Flâneur 1

Flâneur

Paul Gavarni, Le Flâneur, 1842.

Flâneur (pronounced: [flanuʁ]), from the French noun flâneur, means"stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer". Flânerie refers to the actof strolling, with all of its accompanying associations.

The flâneur was, first of all, a literary type from 19th century France,essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. It carried a set of richassociations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, theconnoisseur of the street. It was Walter Benjamin, drawing on thepoetry of Charles Baudelaire, who made him the object of scholarlyinterest in the 20th century, as an emblematic figure of urban, modernexperience.[1] Following Benjamin, the flâneur has become animportant figure for scholars, artists and writers.

Etymology

Charles Baudelaire

The terms of flânerie date to the 16th or 17th century, denoting strolling, idling,often with the connotation of wasting time. But it was in the 19th century that arich set of meanings and definitions surrounding the flâneur took shape.

The flâneur was defined in a long article in Larousse’s Grand dictionnaireuniversel du XIXe siècle (in the 8th volume, from 1872). It described the flâneurin ambivalent terms, equal parts curiosity and laziness and presented a taxonomyof flânerie—flâneurs of the boulevards, of parks, of the arcades, of cafés,mindless flâneurs and intelligent flâneurs.[2]

By then, the term had already developed a rich set of associations. Sainte-Beuvewrote that to flâner "is the very opposite of doing nothing". Honoré de Balzacdescribed flânerie as "the gastronomy of the eye". Anaïs Bazin wrote that "theonly, the true sovereign of Paris is the flâneur". Victor Fournel, in Ce qu’on voitdans les rues de Paris (What One Sees in the Streets of Paris, 1867), devoted a chapter to "the art of flânerie". ForFournel, there was nothing lazy in flânerie. It was, rather, a way of understanding the rich variety of the citylandscape. It was a moving photograph (“un daguerréotype mobile et passioné”) of urban experience.[3]

In the 1860s, in the midst of the rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III and the Baron Haussmann, CharlesBaudelaire presented a memorable portrait of the flâneur as the artist-poet of the modern metropolis:

“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd.For the perfect flâneur ”

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, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in themidst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre ofthe world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince whoeverywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up hisfamily from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magicalsociety of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electricalenergy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one ofits movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.[4]

Drawing on Fournel, and on his analysis of the poetry of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin described the flâneur as theessential figure of the modern urban spectator, an amateur detective and investigator of the city. More than this, hisflâneur was a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism. For Benjamin, the flâneur met his demise with thetriumph of consumer capitalism.[5]

In these texts, the flâneur was often juxtaposed to the figure of the badaud, the gawker or gaper. Fournel wrote: “Theflâneur must not be confused with the badaud; a nuance should be observed there…. The simple flâneur is always infull possession of his individuality, whereas the individuality of the badaud disappears. It is absorbed by the outsideworld…which intoxicates him to the point where he forgets himself. Under the influence of the spectacle whichpresents itself to him, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a human being, he is part of thepublic, of the crowd.”[6]

In the decades since Benjamin, the flâneur has been the subject of a remarkable number of appropriations andinterpretations. The figure of the flâneur has been used—among other things—to explain modern, urban experience,to explain urban spectatorship, to explain the class tensions and gender divisions of the nineteenth-century city, todescribe modern alienation, to explain the sources of mass culture, to explain the postmodern spectatorial gaze.[7]

And it has served as a source of inspiration to writers and artists.

Urban life

Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877. Art Institute of Chicago.

While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a"gentleman stroller of city streets", he saw theflâneur as having a key role in understanding,participating in and portraying the city. Aflâneur thus played a double role in city life andin theory, that is, while remaining a detachedobserver. This stance, simultaneously part of andapart from, combines sociological,anthropological, literary and historical notions ofthe relationship between the individual and thegreater populace. After the 1848 Revolution inFrance, after which the empire was reestablishedwith clearly bourgeois pretensions of "order" and"morals", Baudelaire began asserting thattraditional art was inadequate for the newdynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that theartist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire's phrase, "a botanist of the sidewalk". DavidHarvey asserts that "Baudelaire would be torn the rest of his life between the stances of flâneur and dandy, adisengaged and cynical voyeur on the one hand, and man of the people who enters into the life of his subjects withpassion on the other" (Paris: Capital of Modernity 14).

