Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautés, Sales Clerks
Until 1870, the carriage ruled the streets. On the narrow sidewalks the pedestrian was extremely cramped, and so strolling took place principally in the arcades, which offered protection from bad weather and from the traffic. “Our larger streets and our wider sidewalks are suited to the sweet flânerie that for our fathers was impossible except in the arcades.” / Flâneur/ Edmond Beaurepaire, Paris d'hier et d'aujourd'hui: La Cronique des rues (Paris, 1900), p. 67. [A1a,1]
Giedion shows (in Bauen in Frankreich, p.35) how the axiom, “Welcome the crowd and keep it seduced” (Science et l'industrie, 143 [1925], p. 6), leads to corrupt architectural practices in the construction of the department store Au Printemps (1881-1889). Function of commodity capital! [A3,6]
“We have no speciality”―this is what the well-known dealer in secondhand goods, Frémin, “the man with the head of grey,” had written on the signboard advertising his wares in the Place des Abbesses. Here, in antique bric-à-brac, reemerges the old physiognomy of trade that, in the first decades of the previous century, began to be supplanted by the rule of the spécialité. This “superior scrap-yard” was called Au Philosophe by its proprietor. What a demonstration of stoicism! On this placard were the words: “Maidens, do not dally under the leaves!” And: “Purchase nothing by moonlight.” [A3,8]
For the first time in history, with the establishment of department stores, consumers begin to consider themselves a mass. (Earlier it was only scarcity which taught them that.) Hence, the circus-like and theatrical element of commerce is quite extraordinary heightened. [A4,1]
Engraving from the Empire: The Dance of the Shawl among the Three Sultanas. Cabinet des Estampes. [A7,3]
“Our epoch will be the link between the age of isolated forces rich in original creativeness and that of the uniform but leveling force which gives monotony to its products, casting them in masses, and following out one unifying idea―the ultimate expression of social communities.” H. de Balzac, L'Illustre Gaudissart, ed. Calmann-Lévy (Paris, 1837), p. 1. [A11a,7]
Specifics of the department store: the costumers perceive themselves as a mass; they are confronted with an assortment of goods; they take in all the floors at a glance; they pay fixed prices; they can make exchanges. [A12,5]
Fashion
A pair of lascivious engravings by Charles Vernier entitled A Wedding on Wheels―showing the departure and the return. The bicycle offered unsuspected possibilities for the depiction of the raised skirt. [B1a, 3]
“...They wore their hair and their clothes as though they were to be viewed in profile. For the profile is the silhouette of someone...who passes, who is about to vanish from our sight. Dress became an image of the rapid movement that carries away the world.” Charles Blanc, “Considérations sur le vêtement de femmes” (Institut de France, October 25, 1872), pp. 12-13. [B5a,3]
Haussmannization, Barricade Fighting
“The avenues [Haussmann] cut were entirely arbitrary: they were not based on strict deductions of the science of town planning. The measures he took were of a financial and military character.” Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris), p.250. [E2a,1]
“An independent deputy, the comte de Durfort-Civrac, . . . objected that these new boulevards, which were supposed to aid in repressing disturbances, would also make them more likely because, in order to construct them, it was necessary to assamble a mass of workers.” Georges Laronze, Le Baron Haussmann, p. 133. [E3a,4]
Around 1830: “The Rue Saint-Denis and Rue Saint- Martin are the principal arteries in this quartier, a godsend for rioters. The war for the streets was deplorably easy there. The rebels had only to rip up the pavement and then pile up various objects: furniture from neighboring houses, crates from grocer's and, if need be, a passing omnibus, which they would stop, gallantly helping the ladies to disembark. In order to gain these Thermopylaes, it was thus necessary to demolish the houses. The line infantry would advance into the open, heavily armed and well equipped. A handful of insurgents behind a barricade could hold an entire regiment at bay.” Dubech and d'Espezel, Histoire de Paris (Paris, 1926), pp. 365-366. [E4a,5]
“In Haussmann's time, there was a need for new roads, but not necessarily for the new roads he built. . . . The most striking feature of his projects is their scorn for historical experience. . . . Haussmann lays out an artificial city, like something in Canada or the Far West. . . . His thoroughfares rarely possess any utility and never any beauty. Most are astonishing architectural intrusions that begin just about anywhere and end up nowhere, while destroying everything in their path; to curve them would have been enough to preserve precious old buildings. . . . We must not accuse him of too much Haussmannization, but of too little. In spite of the megalomania of his theories, his vision was, in practice, not large enough. Nowhere did he anticipate the future. His vistas lack amplitude; his streets are too narrow. His conception is grandiose but not grand; neither is it just or provident.” Dubech and d'Espezel, pp. 424-426. [E5a,1]
Around 1837, Dupin, in the Galerie Colbert, issued a series of colored lithographs (signed Pruché , 1837) representing the theatergoing public in various postures. A few plates in the series: Spectators in High Spirits, Spectators Applauding, Spectators Intriguing, Spectators Accompanying the Orchestra, Attentive Spectators, Weeping Spectators. [E6a,2]
