The Metropolitan: Blasé attitude or the Flâneur
Finding a place in the city and participating in the endless cycle of production consumption (1) can mean throwing yourself into the streets during the "rush hour" for those who live there. The coffee is taken from the coffee shop in the corner, which Marc Auge (2) mentions at length in his book Non-Places, the sidewalk that is walked on every day, the uncanny parking lots and the train platforms waiting at the stations are all parts of this feverish fiction. For the unquestioning urbanite, the order of the world has already been established. Even the anonymous life of which Jacobs (3) speaks manifests itself in such urban spaces.
Being modern and then urban; while wandering through the city with a Flâneur ecstasy, recognizing and being inspired by other life practices, urban spaces, and preferences; on the other hand, it means boredom in complex, multi-layered and foggy urban life. The metropolitan makes a peculiar pendulum movement within this dichotomous structure. The individual is curious about city life, becomes at one with it and develops emotions. At the other extreme, he's tired of being exposed to things in this whole world of crazy, over-shimmering material; it even becomes irrelevant. The reactions of the urbanites are undocumented. The "higher awareness" and "rational" attitude that Simmel talks about with the concept of blase attitude are mechanical in one aspect, memorized.
Therefore, today's individual's self-description in the city is like re-reading the complex position of being a "metropolitan". The relationship established with the city exists in the urban space from Lefebvre's framework. It can be traced through the personas that Joyce (4) establishes for the actors of everyday life. It even refers to the new metropolitan layers in contemporary everyday life that Lefebvre envisioned, perhaps in a sense.
This dual mode of existence of the urban is a long narrative, from today's metropolis to the early industrialized, uncanny state of the city at the beginning of the 20th century. Although more than 100 years have passed since Passages (5) was written, the struggle of the urbanites with the shop windows. In the simplest terms, it has only experienced spatial transformations. Beyond being a nostalgic topic of conversation, Passages describe the transformation of the urbanite's exposure to things. Shopping malls that we snob architects do not like at all, art galleries that we criticize for turning art into a commodity to be bought and sold, architecture and art biennials that we are desperate to get entrance tickets to while we despise the theme as "banal again", and hipster spaces that we do not fail to experience even though we find it too bourgeois are the derivatives of the passages mentioned by Benjamin. Then, we plunge into the city like a great swamp; feed on this long list, learn, consume them thoroughly; and then we get bored. Following the urban space from social media channels and gaining value according to the social position of the urban dweller apart from their basic functions are such manifestations. On the other hand, all those alternative mediums that emerge as a reaction to Simmel's rational and distinct stereotypes of the metropolis. It is described through Blasé Attitude resonating in the lives of urban dwellers. The rise of communication platforms outside the mainstream media outlets has traces of such an influence on the attention of niche designers, and artisans engaged in singular production.
Urban space today and the Flâneur
Benjamin deepened the intricate structure of the city with the concept of Flâneur in the first half of the 1900s. Napoleon 3rd, during his presidency, kept the urban individual under surveillance with the help of the archetype of the "conspirator" in Paris. This is Flâneur's most fundamental notion. In the political and sociological context of that period, France would gain meaning based on political tensions and thought practices from the framework of the "anonymous" urban individual who gathered in the city centre and participated in the production. Benjamin describes him as someone who wanders around like a powerless person without a job, thus aiming to specialize in people and, of course, protesting the system.
There are two urban spaces where the Flâneur exists, one of them is the passages. Benjamin describes the passages as the invention of industrial luxury, citing the Paris Guide of 1952. With chic shops on either side, the corridors are a world of their own. This is even an urban path between the street and the interior; is an interface. The other urban space for Flâneur is the street; it is common ground with a conventional structure in the use of the city. As such, the street has four walls and feels like home. In the street space, the feelings of publicity and belonging to a place become complicated and intricate. Two authors who reveal the dialectical predicaments of this article; Benjamin and Simmel agreed on this point about the uneasiness of seeing without hearing.
Pointing to the 1840s, Benjamin discusses the city where the rise of capitalism took place through Baudelaire (6) and speaks of a ground that the Parisian intellectuals welcomed. It is possible to trace the relationship of boulevard journalism with the aperitif clock in Paris, the city chronicle and café life, which is the medium where urban gossip reverberates. Flâneur chooses such an environment as his home; in fact, he is the "chronicler" and philosopher of this period. This world refers to the phantasmagoria (7) of Parisian life.
Benjamin goes a step further and reads The Flâneur between the lines of the city's crowdedness and eroticism. The image that is enchanted is not lost in the crowd. The passion created by not being able to obtain is the love between the commodity and the urban. Flâneur wanders in crowds, has little social interaction, but is not "asocial". Benjamin regards the urbanite as judicially "cursed" to live in Paris; just like today's metropolitan area where people complain about polluted air, rude manners, and endless traffic, but can't let it go.
