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Rethinking the Flâneur: Flânerie and the Senses

Profile image of Aimee BoutinAimee Boutin

2012, Dix-neuf

Abstract

Oh! errer dans Paris! adorable et délicieuse existence! Flâner est une science, c'est la gastronomie de l'oeil', wrote Honoré de Balzac, generously mixing metaphors in his sensuous description of flânerie in Physiologie du mariage. As the embodiment of modernity, the figure of the flâneur is closely associated with our conception of nineteenth-century urban experience and of Paris, the city where he originated. Variously defined as a fashionable male idler, a leisurely stroller, an expert reader of urban signs, an artist or writer, and a sociologist avant la lettre, the flâneur remains as multifarious and elusive as the city with which he is associated. This special number of Dix-Neuf seeks to rethink the flâneur and flânerie's relationship to sensory perception, taking into account the 'sensual turn' in the humanities and social sciences. 1 It brings the sensitivity of sensory studies to bear on the study of the flâneur, who epitomizes the ascendancy of vision in modernist studies. Shifting focus, we can wonder whether the lure of the visual has blinded us to other significant aspects of urban experience. Acknowledging that vision may not dominate the flâneur's ways of perceiving to the exclusion of all other senses, this collection of essays explores new paths taken by the flâneur through the sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of Paris in the nineteenth century. 2 The 'sensual turn' in literary studies, and more broadly the arts, humanities, and social sciences has been moving scholars (since the pioneering work of French historian Alain Corbin in the 1980s, as well as Canadian anthropologists David Howes and Constance Classen and British geographer Paul Rodaway in the 1990s) to make sense of their disciplines by developing 'a habit, a way of thinking about [culture], and a way of becoming attuned to the wealth of sensory evidence embedded in any number of texts, evidence that is overwhelmingly apparent once and, ironically, looked for' (Smith, 2007: 5). 3 The 'sensual turn' follows the return of the body and material culture after the decline of post-structuralism and its attendant repression of the body and the materiality of text (Howes, 2003; 2006). The sensual turn also complements the rise of visual and cultural studies which positioned the flâneur's modernist gaze as painter of modern life at the centre of many of its inquiries. The sensory approach fleshes out 'homogenizing' concepts such as the 'body' by providing a full-bodied understanding of corporeal existence as 'bundles of interconnected experiences' that relate dynamically to the world (Howes, 2006: 115; Syrotinski and Maclachlan 2001: 7).

Key takeaways

  • Resensualizing the flâneur, however, implies a larger desire to reconceive the modern city as a sensual place and reconstitute the sensescapes of modernity to which the flâneur's perambulations give us privileged access.
  • If the flâneur can elude our grasp it is because false flâneurs such as idlers, gapers, and tourists also crowd the streets, as Hahn and Tholozany discuss.
  • Not the dispassionate flâneur of the 1830s and 1840s, Zola's and Maupassant's flâneurs are sensualists who cannot resist temptations.
  • Each contributor tackles a particular sensory system, but together the contributions suggest how the flâneur renders the city a sensuous place, how urban sensations anchor the flâneur onto the streets where he is bathed in the multitude of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touche s. Flânerie was a multisensory practice in the nineteenth-century city, as it remains today, though the modalities of intersensorial experience have changed.
  • Keith Tester acknowledged that 'flânerie might be about more than just looking' (18) in the introduction to his influential edited volume The Flâneur (1994).

Related papers

‘A body passes by: The flâneur and the senses in nineteenth-century London and Paris.’
Estelle Murail

The flâneur is well-known for being the most emblematic nineteenth-century observer of urban life. Critics have often compared the flâneur to a camera eye which records everything and insisted on the predominance of sight over other senses in the cognitive process. I would like to lay emphasis on the embodiedness of the flâneur’s vision, which is an experience of all the senses. I would like to envisage the whole of the flâneur’s body as a surface on which the city leaves its imprint. The city is a space whose sights, sounds and smells are constantly changing and mutating. The city space can be envisaged as a ‘metabolic space,’ in which ‘the links between background and figures are very unstable’ (Augoyard). The moving body of the flâneur, which can adapt to this changing space, seems to be in an ideal position to apprehend the metabolic body of the city. The flâneur’s whole body is a perceptive surface which allows things in. He makes his way through the sounds, smells, tastes and textures of the city as well as through its sights. The flâneur is not only ‘an eye impaled on a stake’ (Wittgenstein), he is ‘a living eye’ which communicates with all the other senses and captures the whole experience of moving through the city. His body might be compared to a seismograph that not only registers all kinds of sensory impressions but also translates and transmits them. By looking at texts by Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, I will demonstrate that flânerie is a sensory activity that shapes our perception of the city as much as the city shapes our own flâneries by transforming our bodies into scribes who write the ‘thicks and thins of the urban text.’ (De Certeau)

