Stockpiling Time Itself: Walter Benjamin's Flânerie

In his latest piece for Hyperallergic, Tim Keane is inspired by The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, currently up at The Jewish Museum in New York (through August 6). His review also discusses new editions of books about city-walking and its connection to writing: Benjamin's One Way Street (Harvard/Belknap 2016) and Franz Hessel's Walking in Berlin (MIT Press 2017), which includes a forward from Benjamin. 

In the streets of Paris, Benjamin earned a living as a journalist while hunting out concrete examples on which to field test and then synthesize cutting-edge social theories. Encouraged by fellow German expatriate author Franz Hessel, he learned how to wander Paris with a voyeuristic curiosity modeled on that of the flaneur — a detached, attentive spectator who believed in the “religious intoxication of great cities” — who passed through every line of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, especially the groundbreaking volume Les Fleurs du Mal (1857).

Through voracious reading of French literature, Benjamin traced how Baudelaire’s flaneur, a nonconformist and “illuminati,” whom the poet himself found in Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” (1854), was reinvented by Surrealist novels like Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, Andre Breton’s Nadja (1928), and in the sensory shocks registered by the meandering narrator in Marcel Proust’s introspective epic In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927).

More than a stereotype or poseur, this flaneur represented an alternative form of modern consciousness, a sort of double agent. As Benjamin had learned from firsthand experience, as well as from his reading of Marx and Simmel, urban capitalism had severed the workplace from home. In doing so, it instigated a never-ending psychic tug-of-war over which domain was the more authentic, or real, and this tension played out through the surreal stagecraft of the modern city.

In imaginative literature as in real life, the flaneur sauntered about manufactured spaces, neither a machinelike worker nor a sleepwalking consumer. As a detached outsider, he is able to rip off the optical blinders and sensory filters imposed by civic conformity and functional pragmatism. Instead of submitting to the fate of commoditized subject or capitalist tool, the flaneur just wanders the city, scoping out randomness, changeability and ephemerality at every turn and intersection, stockpiling time itself, as Benjamin puts it, the way batteries store energy for future untold uses.

In a newly published English edition of Franz Hessel’s Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital (MIT Press, 2017), Benjamin’s foreword further refines this enigmatic mission of random strolling (known in French as flânerie). The wanderer crosses thresholds without purpose other than observing how fellow pedestrians and even inanimate objects seem to quicken with fresh life and return his gaze. As “a connoisseur of the liminal” and the “fleeting,” the flaneur is “a werewolf roaming restlessly in the social wilderness.”

Find the full piece at Hyperallergic.