Volume 23

THE FLÂNEUR

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:SOCIAL THEORY

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THE FLÂNEUR

Edited byKEITH TESTER

First published in 1994

This edition first published in 2015by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

and by Routledge711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Selection and editorial matter © 1994 Keith TesterIndividual chapters © 1994 the contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, nowknown or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in anyinformation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from thepublishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registeredtrademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intentto infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-415-72731-0 (Set)eISBN: 978-1-315-76997-4 (Set)ISBN: 978-1-138-78228-0 (Volume 23)eISBN: 978-1-315-76538-9 (Volume 23)

Publisher’s NoteThe publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint butpoints out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

DisclaimerThe publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and wouldwelcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

The Flaneur

Edited by Keith Tester

\SmLondon and New York

First published 1994 by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Transferred to Digital Printing 2006© 1994 Selection and editorial matter, Keith Tester. Copyright for individual chapters, the contributors.Typeset in English Times byPat and Anne Murphy, Highcliffe-on-Sea, DorsetAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Library o f Congress Cataloging in Publication Data has been applied for.ISBN 0-415-08912-3 ISBN 0-415-08913-1 (pbk)

Publisher’s NoteThe publisher has gone to great lengths to ensurethe quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

Contents

List of figures

1 IntroductionKeith Tester

2 The fl&neur on and off the streets of ParisPriscilla Parkhurst Ferguson

3 The flaneur: from spectator to representationBruce Mazlish

4 Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on flanerieRob Shields

5 The flaneur in social theoryDavid Frisby

6 The artist and the flaneur: Rodin, Rilke and Gwen John in ParisJanet W olff

7 Desert spectacularZygmunt Bauman

8 Digesting the modern diet: Gastro-porn, fast food and panic eatingBarry Smart

9 The hopeless game of flanerieStefan Morawski

Index

vii

1

22

43

61

81

111

138

158

181

198

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Figures

2.1 Illustration from Louis H uart Physiologie du flaneur (1841) 24

2.2 Illustration from Louis H uart Physiologie du flaneur (1841) 25

6.1 Muse pour le Monument Whistler, Auguste Rodin 1126.2 Girl Reading at a Window, Gwen John (1911) 1146.3 La Chambre sur la Cour, Gwen John, painted about

1907-8 1166.4 Interior, Gwen John (1915) 1176.5 A Glimpse o f Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon,

Henri Matisse (1902) 1206.6 Paris through the Window (Paris par la fenetre),

Marc Chagall (1913) 121

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Chapter 1

Introduction1

Keith Tester

. . . my former ennui had returned and I felt its weight even more heavily than before; I doubted whether further attempts at sociability would ever relieve me of it. What I required was not exactly solitude, but the opportunity to roam around freely, meeting people when I wished and taking leave of them when I wished . . .

(Gerard de Nerval 1984)

Flanerie, the activity of strolling and looking which is carried out by the flaneur, is a recurring motif in the literature, sociology and art of urban, and most especially of the metropolitan, existence. Originally, the figure of the flaneur was tied to a specific time and place: Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century as it was conjured by Walter Benjamin in his analysis of Charles Baudelaire (Benjamin 1983). But the flaneur has been allowed, or made, to take a number of walks away from the streets and arcades of nineteenth-century Paris. Not least, 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 flaneur has walked into the pages of the commonplace. But despite this popularization, the precise meaning and significance of flanerie remains more than a little elusive.

