Applied Flâneury

I’m not German; I’m not of Walter Benjamin’s generation, nor do I have much in common with him regarding the actual contours of our respective aesthetics, but I can read, and I am given to understand that he has made the political choice to not give a shit how he is read; I am going to pull from his work what I can use. I am going to participate.

I recognize the strolling flâneur as a mall rat. That is, someone using the infrastructure of what I call “mallworld” (the arcades) not as it is intended to be used, but, rather, for wandering about, or for other of their own, sometimes obscure, purposes. The concept of mallworld occurred to me spontaneously as a young, lumpenproletarian psychonaut in southeastern PA when I realized that the others around me believed in the reality of the interior we shared at the mall. They believed in the advertisements and the SALEs and the enticements and the fonts as though they were a natural landscape – all the design and arbitrariness were obscure to them in a way that my intoxication laid bare. I perceived that we were apes, following a determined path through a silly building, that had been cultivated for us with incoherent, possibly inhuman goals in mind. Goals like profiting by selling candles, or sneakers, or, god forbid, books. Still, sometimes I wanted to be there, for a while, to soak in the spectacle of the phantasmagoria as a kind of connoisseur of silly, blind, presumption. Like going to mass only to watch the faces of those taking communion as they struggled to feel the presence of God.

Decadent poets (and stand up comics) are perhaps like flâneurs, wandering idly in the halls of civilization – making perverted use of the fountains and benches, where consumers are meant to briefly enjoy a soft pretzel or cinnamon bun, by instead living human lives in and upon them – but no, that’s too sentimental. In any case, there’s a liberatory effect to weakening consensuses, like the consensus that the mall is a real place. As Benjamin seems to see it, consensuses generated by, or even merely while in, a state of “distraction” amount to a form of coercion. Can students, other stakeholders in public education, or the project of education itself, benefit from the liberatory effect of doing violence to the unexamined bands, braided & knotted in states of distraction, that confine us to a given consensus on reality?

I feel personally implicated by Benjamin’s confrontation with his reading of Marx on the bohème. By this I don’t mean that I am or ever have been any kind of a “professional conspirator;” only that, for most of my life, I was useless or worse for any kind of institutional use. I have been self-consciously opposed to “narrative authority,” though I didn’t have the word, since I was a small child, and I’ve always actively provoked the community around me with lighthearted, but jarring behavior.

Can fucked up, useless weirdos teach us anything? If I get facial tattoos and publish erotic novellas about cocaine dealing dinosaurs, will I be able to get a job teaching kindergarten?

I used to have a motto on the stupid little white board in my room. It said, ‘make cruelty impossible.’ My best friend (and, essentially, ex-spouse) Anika walked in one day, and just casually said, “I like your slogan; it’s fascist.”

For a long time I’ve relied on a trope I tell myself I invented: I have told myself that, as a public educator, my goal would be to “cripple” my students’ capacity for killing, maiming, or dispossessing others. To ruthlessly, “irresistibly,” as I put it, humanize all to each and each to all. In other words, the process of education I imagined participating in was intended to do a kind of violence to my students. By even persuading them to conform to, say, an evidence-based consensus, education does a kind of violence to the educated.¹

There’s a terrifying brain rot all around – national narratives bifurcated along “political” lines, epistemology splintered by the incoherent incentives of neoliberal consensus reality. Benjamin’s prescience, among other kinds of contributions from peers like Brecht and Bataille, gave some warning and provided a few suggestions for, if nothing else, taking pleasure, interest, and advantage from the diorama into which processes like formal education situate our selves.

Among academics, I am reminded every year that this splintering is either a symptom or the cause of a “crisis.” A crisis that is linked somehow with the fate of these our rad & groovy, our bitchin’ “humanities.”

As far as I understand it, the value of the humanities cannot be punched into a person, so the project should be an educational project, or an otherwise emotionally, spiritually, and behaviorally transformative project. This project will still be violent, but perhaps it need not be authoritarian or “fascist.”

How can we effectively educate people on any topic at all? And, what topics should we teach each other to address the “crisis” in its current manifestations? Such lessons and topics as are suggested by the bodily needs, local events, and environmental circumstances of the current day.

I thought to do damage to my student’s capacity to dehumanize others. My belief, backed up by the evidence of my own life, is that contact with art, writing, music, and communication from other times and places, in former and other idioms, has made cruelty to others feel more and more damaging to me. This is perhaps due to the parts of myself that I have come to recognize as shared with those others throughout time and place. Recognizing this shared humanity in others through their expressions, makes it very difficult to resist recognizing the humanity I share with everyone around me. I’m no longer convinced that a course or curriculum of study could be intentionally designed to reproduce this effect.

The humanities are methods and forms of communication. They are also, in education, weapons, which which to do violence. So much is left unsaid by Benjamin on the topic; I will speculate since he is dead.

