09 JULY 2002: Walter
Benjamin on the flâneur

FROM “FRAGMENTS
OF THE PASSENGWERK”:

“There was the pedestrian
who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flâneur
who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman
of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against
the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also
his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable
to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flâneurs liked to
have the turtles set the pace for them.” 1938

“The street becomes a dwelling
for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses
as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of
businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to
the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses
his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés
are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work
is done.”1938

“The crowd was the veil from
behind which the the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur.
In it, the city was now landscape, now a room. And both of these went into
the construction of the department store, which made use of flânerie
itself in order to sell goods. The department store was the flâneur’s
final coup. As flâneurs, the intelligensia came into the market place.
As they thought, to observe it – but in reality it was already to find
a buyer. In this intermediary stage…they took the form of the bohème;.
To the uncertainty of their economic position corresponded the uncertainty
of their political function.” 1935

“These writings were socially
dubious, too. The long series of eccentric or simple, attractive or severe
figures which the physiology presented to the public in character sketches
had one thing in common: they were harmless and of perfect bonhomie. Such
a view of one’s fellow man was so remote from experience that there were
bound to be uncommonly weighty motives for it. The reason was an uneasiness
of a special sort. People had to adapt themselves to a new and rather strange
situation, one that is peculiar to big cities. Simmel has felicitously
formulated what was involved here. ‘Someone who sees without hearing is
much more uneasy than someone who hears without seeing. In this there is
something characteristic of the sociology of the big city. Interpersonal
relationships in big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance
of the activity of the eye over the activity of the ear. The main reason
for this is the public means of transportation. Before the development
of buses, railroads and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never
been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or
even hours without speaking to one another’.”1938

“On his peregrinations the
man of the crowd lands at a late hour in a department store where there
are still many customers. He moves about like someone who knows his way
around the place…If the arcade is the classical form of the intérieur,
which is how the flâneur sees the street, the department store is
the form of the intérieur’s decay. The bazaar is the last hangout
of 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 merchandise as he had once roamed through the
labyrinth of the city…The flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd.
in this he shares the situation of the commodity.”1938

THANKS TO JOHN C.!