20467157, Flaneur
20467157, Flaneur
20467157, Flaneur
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WALTER BENJAMIN'S MYTH OF THE FLANEUR
The notion of theflcineur, developed by Walter Benjamin at the height of I920S
and I930S modernism when the 'surreal' potential of the previous century's
industrial urban space was explored, has exerted considerable influence on the
way we now interpret nineteenth-century depictions of the city. The concept
has gained unquestioned cognitive status-a sum of insights to be taken for
granted-in contemporary cultural theory. It is the contention of this article
that Benjamin's idea of the fianeur is not only of limited value for an under
standing of nineteenth-century urban experience, but can be seen positively
to hamper it. This detrimental effect results from Benjamin's dogmatic ap
plication of a high-modernist, aesthetic concept of self-loss, derived from a
(flawed) reading of Baudelaire and Poe, to the interpretation of earlier, journa
listic sources conceptualizing the fcitneur. Compared with the mode of viewing
formulated by Poe and Baudelaire, the kind of urban observation presented by
these ephemera of the I830s and i840s is dismissed as lacking cognitive value.
This dismissal has led to a neglect, if not downright demolition, of a whole
genre of nineteenth-century city sketches in 'deconstructive' criticism. What
has shielded Benjamin's pronouncements from being questioned is not only
their own critical thrust informed by Marxist and Freudian theory, but their
apparently solid foundation in empirical textual study. In order to question the
substance of his arguments and to expose his notion of the flaineur as a moder
nist myth, I shall first discuss Benjamin's theorizing of modernity in relation
to the idea of the city stroller. It was his aim to enlighten modernity about
itself, but his critique has, I argue, had an obfuscatory effect which was both
unintentional and necessary, given the peculiarities of his thinking, and which
has been perpetuated by Benjamin-inspired cultural theory. As a second step, I
shall discuss some nineteenth-century materials to illustrate my critical points
against Benjamin and to show that his ideas have handicapped our understand
ing of precisely those journalistic sources (e.g. the Physiologies) from the study
of which his statements derive some of their claim to authority.
Langsam durch belebte StraBen zu gehen, ist ein besonderes Vergniugen. Man wird
iiberspielt von der Eile der anderen, es ist ein Bad in der Brandung. Aber meine
lieben Berliner Mitbiirger machen einem das nicht leicht, wenn man ihnen auch noch
so geschickt ausbiegt. Ich bekomme immer mif3trauische Blicke ab, wenn ich ver
suche, zwischen den Geschaftigen zu flanieren. Ich glaube, man hilt mich fur einen
Taschendieb.'
Franz Hessel's Spazieren in Berlin (I929), from which this passage is taken,
contains motifs that are central to Benjamin's idea of the faneur. These include,
on the one hand, delight in immersing oneself in the crowd, the object of
observation, and on the other hand, being viewed with suspicion since the
keen 'reading' of urban physiognomies shows an affinity with the business of
1 Franz Hessel, 'Der Verd?chtige', in Ein Flaneur in Berlin: Mit Fotografien von Friedrich
Seidenst?cker, Walter Benjamins Skizze 'Die Wiederkehr des Flaneurs' und einem 'Waschzettel' von
Heinz Knobloch (Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1984), p. 7. The volume's text is a re-edition of Hessel's
Spazieren in Berlin.
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I40 Benjamin's Myth of the 'Flaneur'
criminals and detectives. Given Benjamin's friendship and collaboration with
Hessel (who in I926 introduced him to the 'Kunst des Spazierengehens' in Paris
and was his co-author for a planned essay on arcades),2 it is not surprising that
the first-person observer of Hessel's Berlin sketches should be closely related to
the third-person flineur depicted in Benjamin's later work. In fact Benjamin's
review of Spazieren in Berlin, published in Die literarische Welt shortly after
the book's appearance,3 constitutes an important journalistic link in the genesis
of his concept of modernity as it was to be outlined in his I930S essays on
nineteenth-century Paris,4 and in Das Passagen- Werk, his fragmentary magnum
opus with which these essays are directly or indirectly connected. In all of them
the fluineur features among the modern archetypes.
