Carter Smith
Position Paper
A COLLISION OF IMAGES, A KALEIDOSCOPE:
ON GLEBER’S “THE CITY OF
Simultaneously offering a
reading of SwannÂ’s Way and the flaneurÂ’s gaze,
Walter Benjamin observes, in The Arcades Project, the “principle of flanerie” (420) in the following passage from Proust:
“[S]uddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a stone,
the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure
that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing,
beneath what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to approach and
take from them, but which, despite all my efforts, I never managed to
discover.” (qtd. in Benjamin
420)
Though GleberÂ’s
analysis in “The City of Modernity” focuses more on the conditions of flanerie than on the
pleasure and enjoyment of the flaneur, like Proust, she is concerned with “what [the] eyes could see.”
And, according to her argument, the late nineteenth-century city bombarded the
eyes of the city dweller with stimuli such that the visual register becomes “a
primary factor in the quality of his urban life” (24).
Indeed, for Gleber, a study of the city as a visual field is the most
useful way to understand the flaneurÂ’s walk through
it. One of the salutary features of this approach is the way in which it
relates changes in the act of looking to changes in material culture. Electric
light, by making the cityscape visible at night, creates an environment in
which “the public sphere is perceived as an interior space in the street” (33).
Window displays and poster advertisements are but two examples of the “rapid
proliferation of visual stimuli in the street” (36). Everywhere one looked, Gleber argues, there was something to be seen.
To account for the psychological
impact of this proliferation of visual stimuli, Gleber
turns to Georg SimmelÂ’s
1903 work “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Simmel
argues that, as a result of increased stimulation, modern visual sensibility is
informed primarily by differentiation, that “the essentially intellectualist
character of the mental life of the metropolis” (qtd.
in Gleber 25) can be attributed to the mental
processing of images.
“[T]he mental life of the
metropolis”: what a reader might take as an idiom roughly equivalent to “mental
life in the metropolis,” Gleber later emphasizes in a paraphrase of Simmel. Of the dandy, the snob, and the flaneur,
she writes that “these urban dispositions in
the city’s mental life may correspond to three distinct types of ‘social
characters’” (25 emphasis added). The difference
between mental life in the metropolis
and the mental life of the metropolis
has everything to do with the flaneurÂ’s sensibility.
Is his sensibility, after all, comprised only of the specular?
As an amusement for the
eye--one that produces an ever-changing image from small shifts in its
constituent elements--the kaleidoscope is an appropriate metaphor for the flux
of Gleber’s city. The city is a “kaleidoscope of
signs”--signs such as price tags, traffic lights, and advertisements--that
“convey the value of things while at the same time suggesting their value as
signs” (40). It seems to me that Proust’s emphasis on
the unknowability of what lies beneath signs has
something to add to the image of the flaneur that we
get in “The City of Modernity,” something for which Gleber
possibly accounts in her trope of the kaleidoscope. For, at the end of the
essay, she shifts the terms of the comparison, claiming that the flaneur’s “sensitivity to the objects and obsessions of [.
. .] modernity renders him a significant kaleidoscope of his time” (41). The
statement echoes an earlier paraphrase of Simmel: “A
medium embodied in a human sensitivity, [the flaneur]
specializes in the perception and formulation of the cityÂ’s heterogenous
mental life” (29). In the shift from city-as-kaleidoscope to flaneur-as-kaleidoscope, does Gleber
suggest a range of city experiences that extend beyond the visual?