Street Art - Alternative Stadterfahrung und Kunst im urbanem Raum (German Edition)

The Art of Taking a Walk

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Toward a Theory of Literary Flanerie 3 Chapter 2. The City of Modernity: Shifting Perspectives, Urban Transitions 23 Chapter 3. The Art of Walking: Reflections of Berlin 63 Chapter 5. A Short Phenomenology of Flanerie Chapter 8. Women on the Screens and Streets of Modernity: In Search of the Female Flaneur Chapter Weimar Women, Walkers, Writers: The mode of flanerie can be considered a pivotal expression and disposition of its times as well as the means whereby, from early industrial modernity on, the literature and film of flanerie defined themselves.

Flanerie was in fact coincidental with what was perhaps the most accelerated capitalist development in modern history, one that resulted in the emergence of various new dispositions, rapid urbanization and industrialization, and an increased influence of the visual upon our experience of reality. It is connected to such contemporary issues as the interpretation of images, visual literacy, power and public space, the female gaze, and the cultural definition of identity. It seeks to revise and expand approaches to modernity, perception, and representation formulated by critics and theorists such as Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer in their efforts to define a visual epistemology of the city and its exteriority.

It argues that the flaneur, as a product of modernity, experiences city streets as interiors, its traffic and commodities as images of reflection. In addition, the study sketches the European cultural context that produced the German variant of the flaneur, reconstructing the history of this privileged mode in the modern perception of exteriority. Following the lead of the recent work by Dana Brand, Susan Buck-Morss, and David Frisby, I will rehistorize the flaneur by trying to clarify the important cultural and visual connections between writings and representations of the Weimar period and the central literary, philosophical, sociological, political, historical, and cultural texts or movements of this period.

The project thus contributes to a broader understanding of the specific cultural context within which this figure emerged, and thereby helps redefine our conception of the intersections among modernity, vision, and public spaces. Within the movement of this process, I suggest above all the extent to which the writings of flanerie may be read as both symptomatic and critical of the prevailing cultural rhetorics through which the discourses of this period reflected on their own relation to the exteriors and interiors of flanerie.

Flanerie can be said to involve a mode of sensory experience that is bound to the processes of distraction but which works to overcome this alienation through intense visual perception. In these early Weimar texts, the flaneur appears in various forms, often in relation to other figures of modernity, such as the collector, the historian, or the spectator.

As a city stroller, the flaneur is at once a dreamer, a historian, and a modern artist, someone who transforms his observations into texts and images. Even so, the flaneur continues to define himself in terms of his insistence on the process of walking and writing that characterizes his subjectivity. Flanerie embraces both surrealistic and impressionistic sensibilities, the intoxication with images as icons of modern mythology, and an increased attention to the light and textures of big city environments.

Ultimately, flanerie gives way to a perceptual inner monologue, a visual stream-of-consciousness that is translated into writing and images. Focusing primarily on texts by Heinrich Heine and E. Similarly, the flanerie of authors in Berlin illuminates the everyday reality of the Weimar Republic as much as it forms the conceptual background of numerous theories and perceptions of metropolitan sociology by Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, Georg Simmel, and other representatives of Weimar literature, arts, and theory.

Finally, I emphasize the multitude of forms that Paris, the original city of flanerie, brings forth as a variety of perceptions within this new disposition. Hessel is one of the last representatives of the metropolitan, intellectual bohemian characteristic of the European culture of early modernity. In Berlin, Hessel is known as the editor of a major publishing house, an author in his own right, and a close and sensitive observer of the popular and intellectual culture of the Weimar Republic whose work provides access to the intellectual history of Weimar Germany.

This unique mode for the reception of reality perceives passersby, streets, and fleeting impressions as the transitory signs of modernity. These texts provide new models for a veritable reading of reality in which faces, streets, and scenes become semiotic extensions of modernity, texts that demand close and sympathetic interpretation. In this part I argue that the flaneur, in the process of strolling, sets out to perceive everyday life as a three-dimensional screen whose images he projects immediately into his unique form of literature.

In tracing this process, I suggest that the dream state of flanerie has much in common with filmic reception and its hypnosis, reverie, and hunger for experience [Erfahrungshunger], suggesting that we can observe a renaissance of flanerie and its sensibilities in West German literature since the s, that is, since the so-called New Subjectivity.

Through the optic of flanerie, New Subjectivity can be seen as a move toward radical exteriority. Another pivotal moment within the history of flanerie forms a final, yet crucial focus of this book which I explore and expand in my fourth part: I would like to express my special thanks to J. I am grateful to the many inspired and insightful students who have attended my courses on German cinema and Weimar culture at Princeton, among them Alicia Dwyer, Chi Yoon Chung, and Anne B.

I would also like to thank my colleague Walter Hinderer for facilitating this work with his unfailing support and generosity. Thanks is due to Eduardo Cadava for helping to edit the final version of the English text, while at the same time doing everything in his power to prevent the completion of this project altogether. I am very much indebted to the care and stylistic grace that Talia Bloch has taken with this manuscript over the better part of two summers. For many gestures of kindness and words of encouragement offered during the passage of this text toward completion, I would like to express a strong sense of gratitude to my always supportive friends and colleagues: Schindler, Jorg Schweinitz, Robert B.

