Flanerie

the opportunity to roam around freely, meeting people when I wished and taking leave of them when I wished (Gérard de Nerval 1984)

Flânerie, the activity of strolling and looking which is carried out by the flâneur, is a recurring motif in the literature, sociology and art of urban, and most especially of the metropolitan, existence.

the figure and the activity appear regularly in the attempts of social and cultural commentators to get some grip on the nature and implications of the conditions of modernity and post-modernity.

who can reap aesthetic meaning and an individual kind of existential security from the spectacle of the teeming crowds – the visible public – of the metropolitan environment of the city of Paris.

flânerie can, after Baudelaire, be understood as the activity of the sovereign spectator going about the city in order to find the things which will occupy his gaze and thus complete his otherwise incomplete identity; satisfy his otherwise dissatisfied existence; replace the sense of bereavement with a sense of life.

Flânerie can be understood as the observation of the fleeting and the transitory which is the other half of modernity to the permanent and central sense of self.

Flânerie is the doing through and thanks to which the flâneur hopes and believes he will be able to find the truth of his being.

Flânerie also, then, is the way of avoiding arrival at the funeral pyre of being. It is a way of going on precisely because it is ultimately so utterly futile.

flânerie is invariably identified as an activity located in the realm of the empire of the gaze and the spectacle

for an exploration of nineteenth-century Paris as spectacle, see Clark 1985

flânerie might be about more than just looking

Flaneur

Originally, the figure of the flâneur was tied to a specific time and place: Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century as it was conjured by Walter Benjamin

the figure and the activity appear regularly in the attempts of social and cultural commentators to get some grip on the nature and implications of the conditions of modernity and post-modernity.

The flâneur of nineteenth-century Paris receives his most famous eulogy in the prose and poetry of Charles Baudelaire.

In the terms established by Charles Baudelaire, the flâneur is basically the hero of modernity.

The flâneur is the secret spectator of the spectacle of the spaces and places of the city.

the figure, and the activity, of the flâneur is essentially about freedom, the meaning of existence (or the lack of a meaning of existence) and being-with-others in the modern urban spaces of the city.

The flaneur was originally a man

For Baudelaire, there is no doubt that the poet is the ‘man’ (and Baudelaire is quite explicit about the gender identity of the poet; much, if not indeed all, of Baudelaire’s work presupposes a masculine narrator or observer)

‘The Invisible Flâneuse’ (originally Wolff 1985, reprinted in Wolff 1990) and then Pollock 1988 (pages 50–90), Wilson 1992.

Buck-Morss 1986, 1989.

Some idea of the restrictions on the freedom of women to stroll in nineteenth-century Paris can be extracted from Higonnet 1990.

The flaneur is mysterious and indefinable

Because the flâneur is fundamentally a figure who can only be known through the activities of flânerie, a certain mystery is intrinsic to his identity.

definitions are at best difficult and, at worst, a contradiction of what the flâneur means. In himself, the flâneur is, in fact, a very obscure thing. And, therefore, he cannot be defined in himself as very much more than a tautology

The flaneur is in the quest for meaning

Baudelaire makes this indefinability quite clear in his invention of the daily routine and daily quests of the artist Constantin Guys. According to Baudelaire, this flâneur (called Guys) magnifies what is already waiting to be discovered. This_flâneur_ waits to be filled because, in himself, he is utterly empty (and, just like the thinking reed, he knows himself to be empty; the knowing of the emptiness is the pre-condition of the great control over the urban environment).

the meaning (or lack of meaning) of existence because the figure is about the flux of life and the requirement to make its meaning for one’s self

The flâneur senses – or perhaps it is better to say that he allows himself the conceit – that without him the world will lack meaning and he is engulfed by the sense of the deluge which might rain without him.

Awareness of that his life is meaningless distinguishes the flaneur from the crowd

Here, then, the poet is rather like a banal and everyday version of Pascal’s thinking reed. Pascal called humans ‘thinking reeds’ because we are aware of the fragility of our lives; we are breakable like reeds but, importantly, we know ourselves to be like reeds in the winds of circumstance. It is this knowing, this thinking, which makes us what we are and which distinguishes us from all that which is unable to contemplate its reed-like nature.

