More than half a century has passed since Guy Debord and his Letterist and Situationist colleagues began talking about psychogeography and dérive in the 1950s. As we have seen with the neoliberal France depicted by Virginie Despentes, the radical, revolutionary spirit of 1968—in which the Situationnist International (SI) actively participated—seems but a dim memory in contemporary French culture. Today, Debord's graffitied slogan, ‘Ne travaillez jamais’ [Never work], sounds hopelessly romantic in a France of chronic unemployment, where today's young and jobless become vulnerable to very different radicalisms. And yet, if the times have changed, the SI's critical assessment of the city—‘La crise de l’urbanisme s’aggrave’ [‘the crisis in urbanism is worsening’] (Constant, ‘Une autre ville pour une autre vie,’ 37; ‘Another City for Another Life,’ 71)—is perhaps more true than ever, as the ever-growing footprint of urban planning leaves no stone unturned, no space un-purposed. The ‘ambiance morne et stérile’ [‘dismal and sterile ambiance’] (Constant, 37; 71) produced by this crisis can seem nearly totalized today by the proliferation of planned and preconfigured zones, chain stores and hotels, shopping centers, and other such environments described by Marc Augé as non-lieux. Moreover, as we saw in Part I of this book, that other enemy of the SI, spectacle, increasingly infiltrates everyday life. Guy Debord and the SI sought out the ‘relief psychogéographique’ [‘psychogeographical contours’] of their city, but the digital age, with its ubiquitous mobile technologies, puts users of space at even more of a remove from that ‘passionnel’ [‘passional’] urban stratum (Debord, ‘Théorie de la dérive,’ 19; ‘Theory of the Dérive,’ 62).

Truly, then, the dilemmas the SI highlighted persist in exacerbated form in today's world. Perhaps this is why psychogeography has been resurrected in recent decades. Psychogeography, with all its avant-garde trappings, has become a ‘buzz word’ (O’Rourke, Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers, 204) in the contemporary art world, where installations and performances have taken particular interest in the question of everyday spaces and rhythms in the city.