aspects of the dérive demanded rules only insofar as all games are played by some set of rules, however idiosyncratic, its psychogeographical side necessitated more specific guidance. Gleaned from the experience of past experiments, the following advice appeared in Debord’s “The Theory of the Dérive”: Small groups are better, allowing for cross-checking and more objective conclusions. Chance is a necessary but ultimately conservative element since it stems from habit. The urban environment, especially “the great industrially transformed cities—those centers of possibilities and meanings,” is the dérive’s natural location. The average duration lasts one full day, from waking to sleep, but could conceivably be as short as a few hours or as long as several days. The terrain can extend across an entire large city and its suburbs or be limited to a single block of houses. (142)

“Sticking to these general suggestions promised to enhance the quality and quantity of data gathered on a dérive, eventually leading to the discovery of the psychogeographical contours of the city, including its ‘unities of ambiance,’ ‘principle axes of passage,’ and the affective distances that separate different regions without necessarily correlating to physical space,” Waxman continues. “These findings would then be used to draw up ‘maps of influence’ that would reveal not the basic facts of the urban environment but rather their effect” (143).

According to Waxman, psychogeography resembled both detective work and clinical practice: “The dériveur was one part private eye—roaming the city in search of clues, trying to sort out their significance—and one part psychoanalyst—analyzing and helping the inhabitant in terms of his or her relationship to the city” (143). Debord and Rumney suggested the first analogy (143), but the second analogy was expressed by Chtcheglov (145). The dérive, in the second analogy, hoped “to heal the city by appropriating it through sensitive footsteps and enlightened encounters” (145). The Situationists proposed that “the psychogeographic data gathered on their dérives could lead to improvements in urban planning and a rethinking of the city of tomorrow. Developments such as these would mean not just superior cities but a greater way of life” (146). Cities could be planned according to principles of “higher recreation, psychogeography, and freedom from work” (146). “The Lettrists coined a term for the type of urbanism that would utilize the lessons of psychogeography,” Waxman writes. “They called it ‘unitary urbanism’ and defined it as ‘the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques for the integral construction of a milieu in dynamic relation with the experiments in behavior” (146).

What did the psychogeographers actually discover on their dérives? “The myriad publications of the LI and the SI brim with reports, collages, and maps that suggest a wealth of psychogeographic findings,” Waxman writes:

Most of the details of these studies are now completely obsolete, as the authors themselves predicted, but this is not to suggest that the conclusions derived from this information have aged poorly, only that it remains an ongoing task to observe and gather data. Cities change constantly—even the best maps are essentially ephemeral, so why not cut them up and rearrange them accordingly? Which is exactly what the Situationists did. (147)

In a 1957 pair of maps, Debord remade Paris by removing the areas of the city that were not interesting to him, for instance (147). Other maps included neighbourhoods according to “unities of ambiance” (149). “Perhaps the most important unity of ambiance was the one discovered through a series of dérives in spring 1953,” Waxman writes. “The ‘Continent Contrescarpe’ was found to be so promising, with such a particular aptitude ‘for play and for oblivion,’ that the Lettrists chose it for their new headquarters on rue de la Montagne-Saint-Geneviève” (150). They published a detailed description of the neighbourhood that noted that “despite the unity’s proximity to many nearby areas it is effectively isolated from them because of the organization of the streets; various frontier zones are delimited by way of example, as are the urban configurations that act as blocks and flows for drifting pedestrians” (150). Chtcheglov called the area a “continent,” “having determined that to discover the new laws of psychogeography, the Lettrists needed a continuous landmass to explore” (150). In fact, many psychogeographical reports indicate whether an area is suitable for a dérive (151-52). Psychogeographical reports, whether they took the form of “radical maps, memoiristic records, or some combination thereof,” suggest “a parallel between the dérive and drawing,” Waxman suggests (157). The lines and marks represent both the artist’s hand and the artist’s body “drifting through urban space” (157-59). 

