Flâneur

The extensive use of smartphones in our everyday lives has created new modes of appropriation and behavior in public spaces. Recognition of these are essential for urban design and planning practices which help us to improve the relationship between humans, technologies, and urban environment. This study aims to research smartphone users in public space by observing their altering visual attention and walking behavior, and, in this way, to reveal the emergent "new figures". For this purpose, Korenmarkt square in Ghent, Belgium, was observed for seven days in 10-min time intervals. The gaze and walking behavior of smartphone users were encoded as geo-located and temporal data, analyzed and mapped using statistical and spatial analysis methods. Developing and implementing new methods for identifying the characteristics of smartphone users, this study resulted in a nuanced characterization of novel spatial appropriations. The findings led to a better understanding and knowledge of the different behavior patterns of emergent figures such as "post-flâneurs" and "smartphone zombies" while uncovering their altering visual interactions with and movements in the public space. The results evoked questions on how researchers and designers can make use of spatial analysis methods and rethink the public space of the future as a hybrid construct integrating the virtual and the physical.

My contribution today is titled Walking with buildings. The flâneur and the (im)mobilizing power of non-human narrators and aims to reflect on the contrasting encounter between the apparent immobility of buildings, as non-human inert bodies, and the peculiar mobility of the flâneur. I said apparent immobility because my provocation starts precisely from the idea that buildings, despite their inertia, have an intrinsic power to mobilize our gaze and move our feet: my proposal is to imagine them as non-human narrators that invite the flâneur to move in the city both vertically, discovering changes in time, and horizontally, exploring connections in space. Furthermore, as (im)mobile concrete archives, buildings invite us to reflect once again on the peculiarity of the flâneur’s mobility, which is made of a constant alternation between walking and resting, listening and writing practices. Even if always on the move, the flâneur constantly takes time for slow practices like resting, reflect and writing, thus resisting through his own body to the rapid flows of contemporary cities and neoliberal rhythms.
I will explore these suggestions by proposing three examples: first, a graphic novel by Will Eisner published in 1987 and titled "The building"; second, "Living with buildings and walking with ghosts" the latest work by the well-known psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, which appeared in 2018 and became also an exhibition; third, a personal flânerie in the Brutalist Robin Hood Gardens Estate, that I’ve realised in February 2019 while I was living in Tower Hamlets, East London. Following Sinclair’s exploration, I will focus on brutalist estates as architectural bodies that have peculiar stories to tell thanks, to their controversial and critical position in contemporary London as in many other cities. But, How can we listen to voices of buildings, interpreting them as non-human narrators that keep stories hidden in them? Furthermore, “is there a link between the walking and storytelling practice of the flâneur and the encounter with the (im)mobilities
of buildings?”

My aim in this paper was to bring together a theoretical, historical enquiry and an empirical, contemporary project. At the time I was preoccupied, on the one hand, with Walter Benjamin’s writing on images and cities, and on the other hand, with the exhibition project Video as Urban Condition.[1]

The paper locates the crossing point where Benjamin’s thought — in particular, his conception of urban experience — intersects with the technology of television — that is to say, seeing at a distance.

I did not attempt to reconcile Benjamin’s suggestions with the post-war television phenomena that he neither saw nor foresaw. The question I posed myself was whether some observations of Benjamin’s, or rather, some observations on Benjamin’s thought, might furnish the distance necessary for observing the present.

I found, in the interior of the nineteenth century, the pre-vision of television — television almost without technology — and I traced its philosophical heritage. I entered that interior with Benjamin and exited with the flâneur, to whom the city opened up like a landscape even as it enclosed him like a room, as a private domain.

Hence the screen, the façade, the shop window and the television set revealed themselves as the sites where one could interrogate the intersections between exterior and interior, between media and architecture, the city and its phantasmagoria.

[1]: On the one hand, see ‘Imagine no Metaphors: the dialectical image of Walter Benjamin’ in Image & Narrative, special issue edited by Hanneke Grootenboer, no. 18, September 2007. On the other hand, see ‘Who is Big Brother? or The Politics of Looking’, in Dérive Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung, no. 42, January 2011.

With an appendix: Video as Urban Condition

Since comics’ inception in the mid-1930s, the comics page has developed from a means of processing information to a stand alone art object in itself.  However, this evolution has not been determined solely by the innovative creator; rather, this paper will examine, through the application of Marxist and Situationist theory, the ways in which changing modes of production have set the means by which creators present their stories and, thus, the way comic books are consumed as a text. 

From the economy of Golden Age stories (as well as the cheapness and easy disposability of the text itself) to the present emphasis on the trade paperback (“writing for the trade”), how have production standards created a certain kind of consumer?  What issues do “decompression” raise for the visual consumer of the comics page?  How do creators like Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (and others) exploit the structures of production to allow for innovative ways of visually consuming the comics page in works like Ronin and Watchmen? 

Through a study of comic books pulled from the 1930s to the present, this paper will examine the structures that underlie comics innovation.

