Butterfly Hunt

On the flâneur- The collector as the (wo)man in the crowd

Reposted, verbatim, for Karl Whitney

[originally posted November 11 and 12, 2008, on my now-defunct Never Neutral blog]

To walk at leisure a city is a privilege, but it does not de facto mean either bourgeoisie or tourism. Jarvis Cocker’s famous dictum, “everybody hates a tourist” acquires full significance in central London and the London underground. The tourist is not a flâneur: almost by definition tourism implies a superficial engagement with people and places.

I was not a tourist in Mexico City— I was born there, lived and worked there most of my life. But I would make an effort to go out of my house-work-house routine, no matter how awful and stressful public transport is in that most polluted and overcrowded and chaotic of metropolises, and set out in walking trips in search for the unexpected. But cities find a way of getting into you, like Patrick Hamilton’s “crouching monster” (Mexico DF is also known as “el monstruo”), Mexico City or London or any other big city will make every effort to alienate its inhabitants.

The flâneur roams, walks at leisure but seeks something that has not yet been predefined. Walter Benjamin’s reading of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the “psychic shield” as a defining element of modernism is still relevant today, especially on the streets of a city like London: as brilliantly depicted by The Verve’s video of “Bittersweet Symphony”, walking in London is all about avoiding what Benjamin called “the shock”: bodies slamming one against the other.

Mexico City is a car city, but London is mostly about public transport  and walking places. In London people use the pavement (the sidewalk) a lot. But most of them are narrow and there’s never enough room for the mass that is vomited second after second onto the streets. The Londoner walks straight ahead and will not move unless you do it. Seeing anyone in the eye or just to the face is a sign of provocation.

“Hoodies” like their dogs strong and menacing (mostly Staffs, but also bull-terriers, Argentinian mastiffs, American pit-bulls, Akitas) and walk them proudly as if they were police officers patrolling the streets. These are not pets to facilitate friendly human interaction (what you see in New York’s Central Park, the pet as a vehicle to escape loneliness, a medium for meeting or just chatting with like-minded people) but to avoid it through intimidation. The commuting middle classes, on the other hand, clad in black, will find an equivalent in their leather briefcases, long umbrellas, iPods and newspapers: there is no time to be friendly because life is too short to make new friends and days are short and time is money and we don’t really want to be here anyways.

London is not a friendly city: under the stereotype of English politeness lies the rough reality of everyday commuting in a multicultural society where totally different peoples interact.  The ethos of the London street is “move, or else”: there is no patience or tolerance for those who are slower, less aggressive or street wise. There is no time to stand and find your bearings: in London you are expected to always know where you are going. (There’s even a Facebook group from North London titled “I Secretly Want to Kill People Who Walk Slowly in Front of Me” or something similar). In that sense London is still Benjaminian modernism in full swing: walking has been relegated to the countryside or parks; London’s pavements are for getting from point A to B, not to await a revelation.

The post-modernist flâneur then does not walk the city necessarily because he is a bourgeois who has nothing else to do or because he is a tourist who can enjoy the things that locals find distressing. The flâneur of the 21st century seeks to reinstate discovery, perhaps some sort of mystic aura, in what by routine and repetition has become mechanized and dreadful. In a way, like the collector, who wants to make art from the commodity by reinstating unicity in the mass-produced, the flâneur wants to recover the city from the tourists and the bitter commuters. The contemporary flâneur has to become an optimist: there is beauty in the   most obvious places, unseen precisely because of their common essence.

 Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!

Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,

Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!

—Charles Baudelaire

Perhaps more than the streets of Paris, (with the exception of Rue Dante), London’s Soho offers to the street-walker the “deafening sound” (assourdissante) of the crowd, composed of both tourists and locals. Berwick Street, with its market and record shops and smell of fish and chips is only one of the several labyrinthine roads that, at lunchtime on a weekday, can be both the horror, the horror of those uneasy with crowds and the sheer pleasure of the collector.

To be a collector is a curse. I remember reading Hannah Arendt in her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s  Illuminations  where she writes about how a dirt-poor Benjamin spent every penny he had on rare books (and perhaps also toys and other artifacts). The collector is not that different from those politicians and celebrities who declare themselves  ”addicted to sex”: as Benjamin put it, the collector is in love with “the sex-appeal of the inorganic.” It is not a coincidence that that area of London is not only full of new and second-hand record and book shops but also of strip clubs, porn, lingerie and tattoo shops. Like the underwear fetishist, the comic book and the record collector enjoy the very materiality of the object, its texture and smell, the variations in condition, the little details that make one mass-reproduced object unique.

Lukács would write about “commodity fetishism”, but the collector’s pathos is much more than that. It’s not, in post-modernist terms, mere consumerism, or the glorification of the unnecessary material object. The collector, Benjamin wrote, gives objects “only a fancier’s value, rather than use-value.” In this comic book and record collectors are no different to, say, those who collect designer bags or shoes. The difference with the latter lies in the fact that bags and shoes (fashion in general) are worn, carried by the owner as badges of status or taste. For the average, small private collector his/her comic books and/or vinyl records will become value-less (most of the times) immediately after they have been bought. As any book or record collector knows, it’s not a good idea to sell your collection, because most of the times its “fancier’s value” will always be greater than its monetary one. In other words, a collection is  only valuable in a unique way to the collector him/herself. It rarely is to someone else, at least in the same way.

The collector is a (wo)man in the crowd who, like Baudelaire’s poetic voice in À une passante, sees into the deafening and blinding semiotic cacophony of the crowded street and market to find a valuable and loveable object. The collector, like the poet at the moment of getting an idea, cannot resist the urge to acquire a wanted item: if the collector has the monetary means the object will have to be obtained, because s/he knows (and so does the dealer) that it is very likely that object will soon never be there again. The collector feels the object has to be saved from that disappearance (or from being obtained by another collector).

For Benjamin the collector was a “man of the interior”, perhaps because the true enjoyment of his collection only takes place fully when at home. (I remember being in Daniel Clowes’s house in California a few years ago: the ghost of Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb possessed his face and his hands when he showed us his pristine shelved, mylar-bagged book and record collection). But the hunt takes place outdoors, in the city’s streets where there is a constant landslide of stimuli. The collector needs to filter this storm and locate what s/he will want to save, to preserve as a treasure of value perhaps only to him/herself and others of similar taste.

The collector is forever nostalgic because the collector’s ethos is the consciousness of finitude. The collector wants to give commodities their aesthetic, artistic, sensory value back. Mass capitalism deprives objects from the experience of uniqueness; the collector wants to restore that lost unicity. In a way the collector is a ghost-hunter, forever immersed in the phantasmagoria of his imaginary and of the small shops that, unseen by the masses, are, as it were, only there for the collector.