This link has been bookmarked by 22 people . It was first bookmarked on 30 Jul 2007, by dubravka sekulic.
-
22 Jun 16
-
The Flâneur
-
"'Man as civilized being, as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsman were free sensually.' Spengler, vol. 2 p. 125" (AP 806)
-
"Taking a walk is a haeccity . . . Haecceity, fog, glare. A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome". (1000 P 263)
-
"Flâneur" is a word understood intuitively by the French to mean "stroller, idler, walker." He has been portrayed in the past as a well-dressed man, strolling leisurely through the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century--a shopper with no intention to buy, an intellectual parasite of the arcade. Traditionally the traits that mark the flâneur are wealth, education, and idleness. He strolls to pass the time that his wealth affords him, treating the people who pass and the objects he sees as texts for his own pleasure. An anonymous face in the multitude, the flâneur is free to probe his surroundings for clues and hints that may go unnoticed by the others.
-
As a member of the crowd that populates the streets, the flâneur participates physically in the text that he observes while performing a transient and aloof autonomy with a "cool but curious eye" that studies the constantly changing spectacle that parades before him (Rignall 112). As an observer, the flâneur exists as both "active and intellectual" (Burton 1). As a literary device, one may understand him as a narrator who is fluent in the hieroglyphic vocabulary of visual culture. When he assumes the form of narrator, he plays both protagonist and audience--like a commentator who stands outside of the action, of whom only the reader is aware, "float[ing] freely in the present tense" (Mellencamp 60).
-
The flâneur has no specific relationship with any individual, yet he establishes a temporary, yet deeply empathetic and intimate relationship with all that he sees--an intimacy bordering on the conjugal--writing a bit of himself into the margins of the text in which he is immersed, a text devised by selective disjunction.
-
Walter Benjamin posits in his description of the flâneur that "Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd. He . . . enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes" (Baudelaire 55). In this way the flâneur parasite, dragging the crowd for intellectual food--or material for his latest novel (Ponikwer 139-140). In so doing, he wanders through a wonderland of his own construction, imposing himself upon a shop window here, a vagrant here, and an advertisement here. He flows like thought through his physical surroundings, walking in a meditative trance, (Lopate 88), gazing into the passing scene as others have gazed into campfires, yet "remain[ing] alert and vigilant" all the while (Missac 61) .
-
The flâneur is the link between routine perambulation, in which a person is only half-awake, making his way from point A to point B, and the moments of chiasmic epiphany that one reads of in Wordsworth or Joyce. Like Poe’s narrators, he is acutely aware, a potent intellectual force of keen observation--a detective without a lead. If he were cast a character in the "drama of the world," he would be its consciousness.
-
There is little scholarship surrounding the subject of the flâneur that does not in some way refer to Benjamin's writings on Baudelaire or The Arcades Project. This character first appeared in Benjamin's work in 1929 in "Die Wiederkeht des Flâneur," a work reviewing Hessel's Spazieren in Berlin, the title of which "suggests that the flâneur is properly a creature of the past". In his later work on nineteenth-century Paris, however, Benjamin re-examines the figure in what he deems its true dwelling place: Paris.
-
The flâneur figures prominently in his 1935 sketch for The Arcades Project, "Paris--Capital of the Nineteenth Century" and in the two studies of Baudelaire written in 1938 (Rignall 113). Much of Benjamin's research into the flâneur was inspired by the work of George Simmel, who notes that the relationships between members of a large city are more deeply influenced by the activity of the eye than of the ear.
-
His interest in the surrealist movement of the early twentieth century also played a crucial part in his development of the flâneur as a literary concept. Combining "the casual eye of the stroller with the purposeful gaze of the detective" (Rignall 113), Benjamin constructs a literary creature capable of seeing the city as "landscape, lying either desolately or seductively open before the fictional characters, and . . . as a room enclosing them either protectively or oppressively" (Rignall 113).
-
In this context, the city for Benjamin is both an interior and an exterior, "knowable and known, and . . . mysteriously alien and fantastic" (Rignall 113-114). Benjamin collected notes and reflections from mid 1927-1929 in preparation for an article-length essay to be titled "Paris Arcades: A Dialectical Enchantment."
-
In response to the surrounding surrealist influences of the time, Benjamin's "ambition was to read the arcades as phantasmagorical images, 'the hollow mold' from which the image of the 'modern' was cast" (McCole 229); this would place the flâneur in its twentieth-century incarnation, as a product of surrealism; however, Benjamin disagreed with much of the surrealists' theory of images, which, in his opinion, "remain[ed] ensnared in pernicious romantic prejudices that left them prey to the mythic forces they had discovered" (McCole 229).
-
Regardless of Benjamin's perception into the intellectual shortcomings of his surrealist contemporaries, Benjamin's study of Aragon and the architectural theories of his time influenced his work with the flâneur a great deal, allowing him to examine the resident mythologies of the modern city while preserving "fresh antitoxins against the vitalist strains of romanticism" (McCole 231).
-
His favorite flâneur was Charles Baudelaire, who in his poem "A une passante," perhaps best articulates the relationship between the flâneur and the inhabitants of his city. (See section on "A une passante" by clicking HERE.)
-
According to Benjamin, the flâneur came to rise primarily because of an architectural change in the city of Paris. This change, which was rooted in budding capitalism, involved the creation of the arcades, which were passageways through neighborhoods which had been covered with a glass roof and braced by marble panels so as to create a sort of interior-exterior for vending purposes. These passages were "lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, even a world in miniature" (Baudelaire 36-37).
-
The flâneur is completely at home in this cross between interior and exterior worlds because his own personal interior-exterior boundaries are also ambiguous:
-
-
20 Feb 15
-
20 Mar 12
-
An anonymous face in the multitude, the flâneur is free to probe his surroundings for clues and hints that may go unnoticed by the others.
-
As a literary device, one may understand him as a narrator who is fluent in the hieroglyphic vocabulary of visual culture.
-
yet he establishes a temporary, yet deeply empathetic and intimate relationship with all that he sees--an intimacy bordering on the conjugal--writing a bit of himself into the margins of the text in which he is immersed, a text devised by selective disjunction.
-
Combining "the casual eye of the stroller with the purposeful gaze of the detective" (Rignall 113), Benjamin constructs a literary creature capable of seeing the city as "landscape, lying either desolately or seductively open before the fictional characters, and . . . as a room enclosing them either protectively or oppressively" (Rignall 113). In this context, the city for Benjamin is both an interior and an exterior, "knowable and known, and . . . mysteriously alien and fantastic" (Rignall 113-114).
-
"panorama literature"
-
-
an arcade is a city, even a world in miniature"
-
-
18 Sep 11
-
04 Apr 11
-
03 Dec 10
Michael GallagherGood exploration of the flaneur, in particular, and provides some good foundation for my pursuit of flaneur as learning type in an urban architecture.
-
10 Jul 10
-
The flâneur is the link between routine perambulation, in which a person is only half-awake, making his way from point A to point B, and the moments of chiasmic epiphany that one reads of in Wordsworth or Joyce.
-
Because Benjamin's flâneur is weighted with such political and socioeconomic importance, being as he is an icon of bourgeois "conspicuous leisure,"
-
-
08 Sep 09
-
16 Aug 09
-
15 Mar 09
-
01 Oct 08
-
30 Jul 07
-
26 Jul 07
-
28 Feb 07
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.