This research investigates the urban sphere beyond its physical condition and studies it as a transcendent phenomenological field that engages memory, imagination, and dream. By using the perception of Benjaminian flâneur as a phenomenological method to investigate the subconscious layers of New York City's urbanscapes, this research argues that the embodied experience of the flâneur transcends the physical urban space into a surrealist dream world. This contestation between built and dreamt asks us to rethink urban space as a sphere of precarious emergence where experiences reform from memory, poetically perceived images surface from imagination, and embodied consciousness attuned to public spheres arises from dream. The research conducts its theoretical inquiry of urban contestations through a surrealist framework that assesses the perception of the flâneur from a phenomenological perspective and focuses on the relationship between the High Line and New York City to investigate a particular urbanscape of contestations that challenges the boundaries between real and surreal, dream and un-dream, past and present, emergence and nostalgia. It further argues that the phenomenological experience of the flâneur evokes memory, imagination, and dream to transform the physicality of urban space into an atmospheric domain of subjective consciousness. In the case of High Line, this domain finds its home in the latent surrealist world that contests the reality of the built world by instilling subjective architectural uncanniness. For the flâneur, the High Line becomes a place of departure that traces past experiences back to memory, a site of voyeurism that channels imagination, and a threshold between dream and reality.

Die Konvergenz von mobilen Medien, Sensornetzwerken, digitalen Datenvisualisierungen und den Anwendungen des Social Web hat dazu geführt, dass sich Erfahrungen des Urbanen in einem radikalen Wandel befinden. Die Stadt der Zukunft entwickelt sich heute mehr denn je an der Schnittstelle von mobilen Medienpraktiken, digitalen Infrastrukturen und webbasierten Netzwerken. Deren Bildung stellt daher eine entscheidende Grundlage für die nachhaltige Entwicklung der informationellen Stadt dar. Die digitalen Informations- und Kommunikationsnetzwerke, die geolokalisierenden Navigationssysteme und die Konnektivität und Navigation in Echtzeit verändern die Stadt und schaffen einen medieninduzierten Raum sozialer Erfahrung und des kommunikativen Austauschs. In diesem Zusammenhang verstehen zahlreiche Gesellschaftsdiagnosen mobile und plattformbasierte Vernetzungsmedien als einen richtungsweisenden Indikator zur Bestimmung des urbanen Wandels. Folgende Fragen stehen im Zentrum der Untersuchung: Welchen Stellenwert hat der Aufbau der informationellen Stadt bei der Herausbildung neuer Formen der sozialen und kulturellen Interaktion in einer digitalen Gesellschaft? Inwiefern kann die Digitalisierung des Urbanen als gesellschaftlicher Gradmesser verstanden werden? Zur Beantwortung dieser Problemstellungen möchte ich mich eingehend mit den technisch-medialen Infrastrukturen und ihren möglichen Anwendungen auseinandersetzen, um schließlich ihre Wirkungsweisen für alle beteiligten Akteure herauszuarbeiten.

[Article in Swedish.]
"Reviewing a work by Franz Hessel, Walter Benjamin speaks of Berlin as a mnemonic device for the lonely wanderer. This article unpack this peculiar claim by arguing that Benjamin maps ars memoria, a technique for memorization in rhetoric, onto the modern cityscape. According to the art of memory to which Benjamin refers, emblems placed in an imagined series of rooms signify consecutive parts of a speech to be memorized. The mnemonic technique allows the trained orator to trace a narrative sequence through interconnected spaces that encase a chain of images. By treating the city as a mnemonic device, Benjamin indicates how the topography and visual character of the urban space may serve as a repository for narratives that circulate across city-dwelling generations. The Berlin flaneur uses movement through the city to release its deposited past. In Benjamin's review, the lonely wanderer emerges as part shaman and part tourist guide. "

Wandering as Pathscaping, by Vanessa Grasse, presents a practical and theoretical enquiry into a walking and drawing practice grounded in a somatic and dance improvisation informed approach. This is articulated through the author’s experience of walking through two cities without destination, questioning: how to allow a state of wandering, the perceptual processes involved in this state, how these affect navigating, and how the research could reveal an open-ended methodology of practice. Drawing on the notion of ‘wayfaring’ (Ingold, 2011)  and  an ‘active line on a walk’ (Klee, 1953), it proposes wandering as an embodied improvisational practice that engages in a dialogue between welcoming multiplicity and finding containment, as a method to navigate perception, the urban environment and the creative process. Drawing on the attention practices of Deborah Hay, Lisa Nelson and Pauline Olivero it looks at the role of attentional and orientational dynamics in wandering; introducing attentional wandering in relation to permeability and responsiveness to indeterminacy. The extent of our here is proposed as a key orientational process in wandering, in which ground is seen as a perceptual model for the visual and aural fields through emphasizing edges and a towards me perception. Through articulating a walking-drawing practice it then proposes wandering as pathscaping; a journeying that, like drawing, welcomes, channels and scapes multiplicity into a path. The paper moves on to consider how the dialogue between flux and containment was reflected in developing a methodology of practice, revealing how the findings layered into three different modes of attention: Ground-Scape-Edges, Inner-Outer Line, Encounters-Synchronicity. These, combined with a selection of scores, are presented as a frame and an open-ended proposition for the practice. It concludes with the proposal that wandering resides in surrendering to both multiplicity and our here, and allowing a flow of inner and outer attentional dynamics in dialogue with our ground orientation to scape our emergent, wandering and unknown path.

