Dizzee represents himself as an ‘un-docile body’ who has rejected the embodiment or normalisation of institutionalised discipline and punishment. In many ways the corner of the classroom becomes a darkened existential space of his own panoptic sphere. Dizzee has become a watchman. This alienated practice is one that the Parisian flâneur could easily identify with.

     Lighting of course is essential to observation. The eye needs the stimulus of light to mediate objects of the world to the eye, and then to the mind. In the current postmodern epoch, lighting and the visual place themselves as a cultural paramount. Lighting was also recognised as a central issue in Benjamin’s essay and Benjamin took note of writer Robert Louis Stevenson comments about a rapidly modernizing Paris that; “…now the contrast is with a brutal shock caused by the spectacle of entire city’s suddenly being illuminated by electric light.” (P51, Benjamin, 1997.) Benjamin saw this technological advancement from the gas lamp to the electric light, along with the introduction of house numbering and photography, as part of the technological rationalising process that caused the demise of the flâneur. As part of Benjamin’s argument, the initial electronic increase in the contrast between light and darkness helped to expose the dwelling place of the flâneur;

     Since the days of the Parisian arcades, the brightly lit and digitally surveillance panoptic shopping malls of the post-modern world have continued to further sterilise themselves from the threat of terrorism, immoral and criminal elements. The lights have become brighter, the surveillance stronger and the rules stricter. In my evaluation of Benjamin’s essay I presented the notion that the ban on ‘hoodie’ wearing in the Britain’s biggest shopping mall, Bluewater Mall, marked the continuing extraction of some of the key elements associated with flânerie: disguising, loitering, and gazing. The panoptic design of the global post-modern mall has continued to privatize these characteristic properties of flânerie for the security staff that safeguard the mall. The result is that the general public are stripped from these ‘privileges’ in an attempt to create more secure, calculative and efficient public space. The effect of which can be seen within the interior of the mall as well as its effect it has upon the surrounding urban exterior. When writing of the contempory Los Angeles metropolis as a whole, Mike Davis cites Richard Nixon’s 1969 predictions that;

      The effect of an increased contrast between light and dark has also caused a greater divide in acceptable and unacceptable moral activities. Benjamin’s essay noted how the activity of prostitution was ‘designed out’ from the space of department stores of Paris which replaced the shopping Arcades and home of the flâneur. The extraction of hoodies from the post-modern shopping has brings about about the same outcome; the extracted activity’s become the unwanted waste that litters and tarnishes the streets of unevenly developed dystopian neighbourhoods that surround these utopian ‘fortified cell’s’. For anyone who has ever taken a walk through the streets of any ghettoised neighbourhood, areas that Davis chooses to refer to as ‘places of terror’, what is instantly recognisable is the way in which the subject is immediately surrounded by a gloomy atmosphere and general lack of light. In his book ‘The Flâneur; A Stroll throughout the Paradoxes of Paris’ (2001), author Edmund White observes this from his friends apartment on the rue de la Goutte d’Or that;

     Darkness, disguise and un-detection are cultural requirements of those who live in the underworlds drug economy and the darkness that White notices about the ghettos of Paris mirrors the same darkness and criminality that Dizzee represents in the wearing of a black hooded top. Ben Highmore discusses the issue of detection in Urban Noir film genre; Highmore identifies a detective type to which he gives the name the ‘shadow’, in the pursuit of criminal types the ‘shadow’ has to take onboard the following task;

     The figure of the authorities detective is one stood on the right side of law, the notion of un-detect-ability is the dynamic opposite. When choosing to remain shadowed from the glare of authoritative illumination; underworld drug dealers and criminal types share a space of darkness, a space into which the detective must occasionally venture into and remain undetected by criminal types. If light is key to sight then we can only accept that un-detect-ability and darkness are essential components in a form of mastery over a panoptic society, where the power of observational gaze is placed as paramount. The black hoodie worn by Dizzee signifies and calls into question the subject of counteracting law and morality in the binary opposition between; illumination = white = authority = security = good, and, black = darkness = criminal = terrorism = bad / evil. We should then accept from a non-moralistic perspective that a social divide can often be recognised by a contrasting divide in light and darkness, light costs money, light provides vision for surveillance, light aims to highlight moralistic evils.

      So far my essay has outlined the adverse effects of ghettoised society. However, referring back to Bauman and Foucault, it is important to take note the privileges that darkness permits is the illusive activity of flânerie. In Bauman’s essay on the flâneur, Bauman proceeds to point out that;

     Bauman recognises the power that disguise has, a notion that De Certeau also includes into his argument that agency can contradict predetermined structural urban environment; ‘The city is left prey to contradictory movements that counter-balance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power.’ (De Certeau,1980, p. 95) The fact that Dizzee Rascal is framed wearing a hoodie on the LP cover is a very symbolic reference towards this form of self-empowerment. Hoodies allow the subject the privilege of a peephole to spy out onto the objective world while remaining undetectable, and for that reason they have become a statement that proclaims anti-detection, and become self-empowering garments.

