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note: this is adapted from an outline for a never released episode of my old podcast, Commune College. Sources cited at the end. Enjoy! Hours of research went into this, so it might as well live here.

To start, before you start reading, I want you to go on a little thought experiment: make up a guy, but specifically, make up a guy who is quintissentially modern, a guy who represents what society is right now. What are their features? Is he someone to admire or is he someone to loathe, or somewhere in the middle? Think of your guy, and as you read this compare and contrast them with an earlier, 19th century attempt at categorizing This Kind of Guy.

In this extended post, we're going to talk about a 19th century french literary archetype: the "Flâneur". This person (typically male) is an individual who is a part of society who observes society but adds nothing: a "detached voyeur". They are a member of the bourgeoisie, dresses well, and does not need to work. Some referred to the Flâneur [pronounced "fluh-NOOR"; it most directly translates to "stroller"] as a fundamentally Modern man, as he is important and influential in conceptions of 19th century urban experience, and also urban experiences newer than that. Charles Baudelaire gets into this in a 19th century work called “The Painter of Modern Life,” but its really Walter Benjamin out of the Frankfurt school in the early 20th century that codifies our current understanding of what a flâneur is and what it means.

What leads to flanerie [the term for doing flaneur things, pronounced "flannery"]? For one thing, tightened censorship laws in 1836 meant that in France, directly criticizing politics became more the realm of double meaning and satire. That being said, the streets of 1830s paris were not as well equipped for strolling as they are today, before the “modernization” and slum clearing of Paris done by baron Haussmann in the late 1800s.

As Walter Benjamin writes, “Before Haussmann wide pavements were rare, and the narrow ones afforded little protection from vehicles. Strolling could have hardly assumed the importance it did without the arcades. ‘The arcades, a rater recent invention of industrial luxury’, so says an illustrated guide to Paris of 1852, ‘are glass-covered, marble-palleed passageways through entire complexes of houses whose proprietors have combined for such speculations. Both sides of these passageways, which are lighted from above, are lined with the most elegant shops, so such that an arcade is a city, even a world, in miniature.’’ It is in this world that the flâneur is at home.”

An early important predecessor of this discussion of flanerie: Edgar Allen Poe’s The Man of the Crowd. In this story published in December 1840, an unnamed narrator follows an also unnamed old man around London. Why follow this man? Because, apparently, “suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepid [sic] old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age,)—a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression”

An excerpt:

This latter is one of the principal thoroughfares of the city, and had been very much crowded during the whole day. But, as the darkness came on, the throng momently increased; and, by the time the lamps were well lighted, two dense and continuous tides of population were rushing past the door. At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion. I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene without.

At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.

By far the greater number of those who went by had a satisfied, business-like demeanor, and seemed to be thinking only of making their way through the press. Their brows were knit, and their eyes rolled quickly; when pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced no symptom of impatience, but adjusted their clothes and hurried on. Others, still a numerous class, were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around. When impeded in their progress, these people suddenly ceased muttering, but redoubled their gesticulations, and awaited, with an absent and overdone smile upon the lips, the course of the persons impeding them. If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers, and appeared overwhelmed with confusion.—There was nothing very distinctive about these two large classes beyond what I have noted. Their habiliments belonged to that order which is pointedly termed the decent. They were undoubtedly noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers—the Eupatrids and the common-places of society—men of leisure and men actively engaged in affairs of their own—conducting business upon their own responsibility. They did not greatly excite my attention.“

What do we think of this flâneur? Can we relate to him? To a certain degree, this kind of observant wandering is something I've done in the past, certainly. That being said, my ability to do this is a little more limited since transitioning, as really only cishet men are granted an ability to kind of "disappear" into the background as an impartial observer, much as someone else might want to still. This is one of the reasons that the flaneur is generally assumed to be a man.

In the Painter of Modern Life, 20 years later, Baudelaire goes more into detail regarding the flâneur:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.

To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.

The flaneur is and was often contrasted with another archetype, the baudaud [pronounced buh-DOUGH]; that word is probably best translated as “gawker”. So, the stroller is not a gawker.

Victor Fournel, in Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris (What One Sees in the Streets of Paris, 1867), made the distinction perfectly clear. "The flâneur must not be confused with the badaud; a nuance should be observed here. […] The simple flâneur […] is always in full possession of his individuality. By contrast, the individuality of the badaud disappears, absorbed by the outside world, which ravishes him, which moves him to drunkenness and ecstasy. Under the influence of the spectacle that presents itself to him, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a man, he is the public, he is the crowd."

Yes, in the 19th century Fournel and Baudelaire came up with an entire vocabulary to say, essentially, that they’re not like the other girls.