Baudelaire’s poet is like a thinking reed because he is a face in the crowd along with all the other faces in the crowd. But behind the face of the poet lurks a great secret of nobility. Baudelaire’s poet claims to possess a nobility in relation to all the other members of the metropolitan crowd because, even if the crowd should crush him either physically or existentially, he _knows_that the crowd might do this.

The flaneur needs to be a master observant

Constantin Guys as invented by Baudelaire achieves his greatest peaks of existence when he loses himself in what he observes.

The flaneur favors public over private spaces

‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (which was first published in 1863): ‘The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd’ (Baudelaire 1972: 399).

The poet is the man for whom metropolitan spaces are the landscape of art and existence.

For him, the private world of domestic life is dull and possibly even a cause for the feelings of crisis

Without entry into the spectacle of the public, existence can only be wanting in something of fundamental importance.

The private sphere is the home of an existence devoid of an almost orgiastic pleasure

Baudelaire’s poet is a man who is driven out of the private and into the public by his own search for meaning. He is the man who is only at home existentially when he is not at home physically.

The poet is able ‘To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world’ (Baudelaire 1972: 400).

In the ‘Crowds’ item of Paris Spleen, Baudelaire proclaims the (for him undoubted) truth that ‘It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude’; only a poet can take such a bath because it is only on the poet that ‘a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming’ (Baudelaire 1970: 20).

Could it be that the flâneur is rather like a metropolitan vampire

The flaneur is idle because of poetry

The poet (and to be a poet is the real truth of the idler and the observer; the poetry is the reason and the justification of the idling; the poet is possibly at his busiest when he seems to be at his laziest) is possessed by a special and defining ability.

The flaneur creates meaning from public spaces

Baudelaire’s poet is the man of the crowd as opposed to the man in the crowd. The poet is the centre of an order of things of his own making even though, to others, he appears to be just one constituent part of the metropolitan flux. It is this sense of being _of_rather than being in which makes the poet different from all the others in the crowd.

The poet is the sovereign in control of a world of his own definition (that is why he is a prince); he defines the order of things for himself rather than allowing things or appearances to be defining of themselves

for the poet the meaning and the importance of everything is mutable more or less at will.

Baudelaire himself made the connection between the poet of the metropolis and the quest for satisfaction quite clear in his essay on ‘The Painter of Modern Life’.

‘is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call “modernity”. … The aim for him is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory’ (Baudelaire 1972: 402).

even though the flâneur does not choose his urbanity, he senses himself to be responsible for it. It is his inescapable fate.

if flânerie is an activity of public spaces, does this make the flâneur public property?

The flaneur connection with existentialism

the flâneur has been important to the existentialist attempts to discover the secrets of being in the modern (urban, metropolitan, public) world.

Sartre’s novel Nausea (Sartre 1965)

A sense of some of the connections Sartre identified between his existentialism and Baudelaire is contained in Sartre 1950.

t is perhaps not too far fetched to identify the main character of Nausea, Antoine Roquentin, as a kind of flâneur. Existentially, Roquentin’s life is nothing other than a series of individual and largely lonely strollings which suggest an attempt to escape from the private sphere (which for Roquentin is utterly barren) and to find meaning instead from the spectacle of the public.

Roquentin’s observation of all that he sees is predicated on his incognito and detachment from others (which is the other side of his almost complete social isolation; an isolation which is, however, to some extent legitimated by Roquentin’s struggle to write a book; consequently his evident idleness is actually the most active work

Roquentin certainly makes the meaning of the world for himself, but he can only do this because the world is a pre-existing spectacle which is always and already available to the gaze (this is the nub of the dialectic of responsibility without choice). He can only make the meaning of the world because the world is already there.

Many of these themes of Antoine Roquentin as flâneur are contained in the section of Nausea

Roquentin is able to observe the spectacle of the crowd with its rituals of public spaces as if from a distance, as if with the eye of a poet for whom everything is mysterious until its meaning has been invented.