The flaneur o f nineteenth-century Paris receives his most famous eulogy in the prose and poetry o f Charles Baudelaire.2 Certainly, flanerie is one of the main narrative devices of the Paris Spleen collection of 1869 and thus Baudelaire provides an insight into exactly what it is that the flaneur does. Baudelaire achieves this in part by calling forth a poetic - and a poet’s - vision of the public places and spaces of Paris. For Baudelaire, there is no doubt that

2 Introduction

the poet is the ‘m an’ (and Baudelaire is quite explicit about the gender identity o f the poet; much, if not indeed all, o f Baudelaire’s work presupposes a masculine narrator or observer) 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. As Baudelaire said in his best known depiction of the flaneur, the essay ‘The Painter of M odern Life’ (which was first published in 1863): ‘The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the b ird’s, and water that o f 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 which Sartre was later to call nausea. W ithout entry into the spectacle of the public, existence can only be wanting in something of funda­mental importance. The private sphere is the home o f an existence devoid of an almost orgiastic pleasure: ‘The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived o f’ (Baudelaire 1970: 20). It might well be worth reading this passage alongside Emile Durkheim’s later, and allegedly more scientifically sociological, discussion of the importance of men getting out of the little boxes of their own minds and private worlds (Durkheim 1957, 1960).

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 a t home physically. To quote ‘The Painter of M odern Life’ again (it might be speculated that this essay is something like the methodological preamble to Paris Spleen): ‘For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite’ (Baudelaire 1972: 399). The passage continues to stress the involvement o f the poet in the public domain (and therefore, by implication Baudelaire hints at the challenges to the poet and to poetry which a private existence would mean). Baudelaire reveals the tense and fluctuating relationship between the poet and his participation in the public life of the city. The poet (and to be a poet is the real tru th of the idler and the observer; the poetry is the reason and the justification o f the idling; the poet is possibly at his

Keith Tester 3

busiest when he seems to be at his laziest) is possessed by a special and defining ability. 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).

Baudelaire’s poet is the man o f 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 o f rather than being in which makes the poet different from all the others in the crowd. 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 roam ing’ (Baudelaire 1970: 20). Even more starkly, and even more to emphasize the distance between the poet and the crowd in which he mingles, Baudelaire says: ‘Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd’ (Baudelaire 1970: 20).

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. Pascal explains that, ‘even if the universe should crush him, man would still be more noble than that which destroys him, because he knows that he dies and he realises the advantage which the universe possesses over him ’ (Pascal quoted in Hampshire 1956: 98).

Now, 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 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

4 Introduction

and delight of the spectacle o f the public. Crucially, for Baudelaire, the poet is he who knows he is a face in the crowd. And, as such, by virtue of that very knowing, 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 o f masks without which the poet could not transform into the beautiful the raw stuff he witnesses. A fter all, ‘The observer is a prince enjoying his 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 o f the poet), gives the Baudelairean poet an ability to make for himself the meaning and the significance o f the m etropolitan spaces and the spectacle of the public. 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 o f themselves (although there is of course a paradox to this kind o f control; the control over defining meaning for one’s self is purchased at the expense of accepting things as they are, as pre-existing). The poet is the self-proclaimed and self-believing monarch of the crowd. And because he can or does look just like anyone else, nowhere is forbidden to him; spatially, morally and culturally the public holds no mysteries for the man who is proud of the mystery o f himself. The poet can put on whatever mask will gain him access to otherwise secret and mys­terious places: ‘For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting’ (Baudelaire 1970: 20).

This sovereignty based in anonymity and observation means that for the poet the meaning and the importance o f everything is mutable more or less at will. Baudelaire writes: ‘The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege o f being able to be himself or someone else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each m an’s personality (Baudelaire 1970: 20). This ability to be defining o f the meaning and of the order o f things - which is, let it be noted, an event entirely in the realm o f ideas and thus quite independent o f material factors (the poet need not be rich in clothes to be rich in imagination) - implies a connection between the intuited fluidity o f things in the environ­ment of the city and the physical negotiations of the space and

Keith Tester 5

other bodies carried out by the poet during his walks in crowds.It is quite noticeable that Baudelaire’s interpretation of the poet

is built upon a kind of dialectic of control and incompletion. On the one hand, Baudelaire makes the poet the sovereign of the chance meetings of the city stage which has no spaces forbidden to him. The poet can be what he wills to be; he can put on masks and make the faces o f strangers hide the sordid secrets of their souls. To this extent, 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 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.

