Flaneur Wilson
Flaneur Wilson
Hostility to urbanization was more likely to come from opposite ends of the
political spectrum. On the Left, Engels was deeply critical not only of the slum
and factory conditions in which the majority had to survive, but equally of the
1
The theme of this article is touched on in Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City,
London 1991. The immediate stimulus for it was the 'Cracks in the Pavement' (Women
and City Spaces) conference organized by Lynne Walker and the Design Museum in
April 1991. I am much indebted to all those who participated in the lively discussions that
took place on that occasion, and my especial thanks to Lynne Walker for inviting me.
2
See, for example, Robert Vaughan, The Age of Great Cities, London 1843, Andrew
Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820-1940,
Manchester '985, discusses at length attitudes towards urbanization in Europe and the
United States.
Public Women
3
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Moscow
1962, p.56.
4
William Morris, News From Nowhere, and Selected Writings and Designs (1890),
Harmondsworth 1986, pp. 234-5.
5
See Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State,
Cambridge 1980.
6
Alexandre Parent-Duchtelet, De La Prostitution Dans La Ville de Paris, Paris 1836.
He writes: 'Public women, left to their own devices and free of surveillance during the
anarchy of the first years of the first revolution, abandoned themselves to all the
disorders which, during this disastrous period, were favoured by the state of the society;
soon the evil became so great that it excited universal outrage, and...in 1796 the
municipal authorities ordered a new census...registration was always considered the
most important means of arresting the inevitable disorder of prostitution. Is it not in fact
necessary to get to know the individuality of all those who come to the attention of the
police?' (pp. 366-7, 370).
7
Alain Corbin, 'Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth Century France: A System of
Images and Regulations', Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986, special issue on the body,
edited by Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Lacquer.
8
H William Acton, Prostitution (1857), edited by Peter Fryer, London 1968.
9
Josephine Butler, Memories of a Great Crusade, London 1896.
10
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society.
Bourgeois men, by contrast, were free to explore urban zones of pleasure such
asin Paris especiallythe Folies Bergres, the restaurant, the theatre, the
caf and the brothel, where they met working-class women. (In London they
were perhaps as likely to visit the masculine haunt of the Pall Mall clubs.) The
proliferation of public places of pleasure and interest created a new kind of
public person with the leisure to wander, watch and browse: the flneur, a key
figure in the critical literature of modernity and urbanization. In literature, the
flneur was represented as an archetypal occupant and observer of the public
sphere in the rapidly changing and growing great cities of nineteenth-century
Europe. He might be seen as a mythological or allegorical figure who
represented what was perhaps the most characteristic response of all to the
wholly new forms of life that seemed to be developing: ambivalence.
The earliest citation given by Larousse comes from Balzac, and the flneur is
normally discussed in the context of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. However,
at least one discussion of this form of urban individual dates from 1806. An
anonymous pamphlet published in that year describes a day in the life of M.
Bonhomme, a typical flneur of the Bonaparte era; and clearly set out there are
all the characteristics later to be found in the writings of Baudelaire and
Benjamin.13 No-one knows, states the anonymous author of this description,
11
Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season, London 1973.
12
Larousse heads the entry flneur/flneuse, but refers to the flneur as masculine
throughout. The entry also notes a second meaning for flneuse, as the name of a kind of
reclining chair. of which there is a line illustration. It looks like an extended deck chair,
and welcomes its occupant with womanly passivity.
13
Anon., Le Flneur au Salon, ou M. Bonhomme, Examen Joyeux des Tableaux, Ml de
Vaudevilles, Paris, n.d. (but published in 1806). I am very grateful to Tony Halliday for
his generosity in giving me this reference, and for sharing his knowledge of the period
with me.
