For our project, we'll have to figure out the particulars of this new cyberflaneur. Here's Baudelaire's description of his original conception pasted from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur):
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.
—Charles Baudelaire,
So the flaneur is the new poet of the emerging metropolis, impartial and incognito, coming of age at the dawn of Modernism, when visual and media technologies were fast making a dream society of magic become a reality. And as the 19th Century became the 20th, conceptions of the flaneur got tied up with cinema. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin argues for the filmmaker to be considered as a flaneur (and the photographer as shaman). Auteurs like Hitchcock and Truffaut seemed to take the cue and made films with this concept preordained. But soon the 20th century flaneur lost popularity as a media figure in Western cinema. What happened?
The figure of Kevin McCarthy at end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers demonstrates how the Cold War conquered the flaneur and why, for our experiment, our flaneur, like our poetics, must not be heroic:
This scene perfectly illustrates the flaneur's demise. Furthermore it's comparable to what Morozov claims killed the cyberflanaur. Frictionless sharing has turned the public, including the original, well-meaning flaneur, into a commonwealth of zombies; the once proud flaneur is now a failed hero, and not the cool debaucherous anti-hero Baudelaire conceived either--he is the hero fallen into hysteria. From a conspiratorial perspective, aliens or communists or Mark Zuckerberg are to blame, but Lacan and his methods might help us get at something deeper and more constructive.
For Lacan, the subjects gets anxious (and maybe as paranoid as Miles Bennell in Invasion) when she/he reaches the point of "I saw myself seeing himself."
Reflecting on a previous recitation of Aragon poem, Lacan notes: "I did not realize at the time that I would be developing the subject of the gaze to such an extent." Perhaps if we situate Lacan and Aragon's mad poet as either the original 19th century flaneur or the emerging cyberflaneur, we can can use the Gaze, and its manifestations enacted by mass media, as our diagnostic. Mass media (specifically but not limited to digital media) proliferated the Gaze's dimensions and hyper-linked them--that's for sure. So maybe what happened to the flaneur is perfectly illustrated in the above photo, which, through an editing-effect, highlight the flaneur's upper figure with a kaleidoscopic ring. Here, visual technology has highlighted the gaze and ousted the sauntering poet.
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