The Lunatic in the Basement

That’s fine, I’ll take it. Better that than the perverse visual possessor in the arcade. Actually, I really appreciated Wilson’s take-down of some of the conventional feminist mythology behind the flaneur, not to mention her take on the origin of the blase’. Is it just a defensive apathy against such an overwhelming tide of stimulation, or is it the cynicism of the sell-out, the rebel who depends on the object of his angst for survival? Ouch. Take that, hipsters. Wilson touches down on another point I’d felt while reading some of the voyeuristic literature therein described, but which I never quite got the words for... She said what I was thinking (Is that what I think I’m trying to say?). It’s the dramatic irony behind the watcher, that he thinks he’s in control, ‘possessing with his gaze’, but really we know he’s a marginal character, a powerless outsider looking in. He’s a man with nothing but ‘nostalgia for a life he’s never known’. It’s interesting to think about that point alone. This version of the flaneur is controlled by the same type of oppressive ideological landscape that Wilson criticizes some of her fellow feminists for creating. There is a lot of talk about the way we use these ideologies, but it’s nice to see discussed the way ideologies use us. There is a moment in Wilson’s argument where she talks about the use of stone imagery in Baudelaire’s poetry. It’s when she’s talking about the impotence of the flaneur in the face of the new set of transgressive desires offered by the metropolis. The man can either become an object of that desire or turn to stone. It’s easy to forget that men were/are subject to moral frameworks as restrictive as women’s. And it wasn’t like there was a new value system waiting to take up the purpose and function of the original: “The heroism-for both sexes-is in surviving this disorienting space”, she says. Cheers, I say. Particularly depressing is her use Benjamin’s image of the idler in the marketplace, but with no Socrates to come by and offer guidance. I suppose if Socrates were to pass by the commodified spaces of today, he’d just throw some change down. The life never-known also shows itself in the flaneur’s present, as dystopia and utopia co-existing in the same mindscape- which brings us right back to last week’s reading of “City Imaginaries”. Conceptual images, just like ideologies, have real effects on experience. And the trouble really sets in in situations like Wilson’s, because, unlike in physical space, antithetical imaginative constructs can exist both simultaneously and simulspacially (anybody have this word for me?) in the mind, materializing, as she says, as a “narcotic dream”. This is that defining lack of definition that the metropolis challenges us with, the “fluid universe of shifting meanings”. All of us watchers, but who can blame us? The scene keeps changing. We’re all like dogs with our faces out the window, new forms of life flying by like milemarkers on the interstate.