Commodified Spaces
For Kracauer, the student bohemian was to be distinguished from the flneur
of a later date. Also distinct were the dandies, who in the 1830s and 1840s
took possession of the Maison D'Or and the Caf Tortoni in the Boulevard des
ltaliens. This street was the centre of fashionable public life, and along it
loitered the dandies, the bohemians and the courtesansbut also the
population at large. 'Innumerable curious sightseers strolled through these
streets on Sundays', writes Siegfried Kracauer: 'All classes of the population
received a common and uniform education in the streets...their real education.
Workers, laughing grisettes, soldiers, the petty bourgeoisie, who have few
opportunities for strolling and gazing at shop windows during the week...all
took the opportunity of gazing their fill on Sundays.'15
This special form of public life was played out in a zone that was neither quite
public nor quite private, yet which partook of both; the cafs, the terrasses and
the boulevards, likewise Benjamin's arcades, and, later, the department store
and the hotel,16these were commodified spaces in which everything was for
sale, and to which anyone was free to come, yet they endeavoured to create the
atmosphere of the salon or the private house. Here, the glamorous section of
society was at home; the crowds came to stare at but also to mingle with them.
The society which thus constituted itself as a spectacle was a society of
outsiders, and the boulevards and cafs offered, as Kracauer puts it, a
homeland for these individuals without a home.
14
Siegfried Kracauer, Offenbach and the Paris of his Time, trans. G. David and E.
Mosbacher, London 1937.
15
Ibid., p. 23.
16
There exists an extensive literature on the department store. See, for example, Michael
Miller, The Bon March: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920,
London 1981; Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Consumption in Late Nineteenth
Century France, Berkeley, Ca. 1982; and Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer
Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola, London 1985.
17
See Michael Wolff and Celina Fox, 'Pictures from the Magazines', in H.J. Dyos and M.
Wolff, eds., The Victorian City, Volume II, London 1973.
Kracauer tells us that in Paris, 'newspapers had hitherto been purely political
organs, with circulations restricted to small groups of readers sharing the same
views. Small circulations meant high subscription rates, and newspapers had to
charge their readers 80 francs a month in order to be able to exist at all.' In the
1830s, however, came the commercialization of the press. Kracauer credits
Emile de Girardin, publisher of La Presse, with initiating this revolution.
Girardin charged only forty francs, but accepted far more advertising, which
was easily obtained because of the growing circulation of his paper. This,
though, had the further result that the papers became less political, catering
rather to a demand for entertainmentamusing articles about everyday life,
gossip and, before long, the serialized novel. These developments in turn
increased the demand for journalists.19
Kracauer describes the coming together on the Boulevards and in the cafs of
upper-class dandies and the new journalists, arguing that these groups were in
many ways similar. Both rejected conventional society. Yet both were
financially dependent upon it, and as a result their attitude towards society was
cynical or ironic rather than passionately and committedly oppositional. Their
'blas attitude'the attitude which Georg Simmel saw as so characteristic of
urban lifewas the attitude of men who have been bought: while critical of
and opposed to the philistinism of bourgeois society, they were paid to
entertain it.
Kracauer argues that sexuality was also commercialized as the grisettes, who
had simply lived as unmarried partners with their lovers, were replaced by the
lorettes (so called because they lived in the Notre Dame de Lorette district),
who exchanged sex for money on a less emotionally committed basis.
'Although it was necessarily only the favoured few who succeeded in scaling
the giddy heights to which the great courtesans belonged, there were
nevertheless a number of honourable intermediary stages, and those who
belonged to the boulevards' rank and file had climbed quite a considerable
portion of the ladder.'20 Women who lived by their wits and their sexuality
played an important role in the Second Empire, often acting as negotiators,
Kracauer claims, in the orgies of speculation and stock-market madness
characteristic of Louis Napoleon's reign.
