The promenades of the great cities of modernity were places of
high-volume interaction, but very impersonal interaction. The main fea-
ture of such ‘face-to-face’ interaction was that it was visual.^16 It was either
to see or be seen that the flâneursought out the crowd. With such purpose
the flâneurwould overcome unfeeling isolation through enjoying the multi-
plicationof selves. The metropolitan person is also addicted to the height-
ened tempo of the large city – and would form an attachment to the street
as if it were a home.^17
For Benjamin (1977):The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home
among the façades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the
shiny, enameled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament
as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk
against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and
the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his
household after his work is done. (37)As Keith Tester (1996: 5) explains, the flâneurhas a calling, which is
doing, not simply being. For Baudelaire (1972), the man who lives in a box,
or the man who lives like a mollusc (the man who simply is), is actually
incomplete; the struggle for existential completion and satisfaction requires
relentless bathing in the multitude (it requires doing over and over again).
The flâneur, then, ‘the man of the crowd’, works at his identity, and
does not actually lose it in the crowd, as the badaud, or simple ‘man inthe
crowd’, does. His observation of the street is specialized and intellectual.
The aestheticization of such a gaze provides the flâneurwith a sense of dif-
ferentiation; it is what makes him special, and individual, even where in
fact he may be repressing the images of decay which can also be observed
around the city.
For this reason, the flâneurlives heroically as a foreigner in his own
city^18 – the complete reverse of the situation of the village or small town
person. For the latter, strangers only come from outside and must be
assimilated – as Shields (1994) suggests: ‘the stranger is a foreigner who
becomes like a native, whereas the flaneur is a native who becomes like a
foreigner’ (68).
If there was community in the town square and the cafés of mid-
modernity it was in the display of proto-cosmopolitanism. But in both forms
of the flâneurit was interacting with a mass of strangers which became
life’s prime goal: to be outside, to be with others for the sake of it, not to
anticipate an individual interaction. As we shall see, the form of individual
that arose from flânerie, the person who swung between being seen and
being invisible, is very important for understanding the Internet avatar,
whose community is also to mix with those who are strangers. Like the
flâneur, the avatar is invisible, but mixes with the broadest kind of ‘public’
ever envisaged, that of the virtual community.198 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 198