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I made a presentation yesterday on the 19th Century, Parisian Concept of 'The Flâneur'
Below are my (rather extensive, but accessible) notes
Check out these Ask.MeFi questions to get a broader overview on some of these topics:
The Flâneur Exposed and Dadaist Organic Urban Idealism?
(I have linked a couple of old Forum posts at the end too)
Enjoy!
The Flâneur: Baudelaire, Benjamin and Beyond
Definition of ‘The City’:
"The city is a human habitat that allows people to form relations with others at various levels of intimacy while remaining entirely anonymous." (taken from Wikipedia)
The ideal of 'the city' has stood as the most physically accessible representation of ‘Utopia’ since the days of Plato's Republic; the mental playground from which philosophers and writers have played with the subject of human.
Plato (through Socrates) constructs an ideal "city in speech," a theoretical city of theoretically perfect justice. Yet Plato constructs this theoretical city not only to examine the most just city imaginable, but primarily to discover how individuals themselves should best live.
Yet the meaning of ‘the city’ has changed much since the days of Plato.
Psychogeography:
Guy Debord noted “the pleasing vagueness” of the term psychogeography. He defines it as “the study of the specific effects of the geographic environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”
Defoe : “the city is momentarily made strange… as its inhabitants are granted a vision of it as it might be heaven or hell”
Debord: “the essential emptiness of modern life is obscured behind an elaborate and spectacular array of commodities which our immersion in… leaves us disconnected from the history and community that might give our lives meaning”
Psychogeography then is an attempt to re-root us in our environments, the define us and re-establish our umbilical connections to the womb of society.
Peter Ackroyd gives the city to the writer : “in our modern technological landscape… dominated by surveillance and hostile to the pedestrian, it is now the novelist and poet, not the theorist, who are uncovering and celebrating these overlooked and forgotten corners of the city” -
History of The Flâneur:
Merely strolling in the city was not a pastime one could participate in before the industrial era : The Arcades provided a microcosm of the city experience. They existed only because of the industrial technology available in their construction.
The boulevard becomes interior. The Flâneur is at home in these spaces, the colourful signs of the boulevard become like the wall decorations of his home. The complexity of human life, in the city, is conjoined amongst the grey cobbles of the arcades and become the home of the Flâneur’s creative meanderings.
The Flâneur revels in the crowd and is more a person because of it. ‘He catches things in flight; enabling him to dream that he is like the artist.’
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"
Depersonalisation:
Emotion, and love itself, have had their meaning changed, the disconnection of the individual from the crowd can come to signify the fleeting nature of lust which flits into the eye of the wanderer in the city, and flits by as quickly again. There is gain and loss in mere moments. The disappearance of these miniature loves in the masses, in the labyrinthine cities leave no traces.
Identity in administrative processes had long been an alien procedure. The signature, which before had sufficed, now became inadequate in the enormity of the crowds. The photograph became the revolution necessary for these processes, especially where criminology was concerned, and thus the photo identified each person with their image, separating them from the outside world and classing them as the cogs of a new machine.
For Poe the Flâneur was someone who did not feel comfortable in their own company, constantly seeking out the crowd to address his dimensions, to blur his distinctiveness, ‘the harder a man is to find the more suspicious he becomes’.
Dickens saw the sights and sounds of the city as his true inspiration, leaving his creativity lacking when not confronted with such delicacies for his senses.
‘Baudelaire loved solitude, but he wanted it in a crowd.’
Depersonalization here is the key to creativity and not its enemy.
Dangers – The Underworld:
The city became the first place after the train and carriage where the strolling eye would constantly fall on the face of another. An uncomfortable experience and one Goethe says is ‘indicative of the loathsome secret each one of us hides inside us.’
Baudelaire : “What are the dangers of the forest and the prairie compared with the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether a man grabs his victim on a boulevard or stabs his quarry in an unknown woods – does he not remain both here and there the most perfect of all beasts of prey?”