During the Second Empire the decline of bohemia in no way prevented Paris
from becoming an even more dazzling spectacle than it had been in the 1830s,
and in this Paris the flneur replaced the bohemian. At first sight, the flneur
appears as the ultimate ironic, detached observer, skimming across the surface
of the city and tasting all its pleasures with curiosity and interest. Walter
Benjamin writes of the way in which the flneur-as-artist 'goes botanizing on
18
George Augustus Sala, Twice Around the Clock, London 1859, p. 220. In Paris, women
were not allowed to ride on the tops of buses. See Susan Buck-Morss, 'The Flneur, the
Sandwichman and the Whore: the Politics of Loitering', New German Critique, no. 39,
(second special issue on Walter Benjamin), Fall 1986.
19
Kracauer, Offenbach, pp. 66-7.
20
Ibid., p. 72.
It is this flneur, the flneur as a man of pleasure, as a man who takes visual
possession of the city, who has emerged in postmodern feminist discourse as
the embodiment of the 'male gaze'. He represents men's visual and voyeuristic
mastery over women. According to this view, the flneur's freedom to wander
at will through the city is essentially a masculine freedom. Thus, the very idea
of the flneur reveals it to be a gendered concept. Janet Wolff argues that there
could never be a female flneur: the flneuse was invisible.24 Griselda Pollock
writes of the way in which womenmiddle-class women at leastwere
denied access to the spaces of the city, even a successful painter such as Berthe
Morisot mostly taking as her subject matter interiors and domestic scenes
instead of the cafs and other sites of pleasure so often painted by her male
colleagues.25
21
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
trans. Harry Zohn, London 1973, p. 36.
22
Marcel Proust, 'Cities of the Plain', Part One, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume
Two, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, London 1981, p. 627.
23
This view has been developed by Mary McIntosh, 'The Homosexual Role', Social
Problems, vol. 16, no. 2, Fall 1968, and reprinted in Kenneth Plummer, ed., The Making
of the Modern Homosexual, London 1981. See also Alan Bray, Homosexuality in
Renaissance England, London 1982; John D'Emilio, 'Capitalism and Gay Identity', in
Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson, eds., Desire: The Politics of
Sexuality, London 1984; and Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George
Chauncey, Jr., eds., Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past,
Harmondsworth 1990.
24
Janet Wolff, 'The Invisible Flneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity', Theory
Culture and Society, special issue, 'The Fate of Modernity', vol. 2, no. 3, 1985.
25
25. Griselda Pollock, 'Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity', in Griselda Pollock,
Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London 1988.
26
Wolff, 'The Invisible Flneuse', p. 37.
Janet Wolff argues that women were wholly excluded from the public sphere:
27
Franoise Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria, trans. John Howe, London.
28
Janet Wolff, 'Feminism and Modernism', in Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays
on Women and Culture, Cambridge 1990, p. 58.
It is not always clear whether Janet Wolff perceives the flneur as a gendered
concept, or as a descriptive accountor is it both? Is it appropriate to counter
this interpretation of an ideology by recourse to empirical fact? Alain Corbin
suggests that such a strategy is not legitimate: 'Images and schemas rather than
collections of monotonously repeated arguments or denotative discourses
should be our object of study'30that is, we are confronted with
representations, and these are impossible to counter by means of material
evidence, trapped as we are in 'the ultimate labyrinthhistory'31 Yet the
distinction Janet Wolff draws between 'ideology' and 'reality' raises serious
problems. Ideology, it is implied, bears absolutely no relation to 'reality', and
conceivably all women could venture out on to the streets, yet still be 'in
ideology', confined to the home. Ideology thus becomes a rigid and monolithic
monument of thought. By an inversion of 'reflectionist' theories of ideology,
instead of ideology mirroring reality, reality becomes but a pale shadow of
ideology, or even bears no relation to it at all. This approach is unhelpful to the
political cause of feminism, since it creates such an all-powerful and seamless
ideological system ranged against women, and one upon which they can never
make an impact. Griselda Pollock insists on a similar radical division between
the 'mental map' of ideology and the 'description of social spaces', although
there 'was none the less an overlap between the purely ideological maps and the
concrete organisation of the social sphere'.32
29
Theodor Adorno, 'Veblen's Attack on Culture', in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry
Weber, Cambridge, Mass. 1981; and Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899), London 1957. For a further, and most insightful, commentary on fashion-as-
representation, see Kaja Silverman, 'Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse', in Tania
Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture,
Bloomington 1986.