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Rethinking the Flâneur: Flânerie and the Senses. Ed. Aimée Boutin. Special Issue of Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes 16.2 (July 2012).
Aimee Boutin
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Welcome to the revolution: art history and the sensory turn
Jenni Lauwrens

Discourses concerned with the sensorially embodied subject have emerged since the 1990s in various disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, geography, film studies and literary studies. The purpose of this article is to bring the conversation regarding audiences’ embodied engagement in culture closer to art history by investigating the implications of, what has been termed, the ‘sensory turn’ for this discipline. One of the accusations lodged against art history by supporters of the multi-sensoriality of embodied human experience is its alleged ocularcentrism, the implication of which is a detached autonomous subject. In this article, the sensory turn is defined and contextualized, particularly in light of the body of criticism targeted at art history’s emphasis on the visual. The proposed ways in which art historians might usefully deal with audience’s embodied experiences of not only immersive installation works of art, but also artworks in traditional media, such as painting and photography, are teased apart. Keywords: sensory turn, art history, multi-sensorial subjectivity, embodiment

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Performativity and Aesthetic Experience of the City. From the body of the flâneur to the soma of the Man in Gold
Aurosa Alison

Itinera

In this essay, I do not want to focus on performativity as such and understand it as an aesthetic expression; instead, I would like to illustrate how performativity takes on the role consequential to an aesthetic experience. Specifically, I want to highlight how aesthetic experience takes place in the spatial contexts of the city. In this regard, I want to define the aesthetic-practical-sensory relationship of the soma, understood as a paradigm of a living body, that is, a body that moves and acts in space, by declining three historical moments that tell the story. I want to define three historical moments from the early twentieth century to the present through the soma-city relationship: 1) The first moment is inscribed in the emergence of the Baudelairian concept of the flâneur, a symbolic figure who introduces a relationship with the city characterized by a disenchanted gaze and a slow, wandering movement picked up, especially by Walter Benjamin in the Paris Passages; 2) The sec...

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The Flâneur, the Tourist, the Global Flâneur, and Magazine Reading as Flânerie
Hazel Hahn

The flâneur and the tourist were both characterized foremost by movement and curiosity. A range of meanings and resonances were associated with both figures, underlining the tensions between the ideas of the insider and the outsider, the Parisian and the foreigner, travel within Paris and without, mechanical versus purposeful seeing, and compulsive versus meaningful mobility. While the sense of vision was emphasized, literary representations often evoked the idea that vacuous and passive seeing, stimulated by trivial goings-on and merchandise, lets the flâneur neglect the other senses, whereas an inner preparation and discernment lead to a more balanced way of flânerie. The projection of flânerie onto world travel paralleled the mode of reading illustrated magazines, which elicited imaginary flânerie. The re-reading of Baudelaire's 'Le Peintre de la vie moderne' in this light provides some new insights regarding the concept of the artist as the 'man of the world'. What are the connections between the flâneur and the tourist in the nineteenth century? The figures of the tourist and the flâneur have been compared as tropes of modernity in sociological theory. However, little historical analysis exists on the association between the two figures. The flâneur was strongly associated with travel from early on, as the very etymology and definition of the flâneur had to do with the idea of walking, movement. A range of meanings and resonances, including contradictory ones, were associated with both figures especially in the early decades, characterized foremost by movement and curiosity, underlining the tensions between the ideas of the insider and the outsider, the Parisian and the foreigner, travel within Paris and without, mechanical versus purposeful seeing, and compulsive versus meaningful mobility.

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  • Art

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    Flâneur, Phantasmagoria and Existence in Modern Cities: An Analysis of Benjamin and Sartre
    Umutcan Tarcan

    IBAD Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2022

    The modern city ethos has been a significant subject in social and literary theories since Charles Baudelaire, the 19th-century poet and author. Baudelaire's interest in the relationship between city imageries and modernity has inspired many of his successors that look at politics, culture, gender, phenomenology, and ontology. Thus, contemporary philosophy has approached the modern city as an intersectional sphere of existence. The two prominent 20th-century thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre endeavor to use Baudelaire's work as a theoretical structure to ground their understanding of the modern city ethos. Benjamin uses Baudelaire's concept of flâneur, which initially symbolizes the idle, extraordinary, and lonely individuals in early modern cities, to interpret the experience of modernity. Sartre includes city characters that resemble flâneur in his novels and essays to disclose his existentialist thought. Both see the tension between modernity and the city ethos as an enigma that produces alienation, exploitation, and exclusion. In this study, we analyze the thoughts of Benjamin and Sartre regarding the problem of existence in modern cities. First, we look at the concept of flâneur as a subject of modernity. Then we respectively explain the thinkers' works, thus emphasizing their differences. We argue that Benjamin ascribes a relatively sociocultural context to the modern city experience, while Sartre mainly looks at the problem from a phenomenological perspective.

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