The more danger [uncanny] the city becomes the more knowledge of the depravity of the human it takes to survive within it. Each person is opened to its dangers precisely because they are closed off. Literature was soon to grasp these darker aspects of the human, within the jungle which is this city, and expose them in fiction, to enormous applause. The masses became the perfect shield for the antisocial. This loss of the true individual allowed the expulsion of the individual’s darker elements.
‘The underworld’ of criminal origin was similar in texture to ‘the savage’ in literature of the previous century. Both concepts utilize their instinctive awareness of their environment (be it the wilderness or the city) to camouflage their true intentions; they resolve their shape as the predator of the crowds.
The detective novel emerged as a clash between the individual and the chaos of the crowd and their pursuit. The criminal may be said to live in poetically infused love with the crowd, it is his environment, it is in the crowd he finds his identity best accentuated, his victim best made anonymous, his crime best camouflaged. -
The Birth of the Machine:
The city by gaslight, as described by Poe, is as if an interior itself, the light casting the dimensions of the city streets. The crowds began to feel at home at night on these newly lit streets, but the night sky was obliterated, another knocking off of nature in response to the mechanic evolution of the city entity. The buildings themselves, already obscuring the glare of the sun, now became the resting place of the lamplight rather than the stars. But these lights in their flicker defied all romance bringing the lurid shadow of the city into the minds of its wanderers.
The crowd of Poe is reminiscent of the machine. The ebb and flow of the wandering masses mirrors the production of the machines which ultimately drive this city; its economy; its success; its people. For Poe it is the uniformity expressed in the people which outline their isolation. There is absurdity in being one of many. The people of his story seem unable to express themselves in anything other than reflex action, the impeding crowds became too disrupting for a Flâneur to flourish.
The Flâneur’s appearance of personality protested against a division of labour in the city making each human into a specialist ‘nothing’ in the crowd. The pace of progress was at odds with their wealth, the industrialized nation around them reflected their success, but shielded them from being able to express this to others. To wander idly, the rich tapestry of the city reflecting the clothes one wore, was the fashion. For a time Flâneurs would let turtles on leashes set their pace, perhaps they hoped the progress around them would proceed at such a speed, keeping them in their rightful position as leaders of the crowd.
Up until the renaissance our view of the world was organic in quality. We lived to model nature rather than pervert it under our control. In the mechanical understanding of the universe the idea of nature as nurturing mother was lost to the mathematical precision of physical laws. Harmony was lost, and with it the holistic view of reality. In the city this showed itself in the reduction of the world to component parts and the laws which governed them. Everything could be deconstructed to finds its value, so perhaps the role of womanhood was reduced to mere procreation, the consumables of the city began to include the woman herself as mass spaces of the machine-like city were given over to the commodity of prostitution. The postulation of human divinity and its illusionary control over nature lead in time to an illusionary control over MANKIND ITSELF. Legitimating its manipulation, allowing division of power - reflected in the strata of the city - to become an integral part of the mechanical reality we now lived in. Nothing was able to free the shackles of artificialisation. The real became lost in the labyrinthine streets. Nature was walled out, the sky was cast over with lamplight to destroy the universe beyond and all the matters of humanity could be followed back not to nature, but to the workings of this machine: itself a simulacrum of its ideology.
Loss of Flâneur’s Environment:
The Flâneur was to lose their successful place just as this progress increased. The interior of the arcade became as if miniaturized in the department store. The colourful bazaar of the street became the throw away goods on the store floor, suddenly a Flâneur could be anyone, nondependent on class, and the measly idling of the original Flâneur started to lose its value as one saw in them a reflection of the categorization of the city into a constituent of parts to mirror the constituents of people. The person became the commodity and the Flâneur was thus abandoned to the seething crowds. The intoxication of the commodity is where the true power now lay, the Flâneur was a controlled aspect of the crowd and not the perceiving eye which roamed throughout it. That the empathy the people found in objects was merely a summation of the objects ability to rise above its inherent value became the downfall of the individual. Once found in the crowd now the Flâneur was lost, his poetic ability to be at one with all aspects of the city now shielded him from the truth that without the glitz, the fakery, the throwaway nature of the city he would be nothing.