Das Passagen-Werk also offers a clue regarding the methodological signifi
cance of the flineur. The vast array of textual snippets assembled in it includes
Benjamin's own aphoristic remarks as well as quotations from contemporary
cultural studies, and also excerpts from nineteenth-century sources dealing
with phenomena of novelty, e.g. arcades and department stores, panoramas,
exhibitions, fashion, and gaslight. The position from which all these observa
tions are made seems to be that of a strolling spectator, someone who collects
mental notes taken on leisurely city walks and publishes them in the form of
feuilleton sketches and witty essays. In short, they resemble observations of a
flaneur, the viewer who takes pleasure in abandoning himself to the artificial
world of high capitalist civilization. One could describe this figure as the view
ing-device through which Benjamin formulates his own theoretical assump
tions concerning modernity, converging in a Marxist critique of commodity
fetishism. Drawing on Hegelian-Marxist dialectical patterns, this critique is
supposed to make palpable, through precise observation, the secret mecha
nisms of capitalism which provide the key to revolutionary change:
Der Flaneur ist der Beobachter des Marktes. Sein Wissen steht der Geheimwissenschaft
von der Konjunktur nahe. Er ist der in das Reich des Konsumenten ausgeschickte
Kundschafter des Kapitalismus.5
As an observer and connoisseur of market fluctuations and as someone at the
same time on a reconnaissance mission in the consumer's realm, theflcineur pos
sesses the perceptiveness to register all the signs of commodification. Thus his
nineteenth-century view empowers the twentieth-century theorist of moder
nity, who also has an interest in overcoming alienation, to turn into a concrete,
non-theoretical vision the utopian potential inherent in industrial capitalism.
2 See Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1985), pp. 68 and 79.
3 Walter Benjamin, 'Die Wiederkehr des Flaneurs', in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiede
mann and Hermann Schweppenh?user, 7 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), in, 194-99.
This edition is abbreviated henceforth as GS.
4 'Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts' (1935, an expos? for the Passagen-Werk), 'Das
Paris des Second Empire bei Charles Baudelaire' (1938), and '?ber einige Motive bei Baudelaire'
(1939). They are available in English translation by Harry Zohn as 'The Paris of the Second
Empire in Baudelaire' and 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire', and by Quintin Hoare as 'Paris?The
Capital of the Nineteenth Century'; all in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in
the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983).
5 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in GS, v/1-2, v/i, 537-38. Das Passagen-Werk is avail
able in English translation by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin as The Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).
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MARTINA LAUSTER I41
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I42 Benjamin's Myth of the 'Flaneur'
magorische Form eines Verhiltnisses von Dingen annimmt. Um daher eine Analogie
zu finden, muissen wir in die Nebelregion der religiosen Welt fluichten. Hier scheinen
die Produkte des menschlichen Kopfes mit eignem Leben begabte, untereinander und
mit den Menschen in Verhaltnis stehende selbstindige Gestalten. So in der Warenwelt
die Produkte der menschlichen Hand. Dies nenne ich den Fetischismus, der den Ar
beitsprodukten anklebt, sobald sie als Waren produziert werden, und der daher von der
Warenproduktion unzertrennlich ist.9
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MARTINA LAUSTER I43
als Flaneur begibt [... .] sich [der Literat] auf den Markt
und in Wahrheit doch schon, um einen Kaufer zu fin
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I 44 Benjamin's Myth of the 'Flaneur'
de la vie moderne', in which Baudelaire discusses 'The Man of the Crowd' in
the context of Guys's work, celebrates self-loss in the crowd as a precondition
of artistic creativity. Benjamin includes this passage in his collection for the
Passagen- Werk:20
Pour le parfait flaneur, pour l'observateur passionne, c'est une immense jouissance que
d'e1ire domicile dans le nombre, dans l'ondoyant, dans le mouvement, dans le fugitif
et l'infini. Etre hors de chez soi, et pourtant se sentir partout chez soi; voir le monde,
etre au centre du monde et rester cache au monde, tels sont quelques-uns des moindres
plaisirs de ces esprits independants, passionnes, impartiaux, que la langue ne peut que
maladroitement definir. L'observateur est un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito.
[. . .] C'est un moi insatiable du non-moi, qui, a chaque instant, le rend et l'exprime en
images plus vivantes que la vie elle-meme, toujours instable et fugitive.2'
It is well worth pointing out that this passage refers entirely to the 'painter of
modern life', Constantin Guys, and that Baudelaire at no point associates the
fldneur with the unknown 'man of the crowd' espied by the narrator in Poe's
story. The reason Baudelaire enhances his essay on a visual artist by referring
to a narrative work is the fresh, unconditioned perception of the people in the
street that Poe's narrator, in Baudelaire's view, shares with Guys. Yet to see the
object of the narrator's vision, the 'man of the crowd', as a flaneur is absolute
nonsense; if anything, it is the observing narrator who could be labelled thus.