By the twilight of his Sunday of flânerie, Roquentin feels that all of his doing might at long last have led to the satisfaction of being.

The self-defining ability of the Sartrean variant of the flâneur is not without a considerable measure of desperation and panic. Public spaces can be places of an immense existential fear

Robert Musil’s great synthetic novel The Man Without Qualities.

Musil’s use of the devices of flânerie, and his tendency to connect them to global problems of existence in cities, is made very clear in the opening chapter of The Man Without Qualities.

Musil suggests that he is actually concerned with the universal and the general issues of metropolitan existence.

Reading list

Nausea (Sartre 1965) The Man Without Qualities (Musil 1954)

The flaneur of Musil is a twentieth-century figure

Like Baudelaire and Sartre, Musil defines the city in terms of its public spaces, movements and rituals. For Musil the city is a place of flux and fleeting meetings against a somewhat more concrete background. But there seems to be an important difference between Musil’s universal Vienna and the streets conjured forth by Baudelaire and Sartre. Musil’s streets are much, much noisier. Musil’s streets are places of collisions and of a kind of ordered chaos (or of a kind of chaos of order) whereas Baudelaire’s seem to be silent and Sartre’s seem to resonate only with the murmur of bourgeois pleasantries. In this way, then, it might be said that Sartre’s flâneur remains in the nineteenth century; it is Musil who brings the figure into the twentieth century.

Musil’s novel expresses a kind of dialectic of flânerie; a dialectic of incognito observation. First, the position of the narrator is that of the observer who defines the meanings of what he sees

Second, and within the text, Musil describes the wandering along a city street of two individuals. The dialectic consists then, in the _flânerie_of the narrator and of the flânerie in the text.

At exactly the moment when Musil generalizes the flâneur and turns him into a generic rather than a Parisian figure, the _flâneur_begins to disappear. The idle and considered strolling and observing which is the essence of flânerie has become doubtful in universal Vienna.

Three challenges to flanerie per Musil

Musil identifies three sources of the challenge to flânerie. First, there is the problem of traffic

Second, flânerie and the profound intellectual activity it requires might become simply exhausted; the mysteries of the city could well become just banal and boring.

Third, flânerie is rendered less and less likely by the increasing domination of rationality and of an order which is imposed on the city as if by necessity

This third and final qualification of the chance of flânerie is perhaps the most significant; it certainly connects Musil with themes in the more canonical literature on the flâneur.

The flaneur creates meaning by doing not being

Baudelaire’s interpretation of the poet is built upon a kind of dialectic of control and incompletion.

The ontological basis of the Baudelairean poet resides in doing not being. For Baudelaire, the man who lives in a box, or the man who lives like a mollusc (the man who simply is) is actually incomplete; the struggle for existential completion and satisfaction requires relentless bathing in multitude (it requires doing over and over again). Completion requires an escape from the private sphere. The hero of modern life is he who lives in the public spaces of the city.

It is a quest for the Holy Grail of being through a restless doing; a struggle for satisfaction through the rooting out and destruction of dissatisfaction (dissatisfaction being due to the banality of coming across the familiar or across passing friends; dissatisfaction being the sense of finding a world rather than making a world).

the equation of Baudelaire’s poet means that if it is hoped to discover the secret of the truth of being, doing can never cease; it is impossible to rest in the knowledge of being, since even that resting is itself a doing. The secret of being is then the actuality of doing

‘All of us are attending some funeral or other’ (Baudelaire 1972: 104); the funeral of dissatisfaction in the quest for satisfaction. But ironically this means that all of us are attending the funeral of the Grail of being.

It is the fate of the flâneur to never enjoy being because of the relentless doing of flânerie.