According to Benjamin, the Flâneur disappeared as the commercial world slowly deserted the interior-exteriors of arcades for the carpeted, artificially lit department stores that were
to replace them: "If in the beginning the street had become an intérieur for him, now this intérieur turned into a street, and he roamed though the labyrinth of merchandise as he had once roamed though the labyrinth of the city".
The intoxication one finds in objects, even the commodity of the female body in prostituting herself, is what draws the masses. The true reason people fill these streets is in blind addiction for their fix of commodity; to clutch the shiny jewel of the city in their hands. Here again the many beautiful aspects of the individual - whether of different classes, ranks, loves, hopes and dreams – is lost in the seething mass. Men and women pass by each other completely oblivious that there are other identities at all, let alone that these identities hold as much complexity as themselves. The crowd is the white noise which the individual must overcome to subsume themselves in the commodities of the city. A brutal indifference of unfeeling and private interest begins to obliterate the value of the individual.
Enjoyment IN society is distinct from enjoyment OF society, and perhaps here is where the Flâneur went wrong. There is a mesmerizing quality to being within society which forces illusions to overtake one’s perceptions. Society itself is no less wonderful for being categorized out of existence, yet the quality of viewing must be altered to transcend the masses, the featureless void of everything in unison, which the Flâneur can raise themselves above. -
Perhaps the city, and the crowd, signify the great overarching purpose for each of us. For every man, woman and child has an inner life which they pursue, manifest and expel into the world. On top of this we all participate in a society, an entity made up of far greater forces than any one of us alone is aware of. The loss of the individual within these crowds, and in contrast his personal making, are symbolic of the struggle mass society must go through each day. The city is our wilderness where we evolve as a whole.
In the womb of society/the crowd we each make ourselves in reflection, and conflict with the world at large. Perhaps we compare our successes with those around us, perhaps we raise ourselves above the crowd in order to look down and about at their makeup – in both situations the crowd is our birth, the whole is all we have to aspire to, to rebel against. The masses MAKES the individual.
The City and its Otherness:
Half the world’s population now live in cities, this is only set to increase.
The city has a three dimensional identity which laughs in the face of our natural order. In wandering the street, the staircases, the alleyways and arcades of the city one can become a poet, manipulating spatial arrangements in one’s mental map in a similar way one manipulates words, lines and stanzas in a poem. The city for each of us has a different character, not least because each of us sees the world differently, but because in the mind’s eye every environment is mapped under different rules, by seemingly abstract qualities one would find hard to explain to another.
In this way the poetics of walking the city can be compared to a dream in that abstract qualities combine in subjective spaces to create the illusion of an interconnected whole. Actual drawing of these connections is impossible, the space of our environments is no reflection of the mass of datum our minds collects. Henri Lefebvre points out that “signifying processes occur in space which cannot be reduced either to an everyday discourse or to a literary language of texts”. Space produces a sense of the subjugation of infinite variety. The crowd, the rich tapestry of colour and effect below, is made to be confined in the space surrounding it. We see the space, its controlling effect
on our perceptions and we identify a soothing control of our own over the mass of information ahead and around us. The space, as the control, is an illusionary quality. The city is a mere conjunction of these infinities. To wander it is to pursue a semblance of order where perhaps there is none. Yet the search beyond ‘order’ is where true otherness is uncovered.
The Flâneur in witnessing the city makes the city. Turning this power to the creation of fiction should be no problem to a true Flâneur. -
As promised, here are two previous Forum posts which examine some of these concepts:
Co-Evolution II: Evolutionary Illusion and Cultural Semiotics
Looooots of reading there.... If you manage (even a bit of) it then let me know your thoughts....
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