Lets look at flaneurs. While baudelaire’s own ideas of who was the best “painter of modern life” were limited to the now-fairly-obscure Constantin Guys, the impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte has painted some of the most enduring depictions of flanerie. His 1877 painting, "Paris Street; Rainy Day", shown above, is an iconic depiction of Flanerie. One important thing about this painting is that all of these seemingly wealthy, well dresses boulvardiers are looking at something, but none are looking each other in the eye. Seeing without acknowledging anyone else's presence: the perfect flaneur.

Its interesting to note that the concept and writing about flanerie takes place in paris JUST before the paris commune, and that there’s an argument to be made that the same attitudes that made flaneurs more willing to notice the physical form of the city also made less bourgeois parisiens class conscious. So, when the third republic was being set up in 1871, the national guard soldiers guarding paris took the city, refused to accept the authority of the french government, and for a couple months set up an independent directly democratic government. Wikipedia counts the accomplishments of this government during the few months it operated with establishing separation of church and state, self-policing, the remission of rent during the siege, the abolition of child labor, and the right of employees to take over an enterprise deserted by its owner, along with the fostering of socialist, anarchist, and feminist ideology.

Its interesting thinking of this commune as being, if we’re to believe baudelaire and the like, as being composed of a lot of baudauds. So, wait, why is the flaneur good and the baudaud bad? What if these gawkers are actually empathetic observers, actually gawking at the horror of the city like benjamin so wants the flaneur to be?

According to Benjamin, the decline of the flaneur comes with the rise of consumer capitalism. And, given benjamin’s marxist leanings, lets go to more marxism for some ideas of what the flaneur turns into.

If we think of the construction and form of the modern city as something that was built by capitalists to reinforce the seemingly permanent nature of capitalism, flanerie can be seen as a piece in deconstructing it. However, this flanerie needs to happen with intention. In other words, you can’t be a baudaud, merely gawking at the the city that surrounds you as a form of entertainment in it of itself. Its also, as some mid century scholars note, difficult to see how capitalism shapes the city when we, ourselves, are following the patterns it wants us to follow. We do our daily commute, our routes that take us from a point a to a point b, intentionally avoiding other areas of the city. To know it, we must truly experience it, like the flaneurs of old, even if we don’t have their money, right?

Well, at the very least thats what the situationists thought. Here’s what situationist founder Guy DuBord writes about this study of what they call “psychogeography”, defined as the "specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals.":

Historical conditions determine what is considered “useful.” Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal of Paris under the Second Empire, for example, was motivated by the desire to open up broad thoroughfares enabling the rapid circulation of troops and the use of artillery against insurrections. But from any standpoint other than that of facilitating police control, Haussmann’s Paris is a city built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Present-day urbanism’s main problem is ensuring the smooth circulation of a rapidly increasing number of motor vehicles. A future urbanism may well apply itself to no less utilitarian projects, but in the rather different context of psychogeographical possibilities...

The present abundance of private automobiles is one of the most astonishing successes of the constant propaganda by which capitalist production persuades the masses that car ownership is one of the privileges our society reserves for its most privileged members. But anarchical progress often ends up contradicting itself, as when we savor the spectacle of a police chief issuing a filmed appeal urging Parisian car owners to use public transportation...

We know with what blind fury so many unprivileged people are ready to defend their mediocre advantages. Such pathetic illusions of privilege are linked to a general idea of happiness prevalent among the bourgeoisie and maintained by a system of publicity that includes Malraux’s aesthetics as well as Coca-Cola ads — an idea of happiness whose crisis must be provoked on every occasion by every means.

Sure, Benjamin might have argued that the flaneur is dead because of consumer capitalism. And Dubord, along with his fellow situationists, agree to an extent wholeheartedly. The term “situationist” itself refers to the situations that situationists created to cut through what debord called the spectacle as a way of reconnecting with a more authentic life not warped by capitalist spectacle. As wikipedia summarizes, “The situationists argued that advanced capitalism manufactured false desires; literally in the sense of ubiquitous advertising and the glorification of accumulated capital, and more broadly in the abstraction and reification of the more ephemeral experiences of authentic life into commodities. The experimental direction of situationist activity consisted of setting up temporary environments favorable to the fulfillment of true and authentic human desires in response.”

One common form of situation is the derive, french for “drift”. The derive is a sort of idealized flanerie, a walk taken intentionally to see how psychogeography shapes a city in a way that’s influenced as little as possible by the spectacle and routines of capitalism. As dubord writes in 1956,

in a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones...

But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science — despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself — provides psychogeography with abundant data.

A digression--lets think about how this applies to online spaces. Because, sure, we also have patterns online, and the ways we move from website to website are certainly driven by the capitalist enterprises that both run them and, crucially determine their form and digital geography in the form of UX.