“The fragmentation of cities and their social fabric was of great concern to the LI and SI, and to social geographers like Henri Lefebvre and Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe,” she continues. “They believed that Paris, in addition to many other European cities, was under threat of modernist urban planning, a threat falsely smoothed over by the homogenization and continuity of maps like the Plan de Paris. The dérive, as well as the various means through which its findings were recorded, including cutting up the Plan, was meant to reveal this ongoing state of deterioration” (161-62). However, the results of all of this effort was ambiguous: “For even though the LI and the SI tried to drift as objectively as possible, nevertheless they could not escape the fact that they were their own experimental subjects. In this their practice differed from the work of Chombart de Lauwe and Lefebvre, who, as sociologists, found their subjects across the city at large” (162). The social scientists “were obliged to read their encounters definitively,” while the dériveurs, “as artists and revolutionaries, could revel in the extremes of their experiences” (162). 

“Certainly the LI and SI believed that their methods portended a level of objectivity—and why not, given their conviction that individuals were basically modeled by environmental influences, hence the focus of their entire program on urbanism rather than, say, on the unconscious—but whether or not one buys their argument, it is impossible to ignore the tension between the objective and the subjective aspects of their practice,” Waxman contends:

Leaving aside the question of inebriation, and whether any kind of objectivity can be assumed on dérives taken under the influence, there remains the paradox that lies at the heart of psychogeography: it is both about the self and getting beyond it, to a consciousness of how the city feels. But the only way to know how the city feels is through one’s own subjective, terrestrial experience of it. The LI and the SI, social outcasts by their own choosing, had no one to ask but themselves. If the data they found was sometimes disappointing and often inconclusive and mostly bound to become obsolete, these limitations nevertheless have a positive counterpart: they insist on the need for the rest of us too go out into the streets and pay attention to how the city affects us all. (162-63)

I’ve always wondered about the conflict between the subjectivity of the dérive and the claims made for its objectivity by the Lettrists and Situationists, and Waxman’s discussion is useful in that regard.

“Most of the Lettrist and Situationist thinking about urbanism and architecture consisted of ways to alter existing cities, especially those that, like Paris or Amsterdam or Copenhagen, had emerged organically over the centuries but were now faced with the unstoppable ascendancy of the automobile and the totalizing forces of modernist planning,” Waxman continues. “The great exception to this rule was New Babylon, the Situationist city envisioned by Constant” (163). Born Constant Nieuwenhuys, a founding member of several avant-garde groups, including the SI, Constant was the de facto Situationist architect, a “maker of endless models and plans envisioning the kind of city that would put all of the group’s ideals into play, ambitions so grand that by his own reckoning they demanded construction from scratch” (163-64). The central principle, source, and primary activity of this visionary place was the dérive (165). “New Babylon would be engineered to promote playful, adventurous mobility, above all,” Waxman notes. “Its inhabitants, with no fixed abode, would spend their days ‘wander[ing] through the sectors of New Babylon seeking new experiences, as yet unknown ambiances. Without the passivity of tourists, but fully aware of the power they possess to act upon the world, to transform it, recreate it’” (Constant, qtd. 165-67). 

The labyrinth was a key organizing principle of New Babylon (167). Constant proposed a “dynamic” labyrinth, with “multiple moving centers and no wrong way of getting there; no getting lost, only finding new paths; no stable structure, but rather one continually created and recreated based on the behavior of its inhabitants” (169). This idea was also a structural component of the city Constant was planning; his designs “testify to the physical presence of labyrinthian structures” (169). Even though his vision was never realized, Constant continually maintained that it was achievable (170). New Babylon was a utopian project: its purpose “to act not so much as an architectural and social blueprint but as a motivator, a prod to action on terra firma, in everyday life” (171). 

