Situationisms

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.

This is a final draft. Please cite only the published  in Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson, Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics: The Betrayal of Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 211-236.

... and poetic conjuring of local esoterica within an original soundscape by Alan Moore and ... phe, such as George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) or Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City ... and alliances masked by multiple and purposefully multivalent levels of secrecy and deception ...