The Flâneur: A Lens to See the Metropolis

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立 政 治 大 學

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the assumption that space can be understood as a thing, and such practice permits a lot of unrealized possibilities and triggers individual emotions and feelings that is dormant in urban people. I argue that the narrator in Arcadia observes and records the city as a flâneur and this novel could be seen as his textual flânerie. This figure takes the spatial practice of dérive to deconstruct the conceptualized space and to present a city which is remapped by individual mentalities.

Ⅱ. Dissecting the City

The flâneur that rises in the Paris streets and arcades in the nineteenth century has long been a significant object of urban studies. This figure was originally tied to a particular time and space but later has been allowed to walk away from that context.

The flâneur could be regarded as the ever-fresh interest and vigorous energy to investigate human condition. This novel could be seen as a flâneur’s record of a city that works to awaken the public consciousness to the evil generated by the apparently stable and civilized society and to rethink the meaning of living in the city. According to Simon Sadler, “[t]he situationist ‘drifter’ was the new flâneur” who “skirted the old quarters of the city in order to experience the flip side of modernization” (56). With the concepts of dérive and psychogeography, the narrator Burgher presents a new form of cartography which enables representing states of consciousness and feelings and connects them to the objective spaces through the practice of dérive.

A. The Flâneur: A Lens to See the Metropolis

Different parts of a city contain different and multiple meanings. Those meanings may be defined by institutional functions, or decided by means of the excavating of cultural development. In any case, they need to be discovered through

“practices of methodology and through reflexivity” (Jenks 12). Jenks emphasizes the methodology through which we observe the city and bring up the flâneur and explains

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why this figure’s characteristics advantage observation of the relationship between people and the urban environment. Some critics such as Susan Buck-Morss and Elisabeth Wilson bring up the problems the flâneur will undergo in the metropolis:

the domination of capitalist system, the darkness and danger that hide somewhere in the city, both of which make the flâneur a deconstructed one. However, the essential characteristics of this figure, such as mobility, detachment, and observation, might be advantages to survive in the labyrinthine metropolis and even to create meanings in the disorienting space of metropolis.¹²

First of all, the flâneur possesses the sovereignty based in anonymity and observation. Chris Jenks looks back on the poet created by Baudelaire as the embodiment of the flâneur and mentions that the flâneur is “the metaphoric figure originally brought into being by Baudelaire (1964), as the spectator and depicter of modern life, most specifically in relation to contemporary art and the sights of the city” (Jenks 13). The flâneur is considered by Baudelaire an observer who is “a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes” (Baudelaire 1972: 400). The anonymity is advantageous to deciphering the secrets and mysteries of the city because it provides the privilege to move and observe freely in the crowd. The public conceals no mysteries for this person who holds his own mystery. According to Keith Tester, the flâneur knows that he is just the constituent part of the metropolitan flux and that the

12 In “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1939), Benjamin depicts that the flâneur walks in the streets of the capitalist city and “the intelligentsia becomes acquainted with the marketplace. It

surrenders itself to the market, thinking merely to look around; but in fact it is already seeking a buyer”

(The Arcade Project 21). Buck-Morss in “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore” further explains this commodification embodied by the flâneur: “In order to survive under capitalism [the flâneur] writes about what he sees, and sells the product . . . His protests against the social order are never more than gestures because (not surprisingly under capitalism) he needs money” (Buck-morss 111-112). It seems that the capitalism makes the flâneur have no choice but to survive by following its rules, and the creativity and intelligence of this figure degenerate into the means to look for profits.

Moreover, Elizabeth Wilson in “The Invisible Flâneur” argues that the heart of Benjamin’s meditation on the flâneur is “the ambivalence towards urban life . . . a sorrowful engagement with the melancholy of cities” (73). “The city is a labyrinth and the flâneur an embodiment of it” (74). That is to say, living in the city of fragmentation, disorientation, and indifference, the flâneur is paralyzed and loses his activeness, and the path of his strolling takes the form of labyrinth which means “the attenuation and deferral of satisfaction” (74).

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metropolitan crowd might crush him, but it is this sense that makes him different from all the others in the crowd (The Flâneur 3).¹³

Second, the flâneur, rich in imagination and good at observing, is able to have an insight to the inner world of people so that he could be aware of the interaction between human minds and the metropolis. Jenks claims that “the flâneur possesses a power; it walks at will, freely and seemingly without purpose, but simultaneously with an inquisitive wonder and an infinite capacity to absorb the activities of the collective─often formulated as ‘the crowd’” (Jenks 14). Just like the poet in

Baudelaire’s writings, the flâneur “enjoys an incomparable privilege: in his own way he’s able to be himself or someone else. Like those wandering souls in search of a body, he enters anyone’s personality whenever he wants to” (Baudelaire 1991: 355).

In this way, the metropolis is not simply the objective appearance and the planned functional parts we can find in a map but more complicated and related to the subjective motives, feelings, and experiences. This figure who is “the lover of life, may . . . be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness” (Baudelaire 1972: 400). Therefore, the flâneur is less to passively present the contingencies of spectacles than to consciously take each person’s behaviors and inner activities as lenses to see the metropolis and piece

The flâneur is apart from the rubbernecks who just blindly follow the flux of crowds because his knowledge of being in the crowd and his princely incognito endows him the ability to make the significance and the meaning of the metropolitan space for himself. He is like a prince who defines the world rather than allowing things or appearances to control him. He is the person who “cannot be pinned down” (Jenks 15).

13 Keith Tester claims that although the flâneur is a face in the crowd along with all the other faces,

“behind the face of the poet [the flâneur] lurks a great secret of nobility,” and “the nobility of the poet is located quite precisely in his thinking of his mediocrity in the eyes of others” (Tester, The Flâneur 3).

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fragments of people’s experiences together into the understanding and meanings of the metropolis.

According to Chris Jenks’ argument, the flâneur as a concept could be used as “an analytic form, a narrative device, an attitude towards knowledge and its social context,” and it is also “an image of movement through the social space of

modernity” (Jenks 17). That is to say, because of unconstrained characteristics of this figure, we can use it as a lens to see our society, a device to present observation and thoughts, and an analytic form to illuminate social issues. It is like “a multilayered palimpsest” that enables us to “move” from “real products of modernity,” through

“the practical organization of space and its negotiation by inhabitants of a city,” to “a critical appreciation of the state of modernity and its erosion into the post-” (17).¹⁴