Excerpts of The crimes of the Flaneur written by Tom McDonough.
First appeared in October 102, Fall 2002, p.p. 101-122
"No matter what trail the flaneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime." ~ Walter Benjamin
This citation from Benjamin gives rise to two opposed possible readings. On one hand it provides us with a portrait of the flaneur, the solitary urban stroller, as detective, tracking down the transgressions committed in the metropolis and imposing a species of social control over that lawless formation known as the crowd. Yet it also allows for another, precisely opposite, reading; for her we also can see the flaneur as himself criminal, his wanderings through the city streets as themselves perhaps criminal acts, inevitably leading him into crime. This essay is concerned with the very ambiguities contained in the epigraph above, with this telling uncertainty, which registers so effectively the tenuous nature of urban order; the way that our everyday routines are always subtended by other possibilities—the outlawed, the prohibited, the unauthorized uses of the public realm.
Written during the summer and fall of 1938, this article appeared on the intellectual scene a generation later as a major event, at least—as we shall see—in certain circles; for its recovery marked nothing less than the second coming of the flaneur: the return of that idle "man about town" who, while leisurely strolling the city's boulevards, gave himself over to the momentary impressions and scenes encountered there.³
³ It would perhaps be more accurate to designate this third coming of the flaneur: the first being its invention in the early nineteenth century and its long denouement through various incarnations down to the fin de siècle; the second coming then being its rediscovery by benjamin in the orbit of Surrealist practices in the 1920s and subsequent afterlife extending to the postwar Situationist dérives; whereby the 1967 publication becomes a third, one hesitates to say, final apparition.
[The city] bore little resemblance to the metropolis evoked by Benjamin, for whom the class divide—figured in the relation of individuals to crowd—discursively structured the perception of nineteenth-century urban space.
Their role [the role of the flaneur] was to create a phantasmagoria of transparency, to convince their readers that "everyone was, unencumbered by any factual knowledge, able to make out the profession, the character, the background, and the life-style of passersby." Such an ability was like a magical gift bestowed upon the inhabitant of the metropolis, a birthright rather than an acquisition; the physiologies addressed their audience not as a primer might a student, but as one man about town would address another. The flaneur could thereby become a connoisseur of human nature, confident of his capacity to rank and judge the strangers along the boulevards, and he could be reassured that those strangers bore him no ill will, that they harbored no untoward designs on him. A double erasure was here at work: the other was made a version of the same (social difference reduced to that "perfect bonhomie" of petit bourgeois fantasy); and in this "friendly picture of one another," the foundational role of competition, of the cash nexus, in urban social life was disguised.
The detective story would accomplish this by denying the stranger his secret, by searching him out in his most reclusive hiding place; the swarming boulevard. "The original social content" of these stories, Benjamin demonstrated, " was the obliteration of the individual's traces in the big-city crowd; it was just this ability of the multitude on the street to unwittingly shelter the criminal, the malicious, the delinquent, which proved menacing, and it was this threat that the mystery story phantas- matically allayed by transforming the flaneur into the detective—that figure of social control who would pull aside the cloak of the crowd to reveal the asocial criminal hiding at its very heart.
[About Vito Acconci's Following Piece 1969]
Perhaps, as Baudelaire had taught us, the two figures were collapsed into one, the flaneur-detective relinquishing his detachment to submit to his criminal passion toward the other. Indeed, that aspect of submission was pronounced as the element of threat in Following Piece. For this was an art of duration, whose extent was dictated not by the artist but by factors entirely out of his control. Acconci, according to the rules of this game, was compelled to follow his subjects as long as they remained in public spaces, which could include restaurants or movie theaters; he was in a very real sense at the mercy of his mark to the same extent that they, unwittingly, were at his. In the example cited, he spent over three hours trailing this unknown woman, in and out of stores as she shopped in the popular boutiques of Greenwhich Village. Indeed, that was most striking about Following Piece was the coincidence of a barely concealed sense of threat with the networks of desire and dependence created in its simple choreography.
