Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online

Extract

Flânerie, in a narrow sense, refers to the act of idle strolling in nineteenth-century Paris, while visually collecting social artifacts of metropolitan life – the human sights and material culture of the urban crowd. In a wider sense, it is immersion in an anonymous, spectatorial gaze that gives license to wandering and observing. Flânerie engenders reflexivity as both an action and a process of observation that perceptively elucidates social phenomena. Text and sketches of the passing moment serve as witnesses to these random readings of the crowd. Flânerie embodies pleasure in the form of mobile observation. It is an aesthetic action, art form, and social phenomenon that resonate in masculine public space.The flâneur is a figure of modernity, a solitary man of leisure with no destination. He passionately performs the act of idle walking while furtively consuming spatial and temporal impressions. Sociologically, he stands in a contested space, as an intellectual in mass culture, as a “natural” in an artificial environment. The flâneur has been described as a bum, idler, artist, observer, gastronome, social commentator, literary figure, scavenger, intellectual, and poet. At the core, he possesses a way of seeing the world and being in the world that intrinsically reveals meaningful, social commentary.Charles Baudelaire, a mid-1800s poet, and Walter Benjamin, literary critic in ... log in or subscribe to read full text