It is dedicated to Carlos Antonio Briz, for everything that is possible and for everything that he is. All translations are by Anke Gleber, unless otherwise indicated. Going on infinite investigations through the streets and promenades; drifting along, with your nose in the wind, with both hands in your pockets, and with an umbrella under your arm, as befits any open-minded spirit; walking along, with serendipity, without pondering where to and without urging to hurry.

At the same time, they slowly pursue their own trajectories, considering reality with their own careful gaze. As a modern author, the flaneur regards these new images as texts in their own right. Flanerie assumes the sense of a contemporary disposition that becomes a privileged way of recording the exterior world and phenomena of its times.

This innovative access to the world is reflected in the enthusiasm and fascination with which Fournel, as only one representative among many modern authors, begins to perceive these images and scenes as writings of the street, at once embracing the literary and visual sensitivities evoked by the figure of the flaneur. It therefore remains to be seen how the various impulses of flanerie, as a privileged mode of perceiving modernity and its many realities, have always already been present in various forms in both literary and cinematic culture.

That flanerie has been conspicuously absent from histories of perception and literature means that these histories need to be approached in new ways as a largely uncharted territory. Flanerie, this amiable science. The aim of this investigation is to pursue those very imperceptible, yet significant traces of a cultural history and aesthetics of modernity that are captured through the eyes of the flaneur. Tracing the movement of this paradigmatically modern figure, I will suggest that the flaneur is the precursor of a particular form of inquiry that seeks to read the history of culture from its public spaces.

However, this would only be a pleading that follows by the rules. How heavy-handed and absurd an enterprise! I would much rather approach this matter in a much more facile way. The topic will not lose its pertinence, and the reader may even gain as many insights in this process as the author will. So let me therefore. Part 1 therefore reads texts that represent some of the possible stations on a historical tour aimed at following the path of flanerie from the beginnings of the nineteenth century through what we call modern culture.

This part follows the outlines of tenuous yet prevailing connections that link the traces of flanerie to certain contours of cultural history. Taking its first steps, this excursion will return to a few precursors of flanerie in nineteenth-century literature, and situate these early urban dwellers within their specific time frame, that is, in relation to the industrial revolution and the ensuing evolution of cityscapes, urban constellations, and conditions of perception that surround them.

I will explore the foundations of a modern age that give rise to a movement that reaches well into the twentieth century. The visual phenomena of modernity and their related manifestations will be revisited in the specific social, material, and theoretical shapes that they take in the metropolitan sphere of the Weimar Republic, returning to a Berlin that is only beginning to become the pivotal urban center of early twentieth-century German culture.

The return to this lost history of flanerie will be helped by the writings of such seminal thinkers as Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and of many other city dwellers, on the relation between flanerie and modernity. These writers view flanerie as a visible mode of writing, as an aesthetics of reflection in, through, and of images—as Denkbilder.

Within this extended lineage of modernity, the works of Franz Hessel hold a privileged position. As the course of the inquiry will show, flanerie is very closely related to other constructions of cultural modernity. Linked to the movements and images that belong to the processes of tourism, photography, and psychoanalysis, it ultimately charts an aesthetics of modernity that reveals its affinities to the medium of the cinema and its reception of exterior reality.

The flaneur personifies a perspective that links many of these phenomena of modernity, serving above all as a visual medium of perception and subjectivity in human form. He represents a disposition that is closely affiliated with the gaze of the camera, renders the sensitivity of a director who records his own vision, and repeats the spectatorship of a moviegoer who perceives the images of reality as an ongoing film of modernity.

It should be said that this film of modernity includes women as well. For most German writers of the early nineteenth century, the pursuit of such novel experiences inevitably involves a journey to cities, and not just to any city but to Paris, the most advanced and pronouncedly modern city in Europe. One of the earliest traces of an art of flanerie in German literature can be found in the letters that Heinrich von Kleist wrote from his sojourns and excursions to Paris, and later to Berlin. These texts represent notes of a flanerie quasi de negativo, recorded by a disturbed and shocked observer who became a city traveller almost against his will.

For the most part, Kleist deplores the effects of modernity, of a mobility that disturbs the travelling leisure of horse coaches and strolls in the countryside that he so often treasured and praised. He prefers to seek out sites that provide sweeping views of the city from above. Embedded in its landscape, the city becomes a cultural sign enshrined in nature. From the height of this removed perspective in May , Kleist describes the sight of Dresden in its environs as an auratic work of art: The members of this society set out on their expeditions in order to further civilized discourse, rather than to experience the changing and evolving life of their cities and times.

In the fall of , he considers Berlin to be merely a limited distraction for the traveller in transit: He declares even the capital of the nineteenth century to be devoid of stimuli that might resonate in his mind and interests: With this next generation of travelling writers came a wave of reporting from Paris by authors who moved quickly to capture and appreciate the more recent, often conflicting, and decidedly confusing stimuli of urban life with all of their newly liberated senses.

