Strolling Along With the Flaneur: An Inquiry Into the Concept of Encounter

• In Event: 70.018 - The Not-So-Idle Flaneur: A Metaphor for Knowing, Being Ethical, and Negotiating New Data Production

Abstract

Purpose
This paper inquires into the notion of encounter, as part of a larger study on the art encounter by adult viewers in museums. More specifically it opens a common path for thinking in a session on the flâneur. Whether in an art gallery or in an urban space what does it mean “to encounter”? Or thinking in Deleuzian terms, how does it function and what does it do? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983/1972). This conceptual paper has a specific focus on primary literature on the flâneur by Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, 1999; Arendt, 1968) not to define what an encounter “is” but to use Benjamin’s ideas on the flaneurial and see how productive they are for researchers who need to think the relational, materialist and embodied, walking experiences in/as part of their inquiry.

Theoretical framework
Seemingly ubiquitous, the vernacular word “encounter” usually refers to a meeting with a person or thing and sometimes to a casual meeting with experiences or difficulties but it can also suggest a confrontation, a being against. The overarching theoretical frame for this paper is the poststructural and post-humanist work of Gilles Deleuze who wrote: “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.” (Deleuze, 1994/1968, p.139). Drawing from Deleuze, O’Sullivan (2006) suggests that an encounter “operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being” (p.1) and by opening a cut, it allows new ways of seeing and thinking. As I reflect about my own flaneurial strolls in the gallery space at times actively looking, meaning making, contemplating, or daydreaming, I do not always experience a rupture or it may happen much later in a subtle way. Hence, my desire to examine Benjamin’s conceptions and ontology of the urban walker for, as he wrote: “The flâneur, as is well known, makes ‘studies’” (Benjamin, 1999, p. 453). This attentive reading aims to complicate my thinking with Deleuze and create new understandings about the concept of encounter.

Modes of inquiry and data collection
Adopting Law’s (2004) view that the world is so rich that my research will always fail to “catch more than a part of it” (p.8), for this inquiry I choose a methodology of encounters (McCoy, 2012). First, I did a close and attentive walk-through of Benjamin’s writings on the modes of being and experiencing of the flâneur (Benjamin, 1999; Arendt, 1968). Slowly meandering in the text, I resisted looking behind the words for absolute meanings. This data created a productive rhizome of ideas (Jackson, 2013) when placed in conversation with secondary sources such as Buck-Morss (1989) and Lauster (2007) but also new readings on the flâneur branching out of the “sensual turn” in the social sciences (Boutin, 2012; Springgay, 2011).

Results and educational significance
This paper fills a research gap in studies about the encounter by thinking with the flâneur whose meeting with the world is achieved by sensorial, embodied, relational encounters with a strong ethical and political dimension.

Author

• Marie France Berard, The University of British Columbia