From street to virtual flâneur– the transformation of flânerie
Click, click, through cyberspace, this is the new architectural promenade.
(Mitchell, 1996: 24)For Walter Benjamin, flânerie was a peculiarly nineteenth-century
European phenomenon, whose fall from public life resulted from the
withdrawal of spaces in which it could be practised. The street itself was
undergoing massive changes. Pedestrianism of any kind had become
hazardous as the tramcars, the trolleys and locomotion drove corridors of
speed throught the cities. As Benjamin narrated it, this is why the great
arcades had become so important, as they turned the street inward and
quarantined an exclusive zone in which the flâneurcould thrive (Benjamin,
1977: 36). But when the arcades began to be demolished to make way for
department stores, it was the beginning of the end of this kind of flâneur.If the arcade is the classical form of the intérieur, which is how the flâneur
sees the street, the department store is the form of the intérieur’s decay.
The bazaar is the last hangout of the flâneur. ... if in the beginning the
street had become an intérieurfor him, now this intérieurturned into a
street, and he roamed through the labyrinth of merchandise as he had once
roamed through the labyrinth of the city ... (Benjamin, 1977: 54)The story of the disappearance of the flâneurcoincides with the story
of the disappearance of public space. The street becomes the arcade, the
arcade becomes the department store, the department store is absorbed
by vast privately owned zones that are shopping malls.
For Mike Featherstone (1998: 910), in the modern period this means
that urban spaces where the occupants of different residential areas could
meet face-to-face, engage in casual encounters, accost and challenge one
another, talk, quarrel, argue or agree, lifting their private problems to the
level of public issues and making public issues into matters of private
concern – those ‘private/public’ agoraeof Cornelius Castoriadis are fast
shrinking in size and number.
For Benjamin, this process corresponds to a change in the flâneuralso,
who is redefined as a consumer, a private, possessive individual who
attempts to re-create his own sense of a world-of-the-whole through the
market. The final phantasmagoria is the private dwelling itself, which, as
Ann Friedberg (1993) describes it, simulates a dioramic display of goods
and commodities, and, together with media, provides for every need.
As we saw in the previous chapter on mobile privatization, the pri-
vate home itself becomes the basis for a virtual agora. Electronic assem-
blies and electronic interaction take precedence over interaction with our
neighbours, or geographic community. Indeed, as McLuhan says of the
United States at least: ‘to go outside is to be alone’ (quoted from an inter-
view with Tom Wolfe, ‘McLuhan: The Man and His Message’. StayingTelecommunity 199Holmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 199