Quotes About Flaneur

I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets.

Vicambulist (n.) One who walks about in the streets. Now that streetwalker has taken on connotations some people may not care to ascribe to themselves, we have a dearth of words to describe someone who simply likes to walk about in the streets of a city. Here's hoping vicambulist will enter everyday language anew. also

He called him (it was always a man) a flâneur. "The crowd is his habitat, as air is for the bird or water for the fish," he wrote. "His passion and his profession is to wed the crowd. . . . To be away from home, but to feel oneself everywhere at home.

You posted an essay, "How to Be a Flâneur," on the custom of urban strolling and loitering and its place in literary culture. You caught some flak for questioning whether there could really be such a thing as a flâneuse. You didn't think it was possible for a woman to wander the streets in the same spirit and manner as a man. A female pedestrian was subject to constant disruptions: stares

Wilson provides a Lacanian psychoanalytic context for her claim; the flâneur is the Oedipal under threat. The city is a castrating labyrinth that feminizes all who enter it.22

The flâneur traverses an economic space where wares are sold – poetry, journalism, knowledge – in the marketplace. If this is acknowledged then the flâneur's subjectivity is allied with others who sell themselves (albeit existing in competition with them), rather than with all men. He is subservient to the market.

The flâneur turned out to be a first signal of reaction – not a figure of self- realization, mastery, celebration of the modern – but a dupe who was so thrilled to be part of the crowd of consumers, who yielded to appearance, to pure illusion, and failed ultimately to gain self-understanding, let alone class-consciousness. In this regard, at least, the prostitute has a clearer consciousness, for it is not possible for her to be recuperated so easily.

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

The flâneur is not attracted to the city's official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations—an unofficial reality behind the façade of bourgeois life that the photographer "apprehends," as a detective apprehends a criminal.

Flaneur is the French word for walker, or saunterer. A flaneur is someone who walks as self-expression and exploration. For the flaneur, it is not about getting from point A to point B, or about getting into shape. The act of walking is its own reward. A flaneur walks the City in order to experience it, to fully participate through observation and peregrination.

Non-narrative action: Does not depend on a narrative for the action to be right—the narrative is just there to motivate, entertain, or prompt action. See flâneur.

As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning—actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom, and spends time as an aimless (but rational) flâneur benefiting from what randomness can give us inside and outside the library. Provided

I wanted to become a flaneur, a professional meditator, sit in cafes, lounge, unglued to desks and organization structures, sleep as long as I needed, read voraciously, and not owe any explanation to anybody. I wanted to be left alone in order to build, small steps at a time, an entire system of thought based on my Black Swan idea

Bryant ambled. In Paris he would have been a boulevardier, a flâneur, but in London, a city that no longer had time for anything but making money, he was just slow and in the way.

He sauntered. To stray is human. To saunter is Parisian. In

I was seduced by the notion that the long walks I was taking made me a flâneur, too.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

Just as the flâneur wanders the Parisian Grands Boulevards, allowing disparate, shocklike experiences to be inscribed on his body even as they resonate in his memory, so the 'assistant' type, in a state of intoxication akin to a mystical trance, wanders through the Kafkan universe. In their blithe and groundless transparency, such figures alone seem capable of bringing to consciousness the alienating character of historical conditions.

Striving ardently to be what they were and were not. Behold the Race Flaneur: the bourgeois rebel who goes slumming, and finds not just adventure but the objective correlative for his secret despair.