Around the time of the July Revolution in , these expatriate Germans began to understand the shifting signs of the city as indicators of political change and democratic possibilities in the liberal capital of their century. From the early nineteenth century on, their visual observations, working as a screen for cultural considerations, became an important and formative aspect of their journalistic writings.

As a direct reaction to such restrictive prescriptions, their emphasis on the phenomena of public surfaces and exterior realities may have involved a subversive intent. Scrutinizing even the most minute details of their society, they produced observations that were charged with political significance, even if they seemed initiated by or packaged in the guise of an interest in the marginal, the mundane, or the merely contemporary. In this way, a form of writing that emphasizes the visual focus of literature arose specifically from the authors of a liberal opposition, in response to the restoration and oppression of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Defining themselves as writers and reporters, they consistently referred to each other as latent flaneurs in an unknown sphere. Benjamin would soon link this figure of the ragpicker or chiffonnier to that of the flaneur, a figure who scavenges for sights, who collects a plenitude of observations and subsists largely on his status as a public witness. Another correspondent appears to follow similar impulses in declaring his intention to present his travels as a compendium of pictures from a different and diverse society, to describe in detail the housing conditions of Paris, and to render an illustrative signature of the daily conditions of another population in the spaces in which it lived.

This francophile traveller and recorder—an observer with a particular interest in the nuances of the everyday and a physiognomic eye for the furnishings and architectural structures, for the interiors and exteriors of the daily life of a culture—has been known by a name that is nearly programmatic for this movement, Richard Otto Spazier. He and his contemporary precursors in flanerie delineated the close affinities that this sensitivity shares with the emerging modes of journalism and with its minute reporting of contemporary details.

The frames that these authors chose for their journalistic work served to legitimize their dual pursuits: The text that he assembles from this kaleidoscope of impressions reflects the very obsessions that characterize an emerging flanerie: His collection of the details of gossip, statements, and facts forms a kind of journalistic recherche in the street. As the following passage suggests, this perspective involves the effort to register the new relations between economy and the display of its commodities: It is a matter of a minute, of a step, to let the forces of attraction come into play.

Turning toward the streets and its images, Borne arrived at an aesthetics that perceives the realities of the street as a text that always already formulates itself: This expanding text of exterior reality, the city with its multiple stimuli, its multiplying shocks and signs, shapes the accompanying means and media that register and render these multiple and multiplying images.

These new optics begin to formulate forms of visual discourse that are flexible and sensitive enough to approach these new spheres and to continue changing with them. These texts and reports constitute an emerging genre that represents the literary and aesthetic equivalent to an age of increasing industrialization. They enter the literary market as local accounts of the city and provide informed guidance to its ever-expanding possibilities. At the same time, these urban eyewitness reports also reflect an immediate fascination with the technical innova- 12 CHAPTER 1 tions that are changing perception and expanding the city for all time.

These walking physiologists are particularly attracted to the spectacle of new forms of lighting. Their sense of excitement, illuminating the sense of space at work within their physiologies, can be read in texts such as Paris en Gaz, or Paris bei Sonnenschein und Lampenlicht Parts by Sunshine and Lamplight. Exploring the figures of his imagination within the multifold attractions that the streets present to him, he guides his reader to the point of sensory confusion and intellectual disturbance.

These figures search out the secrets and mysteries inherent in the limits of an expanding civilization of the everyday. They explore the mystery and miracle of the modern city rather than retreat to any romanticized sense of nature. At first a lesser cousin—superficially the personification of an anti-flaneur—Hoffmann ascribes to this persona all of the dispositions that would belong to the city-flaneur. As he notes in one of his first responses: Entitled Berlin , this extended study of city life focuses on the political aspects of Prussian society: Dronke opens his text with a space that will later become significant for filmic approaches to Berlin: Prefiguring the moves of urban symphonies with their tracking and aerial shots, these instances of observation reconcile the WA L K I N G T E X T S 15 foundations of flanerie in the nineteenth century with new codes of vision yet to come.

He not only reads the stories of passersby from their faces but also the very appearance of the city as a text from which to read a history in the streets. Dronke proceeds primarily to describe the marginal existences of city life: In immense letters that one can discern and read from hundred steps away, they shine over the distance. Therein consists the entire secret of the great attraction which life in this city holds for everyone and everywhere. In particular, the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire became visible influences on German literary and theoretical thought.

Strolling and observing, the flaneur is therefore a kind of detective of the streets who, by his association with the suspicious circumstances of the public sphere, comes to be regarded as a conspicuous presence in the crowd himself. WA L K I N G T E X T S 17 We should add here that for many of these male authors—whether they be flaneurs, voyeurs, or detectives—the visual pursuit of the evasive and conflicting aspects of the city becomes personified above all in the figure of the woman who passes in the street.

The Augenblick takes on the face of an attraction that is embodied in the momentary passante, a focal image for the transitoriness of a street life that Benjamin reads in the writings of Charles Baudelaire as a paradigm of modern experience and perception. Baudelaire expresses similar epiphanies in a cycle of poems that is dedicated to this fleeting mode of urban perception.

