1SOCIÉTÉS: There are some authors, like Peter Handke, who talk about the end of flânerie in postindustrial times. We do not fully agree with this thinking because residues of flânerie still seem to exist; the modus of living in our contemporary world is an example. What do you think of the tradition of the flâneur and the presence of flânerie in the modern metropolis?

2Aimée Boutin: The flâneur is alive and well in our contemporary society, judging by the number of films and events inspired by the practice of walking in the city. Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris and Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 La Grande Belleza (The Great Beauty) cast their main protagonists as flâneurs who wandered in time and space to find their direction in life. In 2015, Hermès artistic director, Pierre-Alexis Dumas designated “Flâneur Forever” as the theme of his creative design. The flâneur continues to generate a constant flow of journal articles and books; for example, in 2017, Temma Balducci’s Gender, Space, and the Gaze in Post-Haussmann Visual Culture: Beyond the Flâneur (Routledge) aims to reconsider how flânerie was gendered, in terms of masculinity or femininity, across a range of interdisciplinary nineteenth-century sources.

3In 2017, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia curated the exhibition Person of the Crowd which combines a museum exhibit of works by 50 international artists from the 1950s to the present, a lecture series, and an interactive website [1]. Person of the Crowd reclaims the traditional figure of the flâneur, but, in its comprehensiveness, serendipity, and eclecticism, the curated show tells us something about what flânerie represents in this historical moment – while avoiding any grand narrative that would attempt to delimit interpretation. Artists included in the exhibition stay close to the Benjaminian tradition by setting the flâneur in the street, understood as a public and everyday space; such is the case of The Leak (2002), a single channel video with sound by Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs. Alÿs walks aimlessly along city streets holding a punctured can of paint as the stream of paint leaves a trace of his perambulations. The Leak reprises the trope of walking as a narrative in which the flâneur writes upon the city space. Its close focus on the rhythm of ambulatory movement and on the paint stream place the work within the tradition of detached and aestheticized flânerie. Other artists featured in the exhibition draw attention to the forms and the ethos of flânerie that privilege political engagement. A good example is Guerrilla Girls, a group of anonymous American female artists whose posters and billboards expose sexual and racial bias, inequality, and corruption. This group brings a new dimension to the discussion of the gender of flânerie, shaping the flâneuse not only into a female stroller whose urban mobility is transgressive (they wear gorilla masks instead of cross-dressing to remain anonymous) but also into a demonstrator who wages war and whose resistance is written on the city.

4The freedom of the flâneur, central to Guy Debord’s notion of dérive, is questioned in several works included in the exhibition. Can the flâneur escape control and surveillance in cities where open borders and carefree drifting are not a given? It is worth remembering that Benjamin situated the emergence of the flâneur at a historical moment when the Haussmannization of Paris regulated urban mobility through modern city planning. The Barnes exhibition includes two works of art that use the flâneur to think about urban regulation. Cuban artist Tania Bruguera addressed these social issues twenty years ago in a videotaped and mixed media performance piece titled Displacement, 1998-99. Bruguera walked the streets of Havana on Fidel Castro’s birthday in 1998 dressed in a suit made of earth, cloth, wood, and nails that made her the embodiment of a Congolese power figure. A present-day performance piece, Mourning Stutter (2017) by American artist Zachary Fabri walks to explore «the process of mourning in response to police murders of Black people and the loss of freedoms he anticipates under the new presidential administration,» to quote the program notes.

5Based on these events, one might even say there is a revival of interest in flânerie today, though due diligence should be given to the differences between nineteenth century pedestrianism and contemporary urban mobility.

6S.: In our global world where metropolis seems to be everywhere the same, is it still possible to practice flânerie? And in which ordinary places can this practice be found?

7A.B.: When Walter Benjamin discussed flânerie in nineteenth-century Paris, he identified the arcade, the street, and the department store as the locations of choice of the flâneur. These ordinary places remain the sites where the contemporary flâneur/flâneuse can stroll. The street continues to provide opportunities for planned or random encounters in the crowd, happenstances that often provoke the twenty-first century flâneur/flâneuse (no longer a mere detached observer) to reflect on social inequality and on the sexualisation of public space. Of course the “street” in the twenty-first-century city is not the same entity as in the nineteenth century – today’s “street” which includes both the skywalk and the underground is multi-layered. Window shopping in the street and in the indoor shopping mall (in its heydays in the twentieth century and currently in decline) was a phenomena social theorists associated with flânerie (especially with the Belle Epoque flâneuse), but which now emphasize the extent to which flânerie was and continues to be associated with the marketplace. The airport and train station are contemporary places where flâneurs immerse themselves in the crowd and where the transitory nature of our globalized society is perhaps most tangible. To some extent our global world has made the metropolis seem to be everywhere the same; but flâneurs or flâneuses by nature seek out what is distinct in each place. He or she finds the hidden sights, those often taken for granted, overlooked or unexplored by the city’s residents. Through these explorations of ordinary places and contemporary times, flâneurs deepen the grasp of their own time and space.

8S.: What do you think of the contemporary trends of urban studies and cultural studies in terms of the flâneur and traveller – a floating, vulnerable subject who is as different from the modern subject as the bourgeois is from the proletariat? Can the flâneur be understood as a universal subject of the global era, as were class subjects in the past?