(This is connected to “The flaneur favors public over private spaces.“)

The flaneur creates meaning through a dialectic of self and other

This ability to be defining of the meaning and of the order of things – which is, let it be noted, an event entirely in the realm of ideas and thus quite independent of material factors (the poet need not be rich in clothes to be rich in imagination) – implies a connection between the intuited fluidity of things in the environment of the city and the physical negotiations of the space and other bodies carried out by the poet during his walks in crowds.

the poet is in complete control of the meaning of his world. The poet is the maker of the order of things. Yet, and on the other hand, the poet does not indulge in all of this definition through choice or through wilful freedom. The poet does not choose; he is compelled (thus, for the poet of Baudelaire, poetry is a vocation as opposed to a simple profession).

The dialectic of the poet is, then, one of the sovereignty of individual self-hood in synthesis with a situation in which the practice of self-hood is dependent on the contingencies of spectacles such as crowds.

The dialectic of the poet is ‘this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes’ (Baudelaire 1970: 20)

In Baudelaire’s terms, this is also an intrinsically modern existence since it represents a synthesis of the permanence of the soul of the poet with the unexpected changes of public meetings.

being-with-others because the flâneur says important things about how we know who we are, how we become who we are, and how others become who we think they are, when all we can know for sure is what we observe.

The flaneur can create meaning because the world already exists

Creating meaning curtails acceptance

the control over defining meaning for one’s self is purchased at the expense of accepting things as they are, as pre-existing

The flaneur is never satisfied

the search for self-hood through the diagnosis of dissatisfaction does not at all lead in the end to satisfaction; it just leads to more dissatisfaction. Perhaps, then, the poet can never be happy except in the moment of death.

with his fruitless if not actually futile search for satisfaction through the deconstruction of dissatisfaction, the flâneur indicates why the problems that rear their heads in the urban spaces tend to be recurring rather than resolvable

But, inevitably, as soon as Roquentin starts doing once again, as soon as he resumes his stroll, the feeling of satisfaction evaporates. Once again, the urban landscape becomes a place of dissatisfaction and of a searching not finding. For the flâneur, satisfaction could be anywhere; but that only means that satisfaction is most certainly not here.

But, or so at least the flâneur can console himself, he could have achieved the satisfaction of being (and a satisfied being) if only he had gone that way instead of this way. The flâneur is, to this extent, actually the victim rather than the prince of his own freedom.

Anonymity is important to the flaneur

The nobility of the poet is located quite precisely in his thinking of his mediocrity in the eyes of others. Indeed, in many ways, it is exactly the danger of being in a crowd which, for Baudelaire’s poet, inspires much of the pleasure and delight of the spectacle of the public.

the poet is a man apart even though he might well appear to be a man like any other. Indeed, if the poet does appear to be like every one else, so much the better.

The anonymity of the poet is merely a ruse; it is a play of masks without which the poet could not transform into the beautiful the raw stuff he witnesses.

incognito wherever he goes’ (Baudelaire 1972: 400). If the poet could be seen he would be unable to observe.

Such a knowledge of being in the crowd, such a princely incognito (as Baudelaire might well have called the anonymity of the poet), gives the Baudelairean poet an ability to make for himself the meaning and the significance of the metropolitan spaces and the spectacle of the public.

because he can or does look just like anyone else, nowhere is forbidden to him

He therefore treats the objects of the city with a somewhat detached attitude (an attitude which is only a short step away from isolation and alienation

The flaneur masquerades

The poet can put on whatever mask will gain him access to otherwise secret and mysterious places

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or someone else, as he chooses.

The flaneur walks primarily on imagination

This flâneur does not need to travel vast physical spaces to cover vast imaginative spaces. The world of mystery and imagination is here

The flaneur is a bygone figure per Benjamin

Thanks in no small part to Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire, the flâneur is invariably seen as a bygone figure.

Benjamin makes Baudelaire an anachronism: ‘So he roved about in the city which had long since ceased to be home for the flâneur’ (Benjamin 1983: 47).

The rationality of capitalism destroyed flanerie per Banjamin

Benjamin’s argument is that the rationality of capitalism and, especially, commodification and the circulation of commodities, itself defined the meaning of existence in the city so that there remained no spaces of mystery for the flâneur to observe.

