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The Flâneur; from the Arcade to the Shopping Mall. From Modernity to Post-Modernity.
Author: James Addicott
In 1938 Walter Benjamin wrote his essay on ‘The Flâneur’ as part of an analysis of Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire’s. In Baudelaire’s essay; ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Baudelaire ‘calls forth a poetic – and a poet’s – vision of the public places and spaces of Paris’ (Tester, 1994, p. 1), consequently coining the term; ‘modernity’. Benjamin, was himself associated with of a group of left wing Marxist intellectuals; the Frankfurt School. Benjamin used Baudelaire’s poet, or the figure of the flâneur, as a metaphorical device for understanding the cultural impact that high capitalism had on Parisians during the mid nineteenth century. Benjamin’s essay works as a response to Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s ‘concept city’. Haussmann’s newly designed Paris worked two fold, on one hand it; allowed wide avenues for increased traffic flow with an aim of increasing the flow of commodities, and on the other hand it provided wider streets making it easier for the authority to respond to any forms of potential public revolt, in response to the 1848 Paris revolution. In a similar fashion to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (in reference to; ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1944)), Benjamin saw the standardising process capitalism coupled with the logic of rational and order produced by this Enlightenment inspired design, as a detrimental totalising process. |
| With this in mind, Benjamin turned his attention to the urban phenomenon of the arcade, or as he termed it; ‘the original temple of commodity capitalism’ (as quoted in Buck-Morss, 1991 p.83). The arcades glass covered passageway filled with shops, commodities, consumers, and prostitutes, provided the luxurious intérieur for the flâneur. The flâneur’s were petty-bourgeois figures who, in defiance of high capitalism, would stroll and observe the crowd of commodity intoxicated consumers; “The intoxication to which the Flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers.” (Benjamin, 1938, p. 55) As the commodity remains alienated from the consumers, so to the flâneur chooses to remain alienated and isolated. |
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| Benjamin was particularly interested in the literature produced by the Flâneur, the physiologies du flâneur. According to Benjamin, these physiologies were used by the Flâneur as feuilleton to ‘turn the boulevard into an intérieur.’ (1938, p. 37) Benjamin, like Georg Simmel, took the view that the modern city produced alienated social relationships fundamentally based solely around money and the division of labour. For this reason Benjamin saw this literature of the physiologies as ‘socially dubious’ (1938, p.37.), rather than telling the truth of the situation; ‘the Physiologies helped fashion the phantasmagoria of Parisian life in their own way.’ (1938, p.39.) The phantasmagoria, as James Donald explains, was for Benjamin; ‘closely linked to the logic of capitalism as the ‘concept city’ of the rationalist planners and reformers’ (1992, p.440). The physiologies re-produced social categorisations which Benjamin a likened to Poe’s early invention of the detective story; ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (Poe, 1840). |
To assess the critical relevancy of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary culture studies, and its usefulness for understanding life in contemporary city’s, I am draw from the work of two post-modern theorists, namely Michele Foucault and Fredric Jameson. I am going to argue that Benjamin’s essay presents itself to us as a historic milestone from which we can trace the continuing process of standardisation and the continuing effects produced by the rational logic of the Enlightenment era, in the evolution from the arcade, to the department store, to the contemporary shopping mall.
The first step that Benjamin identifies, in the demise of the flâneur’s intérieur, is the introduction of the department store; |
‘If the arcade is the classical form of the intérieur, which is how the flâneur sees the street, the department store is the form on the intérieur’s decay. The bazaar is the last hangout for the flâneur. If in the beginning the street had become an intérieur for him, now this intérieur turned into a street, and he roamed through the labyrinth of the merchandise as he had once roamed through the labyrinth of the city.’
(Benjamin, 1938, p. 54) |
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| The flâneur can find no home in the department stores of Paris, the department store, as a newer environment, with its only emphasis being on commodity shopping alone, provides an intérieur that leaves the flâneur disinterested. Priscilla Parkhurst Furgeson notes of the flâneur that; ‘He haunts the arcades, he does not buy. He consumes the city…’ (1994, p.28). The city’s intersecting arcades provided a crowd, the department store provided a city of merchandise, the flâneur interest was in the solely crowd and the city. The development of the department store and its emphasis on commodity shopping was identified by Benjamin as the first step in the demise of the flâneur.
The power of the flâneur was his ability to gaze, as Parkhurst Furgeson explains; ‘The flâneur’s field of action is encompassed by his field of vision.’ (1994, p.27) The flâneur found within himself a hiding place, a dark alienated corner where he could sketch his own existential observations of the crowd. However, the gaze of the flâneur, or the armature detective, is one that was soon to be monopolised, as Benjamin originally noted; |
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“Technical measurements had come to the aid of the administrative control process. In the early days of the process of identification… the identity of a person was established through his signature. The invention of photography was a turning point in the history of this process… Photography has made it possible to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being.”