“Hundreds of thousands of families, who work in the center of the capital, sleep in the outskirts. This movement resembles the tide: in the morning the workers stream into Paris, and in the evening the same wave of people flows out. It is a melancholy image. . . . I would add . . . that it is the first time that humanity has assisted in a spectacle so dispiriting for the people.” A. Granveau, L'Ouvrier devant la société (Paris, 1868), p. 63 (“Les Logements à Paris”). [E7,5]
Already Rattier assigns to his false Paris “a unique and simple system of traffic control that links geometrically, and in parallel lines, all the avenues of this false Paris to a single center, the Tuileries―this being admirable method of defense and of maintaining order.” Paul-Ernest de Rattier, Paris n'existe pas (Paris, 1857), p. 55. [E8,1]
The Collector
What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from its original functions in order to enter the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this “completeness”? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object's mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection. And for the true collector, every single thing in this system becomes an encyclopedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the industry, and the owner from which it comes. It is the deepest enchantment of the collector to enclose the particular item within a magic circle, where, as a last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquired), it turns to stone. Everything remembered, everything thought, everything conscious becomes socle, frame, pedestal, seal of his possession. It must not be assumed that the collector, in particular, would find anything strange in the topos hyperouranios―that place beyond the heavens which, for Plato, shelters the unchangeable archetypes of things. He loses himself, assuredly. But he has the strength to pull himself up again by nothing more than a straw; and from out of the sea of fog that envelops his senses rises the newly acquired piece, like an island.―Collecting is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of “nearness” it is the most binding. Thus, in a certain sense, the smallest act of political reflection makes for an epoch in the antiques business. We construct here an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to “assembly.” [H1a,2]
Possessions and having are allied with the tactile, and stands in a certain opposition to the optical. Collectors are beings with tactile instincts. Moreover, with the recent turn away from naturalism, the primacy of the optical that was determinate for the previous century has come to an end./ Flâneur/ The flâneur optical, the collector tactile. [H2,5]
One may start from the fact that the true collector detaches the object from its functional relations. But that is hardly an exhaustive description of this remarkable mode of behavior. For isn't this the foundation (to speak with Kant and Schopenhauer) of that “disinterested” contemplation by virtue of which the collector attains to an unequaled view of the object―a view which takes in more, and other, than that of the profane owner and which would do best to compare to the gaze of the great physiognomist? But how his eye comes to rest on the object is a matter elucidated much more sharply through another consideration. It must be kept in mind that for the collector, the world is present, and indeed ordered, in each of his objects. Ordered, however, according to a surprising and, for the profane understanding, incomprehensible connection. This connection stands to the customary ordering and schematization of things something as their arrangement in the dictionary stands to a natural arrangement. We need only recall what importance a particular collector attaches not only to his object but also to its entire past, whether this concerns the origin and objective characteristics of the thing or the details of its ostensibly external history: previous owners, price of purchase, current value, and so on. All of these―the “objective” data together with the other―come together, for the true collector, in every single one of his possessions, to form a whole magic encyclopedia, a world order, whose outline is the fate of his object. Here, therefore, within this circumscribed field, we can understand how great physiognomist (and collectors are physiognomists of the world of things) become interpreters of fate. It suffices to observe just one collector as he handles the items in his showcase. No sooner does he hold them in his hand than he appears inspired by them and seems to look through them into their distance, like an augur. (It would be interesting to study the bibliophile as the only type of collector who has completely withdrawn his treasures from their functional context.) [H2,7;H2a,1]
The Flâneur
The anamnestic intoxication in which the flâneur goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge―indeed, of dead facts―as something experienced and lived through. This felt knowledge travels from one person to another, especially by word of mouth. But in the course of the nineteenth century, it was also deposited in an immense literature. Even before Lefeuve, who described Paris “street by street, house by house,” there were numerous works that depicted this storied landscape as backdrop for the dreaming idler. [M1,5]
One must make an effort to grasp the altogether fascinating moral constitution of the passionate flâneur. The police―who here, as on so many of the subjects we are treating, appear as experts―provide the following indication in the report of a Paris secret agent from October 1798(?): “It is almost impossible to summon and maintain good moral character in a thickly massed population where each individual, unbeknownst to all others, hides in the crowd, so to speak, and blushes before the eyes of no one.” Cited in Adolf Schmidt, Pariser Zustände während der Revolution, vol. 3 (Jena, 1876). The case in which the flâneur completely distances himself from the type of the philosophical promenader, and takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness, was fixed for the first time and forever afterward by Poe in his story “The Man of the Crowd.” [M1,6]