30
Corbin, 'Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth Century France', p. 210.
31
Christine Buci-Glucksmann, 'Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory of the
Modern', in Representations, no. 124, 1986, p. 220.
32
Pollock, 'Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity'.
33
Mary Poovey, Uneven Development: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-
Victorian England, London 1989, pp. 2-3.
With the growth of white-collar occupations for women, there was a need, for
example, for eating establishments where women could comfortably go on their
own. The lack of these in London had long been felt. In 1852, one observer had
noted that working-class women did frequent public housesplaces in which
no middle-class person of either sex felt comfortable. By the 1870s guidebooks
were beginning to list 'places in London where ladies can conveniently lunch
when in town for a day's shopping and unattended by a gentleman'.34
Restaurants as we know them were much commoner in Paris than in London,
but by the 1860s were springing up in the British capital too. Crosby Hall,
Bishopsgate, opened in 1868, employed waitresses instead of waiters, and
'made special provisions to ensure that women felt comfortable there'.35 These
included ladies' lavatories with female attendants. Thereafter the number of
eating establishments grew rapidly, with railway-station buffets, refreshment
rooms at exhibitions, ladies-only dining rooms, and the opening of West End
establishments such as the Criterion (1874), which specifically catered for
women. At the end of the century Lyons, the ABC tearooms, Fullers tearooms,
vegetarian restaurants and the rest rooms and refreshment rooms in department
stores had all transformed the middle- and lower-middle-class woman's
experience of public life.36 While it is arguable that these provisions precisely
indicate the extent of the problem, they hardly support the view that women
were 'invisible'.
Nor is it the case that shopping was 'invisible' in the literature of modernity.
Quite the contrary. The commodification of which Benjamin wrote was very
much to do with shopping, the availability of goods to buy; Emile Zola, Proust,
Dickens and many other writers record this aspect of urban life, and, as we saw,
shopping and/or window-shopping was a key element in the identity of the
flneur as far back as 1806.
The high point of the nineteenth-century shopping revolution was the creation
of the department store. Like the arcades, the boulevard and the caf, this was
an environment half-public, half-private, and it was a space that women were
able to inhabit comfortably. Although one could argue that shopping was for
many womenperhaps the majoritya form of work rather than pleasure, at
least for the leisured few it provided the pleasures of looking, socializing and
simply strollingin the department store, a woman, too, could become a
flneur.37
34
Robert Thorne, 'Places of Refreshment in the Nineteenth Century City', in Anthony D.
King, ed., Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built
Environment, London 1980, p. 25, quoting the Women's Gazette, 1876.
35
Ibid., p. 41.
36
Ibid.
37
See note 16; and Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity,
London 1985.
Griselda Pollock writes from within a theoretical tradition that has emphasized
the importance of the 'male gaze': 'the gaze of the flneur articulates and
produces a masculine sexuality which in the modern sexual economy enjoys the
freedom to look, appraise and possess'.38
This position offers little in the way of a theory of change; yet although many
feminists approach it with at best ambivalence,41 it has gained a perhaps
surprising domination over feminist art history, film theory and literary
criticism. The use of a Lacanian perspective represented, among other things, a
reaction against the 'vulgar reflectionism' of seeing art as a mirror of reality.
The result has been, however, not merely to agree that our knowledge of reality
is always constructed through discourse and representation, but to render
'reality' a pathetically naive misunderstanding, as the authoritarianism of
Lacanian discourse annihilates opposition by rendering it meaningless.
