I looked up the word “flaneur” in the index of hte boojks and skipped straight to it: I’d heard this term first in books by and about Walter Benjamin, and the idea of these urban wanderers–poets, wastrels, misfits, outsiders, rebels–was always appealing to me. The rich cultural life of Paris in the 19th c. cannot be understood without the historical context in mind, meaning the incredible, mind-boggling political tumult of that century. Dotted with revolutions and restorations, burgeoning capitalism and urban planning, riots, battles, and all out international war, many of the figures of this century are larger than life, in a way that somehow, in my mind at least, exceeds those of the last century.
Regarding the flaneurs: Here’s a passage from the book:
One of the new pleasures avaialble to those city-dwelling bohemiens, who, like Gautier, sought the strange, the uncanny, the poetic and the mysterious that lay around them, was the art of wandering pointlessly through the city. This activity, termed flanerie — a word that dated back to the sixteenth century and which had originally been used to mean ‘wander’ or ‘drift’ — was already apparent in the seventeenth century…
The author then talks about Balzac and Baudelaire as flaneurs par excellence: and of course this had to do with the hugely transformative nature of Haussman’s new design for Paris…the urban landscape changed, opening up new potentialities for how people interacted with physical urban space and how that urban space constrained and made possible new forms of (collective) social interaction. Back to flanerie: there are times when I wonder whether or not street photography for me, is at base, just a form of flanerie. I believe the spirit and impulse is the same, at least in the way that in lives in me. There’s another telling phrase in the book: the flaneur is always “detached from hte pleasures that he observes and takes part in.” That phrase was perhaps more striking than anything else I had read about the flaneurs. Because the stock definition leaves you thinking that a flaneur is a kind of hippie, dandy type person that believes in creativity and art, not 9-5, pensions and mortgages. Their lives and their art–if, that is, amidst all the debauchery they could sustain the effort it takes to make lasting art–were conjoined and were, to put it a bit too crudely, a fart in the face of the bourgeoisie. However ephemeral it was, there is something eternal about that, but at least to we who have come into the world so much later. Sure, we all love cities, but the fascination must have been different for them, for modern urban planning, and that entire ethos of rationalist, scientific, Enlightenment progress was gathering steam and changing things in a way that we could not have imagined. They were at the brutal front lines of that epochal shift in human history.
Sure we have our own epochal changes: the rise of megacities, the BosWash thing, southern CA, the Pearl River Delta Region, Lagos, Mumbai: all of this suggest that flanerie ought to be alive and well. Though we might be well-advised to engage in flanerie from within the safe confines of a bullet-proof SUV, where we can cautiously gawk at people, our glances and stares masked by a tinted window.
Maybe this is how we ought to describe urban rappers (and I mean Tribe Called Quest, not Ice Cube or 50 cent) and street photographers. There is, in their respective mediums, a restless search for something in the streets, the nooks and crannies, desolate parking lots and anonymous malls, parks with their anodyne family sculptures, etc.
Street photography is attached, via some unseen umbilical cord, to my visual hunger for a place. A new city offers that kind enticement and that kind of fascination. The city itself might not be inherently beautiful or unique, but I am just fascinated by the fact that I have not seen it before. There is copious room for investigation, which you do with your feet, mostly, and your eyes. And the camera is almost ancillary, it just becomes a capture too, albeit one that you try to use artistically and intentionally with the hopes of some aesthetically pleasing result. Unfortunately, I realize now, after years and years in Shanghai, that I thrive on this kind of stimulation, you could even say I’m addicted to it–and that must explain why I am constantly on websites, looking up travel deals and checking airplane ticket prices and planning in my mind the next great escape.