His Tableaux parisiens present the city as a veritable landscape of vision, a paysage of modernity. This expansion of literary space in turn lets us view even the seeming banalities of modernity as poetic matter: Surrounded by the dawn of modernity, Baudelaire sees its poetry 18 CHAPTER 1 rising to the occasion like a sun that comes to illuminate all of its phenomena alike: Il ennoblit le sort des choses les plus viles. Previous notions of traditional plot begin to give way here to a rendering of images in their own right in the course of being perceived. The street as it is takes precedence over the construction of other story lines.

The very spatiality of the modern city gives form to the narrative and structure of his book. Announcing an addiction—albeit a moderate one—to the dreams induced by these images, Raabe proves himself to be yet another precursor of a literature of flanerie—albeit a sedentary and still limited one. The art of taking a walk becomes further differentiated as modernity takes its course and the twentieth century approaches.

With his techniques for bringing together his inner monologue and exterior perception, Dujardin helped to shape the trajectory of modern narratives. His mental experiments and visual inquiries in fact anticipated a modernist aesthetics that we often associate with James Joyce. These images often beckon the narrator into the narrow side alleys of the city. Visual signs of the transition into modern reality, they at the same time preserve their origins in a calmer and more contemplative era.

The privilege of Munich is transferred to his Pariser Romanze Paris Romance and, in the course of the Weimar Republic, these modes of perceiving the city lead to an extended exploration of the mysteries of its capital, Heimliches Berlin Secret Berlin. This site of secrets is revealed, according to Hessel, by looking at its transient scenes and illuminated boulevards, by sudden perspectives into side streets and oblique insights into the public sphere.

The Novel of the City. Sharing the time of these novel images of modernity, the space of the street assumes the status of a pivotal cultural location for contemporary theoretical thought and philosophical reflection. As a modern sensibility, flanerie is not limited to any particular series of written texts. The image of the street in fact functions as a formative figure of thought in contemporary reflections of modern culture such as the Kino-Debatte, a series of extended Weimar debates around the cinema as its newest medium of vision.

Courtesy of Marquand Library. The primary importance of urban space to this movement requires that we consider a number of crucial steps in the innovation and modernity of this new setting. Within this vast and increasingly complex conglomerate of people and styles, we can differentiate certain characteristic social types—among them, the particularly rarified and aestheticized, style-conscious and visually-obsessed types of the dandy, the snob, and the flaneur. The city and its many modern realities are both the catalyst and the representation of an innovative inventory of images, a spectacle of new phenomena and unseen sensations.

This visual dynamics allows us to see the emergence of the flaneur as a direct function of the multiple differentiations that the exterior surfaces of modern cities reflect. This process of nervous, or sensory, intensification brings humans to define themselves increasingly as visual sensitivities subjected to an array of unforeseeable exterior stimuli within their environment and culture.

To the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological conditions—with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational, and social life—it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatures dependent on differences, a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence.

M, His definition of the changing conditions of modernity puts its emphasis on factors that are constitutive of and derived from an aesthetics and perception of the city. Faced with an enormous number of rapidly changing images, the inhabitant of modernity experiences the visual domain as a primary factor in the quality of his urban life.

With every walk across the street, public space is realized as the central location wherein a perception of its phenomena must be situated. Simmel suggests that these images are provided by the streets. As the primary source of images, streets name the site of an ever increasing, mutually reinforcing kaleidoscope of the city. This dynamics multiplies the expanding visual aspects of modern reality as they begin to manifest themselves not only in advertisements, billboards, posters, placards, store signs, shop fronts, and display windows but also in the multitude of commodity forms and shapes, fashions and architectures that the city offers in its sights and its traffic.

On July 29, , in the meandering syntax of a single sentence—that is to say, in one extended breath of perception—Kleist writes in one of his travel letters about Paris: Ever so often, I am walking through the streets, my eyes wide open, and I see—lots of ludicrous, even more abominable things, and eventually something beautiful.

I walk through the long, crooked, narrow.

I twist myself through heaps of humans, screaming, running, panting, pushing each other, hitting, and turning around without complaining, I look at someone, he looks back. Kleist is exposed to this fast and surfaceoriented mode of perception, even as he resists being drawn into it.

By adding ever newer stimuli, and expanding them even further through the extended means of technological amplification—print, electricity, and rapid transit, for example— this quantitive increase results in a distinct and innovative quality of sensation.

The flaneur engages in a spectacle of dandyism that expands his field of vision with an increasing sense of differentiation. His openness to the perception of stimuli and associations leads to the high degree of sensitization that defines his project. With all of his being, he refuses to participate in a modern system of productivity and rational labor that orients itself according to the values of usefulness and marketability. He resists these modern developments with his drifting and shifting, deliberately nonjudgmental and noncalculatory existence.

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Viewing time as a continuum for his unmeasured drifting, he uses his time deliberately and generously. A kind of ambiguous kaleidoscope that brings together an obsessive attention to detail with a distinct defiance of modern exactitude, the flaneur works to resist some of the constrictions of capitalist modernity. Flanerie is characterized by its very receptive disposition, a mode of embracing rather than of excluding external impulses.

