A serious question that must be addressed in the future discipline of Sadoo Studies is the extent to which the sadoo is a flâneur. A number of significant obstacles are immediately raised.
The flâneur is most ecstatically, horribly, and originally linked to Saint Charles Baudelaire and the museum of Paris. Saint Baudelaire wandered that museum—before it became a museum—during The Great Age of the Birth of The Modern City, when pedestrians were pedestrians not the extensions of cars; when cities were livable and scalable and walkable; when Paris was a living beauty and not a postcard of itself.
It would take many days to walk across Delhi today—most of it tedious, sterile, feet-unfriendly, eye-unfriendly. So in the 143 years since St. Baudelaire died, the psychic and artifactual mass one has to negotiate to see God—the only objective of any authentic sadoo or flâneur—has exponentially and continues to exponentially increase. The distance between the genitals and purity, beast and divinity, ignorance and knowledge, the sacred and the profane, commerce and creation, is now so great as to break the feet of all but the greatest stroller. The human soul itself is being stretched from creation’s dim dawn to apocalypse’s eager maw and what tends to fill its corpulent diameters are money, mirrors, and noisy wills.
Since the ugly tepid demise of St. Charles, the term flâneur has been usurped by the academy and its pedants. This began with Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life) and Walter Benjamin (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire), both likable enough, and from them into the rhetorical discursive polemical psychosociocultural analytical critical mediocre gobbledyfoofoo that passes for knowledge among those who dispense degrees from within the pomo vending machine which in the common tongue is called the university.
But the flâneur is no idea, but first a leaf in bodily form, second the eye that God lacks, and third a continuous visceral-emotional shock that the world in its corrupt incompetent horror and beauty is the way it is.
Whether the flâneur was moneyed or impecunious, he was invariably indolent—at least according to any standard definition of industry. Yet St. Charles flâneured in the pre-nanosecond world when art, God, and nature still were legitimate republics in their own right and had not yet capitulated to money’s false monistic claim. So leisure, anonymity, and caprice have been increasingly desecrated and, with these, the flâneur. Even artists these days—with their workshops and websites, careers and conformance—have lost not just the ability to walk, but their right to walk.
The rise and dominance of virtualization means that a flâneur is now a simulacrum of the flâneur: one can walk the world without walking; one can stroll Parisian streets through two-dimensions from a St. Louis suburb; one can receive mock-shocks and e-bustles from a virtual crowd in a potato-chip-chomping bedroom.
Three or four or more questions arise from these meandering musings and thick conceptual walls.
1. Is the flâneur dead?
2. If not, why? If not, how is it and/or can it—it being flâneurism—be transformed?
3. How is the sadoo a flâneur?
An attempt at answers.
St. Baudelaire’s flâneur is dead—or at least seriously maimed—but the flâneur lives on, minimally in the imagination and quite possibly in that most archaic of possibilities—the body.
The flâneur may continue to live because—
— the crowd—as offensive, cloacal, faceless, goalful, merging, as the nineteenth century—continues to exist and grow and throb in its active urban malaise. As long as the urban crowd exists and bulges, so must the flâneur.
— money—modernity’s cheap divinity—is no longer transcended through art, God, or nature but only through that which money now utterly depends on … movement—continuous meaningless movement—the flâneur’s chief love.
— one subverts the dominance of technomoney (and all money is now technology) by returning to the body in its schizoid simplicity. Certainly the urban throb-mob tries to return through sex, Baudelaire capturing this in his observation—sexuality is the lyricism of the masses. More modernly and popularly, TV shows such as Sex and The City express Baudelaire’s thought mythically and specifically. But the flâneur goes deeper than sex—which reeks too much of self-interest, groupgrasp, and false promises—into the body’s rank core: the combination of futile bestial wandering with the raw deep eye of God. It is a truism to say that nature no longer exists except as metaphor. There is one exception, though. And that is the body in the city—nature’s last stronghold. The flâneur does not primarily give his body over to other individual bodies (the sexual frenzy which dominates urban despair and ecstasy), but to the body of the city in its entirety and so attempts to recover the ancient trees and texts as they were once alive. Attempts to recover them on the shimmering sweat of his flesh.
This particular sadoo has extensively and precisely imagined the modern city as the sarcophagus of God—that we are secretly sustained by decaying divinity, affording the ecstasy our species requires. The human has always thrived on death—we kill (physically, emotionally) to risk extending ourselves—and the city affords great feasting. Faith in the city—the only faith remaining—necessitates believing God is dead; this is no textbook belief, no parched cognitive truth, but one as living and sinewy as water. This faith in the city is an aspect of the sadoo’s faith and an aspect of what drives him to walk.
So, then, the sadoo as flâneur sojourns aimlessly through God’s decaying body to observe and document the great convulsing human mass which has dubiously taken the burden of god upon itself; he sojourns, observes, and documents before the eye that circumscribes divinity, humanity, and bestiality disappears into itself, the city collapses to two dimensions, and the resultant mirror reflects nothing.
