The contemporary dérive: a partial review of issues concerning the contemporary practice of psychogeography

<jats:p> 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. </jats:p>