From the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary,
From the editor's introduction to Georg Simmel's The Metropolis and Mental Life,
- fla·neur
- Variant(s):
- also flâ·neur \flä-ˈnər\
- Function: noun
- Etymology: French flâneur
- Date: 1854
: an idle man-about-town
Simmel's detached and capricious urban cosmpolitan is much similar to the "flaneur" of philospher Walter Benjamen ("Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,") and poet Charles Baudelaire, the Parisian pedestrian dandy, the bourgeois shopper, or the urban commuter. The barrage of lures, stimulations, and choices in the modern city of commerce has induced a kind of monkish self-reflection that can be seen as trascendence as much as retreat. Freed from the prejudices and obligations of family and community, the bourgeois urbanist experiences the restlessness of liberation, a new condition of self-consciousness and inner emotional development. For all his liberation from the communal society, the urban modernist is now embedded in the iron cage of a world of work and bureaucracy, and the consumer's dilemma of a search for identity in a soulless mass society.
-The Urban Sociology Reader by Jan Lin and ChristopherMele
It makes one wonder, who are the flaneurs of our time? Does contemporary culture suppress them or allow them to flourish?
B-squared
1 comment:
"It makes one wonder, who are the flaneurs of our time?"
says the blogger, perhaps the epitome of a flaneur in our time. The internet is about information. Mass information available on demand. This is what makes it powerful, but it also encroached on our society. E-mail and IM replaced the phone. E-Commerce replaced a trip to the mall. Blogs, social networking, etc. are all our ways of dealing with this. It's our way of trying to establish our own individual voice in a "soulless mass society."
Where's the soul in facebook? The poke? The wall?
Post a Comment