The “free space of commodity” —the space of consumption, of spectacle—demands the destruction of “autonomy and quality of spaces”
In an article published one year before the creation of his psychogeographical maps, Debord cites a map created by two researchers working for the urban sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe. It depicts the movements over the course of the year 1950 of a young woman living in the bourgeois XVIe arrondissement; her itineraries almost exclusively define a triangle whose points are her residence, that of her piano teacher, and the School of Political Science.
After all, urban ethnography always aimed to be written representation of a given (sub)culture. This representation would constitute an authoritative account which ordered and made sense of the unruly experience of the city in which it was based. Out of an “intense, intersubjective engagement” with the particularity of the everyday life of the urban other, knowledge was produced.
But it is precisely this at-homeness that the dérive denies, in its concerns for “behavioral disorientation.” This becomes clear when Debord writes that the dérive's sensibility is characterized by “a loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious”—prototypes for this activity include “...slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc.”
...after all, Paris functioned analogously for the situationist-detective as the site of an urban modernity which was both an obstacle and a key to a future organization of life.
Plotting of all the trajectories effected in a year by a student inhabiting the 16th Arrondissement. 