(Benjamin, 1938, p. 48) |
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| The present-day technical measurements associated with the process of identification have advanced far beyond the levels of comprehension that anyone of Benjamin’s era could have possibly envisioned. The introduction in-store surveillance technology of the shopping-mall actuality provides us the physical manifestation of Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptic schema. Before I discuss this, it is important to note that Benjamin makes reference to another identifying process; ‘The numbering of houses in the big city’s may be used to document the progressive standardisation.’ (1938, p.47.) At the beginning of ‘Discipline and Punish’ Foucault writes of the quarantine process undertaken during the plague in the mid seventeenth century, Foucault, quoting Bentham, states; ‘The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the view point of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised’. (1997, p.60-64). Keith Tester points out that; “Benjamin was in no doubt that house-numbering was a measure intended to pin down to a single place and meaning every face in the city. And such pinning down makes flânerie impossible since it establishes meaning and order of things in advance.” (1992, p.14) The ability to number, separate and identify individuals is documented within the texts of Benjamin, Bentham and Foucault and continues to exist in the planning of post-modern city’s. |
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The ability to disguise ones self, in the space of the mall, is increasingly becoming an impossibility and the ability to remain undetected in the mall has become solely a privilege of the mall’s in-store detectives. In 2005 there was a media debate over Britain’s largest shopping Mall; ‘Bluewater’, as they announced a ban on ‘wearing hooded sweatshirt tops and baseball caps in public.’ (Booth, 2005, Available from: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article521620.ece) From a Benjamin / Foucauldian perspective, within this Panoptic space of the mall, the face has now emerges as the new signature. Our presence is recorded in the process of identification with the introduction of new surveillance technology. The flâneur of the nineteenth century would no longer be able to immerse himself within a crowed sea of hats. They have been banned as a requirement of identification, removing mystery of the crowd that go along with them. In a continuing rationalising process, from the signature, to the house number, to the photograph to the face; the mall is the Enlightenments new order over chaos. Tester notes; ‘with rationalisation, all mystery is removed from the city.’ (Tester, 1994, p.14) It was of course, the mystery that motivated the flâneur and a mystery that only those central to the Panopticon schema may possess. |
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The flâneur was the ‘hero of modernity’, the man of leisure who resisted capitalisms requirement for a division of labour, the ability to casually stroll and reorder the chaos, to suit himself through his poetry, was what made him a hero. However, since then loitering ( and perhaps even strolling) have become mindless pursuits associated, like hoodies and hats, with criminality, Zyfmut Bauman states of the shopping-mall; ‘Aimlessness is mortal sin and capital crime, something it has sworn to burn out, or better still strangle at birth.’ (1994, p.149). Our conduct defined for us in the space of the shopping mall is of course is shopping and not flânerie, or any of the characteristics associated with it.
In Jameson’s writings on post-modern warfare, in response to Michael Herrs book on the experience of Vietnam; ‘Dispatches’ – he mentions that; |
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‘Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire, and the emergence of modernism from a new experience of city technology which transcends all the older habits of bodily perception, is both singularly relevant here, and singularly antiquated, in the light of this new and virtually unimaginable quantum leap in technological alienation:’
(Jameson , 1992, p. 84) |
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The alienation of modernity that Benjamin spoke of can no longer exist for Jameson, who states that; ‘The shift in the dynamics of culture pathology can be characterized as one in which alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject.’ Since the ‘breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms’ (1992, p.84) and the expanse of global third phase capitalism, aided by the invention of the information highway, has lead to a compression of time and space in a new global society; we inhabit a new space – the postmodernist space of the global village. The simulation of the shopping-mall resembles the simulation of post-modern war. We embody the discourse as guests within the globally institutionalised shopping mall. From Jameson’s post-modern Marxist perspective, if there are areas in the mall where we can feel the nostalgia of nineteenth century France, we can only accept that this feeling of nostalgia has been pre-designed into the simulated experience. |
In conclusion, if we take on Benjamin and Foucault analysis of Haussmann and Bentham’s Enlightenment inspired architectural designs, coupled with the understanding of the standardising requirements of capitalism that have been identified in Benjamin’s essay, upon reflection, we can see the logical progression from the development of the arcades in Paris in an era of modernity to the shopping malls of the post-modern era. By taking some of the basic elements of Jameson’s argument, we can see how the design of the hyper-simulated space of the shopping-mall continues to refine and secure the shopping experience of consumers. Key elements of the earlier arcade that Benjamin writes of; the gaze, the prostitution, the loitering, have been ‘designed out’ from the conceptual space of the shopping-mall but continue to exist within contemporary society. De Certeau remarks; ‘The city is left prey to contradictory movements that counter-balance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power.’ (1980, p. 95) Benjamin’s essay ‘The Flâneur’ was left incomplete after his death in 1940, and there are still differences of opinion over Benjamin’s intentions, however, his analysis of Baudelaire gives us fantastic documentation era of rapid changes in city planning, which we can genealogically trace back, as I have now, and understand the economic and cultural roots of the present era of third phase capitalism have established themselves. |
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.
- Buck-Morss, S. (1991). The Dialects of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades projects. Cambridge: MA: MIT. Press.
- Donald, J. (1992) The City as Text. in Bocock, R and Thompson, K. ed. (1992). Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- De Certeau, M. (1980). Walking in the City. In (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- 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.
- Le Corbusier, (1933) The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of our Machine-Age Civilisation. New York: Orion Press, 1964
- 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.
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