The dialectic o f the poet is, then, one of the sovereignty of indi­vidual self-hood in synthesis with a situation in which the practice o f 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 o f public meetings. It is a quest for the Holy Grail o f 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). But Baudelaire did not realize the abyss at the heart o f this equation. By its very formulation, 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. Put another way, the search for self-hood through the diagnosis of dissatisfaction does not at all lead in the

6 Introduction

end to satisfaction; it just leads to more dissatisfaction. Perhaps, then, the poet can never be happy except in the moment of death.

Baudelaire himself made the connection between the poet of the metropolis and the quest for satisfaction quite clear in his essay on T h e Painter of Modern Life’. There he emphasized both the sovereign self-hood of the poet (who in T h e Painter of Modern Life’ comes in the guise of the painter Constantin Guys) and yet the relentless struggle to practise and know that sovereignty. (Baude­laire spoke of Guys. However, it is likely that he saw Edouard Manet as the true painter o f modern life; see Collins 1975, Pool 1967.) In this way, Baudelaire draws out the dialectic of being and doing. Also, here again, the poet is set apart from the mass of the public: ‘this solitary mortal endowed with an active imagination, always roaming the great desert of men, has a nobler aim than that of the pure idler, a more general aim, other than the fleeting pleasure o f circumstance’ (Baudelaire 1972: 402). This poet, this man who is in control and who is yet dissatisfied (for Baudelaire’s poet there is more at stake than mere idle pleasure in the transient meetings and truths of the city), ‘is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call “ m odernity” . . . . 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).

All of this is to provide some way of grasping precisely who is the flaneur, precisely what is flanerie. Baudelaire’s poet (or at least, Baudelaire’s poet as he appears in Paris Spleen and T h e Painter of Modern Life’) is essentially identical with the flaneur. In the terms established by Charles Baudelaire, the flaneur is basically the hero o f modernity. The heroism consists in the fact that ‘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 o f us are attending the funeral of the Grail o f being.

The flaneur is the man of the public who knows himself to be of the public. The flaneur is the individual sovereign o f the order of things who, as the poet or as the artist, is able to transform faces and things so that for him they have only that meaning which he attributes to them. 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, a short step which ends with Nerval’s complaint from Les Chimeres: ‘I am the shadowed - the

Keith Tester 7

bereaved - the unconsoled’). The flaneur is the secret spectator of the spectacle of the spaces and places of the city. Consequently, flanerie 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.

Flanerie can be understood as the observation of the fleeting and the transitory which is the other half o f modernity to the permanent and central sense of self. Flanerie is the doing through and thanks to which the flaneur hopes and believes he will be able to find the truth of his being. Flanerie 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.

Because the flaneur is fundamentally a figure who can only be known through the activities of flanerie, a certain mystery is intrinsic to his identity. Baudelaire himself mentioned ‘those inde­pendent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions’ (Baudelaire 1972: 400). Here, once and for all, definitions are at best difficult and, at worst, a contra­diction of what the flaneur means. In himself, the flaneur 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 the man who indulges in flanerie; flanerie is the activity of the flaneur). 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 flaneur (called Guys) magnifies what is already waiting to be discovered. This flaneur 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). It is likely that the emptiness of the flaneur is the reason for the fear of the night and of sleep which Baudelaire attributes to Guys (see Baudelaire 1972: 400-1). There is a kind of frenzied romantic love with the spectacle of the public. And just as (so we are told) the high point of love is to lose one’s self in the beloved, so Constantin Guys as invented by Baudelaire achieves his greatest peaks of existence when he loses himself in what he observes. ‘It is an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting’ (Baudelaire 1972: 400).3