     So far my argument has proved how social constructions in a spatial sense have permitted Dizzee a flaneuric perspective outlook to his urban surroundings. The lyrical content of Dizzees observations should also support my claim that Boy In Da Corner is a similar physiologie of the postmodern form. The opening song entitled ‘Sitting Here’ will further illustrate this point. When interviewed about the songs lyrical content, Dizzee explained that;

      Dizzee observes from his sitting place in the ghetto and notes in his lyrical content that;‘‘…it’s the same old story. Shotters, runners, katz and money stacks.’ In the same way that the flâneur would categorise social groupings found within the crowd, a process that Benjamin referred to as ‘socially dubious’, Dizzee has separated ghettoised society into; ‘shotters’ (drug suppliers), ‘runners’ (people who make drug deliveries), ‘katz’ (crack cocaine addicts and / or prostitutes) and ‘money stacks’ (stacks of money); in the same way that George Simmel and Benjamin describes the socially divided relations of the modern metropolis city as mediated by money. Dizzee sees the workings of the underworld drug economy divided and again mediated by money. However, the darkness of the ghetto paints a new and darker phantasmagoria; highly addictive narcotics lack the requirement of a colourful commodity fetishism associated with the Parisian shopping arcades. Therefore, the darkened marketplace of the frontline ghetto remains as gloomy as the narcotic substances that are sold there. This every day social interaction, from Dizzee’s perspective, remains the ‘same old story’, but what is interesting is his reflection in the following verse;

     To unearth the paradoxical meaning behind this I am going to turn to the theory of Jameson, as the overall reflection in the lyrical content is only extended until yesterday, where life was much more sweet, indicating a time-space-compression. Jameson himself noted about Benjamin’s account of alienating affects of modernity that;

      Jameson argues that the ‘breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms’ (Jameson, 1992, p.84), such as the ‘truth’ of a better tomorrow that the Enlightenment project aimed towards, has lead to the resulting fragmentation of the subject rather than the modern alienation of the subject. If the alienated flâneur could in a poetic sense become a hero of modernity then it would be quite understandable that Dizzees lyrical observations about his postmodern urban surroundings, from a fragmented perspective, can only be concluded in the ongoing question; ‘Wha Gwan?’ This inconclusive statement presents a symptom of Post-modern life that Jameson would culturally diagnose as ‘the Waning of Affect’.

     The symptoms of fragmentation are not only detectable in the lyrical content of Boy In Da Corner but also in the fast and bass heavy musical content produced by Dizzee. The genre ‘Grime’ itself pieces together fragmented elements of Reggae, Hip Hop, Garage and Drum and Bass music to create an entirely new sounds. However, Dizzee also incorporates fragmented elements of the urban environment into his musical mix. In the Telegraph’s review it states that;

     In the same way that the flâneur reordered the chaos of modernity into his own subjective poetic order to conquer his anxieties, Dizzee has reordered the fragmented chaos of postmodern chaotic pastiche of musical styles and the flux and rush of the inner city into his own innovative form of musical expression.

     In conclusion, Dizzee Rascal compliments De Certeau’s optimistic arguments that urban predeterminations can be overcome through the power of an agent’s free will and choices they make within the given game of structural rules. Social constructions predefined Dizzee’s space in the corner of the class room. Rationalised city planning and uneven development predetermined Dizzee’s housing space in London’s South Bo, and a history of oppression predetermined Dizzee’s lesser being as a black male in a white western society. However, as the flâneur rebelled against the changes bought about by high capitalism and rapid modernization, Dizzee rebelled and turned all the odds against into positives through the strength of his own will power. His awareness of darkness and light, detection and un-detection enabled him the power to place himself central within his own panopticon.If we are to accept that the flâneur is the hero of modernity then we should accept that Dizzee Rascal and the hooded rascal types he represents are quite possibly the hero’s of the postmodernity.

     Dizzee’s reward for being an un-docile body is the fact that he has now escaped the darkness of the ghetto and is now embraced by the limelight of global commercial success, the lime-light of the ultimate brightness. His actions are no longer the CCTV cameras of authoritarian surveillance but TV cameras from which we the panoptic pubic observe Dizzee as a celebrity success. Although my essay celebrates the success of this underdog story; one must remember also the thousands of unsuccessful ‘rascals’ who have been less successful in overcoming laws imposed by societies moral condemnation. Faneurism is a privilege endorsed by undetection and with that a privilege reserved for those who now dwell within an intensified darkness outside of the illumination of an Enlighten inspired society.

 Bibliography;

• Benjamin, W. (1938) The flâneur from The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire. in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1983), p. 35-66.
• Beudelaire, C. (1964, 1995) The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. London: Phaidon Press Limited.
• Booth, J. (2005) Blair backs ban on hooded sweatshirts (Online). Available from: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article521620.ece (Accessed 1 December 2007).
• Buck-Morss, S. (1991). The Dialects of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades projects. Cambridge: MA: MIT. Press.
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• De Certeau, M. (1980). Walking in the City. In (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Dizzee Rascal. (2003) Boy In Da Corner. London: Matador Records.
• Foucault, M. (1997) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London; Allen Lane.
• Highmore, B. (2005) Cityscape; cultural readings in the material and symbolic city. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Jameson, F. (1992). Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In Docherty, T. Postmodernism: a reader. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
• Shapiro, G. (2003) Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Poe, E,A. (1840). The Man of the Crowd. From: Selected Tales. (1993) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Tester, K. ed. (1994) The flâneur. London: Routledge.

I’m just sittin’ here
I aint sayin’ much I just gaze
I’m lookin’ into space while my CD plays
I gaze quite a lot
In fact I gaze always
And if I blaze
Then I’ll just gaze away my days

‘Cos it’s the same old story
Shotters, runners, katz and money stacks
‘Cos it’s the same old story
Ninja bikes, gunfights and scary nights
It’s the same old story
Window tints and gloves for fingerprints
It’s the same old story
Police investigate, now that area’s bate

‘Cos it was only yesterday
We was playin’ football in the street (remember man)
It was only yesterday
None of us could ever come to harm
It was only yesterday
Life was a touch more sweet
Now I’m sittin’ here
Thinkin’ Wha gwan?