Subsistences Of The Flâneur
FIONA SONGEL
Words
ANDRÉ CARRILHO
Illustration
Born in the late-19th century, on Haussmann’s wide Parisian boulevards, the flâneur is a solitary stroller who wanders the city’s streets, guided only by his great curiosity. Idealised by literary greats such as Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, as well as immortalised in Gustave Caillebotte’s impressionist paintings, this reader of cities, ever aware of the most subtle of matters, deciphered the modern city by imbibing it with an unhurriedness lent by his standing. In times of mass tourism, virtual maps and hostile suburbs, is there still room for this aficionado of the city to wander and stroll?
When one has visited a city, even if only once –you’ve seen its sights and would at least recognise it in a picture– it’s often said one “knows it”. However, to really know it, it’s not only necessary to have visited it more than once, but also to have done so in a different manner. With a different way of seeing and looking.
The flâneur’s way of getting to know the city has the particularity of not paying a special attention to all those places that define it for tourists, the pictures of which often illustrate articles and travel guide covers. Born in the late modern era, the concept that defines this solitary stroller depicts him as an observer of urban details. His route is unplanned because the objects under his examination tell us the story of the place, while going unnoticed by the busy man or the tourist. As Louis Huart keenly observed in Physiologie du Flâneur : “The busy man looks without seeing, the idler sees without looking, the flâneur sees and looks”.
This is why Walter Benjamin spoke of “reading the streets”, as if all these details were letters which formed words that, when joined together, told the story of the city. When the flâneur visited Paris in the modern era, in addition to Haussmann’s boulevards, he saw its history, its leisure time, the privileged places its men occupied, the clothes they wore. Answering the questions about the “what”, “how” and “when” that all these elements posed allowed him to form a radiography of the city, allowing him to truly know it; putting all the letters together to make the place intelligible, a place that can be read.
Part of this metaphor of the city-as-book includes reading people, whose “physiologies” the flâneur builds, classifying them by type, gender, profession and social class, converting them into “studiable” elements that provide information about the cities.
Studying people in this way allows the flâneur to place himself among the crowd they form, studying them from the inside. From this privileged position, our figure acts like a journalist who doesn’t just gather information, but also processes and organises it to form opinions on how the city works. This final reflection is an essential condition regarding whether flânerie is practised. A flâneur is not just someone who strolls: there’s no flânerie without critique.
Speed and disconnection
Benjamin uses the child’s gaze to establish an analogy with that of our figure, who focusses on details and fragments with the innocence of someone yet to be influenced by culture, ignoring great monuments or places of interest. Learning like a child, by mimesis, he makes himself similar to what he studies in order to get closer to what he observes. This affords the flâneur a certain empathic capacity that allows him to go unnoticed, placing himself in the middle of the crowd, while keeping, although seemingly impossible, a safe distance that allows him to study it.
Such distancing from his own environment lends our figure an individualism –some form of “civic solitude”- by which he is interested in observing the individuals around him, but not in establishing social relations with them.
The individualism that facilitates this disconnection is characteristic of contemporary cities, as it allows for speed. This speed, in addition to silence, are two of the most significant features of the moving crowd’s behaviour in contemporary cities. It’s not only people who are fast; there’s also the speed at which the individual is exposed to stimuli and new urban aspects requiring some form of adaptation. Such individualism, or indolence, can be perceived as a defence mechanism that the passer-by employs to protect himself from this bombardment of information. This is why inside the crowd, surrounded by people, one can feel the loneliest.
The importance of thresholds
The concept of threshold is vitally important, not only for defining flânerie but also for describing how modern and contemporary cities function.
There are physical thresholds, such as passages, which separate interior and exterior spaces. That said, it’s the conceptual thresholds that concern us when talking about the urban stroller’s task: the threshold dividing the individual and collective, which separates two states of consciousness; the public and private, which deeply affects the individual; or that between two historical periods. The flâneur traverses them, from home’s private space to the public space, which is the crowd.
When crossing the threshold between the private space –home– and the public space, there’s a shock, as described by Baudelaire, when the great urban mass is penetrated. This shock is one of temporalities; between that of an individual who only owes explanations about his pace to himself and that of a busy mass trying to get from A to B as quickly as possible, characterised by its individualism, its “civic solitude”. Here, private space coincides with the individual and the public with the collective, thus creating a dual threshold that separates the slowness and familiarity of home from the speed and silence of the crowd.
