CcFieldTripThingDrift
From UoWiki
[edit] Thing Drift
Meet at 3.00, on Saturday June 7th, in the unnamed park between Pedley St and Buxton St (off Brick Lane) E1, opposite The House on Stilts <?plugin IncludePage page=ThingDinner?> We want to put the Psycho back into Psychogeography
Psychoanalysis theorises a primordial loss that structures being - the loss of the Thing or 'das Ding' as Freud termed it; a hole in being which is responsible for producing the strata of subjectivity - id, ego and superego, the unconscious and the consicous. This lost object is often grasped as the infant's relation to its mother; a state of blissful fusion and worldy immediacy. This primordial state is shattered when the child is forced to enter the symbolic order. The father, wielding the knife of castration, severs the infant from its 'original' matrix and ushers him into the world of language and law. We (girls too!) are set adrift to hunt for the Thing in vain, transposing our attachment to it onto secondary or 'partial objects' which can never fully quench our desire. This constant striving comprises the drive, both ardent and deathly.
This at least is one version of events. But who's to say if this mythical state of wholeness is not just another repressive social fiction which casts the main motor of desire as always lost, submerged somewhere at the very bottom of our being? An 'always already lost' heaven which greys out all subsequent experience. This positioning of a lost primordial state of wholeness also accounts for the frozen dialectic of psychoanalysis which sees the repression of the id - with its (now unconscious) desire for incestuous fusion - as the tap-root of psychical pathology, and yet also attributes the possibility of social co-existence to this same repression. In other words, to cure the subject would mean to destroy 'civilisation'.
But what if we admitted the possibility that the Thing might be at large - still as yet untapped, seeping up through the paving stones beneath our feet? A figment of a quenched existence which does not need to be understood as forever lost, preconscious and determined by the family, but perhaps forever in potentia, 'out there' and pre-personal. What if we understood our desire for and cathexis of 'partial objects' as not secondary but primary reflexes pointing the way to a Thing of our own making? This idea can easily be transposed to the city. Little zones of ambience, the surface of walls, the eyes of buildings, certain sounds, the way things fit together, the energy of a street, the way people move or are moved all carry within them the very fabric of desire upon which the city rests. The dream would be to loosen these desires from their current grid-lock, to set them free from their capitalist surface tension, to glimpse them as unbounded fabricating power - to unmake the city.
Taking our desires as material is the intent of the Thing Drift. What if we were to explore the city with this very thought in mind? To go out into the streets, guided only by our desires, in seach of the material Thing. This exercise might seem ludicrous, but the act of taking our desires seriously could be seen as an important step in freeing us from the repressing-representation of lost wholeness.
Our proposal is to invite people to meet one day during the Cartographic Congress for the purpose of a drift in the local environs made under the sign of the Thing-at-large. Clearly such an endeavour would be highly sensitive to inhibitions of every kind and should therefore be kept as loose as possible. We therefore propose that people responding to the invitation would meet, organise themselves into small groups, or remain alone, and make a series of excursions. It would be good if people could attempt to make a record of their findings either during or after their drift. We could then meet up again three hours or three weeks later to discuss the experience - preferably with the help of stimulants. The documentations could then be compiled and act, thereafter, as a preliminary MAP to an auto-graphic future.
The Many Thing Coalition, March 2003
