The Flaneur (RLE Social Theory)

Keith Tester

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317657279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Timely and original, this collection of essays from the leading figures in their fields throws new and valuable light on the significance and future of flânerie. The flâneur is usually identified as the 'man of the crowd' of Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Baudelaire, and as one of the heroes of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. The flâneur 's activities of strolling and loitering are mentioned increasingly frequently in sociology, cultural studies and art history, but rarely is the debate developed further. The Flâneur is the first book to develop the debate beyond Baudelaire and Benjamin, and to push it in unexpected and exciting directions.

1 Introduction¹

Keith Tester

DOI: 10.4324/9781315765389-1

… 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 …

(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. 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 in his analysis of Charles Baudelaire (Benjamin 1983). But the flâneur 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 flâneur has walked into the pages of the commonplace. But despite this popularization, the precise meaning and significance of flânerie remains more than a little elusive.

The flâneur of nineteenth-century Paris receives his most famous eulogy in the prose and poetry of Charles Baudelaire.² Certainly, flânerie 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 flâneur 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 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) 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 flâneur, the essay ‘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 which Sartre was later to call nausea. 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: ‘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 of’ (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 at home physically. To quote ‘The Painter of Modern 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 of 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 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 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 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. 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). 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 and delight of the spectacle of 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 of masks without which the poet could not transform into the beautiful the raw stuff he witnesses. After 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 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. 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 (although there is of course a paradox to this kind of 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 of 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 of everything is mutable more or less at will. Baudelaire writes: ‘The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of 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 man’s personality (Baudelaire 1970: 20). 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.

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 of 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 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. 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). But Baudelaire did not realize the abyss at the heart of 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 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 ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. There he emphasized both the sovereign self-hood of the poet (who in ‘The 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 of 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 of 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 “modernity”. … The aim for him is to extract fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The flâneur on and off the streets of Paris
• 3 The flâneur: from spectator to representation
• 4 Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on flânerie
• 5 The flâneur in social theory
• 6 The artist and the flâneur: Rodin, Rilke and Gwen John in Paris
• 7 Desert spectacular
• 8 Digesting the modern diet: Gastro-porn, fast food and panic eating
• 9 The hopeless game of flânerie
• Index