This is a re-post from another writer named "Eric" on his blog called "The Elliptic Blog", circa 2003. You can link to his original post here. In it, he provides a great definition of what it means to be a flâneur, as well as offering some additional insights from a sociologist named Walter Benjamin. It seems Benjamin was a strong proponent of modern flâneurism in the early 20th century, and championed the more positive connotation to the oft-misunderstood term, severly under-utilized in modern language as a synonym for "idleness".
So please, enjoy Eric's writing, and feel free to comment at the bottom of this post. If nothing else, hopefully this article will inspire anyone who reads it to break out of the back-and-forth-to-work mentality and try exploring your own city, or a neighboring town, just for the sake of (and the joy of) wandering. Happy trails:
Eric then closes his post with a quote from Walter Benjamin himself:The Flâneur
"Let's start with a discussion of what it means to be a flâneur. A simple definition would be 'one who strolls aimlessly through urban spaces.' Often, being a flâneur is associated with idleness and with the decadent luxury of having enough time to take those meandering strolls.
Though the original use of the term might have applied to folks that were decadent dilettantes with plenty of idle time, several writers, theorists and philosophers have appropriated the term and have used it to refer to a more complex activity. Walter Benjamin, in particular, has done the most to bolster the meaning of the term. Instead of assuming that those who have the time to wander aimlessly through urban landscapes are only engaged in a cursory and leisurely survey of their environment, Benjamin brought attention to the cognitive value and pleasures associated with urban strolling.
A flâneur, under this interpretation, becomes an active sociologist or reader of the environment around him or her. As urban landscapes become more dense and the architecture more complex, opportunities to observe and interpret events and objects have increased in number and complexity. Unfortunately, this has occurred in tandem with accelerated industrialization and the entrenchment of the capitalist work-ethic.
More often than not, we spend time in our cities commuting to and from our work places; too preoccupied or tired to take note of the visual complexities around us. We rarely have time to pause and admire small details in the architecture or to pursue a reverie caused by some stranger's facial expression. Our workplaces have also become barren environments where, more often than not, visual complexity has been replaced by monotony -- all in the name of economic efficiency (i.e., cubicles).
This lack of engagement is worrisome since we are not exercising our cognitive skills to read our environment. Whether it is the result of the pressures of commuting, of our inane habit of completing errands at break-neck speeds or of simple laziness, our visual intelligence is becoming rusty. Whether it should be deemed an aesthetic and/or political movement, it is time to rekindle our abilities to engage actively with our immediate environment and resist the tendency to let it pass unnoticed as the rhythmic swaying of our bus or train lulls us into a stupor."
“The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of business are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; newsstands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.”If you've never heard of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), he was an amazing writer who, in his monumental work The Arcade Project, presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.
––– Walter Benjamin, “The Flâneur”
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Special thanks to Eric at The Elliptic Blog for writing this post (01/06/03).
TrackBack URL for his original entry is here:
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3 comments:
Perhaps the proliferation of camera phones provides an affordance (Gibson, Norman) to the latent flâneurs in our city's denizens. I know that when I carry a camera around town it affords me the opportunity to spend a few moments really looking at something in my daily environs that I might not otherwise take the time to engage. This is the case even though I am not a professional photographer - and I know that most of the photos I take will probably never go anywhere or be used for much of anything. Yet, the simple mechanism of capturing a shot almost acts like a permission slip for spending that time, with the spot, that place, this nook, that look.
I have a collection of these permission slips - which may have all the aesthetic interest to others as looking through a stack of receipts.
But those receipts are time stamped indices on those moments in which I awoke from my sleep-walking and asked "what's this?", "how does that work?", "why is this here?", "where did it come from", and "who else was there?"
Great comment Kevin. I couldn't agree more about the "permission slip" analogy. So many people feel a strong need to document how they've spent their time, either through a drawing, some writing or a photograph series. This is great as a first step, but the end goal should be for all of us to feel free to spend our time entirely as we wish, with no need for permission slips or documentation. With that said, I'm certainly glad the camera phone has helped people have more of a reason to enjoy certain scenes, in much the same way that going out for a smoke "allows" people to spend a few minutes outside, idly doing nothing in particular. If only non-smokers could also be allowed that same kind of freedom in our twisted society!
Suppose we were to create an "Arcade Project" in Lowell. What word would substitute for "Arcade"? As Benjamin held affection for Arcades - what is it that we, denizens of Lowell & New England, hold affection for?
What could be the process at the center of our preoccupation? Would a central preoccupation even emerge or would it be a cacophony, plurality and fragmentation? What 'shifts' would we discern? Perhaps the "Walter Benjamin" for our project would not be a single person but a multi-vocal network? And if we employed a collaborative approach to a constructivist formation of categories - would we arrive there via consensus - or would dissensus be preferred?
Is the notion of flâneur, or or 'flâner-ing' still apropos - as observers - or do we need a new metaphor of which we are are own prime models as Benjamin was for the flâneur?
"The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it"." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur
"Benjamin describes the flâneur as a product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution without precedent, a parallel to the advent of the tourist. His flâneur is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante."
What is to be our 'flâneur'? What would that metaphor be a product of today - postmodern life and the post-Industrial Revolution?
Sortons et flâner
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