The flâneur experience as a line of flight from modernity

between parrhesia and phantasmagoria

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze the emergence of the flâneur figure in the nascent artistic and media project of 19th-century modernity as an exercise of parrhesia, in the relation between what is said and the life that is lived, as described by Michel Foucault. Charles Baudelaire personifies the artist’s life, in a dialectical movement between poetic force and co-optation by the market. Theoretical and methodological assumptions from Foucauldian discursive studies were mobilized in dialogue with concepts from the philosopher Walter Benjamin, such as phantasmagoria and dialectical image. The results indicate that flânerie is configured as a type of aesthetic and behavioral resistance that functions as a line of escape in relation to the antagonisms between bourgeois and workers, commodity and poetry. The flâneur, therefore, is conceived as subjectivity in historical discontinuity, representing a poetic subject in the possible space of resistance to a utilitarian logic. For this reason, revisiting it allows us to think about counterpoints to the order of productivist discourse, escaping the immediacy and acceleration of contemporary life.