The flaneur walks in a very large city. It becomes their landscape. They walk where hostile, anonymous crowds abound and where capitalism has included art works and people. Unlike walkers in nature or the countryside like Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the flaneur walks in “an interrupted, uneven rhythm.” Walking was not a communion with Nature, but witnessing of scattered, successive experiences.
The flaneur walks to subverts the city, the crowd, and capitalism, but ambivalently. They seek the crowd to hide in it. They subvert the speed of the city by slowing down, which allows their mind to grasp images rapidly. They subvert productivism by being idle and they are marginalized because of that. But idleness allows them to witness and report what is happening in the city. Lastly, the flaneur resists consumption by urban foraging or even theft. They simply capture vignettes and encounters.
I was surprised to learn that the word is being contemporaneously used by some writers and photographers to refer to the work that they do. Perhaps, this is understandable because latter theorists of the flaneur set the stage for the interpretation of the figure in more global terms outside its original meaning confined in Paris.
Despite this, I have some reservations for using the word, particularly because of its historical baggage of being something that rich men with lots of time tend to do. Also, the flanerie, which is the work of the flaneur, is situated in urban spaces, which doesn’t capture some of the works that I do.
Some good questions to ask about the flaneur:
- Would one use this category to define one’s walks in the Philippines?
Related
References
Gros, F. (2014). A Philosophy of Walking. Verso.