The flâneur is an urban type who first emerges in early nineteenth-century Paris. As classically understood, he is a wanderer in and voyeur of the modern city, who observes the spectacle of urban life while strolling the streets at his leisure. This encyclopedia entry gives a historical and conceptual overview of this figure, from its origins up to the present.

Un uomo cammina per le strade di Parigi, solo e senza una destinazione. Percorre lunghi viali dai palazzi maestosi, si perde tra la folla dei Grands Magasins. Abbottonato nel cappotto nero, vaga per la città irrequieto. Ma che cosa cerca? Dove va?

La parola flâneur deriva dal verbo francese flâner che significa «gironzolare», «perdere il proprio tempo».

Questo libro insegna a perdersi nella città: contiene racconti di promenades e di avventure urbane, storie di dandy e di flâneur… Contiene informazioni su personaggi, autori e artisti che hanno vagato per le vie di Parigi. Leggendo queste pagine scoprirete i segreti della flânerie, la nobile arte di vagabondare senza una meta.

www.federicocastigliano.com

A man walks the streets of Paris, alone and without a destination. He covers the long avenues with their great buildings, he gets lost in the crowds of the grands magasins. Buttoned up in his black overcoat, he wanders, restless, through the city. But what is he looking for? Where is he going?

The word flâneur derives from the French verb flâner, which means “to wander”, “to waste one’s time”. Being a flâneur means walking, free of all commitments, immersing oneself in the living spectacle of Paris.

Flâneur teaches how to roam without an aim, to get lost in the city. It contains some stories about rovers, about people who have lost their way and who have thus discovered new and wonderful things on their route. It provides information on the personages, artists and the authors who have made the history of the aimless strolling in Paris.

The reader has two possibilities:
• A sequential reading, from the first to the last chapter.
• A free reading that allows for the creation of a preferred route through the text.
The rule of the game is simple: the chapters with odd numbers are fiction, while the chapters with even numbers are nonfiction.

Flâneur is, ultimately, an exercise for the mind. It teaches how to immerse oneself in exteriority, and how to give less importance to the self and one’s own petty needs. Because in order to listen to the voice of the world, one must first of all silence the ego.

I vivaci studi italiani degli scritti di Benjamin sulla poesia di Baudelaire (editi da Solmi nel 1962) hanno spesso trascurato l’importanza di allargare la propria prospettiva all’edizione francese del 1974 (Payot), contenente tre importanti saggi noti in Germania dalla fine degli anni ’60. Poiché tali testi sono stati finalmente tradotti in italiano solo nel 2006 (Einaudi) e ripubblicati nel 2012 in un’edizione più articolata (Neri Pozza), ci proponiamo di rilanciare un nostro studio a partire dalla versione italiana, per mostrare come essi gettino le basi della sociologia materialista della letteratura di Benjamin, ancora insufficientemente esplorata. Formatasi proprio muovendo dalla pratica traduttiva dei Quadri parigini, essa ha analizzato il ruolo della bohème, del flâneur e della modernità nell’eroismo lirico di Baudelaire all’apogeo del capitalismo.

Resumen: El movimiento surrealista supuso un antes y un después el arte de principios del siglo XX, algo que influyó directamente en otro de los acontecimientos culturales más sobresalientes de este siglo; la Posmodernidad. Aunque ambos momentos estén distantes en el tiempo, la convergencia de temas, ideología y sistemas de creación del Surrealismo y la Posmodernidad no pueden ser obviados. En este estudio se pretende encontrar los puntos de anclaje entre ambos movimientos artísticos y culturales. Así, a través de las prácticas artísticas y estéticas se podrá elaborar una ideología concordante y estrechamente relacionada con el Surrealismo y la Posmodernidad. Abstract: The surrealist movement supposed a new beginning for art in the 20 th Century, something that influenced in other cultural event: The Postmodernity. Althought these two moments are separated in time, the convergence of themes, ideology, and artistic creation systems of Surrealism and Postmodernity can not be obviated. In this study we claime to state the relation between these artistic and cultural movements. Thus, and throught art and aesthetics, we are able to elaborate a common and related ideology of Surrealism and Postmodernity. El movimiento surrealista es uno de los grupos de vanguardia más interesantes con respecto a la base teórico-estética de la que beben sus artistas. El surrealismo es una realidad en Octubre de 1924 con el Primer Manifiesto surrealista redactado por André Bretón. Desde este momento, Montparnasse fue el centro neurálgico del

Media representations of destinations play a powerful role in tourism appeal. The narrator assumes a role infused with knowledge and power, employing discourse to describe and interpret places and people to entice armchair audiences to not only travel vicariously alongside them, but to follow in their footsteps. This review article uses the English actor and writer Michael Palin to examine this phenomenon through the lens of the flâneur and choraster. Palin’s travels have traditionally been
viewed based on their ability to create space from the perspective of a representational voice of authority. In the present article, we wish to ask whether the power of the travel narrator for tourism is perhaps better expressed in their ability to develop a counter (or chora discourse), one where we are able to see space as locally contested. Palin’s narrator expresses appreciation of his reliance on the people (chora) that inhabit the spaces he visits. His narrations of travel evidence how the flâneur
perspective is influenced (and/or disrupted) by a chora in two ways—that which influences the perspective before travel and directs the gaze, and those that occupy and inscribe meaning on the spaces that are traveled to, that influences and/or forms experience.