Benjamin, however-as John Rignall has pointed out22-contrives the glaring
misinterpretation of Poe's hunted, unknown man as a fldneur. The 'man of
the crowd' becomes identical for him with 'the' flaneur at an advanced stage in
his development, just as, Benjamin claims, Baudelaire saw him in Poe's story,23
i.e. as the bohemian outcast hiding in the crowd, moving in the jungle of the
city, and succumbing in the end to the lure of commodities in the jungle of a
department store. Hence posterity has become accustomed to thinking of Poe
and Baudelaire as twin names with regard to the flaneur, i.e. the 'man of the
crowd'. This is one particularly persistent facet of the Benjaminian myth of the
flaneur which I want to address.
Benjamin's carelessness with regard to his sources, conducive to myth
making, does not end here. When he eventually realizes that Poe's protagonist
is not a flineur, he corrects himself in his second essay on Baudelaire ('Uber
einige Motive bei Baudelaire'), but corresponding statements in the Passagen
Werk have been left unchanged, such as:
Dialektik der flanerie: einerseits der Mann, der sich von allem und allen angesehen
fiihlt, der Verdichtige schlechthin, andererseits der vollig Unauffindbare, Geborgene.
Vermutlich ist es eben diese Dialektik, die 'Der Mann der Menge' entwickelt.24
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MARTINA LAUSTER I45
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146 Benjamin's Myth of the 'Flaneur'
is not only self-contradictory, but has no solid foundation in Poe's or Baude
laire's work either? Let us first recapitulate the main qualities of the icon of
modernity that the flaeneur has become through Benjamin's writings. He is a
type that prefers arcades and gaslight, looks at the city as if it were a panorama
or indeed a phantasmagoria, turns the boulevard into an interieur, collects
urban physiognomies like a botanist collecting specimens, and, as a 'Literat'
prostituting himself on the market, shows an affinity with the commodities he
gazes at in window displays. This icon, for sure, is not a type that ever existed
in social history, but a literary reflection of a complex kind, resulting from a
triple reading (or misreading) process from Poe via Baudelaire to Benjamin.
Benjamin, as John Rignall has remarked, himself invests an epistemological
figure Baudelaire's 'observateur passionne' denoting a manner of viewing
with the qualities of a material type, expressive of developments in the era of
High Capitalism.27 By virtue of the flaneur's sturdy afterlife in cultural studies,
where he occupies the place of a type, a nineteenth-century literary cipher of
vision has thus become a myth, i.e. something that is believed to have materially
existed.
Benjamin cannot be held responsible for what posterity has done with his
ideas, but the myth of the flatneur can be seen as a direct result of his own habit
of condensing conceptual understanding into idiosyncratic images. His inten
tion to strip nineteenth-century modernity of its fetishist veil has backfired
in the sense that the phenomena he discusses (arcades in particular) and his
highly imaginative way of interpreting them have themselves, paradoxically,
acquired iconic status in contemporary cultural and literary studies. In Hart
mut B6hme's terminology, these contemporary critics are trapped in a process
of unintentional 'fetishization' which already bedevilled the work of their cri
tical models, from Marx via Nietzsche to Freud, the very thinkers who drew
attention to fetishist phenomena in enlightened Western societies:
Der Fetischismus, der dem Kapitalismus einwohnt oder auch ihm nur imputiert wird,
prigt sich der Kritik in seltsamen Inversionen auf. Die obskure koloniale Herkunft des
Fetischismus-Konzepts implantiert ins Denken eine fatale Bindung ans Objekt, welches
doch iuberschritten werden soll. Die Geste der Kritik bleibt beherrscht durch eine Art
religiosen Bann. [. . ] Philosophie wird zum Ikonoklasmus. [. . .] Diese kritische Wucht
aber setzt sich bei Marx wie bei Nietzsche, und spater auch in der Psychoanalyse, in eine
Bewegung um, welche zur Kreation neuer Idole und Fetische fiihrt, deren Bannkraft
im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert vielleicht alles iibertrifft. (Bohme, p. 465)
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MARTINA LAUSTER I47
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I48 Benjamin's Myth of the 'Flaneur'
metropolitan fiction-conveying the shock effect of modernization. Benjamin
sees the whole genre of quotidian sketches, subsumed by him under the broad
heading of feuilleton, as a sedative for the middle class, i.e. as socially and ideo
logically suspect and therefore unreliable:
Die beruhigenden Mittelchen, welche die Physiologisten [writers of Physiologies] feil
hielten, waren bald abgetan. Der Literatur dagegen, die sich an die beunruhigenden
und bedrohlichen Seiten des stiidtischen Lebens gehalten hat, sollte eine grof3e Zukunft
beschieden sein. Auch diese Literatur hat es mit der Masse zu tun. Sie verfahrt aber
anders als die Physiologien. Ihr liegt an der Bestimmung von Typen wenig; sie geht
vielmehr den Funktionen nach, welche der Masse in der groBen Stadt eigen sind. [ ...]
