The Idler

Flaneurs

In 1840’s Paris, it was regarded as the height of cool to take your tortoise for a walk. This century, German thinker Walter Benjamin took up the cause of the flaneurs. Mark Ffytche joins his celebration of the city slackers.

Ah, the golden days of flanerie are gone. Saunter, stroll: dally, dawdle; loiter, linger … arm in arm those magical words float by me, trailing their irretrievable aura. The ability to set the pace of of one’s own life is the elusive dream of the urban loafer. But the times when the city could unfold its pavements at the nonchalant pace of the browser are receding ever more rapidly through the subway of modernity. Gone are the days of the man of letters whose boulevard occupation consisted of posing in pumps and keeping himself in readiness for the next incident, witticism or rumour. Gone are the days when people saw fit to pause and jot down physiology’s of city life whose leisurely descriptions were tailored to the style of the flaneur who goes botanizing on the asphalt. No, the city has long been hostile to the humble foot-wanderer and Reebok artist. In the age of Charles Baudelaire, who scented a chance rhyme in every corner, the city was already preparing to submit to the processed rhythms of Taylorist production and its motto “Down with Dawdling!” The un-flanetic life would stick in the spleen of France’s first literary crusty. Abroad from his beloved Paris, Baudelaire remarked bitterly that, “Strolling, something that nations with imaginary love, is not possible in Brussels”. He could only mourn the demise of the dandy, whose slack demeanour and fashionable tics were, “the last shimmer of the heroic in times of decadence”.

But there was one man this century who refused to abandon the stroller’s code, who could not reconcile himself to the fact that, “in bourgeois society idleness … ceased to be heroic”. Walter Benjamin, writer, collector and slacker, born in Berlin in 1892, saw it as his life’s task to interrupt the continuum of history with his gastropoidal reflections. Francoise Meltzer, author of the indispensable “Walter Benjamin and the Right to Acedia” (published in Hot Property, Chicago) noted how the conditions of Benjamin’s birth encouraged dawdling. “Benjamin, like the flaneur, had his home in the 19th Century, an age of security in which children of upper middle class families were assured an income without having to work,, so that they had no reason to hurry.” Early on in life, Benjamin set himself seriously to the task of preserving this idling advantage. A friend from his youth, H.W. Belmore, recounts Benjamin’s aversion to every profession and his wish to live off his fathers money for the rest of his life. Until his late thirties - right the way through his intellectual maturation, marriage, family life and subsequent divorce - Benjamin tarried in the parental home and availed himself of a small monthly stipend with which to pursue his book-browsing bent. According to Benjamin scholar Hannah Arendt, “it is evident that this arrangement caused him a great deal of suffering, but it is just as evident that in all probability he never seriously considered another solution”. He found his parents’ demand that he work for a living unspeakable, while his one organised attempt to free himself from dependency “ended with the proposal that his father immediately give him funds enabling him to buy an interest in a second hand bookstore”. This is the only gainful employment that Benjamin ever considered.

However, despite the financial difficulties of these years, Benjamin still managed constantly to enlarge his library, establishing himself as an itinerant man of letters and bibliophile. The atmosphere of the book-collector’s armchair, a haven for idlers in all times, is lovingly immortalised in Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library”. Here the author dusts his books off from their packing crates and tries to assuage the spring tides of memories they evoke by recounting his collectors tips. One of his favourite methods of acquisition is the borrowing of a book with its attendant non-returning. The book-borrower proves himself to be an inveterate collector not so much by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality, as by his failure to read these books. While publicly Benjamin appeared to labour under the difficult task of assessing the position of German culture in a time of great political urgency, engaging with contemporary debates on dialectical materialism, privately he relaxed amongst his paperly friends: “O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well-being.”

Arendt also notes that “when he did work he produced very little (he would have preferred the aphorism if he had not been paid by the line)”. His output in these years consists mainly of essays and reviews for literary magazines, a series of broadcasts for children, and some travel notes and impressions of Moscow, Naples and Marseilles. Benjamin drew intellectual sustenance from his street wanderings. One Way Street (verso), one of only two completed works published in his lifetime, was a series of musings arranged in the form of a street guide. In it he contemplates the art of writing in coffee houses, and remembers the Princes Caf?� where he spent long evenings pouring over his Origin of German Tragic Drama (his other publication). This last, with its notorious epistemo-critical Prologue, was Benjamin’s submission as a doctoral thesis. It was rejected on the grounds of its incomprehensibility. However, even if Benjamin had successfully made the grade to the world of professional scholarship, he is reported to have said, he would have begun by asking for a leave of absence.

All of Benjamin’s writing is characterised by digression and reverie. In A Berlin Chronicle he records the dreamy recalcitrance with which he accompanied his mother through the streets of the city centre.