Here Waxman shifts to discuss another vanguard group in Paris in the 1950s, the Affichistes: a small group of artists who were “pessimistic about the revolutionary potential of art but paradoxically insistent on making radical gestures with it” (173). They had been members of the LI but did not join the SI, whose political positions they believed to be both too radical and politically naive (173). This point is interesting, because Waxman’s discussion tends to blur the LI and the SI together. The Affichistes made décollages on streets of Paris: 

like the dériviste, the décollagiste would take to the streets, knowing that with the right attitude everything he needs is already out there enmeshed in the urban fabric. The trick for both figures was to walk the streets not in the dulled posture of the laborer or the bourgeois, but as an adventurous pedestrian, drifting through the city in search of encounters with heretofore ignored urban signs and structures. Where the décollagiste played the role of thieving vandal, the dériviste acted the part of inebriated lout—a little bit of hooliganism went a long way. The former collected posters where the latter collected disorienting experiences and psychogeographic data, the city serving both as a primary medium. (173-74)

The Affichistes altered their material very little, “relying on a combination of chance and selection, and the ability to tear a thick layer of posters from a city wall without getting caught” (175). Their work archives an important, and ephemeral, aspect of pedestrian Paris in the 1950s, “direct markers of the particular space and time from which they were removed” (175). 

Like the LI and the SI, and also the Surrealists, the Affichistes emphasized the “need to approach the city at the level of the pedestrian, if one is to have a hope of engaging actively and radically with urban life” (181). For Waxman, “the urban situation, as all of these artists, architects, poets, and thinkers understood, extends from the layout of streets to the clutter on sidewalks to the shape and color of buildings to the slogans that decorate them and, most importantly, to the way regular people feel and behave every day as they walk amid it all” (182).

Part three of the book, “How Fluxus Keeps Walking Intently,” begins with an instruction written by Fluxus member Takchisa Kossugi, a Japanese artist and violinist, in 1963: “Keep walking intently” (195). This statement is important to Waxman, since it gave her the title of her book: “Just three words, and yet as a directive they offer no givens, no straightforward means of interpretation. How exactly does one follow these instructions, how does one keep walking intently? What does it even mean to walk intently?” (195).

She suggests focusing “on the physiological act of walking” as a way of understanding this directive (195). Walking, and paying attention to walking, “is in keeping with the Fluxus modus operandi to consider some of the most commonplace actions in daily life, from making a salad to turning on a light switch” (197). For instance, Benjamin Patterson’s Stand Erect, published in his 1961 artist’s book Methods and Processes, offers “fairly accurate instructions for how to walk” that require anyone attempting to accomplish the action described to be consumed by “the specifics of an act rarely paid much heed” (197). However, “[t]he physiology of walking is not the only imaginable subject of Theatre Music. To walk intently might also mean to walk while contemplating the place being walked to or from; the environment walked through or something encountered unexpectedly within it; the person walked with or the people walked past; or even some thought completely unrelated to any of the above” (198). Art historian David T. Doris suggests that in Kosugi’s work, “the specified object or action serves as ‘a focusing element, the meditative stasis around which the world unfolds’” (qtd. 198). The walking of the Surrealists, the Lettrists, the Affichistes, the Situationists, and Waxman’s own search for edible plants in alleys and along sidewalks, are all forms of walking intently: “None of these actions is easy to accomplish without walking intently; all demand the kind of pace, environmental proximity, and floating but powerful attention offered most readily by undirected urban ambulation” (198-99).

Fluxus, for Waxman, “was less an art movement than an alternative attitude, a collective tendency, a voluntary association—even, according to its self-appointed chairman, George Maciunas, a way of life” (199). “Fluxus produced newspapers, newsletters, artist multiples, films, installations, and all kinds of events, from concerts to banquets to street actions large and small. Its name was first coined by Maciunas as the title of a magazine and only later came to be applied to a much broader set of activities, objects, and ideas,” she explains (199). It was a “disparate, nomadic, and shifting group of artists” whose members came from countries all over the globe (199). One problem posed by Fluxus for art historians is “the work itself” (200): 

How to negotiate the difference between what Fluxus called an ‘event score’—simple written instructions, like Theatre Music or Stand Erect—and its limitless performances, be they historical, contemporary, nonexistent, or even imaginary? How to get a full sense for a non-movement grounded in experience, performance, and daily life, given the limits of photographic documentation and retrospective memorialization? How to identify that which characterizes Fluxworks as a whole? (200)