Capital imposed its own order on the metropolis as if from outside, like a natural force. Benjamin proposes that the hollowness of the commodity form and, indeed, the hollowness of the egoistic individuals of capitalism is reflected in the flâneur.

‘The flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the commodity … The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers’ (Benjamin 1983: 5).

The flâneur is a passive spectator who is as duped by the spectacle of the public as the consumer who is duped by the glittering promises of consumerism. The flânerie which features in the work of Benjamin is soul-less and truly empty, just like the commodity forms it represents.

Flanerie is a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness of capitalism per Benjamin

Flânerie is a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness even though it is actually a final resignation to it.

‘The flâneur only seems to break through this “unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest” by filling the hollow spaces created in him by such isolation, with the borrowed – and fictitious – isolations of strangers’ (Benjamin 1983: 58).

Administrative rationality removed meaning in spaces per Benjamin

Flânerie, of course, is predicated on the possibility that there might be secrets to be imputed to things. Administrative rationality destroyed that possibility when it removed the romance of what might lurk behind the doors of houses by giving each house a matter-of-fact and a defining number. Benjamin was in no doubt that house-numbering was a measure intended to pin down to a single place and meaning every face in the city. And such pinning down makes flânerie impossible since it establishes the meaning and the order of things in advance. It is impossible for any sovereign observer to impute to himself a responsibility for what things might or might not mean; numbers destroy the poetry of the city.

It meant not least that the city ceased to be a place of free wanderings, of free coming and going.

Benjamin goes on to stress that this process of rationalization was given further impetus with the development of photography; photography meant that each face was given a single meaning (the meaning of a name which had an address appended to it) and thus the flâneur’s playing with masks and incognito was undermined (Benjamin 1983: 48).

Flanerie challenges the relevance of time in the metropolis

Baudelairean flânerie is predicated on the irrelevance of time. Flânerie is more or less independent of the clock

The relationship between flânerie and time discipline is illustrated particularly well by the brief fashion of taking turtles for walks.

According to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, this temporary predilection of the flâneur to take a walk with a turtle represents one desperate response to the increasing speed of circulation (of traffic, commodities, thoughts) in the nineteenth century. _Flânerie_is a harking back and a nostalgia for a slower and more definite world.

Schivelbusch also stresses the point that flânerie is only really possible if the flâneur is in no great danger of getting run over by speeding things.

The protest of the turtles against the hare of Progress (to rather misquote Aesop), was futile

That is why the arcades of the Paris before Haussmann were so important. They were public spaces which were protected from the circulations of the city. When the arcades were demolished, the flâneur was thrown into the way of circulation. It might even be said that the flâneur was thrown out of the arcades of Paris and onto the killing streets of the universal Vienna. Flânerie is existence at a pace that is out of step with the rapid circulations of the modern metropolis.

Rationalization also challenged flânerie through the establishment of time discipline.

The flaneur dies in the modern city

The message from Benjamin, Schivelbusch and even Robert Musil is quite clear; the flâneur dies in the modern city.

The flaneur is no longer specific to time and place

And yet Sartre and Musil (once again) use the figure of the _flâneur_in a very general way to try to say something about metropolitan existence as a general problem. There is a certain ambiguity concerning the historical specificity of the figure of the flâneur. On the one hand, there seems to be little doubt that the flâneur is specific to a Parisian time and place. On the other hand, the flâneur is used as a figure to illuminate issues of city life irrespective of time and place.

This greyness of the historical specificity of the flâneur is perhaps as intrinsic to the debate as the problem acknowledged by Baudelaire of defining exactly what ‘flâneur’ means. It most certainly has its roots in some of the twists and turns of Baudelaire’s thought and prose.

the flâneur certainly occupies the specific times and places of nineteenth-century Paris, but that Paris is itself made important because it is an expression of modernity.Baudelaire’s uncertainty as to whether he was talking about Paris or modernity is, then, better understood in terms of an attempt to talk about both at one and the same time. For Baudelaire, modernity is the form; Paris is the content. The flâneur is the figure and the point of observation that straddles the two and pulls them together into a unity.