There are familiar and well-argued reasons for trusting the experts who “produce knowledge,” and, by extension, the abstracted “expertise” that ostensibly informs the consensuses that our schools distribute. Throw them all in the toilet and flush. Because I said so.

Benjamin seems to abhor any concession to bourgeois consensus reality, along with concessions to most other forms of authority – including, perhaps, certainly sometimes, one’s own authorial voice.² At one extremity, the rejection of authority presented in his Critique of Violence indicates a specific and general position of anarchy regarding truth claims. Current systems for producing and distributing “true” knowledge rely on institutional hierarchies. The institutions concerned with knowledge production, from universities to pharmaceutical companies, are fully embedded in the broader neoliberal economy. As far as consumer-capitalist hegemony is concerned, ‘teacher,’ ‘scientific researcher,’ and (especially) ‘university administrator’, are positions that exist, like everything else, to generate abstract cash profit, one way or another.

Would divorcing the project of knowledge production entirely from the money system help produce more spontaneous cultural agents? That is, would the relationship between individuals – teachers, students, workers in all fields – and art itself be enriched in some subjectively positive way by removing the distortions generated by market incentives?

What kind of a creep would teach without getting paid? What kind of suspicious cult of creeps would establish an Adverse Academy to facilitate mutual public education with no concern for Benjamins (of the Franklin variety rather than the Walter) or other material advantage in the neoliberal order?

To avoid authoritarianism in pedagogical practice, in addition to teaching, instructors should both learn from students and let them teach each other. Let a learner’s curiosity draw information from available source material in the local environment, and propel them along a more spontaneous, less authoritarian, curriculum. Both teacher and student should become a kind of flâneur, strolling through the canon – looking at everything, but buying nothing.

Self-consciously taking only what I need from Benjamin’s work and reading it as I read it, for now, means leaving a whole lot of it on the floor, but I can easily picture an intentional transition, for some flâneur-types, from wandering the halls of commerce, to wandering the halls of the academy as instructors.

Is it mere uselessness for the purposes of, incongruity with, or contrariness to, “phantasmagoria” that gives the figure of the flâneur its revolutionary potential? Are those features just stigmata? It might be some combination, something to do with the context (e.g. the arcades, mourning plays), or perhaps something else. In contemporary American cities, for example, certain neighborhoods or locations are full of people in crisis, one way or another – homeless people, individuals suffering from profound mental illness, and whole communities of drug users – a whole nation of folks who seem “useless,” or maybe even “contrary,” but certainly not incongruous to anyone who is paying attention.

People living in discomfort and distress don’t necessarily buttress my resistance to the grand capitalist-realist narrative. Their omnipresence in my day-to-day life saddens me and hardens my certainty that the organizing principles of my society are failing human beings – it persuades me that the story is about injustice, not that the story isn’t real.

Perhaps the flâneur must appear unscarred by the system – somehow impervious to its discipline. They must represent an alternative, not a failure. Authoritarian capitalism does have a use for homeless people in crisis: they are a threat. They represent the consequences for noncompliance.

Theodor Adorno, and the other authors of The Authoritarian Personality, found that those inclined toward fascism more broadly, tend to “cling” to strength, displaying a “disdainful rejection of whatever [or whomever] is relegated to the bottom" emphasis mine.³

The flâneur, the wild-eyed poet, does not resemble those despised ones at the “bottom” who are so easily reviled by those of us whom Adorno et al. identify as possessing authoritarian personalities. They confound the authoritarian bootlicker’s cosmogony by visibly and shamelessly rejecting the “conventionality” and “rigidity” that fascism demands.⁴

Recent popular literature, to the extent that it deals with critical theory in good faith, is tilting negative toward Habermas’ notion of the unique legitimacy of “that peculiar, strange, unforced force,” that is: the better argument.⁵ What else can public education consist of? What other sort of violence could be ethical in education? Even to get people to listen requires an ongoing argument – in the form of an interesting or gratifying experience of learning.

If Baudelaire is to be taken as an ideal incarnation of the flâneur, then we have some clue as to the kinds of learning experiences flâneurs might offer if we gave them the schools, or at least some of the clever students some of the time,

“And I was full then of this Truth: / That the greatest treasure reserved by God for the Genius / Is to know profoundly earthly Beauty / So that from there can spring forth Rhythm and harmony.”⁶

To know profoundly, earthly beauty. The senses, and thereby the body, would be engaged by their lessons. Something heterodox or unexpected will be pursued in their lessons. New physiognomies proposed and just as readily discarded (one hopes). Fashion? Perhaps not fashion that sells, or, rather, that is fashioned to sell, but, instead: desire, taste, appropriateness, beauty, justice, change within and between traditions; traditions invented yesterday, or in ancient Ægypt, all only adhered to conditionally, provisionally, loosely – as a private joke for oneself alone.