She lists 12 characteristics of the work associated with Fluxus, defined by Fluxus-associated artists Dick Higgins in 1982 and updated by Ken Friedman in 1989: “globalism, unity of art and life, intermedia, experimentalism, chance, playfulness, simplicity, implicativeness, exemplativism, specificity, presence in time, and musicality” (200-01). Globalism, she explains, is “the international origins of the artists themselves, and also a democratic and anti-elitist position” (201). Intermedia is a term coined by Higgins “to denote art made in a world in which no boundaries exist between various media” (201). Experimentalism refers to the fact that “Fluxus artists worked more like scientists than artists, trying new things, being open to chance, assessing the results, and working collaboratively” (201). Playfulness includes gags, “but also the play of ideas and words” (201). Simplicity refers to “a simplicity of means,” and an “exemplative work exemplifies the theory and meaning of its own construction” (201). “Specificity concerns the ability to be self-contained and unambiguous” (201), while the unity of art and life suggests that the formal artistic or performance situation “served as a necessary midpoint, where new perspectives on common phenomena could be registered. Such means, however, were directed toward an end that was located resolutely in real life itself. What was noticed outside the concert hall was what was ultimately important” (202).

“The title of Kosugi’s Theatre Music now becomes clearer: it implies that walking intently as an action could be performed equally on the street or in a recital hall, and that, regardless of location, the performer’s entire experience constitutes something as important—and perhaps even as musical—as the melodies typically played in theatres,” Waxman contends (202). Theatre Music and Stand Erect “share two central qualities. First is the banal and unspecialized nature of the action itself, which can be performed by any able-bodied person, professional or amateur, skilled or not, and in fact is already performed everyday by everyone, as they move about their lives” (202). The second quality is “the ability of Fluxus to make ordinary actions ‘anomalous,’ as art historian Kristine Stiles has dubbed it, ‘thereby provoking, arousing, and vexing the mind and simultaneously energizing the body to animate novel ways and means to view and experience the world’” (203). “Given this emphasis on the familiar, and the fact that since the early 1960s Fluxus has scored every movement from sweeping to reading train timetables to eating lunch to sitting in a chair to taking care of children to passing through a doorway, it might appear somewhat beside the point to attempt to isolate those scores that concern themselves directly with walking,” Waxman argues. “And even those scores that don’t implicate walking specifically but could, depending on their realization” (203).

For Waxman, “focusing on walking in the context of Fluxus is beside the point. But it is also not, because by finding an oblique angle through what would otherwise be taken for granted, Fluxus brings attention to all things and to the specific action in question.” So, while walking can enable both performers and spectators to find “the unexpected in the world, it does so as well on a more concentrated level, making, in the cases that will be examined here, the most unexceptional movement of all, walking, into something potentially incomparable” (203-04). In this context, “walking” means either “plain old walking” or scores which twisted that activity, such as Patterson’s score that called for pedestrians to walk with their eyes closed (204). “By insisting on direct experience, be it wth self-generated shadows or unseen roadblocks, Fluxus exhorts its importance in knowledge formation,” Waxman suggests (204).

Today, “Fluxus seems positively prophetic in its promotion of a bodily means of learning about the world” (204):

To understand the radicality of this endeavor, it bears comparing this body to the ones implicated in other forms of performative artwork. The Fluxus body is neither the highly individualized, psychologically driven body of Surrealist ambulation nor the rebellious, overtly politicized body of Situationist drifting; it is not the gestural, expressionistic body of 1950s Action painting or the conceptual, militant body of ’70s performance art. On the contrary, the Fluxus body is much closer to the neutral, focused figure that examined pedestrian movements at Anna Halprin’s San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop in the 1950s and later at the Judson Dance Theater in New York in the ’60s, finding actions as common as walking to be fit subjects for serious dance. Without straying into the emotionally subjective, the overtly expressive, or the audaciously transgressive, the Fluxus body nevertheless constituted a unique interpretive participant concerned with concrete actions and their real, not symbolic, effects. (205)

“Any expression is objectivized and depersonalized to the point of becoming transpersonal,” explained Dick Higgins. “One does not, as one does in so many works of art, see through the work to the artist.” However, one might see through the work to the performer, “depending on the realization” (205).

