Back to index of Nerve 24 - Summer 2014

The Flaneur

By Jim Stanton

Not so long ago, I'd amble lazily into town to meet up with the esteemed Tom Bottle of this very publication. For purpose, we had none. We'd wander, through the business district, through back streets, through crowds, into new buildings or interesting spaces. We'd note graffiti, catch verbal exchanges, sometimes have a little flutter or a drink in the unquietest of places.

Once, beholding the rich tapestry of 'The Blob Shop', I turned to Mr Bottle and said ' Why the F_ did Darwin bother to go to the Galapagos Islands when he could have just come here?'

Look and you'll see him around town, wearing sunglasses, listening to mainstream music through high-tech headphones, carrying his Macbook and his Starbucks coffee. In Berlin they call him the 'Kiez Killer' or Neighbourhood Killer. He's the antithesis of a phenomenon born on the streets of nineteenth century Paris - the Flaneur. Although flaneur originally meant to stroll, to saunter or to idle, it is only at this time that the word takes on its wider connotations of embodying an attitude. It is in the person of the French poet Charles Baudelaire that this attitude first takes shape. Already alive to experience, Baudelaire's flanerie took shape on the newly Hausmannised boulevards of Paris, where the flow of the crowd opened up new possibilities for social interaction:

“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes” (Baudelaire).

Contemporaneously, in America, Walt Whitman was aiming for a new democratised poetry as he sought to capture city life, or the 'blab of the pave', in his Leaves of Grass.

The Flaneur is alive to his environment, a connoisseur of the streets. The critic Walter Benjamin calls him 'the botaniser on the asphalt', although he is less of a classifier than an experiencer of life. He appears lazy, but his doing nothing is a way of being. Engels saw him as a critic of industrialisation, which was problematic for our human nature and our interaction with the world. Benjamin, again, takes up this point:

“But to lose oneself in a city...then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest...”

The critic sees the art of flanerie as reclaiming spaces given over to 'planners, architects and the owners of capital', but also believed that the Flaneur was eventually lost in consumer capitalism. The Marxist theorist David Harvey sees Baudelaire as negotiating the gap between 'man of the people' and cynical observer. Perhaps that is the nature of man, as a socially constructed animal. Placing himself in that space between ideas of Individual/super-individual, Watcher/Participant, maker/consumer of meaning, the Flaneur continues to fascinate.

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