szövegei gyakran álltak a kritikai viták homlokterében, különösen Az ellopott levél (1844) címû novella váltott ki komoly hatástörténetet. Poe francia recepciója már a kezdetektõl rendkívül termékeny szempontokkal gazdagította a szakirodalmat, hiszen Charles Baudelaire-tõl indul az a hagyomány, amely késõbb Jacques Lacan és Jacques Derrida vitájában érte el a csúcspontját (EISEMANN 1999, 5; KALMÁR 1999, 181). A "francia" megközelítések elsõsorban a novellák nyelvi és lelki dinamikáját vizsgálták, gyakran figyelmen kívül hagyva így a történeti kontextusukat. Ez a fajta dekontextualizáció bizonyos szempontból indokolt is volt, ugyanis sok kritikus vádolta meg Poe-t azzal, hogy történeteiben teljesen elszakadt attól a társadalomtól és kultúrától, amelyben írt és alkotott. Ennek ellenére a Shawn Rosenheim és Stephen Rachman által szerkesztett The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe címû könyvben helyet kapó tanulmányok éppen arra hívják fel a figyelmünket, hogy "fel kell ismernünk, hogy Poe legextravagánsabb irodalmi lépései általában a polgárháború elõtti Amerika kulturális és politikai környezetén alapultak" (ROSENHEIM-RACHMAN 1995, xi). A szerkesztõk szerint a "francia" vagy "ellopott" 1 Poe mellett tehát észre kell vennünk a szerzõ "amerikai arcát" is ahhoz, hogy kiegyensúlyozott képet kaphassunk a tevékenységérõl.

Dalloway -Woolf became dissatisfied with conventional novelistic form. The idea of discrete contained chapters "seemed to be the opposite of her vision of a web or organism of relations"; the narrative too heavily woven to allow for such disjuncture. 1 Woolf remained unhappy with the flimsiness of her characters and of the two-dimensionality of her construction until June the following year, when she had a revelation of process. Recording in her diary, Woolf wrote of this discovery: "how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment." 2 Woolf found that these tunnels allowed her access to her characters' pasts; that by adding a further dimension she could reinforce the instability of her modernist structure. Further she found in these passages the opportunity for interconnection -both in the physical reality of the novel and in another more metaphorical, psychological sense. Considering "[t]he underground is our ghost landscape, unfolding everywhere beneath our feet, always out of view", tunnelling is an apt metaphor for such a process. 3 The underground as this dark liminal space provides a murky parallel to the comparative clarity of surface life; this dubious and uncertain threshold affording potential for constant mutation, the burrowing animal forever able to alter its landscape of refuge. To tunnel is to retreat into darkness, potentially both sanctuary and harbourer of the malignant unknown. Like the heath, it is a place through which you journey, and not for human habitation. Woolf ventures into these tunnels in order to accumulate ghosts, to find points of interconnection and bring them to light, to partially unearth the threads of this weaving that is life.

This paper concerns the psychic trauma of the linguistic opposition of the terms “work” and “play” on unemployed youth as visually portrayed in the independent videogame Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, 2017). Night in the Woods follows an unemployed young woman named Mae who returns to her hometown – a fictional, economically depressed Pennsylvania mining town – after dropping out of college. The player takes on the role of Mae as she traverses the town, an activity which is received by other characters as being inherently playful due to Mae’s position outside of the system of wage labor. The surveillance of judgmental neighbors robs Mae’s flânerie of its anonymity, in turn depriving Mae of the critical distance from her environment which permits the playful subjectivity of the flâneur. This ontological disjunction is addressed in the game through a dissociative breakdown in which Mae sees the entire world as incoherent shapes, a perceptual mode which infects the game’s visual style, wherein environments are an assemblage of geometric forms. This aesthetic evokes the geometric patterning of early Cubism, in which the intervention of language in the human perception of reality is represented through basic shapes which serve as arbitrary signs that are given different functions through the context of their relative position on canvas. In Night in the Woods, perceptible geometric signs represent Mae’s faltering comprehension of reality due to her uncertain position within the linguistic opposition of work and play, and the breakdown of the ideological unity of late capitalism itself.

As the first prominent Yiddish writer from the Polish territories of the Pale of Settlement, I. L. Peretz (1852-1915) was from the beginning of his career an outlier in the geographical politics of Yiddish culture. He dramatized this difference in a number of ways: insisting on the linguistic difference of his Yiddish from that of his colleagues, dispensing with the overt appeals to oral discourse which Yiddish literature had adopted and adapted from Russian literary models, and demanding of himself and his readers a sensitivity to literary style on the highest level of sophistication. As an outlier, these aesthetic differences find representation in analogously exceptional approaches to the question of literary space. Unlike his primary colleagues, and competitors, in Yiddish literature of the day-Sh. Y. Abramovitsh (c. 1835-1917) and Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916)-Peretz dispenses with the convention of creating prototypical, imaginary shtetlekh in order to situate his stories, including his most fantastic and parodic narratives, in a verifiable Eastern European geography. He is moreover the first great Yiddish writer to describe these traditional communities from a perspective of the writer living in a modern metropolis, even if the metropolis itself figures in comparatively few of his narratives. What emerges from these strategies is a writer who situates himself not only as an "outlier" with respect to the linguistic and literary conventions of his contemporaries, but also with respect to the territories he describes. His narratives are neither traditional nor modern, neither metropolitan nor peripheral, neither realistic nor phantasmagoric, but in each instance somewhere in between and, more significantly, constantly in a state of flux among these contrasting locations. This essay will trace the narrational techniques and representations of space in Peretz's fiction to demonstrate the dislocations which determine his best writing and provide a model for the leading trends in Yiddish modernism that follow in his wake. ___________________