Fluxus scores changed over time: they were simpler in the 1960s and more open-ended, group-oriented, and game-focused in the 1970s (205). Fluxus artworks—objects—were intended to be played with, handled, even cooked. They were meant to be used, in other words: “Hence the interpretive and active qualities of the implicated body—Fluxworks, be they object or event score, do not tell a person exactly how to perform them. Even when the instructions are explicit, as in Patterson’s Stand Erect, the expectation is that something else might happen with each new iteration” (206). For instance, La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #10, which reads “Draw a straight line and follow it,” was performed in many different ways by different Fluxus artists (206-08). Fluxus encouraged “permissive, exploratory engagement” (210); there were no wrong ways to follow a score.

Understanding Fluxus within the context of other avant-garde groups of the twentieth century: Maciunas self-consciously diagrammed the relationship between Fluxus and its historical context (210). “Like Dada and Surrealism, Fluxus set its sights primarily on the time, space, actions, and objects of everyday life, and less so on the special practices and places of art, believing that the separation of art and life was a false, bourgeois notion, one that did as much disservice to life as it did to art,” Waxman writes. “All maintained, however, that much of what they produced, despite looking, sounding, or feeling unlike any other art, was in fact something to be experienced aesthetically—as well as socially, politically, or subjectively, depending on the framework. Artistic production could become a way of life, as life could become a means of artistic production” (211). However, there are important differences between these groups (212). For instance, Dada “functioned in great part on the basis of nihilistic destruction—of social mores, of the artist as hero, of the art object as a commodity, of traditionally defined boundaries between the arts, and of conventional forms of artistry. Fluxus negated many of these norms as well, but did so with a resolutely affirmative attitude, one that took great pleasure, production, and fun in occasional acts of destruction” (212). “Leaving aside the psychoanalytic, Fluxus and Surrealism have much in common, including an extraliterary notion of poetry as a mode of thought, the use of research as practice, art as a means or process rather than an end unto itself, the promotion of non-specialization and non-professionalization, and a belief in play,” Waxman argues. :Fluxus, thought, inverted “the Surrealist strategy of finding the marvelous in everyday life by making it strange: Fluxus takes a realist tack, returning life to normal again, but with a new kind of attentiveness. The Surrealist program was thick with egos and ideology, neither of which could ever be properly served by the open-ended nature of Fluxus productions, meant to be interpreted and reinterpreted in every conceivable way” (213). 

John Cage was an important influence on Fluxus; Maciunas acknowledged this, although Higgins rejected the idea of anyone as a father figure (214). Many members of Fluxus had taken Cage’s Experimental Composition class at the New School for Social Research in New York between 1957 and 1959 (214). However, these facts 

do little to explain why Cage’s ideas about concretism, indeterminacy, bruitism, simultaneity, or chance procedures (to borrow the terms Maciunas uses on his diagrams) proved so influential to Fluxus. One place to start is with two of Cage’s works from the late 1950s, created while he was teaching at the New School. Music Walk (1958) is composed for one or more pianists who also play radios and produce auxiliary sounds by singing or other means. The duration is indeterminate. The score consists of a transparent piece of plastic with five parallel lines drawn on it, ten unnumbered pages scattered with dots, and several transparent squares with lines intersecting at various angles. Much as the Fluxus event score is open to interpretation, every performer of Music Walk creates his or her own part from this abstract notation, darting from one “instrument” to another. (215)

The “walk” of the title, according to musician David Tudor, refers to the performer’s mobility—going backstage to play a record or make an auxiliary sound, for instance (215). Cage’s related 1959 work, Water Walk, proceeds in a similar way: 

