Dérive

Definition

The dérive is the Situationist practice of drifting through urban space — a "mode of experimental behavior" and the art of wandering that attends to the psychogeographical charge of the city. It is an active, playful technique (distinct from earlier Dada/Surrealist excursions) that seeks to resist the productivist and "anti-objective" ordering of physical surroundings, exploring residual and interstitial spaces and passional interactions. It figures centrally in Debord's psychogeographies and in the Mémoires with Asger Jorn.

Key Thinkers

• Guy Debord — theorized and practiced the dérive (e.g. The Naked City).
• Johan Huizinga — supplied the play-theory (via the SI) that frames the dérive's "apart together" character.
• Libero Andreotti — recent argued for the play reading.

Related Concepts

• Unitary Urbanism — the dérive is its mobile practice.
• Détournement — the SI's other primary "play critique"; the semiotic counterpart to the dérive's spatial practice.
• New Babylon — a city organized around continuous dérive.
• Play — the ludic frame of the practice.
• Politicizing the Interior — the dérive as appropriable method: a model "for subversion of conventional urban design" carried across the disciplinary frontier into the interior.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Unitary Urbanism: Play-Tactics of the SI
• Debord, Constant, and the Politics of Situationist Urbanism
• The Everyday: Wandering, Wondering (Heindl)
• The Society of the Spectacle
• Troubles in Theory Part VI: From Utopia to Heterotopia (Vidler 2008) — the Situationists' dérive and psychogeography as an alternative mode of spatial occupation against the rationalised space of postwar housing.
• Stalking Detroit — Young et al.'s "Line Frustration" frames the project as "a drift through the conditional emptiness of Detroit": walking three segments of the Federal Empowerment Zone boundary, making psychogeographic charts, and refusing Debord-adjacent media nostalgia; the dérive as "the ultimate resistance to the media enterprise of mythic exaggeration."
• Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the method transfer: the SI "would derive (drift) through the city by arranging experiential, unplanned (and often alcohol-fueled) multi-day journeys. These dérives were used to question the nature of urbanism, consumerism, and the individual"; the dérive as the model by which "political interior architecture" can be "concerned with spaces of movement" while exploring "the everyday city from an experiential and personal standpoint."

Open Questions

• How does the dérive's "anti-objective sense" resist the tendency to spatialize and commodify the city today (e.g. as touristic or instagrammed urban experience)?