Hier erscheint die Masse als das Asyl, das den Asozialen vor seinen Verfolgern schutzt.
Unter ihren bedrohlichen Seiten hat sich diese am zeitigsten angekiindigt. Sie steht im
Ursprung der Detektivgeschichte.29
Der urspriingliche gesellschaftliche Inhalt der Detektivgeschichte ist die Verwischung
der Spuren des Einzelnen in der Grof3stadtmenge.30
Benjamin here assigns aesthetic durability and hence quality to 'Literatur' in
the form of the detective story (to which he unscrupulously also subsumes
Poe's 'Man of the Crowd', as a kind of 'X-rayed version' of the genre)3' and
declares the Physiologies written by journalists to be transitory and therefore
worthless. Since detective fiction engages with the phenomenon of masses in a
way that does justice to the unsettling experience of the individual's anonymity
and loss of moral ties in the 'asylum' of the crowd, it points forward to the
twentieth century, even if it is itself part of the nineteenth-century fldneur's
delusion.32 This seemingly avant-gardist, but in fact quite conventional value
judgement is predicated on the devaluation of entertaining journalism-the
typological portrait written for the day-as a genre providing something more
dubious than phantasmagoric illusion, in other words, opiatic medicine ('Mit
telchen'). In Benjamin's view, it numbs the authentically experienced anxieties
of readers in an increasingly threatening urban environment. The non-fictional,
witty proto-sociological study of type is thereby denied any cognitive capacity.
This problematic judgement is informed by the suspicious attitude of Ger
man Kulturkritik towards the 'billige Eleganz' of the feuilleton,33 even though,
paradoxically, journalism and its ruses (such as recycled aphorisms) very often
provide the very medium in which this cultural criticism is expressed.34
Kai Kauffmann has noted the tendency to see the newspaper press as the
'letzte Verfallsform' of narrative communication in Benjamin's criticism of the
29 'Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire', p. 542.
30 Ibid., p. 546.
31 'Poes ber?hmte Novelle "Der Mann der Menge" ist etwas wie das R?ntgenbild einer Detek
tivgeschichte. Der umkleidende Stoff, den das Verbrechen darstellt, ist in ihr weggefallen' (ibid.,
P 55o):
32 With reference to works such as Dumas's Mohicans de Paris, Benjamin writes: 'Welche Spur
der Flaneur auch verfolgen mag, jede wird ihn auf ein Verbrechen f?hren. Damit ist angedeutet,
wie auch die Detektivgeschichte, ihres n?chternen Kalk?ls ungeachtet, an der Phantasmagoric
des pariser Lebens mitwirkt' ('Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire', p. 543).
33 See ibid., p. 529.
34 One striking example of Benjamin's own recycling can be seen in the image of the street as an
int?rieur which appears in his 1929 review of Hessel's Spazieren in Berlin ('Die Wiederkehr des
Flaneurs', GS, in, 194-99 (p. 196)) as well as, almost verbatim, in Das Passagen-Werk, GS, v/i,
533, and 'Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire', p. 539.