9A.B.: I do not believe the flâneur can be understood as a universal subject of the global era. There continues to be a need to think of the twenty-first-century flâneur in terms of race, gender, and class. Considering gendered mobility in a global perspective accounts for social differences among countries where women (in Muslim countries for instance) still do not have the same freedom of movement as men. The vulnerability of the contemporary traveller can indeed be dependent on identity. Personal safety and walking have different implications for instance for black than for white youth in the USA.

10S.: In “Rethinking the flâneur” you discuss the rehabilitation of sensory perception. What is the relationship between the senses and the practice of flânerie in our contemporary world?

11A.B.: The flâneur and flâneuse discover the hidden or unexplored areas of the city through sensory exploration: they investigate the sights, sounds, smells, and textures of urban spaces to make sense of what makes each a distinct place. In my book City of Noise, I examined how street vendors shaped the experience of flânerie in nineteenth-century Paris. The taunts and cat-calls of peddlers assailed the ears of passersby back then but they continue to do so today. Faced with the intrusiveness of peddlers’ vocalizations, flâneurs hear the contested voices of the city that draw attention to unequal working conditions and immigration issues. Outdoor markets, where accents, smells, and tastes from around the world mingle, provide rich sensory environments for the flâneur. Street performances, posters, billboards, signs, and graffiti give a visual texture to urban space that invites flâneurs to leave their own mark on the city. If in the nineteenth century the flâneur strived to stroll unobserved, seeing but not seen, the twenty-first century stroller cannot avoid the omnipresence of surveillance. Finally in our contemporary world, flânerie is increasingly a nocturnal activity. Strolling the city at night brings all the senses into play (or vigilance as the case may be) as flâneurs experience the city as a space of entertainment but also of insecurity.

12S.: There is in East Asia a strong tendency toward postcolonialism. Many East Asians are very interested in the views of Western flâneurs and travelers. There are many famous travel stories written by them and translated into Korean and Japanese. East Asians are very sensitive to the asymmetrical views of Western travelers and flâneurs. Have you ever thought about the flâneur in the postcolonial context? If so, please comment.

13A.B.: Our globalized society means more people have access to international destinations and to some extent, travel and tourism have become one of the contemporary forms of flânerie. By integrating cross-cultural interactions into our perspective on this well-known type, scholars can move beyond the strict nineteenth-century European boundaries imposed on the flâneur in the Benjaminian critical tradition. This tradition accounts neither for the numerous European flâneurs who travelled abroad in the nineteenth century, nor the non-European writers, then and now, who adopt the posture of the flâneur. Constantin Guys, whom Charles Baudelaire identifies as the perfect flâneur in The Painter of Modern Life, is but one example of a French journalist whose travels fuelled his flânerie. In an essay in a special issue of L’esprit créateur titled Cultural Exchange and Creative Identity: France/Asia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries that I edited with Elizabeth Emery (vol. 56.3 -- Fall 2016), Ke Ren discusses Chen Jitong (1852-1907), a Chinese diplomat and journalist who identified as a Parisian boulevardier and published a book inspired by the French literature of flânerie titled Les Parisiens peints par un Chinois. That same journal issue includes an essay by Akane Kawakami on two cosmopolitan Francophone flâneurs who stroll in the underground spaces of twenty-first century Tokyo; Kawakami shows how Michaël Ferrier and Régine Robin avoid an “orientalizing stance,” and cross national and cultural boundaries to discover a “common humanity based on a universal syntax” (120-21). The contemporary flâneur can chose to make sense of the world at a local or a global scale, but either way must be sensitive to the asymetrical relations that mobile subjects often occupy.

14S.: The mobility of travelers and flâneurs is highly dependent on technology. Moreover, the urban environment has changed because of technology, which is something we have all experienced. How do you estimate the capacity of technology in terms of everyday city life? If this question is vague, I would like to pose another question: which aspect of technology will affect our fluid modernity the most?

15A.B.: From its inception in the nineteenth century, the historical literature on the flâneur constructed the type in relation to technologies, whether it be the kaleidoscope, the panorama, or the newspaper. In the twenty-first century, modern technologies of mobility, including light rail, fast trains, automobiles, and aircraft have expanded the ways one can move about urban space. Along the lines of Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794), flânerie has also always taken imaginary forms. Hazel Hahn for instance described the flâneur’s armchair travel in relation to nineteenth-century illustrated magazines in an essay in Rethinking the Flâneur: Flânerie and the Senses (Dix-Neuf 16.2 [2012]). Giving new impetus to imaginary flânerie, digital technologies that enable virtual movement affect our fluid modernity the most. There has been much discussion of the cyberflâneur and surfing the Internet, though, as Evgeny Morozov has suggested, the freedom of cyberspace is more limited today than in the 1990s. Mobile apps such as LiveTrekker and Dérive, however, use technology to enhance actual pedestrianism by making it possible to build souvenirs and tell stories complete with maps, photos, videos, sound-clips and notes. Virtual reality tours such as those by Panotour, allow for an immersive experience of flânerie without leaving one’s computer screen.