8 Introduction

In these terms, the figure, and the activity, o f the flaneur 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. Freedom because the figure revolves around the dialectic of self-definition and definition from outside (although this freedom is perhaps something more by way of a curse than a promise); 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 (a problem which is turned into a surreal reverie in the flanerie of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, Aragon 1971); being-with-others because the flaneur says im portant 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. (A sense of the opportunities, conceits and finally utter emptiness of this aspect of the flaneur runs through Gerard de Nerval’s Journey to the Orient. Nerval dis­covered that wherever he went to try to find answers, he had to take himself. And so the questions remained; see Nerval 1984.) M ore­over, with his fruitless if not actually futile search for satisfaction through the deconstruction o f dissatisfaction, the flaneur indicates why the problems that rear their heads in the urban spaces tend to be recurring rather than resolvable (and why Nerval could not escape them even on a boat to Beirut). In a sentence, it might be said that even though the flaneur does not choose his urbanity, he senses himself to be responsible for it. It is his inescapable fate.

Perhaps for these reasons, the flaneur has been im portant to the existentialist attempts to discover the secrets of being in the modern (urban, m etropolitan, public) world. Certainly the figure is of central importance in 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.) It is perhaps not too far fetched to identify the main character o f Nausea, Antoine Roquentin, as a kind of flaneur. 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 o f the public. In this way also, 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

Keith Tester 9

idleness is actually the most active work - or at least, that is what Roquentin can claim). 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 flaneur are con­tained in the section of Nausea in which Roquentin goes for a Sunday morning stroll. In many ways, this stroll represents a classic statement of flanerie. Roquentin’s flanerie is explicitly tied to the public spaces and spectacles of the urban environment; T have arrived: this is the rue Tournebride, all I have to do is take my place among my fellows and I shall see the gentlemen of substance raising their hats to one another’ (Sartre 1965: 64). It might seem as if Roquentin is preparing to become a man in the crowd as opposed to the man o f the crowd. After all, Roquentin is about to join in the anonymous and empty rituals of meetings with strangers. Yet Roquentin is incapable of becoming so mundane.

Antoine Roquentin knows that he might look to others as others look to him and, by virtue of that very knowing, 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. Roquentin sees, ‘hats, a sea of hats’ (Sartre 1965: 67). But such a sight is not banal. The banality might be intuited by the men in the crowd, but for the man o f the crowd, a sea of hats is a place for voyages which promise the very greatest adventures. This flaneur does not need to travel vast physical spaces to cover vast imagin­ative spaces. The world of mystery and imagination is here, in the rue Tournebride. Referring to the hats of the men in the crowd, Roquentin declares that ‘Most of them are black and hard. Now and then you can see one fly off at the end of an arm, revealing the soft gleam of the skull; then, after a few moments of clumsy flight, it settles again’ (Sartre 1965: 67). This is almost a world without the meanings of words.

By the twilight o f his Sunday of flanerie, Roquentin feels that all of his doing might at long last have led to the satisfaction of being. Roquentin stops walking and ponders: ‘It seems to me that I have reached the summit of my happiness. In Marseille, in Shanghai, at Meknes, what haven’t I done to try to obtain a feeling of such

10 Introduction

satisfaction?’ (Sartre 1965: 83). 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 o f dissatisfaction and of a searching not finding. For the flaneur, satisfaction could be anywhere; but that only means that satisfaction is most certainly not here.

The self-defining ability of the Sartrean variant o f the flaneur is not without a considerable measure of desperation and panic. Public spaces can be places of an immense existential fear (although for Roquentin - perhaps because o f his masculinity - not physical threat): ‘Isn’t something waiting for me at the end of the passage? But in the place Ducoton, at the end of the rue Tournebride, there is also a certain thing which needs me in order to come to life’ (Sartre 1965: 83). The flaneur 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. The Sartrean flaneur is universally respon­sible: ‘I am full of anguish: the slightest gesture engages me. I can’t imagine what is required of me. Yet I must choose: I sacrifice the passage Gillet, I shall never know what it held for m e’ (Sartre 1965: 83). It is the fate of the flaneur to never enjoy being because of the relentless doing of flanerie. But, or so at least the flaneur 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 flaneur is, to this extent, actually the victim rather than the prince o f his own freedom.