So with this--is doomscrolling flanerie, or are we all baudauds when we’re on twitter or facebook? There’s certainly an argument to be made that part of what makes the flaneur a fundamentally modern creation is that they are an observer, albeit one with their own opinions, but those opinions in it of themselves are generally intentionally kept private. You are a face in the crowd. And online, we are those observers the great majority of the time, sure.

But if we take Benjamin's perspective, since we now live in the era of consumer capitalism we are less flaneur, and more a drone in capitalist spectacle. And following from DuBord and the other situationists, we cannot and will not escape this spectacle until we treat it honestly, as routine to be actively broken from with an integration of art and radicalism.

What do we think of this? How is flanerie and situationist action relevant to being online? Tell me in the comments below.

I will close out with an excerpt from a final piece of situationist text, one that was fairly successful in its goals. This is an excerpt from “On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy”. The story behind this text is as important as the text itself: in 1966, five situationist students were elected to the University of Strausborg and, taking advantage of the apathy of other members, promptly started using university funds to achieve situationist goals. And one of those goals was getting situationists to criticize the university they attended; “On the poverty of student life” was the product of this. Written by Mustapha Khayati, its probably one of the most accessible and damning of situationist texts, aimed squarely at an audience of french college students. The students proceeded to print out 10,000 copies of this damning pamphlet and distributed it at an official “beginning of the academic year” event.

Once upon a time the universities were respected; the student persists in the belief that he is lucky to be there. But he arrived too late. The bygone excellence of bourgeois culture (By this we mean the culture of a Hegel or of the encyclopédistes, rather than the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure.) has vanished. A mechanically produced specialist is now the goal of the "educational system." A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking. Hence the decline of the universities and the automatic nullity of the student once he enters its portals. The university has become a society for the propagation of ignorance; "high culture" has taken on the rhythm of the production line; without exception, university teachers are cretins, men who would get the bird from any audience of schoolboys. But all this hardly matters: the important thing is to go on listening respectfully. In time, if critical thinking is repressed with enough conscientiousness, the student will come to partake of the wafer of knowledge, the professor will tell him the final truths of the world...

The student is blind to the obvious--that even his closed world is changing. The "crisis of the university"--that detail of a more general crisis of modern capitalism--is the latest fodder for the deaf-mute dialogue of the specialists. This "crisis" is simple to understand: the difficulties of a specialised sector which is adjusting(too late) to a general change in the relations of production. There was once a vision--if an ideological one--of a liberal bourgeois university. But as its social base disappeared, the vision became banality. In the age of free-trade capitalism, when the "liberal" state left it its marginal freedoms, the university could still think of itself as an independent power...

Of course it was a pure and narrow product of that society's needs--particularly the need to give the privileged minority an adequate general culture before they rejoined the ruling class (not that going up to university was straying very far from class confines). But the bitterness of the nostalgic don (No one dares any longer to speak in the name of nineteenth century liberalism; so they reminisce about the "free" and "popular" universities of the middle ages--that "democracy of "liberal".) is understandable: better, after all, to be the bloodhound of the haute bourgeoisie than sheepdog to the world's white-collars. Better to stand guard on privilege than harry the flock into their allotted factories and bureaux, according to the whims of the "planned economy". The university is becoming, fairly smoothly, the honest broker of technocracy and its spectacle. In the process, the purists of the academic Right become a pitiful sideshow, purveying their " universal" cultural goods to a bewildered audience of specialists.”...

The real poverty of his everyday life finds its immediate, phantastic compensation in the opium of cultural commodities. In the cultural spectacle he is allotted his habitual role of the dutiful disciple. Although he is close to the production-point, access to the Sanctuary of Thought is forbidden, and he is obliged to discover "modern culture" as an admiring spectator. Art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac. He peeks at the corpse in cine-clubs and theaters, buys its fish-fingers from the cultural supermarket. Consuming unreservedly, he is in his element: he is the living proof of all the platitudes of American market research: a conspicuous consumer, complete with induced irrational preference for Brand X (Camus, for example), and irrational prejudice against Brand Y (Sartre, perhaps).”

Thoughts? What does role does flanerie play in our lives? Do you still agree with your original guy you made up?

Sources

Baudelaire, Charles (1964). The Painter of Modern Life. New York: Da Capo Press. Originally published, in French, in Le Figaro, 1863.

“Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine” originally appeared in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #6 (September 1955). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

Guy Debord (1958) Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation. Internationale Situationniste No. 1 (Paris, June 1958). Translated by Ken Knabb. https://historycooperative.org/journal/the-flaneur-the-badaud-and-the-making-of-a-mass-public-in-france-circa-1860-1910/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badaud https://victorianpersistence.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/benjamin-ii-the-flâneur.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPc0JNXarkE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_of_the_Crowd https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/psychogeography
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/flaneur https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Poverty_of_Student_Life

Keeble

@Keeble

"the bird"

Longpost: Are We All Still Flâneurs?