This article contextualizes the work of William Burroughs in terms of twentieth-century avant-garde movements, particularly Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism, and Situationism, arguing that he was deeply influenced by them and also made significant and hugely influential contributions to their aesthetic and political projects. It situates his early work with the beats as markedly Surrealist, and it argues that Naked Lunch is a Surrealist masterpiece. It traces Burroughs’ movement into 1960s multimedia cut-ups, image-text, film, and audio experiments in relation to Guy Debord and Situationism. The article concludes by noting that we should be cautious in how optimistically we read some of this work, particularly in light of the many ways the twentieth-century avant-gardes failed to realize their revolutionary hopes and how our current experience with a fully-networked world that uses many avant-garde techniques and ideas often leads not to a utopian revolution but instead a morass of reactionary post-truth politics.

Psychogeography came to exist because you can live in a city and still go searching for it. Nearly seventy-five years ago, Guy Debord and the Situationists defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” It was an avant-garde practice, notably employing dérive (drift), whose goal was to liberate city-dwellers from the forms of alienation imposed by urban planning and spectacle. Today, the term “psychogeography” continues to pop up in contemporary literature and art, where fieldwork-inspired essays, art installations, and performances have taken particular interest in the question of everyday spaces and rhythms in the city. This chapter traces the roots of this radical, topo-analytical tradition from the nineteenth-century flâneur, up through contemporary writers, filmmakers, and artists such as Iain Sinclair, Philippe Vasset, Patrick Keiller, and Sophie Calle. Psychogeography remains appealing today because of its intransigent, topophilic wager that alienation from one’s built environment can be dispelled if only one can re-envision or recreate one’s relationship to space and place.