ancient cities

274 Florence, Italy
the flâneur that remained paradigmatic for much
of the twentieth century.
Although still connected to the modern city,
Benjamin’s flâneur became the universal symbol
of commodity culture as embodied by the modern
intellectual who was forced to sell himself in
the capitalist market. The commodified flâneur
assumed the attributes of the nineteenth-century
badaud, who had also been characterized by passivity
and self-loss. In Benjamin’s tragic reformulation
of flânerie, the passive and active sides of
the flâneur were once again splintered off from
each other, with the commodified flâneur assuming
the role of the badaud and the modernist artist
that of the creative flâneur.
The acceleration of social and cultural transformations
in the late twentieth century has given rise
to an even more multifaceted image of the flâneur.
Linked to an ever-widening range of phenomena,
from the cinema and cyberspace to global tourism
and the themed environments of Las Vegas and
Disneyland, the postmodern flâneur has sometimes
been accused of losing all coherence as a
meaningful cultural symbol. According to some
critics, this figure bears few traces of the historical
flâneur who flourished in the Parisian arcades of
the early nineteenth century. A symbol of a commodified
and aestheticized culture, he has become
“a pure sign, a signifier freed from, bereft of, any
special signified,” according to Gilloch.
While such observations are undeniable, it is
important to stress that the postmodern flâneur’s
continuity with the past lies precisely in his instability
as a cultural image. For the flâneur was,
from his inception, characterized by mobility and
resistance to stable definitions and essentialized
identities. Compared to the reassuring promises
of scientific objectivity and political analysis, the
flâneur undoubtedly offers only a mobile and
contingent image of the social world. Yet, he also
provides an invaluable corrective to the objectivist
perspective of the traditional social sciences.
The flâneur’s intimate association with the world
of popular culture opens up new possibilities for
conceptualizing the shifting constellations of modern
experience. More important still, his affirmation
of the discursive world of culture legitimates
the individual’s freedom to create meaning within
the destabilized environment of modernity.
Mary Gluck
See also Benjamin, Walter; Cinematic Urbanism;
Photography and the City; Paris, France
Further Readings
Baudelaire, Charles. 1965. The Painter of Modern Life
and Other Essays. Translated and edited by Jonathan
Mayne. London: Phaidon.
Benjamin, Walter. 1973. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric
Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Translated by
Harry Zohn. London; New York: Verso.
———. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1986. “The Flâneur, the
Sandwichman, and the Whore: The Politics of
Loitering.” New German Critique 39(Fall):99–140.
Cohen, Margaret. 1995. “Panoramic Literature and the
Invention of Everyday Genres.” Pp. 227–52 in Cinema
and the Invention of Modern Life, edited by Leo
Charney and Vanessa Schwartz. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
De Lacroix, Auguste. 1841. “Le Flâneur.” Pp. 66–72 in
Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: Encyclopédie
morale du dix-neuvième siècle (The French Painted
Themselves: Moral Encyclopedia of the Nineteenth
Century), Vol. 4, edited by Léon Curmer.
Friedberg, Ann. 1993. Window Shopping: Cinema and the
Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gilloch, Graeme. 1997. “‘The Figure That Fascinates’:
Seductive Strangers in Benjamin and Baudrillard.”
Renaissance and Modern Studies, 40:17–29.
Gluck, Mary. 2003. “The Flâneur and the Aesthetic
Appropriation of Urban Culture in Mid-nineteenthcentury
Paris.” Theory, Culture, and Society
20(5):53–80.
Hartman, Maren. 2004. Technologies and Utopias: The
Cyberflaneur and the Experience of “Being Online.”
Munich: Fischer.
Hollevoet, Christel. 2001. “The Flaneur: Genealogy of a
Modernist Icon.” PhD dissertation, City University of
New York.
Prendergast, Christopher. 1992. Paris and the Nineteenth
Century. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Tester, Keith, ed. 1994. The Flaneur. London; New York:
Routledge.
Fl o r E n c E, it a l y
Florence is as much a complex cultural phenomenon
as a physical place, and it is this culture that