If it can be said that Robert Musil invents a universal Vienna, then similarly Charles Baudelaire invents a universal Paris.

Baudelaire makes the flâneur into a figure who has two objects of specificity; Paris and modernity. This dualism leads to the identification of other axes of specificity: the local and the general; the particular and the universal. The advantage of Baudelaire’s move is that it makes eternal his reflections on the transitory; it makes Modernity out of his modernity

the relationships between Baudelaire’s personal, Parisian modernity and a more universal Modernity are explored in Berman 1983

The disadvantage is that it could lead to flânerie being made so specifically about Paris at a given moment in its history that flânerie becomes of no contemporary relevance at all. Either that, or flânerie becomes so general as to be almost meaningless and most certainly historically rootless if not seemingly somewhat ahistorical.

==My thought: If the flaneur is undefinable, it makes sense that he could transcend gender, time and place

The flaneur persists by his exploration of his modernity

The flâneur observes and seeks the meaning of his modernity

‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable’ (Baudelaire 1972: 403).

To the extent that the flâneur is observing the fleeting and the contingent content of the eternal and the immovable forms (and the project of finding the eternal in the transitory runs through Sartre and Musil, and for that matter even Benjamin), then in observing Paris, the flâneur is looking at nothing other than the current expression of modernity.

Department stores

are department stores therefore best understood as surrogate private spheres as opposed to public spaces?

department stores become problematic since with their bright lights they are both part of the metropolitan spectacle and places from which the spectacle might be observed.

Flanerie as a narrative device

Musil uses flânerie as a narrative device.

Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (Perec 1987).

Perec’s book seems to randomly move from floor to floor and from apartment to apartment within the building 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Perec thus turns the reader into a flâneur of the text. Perec leaves it to the reader to try to find the meaning of existence from within the pages of his novel. Perec makes the reader free of any single plot-line and aware of nothing so much as the multiplicity of the existences in and of the text. The reader is responsible for the meaning of the book even though s/he does not choose the stories it contains. If the reader pauses with any one part of the novel, the meaning found is only partial. A fleeting satisfaction is quickly overwhelmed by a dissatisfaction caused by the possibility that perhaps something clearer or even better can be found with the next tenant, in the next apartment. And so the reader as flâneur has to get up onto weary legs and start going up and down the stairs once again.

Conceptualizations of the city for the flaneur

Both Baudelaire and Sartre tend to concentrate on existential danger

Both Baudelaire and Sartre see the city as an essentially fabricated world; it is fabricated in chance meetings and rituals as much as in parks and streets. Consequently, for them, the city is physically distinct from natural threats but riddled with social threats. However, with Musil the equation is reversed. His universal Vienna is as natural and as inevitable as weather fronts over the Atlantic. Consequently, Musil’s city is imaginatively constructed to be like nature, where life and limb is threatened by unforeseen dangers which lurk around the corner and which strike without warning.

Unsorted

Summary

The flanerie is an existential project and the flaneur is an existential figure. The flaneur begins with the recognition that his life is meaningless. He then sees doing, not being, as the solution to meaninglessness. He then discerns that meaning is in public spaces not private spaces, so he goes out into the crowd. But he is distinguished from the crowd because of his awareness of his life’s meaninglessness. His quest for meaning in the crowd and public spaces necessitates a mastery of observation. He creates meaning through what he observes. But the meaning he creates is a negotiation between choice and the social structures in the public spaces that he is compelled to accept.

Notes for the essay

Issues to tackle:

gendered walking
public vs private space
the intellectual walker’s relationship with the crowd

My would-be walks in Pangasinan will be a dialectic of control and incompletion. I could control my imagination and create meaning out of the walks, but I am also compelled by the human and nonhuman structures in place in the places I walk in no matter how fluid they may seem.

Going to the mall, travel, etc. is a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness of capitalist society, even if it’s actually a resignation to it.

References

Tester, Keith, editor. The Flâneur. Routledge, 1994.

Vince Imbat

The Flaneur by Keith Tester