Traveling and wandering seem, to me, much more “natural” a mode to be in. I think it might just be this heightened aversion to boredom, this constant thirst to see things, explore. There is a phrase in this book or perhaps somewhere else, that springs to mind: “reservoir of electricity”–I think many people who come to Shanghai feel this kind of “buzz”, this ineffable quality that somehow swims above and around and can’t quite be expressed by economic indicators. Even when markets take a dive: there’s still that buzz, that creative license to follow your own gods, make your own identity, shape your own destiny. That’s a romantic view of Shanghai, no doubt, and it’s very subjective because half of the time I don’t feel it at all; I think that this place is hopelessly crummy and inferior, very noveau-riche. Sometimes it feels like everyone is a benighted bumpkin and other times they strike me as arrogant parvenus. And sometimes they just appear as regular people getting on with their lives. Of course, it’s not that they are in someway chameleonic, this is just, in psychobabble terms, what I am projecting of myself onto them.
Cafe life’s intimate connection with politics, satire, revolution, literature, cabaret and general licentiousness in Paris is fascinating for me. What do the sociologists call it? The third space? Well it was alive and kicking in the Paris of the 19th century. I don’t know if I feel any electricity anymore, anywhere: in Paris there were cafes that were popular with journalists and actors, while other groups flocked to other places. This milieu was actually many micro-milieus, niches, and I don’t know if anything analogous really exists here in Shanghai. I keep thinking it must because it is, or ought to be in my mind, some kind of invariant of human social life. These are niches that you bury yourself in, and by doing so embed yourself in history, live history, not outside it. And somehow that is connected to the idea of authentic living, or just really living. Because although we all live in history most of the time it seems to me to be more like a truck whizzing by you very fast that you have to jump out of the way for lest you get flattened by it. The flaneurs are somehow removed the pleasures they observe and indulge in. They are participant-observers. Some of them are quintessential outsiders (in Colin Wilson’s sense of the word).
In any case, as exciting as it is to read about these things, there is always the collateral cost of reading any kind of history: the heightened sense of ephemerality of things, and the analytical impasse that the mind comes to when it reaches beyond the author’s guidance. That is to say, when you take the author’s writings and analysis as a point of departure for your own thoughts about that period in history or worse yet, meta-reflections in history itself, you feel disoriented, lost. You don’t have the moorings that historical facts (or what we take for fact at present) give you. There’s the Faustian hope that if you know enough, you will have solved the problems and saved your own soul, but you’ve got a sneaking suspicion that this is just flat out impossible. For example, what can we extrapolate about France and the French from its illustrious 19th century cultural history? So many of the great writers, novelists, poets, intellectuals, and painters of the world all walked the earth at this time, and to be specific, walked the boulevards and alleyways of Paris. That’s just plain anomalistic by any standards, and reminds of me that famous line from Carol Reed’s The Third Man, where Harry Lime (Orson Welles) says to Holly Martins that the tumultuous years under the Borgias produced Michelangelo and the Renaissance greats, while 500 years of peace and democracy in Switzerland produced…the cuckoo clock. It’s a great monologue, for one, but it does make one think about how these unusual and intense bursts of cultural activity happen…highly nonlinear for sure.
More as I come up with more…if anyone is even reading…
Was it deliberate that your rant was a bit of a ramble itself? Shanghai is definitely one of the best wandering cities in the world, and late summer/early autumn is the best time for urban (photo) safaris, as I like to call them.
I find it’s a bit of a toss-up whether to pack the camera when urban hiking, though, it shapes the experience and encounters. Generally I linger longer, chat more with more people when I don’t; when I do I’m more focused and driven, and when wandering it is rather nice to be blurry and meandering.
Shanghai does have its cultural salons, but not very public. The art community hangs out and discourses endlessly. Most of them aren’t that politically or socially concerned, less and less as they get rich and lazy, but some still are. They/we used to all just hang out at each others’ homes and studios out of poverty, now it’s force of habit. But also people feel a lot more free and open in private; in public they’re more cautious – if only out of force of habit.
thanks for the comment: agreed about the fine weather in the late summer and early fall, or even late fall. Not sure whether or not this is for me, the epitome of walking cities. I think I’ve been so enamored of Amsterdam, Paris, Athens because I am a stranger there…in Shanghai the things on the surface are not that surprising to me, anymore…I’ve unfortunately become numb to some (not all) of it and what that means is not that the place has exhausted its possibilities but that one has to work (dig) harder to find what’s there. After an honest self-appraisal I don’t know if I have the stamina or persistence for that. I am doubtful.