This article assesses aspects of the troubled and disputed practice of the dérive some half a century after its Lettriste inception. Rather than seeking to draw a ‘virtuous’ layer from the multiplicity of practices presently grouped around the category of ‘derive’, the article identifies generative properties in their contradictions and variegated connections. Particular attention is given to the spatial question, to the politics of the everyday and ‘anywhere’, to the limitations of aesthetic and occult psychogeographies — suggesting their dispersed and hybrid redeployment — and to the dérive as a socialized rather than individual practice. The article addresses the relationship of the dérive to relational aesthetic practices as a means to renew a connection with a critique of the spectacle, with the distributive trajectories of labour and capital, and with the creation of ‘situations’ in a society that has, for some time, accommodated them.
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust (London & New York , Viking, 2000), p. 212.
3.
Coverley, Psychogeography, p. 19.
4.
Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism (London & New York , Routledge, 2002), p. 97.
5.
Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a critique of urban geography’, in Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa, eds, Theory of the Dérive and other situationist writings on the city (Barcelona, ACTAR, 1996), p. 20.
6.
Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’ in Andreotti and Costa, eds, Theory of the Dérive, p. 22.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Guy Debord, The society of the spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith ( New York, Zone Books, 1995), p. 20.
9.
Alan Moore and Tim Perkins, The Highbury working: a beat séance (audio CD, 2000) and Snakes and ladders (audio CD, 2003).
10.
Will Morris, Surveying an edge (self-published, 2006).
11.
Future Sound of London, Dead cities (audio CD, Virgin, 1996).
12.
John Foxx, Tiny colour movies (audio CD, Metamatic, 2006).
13.
Anna Best, Occasional sights - a London guidebook of missed opportunities and things that aren’t always there (London, The Photographers’ Gallery, 2003).
14.
Wrights & Sites, An Exeter mis-guide (Exeter, Wrights & Sites, 2003); Wrights & Sites, A mis-guide to anywhere (Exeter, Wrights & Sites, 2006).
15.
Alfred Watkins, The old straight track, its mounds, beacons, moats, sites and mark stones (London, Methuen, 1925).
16.
Stephen Graham , The gentle art of tramping ( London, Thomas Nelson, 1936), pp. 184-91.
17.
Simon Whitehead , Walking to work (Abercych , Shoeless, 2006), p. 68.
18.
Nicolas Bourriard , Relational aesthetics (Dijon, les presses du réel, 2002), pp. 84-5.
19.
Alan Woods, The map is not the territory (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 70.
20.
Steve Hanson , ‘Mind the gap: psychogeography as an expanded tradition’, Street signs (Autumn 2007 ), p. 11.
21.
Jim Colquhoun , The black drop or once and future cathures ( Glasgow, private publication, 2003 ).
22.
Francesco Careri , Walkscapes (Barcelona, Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002), pp. 180-4.
23.
Tom Nielsen , ‘The return of the excessive: superfluous space’, Space and culture5(1) (2002), pp. 53-62.
24.
Neilsen, ‘Excessive’ , p. 62.
25.
Robert Kirkman , Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn, The walking dead volumes 1-8 ( Berkeley, CA, Image Comics Inc., 2000-2005).
26.
Doreen Massey , For space (London, Sage, 2005), p. 9.
27.
Miwon Kwon, One place after another: site specific art and locational identity ( Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002), p. 26.
28.
Claire Doherty , Contemporary art from studio to situations ( London, Black Dog, 2004), p. 11.
29.
Mark Dion, Archaeology (London, Black Dog, 1999).
30.
Michael Evamy , World without words (London , Laurence King, 2003), pp. 164-5.
31.
Mark Bonta, ‘The multitude and its doppelgänger: an exploration of global smooth space’, under review, ACME: an international e-journal for critical geographies.
32.
Lesley Soule , The actor as anti-character: Dionysus, the devil and the boy Rosalind (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 2000), p. 6.
33.
Soule, The actor as anti-character, p. 8.
34.
Christine Buci-Glucksmann , Baroque space (trans. Patrick Camiller) ( London, Sage, 1994), p. 61.
35.
Massey, For space, p. 47.
36.
Massey, For space, p. 47.
37.
Cynthia C. Davidson , Anywhere (New York, Rizzoli International Publications, 1993), pp. 23-4.
38.
Davidson, Anywhere, p. 24.
39.
Wrights & Sites, A mis-guide to anywhere, pp. 110-11.
40.
Anselm Jappe , Guy Debord (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith) ( Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1999), p. 39.
41.
Guy Debord , The society of the spectacle (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith) (New York, Zone Books, 1994), p. 20.
42.
David Wade, Li: dynamic form in nature, (Presteigne, Wooden Books, 2003), p. 1.
43.
Tim Edensor, ‘Social practices, sensual excess and aesthetic transgression in industrial ruins’, in Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens, eds, Loose space: possibility and diversity in urban life (London, Routledge, 2007), p. 242.
44.
Edensor, ‘Social practices’, p. 242.
45.
Andy Merrifield, Guy Debord (London, Reaktion Books , 2005), pp. 92-104.
46.
Wrights & Sites, A mis-guide to anywhere, pp. 110-1.