Τόμος: 10 χρόνια Performance Now
Επιμ. Αυγητίδου Αγγελική
ISBN 978-618-83267-9-8

Η ανθρώπινη εμπειρία είναι βαθιά χωρική, μια ταλάντωση μεταξύ σώματος, μέρους, ροών και ρυθμών. Τα σώματα αισθάνονται, νιώθουν και κινούνται στο τοπικό, όμως η φαντασία και το αποτύπωμά μας επεκτείνονται στο παγκόσμιο. Από την δεκαετία του 1960, οι ιστορίες και οι πρακτικές του Fluxus, της Land Art και του Μινιμαλισμού ανέδειξαν ποικίλους συνδέσμους μεταξύ σωματικής χειρονομίας, μέρους και διαφόρων τεχνολογικών μέσων. Ένα διακαλλιτεχνικό σώμα έργων που συμπεριλαμβάνει τα έργα γεωτέχνης των Robert Smithson και Michael Heizer, τους εννοιολογικούς και ποιητικούς περιπάτους των Richard Long και Francis Alÿs, τις γλυπτικές performances των Franz Walther, Carl Andre και Denis Oppenheim, τα Fluxus scores ή τις τεχνολογικά διευρυμένες performances με μέσα επικοινωνίας δι’ εντοπισμού (locative media) στις αρχές του 21ου αιώνα κάνει ορατή την έννοια των διευρυμένων επιτελεστικών καταστάσεων στο μέρος με εικαστικό μεθοδολογικό δυνητικό. Το παρόν κείμενο εστιάζει στις συνδέσεις του ποιητικού και του τεχνολογικού, φέρνοντας σε κοινό κάδρο την έννοια των επιτελεστικών συμβάντων στον δημόσιο χώρο. Συγκεκριμένα, το κείμενο αποτελεί έναν εικαστικό/μεθοδολογικό στοχασμό προσπαθώντας να διαφωτίσει διεπιστημονικές και διακαλλιτεχνικές συνδέσεις μεταξύ των γλωσσολογικών προθέσεων «μέσα σε» (into), «μαζί με» (with) «διαμέσου» (through) και περιπατητικών performances, διευρυμένων εγκαταστάσεων και ψηφιακών τεχνολογιών. Στο παρόν άρθρο στοχάζομαι πάνω σε επιτελεστικούς αστερισμούς κινήσεων, λέξεων, αντικειμένων, τεχνολογιών και χώρων. Ως εκ τούτου, αναδεικνύονται οι τρόποι όπου η ενσωμάτωση ενός αντικειμένου (οργανικού, τεχνολογικού) ως συν-διαμορφωτή της performance λειτουργεί ως αισθητηριακή, συμβολική, συμμετοχική ή τοποθετημένη/γλυπτική επέκταση για τον καλλιτέχνη, αναδεικνύοντας τόσο αυτοεθνογραφικές θεωρήσεις μεταξύ χώρου, σώματος και οπτικοακουστικών μέσων, όσο και γεφυρώνοντας την περιπατητική performance, την τοποειδική τέχνη και την ποίηση μέσα από μια γεω-ανθρωπιστική προσέγγιση.

Η δημιουργία της σύγχρονης μεγαλούπολης και του σύγχρονου αστικού τρόπου ζωής είναι αποτέλεσμα κοινωνικών, πολιτισμικών και οικονομικών αλλαγών, που διαδραματίζονται ήδη από τις αρχές του 19 ου αιώνα, και συνδέονται με την αστικοποίηση, την εκβιομηχάνιση και τον καπιταλισμό. Οι πόλεις ήταν οι χώροι της γρήγορης πληθυσμιακής ανάπτυξης, της κοινωνικής αλλαγής και αναταραχής, και ταυτόχρονα, οι χώροι όπου αναπτύσσονταν οι νέες μορφές πολιτισμικής έκφρασης. Η εξυγίανση και ο εκσυγχρονισμός του αστικού χώρου αποτελεί, παράλληλα, κρίσιμο σημείο του νέου καθεστώτος αντιληπτικής προσαρμοστικότητας που εγκαθιδρύεται. Η παρατηρητικότητα του θεατή καλείται τώρα να ανταποκριθεί απέναντι σε έναν κόσμο που διακρίνεται από μια αδιάκοπη αστάθεια και που καθετί που τον απαρτίζει βρίσκεται διαρκώς σε μια προσωρινή κατάσταση. Ένας ολόκληρος κόσμος υπάγεται σε συνεχή κινητικότητα, εκμοντερνίζεται και διαμορφώνει για το μοντέρνο υποκείμενο που αναδύεται ένα νέο καθεστώς όρασης. Η όραση βρίσκεται σε μια συνεχή διασπαστική διαδικασία όπου τα αντικείμενα και ο κόσμος παύουν να γίνονται κατανοητά με όρους σταθερών θέσεων και συνοχής, οδηγώντας τελικά στην αποσυναρμολόγηση της αντίληψης. Συνεπώς, η νέα υποκειμενικότητα καλείται, σε μια προσπάθεια διάσωσης της αυτονομίας της ύπαρξής της, να ανταποκριθεί αντιληπτικά και ψυχικά σε όλες τις παραπάνω αλλαγές που συντελούνται.

Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal's Tourism (2006), as a contemporary British Asian novel, counts as postcolonial fiction yet adds a post-postcolonial and postmodern twist by presenting itself in the context of tourism. Although generally perceived as pulp fiction for its provocative themes and pornographic scenes, the novel's portrayal of the second-generation immigrant experience, urban space and tourism invites a close reading from the perspectives of spatiality and movement, as well as an analysis that is interdisciplinary in its approach, its theoretical background situated at the intersection of tourism, cultural, postcolonial and diaspora studies. The present paper investigates Dhaliwal's novel in terms of the relationship of identity, space and movement, or more specifically what I call mobile subjectivities: the figures of the tourist and the flâneur, and argues that the basic elements of flânerie and tourism are indispensable attributes of British Asians' diasporic identity and experience, and thus integral to the analysis of movement and subjectivity in British Asian fiction.

Новая Голландия": прогулка и историческое воображение В одной ленинградской артистической компании конца 1940-1950-х гг. прогулки были не только времяпрепровождением. Художники Александр Арефьев, Рихард Васми, Валентин Громов, Владимир Шагин, Шолом Шварц и поэт Роальд Мандельштам, которых впоследствии стали называть "арефьевцы" по имени лидера круга, предпочитали другое название. "Болтайка" -это бесцельное "болтание" по задворкам центра вроде Коломны, во время которого можно "поболтать" и увидеть что-нибудь запоминающееся 1 . Фланеры послевоенного Ленинграда едва ли могли щеголять, как изысканные дэнди времен Браммела или знаменитый парижанин, прогуливавшийся по парижским пассажам с черепахой (1840-е гг.). Но ничто не мешало ленинградским художникам пересказывать на свой лад литературные и художественные прогулки поздних романтиков и декадентов.

È vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, non autorizzata, con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata, compresa la fotocopia, anche a uso interno e didattico. L'illecito sarà penalmente perseguibile a norma dell'art. 171 della Legge n. 633 del 22.04.1941

The intention in this chapter is to explore the various meanings of doors and other places of passage by referring not only to a mechanism that opens and closes but to a net of different interior images within the universal concept of The Door. In its initial form, the door might have had its shape improvised by use of simple material without the stability of material that characterizes a modern door. Today’s idea of a door seems to have its origin at the exact moment humans abandon nomadic life and the round shelters that characterize food collectors’ communities (such as a tent, a cave or an igloo), to become specialized in a labor activity and permanently inhabit a specific place within a square house.

Is there a different perception of things if someone lives in the desert, the mountain, the wood or the seaside, in the city or in the countryside? Does it make any difference the choice of method of transportation to cover distances? Whatever the object one finds along the way, whatever the road one chooses to connect the starting point with the location of destination, it contributes to shape one’s perception of reality. The place from which we originate, the place where we grew up and the place where we chose to live, leaves its mark daily whether we passively accept it or dynamically deny it. Transportation, roads and places are passages are doors into different paths in life. This chapter aims at to match societies and doors, to track dead end passages and generally open doors towards human development.

In Jim Jarmusch's 2016 film "Paterson," the director portrays a bus driver named Paterson, who routinely explores the man-made and natural landscapes of Paterson, NJ, by transporting passengers across town and eavesdropping on interesting conversations about the city’s bygone celebrities and events. Over the course of seven days, the film meticulously traces the repetitive daily routine of the main character, recording the his encounters with the quotidian—seemingly insignificant objects and people.

Paterson’s act of traversing an urban landscape while recording his reflections on life through poetry harks back to the behaviors of the flâneur outlined by Charles Baudelaire in the 1860s and rearticulated by Walter Benjamin in the 1920s. Both Baudelaire and Benjamin define flânerie as a three-component process of walking amongst the crowd, observing the urban dwellers, and then transforming these visual investigations into creative writing. These striking similarities between the behaviors of the European flâneur and those of Paterson justify using flânerie as the theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between poetic writing and driving in Paterson. Nevertheless, Paterson differs from the European flâneur in one respect. Whereas the advent of consumerism in the early twentieth century undermines the European flâneur’s leisurely act of observing and commenting on the city and its dwellers, Jarmusch’s contemporary American flâneur resists the corruptive effect of capitalism by declining to use modern technology and to publish his poems. Paterson’s evasion of the defining aspects of modern life does not marginalize him; instead, it empowers him to discover the hidden beauty in life that goes unnoticed by others. As such, Paterson becomes a reflection of Jarmusch, who adamantly refuses to enter mainstream cinema and staunchly remains in the independent sector for the past three decades. The film’s poetic structure and emphasis on mundane elements together advocate for a leisurely, but also meticulous and inquisitive approach to life that often eludes contemporary American cinema.