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The observer-participant dialectic is evidenced in part by the dandy culture. Highly self-aware, and to a certaindegree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies of the mid-nineteenth century created scenes through outrageous acts likewalking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris. Such acts exemplify a flâneur's active participation in andfascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity ofmodern life in the city.The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity. While Baudelaire'saesthetic and critical visions helped open up the modern city as a space for investigation, theorists, such as GeorgSimmel, began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and psychological terms. In his essay "TheMetropolis and Mental Life", Simmel theorizes that the complexities of the modern city create new social bonds andnew attitudes towards others. The modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time andspace, inculcating in them a "blasé attitude", and altering fundamental notions of freedom and being:

“The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in theface of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature whichprimitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called uponman to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man's nature, originally good andcommon to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of manand his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent.However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees thefull development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of allcompetition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists being leveleddown and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, intothe soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individualand the super-individual contents of life. ”

—Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life"

Writing in 1962, Cornelia Otis Skinner suggested that there was no English equivalent of the term, "just as there isno Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumberedby any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his timewhich he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city".[8]

Architecture and urban planningThe concept of the flâneur has also become meaningful in architecture and urban planning describing those who areindirectly and unintentionally affected by a particular design they experience only in passing. Walter Benjaminadopted the concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. From his Marxist standpoint,Benjamin describes the flâneur as a product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution without precedent, aparallel to the advent of the tourist. His flâneur is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante. Benjaminbecame his own prime example, making social and aesthetic observations during long walks through Paris. Even thetitle of his unfinished Arcades Project comes from his affection for covered shopping streets. In 1917, the Swisswriter Robert Walser published a short story called "Der Spaziergang", or "The Walk", a veritable outcome of theflâneur literature.

“The crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur. In it, the city was now landscape, nowa room. And both of these went into the construction of the department store, which made use of flânerie itself in order to sell goods. Thedepartment store was the flâneur's final coup. As flâneurs, the intelligensia came into the market place. As they thought, to observe it—but inreality it was already to find a buyer. In this intermediary stage [...] they took the form of the bohème. To the uncertainty of their economicposition corresponded the uncertainty of their political function. ”

—Walter Benjamin (1935), "Paris: the capital of the nineteenth century", in Charles Baudelaire: a lyric poet in the era of high capitalism)

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In the context of modern-day architecture and urban planning, designing for flâneurs is one way to approach issuesof the psychological aspects of the built environment. Architect Jon Jerde, for instance, designed his Horton Plazaand Universal CityWalk projects around the idea of providing surprises, distractions, and sequences of events forpedestrians.

PhotographyThe flâneur's tendency toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation has brought the term into the literatureof photography, particularly street photography. The street photographer is seen as one modern extension of theurban observer described by nineteenth century journalist Victor Fournel before the advent of the hand-held camera:

This man is a roving and impassioned daguerreotype that preserves the least traces, and on which arereproduced, with their changing reflections, the course of things, the movement of the city, the multiplephysiognomy of the public spirit, the confessions, antipathies, and admirations of the crowd.

—Victor Fournel, Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris (What One Sees on the Streets of Paris)The most notable application of flâneur to street photography probably comes from Susan Sontag in her 1977essay, On Photography. She describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20thcentury, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur:

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urbaninferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept ofthe joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque."

—Susan Sontag, On Photography, pg. 55

ExhibitionDana Brand, an American literature scholar, notes that in mid 19th century "[t]he New York flaneurs were alwayscomparing their productions to panoramas, dioramas and daguerrotypes", and they often visited and describedBarnum's American Museum. Brand argues that "[t]hese panoramic spaces, containing the entire multiplicity of theworld and presenting it as a spectacle to be consumed, appeared to spectatorial narrators to be the mostrepresentative spaces in their respective cities, the one true metaphor for the whole." (Spectator and the City inNineteenth-Century American Literature)

Other uses of the flâneurFlâneur is not limited to someone committing the physical act of a peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, butcan also include a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking", and a process of navigating erudition asdescribed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb's essay on "why I walk" in the second edition of The Black Swan (2010).[9]

Louis Menand, in seeking to describe T.S. Eliot's relationship to English literary society and his role in the formationof modernism, describes Eliot as a flaneur (The New Yorker,September 19, 2011, pp. 81–89?)In "De Profundis," Oscar Wilde writes from prison about his life regrets, stating "I let myself be lured into longspells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy a man of fashion. I surroundedmyself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds."

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References[1] Gregory Shaya, " The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–1910, (http:/ / historycooperative. press.

uiuc. edu/ journals/ ahr/ 109. 1/ shaya. html)" American Historical Review 109 (2004), par 10.[2] " Grand dictionnaire universel (http:/ / gallica. bnf. fr/ ark:/ 12148/ bpt6k205356p)", vol. 8, v. flâneur and flânerie.[3] Victor Fournel, Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris, (http:/ / gallica. bnf. fr/ ark:/ 12148/ bpt6k757298) p. 268.[4] Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life", (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964). Orig. published in Le Figaro, in 1863.[5] Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (http:/ / books. google. fr/ books?id=XYsqAQAAIAAJ&

q), Harry Zohn, trans. (London, 1983), p. 54.[6] Victor Fournel, Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris (http:/ / gallica. bnf. fr/ ark:/ 12148/ bpt6k757298), (Paris, 1867), p. 270. See Shaya

2004.[7][7] See, among others, Buck-Morss, 1986; Buck-Morss, 1989; Wolff, 1985; Charney and Schwartz, 1995; Tester, 1994; Ferguson, 1994;

Prendergast, 1992; Feathersone, 1998; Friedberg, 1993.[8] Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962, Houghton Mifflin, New York[9][9] Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2007/2010). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House., Second Edition

ISBN 978-1-4000-6351-2.