In Nausea, the figure of the flaneur and the activity o f flanerie has left the streets of historical Paris and has, instead, been con­nected to something more by way o f a genre o f urban existence. Sartre is writing about the man of the crowd, as such, rather than the man of the crowd of nineteenth-century Paris. He is invoking a universal and a general situation as opposed to a local and a particular situation. Sartre was not alone with this appropriation of morifs which can be identified with the figure o f the flaneur to try to say something about m etropolitan existence in and of itself. Something very similar, although arguably much more ambitious, can be found in Robert Musil’s great synthetic novel The Man Without Qualities.4

Musil’s use of the devices o f flanerie, 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. The chapter sets

Keith Tester 11

the scene for the whole novel by locating it in a specific geographical place (which is identified through a knowledge of weather patterns) and on the streets of a single city. Yet, despite his use of meteoro­logical information to set the scene very precisely, and indeed despite his explicit identification o f the scene of the novel as Vienna, Musil suggests that he is actually concerned with the universal and the general issues of metropolitan existence. Here, the flaneur has most certainly taken a very long journey away from Paris. Musil claims that the Viennese context of his novel is actually beside the point of the broader things he is trying to say. It is worth quoting Musil at some length; he is explaining why ‘no special significance should be attached to the name of the city’ (Musil 1954: 4):

Like all big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence in between, of paved ways and wilderness, of one great rhythmic throb and the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms, and as a whole resembled a seething, bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of the solid materials of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions.

(Musil 1954: 4)

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 im portant 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 o f 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 flaneur 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 flanerie', a dialectic of incognito observation. First, the position of the narrator is that of the observer who defines the meanings of what he sees (and Musil’s narrator does seem to utilize a masculine gaze). Second, and within the text, Musil describes the wandering along a city street of two individuals. The dialectic consists then, in the flanerie of the narrator and o f the flanerie in the text. The dialectic becomes

12 Introduction

clear when Musil refers to the two characters who are made to stand out from the swirl of the city. These characters are themselves carrying out a kind of flanerie and the narrator is himself a flaneur in relation to them. The characters in the novel and the narrator of the novel are responsible for the meanings they use to try to make sense of their urban existence. But none of them choose their urban existence.

The flanerie o f the narrator - his freedom to define meaning, but only because he accepts the spectacle of the city without challenging it - is illustrated when an attempt is made to give names to the two characters. The narrator is unable to know the true names of the characters and so he invents them. But that invention comes unstuck because of the being-of-others: ‘Let us assume that their names were Arnheim and Ermelinde Tuzzi - but no, that would be a mistake, for Frau Tuzzi was spending this August in Bad Aussee, accompanied by her husband, and Herr Dr. Arnheim was still in Constantinople’ (Musil 1954: 4). The flanerie of the narrator merely serves to magnify the mystery of the city and the lack of initial choice on the part of the flaneur: ‘So we are confronted with the enigma of who they were’ (Musil 1954: 4). It is worth noting that Musil also creates another enigma about these nameless lives; if they might not be married, why are they walking along the streets together? Where are they going? How do they know that their partner has monogrammed underwear?

The characters in the story are possessed of the confidence to wander the streets, and they wander in the quiet glow of their own little secrets: ‘They had their initials significantly embroidered on their underclothing’ (Musil 1954: 4). The ability to name one’s underwear goes hand in hand with an ability to see oneself as the centre of the universe: ‘And likewise - that is to say, not outwardly displayed, but, as it were, in the exquisite underlinen of their minds - they knew who they were and that they were in their proper place in a capital city’ (Musil 1954: 4). This flanerie within the text is demonstrated when the characters witness an accident; a man is knocked down by a speeding lorry (here, then, Musil’s city has a few more physical dangers than Baudelaire’s).5 The enigmatic duo define the meaning of the accident for themselves; it was due to the fact that lorries have a too long braking distance to be safe for the city (Musil 1954: 5).

