After my grandfather's funeral, I took a walk. I shut the front door of our Airbnb, followed the sidewalk for a few blocks, then turned right toward Polk Boulevard, one of Des Moines' oldest neighborhoods. Where was I going? I had no idea. What was I doing? I didn't know.
It would take two years before I'd find an accurate descriptor for my walk: psychogeography. My professor brought it up during a discussion of Teju Cole's "Open City," a book that follows a med school student aimlessly walking around post-9/11 New York City. My professor explained that psychogeography shares philosophical similarities with the book's protagonist, as both encourage strolling as a way to learn the cultural identities of places. Cole's narrator uses his walks to explore the ethnic neighborhoods of NYC, seeking to foster a sense of multicultural empathy in a city often divided by xenophobia. Thus, a stroll can be an act of resistance against societal prejudice, an attempt at cosmopolitan unity in a fracturing metropolis. Walking can be far more than just exercise.
This is the crux of psychogeography: our physical movements across space carry as much philosophical weight as our ideologies. It's an idea central to Guy Debord's "Theory of the Dérive," an essay often considered to be psychogeography's most foundational text. On the first page, Debord cites an experiment in which a researcher, Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, mapped the walking patterns of a Parisian student over a one-year period. When the map was finished, the researcher found that the student primarily walked to three places—her classroom, her home and her piano teacher's home—with minimal deviations. For Debord, the study is "modern poetry" in how it can elicit "sharp emotional reactions" to the student's spatial constraints, namely a feeling of "outrage at the fact that anyone's life can be so pathetically limited". Our own daily routines, according to Debord, can be just as powerfully repressive to our lives. He identifies anger and shock as common reactions to this fact.
Let's do an experiment. Designate a time frame: one week, a month, whatever you feel comfortable with. Every time you leave your home, take note of where you are going and how you get there. Then, when it's time to record results, tally the number of times you took the same route. Try to find your three most common travel patterns. Here, I'll start.
My most common route was from my dorm to Russell House, followed by my dorm to the Humanities Classroom Building and finally, from my dorm to the library. In each case, I took the same route by virtue of efficiency: I wanted to get there as quickly as possible. Mind you, this was not thoughtful walking—I spent the majority of these strolls checking my phone. I wouldn’t consider these walks to be particularly enjoyable; they were focused solely on moving from point A to point B.
How about we look at what points A and B were? When I left my dorm, it was either to go to academic buildings such as the library for studying and Humanities for class or to get essential resources like Russell House for food. In all cases, I returned to the dorm, where my academic and utilitarian needs coalesced in a series of essay-writing sessions featuring late-night snacks. My spatial existence on campus seems to be defined by fulfilling academic goals and getting what I need to survive. Who's to say my philosophical existence isn't in the same place?
Debord isn't a fatalist, though. Instead, he proposes that we break our spatial routines by taking "dérives," which he defines as strolls where one ignores their "usual motives for movement and action" in order to "let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there." In short, Debord urges us to shift our focus from repetitive daily tasks to the surroundings we often overlook in our destination-based travel. Furthermore, we can use our imaginations to analyze the interpretive possibilities of any given space or, in layman’s terms, how a space makes us feel. Through a dérive, we can explore what makes our favorite places so significant.
Polk Boulevard is in the Ingersoll Park neighborhood of Des Moines, an upper-middle class section of the city notable for its fully-grown oak trees and large front lawns. It’s home to my mother's high school, my grandparents' first house and the Des Moines Art Center: the site of many childhood museum tours and my grandfather's memorial service. For my mother's family, the city was home. For me, it was a place we visited until the family moved away. In fact, I haven't seen Polk Boulevard since the funeral service—I'm writing this paragraph in my cloistered dorm room with the help of Google Maps.
One can't blame Debord for not anticipating the rise of digital culture. "Theory of the Dérive" was published in 1956, far before the development and mass circulation of computer technology. Digital space has emerged as a counterpart to the physical world, yet psychogeographic thought often struggles to apply its principles to the digital realm. How can one dérive through a series of websites if they don't contain any physical "terrain" or "encounters"? Does scrolling on social media, a similarly aimless activity, count as a dérive?
I don't know the answer to that, but I would advise digital psychogeographers to proceed with caution. Much of today’s digital infrastructure relies on predictive algorithms that trap us in content loops, often limiting the breadth of material we encounter on our dérives. Isn't this limitation antithetical to the essence of psychogeography, that we can liberate ourselves from the spatially repressive structures of society? Perhaps the digital world has superseded the physical in terms of cultural importance, becoming the primary space we interact with.
Psychogeography is nothing if not indefinite. Each person's reactions during their dérives are bound to be subjective, simply because different places carry different meanings for different people. Even Debord acknowledges the impossibility of psychogeographic objectivity by questioning his definition of what constitutes a dérive, stating that "written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game." Debord's self-contradiction can be infuriating to many—why would he spend four pages outlining a philosophy that, in his eyes, is impossible to define? But psychogeography is about breaking free from definition and the logical patterns of travel that trap us in repressive daily routines. We don’t dérive in search of rationality. Instead, we dérive to introduce irrationality into our spatial existence, breaking predictability and replacing it with possibility.
Perhaps an example would explain this idea best.
I walked four blocks on Polk Boulevard before the highway stopped me. I passed a row of brick houses that must have been standing for over a century—maybe my grandfather walked by them when he was little. I passed a gardener playing a Pixies song I hadn't heard since high school, back when Grandpa was just a bike ride away. I passed several thick-trunked oak trees with fully leafed branches, remnants of years upon years of suburban Des Moines history, all inaccessible to me, of course.
There were no epiphanies on this walk. I didn't somehow "solve" my grief, nor did I gain some profound realization about my grandfather's life in Des Moines. It was a pointless stroll. Absolutely pointless. So what was I doing, again?
A few months later, I decided to explore my loss through writing: my life's main passion. I opened up a Google Doc, adjusted the font, and stared at the blank screen for a good 30 minutes, trapped in another moment of writer's block. The only starting points I could think of for my piece were rehashed clichés about some spiritual "pain," but my grief was not primarily painful. No, it was confusing, a mixture of first-loss shell shock and unanswered questions about my grandfather's past... and some gut-churning feeling that arose when I realized I wouldn't be speaking to him again, that I would never be able to complete his personal history. It wasn't a topic you could write about—it had no meaning, no depth. Just ambiguity and infinite possibility.
The first line of what would become a two-page poem reads: "After we buried Poppy, I took a walk / down Polk Boulevard."
Where was I going? I had no idea. What was I doing? Getting there on foot.
