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Streetwalking Metropolis

Review in 19th c French Studies (Gayle Levy)

• “Can there be a flaneuse, and what forms could she take?”
  • Yes: Anne Friedberg, Rachel Bowlby, Judith Walkowitz, and Erika Rappaport
  • No: Griselda Pollock, Janet Wolff (in 19th c, “gender divisions” made flaneuse impossible)
  • Parsons: Yes, and I’d like to change the terms of the argument, please: flaneur = “critical metaphor for the characteristic perspective of the modern artist” (Parsons 5), where male authority is “contested” rather than unambiguously embodied; where it’s rather the “marginalized urban familiarity” of ragpicker
    • Me: but then doesn’t she change it from the flaneuse to the author-flaneur of any gender, which means she doesn’t answer Wolff?
• Does Levy accept Parsons? Parsons’ impressive sweep of references show that flaneuse is “not only imaginable, but quite easy to spot in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature”
• Janet Flanner: American writing “Paris Letter” from 1925-1976 for The New Yorker: as professional flaneur

Review in Modernism/Modernity (Margaret Soltan)

• Too sentimental
  • Goes too far, saying the flaneuses “go one step further” than the male flaneur, who feels threatened by wandering
  • She had been subtle about gender, but at the end it turns out to be a victory story for women: that’s too simple
• Two contexts
  • T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” in The Politics of Interpretation, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 244.
    • Is modernist art just “disintegration,” only leading to negative answers?
  • Feminism and the flaneur: to what degree did women participate in the street culture of the Victorian and Modernist periods?
    • Against typical characterization of women being the object of the male gaze, the prostitute figure (Janet Wolff; Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” 1989)
    • Such characterization puts the modern woman back into the Victorian home, says Parsons
• Parsons: don’t literalize “flaneur:” it’s a “concept” and applies to the citizen of de Certeau’s contemporary world too; flaneur as androgynous
  • Woolf, Richardson: they observe and write about their observations
  • Ambiguous gender of the streetwalking person
  • Uses Richard Sennett (urban theorist) and his concept of the “open” city that Others can use to their advantage; Parsons: the person “comes alive” in the city
  • Anonymity leads to freedom
• What’s Good
  • She “corrects” the idea of woman as passive in metropolis
  • But “over-corrects:” “prettifies the undeniable ugliness of modernity” as unproblematically liberating
    • Where’s modernity’s darkness?
    • Shouldn’t have claimed victory before grappling with the dark heart of modernity

Victorian Studies review (Richard L. Stein large review essay)

• Studies of the city swerve between positivism and Benjaminian multivalence (uneven, surreal, fantastic)
  • Since 2000, city seen “less a centre than a crossroads,” Imperial Cities (Driver and Gilbert)
  • Since 2000, focus is on the woman
  • Since 2000, “microhistories” that interrogate the nature of the fact (Mary Poovey), nature of space (Henre Lefebvre), “dense” and “competing” (Foucault: the competing stuff emphasized by Judith Walkowitz in City of Dreadful Delight)
• Also sees de Certeau as contiguous with Benjamin, quoting Certeau: “the story begins on ground level, with footsteps”
• Parsons: Amy Levy (1880s) through Bowen’s blitz work; also Woolf, Richardson, Lessing, Rhys
  • Basic argument: interactions with city have provided arena for the formation and presentation of self
• Flaneuse: takes from Baudelaire’s early “ragpicker” (marginal) flaneur rather than Benjamin’s later dandy (authoritative) figure
  • Compared w/flaneur, flaneuse is more adventurous but less assured and “less leisured”
  • Compared with Baudelaire’s Paris, the cities she examines and that women have access to are “more variable, fleeting, and assaulting”

Some Quotes

• “infinite versions of any one city” (1): she is a part of the general academic movement to recognize this kind of city, where the person “produces” it
  • later, “palimpsest of layered time”
• “broader context” than political power, sexual politics
• ragpicker: “scavenger, collecting, rereading and rewriting” b/c the “expert observer” of Benjamin’s other flaneur is too isolated and separate from the environment
  • out of the many types of “urban nomads” described by Baudelaire and elaborated on by Benj, she’s going to rag-picker: “refuse objects of everyday life” not monumental history
  • she sees the ultimate ambiguity in the discourse around the flaneur, about being authoritative or not, marginal or not, detached or connected.
• “aesthetic, urban perception as a specifically male phenomenon and privilege is challenged”
  • okay, but why not find a different term and different history, perhaps from the cultural history of women? the tradition of female authors?

Reactions

• If she has to change the definition of the flaneur in order to find women in it…she’s not so much saying there’s a woman flaneur than creating an alternative figure beside the authoritative male one
• Ultimately, I’m on the side of Janet Wolff: I also believe that just b/c women now have “reasons” to be on the street doesn’t mean that they’re flaneuses
  • I think there’s too much conflation going on to be able to say that they are
  • Parsons: refuses to see that b/c of the limits of middle class woman that you can’t have say a female aesthetic view that’s flaneuse.
    • But then she’s restricting it! You can’t say there’s a flaneuse when it’s so restricted.
  • Parsons: see it as a metaphor
    • But why should I? All of the fascination behind the flaneur is the assumption that there is a figure behind it.
• Parsons uses Gillian Rose’s geography as support to say that women aren’t looking for the “total” city of the male flaneur, but I say, don’t confuse the birds-eye view with totality: a scientific totality that takes from the dictates of perspectivism might be silly and exclusionary and ranged with problems, but…maybe there’s a diff kind of totality (refer to Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History: constellation history, not chain-of-events history)
• Good stuff @ city, however
  • Hmm… should wonder if she’s right to say that Le Courbusier’s “modernity is based on the enlightenment principles of the past” (12), “utopian city becomes analogous with the rational mind”
    • I’d say this impulse is WITHIN MODERNISM ITSELF, going to the rational
    • She says the Courbusier is enemy of flanerie; nonetheless, he’s all about flow
    • She says his city is “textual city,” only on paper, not social

See

• Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer
  • 149 modernization as deterr
  • when the urban environment is unfamiliar and fragmented, it calls a change in the philosophical constitution of the observer: the observer had traditionally had “philosophical reflection and empirical study” but now it’s diff
• Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: Limits of Geography 1993
  • Male geography: “omniscient view, transparent knowledge, total knowledge”
    • if the city is fragmented, it’s b/c it was whole and is now being fragmented, but “still-coherent” as a whole
  • Female geography: challenges this view “and its exclusions”