Inevitable boredom: Blasé attitude
Benjamin's ecstatic Flâneur as he looks at the shop windows in the Paris passages is confronted by Georg Simmel's weary Blasé attitude (8), which curls a lip to the glittering things in these showcases. Keeping the dominant and intense influences of the metropolis at bay with an "I've seen this before" attitude. The individual who feels physically and emotionally distant from people is literally lonely. According to Simmel, by virtue of being human, the urbanite cannot remain indifferent and indifferent to others.
However, this densely populated urban environment represses individuals to protect their individual selves. Moreover, the norm forces us to adopt patterns of behaviour. So, for the metropolis, Ruskin and Nietzsche are unpleasant, and the questioning of economies and intellectual existence is frowned upon. Intense stimulus bombardment causes a feeling of boredom in the individual. It is now at its peak that the urban dweller becomes unresponsive to stimuli with neural stimulation. The bored individual is regular, flat, and grey. Therefore, one individual has become unable to manifest a significant difference to be preferred over another.
Thus, dependence on the living practices and activities of other inhabitants increases in the metropolis. As a result, unique existence becomes difficult. Ultimately, the identity turns out to be metropolitan. The inner and outer world of the person is constantly busy with the stimuli in the city. The feeling is rinsed off from the personality. Thus, the sensitivity to be different increases and qualitative differences reach their limits. The most bizarre eccentricities, the obvious metropolitan exaggerations or whims involving individual distancing... All this becomes a kind of different way of being. Here, the boundaries of the urban individual are clear, his clear attitude draws attention. Flexibility, being changeable and experimental is almost not allowed. The concept of the Blasé Attitude refers to a weakening in spirituality, sensitivity, and idealism in the cultural development of the individual. Objective culture is less and less satisfying for the individual. The social formulation, which has been a part of urban life since the past, imposes weak demands on the development of antagonistic (9) and individual characteristics, and independent stances, which oppose the establishment of intimacy. Therefore, a metropolis produces a uniform type of people from its own society.
In the production of social life, defining influences, interests, and attention is extremely easy once the personality disappears. The urban dweller defines itself through the conventional. Tags get to be important. The uniqueness that exists in every individual, the general human quality that points to the irreplaceability of something else, is no longer a measure of one's worth. Being a uniform human being creates a conflict in terms of the individual's sensual and spiritual self-definition. Judgment is now inevitable and the norms of the urban occupy hold onto the status quo.
As a result, urban life is fueled by a strong tension between being a curious spectator and being bored. It is the search for the human in the frenzy of production and consumption that disregards the human being who creates the metropolis. For this reason, urban dwellers make mistakes and carry the simple weaknesses of being human within themselves. While all this is happening, the public urban space creates belonging in the individual, and some places are special for us earthlings. We find conventional hedonism banal, and we yearn to be separated from others by our choices. Being a Metropolitan requires both a little Flâneur and a little boredom. We become one with this duality, we crave to discover ourselves in its intricacy.
Notes
I would like to express my gratitude to my dear colleague Ozan Soya, who made me remember Georg Simmel's text The Metropolis and Mental Life and opened the doors of this discussion.
Guest Writer: Sedef Özçelik
Author’s Notes
Here it may be useful to recall Marshall Berman's glorious text, "Everything That Is Solid Melts in the Air" from the framework of modernity, the relationship of production and consumption with space is important to define the urban dweller through the urban space.
Mark Auge describes the anonymous spaces of the city and how the urban adapts to the conventional in this fiction in the form of a flow through the practices of global daily life.
In the introduction to Jane Jacobs' book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, entrusting housing keys through the example of New York points to the anonymous nature of the metropolitan area.
In the An Introduction to a Study and Some Findings chapter of “Everyday Life in the Modern World”, Lefebvre depicts stereotypes and the capitalist system through the everyday personas of James Joyce's Ullysse.
Walter Benjamin began his book Pasagenwerk in 1927 but was not completed until his death in 1940. Based on his own notes and letters, he aimed to explain the author's philosophical approaches to the existence of the individual in society by constructing a complete text.
Baudelaire takes a critical stance on lesbianism, holiness, worldly love, metamorphosis, melancholy, the corruption of the city, lost innocence, and the overwhelming nature of life. He reflects on this metropolitan darkness through his book "Flowers of Evil".
Walter Benjamin defines the concept as "is now the commodity itself, the deceptive image. In this good, the exchange value or form of value obscures the use value; it is synonymous with the whole process of capitalist production."
The concept described by Georg Simmel describes the bored individual who has lost interest in the stimuli in the metropolis.
The opponent, the enemy, the person responsible for blocking, the bad character in a plot.
References
Augé Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.
Berman Marshall. 1988. All That Is Solid Melts into Air : The Experience of Modernity. New York N.Y. U.S.A: Penguin Books.
Giddens Anthony and Philip W Sutton. 2021. Sociology Ninth ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Jacobs Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House.
Simmel, Georg. 1976. The Metropolis and Mental Life The Sociology of Georg Simmel New York: Free Press
Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World New York: Routledge