The flâneur takes his foppish place among other “decadent” counter-cultural figures. Dear reader I’m assuming you already grasp the enormous contribution to the enlightenment made by proud peacock weirdos who don’t conform, and don’t seem miserable about it.

You don’t need a junkie artist to teach ethics, however – nearly any woman, queer, or very old man could do so. What we need, maybe, from some agent, is an introduction to doubt; specifically, useful, fruitful doubt, toward authors and authority. We need one teacher to take the class away from the school unannounced, bring them to an auditorium or public park, and tell them that all teachers are full of shit.

Adverse history class. Rule Breaking 101. Students and other learners in public education contexts need at least one influence, meaning figure of influence, who uses students’ own senses, or aesthetic persuasion via introductions to beauty in works of art, or absurdity and chaos, to teach – and, importantly, to cast doubt on the teachings of every other instructor – the instructions of every other teacher (especially those filthy neo-neo-positivists in STEM). In informal contexts this is clearly feasible, and many figures have assumed this role, from the flâneur to the clown, stand-up comic, gadfly, provacateuse, etc. But how can we sanction an unsanctioned element in more formal educational contexts? I’m reminded of the children’s book by Lois Lowry, The Giver, in which (as a I recall) a young person is selected from each generation to receive generally forbidden knowledge from the otherized figure of a mysterious curmudgeon. I would prefer, however, that access to an irreverent or indifferent mental mode or aspect be nurtured in all those with whom I am in community.

No curriculum, even that of an autodidact, remains untouched by systematic, historically-determined schemes for distributing knowledge. There are silences and amplifications at every level of knowledge production and distribution, some necessary, some arbitrary, and some artificial – that is, designed or cultivated. Even the self-taught build their worldviews from rough ingredients left by history; "it does not lie within the power of mere thought to confer such a form."⁷ Historical forces outside the agency of any individual are what determine the specific contours of doctrines and even “random” courses of study. Reading Chrétien de Troyes might lead one to Wolfram von Eschenbach to Geoffrey of Monmouth, etc. Perhaps not in that order, but in any case, the texts are historically interrelated and if you study one you’ll find mention of the others.

An educational project that relies on texts as sources only has sources on the kinds of things one finds in the kinds of texts that get made. The only connections it can make are between texts, so lists and hierarchies, canons and libraries and curricula and top fifty countdowns automatically emerge. What could we study instead? And if texts remain among our best tools to communicate our humanity to one another, which texts and in what order and to which learners? Is communicating our “humanity” enough to disturb one another from our various states of distraction?

Benjamin acknowledges the involuntary reactions of the body as part of the experience of art.⁸ When he says, “Distraction, like catharsis, should be conceived as a physiological phenomenon,” he’s also alerting us to the involuntary aspects of our reactions to information absorbed through text.⁹ The body itself is also the very thing being “educated” by a process of education, the brain physically reconfigured. The body is also engaged by information subversive to the goals of consensus education. Decadent countercultures draw from well established non-sanctioned sources of pleasure and interest, to the body and senses, in the interplay and interstices between phantasmagoria.

But, perhaps, rather than becoming some inverted satanic cadre of traveling mendicant tutors, imparting specific heterodox “lessons,” the flâneur/outsider-type individuals I’m talking about here can simply, by demonstration, teach us to become a little more like they are.

Could a kind of incidental or intermittent attitude of contemporary flâneury be taught or inspired? Through engagement with a curriculum designed to introduce the body to the pleasures and interest behind and between the phantasmagoria? Would former flâneurs, or dislocated proletarians nurtured by decadence and counterculture, be particularly well-suited to “teaching” this attitude or to initiating “students” in the kinds of lessons that subversion offers the body?

After many years of sympathizing with their arguments, basically in gratitude for the explanatory power of their frameworks, I must admit that some of the angles of critique taken by Frankfurt school thinkers have been rendered fully obsolete by time and change. Benjamin’s flat assertion that works of art on film are more “susceptible to becoming worn out” by the incessant grinding of the fashion wheel, for example, could only have been true in a period where no ‘timeless’ or classic films had yet been identified.¹⁰ Some of the doom anticipated by thinkers like Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin himself, was averted; but, in some cases, an even grimmer state than what they seemed to predict has emerged through highly addictive “technologies” and combinations of technologies like smartphones and social media. But unanticipated sources of hope have also emerged: new ways of remaining peripheral to the production and maintenance of the various consensuses we encounter. New ways of becoming rats in mallworld.

In determining “whether destruction might have a positive role to play within pedagogical theories,” thought must be given to counter-intuitive targets, and seeming nonsense as a method.¹¹ The more we kick back directly against the pricks of imposed, coercive consensus reality, the harder it will be for us. The flâneur can teach us to relax, maybe, and to experience our refusal to concede (to the world as it is presented by authority) as a private joke for us alone.