Refusing to go along with given interpretations of the impressions that he receives, the flaneur insists on the free range of a subjective gaze that leads him to an unprecedented experience of unforeseeable phenomena. Privileging perception and freedom of movement, he defines a site and perspective of resistance that perseveres in the anonymous presence of modernity. This impersonality, he suggests, appears primarily as a protective reaction, one that is aimed at decreasing the vulnerability and susceptibility of modern man to the proliferation of objects and phenomena.

On July 18, , he notes the new social dynamics that accompany this shift in human interactions, this seeming increase in indifference: In the city men are too scheming. Actors, that is what they are. He arrives on the scene as a spectator who displays an equal interest in all the phenomena of exterior reality. Instead, it resists this contemporary tendency in favor of an acute sharpening of his overall sense of attentiveness. Moreover, the flaneur also participates in what Simmel views as the most significant aspect of intellectual city life: The very differentiation of these fields and their images provides the vast visual materials of his extended perception.

The atmosphere of modernity that gives rise to the flaneur comes into being by a paradox of interrelated, yet contradictory phenomena: Simmel already indicates the possibility of such shifts in point of view: Responding to the cultural conditions of modern realities, the flaneur and the dandy form versions of an ultimate, if in many ways opposite, stylization of the self.

Their differentiation multiplies further with the rising numbers of noticeable and noteworthy stimuli, the encounters with more stylish and stylized passersby. The rise of an individual with a new sense of independence and heightened awareness of his mobility corresponds to the rise of the flaneur, whose spaces of perception and movement in the city characterize his singularity. The flaneur represents a perspective on modernity that is particularly partial to the visual registration of its multiple phenomena.

In his approach to the modern metropolis, Simmel defines modernity as an age of indifference, of reservation and specialization; the ostensible limitations of these positions at the same time stimulate an increase in seemingly reserved forms of perception. While the city reduces the previous forms of access to small-scale, small-space organizations of life, it also, through an abundance of anonymous, shocking phenomena, provokes new forms of response.

Human survival in modern traffic becomes a matter of the mere inches that may separate automobiles and railroads from pedestrian paths. The gaze that is directed toward other participants in the scene of traffic—participants who are either driving or driven, running or walking—becomes the focal point that structures all the angles and aspects of life in the street. A virtual arsenal of visual signs competes for the attention of passengers, pedestrians, and passersby: Faced with this very new terrain of complex and conflicting stimuli, more than ever the eye becomes the prevailing medium of attention and orientation.

It not only imparts a sense of spatial perception but it also determines the life of the city via the sheer multiplication of what can now be seen. The proliferation of visual phenomena is variously affected by the developments of modernity emerging from the conditions that determine its traffic: The cumulative effects of industrialization and centralization in the cities have introduced an enormous number of anonymous and diverse persons into public view. Never before have there been so many different people pursuing so many different purposes in so many different streets.

The interpersonal relationships [Verkehr] of people in big cities are characterized by a markedly greater emphasis on the use of the eyes than on that of the ears. The primacy of perception in the living conditions of modernity resonates in an ample array of technological phenomena and psychosocial reverberations.

They register a decaying consensus of social sense, a state of prevailing plurality and disorientiation. Periods of reduced clarity or consensus about the social or ideological rationales of their realities be they collectively experienced in the s of the Weimar Republic or in the New Subjectivity of the s seem to inspire a flanerie that, in its visual experience of reality— an experience that is constituted and transmitted by way of pictures of the exterior world, ranging from impressionist to surrealist styles of expression and reception—goes beyond rational insights. Modernity is characterized by its emphasis on the visual which appears as its primary and privileged sphere of perception.

Simmel suggests that this prevailing disposition is shaped by the process of seeing that takes place in the streets. With these material conditions, flanerie becomes imaginable as an all-day pursuit of everyday exteriors, precipitated by the expansion of improved gaslighting and the introduction of electrical illumination. These innovations provide from the mid-nineteenth century on an allencompassing lighting of the street, a public illumination that renders all the subjects that move in the streets increasingly visible.

The processes whereby the senses began to adapt to the conditions of modernity date back to the first increases in the intensity of light, brought about by the introduction of gas lighting in the s. These innovations in technology changed the cultural conditions of seeing as significantly as did the introduction of electric light in the s, which culminated in the first flickers of commercial neon lights and brought about the electric advertisements of the twentieth century. As the processes of illumination were transformed, the everyday perceptions of pedestrians adapted to an unprecedented intensity of light before they could differentiate and appreciate the nuances of this new visible world.

The eye would have to come to terms with its results. This initial, paradoxical disorientation prevails until the senses adapt to the altered level of light and come to accept, and expect, this new intensity as the norm of everyday experience. As the more recent technologies of illumination supercede earlier bearers of light from the age of romanticism, he even reacts in response to his anticipation of certain sensory expectations: I extinguish my candles. In the s, the technique of gas lighting, introduced some thirty years earlier, still merits close observation: This increase in illumination transforms the boulevards of the city, touched by the powers of light, into veritable living spaces of the streets.