However, thresholds don’t always polarise opposites, like the abovementioned examples. Sometimes they indicate places that certain individuals should not or cannot cross. This may be due to their social class, for example. We know that the flâneur is originally a bourgeois figure, allowing him access to certain places that a lower-class individual would be denied, and vice versa. Also, the flâneur is originally a man, meaning that certain thresholds he can cross freely women cannot, either because they’re unwelcome on the other side, or because it’s not safe for them.
The possibility of female flânerie has been widely discussed in recent decades and, although at first it would be ruled out because the flâneur is, by definition, a bourgeois man, it’s interesting to understand more fully the cause of this impossibiliy. Women couldn’t have been flâneuse when the term was first coined because of the flâneur himself.
Texts written by authors such as Baudelaire and Franz Hessel depict women as if they were just another feature of the city itself, there to be observed. Denied a “voice of their own”, as well as being barred from certain thresholds, meant exercising this practice was beyond their reach.
The female authors who have attempted to revise the term and do justice to the women who did approach the cities with this particular “way of looking”, speak of a dual revolution of the flaneuse against the prohibition of physically occupying certain places and against the object-like condition that the flâneur imposes upon them.
The contemporary flâneur
As someone who primarily studies changes in cities, and given that we’re living in an age when these changes are happening at remarkable speed, can we say that the flâneur still exists? The most obvious answer is no. As we have seen with the flaneuse, and as happens with many other terms, any centuries-old concept has nuances and inadequacies that prevent it from being applied now. That said, if we unshackle this typically bourgeois, male, European figure from the restrictions of class, gender and place, we encounter subsistences that spawn different conceptual revisions which are, at the very least, interesting to contemplate.
If we untie this concept from its original socio-economic characteristics, it’s easy to imagine a woman being a flâneuse, so much so that it seems odd to have denied her that chance until now.
If we reduce it to the way of looking at and reading the streets that we have defined, a world of possibilities emerges.
If there is anything having a considerable effect on the flâneur’s task nowadays, it’s consumerism, which diverts our gaze towards that which can be bought. Chain stores, advertising, illuminated signs and shop windows capture our attention, hindering the collection and study of those aspects that reveal more about the city, its workings and its history. Now, the flâneur has the added task of resisting and not becoming subordinate to consumption, while observing it as part of his research. This element, allied with the contemporary burden of productivity that forces the individual to follow the urban pace, is the flâneur’s greatest challenge. He must transform his stroll into something that resists this speed, lingering before that which others do not see.
In addition to all this, one way or another, we must also add that many of our experiences now involve the virtual world, which permeates our experiences and sometimes divorces us from the physical. This new paradigm may appear incompatible with flânerie; however, it offers a new medium for new ways of looking. For example, urban photography on social media constitutes a new way of studying city details and elevating spaces not usually seen by the consumerist individual, who hurries through the city.
The contemporary flâneur’s challenge is knowing how to resist the forced paces of productivity and consumption and, above all, putting at his disposal the tools now available.
An exercise for all times
According to Benjamin, to really lose ourselves in a city, as flânerie demands, a certain training is required. You can get lost in any city, but “learning” to do so is best done in our own hometown. Again, like a child, the flâneur must jettison everything he has learned in his city that prevents him from really getting lost. This allows him to observe it properly, from its origin, seeing each letter and joining it to the next to form the words that the city utters.
As such, Benjamin’s invitation places each of us perfectly to de-familiarise ourselves with our city. The next step involves becoming reacquainted with the place by paying attention to details and elements that had previously gone unseen. Those willing to do so are perfectly positioned to research and chronicle their own city. And it’s important to do such a thing, especially when cities are becoming so alike; chain stores invade the streets and pedestrian areas are almost exclusively focused on consumption. It’s increasingly difficult to find the unique and we’re subject to greater distractions, although the things that set flânerie in motion and allow us to read the streets are still there.
Cities have grown, changed and may seem more hostile to the 19th-century practice of flânerie in its classical definition. But the truth is the flâneur also changes with the world. He adapts and broadens his horizons, facing the challenges of his time without forgetting his duty: to bear witness to what a city has to tell us before it changes again.