The flâneur and the tourist were both characterized foremost by movement and curiosity. A range of meanings and resonances were associated with both figures, underlining the tensions between the ideas of the insider and the outsider, the Parisian and the foreigner, travel within Paris and without, mechanical versus purposeful seeing, and compulsive versus meaningful mobility. While the sense of vision was emphasized, literary representations often evoked the idea that vacuous and passive seeing, stimulated by trivial goings-on and merchandise, lets the flâneur neglect the other senses, whereas an inner preparation and discernment lead to a more balanced way of flânerie. The projection of flânerie onto world travel paralleled the mode of reading illustrated magazines, which elicited imaginary flânerie. The re-reading of Baudelaire's 'Le Peintre de la vie moderne' in this light provides some new insights regarding the concept of the artist as the 'man of the world'. What are the connections between the flâneur and the tourist in the nineteenth century? The figures of the tourist and the flâneur have been compared as tropes of modernity in sociological theory. However, little historical analysis exists on the association between the two figures. The flâneur was strongly associated with travel from early on, as the very etymology and definition of the flâneur had to do with the idea of walking, movement. A range of meanings and resonances, including contradictory ones, were associated with both figures especially in the early decades, characterized foremost by movement and curiosity, underlining the tensions between the ideas of the insider and the outsider, the Parisian and the foreigner, travel within Paris and without, mechanical versus purposeful seeing, and compulsive versus meaningful mobility.

This article examines the popular fascination with what was known as "ryōki" (curiosity-hunting) in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s.  In the 1920s, there emerged with the rise of the mass printing industry, a large number of publications dedicated to "strange" and "curious" things, including things associated with foreign cultures and expressions of non-heteronormative forms of sexual desire.  These publications helped establish a dynamic that was characteristic of the 1920s and 1930s culture of ero, guro, nansensu: readers might vicariously enjoy some “strange” or perhaps even transgressive occurrence that, because it was coded as “strange,” necessarily remained at a remove from ordinary life. At the same time, the desire to discover and interact with unusual things (sometimes called ryôki shumi , literally, “interest in, or taste for, curiosity hunting”) in some cases gave rise to a form of active pursuit in which readers set off on their own adventures, becoming “curiosity hunters” (ryōkisha) exploring the city and the fringes of the “known” world, most often in a search for manifestations of eroticism (especially in its non-heteronormative forms) or crime. Such ryōki adventures became a feature of popular modernist literature, especially the genre of mystery writing known as tantei shōsetsu.  This article examines a number of these publications in relation to trends within ethnography, sexology, literature, and the consumption and imagination of urban space in  Japan during the two world wars.

Iain Sinclair, in his Lights Out for the Territory (1997) declared that "walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city". But what exactly is that we are looking for in our contemporary cities? And how can walking contribute in tracing (explore) and therefore mapping (exploit) all those elements or situations that we seek for? Urban space is constantly mutating. Our experience of space as a practiced place changes gradually as the surrounding urban environment evolves around us. Amidst "sterile" private spaces and misleading billboards, the neo-urban walker drifts through the city in search for the peculiar, the original, the intriguing, and the fringe. An urban journey/drifting starts and ends without any predefined plan in mind, while remaining alert and receptive to all incentives given by the practiced urban locus (audio, visual, olfactory, and psychological incentives). Originating from the post-Romantic English writers and the mid-nineteenth century Parisian flâneur, urban drifting has been practiced in multiple ways with different outcomes, but yet highly contributory in the depiction and specific mapping of our urban environment. This paper attempts to investigate the roots of urban drifting, its evolution, and its potential utility as a spatial practice in visual arts, architecture, and mapping.

מקובל להנגיד בין שני אופני הכרה של העיר: הכרה מלמעלה והכרה מלמטה. המבט מעל נותן תמונה כולית של העיר, אך עיוור לפרטים ולחיים שבה; ההכרה מלמטה, דרך ההליכה, רגישה לחיים העירוניים על פרטיהם, אך אינה נותנת תמונה מקיפה של המכלול. ולטר בנימין מזוהה, על־פי־רוב, עם אופן ההכרה השני. השוטטות היא דרך הגישה שהוא מציע לשולי, לנשכח ולפרגמנטרי במרחב הזה ובעברו. אורי רוטלוי טוען, כי זוהי תמונה חלקית של תרומתו לחקר העיר. דרך הצגת הפסאז'ים הפריסאיים כמיניאטורה של פריס במאה התשע־עשרה, בנימין מרכיב את הפרטים של הזמן־מרחב העירוני לכדי מכלול, שבו לכל פרט יש מקום ומשמעות. כך, דווקא דרך העיסוק בפרטים, הוא פורש בפנינו תמונה פנורמית רחבה של העיר המודרנית. במובן זה הוא קורא תיגר על עצם הניגוד בין הכרה
מלמעלה ומלמטה.

