The Wandering Flâneur, or, Something Lost in Translation

Abstract

The flaneur and flanerie have become a standard trope in accounts of an emergent modernity and the experience especially of the modern city. More recently, the historical figure of nineteenth-century Paris has been reexamined in readings of the gendered formations of modernism and further reconfigured in accounts of more contemporary, postrnodem forms of urban experience. The Parisian stroller or window-shopper identified by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin as a new social type and the model of the artist reappears as the mall rat or TV viewer slaloming across channels. This essay argues that, productive as these later discourses often are, critics responding in particular to the "deconstructive turn" are in danger of losing sight both of the historical and spatial specificity of the later postrnodern moment. The flaneur becomes a sight without a referent, an unwitting or romanticised projection of the disengaged textualising theorist. The essay therefore calls for a renewed historical awareness which will not only confirm the situated and short-lived role of the fliineur and significantly different attitude of the female flaneuse in the modernist city, but help to ground the fertile ideas of the nomadic postrnodern intellectual.