The exterior of the street becomes a veritable showcase, a shopwindow turned inside out, an interior realm for the display of exterior commodities, slices of social life, and ever more differentiated phenomena of scopophilia, which together encourage the turn toward an aesthetic stance of leisurely contemplation. The noticeable spatialization of these passages relies on the new conditions of lighting that illuminate the streets as a specific form of urban space.

Beyond such physical circumstances, the visual, aesthetic, and philosophical implications of this new constellation in perception, a constellation on which Benjamin will be among the first to comment, cannot be overlooked. These forms of illumination open up the space for modern images, new sights, and visual sensations, which bring forth an increasing crowd of observers who now reflect on these images with an increased sensory attention.

Outlining wider spaces and bringing to light ever more and newer visual phenomena, these emerging methods of commodity presentation at the same time create visual forms that assemble these objects and images into ever-changing constellations. A consequence of the expansion of gaslight and the construction of boulevards, of the increase in shopping and the fascination of a wave of Paris tourism, the new storefronts of the city offer an extended screenlike surface of glass, transforming these walls of glass into spaces of light.

The resulting effect is one of a reflection, duplication, and multiplication of the phenomena in the street, a visual sphere that now encompasses everything from lights to objects to pedestrians. The fascination that surrealism will derive from this modern intoxication with the image emerges from the enigmatic character of transitional spaces— the cryptic Paris arcades or the expanded spaces of light on the boulevard— that transgress the line between interior and exterior spaces.

The more the streets could supply potential customers, the more the shops opened up to them.

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The gaze is solicited further by an increasing aestheticization in the decoration of stores, in window arrangements, advertising posters, and walking advertisements. The advance of mass media and the distribution of posters and other advertising images emerges at a time of rapid change to escalate these visual conventions. By , the color lithograph poster has already replaced previous techniques of wood and copper engravings with more modern, technologically reproduced commercial images.

Shifting constellations of the moving image are set into motion and circulation by human carriers of commercial appeals such as the sandwichmen, walking bodies that literally carry new signs and images with them into the street. As the metropolis of modernity in German culture, Berlin was among the first to introduce the new medium of advertising posters to its buzzing streets. The connections between capitalist markets, the concentration of cities, and the attendant shifts in the perception and display of these stimuli are in fact often commented upon by writers of the period: The emerging movement of Jugendstil served to elevate posters to a complex form of expression.

An entire spectrum of images, sights, and stimuli offered a new aesthetics, a new definition of art in the street, one in which art can inhabit the everyday reality of contemporary modernity. Within the perspective of a variety of commercial and material purposes, these new arts help to shape the as yet unmapped but pervasive scopophilia of modernity.

This hunger for visual experience finds common ground with the fundamentally visual disposition of modernity in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The search for new optical sensations reached its peak with the invention of the cinema, the formative technological manifestation of the scopophilia produced by the nineteenth century. Products of industrialization redefine habits of seeing that prevailed in preindustrial societies and, in so doing, change the worlds to be seen along with the spectators who see them. The development of the railroads and their influence on modes of perception ran parallel to what Simmel sees as the influence of modern traffic on the visual disposition.

Like other factors contributing to the intensity of urban perception, the invention of the railroad led to an increase in the number of stimuli to be encountered and perceived. This new orientation, defined by changes in technology throughout the nineteenth century, increasingly elevates space to the category of perception, the most prevalent category in modern experience and consciousness. Experiences therefore were rewritten as relative, as were the types and modes of sensory impressions to which contemporaries have already adapted in the streets of the city.

As the initial phase of shock and mourning for the loss of a former state of travel faded away, a new form of perception gradually came into being. The latent scopophilia that is legible in phenomena such as photography and the cinema derives from these same changes. This visual disposition was accelerated by the new ways of thinking and experiencing perception that emerged with railroad travel. The panoramic gaze of the railroad traveller links the sweeping rapidity and brevity of impressions with the heightened fascination of acute details that, rapidly flashing up, are emphasized in perception, leaving no traces except the ones left behind in the mind.

In the work of some of its earliest practitioners, photography also focuses its fascination on the most minute visual details, forms, and structures: As speed becomes constitutive of a panoramic gaze, the flaneur, too, defines himself in terms of the particular quality of his movement: If flanerie pursues a decidedly less speedy approach, one that is not accelerated technologically, it nevertheless presents another process of continuous movement, a similarly panoramic way of passing.

Suggesting a new rate of travel in opposition to the prevailing haste of his time, he encourages a fuller appreciation of single images within the fascination of the total panorama.

Like his nineteenth-century contemporaries, the flaneur believes that we will see less the more we accelerate our exposure to the world. He does remain partial, however, to the urban reality of modernity.