At exactly the moment when Musil generalizes the flaneur and turns him into a generic rather than a Parisian figure, the flaneur

Keith Tester 13

begins to disappear. The idle and considered strolling and observing which is the essence of flanerie has become doubtful in universal Vienna. Musil identifies three sources of the challenge to flanerie. First, there is the problem of traffic; if the flaneur does not pay attention when he crosses roads he too will become a victim of a lorry (indeed, perhaps the man who is knocked down at the begin­ning of The Man Without Qualities is, in fact, the last flaneur). Second, flanerie and the profound intellectual activity it requires might become simply exhausted; the mysteries of the city could well become just banal and boring. Reflecting on the problem and the responsibility of giving his characters names, Musil’s narrator finally brushes aside difficulties of this kind: ‘they become resolved in a remarkably easy manner by being forgotten, unless in the next thirty yards one can remember where one has seen these two people before’ (Musil 1954: 5). Third, flanerie 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 (such as the neces­sities of braking distances or of the weather). This third and final qualification of the chance of flanerie is perhaps the most signifi­cant; it certainly connects Musil with themes in the more canonical literature on the flaneur.

Thanks in no small part to Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baude­laire, the flaneur is invariably seen as a bygone figure. Thanks to Benjamin, the flaneur is often seen as living and dying on the streets of Paris alone, so that any generalization of the figure and the activity would be historically questionable at best. 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 flaneur 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 o f the egoistic individuals of capitalism is reflected in the flaneur. Flanerie is a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness even though it is actually a final resignation to it. Benjamin says: ‘The flaneur 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). Indeed, ‘The flaneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the commodity . . . The intoxication to

14 Introduction

which the flaneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers’ (Benjamin 1983: 5).

For Benjamin, then the flaneur is almost the humanization o f the bad faith of the commodity. The flaneur becomes little more than a seeker after mystery from banality. The flaneur 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 flanerie which features in the work of Benjamin is soul-less and truly empty, just like the commodity forms it represents. It is perhaps not surprising that actually Benjamin’s comments on flanerie are not without a sneer.

But Walter Benjamin identified other, rather more mundane but no less significant, challenges to flanerie. These challenges revolve around the rationalization o f the spaces of Paris; with rationaliza­tion, all mystery is removed from the city.6 Flanerie, 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 m atter-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 flanerie 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. Benjamin writes that ‘Since the French Revolution an extensive network of controls had brought bourgeois life ever more tightly into its meshes. The numbering of houses in the big cities may be used to document the progressive standardization’ (Benjamin 1983: 47). It meant not least that the city ceased to be a place of free wanderings, o f free coming and going.

Talking about the struggles o f Baudelaire to find some haven in the rational and capitalist Paris from the relentless pestering of creditors, Benjamin makes Baudelaire an anachronism: ‘So he roved about in the city which had long since ceased to be home for the flaneur’ (Benjamin 1983: 47). Benjamin goes on to stress that this process o f rationalization was given further impetus with the development of photography; photography meant that each face was given a single meaning (the meaning o f a name which had an

Keith Tester 15

address appended to it) and thus the flaneur's playing with masks and incognito was undermined (Benjamin 1983: 48).

