Flaneur/euse

The flaneur is a key figure for understanding consumption, as he is linked with the experience of the phantasmagoria of the modern city and its commodities, leisure places, marketplaces, and shop displays.

The French word flanerie denotes the activity of ambling and strolling through the city without a specific purpose, if not that of observing and experiencing the city itself, its people, and its events. The person (typically male) who engages in this idling activity, the flaneur (or flaneuse, if female), is a figure who derives delight and pleasure from the life of the city streets, moving among the urban crowd with the watchful and critic eye of the artist. He is typically a well-dressed man, strolling leisurely through the arcades of the nineteenth-century Paris—at least in his first conceptualization. He is a shopper with no intentions to buy, considering and treating the people who pass and the objects he sees as texts for his own pleasure. This ambiguous city stroller and observer has become the epitome of the individual living in the metropolis, and a referent for understanding the urban condition and modernity.

The French poet Charles Baudelaire is the creator of this figure. For Baudelaire, the shock experience is at the center of the artistic work, and the city dweller, jostled by the city crowd, must remain ever vigilant. A plethora of stimuli bombard him, and the artist/flaneur surrenders to this intoxication that is an “intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers” (Benjamin 1983, 55). Thus, Baudelaire is the figure who gives voice to the shock and intoxication of modernity; he is the “lyric poet [Page 607]of the metropolis” (Gilloch 1996, 134). According to David Harvey,

In Walter Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire, flanerie stands for the production of meaning in modernity, in its typical observer-participant dialectic. Benjamin's flaneur is the urban idler who not only “reads” the city but also produces metropolitan texts. He enters the urban environment in a manner both detached and personal, transforming the city's exterior designs into an interior monologue, gazing on the entire scene and at the same time getting lost in the labyrinth. Much of Benjamin's research into the flaneur was inspired by the work of Georg Simmel, who notes that the relationships between members of a large city are more deeply influenced by the activity of the eye than of the ear. Thus, the figure of the flaneur is close to that of the artist, the detective, and the sociologist. For Benjamin, flanerie and the flaneur express the commodity culture of the nineteenth century.