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MARTINA LAUSTER I49
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I50 Benjamin's Myth of the 'Flaneur'
Acheter une physiologie c'est donc se procurer un acces indirect a toutes les prerogatives
de la flanerie: oisivete, curiosite, ubiquit& et par dessus tout la certitude que la ville peut
etre connue et maitris&e comme un jeu pred&termine de signes ... .]. ... .] Le succes de
cette 'litterature panorama' de l'6poque a sans doute quelque rapport avec l'assurance
de pouvoir voir sans etre vu. Un reve semblable d'invulnerabilite [. . .] est sous-jacent
au mecanisme renconfortant de la satire dans les physiologies, car il rend leurs lecteurs
capables de jouir de la superiorite (diabolique, comme le dirait Baudelaire) du rire sans
etre eux-memes impliques comme cibles du ridicule. (Sieburth, pp. 57 and 58)
[Les physiologies] iraient finalement moins dans le sens d'une apprehension de la realite
sociale que vers son occultation systematique dans ce que Walter Benjamin nomme
'l'univers d'une fantasmagorie'. (p. 46)
This regardless of the fact that the physiologies are a parodistic genre,39 poking
fun at the more 'serious' sketch collections, such as the serial Les Franfais peints
par eux-memes (I839-42), and their exercises in social classification. Nor does it
in the least take account of the fact that these socially classifying sketches, which
the physiologies parodistically respond to, created a portrait of the metropolis
in collections of hundreds of individual contributions-not dissimilar, in fact,
to Benjamin's own synthetic picture of modernity in the Passagen-Werk, 'ein
Bild des i9. Jahrhunderts [. . .], das die Leuchtkraft des Traums oder der
unwillkiirlich sich 6ffnenden Erinnerung hat' (Stierle, p. 39), which is com
posed of hundreds of (usually discursive) fragments. Benjamin himself draws
the analogy between sketch collections and huge circular paintings by describ
ing them rightly as moral panoramas, but this analogy does not do them jus
tice if, as he and his followers believe, they merely replicate the entertaining
and informative medium of the visual panorama.40 The cognitive claim, for
example, of Les Franfais peints par eux-memes to synthesize an Encyclopedie
morale du XIXe siecle (thus the serial's subtitle from Volume iv onwards) from
a vast number of individual typological sketches is as serious as that of the
Passagen-Werk to construct an 'Urgeschichte der Moderne' from scraps. Ac
cording to Stierle, Benjamin reads the nineteenth century in such a way 'daB
aus Detail und Bruchstiick immer neue Bilder und Konstellationen entstehen.
[.. .] Fur diesen Bricolage des historischen Sinns ist alles brauchbar: Zeitungen,
ephemare Schriften, Plakate, die abgelegensten Buicher wie die groBe Literatur'
(Stierle, p. 40). I would argue that, since collections such as Les Franfais peints
par eux-memes construct proto-sociological 'encyclopaedias' of the nineteenth
century from observation (including observations of seemingly insignificant
trivia, of the observer himself as well as of media of observation and popu
lar entertainment), their cognitive value for a concept of modernity is in fact
39 As Nathalie (Basset-)Preiss already pointed out in 1984: N. Basset, 'Les physiologies au xixe
si?cle et la mode: de la po?sie comique ? la critique', Ann?e balzacienne (1984), 157-72; and as she
has amply demonstrated in her book: N. Preiss, Les Physiologies en France au XIXe si?cle: ?tude
historique, litt?raire et stylistique (Mont-de-Marsan: ?ditions InterUniversitaires, 1999).
40 Benjamin says that the 'panoramatische Literatur' of the sketch collections (e.g. Le Livre des
Cent-et-un, Les Fran?ais peints par eux-m?mes, Le Diable ? Paris, La Grande Ville) enjoyed the
same popularity as the visual panorama and worked with similar devices: 'Diese B?cher bestehen
aus einzelnen Skizzen, die mit ihrer anekdotischen Einkleidung den plastischen Vordergrund
jener Panoramen und mit ihrem informatorischen Fundus deren weitgespannten Hintergrund
gleichsam nachbilden' ('Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire', p. 537); see also the section
'Panorama' in Das Passagen-Werk, GS, v/2, 655-65 (p. 659), with a characteristic imprecision in
terminology: 'Sie sind gewisserma?en moralische Dioramen'.
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MARTINA LAUSTER I51
PAR E.UX-MI11MIIS.
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I152 Benjamin's Myth of the 'Flhneur'
self-conscious point of reference, as Gavarni's frontispiece to Volume ii of Les
Franfais peints par eux-memes makes strikingly clear. An allegorical, angelic
demonic figure viewing him(?)self in a mirror while writing is seated on a pile
of books which can be identified as works of the great moralists (La Bruyere's
name is legible on one of the spines). The figure can thus be seen as an allegory
of the modern sketch-producer, engaged in adding live, present-day moral ob
servations collected in notebooks to those of literary history bound in books.