Bibliography• Charles Baudelaire,The Painter of Modern Life, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964). Orig. published in Le Figaro,

in 1863.• Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Rolf Tiedemann, ed., Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans.

(1999).• Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Michael Jennings, ed., Howard

Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Harry Zohn, trans. (2006).• Brand, Dana (1991). Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York: UP

Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-36207-5. This book argues that there are also flaneurs in 19th century US cities.• Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.,

1989).• Susan Buck-Morss, " The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering, (http:/ / links.

jstor. org/ sici?sici=0094-033X(198623)39<99:TFTSAT>2. 0. CO;2-1)" New German Critique 39 (1986).• Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, 1995).• Anne Friedberg, Windowshopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, 1993).• David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity. (New York: Routledge, 2003).• Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, "The Flâneur: The City and Its Discontents," in Paris as Revolution: Writing the

Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley, 1994).• Louis Huart, Physiologie du flâneur (http:/ / gallica. bnf. fr/ ark:/ 12148/ bpt6k62352r). (Paris, 1841).• Gregory Shaya, " The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–1910, (http:/ /

historycooperative. press. uiuc. edu/ journals/ ahr/ 109. 1/ shaya. html)" American Historical Review 109 (2004).• Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental life, adapted by D. Weinstein from Kurt Wolff (Trans.) The Sociology

of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press, 1950, pp. 409–424• Keith Tester, ed., The Flâneur (http:/ / books. google. fr/ books?id=-OGPMUcnNvQC& dq) (London, 1994).• Laurent Turcot, "Promenades et flâneries à Paris du XVIIe au XXIe siècles : la marche comme construction d’une

identité urbaine", Marcher en ville. Faire corps, prendre corps, donner corps aux ambiances urbaines. sous ladirection de Rachel Thomas, Paris, Ed. des Archives Contemporaines, 2010, p. 65-84.

• Laurent Turcot, Le promeneur à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, Gallimard), 2008.• James V. Werner, "American Flaneur: The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe" (http:/ / www. wcenter.

ncc. edu/ gazette/ wernerreview. htm), Studies in Major Literary Authors Series (2004), retrieved March 6, 2006.• Elizabeth Wilson, " The Invisible Flâneur, (http:/ / newleftreview. org/ ?page=article& view=1665)" in New Left

Review I/191 (1992).

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• Janet Wolff, " The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity, (http:/ / tcs. sagepub. com/ cgi/content/ abstract/ 2/ 3/ 37?ck=nck)" Theory, Culture and Society 2 (1985).

External links• The Arcades Project Project: The Flaneur (http:/ / www. thelemming. com/ lemming/ dissertation-web/ home/

flaneur. html)• The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2001) by Edmund White (http:/ / www. amazon. com/ dp/

1582341354)• Women's Passages, a Bildungsroman of female flânerie. (2005) by Karen Van Godtsenhoven (http:/ / hdl. handle.

net/ 1854/ 4333)

Article Sources and Contributors 7

Article Sources and ContributorsFlâneur  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=572339993  Contributors: AdRock, AgadaUrbanit, Ahwallis, Alcmaeonid, Alejaplace, Alex contributing, AmbassadorShras,BD2412, Bhny, Bigtimepeace, BlackAndy, Bruce Marlin, CLW, Ceoil, Colonies Chris, Cunningpal, Dcljr, Dick Shane, Dimadick, DocWatson42, EamonnPKeane, Eduen, Everything counts,Gene Nygaard, Gksamsa15, Grantsky, Gsamsa99, Halfeman, Heroeswithmetaphors, Humpty Dumpty, Ifrit, Ignatzmice, Igni, Jahsonic, JamesMLane, Jeandjinni, John of Reading, Joseph Solis inAustralia, Karenvg83, Koumz, Kwamikagami, Lbbzman, LilHelpa, Lockley, Lutherarkwright, MFH, Mark Preston, McGeddon, Mikeroodeus, Miq, Moocha, NawlinWiki, Ninaredux, Noise ofcarpet, Oqm4, Philip Cross, Pilatesball, Pmms2005, Pugetive, Quiddity, Raeky, Reify-tech, SchreiberBike, Spicemix, Steven Walling, Steveprutz, The Man in Question, The Thing That ShouldNot Be, TheFMLY, TheMadBaron, Tvaughn05, Verne Equinox, Wdyoung, 85 anonymous edits

Image Sources, Licenses and ContributorsFile:Rosler-LeFlaneur.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Rosler-LeFlaneur.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: AlejaplaceImage:Étienne Carjat, Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, circa 1862.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Étienne_Carjat,_Portrait_of_Charles_Baudelaire,_circa_1862.jpg License: Public Domain  Contributors: Andrew Gray, Christoph Braun, Foundling, Jean-Frédéric, Mywood, Paris 16File:Gustave Caillebotte - Paris Street; Rainy Day - Google Art Project.jpg  Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Gustave_Caillebotte_-_Paris_Street;_Rainy_Day_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Ophelia2

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