This is a video I found on youtube about the “Flâneur”.
“For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite.” Charles Baudelaire.
What do you guys think? I’m kind of torn. Is this the flâneur or flânerie?
Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk / Arcades Project, 1927-40
“The Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was an unfinished lifelong project of philosopher Walter Benjamin, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the iron-and-glass covered “arcades” (Passages couverts de Paris). Benjamin’s Project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed due to his death under uncertain circumstances on the French-Spanish border in 1940. Written between 1927 and 1940, the Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections. These arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire. Benjamin linked them to the city’s distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the Flâneur (i.e., strolling in a locale to experience it).”
Go to Paris and visit the Arcades
Approximate date:
September.
