Flâneur

The term "flâneur" comes from the French verb "flâner", which means "to stroll". A "flâneur" is thus a person who walks the city in order to experience it. Because of the term's usage and theorization by Charles Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity.

Contexts

Urban life

While Baudelaire characterized the "flâneur" as a "gentleman stroller of city streets", he saw the "flâneur" as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. A "flâneur" thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace. After the 1848 Revolution in France, after which the empire was reestablished with clearly bourgeois pretensions of "order" and "morals", Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire's phrase, "a botanist of the sidewalk". David Harvey asserts that "Baudelaire would be torn the rest of his life between the stances of "flâneur" and dandy, a disengaged and cynical voyeur on the one hand, and man of the people who enters into the life of his subjects with passion on the other" ("Paris: Capital of Modernity" 14).

Because he used the word to refer to Parisians, the "flâneur" (the one who strolls) and "flânerie" (the act of strolling) are associated with Paris. However, the critical stance of "flânerie" is now applied more generally to any pedestrian environment that accommodates leisurely exploration of city streets—in commercial avenues where inhabitants of different classes mix in particular. Indeed, diverse texts such as Baudrillard's "America", or Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" demonstrate the concept's impact and flexible usage.

The observer-participant dialectic is evidenced in part by the dandy culture. Highly self-aware, and to a certain degree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies of the mid-nineteenth century created scenes through outrageous acts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris. [http://www.wcenter.ncc.edu/gazette/wernerreview.htm] Such acts exemplify a "flâneur"'s active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city.

The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity. While Baudelaire's aesthetic and critical visions helped open-up the modern city as a space for investigation, theorists, such as Georg Simmel, began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and psychological terms. In his essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life", Simmel theorizes that the complexities of the modern city create new social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space, inculcating in them a 'blasé attitude', and altering fundamental notions of freedom and being:

Architecture and urban planning

The concept of the "flâneur" has also become meaningful in architecture and urban planning describing those who are indirectly and unintentionally affected by a particular design they experience only in passing. Walter Benjamin adopted the concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. From his Marxist standpoint, 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. Benjamin became his own prime example, making social and aesthetic observations during long walks through Paris. Even the title of his unfinished "Arcades Project" comes from his affection for covered shopping streets. In 1917, the Swiss writer Robert Walser published a short story called "Der Spaziergang", or "The Walk", a veritable outcome of the flâneur literature.

In the context of modern-day architecture and urban planning, designing for "flâneurs" is one way to approach issues of the psychological aspects of the built environment. Architect Jon Jerde, for instance, designed his Horton Plaza and Universal CityWalk projects around the idea of providing surprises, distractions, and sequences of events for pedestrians.

Photography

The "flâneur's" tendency toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation has brought the term into the literature of photography, particularly street photography. The street photographer is seen as one modern extension of the urban observer described by nineteenth century journalist Victor Fournel before the advent of the hand-held camera:

This man is a roving and impassioned daguerreotype that preserves the least traces, and on which are reproduced, with their changing reflections, the course of things, the movement of the city, the multiple physiognomy of the public spirit, the confessions, antipathies, and admirations of the crowd. ("Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris", What one sees on the streets of Paris)

The most notable application of "flâneur" to street photography probably comes from Susan Sontag in her 1977 essay, "On Photography". She describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the "flâneur":

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.' (pg. 55)

Cornelia Otis Skinner's flâneur

ee also

* Psychogeography

References

* James V. Werner, [http://www.wcenter.ncc.edu/gazette/wernerreview.htm "American Flaneur: The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe"] , Studies in Major Literary Authors Series (2004), retrieved March 6, 2006.
* Gregory Shaya, " [http://historycooperative.press.uiuc.edu/journals/ahr/109.1/shaya.html The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–1910,] " "American Historical Review" 109 (2004).
* David Harvey, "Paris: Capital of Modernity". New York: Routledge (2003).
* Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, eds., "Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life" (1995).
* Keith Tester, ed., "The Flâneur" (1994).
* Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, "The Flâneur: The City and Its Discontents," in "Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City" (1994).
* Elizabeth Wilson, " [http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=1665 The Invisible Flâneur,] " in "New Left Review" I/191 (1992).
* Susan Buck-Morss, "The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project" (1989).
* Janet Wolff, " [http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/3/37?ck=nck The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,] " "Theory, Culture and Society" 2 (1985).
* Susan Buck-Morss, " [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0094-033X(198623)39%3C99%3ATFTSAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1 The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,] " "New German Critique" 39 (1986).
* Walter Benjamin, "Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism", Harry Zohn, trans. (1983).
* Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental life", adapted by D. Weinstein from Kurt Wolff (Trans.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press, 1950, pp.409-424

External links

* [http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/flaneur.html The Arcades Project Project: The Flaneur]
* [http://www.theflaneur.co.uk La Société des Flâneurs Sans Frontières]
* [http://theflaneurblog.com/ The Flâneur :: 'modern hypertext, fin de siècle flair']
* [http://www.dandyism.net Dandyism.net]
* [http://www.flaneur.org Flâneur.org]
* [http://condor.depaul.edu/~dweinste/intro/simmel_M&ML.htm Georg Simmel: "The Metropolis and Mental Life"]
* [http://www.amazon.com/dp/1582341354 "The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris" (2001) by Edmund White]
* [http://hdl.handle.net/1854/4333 Women's Passages, a Bildungsroman of female flânerie. (2005) by Karen Van Godtsenhoven]
* [http://marvellousmelbourne.blogspot.com/ The Adventures of ShinyShiny and Halfeman]