The main difference between historical, 'pre-modern' moral observation and
the kind of sketches the reader will find in the present collection, however, is
their apparent immediacy, capturing the here-and-now in an unprecedented
interplay between writing and drawing or letterpress and graphic image. The
fact that Les Franfais peints par eux-memes is an illustrated work can be gleaned
from the poster advertising the series in the background and the 'graffiti' of
Parisian types below. On close inspection of the way the sketch-writer holds
the mirror, the viewer becomes aware that what is reflected in it must be more
than the writer's face and include images of his environment, i.e. the kind of
urban scenes that become the subject of sketches. The wall with its poster and
graffiti would be just one of this sort. The very medium of reproduction of
fers a 'mirror image' of the artist's drawing, as Gavarni's reversed signature
implies. Sketches thus present themselves not as naive and spontaneous depic
tions, but as a sophisticated genre working with reflections, and these reflections
include the medial conditions under which the genre operates, such as print
on an industrial scale, the collaboration of many in drawing the self-images of
the nation, and the continuity-through print-of the moralist tradition. The
composite nature of the figure, uniting angel, devil, and fool in a gesture of
vanity, hints at the old theatrum mundi and, at the same time, indicates the
loss of authenticity in a world of reproduction and commodification-a world
which Les Franfais, a publisher's commercial enterprise in the first instance,
eminently represents. Benjamin could have found a prime example here of how
modernity is 'critiqued' by a medium he deems incapable of penetrating vi
sion. Accepting in one's own creations the 'Zertriimmerung der Aura', which
Benjamin sees as the heroic achievement of the lyric poet Baudelaire, is surely
also Gavarni's achievement, but it lacks heroism and therefore iconic potential
because it is an acceptance without communicating a 'Chocerlebnis'.4'
The way in which panoramic (or encyclopaedic) sketch collections present
their views of the city can often be described as an inversion of the traveller's
view of foreign places in a critical self-inspection of the social body. Their syn
thetic structure responds to the increasingly diversified environment in which
social sign-reading has to be practised. In this context, the flaneur emerges
as one of a countless number of ordinary city-dwellers who read metropolitan
41 In Nietzsche's terms borrowed by Benjamin, Baudelaire has achieved modern astral status,
the status of a star without an 'aura' or atmosphere: '[Baudelaire] hat den Preis bezeichnet, um
welchen die Sensation der Moderne zu haben ist: die Zertr?mmerung der Aura im Chocerlebnis.
Das Einverst?ndnis mit dieser Zertr?mmerung ist ihn teuer zu stehen gekommen. Es ist aber
das Gesetz seiner Poesie. Sie steht am Himmel des zweiten Kaiserreiches als "ein Gestirn ohne
Atmosph?re" [Nietzsche, Unzeitgem??e Betrachtungen]' (Walter Benjamin, '?ber einige Motive
bei Baudelaire', in Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, GS, 1/2,
509-690 (p. 653)).
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MARTINA LAUSTER I53
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I54 Benjamin's Myth of the 'Flaineur'
a Baudelairean 'man of the crowd', but the new social type. The portrait of the
professional decipherer of the city by a professional decipherer, in a collective
medium which is itself characteristic of the changing social fabric of the July
Monarchy, therefore possesses the highest cognitive interest both for writers
and the reading public at the time and for nineteenth-century specialists today.
Like the other journalistic collections following in its wake,45 the Livre des
Cent-et-un presents the fl?ineur as a new type whose existence is defined by
externality, by abandoning private space and moving in the streets as well as by
extroverting meaning which used to be hidden so that it becomes accessible in
urban physiognomies. The flaineur is thus also, from the start, a cipher for the
deciphering view which thrives in its proper environment, the urban crowd.
This crowd is not to be understood as an object which the flaineur and the
reader of a physiological sketch need in order to reassure themselves of their
diabolical superiority as decipherers. Nor are they, from an ostensibly secure,
static, unseen position, able to laugh about the other, as Sieburth argues, follow
ing Baudelaire's theory of laughter and indirectly Benjamin's and Baudelaire's
view of the princely observer enjoying his incognito here (Sieburth, p. 58). The
fantasy of seeing without being seen is exactly that of the i820S 'swell' observ
ing the city from the 'snugness' of a camera-obscura viewer, as in Pierce Egan's
Life in London (I 820-2 I).46 Contrary to this perspective, the I830s observer is
included in the crowd as its reflective viewing device, and the same technique
of 'reading externality' that he applies to the city needs to be applied to him as
a type. Social anatomy, in other words, has passed to collective ownership.