In works from the summer and fall of 1969 such as Lay of the Land, Toe Touch, or Throw, the individual and the surrounding environment were conjoined into a unified field of influence, the one becoming the mirror of the other: "my body as a system of possible movements transmitted by my body to the environment (the environment as a system of possible movements transmitted from the environment to my body), as Acconci described it.
"I can move, in real space," he had written, "by trying myself into a system (another agent, a conventional situation) outside me. I become an agent (of my own activity) by becoming a receiver (of someone else's activity)." For Krauss, that double to whom Acconci tied his movements did not constitute a true, external object, and was not what we could call an other; rather, it was " a displacement of the self which was the effect...of transforming the performer's subjectivity into another, mirror, object. Despite the pretense of giving himself over to the unscripted movements of the other and the concomitant loss of control over the specific contents of a performance, in other words, Acconci was only ever pursuit of his own mirror-reflection.
[In Allan Kaprow's Calling 1965, participants were kidnapped, wrapped in aluminum foil or muslin and left at the information booth in Grand Central Station.]
Kaprow's event, in other words, inscribed itself only too readily into the consumer spectacle of its setting, becoming just one more sight for the throng of commuters ready for diversion while awaiting the next train home. These aspects of the Happening, its melodramatic, scripted quality and its relatively clear separation of actors from audience, would be precisely what Acconci wished most strenuously to avoid. Whereas Kaprow tended to the sprawling and operatic, which transformed his works into species of public theater, the latter preferred to keep his actions discreet, barely distinguishable from the everyday world around them. As he would later write in recalling this moment. " we wanted...a region that was a section of the accustomed world that everybody knows and that you simply as a matter of course passed by, that you chose sometimes of your own accord to go through. The artist would, in other words, disappear into the crowd, his activities rejecting the ostentatious or the theatrical aspects of their antecedents, so that they could now almost seamlessly blend in with the life of the city.
Acconci was rather absorbed in manipulating codes of public behavior, experimenting with the limits of the permissible at a time when those limits had been thrown into question.
It is not hard to understand why Acconci with his own interest in exploring the enactment of the self outside of moral of normative explorations, might be drawn toward this work. [The presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Ervin Goffman 1959] I am less, however, interested in adducing Goffman's influence on Acconci's performance activities than in the ground that they both unwittingly shared in the late 1960s, when each investigated the fine line separating order from disorder, the leal from the criminal, in the contemporary city.
Only by studying normal appearances with an almost anthropological exactitude could one come to imitate them [others on the street] so well, to "act natural".
Goffman wrote: "They are forced to become phenomenologists, close students of everyday life...Whereas experience leads him to become decreasingly aware of what he is taking for granted, experience leads them to become increasingly aware...Fear, then, but also desire motivated his seemingly scientific project, and if sociology generally had played a role comparable to the detective literature of the nineteenth-century—interposing a transparency in the opaque matter of the crowd—Goffman seems to have chosen another position, one analogous to that of Acconci: an ambivalent identification with the source of threat itself.
In Tschumi's drawings [Bernard Tschumi The Park 1977], in Acconci's activities, and in Goffman's sociology, pursuer and pursued were denied their distinct identities, a shared desire for the other now provoking their mutual choreography through the city. The rediscovery of this model of the Benjaminian flaneur (itself an earlier twentieth-century meditation on a nineteenth-century type), that is, would coincide with its reinscription in spatial practice at just this moment. Yet to align these "crimes of the flaneur" with Baudelaire's "fatal, irresistible passion" is not to propose some transhistorical category of flanerie; it is, rather, to claim a discursive reality for that practice, one that proved available for reinvention (or more precisely, perhaps, contestation) at specific historical junctures. The decade stretching roughly from 1967 to 1977 was then one such moment, when a broader social crisis, which manifested itself as, among other things, a breakdown in the normative, bourgeois conception of urban order, provoked a return of the street's repressed: the reappearance of a twinned libidinal attraction to and visceral fear of the stranger. Nowhere were those symptoms more trenchantly apparent than in the practices analyzed here.
