Fall has officially begun, although I prefer my autumns chillier and darker. Despite this somewhat warm October, the colder evenings remind me that the weather will soon be perfect to stroll the streets.
The concept of the flâneur, although very romantic, is a symptom of modernity. As a matter of fact, it is the Industrial Revolution which made the phenomenon possible, reshaping cities, constructing boulevards and arcades, allowing passersby to walk around boutiques and under covered passages. Under the 19thcentury, Haussmann renovation of Paris, the expansion of the railway system as well as the development of industries changed the face of the city forever. The new commodity culture organized the public space, turned the streets into interiors, creating more places for commercial exchanges and for customers to wander. Many poets and artists were seduced by these comfortable arcades. Nerval, Réda, Constantin Guy and Baudelaire are some of them.
This industrial era is a period of high mobility, as capitalism changed what was still and somehow predictable into something that changed constantly. Everything, from the quick assembly lines of factories that turn a few pieces of material into a product of mass production, to the speed of modern transportation, started to move constantly. Even the poet left his living room to observe the buildings, the signs and the crowd that has now become the subject of his reverie. Baudelaire once pointed out that beauty both had an eternal and a circumstantial side. The flâneur is without a doubt an observer of the transitory and fugitive nature of the city.
The flânerie also changes our relation to the Other. The depersonalization of the crowd allows the flâneur to experience solitude surrounded by dozens. The city is anonymous and its passersby are impossible to seize. Who is this strange man that I just saw? It is easy, and often pleasant, for the flâneur to imagine the lives of those he sees on the street, to act like a physiognomist. But his reflections are nothing but illusions and dreams, and soon the different individuals merge into one another, as otherness becomes repetitive and undefinable, but also distant and inaccessible. Somehow, one can say that these anonymous passersby become the commodity they produce, wear, buy or sell. The machine-like city becomes the reflection of the new industrialized world.
Jacques Réda adapted the flânerie to post-modernity. While Baudelaire’s arcades were a transposition of the comfortable living rooms around which the walker could gravitate, Reda’s streets never led to a center. The poet is in fact attracted by its periphery, walking towards the center while never being able to approach it. Like Derrida, Reda’s poetry rejects the idea of the Object, of the Ideal. His poetry is torn between the fracture and the quest for unity and order, between the crowd and the solitude, between the search for a center and the call of the periphery. Reda’s walks are therefore never linear, almost rhizomatic, like an air of jazz, and the changing city is never captured.
As suggested by Deleuze (after all, can’t we read about the “ligne de fuite des nuages” in one of Réda’s poem “Le détour”?), the poet doesn’t want to fix what he sees into words or frames but let each being and thing express their full potential without being limited to any definition. Similarly, the post-modern flâneur becomes an observer of the becoming city, of its perpetual movements and of its eternal escape from the center.
but more about that later.
Les ruines de Paris (Réda, 1977) Le Spleen de Paris (Baudelaire, 1862) Das Passagenwerk (Walter Benjamin)