Ironically, a theoretical position derived from Lacan, who argued that
subjectivity was split and unstable,42 has resulted in the creation of a theoretical
Medusa's head, whose gaze petrifies everything: women are stuck forever in the
straitjacket of otherness, struck down and turned to stone by the Male Gaze.43
We might have expected an emphasis on signifying practices and
representations to result in a fluid universe of shifting meanings (rather like the
38
Pollock, 'Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity'.
39
E. Ann Kaplan, 'Is the Gaze Male?', in Snitow, Stansell and Thompson, eds., Desire:
The Politics of Sexuality, p. 321.
40
Ibid., p. 323.
41
Feminist criticism of the Lacanian tradition has often been from within an alternative
psychoanalytic perspective. See Janet Sayers, Sexual Contradictions: Psychology,
Psychoanalysis and Feminism, London 1986; and Joanna Ryan, letter, in Feminist
Review, no. 38, Summer 1991, in response to Diane Hamer, 'Significant Others', Feminist
Review, no. 34, Spring 1990.
42
Terry Eagleton, Ideology, London 1991, p. 144.
43
As Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out (in 'The Flneur, the Sandwichman and the
Whore'), the image of the Medusa's head is frequently used to refer to the castrating
potential of the urban woman, and especially the woman of the revolutionary crowd. See
Neil Hertz, 'Medusa's head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure', Representations, vol.
1, no. 4, Fall 1983. There is a feminist tradition of the subversion of this image; see
Helene Cixous, 'The Laugh of the Medusa', in Elain Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron,
eds., New French Feminisms, Brighton 1980.
To look at the issue from a slightly different angle, it is a matter for emphasis
whether one insists on the dangers or rather the opportunities for women in the
cities. It depends on the comparison. Then and now, opportunities were very
much according to class and race; yet if we compare the life of urban working-
class women with what they had left behind in the countryside, we may well
conclude that they were better off in the town. One study of divorce in France
at the end of the eighteenth century suggests that the reason divorce was more
common in cities was because women had a wider choice of alternative forms
of financial support (that is, paid work) and a wider range of alternative
housing than in the rural areas.45 Their financial position notwithstanding,
women's independence does seem to have increased when they lived in towns.
Nevertheless, they certainly remained badly off by comparison with men of
their own class. The majority of women led insecure lives at best, and often
they existed in conditions of grinding povertyaccording to one study there
were 60 per cent more pauper women than men in Paris.46 Yet most became
44
Ocular imagery is a contested issue, and much postmodern discourse has criticized the
overvaluation of the visualthe visual terrorism of modernism being held to be one of its
major problems. Doreen Massey, for example, writes: 'It is now a well-established
argument, from feminists, but not only from feminists, that modernism both privileged
vision over the other senses and established a way of seeing from the point of view of an
authoritative, privileged, and male, position...the privileging of vision impoverishes us
through deprivation of other forms of sensory perception.' Doreen Massey, 'Flexible
Sexism', Society and Space, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 45, 1991. Luce Irigaray made a similar point
in Speculum de L'Autre Femme, Paris 1974. Martin Jay, however, writes, in the context
of a discussion of the work of Michel Foucault, of 'a discursive or paradigm shift in
twentieth-century French thought in which the denigration of vision supplanted its
previous celebration'. He suggests that 'it may be time to begin probing the costs as well
as benefits of the anti-ocular counter-enlightenment. Its own genealogy needs to be
demystified, not in order to restore a naive faith in the nobility of sight, but rather to cast
a little light on the manifold implications of its new ignobility.' See Martin Jay, 'In the
Empire of the Gaze: Foucault and the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French
Thought', in David Couzens Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford 1986. The
feminist critique of visualism thus becomes part of a new problem, rather than the
solution of an old one.
45
Roderick Phillips, Family Breakdown in Late Eighteenth Century France: Divorces in
Rouen, 1792-1803, Oxford 1980. My thanks to Tony Halliday for this reference.
46
Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Le Travail des Femmes all XIX Sicle, Paris 1873.
