In his reflections on Paris, Walter Benjamin spotlighted the character of the flâneur, far removed from the ogling Tuileries gallant. He analysed, described and captured him from a rereading of Baudelaire – Le Spleen de Paris, the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ in Les Fleurs du mal, the sketches in Vie moderne. This form of strolling presupposes three elements, or the presence of three conditions: city, crowd, and capitalism.
The urban flâneur does experience walking, but in a way far removed from Nietzsche or Thoreau. Walking in town is torture to the lover of long rambles in nature, because it imposes, as we shall see, an interrupted, uneven rhythm. But the fact remains that the flâneur walks, unlike the mere loafer, always stopping to see the attraction or stare entranced into shop windows. The flâneur walks, he makes his way even through the crowd.
Strolling requires those urban concentrations that developed in the nineteenth century, so dense and unbroken that you can walk for hours without seeing a piece of country. Walking through these new megalopolises (Berlin, London, Paris), you passed through districts that were like different worlds, separate, apart. Everything could vary: the size and architectural style of the buildings, the quality and scent of the air, the way of living, the ambiance, the light, the social topography. The flâneur appeared at a time when the city had acquired enough scale to become a landscape. It could be crossed as if it were a mountain, with its passes, its reversals of viewpoint, its dangers and surprises too. It had become a forest, a jungle.
The second element behind the appearance of the flâneur was the crowd. He strolled among the crowd and through it. That crowd in which he developed had already become the masses: labouring, nameless, bustling. In the great industrial cities, those people on the way to or from work, going to business meetings, rushing to deliver a package or get to a rendezvous, were representatives of the new civilization. This crowd was hostile, hostile to all its members. Everyone was in a hurry and everyone else was in their way. The crowd transformed the other instantly into a competitor.
This crowd wasn’t that of the people on the march, the crowd of big demonstrations, of united demands; the epic mob, that formidable mass of collective energy. On the contrary, everyone in it showed contradictory interests, on the concrete level of their movement from place to place. No one met anyone. Unknown faces, generally forbidding, statistically unlikely to be known. The common experience of preceding centuries had been surprise at the sight of a stranger in town, an unknown face. Where’s he from, what’s he up to? Now, anonymity was the norm. The shock would be to recognize someone. In the crowd, the basic codes of the encounter vanish completely. Out of the question to say ‘Good day’, or stop and exchange a word or two on the weather.
Thirdly, capitalism; or more exactly, what Benjamin saw as the reign of merchandise. For him, capitalism designated the moment when the concept of merchandise extended beyond industrial products, to include art works and people. The mercantilization of the world: everything becomes a consumer product, everything is bought and sold, available on the great market of endless demand. The reign of generalized prostitution, of selling, and selling yourself.
The urban stroller is subversive. He subverts the crowd, the merchandise and the town, along with their values. The walker of wide-open spaces, the trekker with his rucksack opposes civilization with the burst of a clean break, the cutting edge of a rejection (Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, etc.). The stroller’s walking activity is more ambiguous, his resistance to modernity ambivalent. Subversion is not a matter of opposing but of evading, deflecting, altering with exaggeration, accepting blandly and moving rapidly on. The flâneur subverts solitude, speed, dubious business politics and consumerism.
Solitude first: the isolating effect of crowds has often been described. An unending succession of strangers’ faces, a thick blanket of indifference which deepens moral solitude. No one feels he knows anyone else, and the mass presence of this feeling produces a dense hostility, making the individual prey to everyone. The stroller seeks this anonymity because he hides in it. He melts into the mechanical mass, but voluntarily, to conceal himself there. After that, anonymity is not a constraint that crushes him, but an opportunity for enjoyment, enabling him to feel more vividly himself from his private internal vantage point. Since he is hiding, he won’t experience anonymity as oppression, but as opportunity. Amid the dense, gloomy solitude of the crowd, he carves out that of an observer and poet: no one can see what he is looking at! He is like a wrinkle in the crowd. The stroller is out of synch, a decisive maladjustment that without excluding or distancing him, abstracts him from the anonymous mass and makes him singular in himself.
Next, speed. In the crowd everyone is pressed, in two ways: in a hurry, and constantly obstructed. But the stroller doesn’t have to go anywhere in particular. So he can stop for any incident or display, scrutinize interesting faces, slow down for intersections. But resisting the speed of business politics, his slowness becomes the condition for a higher agility: that of the mind. For he grasps images on the wing. The hastening passer-by combines velocity of the body with degradation of the intellect. He wants only to go fast and his mind is empty, preoccupied with slipping through the interstices. The flâneur’s body moves slowly, but his eyes dart about and his mind is gripped by a thousand things at once.
With regard to the convoluted relations between business and politics, government increasingly by and for big capital, Benjamin’s stroller was absolutely impervious to the ambient productivism and the utilitarianism behind it. He was himself useless, and his idleness condemned him to marginal status. Nevertheless he never remained wholly passive. He might do nothing, but he followed everything, observing, his mind always alert. And by catching collisions and encounters in flight, he created a flow of poetic images. If the stroller didn’t exist, everyone would follow their own course, produce their own series of phenomena, and there would be no one to report what was going on at street corners. The stroller noted sparks, frictions, encounters.
Lastly, consumption, consumerism. The crowd is the experience of a commoditized future in formation. Tossed about and dragged along by it, the individual is reduced to being a mere product offered up to anonymous tides. Offered up, going with the flow. In a crowd, there’s always this impression of being effectively consumed: by the movements that constrain the body, the paroxysms that shake it. One is consumed by the streets, the boulevards. The signs and shop windows are only there to boost the circulation and exchange of goods. The stroller does not consume and is not consumed. He practises urban foraging, or even theft. He does not, in the manner of the walker of the plains or mountains, receive the landscape as a gift for his effort. But he captures, snatches in flight implausible encounters, furtive moments, fleeting coincidences. He doesn’t consume, but nevertheless continues to capture vignettes, to bring down on himself a drizzle of images stolen in the improbable instant of the encounter.
Yet this poetic creativity retains an ambiguous quality: it is, Benjamin said, a ‘fantasmagoria’. It bypasses the awfulness of the city to recapture its passing marvels, it explores the poetry of collisions, but without stopping to denounce the alienation of labour and the masses. The flâneur has better things to do: remythologize the city, invent new divinities, explore the poetic surface of the urban spectacle.
Baudelairean sauntering spawned a number of descendants. There was the surrealist meandering that gave the stroller’s art two new dimensions: chance and night (Louis Aragon at the Buttes-Chaumont in Paris Peasant, André Breton crazily seeking love in Nadja). Then there was the Situationist ‘drift’ theorized by Guy Debord: sensitive exploration of differences (being transformed by ambiances). The question that now arises is whether the spread of uniform brands (‘chains’ as we call them without irony, identical links, tightening around us) and the aggressive expansion of traffic haven’t made urban strolling more difficult, less delightful and surprising. Spaces where strolling is compulsory are being made, but no one has to go there.
The great romantic walker, the eternal wanderer, communed with the Essence. Walking was a ceremony of mystic union, the walker being co-present with the Presence, curled up in the pure bosom of a maternal Nature. In both Rousseau and Wordsworth we find walking celebrated as testimony to presence and mystical fusion. What is retained in Wordsworth’s well-turned verse and Rousseau’s musical prose is precisely that deep unhurried breathing, that gentleness of rhythm.
The urban stroller doesn’t put in an appearance at the fullness of Essence, he just lays himself open to scattered visual impacts. The walker is fulfilled in an abyss of fusion, the stroller in a firework-like explosion of successive flashes.