I‘ve started reading David Frisby’s Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (2001) in which he argues that flanerie as activity in the metropolitan modernity of the late 19th/early 20th century is not merely one of being an observer or even a decipherer. The flaneur can also be a producer of literary texts (including lyrical and prose poetry (as in the case of Baudelaire); a producer of illustrative texts (including drawings and painting); a producer of narratives and reports; a producer of journalistic texts; a producer of sociological texts. We can also add the figure of the photographer in urban modernityas a producer of photographic images (a figure who has become a suspicious person in late modernity).

Friby adds, in reference to Walter Benjamin, that the interpretation of flaneur author as producer (which applies to Benjamin himself) challenges the largely negative interpretation of the flaneur which confines this figure to that of seeing, observing and, in general, being confined to a mere spectator. Frisby does not mention Eugène Agtet and his photogprahs of old Paris.

The activity of watchful observation in the modern metropolis is a multifaceted method for apprehending and reading the complex and myriad signifiers in the labyrinth of modernity. Flanerie as observation involves modes of seeing, reading and interpreting the street. The flaneur traverses metropolitan modernity in search of that which is hidden: theever-same in the new; antiquity in modernity; representatives of the real in the mythical, the past in the present and exploring the texts of the city.

The flaneur as marginal figure, collecting clues to the metropolis,like the ragpicker assembling the refuse, like the detective seeking to bring insignificant details and seemingly fortuitous events into a meaningful constellation — all are seeking to read the traces from the details——those myriad cross-cutting interactions, momentary shocks, fleeting impressions and all that which Baudelaire signified as ‘the transitory, the fleeting and the fortuitous’.

flanerie as activity

Becoming familiar