Scored for a solo performer, it makes use of thirty-four instruments, including a bathtub, pitcher, watering can, mechanical fish, bottle of wine, quail call, rubber duck, seltzer siphon, pressure cooker, and ice cubes. The piece lasts three minutes and the performer must use a watch to time his or her noise-generating motions—pouring the wine, banging a pipe on the tub, mixing the ice cubes, and so on, all of them as unskilled and comic and concrete as a typical Fluxus action—so that they follow the score, which is structured as a timeline. (215-16)

Cage explained that the title refers to the fact that the performer spends much of the time walking from one water-related instrument to another (216). Therefore, in both Music Walk and Water Walk, “two unexpected elements are integral parts of the concert: the strange sounds created by playing nontraditional instruments borrowed from everyday life, and the vision of the performer(s) dashing this way and that, even offstage, to create some of these sounds. The commonplace objects, noises, and actions of life—including, in this case, walking—become something worth attending to, not for any symbolic meaning that they might hold but rather for the new experiences of the real they offer, however theatrically” (216).

Waxman notes that Cage’s mushroom picking—for a time he made a living selling rare wild mushrooms to expensive restaurants in New York—also involved walking (217). Moreover, that activity required walking slowly and paying close, focused attention to his environment (219). For Cage, mushroom hunting offered “a model for learning, observing, and having new thoughts” (220). Cage limited his analogy of mushroom hunting to music, but Waxman suggests “the implications go beyond the auditory. This is not just about learning to appreciate all the sounds that make up our never-silent surroundings—it is also about doing the same with the rest of one’s senses and even extending this to an entire world view” (221). “When Cage’s students in his Experimental Composition class, who would go on to invent Fluxus, scored plain old walking and running and shuffling, rearranged objects in the street, cleaned the sidewalk, and gave tours of curbs and alleyways, this is exactly what they were doing,” she states. “And Cage was one of the ways they got there” (221-22).

In September 1964, a group of Fluxus artists and associates picketed a performance of Stockhausen’s Originale; it was not their first demonstration against high culture events in New York (222-23). Those demonstrations, organized by Henry Flynt, made rejection of high culture a political position (226). That was not necessarily Maciunas’s political position: “He believed firmly in a radical Left politics modeled on Soviet notions of collaborative culture—one outcome of this was his suggestion that all Fluxus artists copyright their works collectively—and spoke often of the need for Fluxus to provide a ‘common front’” (227). Those beliefs were not necessarily shared by other members (227). Nevertheless, Maciunas argued that the art practiced by Fluxus “could serve as an art for the masses in a Marxist-Leninist sense” (227). According to Waxman, “one outcome of this belief in the sociopolitical possibilities of Fluxus was participation in Flynt’s demonstrations” (228). Other outcomes were suggested by proposals published in the Fluxus News Letter that called for disruptions of New York’s transportation and communication systems and art institutions (228). The newsletter also published scores to be performed on the street; some of those gestures were realized (228). “The radical ideas proposed in the newsletter and articulated through Flynt’s pickets failed to generate a sense of collective Fluxus political action,” Waxman suggests “Instead the opposite occurred, with artists such as Young, Brecht, Robert Morris, and Richard Maxfield threatening to dissociate themselves from Fluxus and calling for Maciunas’s resignation as chairman” (229). “The uproar was not ultimately about abstaining from political action but rather from Flynt’s mode of unilateral anti-art propaganda,” she continues (229). 

“In the end, the kind of public action that would come to represent Fluxus” was not obviously political, but it was “based on the kind of collective meaning making made possible by a group of people moving together in public” (230). As an example, Waxman suggests the composition March, by Willem de Ridder and Wim T. Schippers, performed in Amsterdam in December 1963—a march on the city’s sidewalks, undertaken by a half-dozen people, without signs, leaflets, or other forms of propaganda, without any statement about the purpose or reason for the march (230). “From most perspectives, the gesture would have seemed utterly pointless. But as Dick Higgins has explained, ‘It is a great source of mental refreshment to do something for no particular reason, especially when it is not interesting or refreshing. One simply becomes very conscious of nothing in particular,’” she writes (231). “What could be more Fluxus than an action—especially one like marching, with its militaristic connotations—opened up to new possibilities, to repurposing or even de-purposing, to play and the kind of emptiness meant to be filled by the world at large?” (231). 