Dreher: Partizipation mit Kamera

This mode of optics manifests itself in the lines and tracks of the railroad, in the architecture of its train stations, and in the characteristic constructions of iron and glass that sustain these halls of transportation, all of which become representative locations of scopophilia. These industrialized constructions vastly expand the space that now submits to the full sunlight of day. They variously reflect the already multiplied effects of the artificial sources of lighting available during this time, and differentiate further the subtle nuances of minute shadows and contrasts of light fractured through the frames of their modernized lines of construction.

This impressionist approach begins to describe as well the modes of writing of those moderns who are susceptible to these effects of light. This inclination toward new ways of writing that highlight visual nuances appears above all in travel texts from Paris, texts whose texture reflects the subtle changes in illumination, from daylight in the streets to gaslit alleys to luxurious spaces bathed in the newest effects of electricity. In the economic domain, this impressionism can be seen in the commercial innovations of department stores as well as in the many new forms of advertising images in the streets.

These intricate labyrinths for the display of accessible commodities facilitate new avenues for the city and for the experience of flanerie. The primacy of the visual appears as a founding principle of this new commercial form: Likewise, the merchandise on display seduces the eye of the buyer primarily through its visual impression, through the broad appeal of the range of its products, through their variations in shape and color.

In this way, they provide the flaneur with a venue for both a critique of capitalism and an appreciation of its semiotics. The visual kaleidoscope of the city changes in accordance with the development of a new constellation of modern images: The pervasive web of the railroads reaches beyond the limits of its tracks in order to transform the physiognomy of the cities that surround them: Only a few traces of this new aesthetics can be found in a kind of literary realism that adheres to preconceived, teleological structures of plot.

Instead, it appears in a consciousness that, closely mapping the environs and realities of modernity, manifests itself in a specific set of texts that are dedicated to reading the experience of the flaneur. The figure of the flaneur presents himself as an all-encompassing medium of perception, a visual perspective that sensitively responds to the continuously changing conditions of modernity with the specific attention and openness of a new aesthetics.

Joining the images of an impressionistic, panoramic and photographic mode of seeing with the art of walking in the street—that is, an art of perception in motion, a quasi-filmic way of seeing—the flaneur becomes the human equivalent and corresponding medium of the unfolding visual multiplicity of modernity. Representing a perspective that is oriented toward exterior perception, he is as much a product of modernity as a producer of its images. His sensitivity to the objects and obsessions of this modernity renders him a significant kaleidoscope of his time.

Along with the resignation brought about by World War I, the confusion of a German revolution, and the uncertainty over the first years of Weimar democracy, it also reflects the insecurity provoked by technical innovations and the revolution in visual modes, both of which helped to increase the number of freely accessible images in the public sphere and external world of the Weimar metropolis. As Simmel suggests in his sociology of the senses, this quantitative increase of external stimuli is linked to a qualitative change in and destabilization of internal positions.

Mechanized office work now reflects the processes of a society in motion: The ultimate destination of these journeys into distraction is most often their continuation into the codified world of images, that is to say, the cinema. The posters swoop into the empty space. And once the images begin to emerge one after another, there is nothing left in the world besides their evanescence. One forgets oneself in the process of looking, and the huge dark hole is animated with the illusion [Schein] of a life that belongs to no one and exhausts everyone.

This boredom develops along with its distraction in analogy to the newest medium of both dispositions, the cinema. It is no accident that both the sociophilosophical discourse of the Weimar period and the tone of its feuilletons are articulated in terms of a process of walking. It is this very movement toward the street that leads Benjamin to speak of a return of the flaneur in Weimar Berlin.

There he explains that, [The citizens in that time of transition] did like everyone else and went for strolls [flanierten]. At this time appeared the type of the flaneur, who sauntered along aimlessly and covered the nothingness he detected around him and in him with innumerable impressions.

Shop window displays, lithographs, new buildings, elegant attires, fancy coaches, newspaper vendors—indiscriminately he inhaled the images which pressed in upon him. The social motivation and function of flanerie can be recognized here in its minute details: Aimless drifting along the streets is the refuge of an epoch in which ideological orientations have been exhausted: The overburdening of theoretical thinking has led us to a horrifying degree to become distanced from reality—a reality that is filled with incarnate things and people and that therefore demands to be seen concretely.

Its locations are the places both of collective boredom and of its collective distraction: His function is visual perception per se, as a passerby on the street and a figure in the detective novel of the modern metropolis. He supplies a literary perception of the images of the metropolis and modernity in the same way that the text relates to its photographic medium, to a medium, that is, whose revelatory capacity, according to Benjamin, can no longer be underestimated. They form both the objects of experience and the medium of expression for those material worlds that haunt the spheres of their collecting and strolling.

Their collections may be dedicated to items that differ in the degree of their volatility or durability: As a flaneur himself, Benjamin conjures the Paris Arcades as the project of his daytime work and the object of his dreams alike, seeking to understand the period of the arcades as a formative period of high capitalism in the process of its decline: The flaneur is at once a sleeper and the one who researches this process of sleeping, the medium as well as the subject of this deep-sleep and dream-phase of capitalism.