Nor was it the case that female advancement could only be by means of
prostitution in one form or another. There were 'flneuses' in the sense that
there were women journalists and writers. George Sand is the most famous
example (famous, among other things, for wearing male dress on occasion in
order to roam the streets in freedoma clear indication of the limitations on
47
See Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite
Movement, London 1989; and Jan Marsh, The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, New York
1985.
48
Griselda Pollock (written in collaboration with Deborah Cherry), 'Woman as Sign in
Pre-Raphaelite Literature: the Representation of Elizabeth Siddall', in Pollock, Vision and
Difference. This is not to deny the very sensitive analysis of representations of Elizabeth
Siddall in its own terms.
49
Barret-Ducrocq, p. 31.
Prostitution became, in any case, a metaphor for the whole new regime of
nineteenth-century urbanism. Both Baudelaire and Benjamin view the
metropolis as the site of the commodity and of commodification above all else.
Prostitution comes to symbolize commodification, mass production and the rise
of the masses, all of which phenomena are linked:
50
Georges O'Reilly, Madame E. de Girardin (Delphine Gay): Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres,
Paris 1869.
51
The feminist literature on this subject is too numerous to cite, but for an interesting
discussion of some of the issues, see Michelle Z. Rosaldo, 'The Uses and Abuses of
Anthropology', Signs, vol. 5, no. 3, 1980.
52
Buck-Morss.
53
Walter Benjamin, 'Central Park', New German Critique, no. 34, Winter 1985, trans.
Lloyd Spencer with help from Mark Harrington, p. 40.
Some writers romanticized the flneur as a tragic figure. Jules Valles, for
example, himself a Communard and more politically unambiguous than most
of his fellow writers, commented upon the romantic yet fated calling of these
new men of the crowd. For him they were the 'Rfractaires'the refractory
ones, the rebels, the refuseniks:
54
Ibid., p. 42.
55
Ibid., p. 44.
56
Buck-Morss, p. 122.
57
Janet Wolff, 'The Invisible Flneuse'.
58
Jules Valls, 'Les Rfractaires' (1857), Oeuvres Compltes, Volume II, Paris 1969, pp.
148-9.
59
My thanks to Christine Battersby for this suggestionpart of the discussion at the
'Cracks in the Pavement' conference (see note 1).
There is, however, a further theme in Benjamin's exploration of urban life: that
of the sexual life generated by capitalist relations. The city is a labyrinth, and
the flneur an embodiment of it. The labyrinth has a specific sexual meaning:
male impotence. It is, suggests Benjamin, 'the home of the hesitant. The path of
someone shy of arrival at a goal easily takes the form of a labyrinth. This is the
way of the (sexual) drive in those episodes which precede its satisfaction.'61
Voyeurism and commodification lead to the attenuation and deferral of
satisfaction. Related to this is Baudelaire's 'spleen'. This mood or temperament
determines his vision of the city. Gambling, wandering and collecting are all
activities, suggests Benjamin, waged (or wagered) against spleen. And yet the
routines of the flneur are entirely monotonous, and Benjamin observes
ominously: 'For people as they are today there is only one radical novelty, and
that is always the same: death. Petrified unrest is also the formula for the image
of Baudelaire's life, a life which knows no, development.'62 The repetitive
monotony of the flneur's regime of strolling is an instance of 'eternal
recurrence'the eternal recurrence of the new, which is 'always ever the same'.
And the monster at the heart of the labyrinth is the Minotaur, the monster
waiting to kill. Baudelaire's spleen is also a kind of death: 'male
impotencethe key figure of solitude'.63
From this perspective, we might say that there could never be a female flneur,
for this reason: that the flneur himself never really existed, being but an
embodiment of the special blend of excitement, tedium and horror aroused by
many in the new metropolis, and the disintegrative effect of this on the
masculine identity. The flneur does indeed turn out to be like Poe's Man of the
Crowda figure of solitude, he is never alone; and, when singled out, he
vanishes. He is a figure to be deconstructed, a shifting projection of angst
rather than a solid embodiment of male bourgeois power. Benjamin likens him
to 'the idler whom Socrates engaged as his partner in discussion in the
Athenian market place...Only there is no longer a Socrates and so he remains
unengaged. And even the slave labour has come to an end which guaranteed
him his idleness.'64 He floats with no material base, living on his wits, and,
lacking the patriarchal discourse that assured him of meaning, is compelled to
invent a new one.
