ABSTRACT
This chapter examines urban space; and seeks to reconstitute the analytic force of the flaneur. The flaneur is the metaphoric figure originally brought into being by Charles Baudelaire, as the spectator and depicter of modern life, most specifically in relation to contemporary art and the sights of the city. The flaneur moves through space and among the people with a viscosity that both enables and privileges vision. An observer is a prince who is everywhere in possession of his incognito. The flaneur, in concrete and descriptive terms, was never a wholly admirable image perhaps because of its potential hauteur. It was, nevertheless, indisputably invested with a certain gaiety and a strong, implicit, irony by Baudelaire. The flaneur is essentially a product of modernity, it provides one image of how that state of being in time can be realised or, at least, understood. It is also an attempt to 'see' modernity; a metaphor for method.