And yet, it is important to pay attention to the specificities of who the performers were:

How the world comes to fill that meaning is worth considering. De Ridder and Schippers conducted their march in central Amsterdam in the early 1960s, a place and time of extreme permissibility. But what if they’d realized it in Birmingham, Alabama, or in Moscow? What if they’d been black instead of white, Asian instead of northern European, women instead of men? What if they’d been dressed as hippies or soldiers instead of gentlemen? (231)

“These questions of geographic, temporal, and participant specificity apply to most of the Fluxus scores discussed so far, all the more so to those works realized in public space,” Waxman continues (233).

“Streets may not be the exclusive space of everyday life, but they are unique in their accessibility, familiarity, and impact,” she writes (238). What Fluxus artists ended up doing on sidewalks was ambiguous: were they taking unplanned events from daily life as art or realizing preplanned events as life? (238). For instance, Brian Buczak’s Falling Down on the Icy Sidewalk consists of “slipping and falling down on the sidewalk when least expecting to do so” (238). Benjamin Patterson’s A Lawful Dance instructs participants to cross the street at a traffic light over and over again: “Through nonsensical repetition, Patterson transforms the ordinary into something anomalous, enough so that when he and Higgins realized A Lawful Dance in Times Square, they attracted the attention of the locals,” some of whom joined in the performance, “using it to turn their own workaday action into something playful and new” (238-39). “Walking was doubly implicated here, both in terms of qualifying the score and qualifying the audience,” Waxman writes:

But even scores that don’t involve ambulation imply it when performed as street events, since most witnesses were pedestrians. They were going wherever they were going and likely not planning to encounter art along the way. And they were walking, because even if by the early 1960s cars had taken over the landscape, Fluxus was making its street works in cities that remained bastions of foot traffic, like New York, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Paris, London, and Nice. (239)

As with the Situationists, “Stopping unsuspecting people in their tracks offered Fluxus the chance of waking them up to the possibilities of a life where moving through the city could be more than just a pragmatic affair” (239).

In their walking pieces, Fluxus members reinvented different types of walking, “flexing (or fluxing) their characteristic aspects of gender, religion, tourism, guidance, diversion, or confusion. The result could be challenging, revelatory, entertaining, or some combination thereof” (254). Yoko Ono’s walking works, for instance, “implicate women’s bodies because she, a woman, authored them, but also because they often directly invoke gendered activities of perspectives,” such as 1961’s City Piece, which instructed participants to walk all over the city pushing an empty baby carriage (254). “A number of other scores by Ono involve the act of walking around the city, and while each of these has many possible connotations, some of the most interesting, as with City Piece, revolve around gender,” Waxman suggests (256). Map Piece, which exists in two versions, one from 1962 and the other from 1964, proposes 

an approach to the city that marries body and mind, physical fact and imaginary potential. The first suggests that the city can be anything you want it to be, if you’re willing to ambulate through it via proactively unconventional means. The second suggests the pleasures of being unfamiliar with one’s surroundings, even if they happen to be known. These compositions also invoke, respectively, a sense of ownership over the city and a feeling of confident safety on its streets, neither of which is an attitude typically open to women—not historically, not in the early to mid-’60s, not today. . . . Yet Ono proposes these positions as if they were available to anyone, regardless of gender. (256-57)

Other scores by Ono “recognize that all people walk differently, whether inherently or though conditioning or both, and that it might be worthwhile to understand these distinctions through direct experience” (257). Several of Ono’s scores call on participants to follow others, for instance (257). Others ask participants to walk as men (259).

“Fluxus artists sometimes took people to familiar places in unfamiliar ways, or at least suggested they might go there,” such as Benjamin Patterson’s 1963 score Tour, which invited people to be blindfolded and led by guides. “Whether or not tours of this nature were ever actually conducted, what Patterson scored is an experiment in trust, communication, and potential disorientation. His tour engages the kind of heightened awareness triggered by blocking off the one sense on which we rely most heavily: sight” (267). De Ridder experimented with sound walks in Los Angeles in the early 1970s (272). Later, after the invention of the Walkman by Sony in 1980, technology caught up with De Ridder’s ideas “and he was commissioned to record audio guides through cities including Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Vienna, and West Berlin” (273). These works were precursors to the practice of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, who “constructs complexly layered soundscapes that interact with the walked-through environment in engrossing and often uncanny ways” (274). Cardiff’s walks are about encountering the world, rather than the self (275).