Rationalization also challenged flanerie through the establish­ment of time discipline. Baudelairean flanerie is predicated on the irrelevance of time. Flanerie is more or less independent of the clock (although, as Baudelaire’s invention of a day in the life of Constantin Guys suggested, flanerie is dependent on the natural cycle of day and night; the flanerie become more and more des­perate and intense as the light becomes less and less bright). The relationship between flanerie and time discipline is illustrated par­ticularly well by the brief fashion of taking turtles for walks. Benjamin interprets the fad as an example of the protest of flanerie against the local clock of hours and the universal clock of progress: ‘The flaneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. If they had had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommo­date itself to this pace’ (Benjamin 1983: 54). The protest of the turtles against the hare of Progress (to rather misquote Aesop), was futile: ‘But this attitude did not prevail; Taylor, who popularized the watchword “ Down with dawdling!” carried the day’ (Benjamin 1983: 54).

According to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, this temporary predilec­tion of the flaneur 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. Flanerie is a harking back and a nostalgia for a slower and more definite world. Schivelbusch also stresses the point that flanerie is only really possible if the flaneur is in no great danger of getting run over by speeding things. It was im portant that there were places ‘where the flaneur would not be exposed to the sight of carriages’, where there were ‘refuges from the vehicular traffic on the regular streets’ (Schivelbusch 1980: 189). That is why the arcades of the Paris before Haussmann were so im portant. They were public spaces which were protected from the circulations of the city. When the arcades were demolished, the flaneur was thrown into the way of circulation. It might even be said that the flaneur was thrown out of the arcades of Paris and onto the killing streets of the universal Vienna. Flanerie is existence at a pace that is out of step with the rapid circulations of the modern metropolis.

Or is it? There is a greater paradox at the heart of discussions of the flaneur. The message from Benjamin, Schivelbusch and even

16 Introduction

Robert Musil is quite clear; the flaneur dies in the modern city. And yet Sartre and Musil (once again) use the figure o f the flaneur 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 flaneur. On the one hand, there seems to be little doubt that the flaneur is specific to a Parisian time and place. On the other hand, the flaneur is used as a figure to illuminate issues of city life irrespective of time and place. It is, following Musil, the difference between the historical and the geographical place called Vienna and the potentially universal con­cept of Vienna. This greyness of the historical specificity o f the flaneur is perhaps as intrinsic to the debate as the problem acknow­ledged by Baudelaire of defining exactly what ‘flaneur’ means. It most certainly has its roots in some of the twists and turns of Baudelaire’s thought and prose.

The problem with Baudelaire is that he was unprepared to make any significant distinction between Paris and modernity. U nfor­tunately, this leaves something of an impression that, actually, he was never really too sure whether he was writing about one or the other or indeed both at the same time. (This problem also runs through Benjamin; on the face o f it he pays scrupulous attention to the historical specificity of Paris, but he is perfectly happy to refer to London or Berlin if that will enable him to make a point more forcefully - and especially if it enables him to drop in a quotation from Engels. Similarly, Benjamin stresses the significance o f Poe’s story ‘The M an of the Crow d’. The story is set in London; Benjamin 5 7 -9 .)

The ambiguity is expressed when Baudelaire paints his picture o f precisely what it is that the flaneur observes. The flaneur 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 flaneur 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 flaneur is looking at nothing other than the current expression of modernity. When Baudelaire has Constantin Guys (or should it be Manet?) admire ‘the eternal beauty and the aston­ishing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so providen­tially maintained in the tum ult o f human liberty’ (Baudelaire 1972:

Keith Tester 17

400), Guys is actually admiring Paris and modernity at the same time. Guys is admiring the beauty in the unity of the transient and the timeless.

In other words, and to clarify, the flaneur certainly occupies the specific times and places of nineteenth-century Paris, but that Paris is itself made im portant 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 fo rm ; Paris is the content. The flaneur 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 flaneur 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 flanerie being made so specifically about Paris at a given moment in its history that flanerie becomes of no contemporary relevance at all. Either that, or flanerie becomes so general as to be almost meaning­less and most certainly historically rootless if not seemingly some­what ahistorical.