60
This is a theme pursued, for example, in Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', NLR L46,July-August 1984; see also Arthur Kroker
and David Cook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics,
Basingstoke 1986; Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, eds., Body Invaders: Sexuality
and the Postmodern Condition, Basingstoke 1988; and Alex Callinicos suggests some
reasons for the aestheticization of the contemporary urban scene (Jameson's
'hallucinatory euphoria') in 'Reactionary Postmodernism?', in Roy Boyne and Ali
Rarransi, eds., Postmodernism and Society, Basingstoke 1990.
61
Walter Benjamin, 'Central Park', p. 40. 6, Ibid.
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid., p. 47.
64
Ibid., p. 51.
The flneur represented not the triumph of masculine power, but its
attenuation. A wanderer, he embodies the Oedipal under threat. The male gaze
has failed to annihilate the castrate, woman. On the contrary, anonymity
annihilates him. The flneur represents masculinity as unstable, caught up in
the violent dislocations that characterized urbanization. Christine Buci-
Glucksmann suggests that in Baudelaire desire is polarized between perversity
and a 'mystical consummation'a split we still consider the key to Victorian
sexuality, and which remains with us in one form or another. The split between
the two is constitutive of male impotence; and the metaphors of stone and
petrification in Baudelaire's poetry hint at this ruin of desire (and also suggest,
she says, a partial convergence of Benjamin's analysis of Baudelaire with
Lacanian thought).65
In the labyrinth the flneur effaces himself, becomes passive, feminine. In the
writing of fragmentary pieces, he makes of himself a blank page upon which
the city writes itself. It is a feminine, placatory gesture yet he is still
endangered. The Minotaur of some horrible love objecta decayed prostitute,
an androgynestill waits round every corner. And in the long run he, too,
becomes sinister and dangerous; the flneur himself becomes,the Minotaur,
Peter Lorre's 'M', a forerunner of the serial killer with which contemporary
popular culture is so preoccupied. Clearly Hannibal Lecter, in the film The
Silence of the Lambs, does represent the Minotaur. He eats his victims, and he
is, like the Minotaur, trapped at 'the centre of a labyrinth (although this is but
the latest reworking of a founding clich of the horror film).
It is, then, the flneur, not the flneuse, who is invisible. He dissembles the
perversity and impossibility of his split desires, attempting an identification
with their object, and wrenching his 'heroism' out of this defeat: 'The pageant
of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existencescriminals and kept
womenwhich drift about in the underworld of a great city...prove to us that
we have only to open our eyes to recognise our heroism.'67 The heroismfor
both sexesis in surviving the disorientating space, both labyrinthine and
agoraphobic, of the metropolis. It lies in the ability to discern among the
massed ranks of anonymity the outline of forms of beauty and individuality
65
Buci-Glucksmann, 'Catastrophic Utopia', p. 226.
66
Ibid., p, 221. See also Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic
Representation in Weimar Germany, Princeton, NJ 1989, for an insightful discussion of
this and related issues.
67
Charles Baudelaire, 'The Salon of 1846', in The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies by
Charles Baudelaire, London 1955, p. 128.
Ultimately more truthful than the zeal of the reformer was the disturbed glance
of the flneur, recording with stoicism the challenge to patriarchal thought and
existence made by the presence of women in cities. Contemporary debates
concerning rape, pornography and sexual harassment testify that we have not
solved these problems; nor have they gone away.
68
See Wilson, The Sphinx in the City.