Many examples of Fluxus scores involve explicit playfulness, references to sports or games (276-77). Take, for instance, Fluxlabyrinth in Berlin. However, “a comparison with the various labyrinth concepts conceived by the Situationist International and Constant . . . elucidates how relatively benign these Fluxus ideas were,” Waxman argues. “The Situationist labyrinth and the Fluxus labyrinth have some factors in common: both aimed to disorient ambulatory viewers and force them to engage in the surprising present of their surrounding environment,” but the proposed SI labyrinths were much more ambitious and insisted on “the real world as the space of revolutionary change. Constant rejected the very notion of a start and a finish, of a contained and static space, of anything less than a new city constructed from scratch on labyrinthian principles. Not surprisingly, it is the Fluxlabyrinth that was finally built” (278). 

In her conclusion, Waxman briefly asks larger questions about the Surrealists, the SI, and Fluxus through their walking practices: “What each of these groups had to say about walking has been the subject of these pages, but what walking has to say about them is their tentative conclusion. What do Surrealist wandering, the Situationist dérive, and Fluxus’s undefinable, all-inclusive actions reveal about these three key vanguard groups of the twentieth century?” (279). What do these groups have in common, and what sets them apart? “There is much overlap: Each, after all, was led by a pope-like figure with socialist leanings who exerted control over the membership, activities, and ideological underpinnings of his organization,” she notes. “All three groups fashioned themselves self-consciously as groups, insisting on their collective and unique recastings of avant-garde undertakings Their vanguard exploits, more often than not, resulted in the production of experiences rather than art objects” (279). In addition,

Walking, an action as common to humans as breathing, was perhaps the ultimate material for these groups to have taken up and made their own. Committed to revolutionizing everyday life, they each took its ubiquitous physical gesture and used it tactically toward that goal. In its very banality and accessibility, walking needs constant redefinition—how better than by an ideologically and artistically organized group, led by a central figure like André Breton, Guy Debord, or George Maciunas? (279)

However, there were important differences between these groups. For example, “the comparatively neat theoretical bases of Surrealism and the SI, as articulated in signed manifestoes and other didactic documents, gave way with Fluxus to self-fashioning chaos. . . . On the whole, Fluxers did what they wanted to, sometimes under the auspices of Fluxus, sometimes not, sometimes both” (280). For Waxman, “all the Fluxers could ever seem to agree on was that there was nothing to agree on” (280). “Despite, or perhaps because of, Maciunas’s repeated efforts at order, Fluxus functioned as a kind of messy, catch-all presence that paralleled the general counter-culture at the time,” she writes. “It is almost as if, by the mid-1960s and even more so by the ’70s, the kind of tight-knit group that both Surrealism and the SI constituted became an impossibility. In terms of walking, the sign of this is the almost uncontainable array of ambulatory gestures” of Fluxus, “versus the tactical specificity of the Surrealists’ automatic deambulation and the Situationist drift. In terms of art history, it marks the very diffuseness, the playfully ungraspable and ultimately open-ended nature of Fluxus itself” (280). Fittingly, the book ends with an invitation to readers to “walk intently,” following the suggestions of either the Surrealists, the Situationists, or Fluxus (281).

I would have to read more about the Surrealists, the Situationists, and Fluxus to figure out if Waxman’s accounts of the walking activities of these groups are accurate. Nevertheless, this book seems to be a good place to start an investigation into the way these groups walked. I’m going to continue down this path a while longer, I think; there’s a lot to learn from the history of artistic walking.

Works Cited

Waxman, Lori. Keep Walking Intently: The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus, Sternberg Press, 2017.