What is Flâneurie? 
<snip>
Walter Benjamin’ notion of the flâneur-the wanderer
of city spaces (or even the window shopper or frequenter of
malls)-might or might not belong to that more general type of
modern figure-the wanderer or traveller. This may mean travel
in the ordinary sense, travel as flâneurie, or travel
in the metaphorical sense, which includes the virtual
journey, where you actually don’t go anywhere.
<Snip/>
Walter Benjamin (1938) says...
<snip>The
street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much
at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four
walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at
least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois
in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses
his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces
of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on
his household after his work is done. [...] The crowd was the
veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned
to the flâneur. In it, the city was now landscape, now
a room. And both of these went into the construction of the
department store, which made use of flâneurie itself in
order to sell goods. The department store was the flâneur’s
final coup. As flâneurs, the intelligentsia came into
the market
place. <Snip/>
Walter
Benjamin Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism, translated form the German by Harry Zohn, NLB,
London, 1973. (original essay from Charles Baudelaire "The
Painter of Modern Life" (1863) in My Heart Laid Bare
and Other Prose Writings, Soho Book Company, London, 1986)
This
is what Mike
Featherstone (2000) has to say about Flâneurie,
Benjamin, hypertext, and the city as archive
<snip>
Yet, however much we want to see Benjamin as developing his
archive of the city in order to redeem the immediacy of the
past, the detective piecing together fragmentarily clues to
discover what actually happened, there is also the sense that
the momentary recoveries themselves must remain incomplete and
partial. In effect the fragments, the discarded minutiae of
urban life can never be pieced together again, they remain tantalising
in the capacity to speak to us. Yet they speak in an allegorical
manner, summoning up half-remembered memories which only lead
to other incomplete allegories, broken allegories for which
no final resolution is possible. Ultimately, then, Benjamin's
text-as-city with its eschewal of conventional narrative structures
has a unifying labyrinthine quality to it: there are many portals
of entry, repetitions, circling and crossing through the same
place from different directions, which itself echoes the orderly/
disorderly structures of urban everyday life. A textual architecture
and method that we can speculate could have been more fully
realised through the use of new electronic information technologies
with hypertext and multimedia.<Snip/>
Featherstone,
Mike, Archiving Cultures, British Journal of Sociology,
Vol. No. 51 Issue No 1 (January/ March 2000) pp. 161-184.(p172)
This
is what
Lev Manovich has to say about the Flâneur
"...the
subjectivity of the
flâneur
is determined by his interaction with a group-even though it
is a group of strangers. In place of the close-knit community
of the small scale traditional society (Gemeinshaft), we now
have the anonymous associations of modern society (Gesellshaft).
We can interpret the flâneur behaviour as a response to this
historical shift. It is as though he is trying to compensate
for the loss of a close relationship with his group by inserting
himself into the anonymous crowd"
Lev
Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, Massachusetts,
2001.p269.