Dans sa traversée de Paris au XIXe siècle, Walter Benjamin s’est trouvé confronté à un ensemble d’espaces singuliers et emblématiques du capitalisme naissant qui en exprimaient toute la puissance triomphante. Mais ces espaces en éclipsaient en même temps la violence derrière des étuis confortables et des anachronismes foisonnants : appartements bourgeois ensevelis sous les pièces de collection, les tentures et le velours ; passages couverts dégoulinants de marbre et de colonnades ; bâtiments d’expositions des produits de l’industrie déguisés en palais des mille et une nuit ; boulevards impériaux avec leurs défilés de statues triomphales et d’églises grandiloquentes…

Pour appréhender ces objets, Benjamin élabore, dans la perspective critique d’une théorie sociale, le concept de fantasmagorie – la fantasmagorie comme cristallisation de rêves collectifs. Et il esquisse parallèlement un modèle inédit de chercheur, le chiffonnier. Car celui-ci est peut-être le seul à même de fracturer le sédiment fantasmagorique et de collecter les rebuts de la vie onirique qui s’en échappent.

Marc Berdet est actuellement enseignant-chercheur Conicyt à l’Institut d’art de l’Université pontificale catholique de Valparaiso et professeur invité par la DGAPA à l’Institut de recherches philologiques de l’Université nationale autonome du Mexique.

Introduction : version pré-impression.

While Teju Cole's 2011 novel Open City has been received as an exemplary cosmopolitan performance, a careful reading of the novel's engagement with memories of suffering and of its evocations of aesthetic experiences shows that it interrogates rather than affirms an aesthetic cosmopolitan program. Through its use of a flat, nearly affectless tone, it renders visible the inability of contemporary calls for aesthetic and memorial cosmopolitan practices to engage a global landscape riven by injustice and inequality. As the novel progresses, its apparent celebration of the exemplary cosmopolitan figure of the flâneur makes way for the decidedly less glamorous figure of the fugueur. By mobilizing this marginal figure from the history of psychiatry, a condition marked by unwanted restlessness and ambulatory automatism, Open City exposes the limited critical purchase of the imaginative mobility and intercultural curiosity celebrated by cosmopolitan defenses of literature and art.

ASLAN ERDEM "Beni yirmi yıl sıkıntıya mahkûm ettiler Düzeni içimden değiştirmeye çalıştığım için." Leonard Cohen, "First We Take Manhattan" Walter Benjamin'in Pasajlar adlı eserinde aktardığına göre, 1840'larda Paris pasajlarında kaplumbağa gezdirmek bir süre için kibarlığın gereklerinden sayılırdı. Bu dönemde adımlarını kaplumbağaya uydurarak gezen, olması gereken hızın bu olduğuna inanan bir insan yaşardı: Flâneur… Kapitalistleşen dünya ile hayata giren hız ve ilerleme algısına rağmen flâneur'ün yavaş yavaş adımladığı pasajlar, onun ilk mekânı, bir anlamda evi, varlığını bağladığı bakınma edimini sürekli gerçekleştirebileceği yerlerdi. "Endüstriyel lüksün yeni sayılabilecek bir buluşu olan bu pasajlar, bina kitlelerinin arasından geçen, üstü camla örtülü, mermer kaplı geçitlerdir […] Işığı yukardan alan bu geçitlerin iki yanında en şık dükkânlar yer almaktadır; böylece bu türden bir pasaj, kendi başına bir kent, küçük bir dünya demektir." 1 Denilebilir ki flâneur bu pasajlarda asıl mekânının hazırlanışını beklemektedir. Pasajlar, iç mekânla dış mekânın birbirine kavuştuğu yerlerdir. O yıllarda barikatlarıyla ünlü Paris sokakları, flâneur'ün gezinmesi için uygun değildir. Paris sokaklarının yeniden onarıldığı, caddelerin ve kaldırımların genişletildiği 1860'lı yıllarda flâneur, kiracı olarak durduğu pasajlardan asıl evine geçer: caddelere. "Cadde, Flâneur için konuta dönüşür; sokaktaki adam, kendi dört duvarı arasında nasıl evinde olduğunu duyumsarsa, Flâneur de bina cepheleri arasında kendini evindeymiş gibi duyumsar. Onun gözünde emaye kaplı parlak firma tabelaları, aşağı yukarı bir burjuva salonundaki yağlıboya tablo gibi bir duvar süsüdür; duvarlar, not defterini dayadığı yazı masasıdır; gazete kulübeleri kitaplıklardır; café'lerin balkonları da, işini bitirdikten sonra eğilip sokağa baktığı cumbalardır." 2

Resumo do capítulo A Paris do Segundo Império em Baudelaire: II. O flâneur, de Walter Benjamin (In: Walter Benjamin: Sociologia, 1991. p. 65-92.).
O flâneur. Trata da literatura panorâmica. Uma literatura muito popular nas ruas das principais cidades europeias do século XIX, sendo como uma leitura de bolso. Essa literatura inseria os novos elementos das modernas cidades, destacando de pequenos burgueses, como os camelôs, aos ricos que frequentavam óperas. No entanto esse gênero literário enfraqueceu após 1841. O interesse por tipos “fisiológicos”, dos homens, das cidades, dos povos, dos animais, foi decaindo nessa literatura, até sofrer de fato com medidas de censura em 1836. Tal literatura não era necessariamente caracterizada como suspeita, mas, cheia de boemia.

This paper outlines the scope of my doctoral thesis, as of my first year of study.  My research is practice based but incorporates academic writing. It aims to present photographic practice as research, at the same time, exploring writing as a form of practice.