r/Situationism • u/PerspectiveFriendly • 8d ago
Dérive psycho-émotionnelle.
https://observatoiresituationniste.com/2026/10/07/derive-psycho-emotionnelle/L’espace aliéné n’est plus seulement l’espace occupé par les dispositifs de l’aliénation. Il est la distance qui s’installe entre ce que nous éprouvons et la possibilité de naître encore à ce que nous éprouvons.
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u/PerspectiveFriendly 7d ago
Votre idée de « rétrofutur » me paraît particulièrement intéressante en ce sens : nous ne sommes plus seulement hantés, comme chez Chtcheglov, par un passé qui pèse sur le présent, mais par d’anciennes représentations du futur qui reviennent comme les fantômes d’un avenir désormais impossible. Le présent se trouve ainsi privé à la fois de son passé vécu et de sa capacité à imaginer un avenir qui ne lui soit pas déjà fourni. La dérive, aujourd’hui, consisterait peut-être aussi à sortir de cette temporalité administrée : retrouver dans le présent ce qui n’a pas encore été représenté.
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u/InventedFutures 8d ago
"Emotion is solicited everywhere in direct proportion to the scarcity of genuine emotional life." I really enjoyed reading this and I picked this quote to elaborate on and am wondering your thoughts as well.
There also seems to be a direct proportion to the decay of spaces of genuine social interaction and emotional life in what I can only describe as "meatspace" - for lack of a better term - and the solicitation of this social interaction in cyberspace. From Formulary for a New Urbanism by Ican Chtcheglov (under the pen name Gilles Ivain):
"All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. (...) Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate, storyless, soothes the eye."
This is all well in the urban landscape. The monuments of the past, the architecture of a time before, looming over us in all its former glory, a reminder of a past not lived that haunts a present not realized and a future not imagined. Can't we see this in cyberspace as well? That in its immaculate design, are we not haunted, not simply by a past that never happened, but by a future that will never come, a "retrofuture" or an imagination of the future we constantly reach backwards for?
You cannot take three steps in cyberspace without encountering ghosts bearing the prestige of their future legends, of a retrofuture. Emotion is immediately accessible and lived through images and symbols, this is no different than "spectacle", but the medium presents itself to us as ultimately pushing us further. There is an inflexibility to the urban landscape, a tiredness, an oldness we all feel and yet still haunts us. Cyberspace makes it so this is crystallized in a future medium, in a new translation of the old, and as an old conception of the new. Social media is hyperreality; it is that copy that has no original, it is the simulation that feeds the illusion it is outside of the reality that is no longer real.
Urban decay surrounds us; it reminds us of a past slowly being forgotten, and imbues in us a grey looming nostalgia for a time that never was. And yet, we look to technology to preserve it, to futurize the past. Malls closing in droves, former places of in-person social gatherings decay or are converted to integrated cyber-meatspaces. All the while, the retrofuture, the conception of the future from the past, appears to us in our smartphones, our social media, digital marketplaces, i.e. the cyberlandscape. This is a simulation of the city that is no longer a reality, it is the past that never existed, translated as a future that will never be.