Flâneur

Definition

The flâneur is the figure of the urban stroller — the detached but observant wanderer who experiences the modern city through the act of walking rather than the discipline of the map or the efficiency of transit. For Baudelaire, the flâneur is the "painter of modern life" who finds poetry in the crowd; for Benjamin, the flâneur is a historical figure whose habitat is the arcades and whose demise is sealed by Haussmannization and the commodity. The flâneur is a way of using the city that is irreducible to its functional grid — a practice of the everyday that prefigures both the Situationist dérive (wandering as critical method) and de Certeau's "walking in the city" as the tactical appropriation of space from below.

Teyssot's chapter adds the figure's interior double: the flâneur inside the room. The pairing is explicit — "Two kinds of experience have been defined: First is that of the dandy or flâneur, the man who has time to waste. He strolls in the streets, stopping at anything that happens, any event, any accident. The city and the crowd are a huge spectacle for him. Second, on the other side, is that of the philosopher, best personified by Kierkegaard, or the man within the bourgeois intérieur" (p. 347) — and Adorno's formula collapses them into one: Kierkegaard as "the flâneur who promenades in his room: 'the world only appears to him reflected by pure inwardness'" (p. 347). The flâneur's mode (strolling, spectating, wasting time) is conserved; only its venue changes — the boulevard replaced by the apartment, the crowd by the mirror. Where the street flâneur's spectacle is the city, the room-flâneur's is his own inwardness: the interior as the flâneur's private arcade, and boredom (rather than modernity's shock) as his affect. See inwardness, aesthetic-boredom.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — the flâneur as the hero of modernity; the arcade as flâneur-habitat.
• Baudelaire — the flâneur as the painter of modern life.
• Theodor W. Adorno — the interiorization: Kierkegaard as "the flâneur who promenades in his room," the world appearing "only… reflected by pure inwardness" (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, 1933, quoted p. 347).
• Georges Teyssot — the two kinds of experience: the street flâneur and "the man within the bourgeois intérieur" as boredom's twin social figures (1996/2006).

Related Concepts

• Arcades — the native habitat of the 19th-century flâneur.
• Psychogeography — the method that descends from flânerie.
• Dérive — the Situationist radicalization of flânerie.
• Modernity — the condition the flâneur navigates and embodies.
• Inwardness — the room-flâneur's regime: the interiority in which the promenading philosopher's world appears.
• Aesthetic Boredom — the flâneur's shared affect across both venues: the man "who has time to waste" in the street and the man who wastes it in the room.
• Everyday Life — the practice-domain both figures inhabit: strolling as the everyday's unmotivated use of space.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — the flâneur and the experience of the modern city.
• Boredom and Bedroom (Teyssot 1996/2006) — the interior double: "Two kinds of experience have been defined: First is that of the dandy or flâneur, the man who has time to waste… The city and the crowd are a huge spectacle for him. Second, on the other side, is that of the philosopher, best personified by Kierkegaard, or the man within the bourgeois intérieur" (p. 347); "Theodor Adorno called Kierkegaard the flâneur who promenades in his room: 'the world only appears to him reflected by pure inwardness'" (p. 347); Adorno's further anatomy — the window-mirror occupant "solitary, inactive, and separated from the economic processes of production" (p. 347). The flâneur's venue-shift (street → room) as boredom's geography. See inwardness, aesthetic-boredom.
• source-notes/hedges-2018-the-waiting-room