The essays in this book deal with some of these twists and turns of the figure of the flaneur. The essays also attempt to pull the figure out of the dark shadows in which he otherwise all too frequently lurks. In the achievement of these aims it becomes quite clear that there is a lot more to be said about the flaneur than is said in the usually cited texts by Baudelaire and Benjamin. The cultural history of the flaneur is explored in a number of ways: Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson locates the figure in nineteenth-century Paris; Bruce Mazlish offers a genealogy of the flaneur which argues for the importance o f Adam Smith’s concept of the ‘impartial spec­ta to r’; David Frisby traces the hidden role of flanerie in the development of social theory; and Zygmunt Bauman provides a background organized around the categories of modernity and post-modernity.

18 Introduction

One of the main themes touched upon in the essays is the relationship between gender and flanerie. The pieces by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Janet W olff and Zygmunt Bauman all raise a question about whether women could (can) walk the streets or whether, instead, women were (are) fated, thanks to men, to be only streetwalkers (once again, the question emerges of the nature of the relationship linking the man and woman at the beginning of Musil’s novel). Indeed, if flanerie is an activity of public spaces, does this make the flaneur public property? M oreover, to the extent that women were identified as the subjects o f consumerism in nineteenth-century Paris (Ferguson) and modernity (Bauman), are department stores therefore best understood as surrogate private spheres as opposed to public spaces?

Meanwhile, flanerie is invariably identified as an activity located in the realm of the empire o f the gaze and the spectacle (for an exploration of nineteenth-century Paris as spectacle, see Clark 1985). Consequently, department stores become problematic since with their bright lights they are both part o f the metropolitan spectacle and places from which the spectacle might be observed. Yet flanerie might be about more than just looking. The essays by David Frisby, Barry Smart and Bruce Mazlish contain suggestions of connections between flanerie and activities which rely on other senses than the detached observations of the flaneur of Baudelaire and Benjamin: touching (Frisby), eating (Smart), hearing (Mazlish). The connections between flanerie and other kinds o f empires, other kinds of imperialism, is explored by Rob Shields. Finally, the book contains the seeds of a possible line of enquiry about the stakes, preconditions and possibilities o f intellectual work such as writing and more specific enterprises like cultural sociology and cultural history. Frisby, Bauman and Morawski all examine whether flanerie is, in fact, the precondition - if not indeed the only chance - of reflection upon the worlds we inhabit.

The flaneur emerges from this collection as a little less mysterious and a lot more challenging. The figure is rescued from the margins where he has usually been left. The flaneur and flanerie become different and intriguing keys to understanding the social and cultural milieux. This collection offers some ways of turning those keys.

Keith Tester 19

NOTES

1 This Introduction represents my own thoughts on the questions of the flaneur and flanerie. It should not be assumed that any of the con­tributors would necessarily agree with what I say.

2 I have called the flaneur ‘him* and will do so throughout this Introduc­tion. The question of the gender specificity of flanerie is very much an issue for debate. See Janet W olffs article on The Invisible Fldneuse1 (originally Wolff 1985, reprinted in Wolff 1990) and then Pollock 1988 (pages 50-90), Wilson 1992. See also 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.

3 I know that this note might well say more about me than it does about Baudelaire or Constantin Guys, but when I read this passage I almost immediately thought of Dracula. Could it be that the flaneur is rather like a metropolitan vampire - a domesticated variant of the figure popu­larized by Bram Stoker?

4 Musil uses flanerie as a narrative device. However, a kind of flanerie is also important in the other great twentieth-century synthetic novel: 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 flaneur 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 flaneur has to get up onto weary legs and start going up and down the stairs once again.

5 It might be interesting quickly to speculate on why Musil’s city is a more dangerous place for physical being than Baudelaire’s and, for that matter, Sartre’s cities. (Both Baudelaire and Sartre tend to concentrate on existential danger; Antoine Roquentin never minds the traffic when he crosses a road.) Perhaps the differences can be explained in terms of the naturalization of the artificial environment of the city. 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.

6 Benjamin’s comments on the rationalization of Paris are not very far

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