people watching and street photography IV.

Rethinking the Flâneur: Flânerie and the Senses, Aimée Boutin

It is useful to distinguish the ‘popular’ from the ‘avant-garde’ flâneur: whereas the popular flâneur emerged in panoramic literature and the commercial press, the avant-garde flâneur is more closely associated with innovative artists. Charles Baudelaire identified the flâneur with the artist and the imagination, against a scientific conception of modernity. In contrast, Honoré de Balzac had conceived of flânerie as a synthesis of empiricism, creativity, and science in a well-known passage of Physiologie du marriage.

In ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, Baudelaire compares the flâneur to Poe’s ‘man of the crowd’. As he who chooses to dwell at the centre of the movement of the crowd but who resists being sucked into it, he remains disengaged, masterful, princely, invisible, superior, and omniscient; but, as Krueger demonstrates in her rereading of this passage, the man of the crowd not only observes the spectacle but he smells its effluvia.

Benjamin sought to define the modern stroller as the avant-garde flâneur and based his understanding of the type on the artist-flâneur. Martina Lauster (2007) has pointed out, Walter Benjamin largely ignores the import of panoramic literature in shaping the type, consequently undermining how these typologies thematized the process of observation. His materialist interpretation of the flâneur emphasized the significance of the new architectural visual aesthetic in Paris, notably the arcades or passages, built in the first decades of 19th century, and the boulevards.

The new phenomenon of the boulevards and the urban masses made the flâneur into a ‘man of the crowd’ whom Benjamin counterintuitively interpreted as a person disconnected from the crowd. He cast the flâneur as an oppositional figure whose pace and leisurely attitude protest the industriousness of the marketplace.


continue/

- urban and architectural studies moved by the sensual turn

- Baron Haussmann's design turned the street into an interior

- popular flâneur and panoramic literature / avant-garde flâneur and innovative artists

- Poe’s 'man of the crowd'

- aesthetic, urban perception as a specifically masculine phenomenon

- flâneuses


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