The contagious effects transmitted by the atmosphere of the city affect him like the phenomena that take sensual possession of him: The flaneur dreams himself into a state of sensitivity that registers, with the increased susceptibility of a physical medium, its spatial sensations in decidedly sensory ways: Very often he would give away all his knowledge. His observations en reverie turn the flaneur into a subjective yet peripatetic historian of the city. Presumably this is what happened to the streets of Paris at that time. The phenomena of modernity that are disturbing the tranquil equilibrium of the city in their very newness emit indelible shocks.

Such shocks define the decisive moments when an instantaneity of momentary insight communicates itself to the one who looks on the scene. This sudden insight involves the recognition of the ways in which an image only becomes an image 50 CHAPTER 3 insofar as it is already threatened. As Benjamin suggests, the flaneur is addicted to the perception of exterior reality and visual experience.

The potentially unlimited continuum of impressions in the city, according to Benjamin, can be best experienced in a state of intoxication, an intoxication that provides the only viable access to a modernity that can neither be fixed in static positions nor stopped and comprehended in the terms of a preceding generation. This is why the flaneur is driven into the modern streets in his search for new shocks and stimuli.

He pursues and collects all the evidence of his visual experience that he can retrieve from exterior reality. Given this distinct obsession with the accumulation of relics and debris, Benjamin discusses the flaneur as a modern variant of the collector: Putting his freely floating attention to work on all the details, fragments, and kaleidoscopic particles of experience that come his way, the flaneur is as much a collector who seeks to preserve the P A S S AG E S O F F L A N E R I E 51 aesthetic marginalia of modernity as he is a chiffonnier who scavenges for discarded products left aside in the street.

What distinguishes the flaneur from these other figures of the street can be read in the literary difference of his project, his attempt to both read and write about the phenomena that he sees. All of these figures pick up the historical materials of their own time, use them in a new context, and thereby recycle some of the discarded but fundamental material aspects of modern life.

He finds these texts in the streets, reads them, and then translates them into the medium of a flaneuristic writing which seeks to reflect these new realities closely and attentively. This focus includes, but is not limited to, the forms of architecture and the new arts of advertising that are everywhere before him. His attention extends to the entire continuum of modern existence, ranging from an aesthetics of the everyday in traffic and signs, vehicles and commodities, to fashion and other more stylized expressions of life. The language that speaks of these images often takes the shape of dream sequences, as it seeks to outline the irreality of shocks and images in forms that correspond to their intricate intensity.

For Benjamin, this act inaugurates the process of flanerie: The flaneur reads the street—its signals, shocks, stimuli, and sensations. His perspective is above all a visual one, one that positions him as a spectator of urban signs, shapes, and structures, a walking reader who transforms these multiple and multivalent signs into written texts. These effects and their experience change not only what readers and writers consider to be the intrinsic materials of literature and life; they change the relation of these materials to the presumably stable opposition between exteriority and interiority.

Both exterior and interior spaces turn into objects of scopophilia that can be experienced either by walking in the street or by tracking extended lines of serial images. For the inhabitant of modernity who walks and writes, the street offers, according 54 CHAPTER 3 to Benjamin, all the amenities and necessities of home and office, of the work place and the space of leisure: To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses [Firmenschilder] are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his salon.

At the same time, it distances the bourgeois existence from the experience of flanerie. The flaneur approaches the signs of his time as a new semiotic code and highlights the characteristics of modernity in terms of a new aesthetics. His critical perception of the enamelled signs of the advertising culture of capitalism can be mobilized to revolutionize previous functions of art and to disseminate aesthetic notions through forms of decorative distraction. Journalistic media extend the notion of literature in order to supply erudition, information, and a pleasure in texts at the level of everyday readings.

The recently introduced and newly illustrated journals bring together in one innovative medium the functions of both written and visual codes. By reading the world and writing it anew, flanerie literally functions as a kind of work, a journalistic form of labor that involves the work of inquiry, the gathering of information, and the collection of contemporary impressions.

The function of the physiologies in the s, to which Benjamin has recourse in his definition of flanerie, was to contain this disquiet: As Benjamin suggests, these physiological studies of the street even seek to understand the larger collective physiognomies of the city itself. Paris la nuit which illuminates a scene of nocturnal strolls , Paris a cheval which suggests a flanerie that may take place even from horseback , and Paris pittoresque which unfolds a city of distracting images.

The growing disquiet escapes physiological explanation, even as it suggests a sense of uneasiness that originates from the de-individualized and commodified existence of the fleeting masses that move the flaneur along with them. This allegorical view offers us a window on the world of commodities that potentially illuminates not only their aesthetic qualities but also their wider political implications.

Benjamin himself identifies these striking forms of capitalist reification with a seemingly aimless yet purposeful flanerie. The flaneur begins to enter the street as an observer with professional interests and to market himself as a journalist. As the author turns first flaneur and then journalist, the literary space of his wanderings becomes the primary text of his writings.

Within the primordial landscape of consumption, his empathy with the objects of his observation turns him into a journalistic commodity. The flaneur is driven by an aesthetic fascination that gathers the signs of the city into the fabric of his text, while the detective is driven by the logistic challenge of gathering these same signs as evidence to uncover the meaning of his story.

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