Aural Flânerie

Abstract

The diverse body of primary literature on flânerie supports a multisensory interpretation of urban spectatorship, one in which hearing is especially keen. Walter Benjamin’s influential approach to the flâneur has tuned out or toned down the aural dimensions of flânerie following Georg Simmel’s sociology of the senses which privileges the eye over the ear in the modern metropolis. Resituating the figure of the flâneur within the framework of ‘sound studies’ enables us to investigate alternative tropes for some of the prevalent visual constructs in flâneur theory: the city as readable book, ‘capital of signs’, and as kaleidoscopic spectacle. Writings on the flâneur, Honoré de Balzac’s Physiologie du mariage and especially Victor Fournel’s Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris represent the city in aural terms as musical score, and as harmonious or cacophonous concert. They describe walking in the city as a multisensory embodied experience rather than a disengaged spectatorship, making the artist’s contact with the sounds of the city a formative creative experience. A theory of the flâneur conceived as bathed in a multitude of sounds and sights rather than as untouchable mobile gaze can, I hope, enrich our definitions of modernity.