The sketch portraying the flineur in the sixth volume of the Livre says that
it is unnecessary to catch a glimpse of the domestic secrets of the professional
stroller. Why? Because he has none. His ambience is the public sphere, and
in order to understand him you need to watch him move about the streets.
The type whose definition it is to be outside reading surfaces is himself crying
out to be deciphered as a meaningful external phenomenon, and the author of
the sketch is significantly named 'un flaneur'. 'Nothing', we learn, 'escapes his
investigative gaze' as he moves forward 'in the middle of the crowd of which he
is the centre'-not an unseen centre of power, but a recognizable type on whose
reflections the seen world centres. This type, himself subject to analysis, is pre
sented as an integral part of the general 'movement' on which his vision vitally
depends. From the latest display of luxury and lithographs in shop windows
to the progress of a building forever under construction, and a never-seen face,
'everything is to him a text of observation'.47 This compulsive sign-reading is
45 Apart from Les Fran?ais peints par eux-m?mes, they include serials such as Nouveau tableau
de Paris au XIXe si?cle, 7 vols (Paris: Librairie de Madame Charles-B?chet, 1834-35); Mus?um
parisien (Paris: Beauger and Aubert, 1841); La Grande Ville, 2 vols (Paris: Maresq, 1844); Le
Diable ? Paris, 2 vols (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1845-46); and others.
46 '[. . .] safety [. . .] should be the primary object of the traveller. The curious, likewise, in their
anxiety to behold delightful prospects or interesting views, ought to be equally careful to prevent
the recurrence of accidents. The author, in consequence, has chosen for his readers a Camera
Obscura View of London, not only from its safety, but because it is so snug, and also possessing
the invaluable advantages of seeing and not being seen' (Pierce Egan, Life in London; or, The Day
and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom [. . .], 3rd issue
(London: Sherwood, Jones & Co., 1823), p. 18).
47 'Le voyez-vous mon fl?neur, [. . .] comme il s'avance librement au milieu de cette foule dont
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MARTINA LAUSTER I55
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I156 Benjamin's Myth of the 'Flineur'
urban environments in terms of natural history, but only inasmuch as 'life sci
ence' (anatomy, physiognomy, zoology, and physiology) is a paradigm for social
science. No Physiologie or related publication would at any point suggest that
a place shaped by human history is to be understood as natural space. This
kind of understanding, which does also exist in metropolitan sketches, has, as it
were, an axe to grind. It is a reactionary view formulated against the Western,
historical, and dynamic interpretation of the city, as becomes evident from a
Viennese panoramic collection, Wien und die Wiener.5' But even this collection
engages with the process of sign-reading in a democratized and everyday sort of
way. The light in which the sketch industry of the I83os and I840s needs to be
interpreted is that of the Enlightenment project making its way into quotidian
knowledge on a massive scale. This happens thanks to the very progress of
reproductive technologies (such as the use of stereotypes for reproducing texts
and images quickly and cheaply, and in high print-runs, on the steam-powered
press) that prepare the ground for the 'post-auratic' forms of art of photo
graphy and film. While Benjamin appreciates their revolutionary potential in
'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit', he denies
such a capacity to the mass-produced illustrated sketch, not a 'Kunstwerk', but
a form that nevertheless points to its own reproducibility in such a way as to
imply a critique of modernity. Benjamin's keen interest in the figure of the col
lector, and his own activity as one of the kind, is clearly prefigured in the huge
collections of contemporary types and phenomena that the nineteenth-century
sketch industry provided. But, like the Jlineur, this type appears in sketches
as a significant common figure of the time, occupying an important place in
an environment characterized by 'Verdinglichung', and not as our latter-day
Benjaminian icon of modernity, a 'Schicksalsdeuter' and 'Allegoriker' of the
object world.52
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER MARTINA LAUSTER
51 Wien und die Wiener, in Bildern aus dem Leben, ed. by [Adalbert Stifte
and Carl Edmund Langer] (Pesth: Gustav Heckenast, 1844).
52 See the section 'Der Sammler' in Das Passagen-Werk, GS, v/i, 269-80
279-80.
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