The “colportage phenomenon of space” is the flâneur's basic experience. Inasmuch as this phenomenon also―from another angle―shows itself in the mid-nineteenth-century interior, it may not be amiss to suppose that the heyday of flânerie occur in this same period. Thanks to this phenomenon, everything potentially taking place in this one single room is perceived simultaneously. The space winks at the flâneur: What do you think may have gone on here? Of course, it has yet to be explained how this phenomenon is associated with colportage./History/ [M1a,3]
“It is wonderful that in Paris itself one can actually wander through countryside.” Karl Gutzkow, Briefe aus Paris (Leipzig, 1842), vol. 1, p. 61. The other side of the motif is thus touched on. For if flânerie can transform Paris into one great interior―a house whose rooms are the quartiers, no less clearly demarcated by the thresholds than are real rooms―then, on the other hand, the city can appear to someone walking through it to be without thresholds: a landscape in the round. [M3,2]
Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that―in the space between the building fronts―experiences, learns, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For this collective, glossy enameled shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in the drawing room of a bourgeois; walls with their “Post No Bills” are its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, mailboxes its bronze busts, benches its bedroom furniture, and the café terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its household. The section of the railing where road workers hang their jackets is the vestibule, and the gateway which leads from the row of courtyards out into the open is the long corridor that daunts the bourgeois, being for the courtyards the entry to the chambers of the city. Among these latter, the arcade was the drawing room. More than anywhere else, the street reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses. [M3a,4]
The flâneur is the observer of the marketplace. His knowledge is akin to the occult science of industrial fluctuations. He is a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers. [M5,6]
“A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralization, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold; has raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover the Thames. . . . But the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, . . . one realizes for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization. . . . The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive about it―something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other―aren't they all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And aren't they obliged, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one―that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd―while no man thinks to honor another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together within a limited space. And however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious, as just here in the crowding of the great city.” Friedrich Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1848), pp. 36-37 (“Die grossen Städte”). [M5a,1]
“Therefor the one who sees, without hearing, is much more . . . worried than the one who hears without seeing. This principle is of great importance in understanding the sociology of the modern city. Social life in the large city . . . shows a great preponderance of occasions to see rather than to hear people. One explanation . . . of spacial significance is the development of public means of transportation. Before the appearance of omnibuses, railroads, and streetcars in the nineteenth century, men were not in a situation where, for minutes or hours at a time, they could or must look at one another without talking to one another.” G. Simmel, Mélanges de philosophie rélativiste: Contribution à la culture philosophique
“Dickens . . . could not remain in Lausanne because, in order to write his novels, he needed the immense labyrinth of London streets where he could prowl about continuously. . . . Thomas De Quincey . . . , as Baudelaire tells us, was 'a sort of peripatetic, a street philosopher pondering his way endlessly through the vortex of the great city.” Edmond Jaloux, “Le Dernier Flâneur,” Le Temps (May 22, 1936) [M9a,5]
The masses in Baudelaire. They stretch before the flâneur as a veil: they are the newest drug for the solitary.―Second, they efface all traces of the individual: they are the newest asylum for the reprobate and the proscript.―Finally, within the labyrinth of the city, the masses are the newest and most inscrutable labyrinth. Through them, previously unknown chthonic traits are imprinted on the image of the city. [M16,3]
The most characteristic building projects of the nineteenth century―railroad stations, exhibition halls, department stores (according to Giedion)―all have matters of collective importance as their object. The flâneur feels drawn to these “despised, everyday” structures, as Giedion calls them. In these constructions, the appearance of great masses on the stage of history was already foreseen. They form the eccentric frame within which the last privateers so readily displayed themselves. (See K1a,5.) [M21a,2]
On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress
Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse―these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them. [N1a,8]
