Who and where is the flâneur?
Something else: that memory-filled intoxication in which the flâneur moves through the city not only draws nourishment from that which comes before his eyes, but also allows him to be affected even by knowledge of dead dates as something experienced and lived.
Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, quoted in Buck-Morss.
Is the flâneur a figure of a specific time and place? The ideal: the nineteenth century Parisian gentleman of leisure--the 'poet of the crowd' who strolled idly through the Arcades (with his pet turtle setting the pace), fascinated and enraptured by the glitter and dazzle of the crowd's movement; seeking out new and unplanned experiences; symbolically protesting the hastening pace of modern industrialisation; and who, because of his idle pace, his openness to experience, his position as 'of' and yet 'not of' the crowd, could see (and thus write about) what those immersed in the crowd could not.
This flâneur has died many deaths.
Buck-Morss suggests he was 'killed' by traffic. Benjamin--who saw Baudelaire as the flâneur incarnate--thought his later works evidenced an exhaustion with the crowd, a lessened ability to perceive the lustre and glitter of its motion and its images. Others have claimed that the flâneur's privileged position 'of' yet 'not of' the crowd was swallowed up in the tide of capitalism: the flâneur as writer seeking a market necessarily became yet another player in the game.
Where, then, did the flâneur go?
In keeping with Benjamin's method, this may not even be a valid question. Benjamin-reading-Baudelaire, Benjamin wandering through the streets and Arcades of Paris (and earlier, Berlin), Benjamin-reading-Poe-reading-London: all of these are readings, citations, fragments of a past that may otherwise 'flit by' but which Benjamin, however briefly and tenuously, "crystallises into a monad." It is the method--a kind of dialectical experiencing of the now and the past at the same time; of being part and yet not part of what historians call 'progress'; the ability to, almost magically, endow a chanced-upon object or image with a history that is at once its own, yet also intensely personal. And it is the nature of the figure of the flâneur itself which fascinates: crystallising in a specific place and time, then dispersing, reincarnating, evolving: leaving traces everywhere. Like all of Benjamin's figures, he is shot through with chips of Messianic time.
The flâneur permeates Benjamin's writings as (one) description of his method.
|
|
The 'sandwichman' of Paris was another incarnation: a human-turned-commodity, a living dialectic. The journalist; the tourist; the photographer. Benjamin's 'angel of history' also carries the traces: propelled, as the flâneur in the crowd, by the 'storm of progress', he attempts to turn his back on it and awaken the dead. |
Musil's Man without Qualities tries to engage in a special kind of seeing
as he observes the traffic from his privileged vantage point. Others are
swept away--lost in the crowd.
Ryman's narrator in 253
lets us stroll through the carriages, playing with time as we stop and
learn people's lives, while at the same time they are continually propelled
forward; part of something much larger of which they are oblivious.
Debbie Peacock
