Modernity

• secularization – sacralization, disenchantment – re-enchantment

• Illusion of a rift with the past and with all other traditional cultures

• Myth of history-as-progress• Fetishistic equation of technological

development with social progress• The “new” as eternal repetition of the old

Key dates in the development of Modern Western Identity

• Years of revolution: 1789, 1848, 1871• Between the World Wars: • Weimar Republic 1919-1933• Fascism: 1933-1939

From Marxism to Neo-Marxism

• Neo-Marxism also called “Western Marxism”

• Frankfurt School: Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas,

• Questioning of the substructure – superstructure reductionism/determinism

• Influence of Freudian psychoanalysis and Nietzsche/Husserl/Heidegger (phenomenology)

Maxism / Neo-Marxism

• Marx: culture, ideology, religion, the superstructure = illusion that must be torn away, like a veil, revealing the underlying reality of exploitation and class structure

• Barthes: mythology/ideology naturalizes what is historically contingent

• Benjamin: archaic mythic forces have been reactivate by the new urban industrial landscape – they must harnessed to the end of awakening a revolutionary consciousness rather than reified

Flaneur

• the flâneur is the prototypical embodiment of the key modern experiences of the customer, the shopper or consumer.

The Flaneur

A 'gentleman' who spends most of the day roaming the streets observing the urban spectacle -- the fashions in dress and adornment, the buildings, the shops, the books, the novelties and attractions. A kind of voyeur with an endless curiosity for witnessing the ordinary scenes of city life.

His means of support are invisible, there is the suggestion of private wealth (he is possibly a rentier) but an apparent absence of family, business or landowning responsibilities.

His interests are primarily aesthetic and he frequents cafés and restaurants where actors, journalists, writers and artists gather.

In varying degrees flânerie is evident in the novels of Charles Dickens (Benjamin specifically identifies Sketches by Boz), the documentary reports of the Victorian 'social explorers' like Booth and Mayhew, the 'man in the crowd' of Edgar Allen Poe, the sociology of Georg Simmel, as well as Benjamin's own reflections on Paris (the Arcades Project).

The flaneur as amiguous character

• “The flaneur is the observer of the marketplace. His knowledge is akin to the occult science of industrial fluctuations. He is a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers.” (AP M5,6)

• “The idleness of the flaneur is a demonstration against the division of labour.” (AP M5,8)

Feminists have highlighted the taken-for-granted associations implicit in the flâneur figure as a bourgeois, bohemian and male.

From one point of view the non-existence of the role of flâneuse symbolises women's restricted participation in public places as well as the malestream bias of some of the classical literature on modernity (Wolff 1985).

The invisibility of the flâneuse underscores how the freedom to roam was very much a male freedom: the flâneur's licence to watch the city sights can be regarded as the walking embodiment of the 'male gaze'.

Other feminists have argued that there is a risk of overgeneralising this argument.

Women's experiences of the urban life, even in the nineteenth century, varied from city to city and from class to class.

The growth of department stores, tea rooms, railway station buffets, ladies-only dining rooms, public conveniences with female attendants and so forth, made it possible for middle and lower middle class women to experience public places and thus afforded at least some women the opportunity for flânerie.

Death of the Flaneur

• Bon Marche, pioneer of the department store, opens in 1852

• Shop windows organized as an enticement to stop and gaze

• Commodities visibly piled high become spectacle in their own right

• Army of salespeople – blatant sexuality involved

• Women have much more important role, as both buyers and sellers

• While the role of bourgeois women was in some ways enhanced by this progression from the arcades to the department stores, it was still their lot to be exploited, though this time as consumers rather than as managers of the household.

• It became a fashionable necessity for them to stroll the boulevards, window-shop, buy and display their acquisitions in the public space

• Women became part of the spectacle that fed upon itself and defined public spaces as exhibition sites for commodities overlain with an aura of sexual desire