Right into adult life, Benjamin sought to lose himself in the thoroughfares of cities as in a fairy-tale forest: “Then, signboards and streetnames, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance.” In Marseilles he supplemented his wanderings with some hashish, and found: “My walking stick begins to give me special pleasure.” It is the mark of the Idler to be absorbed by the minor details of life. It is these minutiae - useless perhaps even to him - that provide the main justification for his slower rate of progress through the world. Benjamin himself described his faculty of remembrance as advancing from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal. A characteristic moment finds him ruminating on the moulding, crowned with crenellations, above his old school classroom. Many schoolchildren in their time must have found solace in such architectural features - but Benjamin was still writing about it when he was 40: “this moulding …left stranded like a shell on the shore of my daydreaming. And there I now come across it. I pick it up and question it like Hamlet addressing the skull …”

Moments like these are a tribute to many arduous afternoons spent pillow-farming. However, nothing quite prepares one for his magnificent, sprawling, unwritten masterpiece, the Arcades project - a loose collection of notes and quotes on 19th century Paris, the proceeds of ten years browsing in dusty archives throughout Europe. A bible of Flanerie, it contained drafts for sections on idleness, fashion and boredom, and if completed it would have elevated Benjamin to the position of Euro super-stroller. For first time flaneurs, Francoise Meltzer provides the following useful definitions: “the flaneur, says the Petit Robert, is someone who enjoys doing nothing … the word ‘work’ is given as the antonym. According to the Larousse the verb flaneur means to wander around aimlessly with frequent stops for looking; to waste time.” The flaneur is someone who scorns the ideology of capitalism “by his very prescence on the streets as a loiterer, by his aimless strolling during working hours, by his exhibitionistic wasting of valuable time”.

The rise of the flaneurs coincides with that of the Feuilleton - the daily newspaper that at that time opened its pages to serial novels, city-sketches, short items of news and adverts. It was this journalistic development that allowed the flaneur to maintain the life of a gentleman of leisure, while carving out a modest living from the fringes of society. As revolutionary ferment swept across Europe, the flaneur was occupied with the innocuous novelties of fashion and journalistic ephemera. On a long summer’s day, the flaneur would weave through the city, psychologising, lingering over an amusing trifle for the Feuilleton. According to Benjamin street-journalism demanded a specific form of being on stand-by for work: this specific form is idleness. In the view of the public, these “protracted periods of idleness… were necessary for the realisation of his own labour-power. While others sweated indoors, the flaneur used the street as his lounge, office and smoking-room: “The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of caf?�s are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.”

To give some indication of the slacker-than-thou ethos that flourished in Paris Benjamin notes in Arcades: “Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flaneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them.” There arose also the custom of the aperitif and the cocktail hour. The rise of window shopping and the extension of opening hours to ten O’clock were designed to accommodate super-flans. At the height of the Second Empire, 24-hour flanerie was a hip form of noctambulism - equivalent to raving. Delvau writes: “A person may take a rest from time to time, he is permitted stops and resting places; but he has no right to sleep.”

The hub of slacker culture was undoubtedly the arcades. These were 19th Century shopping malls - covered streets covered with lowlife, consumer trifles and loafers: “It is in this world,” writes Benjamin, “that the flaneur is at home; he provides the favourite sojourn of the strollers and the smokers, the stamping ground of all sorts of little metiers, with its chronicler and its philosopher.” The arcades featured prominently in the literature of the time and were likened to a salon for the masses. In 1848 Victor Hugo remarked that where “the monarchy had its Idlers, the republic had its loafers”, Benjamin comments: “Hugo was, in a word, no flaneur.”

The true chronicler was Baudelaire who depicted the life of a hero within a crowd of wasters: “To the perfect spectator, the impassioned observer, it is an immense joy to make his domicile amongst numbers, amidst fluctuations and movement, amidst the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home, and yet to feel at home.” The flaneurs were the aristocrats of the crowd - their way of living “still bestowed a conciliatory gleam over the growing destitution of men in the great city”. At the height of his power the Idler was likened unto God: “As flaneur he has omnipresence at his disposal, as a gambler omnipotence, and as a student, omniscience”.

As a final tribute to Benjamins Arcades, let me quote from a section marked Konvolut M. and headed simply “The Flaneur”. These passages have not to my knowledge been translated. “The street leads the flaneur into a vanished age. For him each one slopes away; it leads upwards, if not to mother, then into a past which is all the more captivating in that it is not his own, private past… In the asphalt over which he passes, his footsteps awaken an astonishing echo. The gaslight, that streams down onto the pavements, throws an ambiguously suggestive light onto this false bottom…

A rapture comes over him who spends a long time marching aimlessly through the streets. With every step, the walking urge grows more powerful; ever quicker come the seductions of shops, of bistros, of smiling women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next street corner, a distant mass of foliage, a street name…”

Finally Benjamin quotes from the Larousse dictionary of 1872: “the greater part of men of genius were great flaneurs… Often it is at the time when the artist or the poet seems the least occupied in their work, that they are plunged in it the deepest.” This last passage seems rather tendentiously dropped into the m?�lange. It is the Idlers great wager with society that indolence is merely the outward sign of greater spiritual exertions that will ultimately be of benefit to all. Unfortunately Benjamin only ever actually published a small, incomplete section of his directory of loafers, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. But the rest of his collected fragments are suffused with the air of a long, treacly, self-absorbed project. The kind of work in progress that is professed as a terrible burden, a daemon of inspiration, but which once entered, has all the cosy familiarity of the garden shed.

According to Benjamin, the Sandwichman is the last Flaneur. Idle gazers long ago left the domain of the street and taken up their abode in front of the TV screen. Here on their daily flatland saunters they can play detective, observer, gossip, connoisseur, archivist and dreamer. A flaneur of the old school, Benjamin would not have been suited to life as a cathode-ray cowboy. In July 1945, fleeing from occupied France and awaiting his exit visa to America, he wrote to Hannah Arendt, quoting an aphorism from La Rochefoucaud which had saved him from the depths of depression: “His laziness supported him in glory for many years in the obscurity of an errant and hidden life,” Two months later, hampered at the Spanish border, he took the Cobain route out of reality. However, before we weep for the loss of a great loafer we should remember this phrase from his heyday: “The flaneur’s last journey: death. Its goal: novelty.”