Фланер: Человек досуга и наблюдатель городской жизни

Idler or man of leisure

Flâneur (flɑnœʁ) is a French term popularized in the nineteenth century for a type of urban male "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer". The word has some nuanced additional meanings (including as a loanword into English). Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near synonym of the noun is boulevardier. The flâneur was first a literary type from 19th century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. However, the flâneur's origins are to be found in journalism of the Restoration, and the politics of post revolutionary public space. Drawing on the work of Charles Baudelaire who described the flâneur in his poetry and 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life", Walter Benjamin promoted 20th century scholarly interest in the flâneur as an emblematic archetype of urban, modern (even modernist) experience. Following Benjamin, the flâneur has become an important symbol for scholars, artists, and writers. The classic French female counterpart is the passante, dating to the works of Marcel Proust, though a 21st century academic coinage is flâneuse, and some English language writers simply apply the masculine flâneur also to women. The term has acquired an additional architecture and urban planning sense, referring to passers by who experience incidental or intentional psychological effects from the design of a structure.

The historical feminine rough equivalent of the flâneur, the passante (French for 'walker', 'passer by'), appears in particular in the work of Marcel Proust. He portrayed several of his female characters as elusive, passing figures, who tended to ignore his obsessive (and at times possessive) view of them. Increasing freedoms and social innovations such as industrialization later allowed the passante to become an active participant in the 19th century metropolis, as women's social roles expanded away from the domestic and the private, into the public and urban spheres. Twenty first century literary criticism and gender studies scholarship has proposed flâneuse for the female equivalent of the flâneur, with some additional feminist re analysis. This proposal derives from the argument that women conceived and experienced public space differently from men in modern cities. Janet Wolff, in The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity (1985), argues that the female figure of the flâneuse is absent in the literature of modernity, because public space had been gendered in modernity, leading, in turn, women's exclusion from public spaces to domestic spaces and suburbs. However, as these feminist scholars have argued, the word 'flâneuse' implies women's distinctive modalities of conceiving, interacting, occupying, and experiencing space.

While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a "gentleman stroller of city streets", he saw him as having a key role in understanding, participating in, and portraying the city. A flâneur thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary, and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace. In the period after the French Revolution of 1848, during which the Empire was reestablished with clearly bourgeois pretensions of "order" and "morals", Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire's phrase, "a botanist of the sidewalk". The observer–participant dialectic is evidenced in part by the dandy culture. Highly self aware, and to a certain degree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies of the mid nineteenth century created scenes through self consciously outrageous acts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris. Such acts exemplify a flâneur's active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city. The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity. While Baudelaire's aesthetic and critical visions helped open up the modern city as a space for investigation, theorists such as Georg Simmel began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and psychological terms. In his essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life", Simmel theorized that the complexities of the modern city create new social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space, inculcating in them a "[[wikt:blasé attitude", and altering fundamental notions of freedom and being:

text=The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists being leveled down and worn out by a social technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super individual contents of life. Writing in 1962, Cornelia Otis Skinner suggested that there was no English equivalent of the term: "there is no Anglo Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city."

The concept of the flâneur has also become meaningful in the psychogeography of architecture and urban planning, describing people who are indirectly and (usually) unintentionally affected by a particular design they experience only in passing. In 1917, the Swiss writer Robert Walser published a short story called "italics=no" ("The Walk"), a veritable outcome of the flâneur literature. Walter Benjamin adopted the concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. From his Marxist standpoint, Benjamin describes the flâneur as a product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution without precedent, a parallel to the advent of the tourist. His flâneur is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante. Benjamin became his own prime example, making social and aesthetic observations during long walks through Paris. Even the title of his unfinished Arcades Project comes from his affection for covered shopping streets. In the context of modern day architecture and urban planning, designing for flâneurs is one way to approach the psychological aspects of the built environment.

The flâneur's tendency toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation has brought the term into the literature of photography, particularly street photography. The street photographer is seen as one modern extension of the urban observer described by nineteenth century journalist Victor Fournel before the advent of the hand held camera:

text=This man is a roving and impassioned daguerreotype that preserves the least traces, and on which are reproduced, with their changing reflections, the course of things, the movement of the city, the multiple physiognomy of the public spirit, the confessions, antipathies, and admirations of the crowd. An application of flâneur to street photography comes from Susan Sontag in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography. She describes how, since the development of hand held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur:

The flâneur concept is not limited to someone committing the physical act of a peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking", and a process of navigating erudition as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb's essay "Why I Do All This Walking, or How Systems Become Fragile". Taleb further set this term with a positive connotation referring to anyone pursuing open, flexible plans, in opposition to the negative "touristification", which he defines as the pursuit of an overly orderly plan. Louis Menand, in seeking to describe the poet T. S. Eliot's relationship to English literary society and his role in the formation of modernism, describes Eliot as a flâneur. Moreover, in one of Eliot's well known poems, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock", the protagonist takes the reader for a journey through his city in the manner of a flâneur. Using the term more critically, in "De Profundis", Oscar Wilde wrote from prison about his life regrets, stating: "I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds."