The Crimes of the Flaneur

The Crimes of the FlaneurAuthor(s): Tom McDonoughReviewed work(s):Source: October, Vol. 102 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 101-122Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779133 .

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The Crimes of the Flaneur*

TOM McDONOUGH

No matter what trail the flaneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime.

-Walter Benjamin,"The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"I

This citation from Benjamin gives rise to two opposed possible readings. On one hand it provides us with a portrait of the flaneur, the solitary urban stroller, as detective, tracking down the transgressions committed in the metropolis and imposing a species of social control over that lawless formation known as the crowd. Yet it also allows for another, precisely opposite, reading; for here we also can see the flaneur as himself criminal, his wanderings through the city streets as themselves perhaps criminal acts, inevitably leading him into crime. This essay is concerned with the very ambiguities contained in the epigraph above, with this telling uncertainty, which registers so effectively the tenuous nature of urban order: the way that our everyday routines are always subtended by other possibilities-the outlawed, the prohibited, the unauthorized uses of the public realm. These other possibilities generally remain hidden, only flaring into view at moments of social crisis; this essay is about one such moment, in the last years of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, when there was at least the perception among the American middle classes of a breakdown in certain normative models of the city and the comportments appropriate to it. Not coincidentally, there is a remarkable conjunction of discourses at that very moment in critical theory, in sociology, in aesthetic practice, and in architecture, all of which are concerned with reinventing the

* I would like to acknowledge the support of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, where this essay was researched and written; early versions were presented at the C.C.A.'s Study Centre, at Princeton University's School of Architecture, and at Purchase College. Invaluable editorial comments were provided by George Baker, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Aruna D'Souza, and Alessandra Ponte, as well as by the audiences at the aforementioned venues. 1. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 41.

OCTOBER 102, Fall 2002, pp. 101-122. ? 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.



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figure of the urban stranger, of the passerby on the street, as an object of anxiety. The flaneur, the figure of refined urbanity, reappears here as that urbanity's disturbance if not its very negation.

In 1967 the Frankfurt-based intellectual journal Neue Rundschau printed a long, previously unpublished work by Walter Benjamin entitled "Der Flaneur."2 It was the central section of his extensive essay on the French poet Charles Baudelaire, itself just one facet of his never-completed "Pariser Passagen" or "Paris Arcades," on which he had worked from 1927 until his death in 1940. Written during the summer and fall of 1938, this article appeared on the intellectual scene a generation later as a major event, at least-as we shall see-in certain circles; for its recovery marked nothing less than the second coming of the flaneur: the return of that idle

"man about town" who, while leisurely strolling the city's boulevards, gave himself over to the momentary impressions and scenes encountered there.3

The reception accorded this essay at the time of its eventual publication was significant, for when Hannah Arendt came to publish a profile of Benjamin in The New Yorker one year later (in October 1968), she positioned the flaneur as the key to his thought as a whole, and understood it to be a sort of allegorical self-portrait, in which the author discovered in Paris the natural home of that style of strolling and thinking which became his own. Her discussion of the city in the profile became a paean to a form of public life she saw disappearing from the postwar world: "In the wasteland of an American suburb, or a residential district of a metropolis," she wrote, "all the life of the streets goes by out in the roadway, and one can walk along the sidewalks-by now reduced to footpaths-for miles without encountering a human being. Paris is the exact opposite. What all other cities seem to permit only reluctantly, and only to the dregs of society-strolling, idling, flanerie-Paris streets invite everyone to do."4

2. Walter Benjamin, "Der Flaneur," Neue Rundschau 78, no. 4 (1967), pp. 549-74. 3. It would perhaps be more accurate to designate this the third coming of the flaneur: the first being its invention in the early nineteenth century and its long denouement through various incarnations down to the fin de si&cle; the second coming then being its rediscovery by Benjamin in the orbit of Surrealist practices in the 1920s and subsequent afterlife extending to the postwar Situationist d6rives; whereby the 1967 publication becomes a third, one hesitates to say final, apparition. 4. Hannah Arendt, "Reflections: Walter Benjamin," The New Yorker, October 19, 1968, p. 102. This

Walter Benjamin's "Der Flaneur, " published in Neue Rundschau. 1967.



The Crimes of the Flaneur 103

Of course, in writing this Arendt was merely deploying a well-known intellectual trope, contrasting the "good" European city with its caf6s and street life to the "bad" automobilized city of the New World. She was also, however, strongly misreading the Benjamin text before her, celebrating a comforting vision of public space as a site of leisure open to all, where everyone might drift through streets in a shared experience of urban vitality; she endorsed Benjamin's reading of the city as a vast interior, as a kind of open-air apartment that one inhabited precisely by those practices of boulevard life known as flanerie, while she ignored Benjamin's own ambivalence toward this bourgeois conception.5 The city-as-interior was for her precisely a homely space, a space of belonging and familiarity, and the flaneur became its model citizen. This articulation of the city was, it must be pointed out, far from neutral; in fact, we might assert that she was deploying the flaneur against other inhabitants of the city, whose presence would have been impossible to ignore at the time of her profile. Her article appeared, after all, only six months after the largest social upheaval Paris had seen since the Commune of 1871, and amid continuing mass protest throughout the cities of the West. As she was writing, demonstrators battled in the streets with riot police at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention, images of which were televised nightly. It was not, however, merely these instances of collective action and political mobilization that challenged her reassuring view of urban life; rather we need to see her memorialization of the solitary stroller as a reaction to the larger collapse of public order at the end of the 1960s (whether real or perceived matters little here). At that moment, to muster the flaneur into duty, to revive him as a key figure of thought in Benjamin, could only represent a political choice: a rejection of the realities of the contemporary city in favor of a consoling fantasy.

Recovered after languishing in the archives for almost thirty years, Benjamin's essay presented a rather more complex view of its subject than that abstracted in Arendt's profile. The city that for her was "the paradise of all those who chase after no livelihood, pursue no career, struggle toward no goal-the paradise, that is, of the bohemians,"6 bore little resemblance to the metropolis evoked by Benjamin, for whom the class divide-figured in the relation of individual to crowd--discursively structured the perception of nineteenth- century urban space. The solitary walker who prowled these streets was not the bohemian of romantic mythology, and certainly was not the subject of any simple identification on Benjamin's part; this figure was, rather, of interest as a site at

essay would be reprinted in a revised version as the introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 1-55. 5. Benjamin's ambivalence with regard to the flaneur is treated at some length in Susan Buck- Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering," New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986), pp. 99-140. 6. Arendt, "Reflections: Walter Benjamin," p. 102.



104 OCTOBER

which the petit bourgeoisie confronted the opacity of capitalist modernity in the form of the most unreconcilable aspects of urban life. His flaneur essay, then, inscribed precisely the politics and the history that Arendt tried to erase, and held other lessons for readers at the moment of its publication in the late 1960s.

Benjamin's text opened on a period of transition in the literary tropes available for representing the metropolis: the waning years of the July Monarchy, when in the early 1840s the popular genre known as "physiologies" was on the decline. These were catalogues of figures of Parisian life, typologies of urban flora that ideally suited "the flaneur who goes botanizing on the asphalt," as he wrote.7 It was a suspect genre, ideologically ambiguous on both political and social grounds: first, because the repressive reign of Louis- Philippe formed the necessary gray backdrop to the colorful variety of street life there documented, guaranteeing the flaneur's security as the latter provided the regime's alibi; and second, because for all the diversity of character presented in the physiologies, their types shared one common feature-that is, Benjamin told us, "they were all harmless and of perfect bonhomie."8 The physiologies were, in other words, a literature of social pacification.

Their role was to create a phantasmagoria of transparency, to convince their readers that "everyone was, unencumbered by any factual knowledge, able to make out the profession, the character, the background, and the life-style of passersby."9 Such an ability was like a magical gift bestowed upon the inhabitant of the metropolis, a birthright rather than an acquisition; the physiologies addressed their audience not as a primer might a student, but as one man about town would address another. The flaneur could thereby become a connoisseur of human nature, confident of his capacity to rank and judge the strangers along the boulevards, and he could be reassured that those strangers bore him no ill will, that they harbored no untoward designs on him. A double erasure was here at work: the other was made a version of the same (social difference reduced to that "perfect bonhomie" of petit bourgeois fantasy); and, in this "friendly picture of one another," the foundational role of competition, of the cash nexus, in urban social life was disguised.

Yet the flaneur's boast that he might "divide the Parisian public according to its various strata as easily as a geologist distinguishes the layers in rocks"10o was in vain. As Benjamin explained, such an illusion of simple transparency could not be sustained; it was doomed by its own internal contradictions, by its inability to address the real social conditions of the metropolis. There, the opacity of the stranger proved more resilient, and more disquieting, than the

7. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, p. 36. 8. Ibid., p. 37. 9. Ibid., p. 39. 10. Ibid.




authors of the physiologies had supposed. The fundamentally troubling nature of life amid the crowd was epitomized by the obscurity of the secret; as one author of the July Monarchy, paraphrased by Benjamin, remarked, "every person, the best as well as the most wretched, carries around a secret which would make him hateful to all others if it became known."ll This kernel remained inaccessible to the gaze of the physiologist. If one assumed that "the more uncanny a big city becomes, the more knowledge of human nature'... it takes to operate in it,"12 then a new sort of literature, and a new model for the flaneur, would be required: hence Benjamin turned to the rise of the mystery novel and its hero, the detective, in these years.

This was a genre that at first glance seemed the opposite of the physiology, concerned as it was with "the disquieting and threatening aspects of urban life," with precisely those uncanny circumstances that were outside the visibility of the typological catalogue of Parisian streets. Similarly, rather than providing the reader with an inventory of urban comportments, it was devoted to teaching a mistrust of appearances and the cunning to see through them to the truth. But of course these skills served the same ideological function of transparency, if now through a somewhat more hardened view of metropolitan life, "criminological sagacity" supplementing the imperturbability characteristic of the flaneur.13 The detective story would accomplish this by denying the stranger his secret, by searching him out in his most reclusive hiding place: the swarming boulevard. "The original social content" of these stories, Benjamin demonstrated, "was the obliteration of the individual's traces in the big-city crowd";14 it was just this ability of the multitude on the street to unwittingly shelter the criminal, the malicious, the delinquent, which proved menacing, and it was this threat that the mystery story phantas- matically allayed by transforming the flaneur into the detective-that figure of social control who would pull aside the cloak of the crowd to reveal the asocial criminal hiding at its very heart.

But this neat alignment of the genre with the interests of bourgeois social order was troubled at its very origins in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The latter's tale "The Man of the Crowd" could be considered an ur-detective story, in

11. Ibid., p. 38. 12. Ibid., p. 40. 13. Ibid., p. 41. Raymond Williams would restate this argument succinctly for the slightly later English tradition of the detective story, epitomized in the Sherlock Holmes tales of Arthur Conan Doyle. The urban detective emerged there "as a significant and ratifying figure: the man who can find his way through the fog, who can penetrate the intricacies of the streets. The opaque complexity of modern city life is represented by crime; the explorer of a society is reduced to the discoverer of single causes, the isolable agent and above all his means, his technique." The chaos and variety of London were juxtaposed with "this eccentric sharp mind, this almost disembodied but locally furnished intelligence, which can unravel complexity, determine local agency, and then, because there the inquiry stops, hand the matter over to the police and the courts: the clear abstract system beyond all the bustle and fog" (Raymond Williams, The Country and the City [New York: Oxford University Press, 1973], p. 227). 14. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 43.



106 OCTOBER

which the incidentals of crime have been stripped away until, as Benjamin remarked, "the mere armature has remained: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who arranges his walk through London in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd."15 It was a tale that fascinated Baudelaire, who summarized it in his "Painter of Modern Life" essay of 1863 as follows:

Do you remember a picture (it is truly a picture!) written by the most powerful pen of our time, entitled "The Man of the Crowd"? Behind the window of a caf6 a convalescent, contemplating the crowd with delight, allows his thoughts to mingle with all the thoughts that are active around him. Having recently returned from the shadows of death, he breathes in with pleasure all the germs and all the effluvia of life; as he has been about to forget all, he remembers, and ardently desires to remember, all. Finally, he rushes through this crowd in search of an unknown man, whose physiognomy, glimpsed for a split second, has entranced him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion!16

Here both the discrimination of the detective and the composure of the flaneur have been left far behind. The narrator, motivated solely by the glimpsed countenance of the disquieting stranger, has abandoned his observation post in the caf6 window and has himself plunged into the midst of the crowd, in head- long pursuit of "a fatal, irresistible passion." The flaneur-detective and the criminal became mirrors of each other, indistinguishable along the streets of the metropolis: "these two individuals," Michel Butor once explained, "are at bottom identical. The second places his steps in the footprints of the first who remains unaware of him, although the former is without knowing it the initiator, the guide of the second...."17

In his flaneur essay Benjamin had traced this transformation of his subject from an instrument of panoptic surveillance--the boulevardier first as botanist of street flora, then as nascent criminologist of the pathological crowd-to a figure indistinguishable from the urban throng itself. Originally dedicated to converting the threatening opacity of the crowd into a reassuring transparency, the flaneur would become, in Baudelaire's reading of Poe, he who has chosen "to marry the crowd," who can "bathe in the multitude" (to choose two famous expressions from the former's work), in an almost erotic encounter with the other.18 For Benjamin, in other words, Baudelaire's greatness lay in this ability

15. Ibid., p. 48. 16. Charles Baudelaire, "Le Peintre de la vie moderne" (1863), in Oeuvres completes, vol. 2 ("L'Art romantique") (Paris: Louis Conard, 1925), p. 59. 17. Michel Butor, Histoire extraordinaire: Essai sur un rive de Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), p. 33. 18. Charles Baudelaire, "Le Peintre de la vie moderne" (1863), in op. cit., p. 61; and Charles Baudelaire, "Crowds," in Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varnse (New York: New Directions, 1947), p. 20 (translation modified).




to transcend the petit-bourgeois origins of the physiology and the detective story; instead, he utilized their tropes to dismantle them from within, transfiguring the aloof observer of the city's masses into a figure driven by suspicion and longing in equal measure. And that libidinal tangle in which pursuer and pursued lost their clear polarities, that desire for the other that propelled this project, depended on criminality for its very existence. The coordinates of the crowd that Arendt attempted to formulate as the site of pleasurable strolling were shown to be warped not only by anxiety but also by desire, becoming a space in which the confident bourgeois appropriation of the city was doubly threatened.

Such formulations were by no means of academic interest alone, for the publication of "Der Flaneur" coincided rather precisely with the rearticulation of an artistic practice sited in the urban realm and concerned with just such contaminations of the sanctioned by the criminal, the anxious, and the desirous. On the calendar of events for "Street Works IV," sponsored by the Architectural League of New York during the month of October 1969, Vito Acconci described his untitled contribution in the following laconic terms: "Each day, a person is chosen, at random, in the street, any location. Acconci follows him wherever he goes, no matter how long or how far he travels. He stops following only when he enters a private place." To this the artist added a brief commentary, taken straight from a dictionary's definitions of the verb "to follow" and the noun "street": "To act in accordance with something; to take as an example; to come about or take place as a result; effect, or natural consequence; to keep the mind fixed on something. A public thoroughfare; a promising line of development or a channeling of effort; 'right up your street.'"19

Each day from October 3 to the 25 Acconci undertook what became known as his Following Piece, the details of each pursuit dutifully recorded afterward on a large index card. For example, on the afternoon of October 11, he began trailing a young woman in a bright orange coat at the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. According to his record of the surveillance, at 3:57 P.M. she entered a store on Eighth Street, leaving about twenty minutes later and continuing east, where at 4:29 she entered another shop. At 4:52, upon exiting, she now headed west, entering the Eighth Street Bookstore four minutes later, and soon after visiting a shoe store; by 5:59 her shopping expedition was over, and she walked eastward to the IRT station at Astor Place, catching an uptown local at 6:15 P.M. Twenty-five minutes later she exited at Seventy-seventh Street and walked east to York Avenue, where she turned south and, at 7:12, entered an apartment building at 1432 York Avenue. At that point, Acconci's pursuit ceased.20 As in Poe's "Man of the Crowd," we seem to have been left

19. Unpublished "Calendar of Events/'Street Works IV,'" under item number 13. My thanks to Hannah Weiner for making this document available to me. 20. Acconci's record of this work is reprinted in Mario Diacono, Vito Acconci (New York: Out-of- London Press, 1976), p. 132.



108 OCTOBER

here with the mere framework of the detective story: the pursuer, the invisible but ever-present crowd, and the individual being sought. That framework found its own peculiar resonance in Acconci's language, whose insistent matter- of-factness and quantification seemingly derived in equal measure from his earlier experiments in Minimalist poetics and from the laconic tone of the police blotter. The quantifying or, to use a perhaps more appropriate legal term, evidentiary mode here refused the even residual psychologizing tone of Poe or Baudelaire; we are given no privileged access to Acconci's state of mind. Moreover, this absence of a narrative explication for his actions produced a telling ambiguity in Acconci's undertaking, for we are constrained to remain unsure of his motivation: Was he the detective observing his suspect, or was he the sociopath stalking his mark?

Perhaps, as Baudelaire had taught us, the two figures were collapsed into one, the flaneur-detective relinquishing his detachment to submit to his criminal passion toward the other. Indeed, that aspect of submission was as pronounced as the element of threat in Following Piece. For this was an art of duration, whose extent was dictated not by the artist but by factors entirely out of his control. Acconci, according to the rules of this game, was compelled to follow his subjects as long as they remained in public spaces, which could include restaurants or movie theaters; he was in a very real sense at the mercy of his marks to the same

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Vito Acconci. Following Piece. 1969. Photo courtesy of Vito Acconci.




extent that they, unwittingly, were at his. In the example cited, he spent over three hours trailing this unknown woman, in and out of stores as she shopped in the popular boutiques of Greenwich Village. Indeed, what was most striking about Following Piece was the coincidence of a barely concealed sense of threat with the networks of desire and dependence created in its simple choreography.

Such contaminations were generated from Acconci's response to models of avant-garde artistic production in the 1960s; most notably, he had absorbed the implications of Minimalism. We need not look as far as works such as Seedbed (1972), in which Acconci was clearly concerned with taking up the phenomenologi- cal interests of Minimalist sculpture and the exploration of presence (now infused with the dynamics of sexuality and desire), to find him articulating its

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i :-::........... practices of reductivism and self-referentiality. Already as a poet, he had refused to employ words that denoted objects off the written page, thereby limiting his writing to a circular logic (a practice that resonated as well with contemporary experimental literature, from Beckett to the nouveaux romanciers), and his earliest performative activities similarly took his own body as their source and ultimate destination. In works from the summer and fall of 1969 such as Lay of the Land, Toe Touch, or Throw, the individual and the surrounding environment were conjoined into a unified field of influence, the one becoming the mirror of the other: "my body as a system of possible movements transmitted by my body to the environment (the environment as a system of possible movements transmitted from the environment to my body)," as Acconci described it.21 Even the camera became a narcissistic extension of the body, the resulting photographs existing less as iconic documentation than as physical traces of exertion, no different from the sweat, spittle, and other assorted bodily fluids likewise produced as by-products of his actions.

21. Vito Acconci, commentary in Judith Russi Kirshner, Vito Acconci: A Retrospective, 1969 to 1980 (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1980), p. 10.

Acconci. Throw. 1969. Photo courtesy of Vito Acconci.



110 OCTOBER

Early writing on the artist's work emphasized just this quality of narcissism and self-reflexivity: critic Robert Pincus-Witten would maintain that Acconci's performances had been carried out "in a virtually autistic vacuum,"22 and Rosalind Krauss similarly would characterize the artist's video production as "a sustained tautology" and an "image of self-regard."23 Indeed the mirroring, which she understood to be the very condition of video as a genre, seems to have been a central preoccupation of Acconci, not least in Following Piece. It was present, for example, in the implicit feedback coil between pursuer and pursued: "I can move, in real space," he had written, "by tying myself into a system (another agent, a conventional situation) outside me. I become an agent (of my own activity) by becoming a receiver (of someone else's activity)."24 For Krauss, that double to whom Acconci tied his movements did not constitute a true, external object, and was not what we would call an other; rather, it was "a displacement of the self which has the effect ... of transforming the performer's subjectivity into another, mirror, object."25 Despite the pretense of giving himself over to the unscripted movements of the other and the concomitant loss of control over the specific contents of a performance, in other words, Acconci was only ever in pursuit of his own mirror-reflection.

Yet Following Piece cannot be wholly subsumed under this psychological model of narcissism, significant as it is. Craig Douglas Dworkin, in an insightful recent essay, has provided a linguistic reading of this performance, with particular implications for the role desire would play in structuring its trajectories: like individual elements of language, Dworkin writes, "the two figures ... have mean- ing (follower and followed) only in relation to each other. As they signify in this way, they mark off space: one points back to the other, who moves to the place then vacated by the first (who has moved on in relation to the place now held by the second), who refers forward to the other, ad infinitum."26 As Butor reminded us, in this erotic tangle of displacement and deferral, pursued and pursuer become mirrors of each other: "the second places his steps in the footprints of the first who remains unaware of him, although the former is without knowing it the initiator, the guide of the second ...." And while the fantasy of imaginary reprojection of a frozen self was undoubtedly operative in the work to some extent, the street as setting and the very corporeal reality of the

22. Robert Pincus-Witten, "Vito Acconci and the Conceptual Performance," Artforum 10, no. 8 (April 1972), p. 49. 23. Rosalind Krauss, "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism," October 1 (Spring 1976), p. 51. 24. Vito Acconci, commentary in Judith Russi Kirshner, Vito Acconci, p. 10. 25. Krauss, "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism," p. 55. 26. Craig Douglas Dworkin, "Fugitive Signs," October 95 (Winter 2001), p. 108. Dworkin's emphasis on the continuity of writing and performance throughout Acconci's early work, on their mutual staging of a sort of deconstructive choreography (as in his discussion of the performative, spatial qualities of language on pp. 102-103), also begs the question of whether Following Piece indeed might be seen as in some ways continuous with avant-garde dance practices of this moment; see, for example, Laurence Louppe, Poitique de la danse contemporaine, 2nd rev. ed. (Brussels: Contredanse and Paris: Librairie de la danse, 2000), for suggestions of what such a model may consist.




stranger worked to prevent the neat functioning of the feedback loop necessary for successful narcissistic investment. The city itself, that is, provided a kind of recalcitrance that guaranteed that the experience of Following Piece would be a continuously frustrated effort to close the circuit, to subsume other into self, to erase the distance between pursuer and pursued.

Acconci's evocation of synchronous feedback-becoming "an agent.., .by becoming a receiver"-entailed not merely an (ever-deferred) auto-reflection, it also implied the refusal of a sort of theatricality and theatrical spectacle. Here we sense the distance that separated Acconci's activities from that aspect of conceptual performance known as Happenings, which had been codified by Allan Kaprow at the end of the 1950s as the legitimate heir to Jackson Pollock's expansive practice of painting, an art which in his opinion "tends to lose itself out of bounds, tends to fill our world with itself." According to Kaprow, one should follow Pollock's logic through to its radical conclusion, abandon the discrete canvas, and "become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street." Artists would leave the comfortable confines of sanctioned disciplines and institutions, opting instead to "show us, as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us but ignored." Out of "garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies," out of store windows and the streets, out of "dreams and horrible accidents," they would create a total art, a Gesamtkunstwerk for the present.27

Certainly, Acconci's works shared some common ground with the genre conceived by Kaprow; indeed, four years before the former adopted the ambiguous role of detective-stalker, Kaprow himself had staged an elaborate criminal scenario as an art work in the streets of New York. Calling was an event organized over two days in August 1965 and its first, or "city" section, involved a complicated choreography whereby participants were "abducted" at various points in the city. They would be picked up by cars, wrapped in aluminum foil and later muslin, transferred to other vehicles waiting in parking garages, and then finally, in the early evening, left at the information booth of Grand Central Station. Here for the first time we find postwar American aesthetic practice adopting and exploring the codes of criminal behavior (to the extent that Callingwould appear to have been based on a primer for successful kidnapping), and we find as well the appearance of a frisson of danger for the participants (who, blindfolded, might never have been too certain of what awaited them)-indeed, with two of the three abductees being women, a rather questionable sexual politics seems to have been inherent in this pre-feminist urban performance. All these aspects would be present in Acconci's Following Piece.28

27. Allan Kaprow, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" (1958), in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed.Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 7, 9. 28. For the script of this performance, see Allan Kaprow, "Calling," Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965), pp. 203-11.



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However, if we examine Peter Moore's documentation of the event, and in particular his photographs of its final moments at Grand Central Station, the limitations of Kaprow's practice become clear. A crowd has gathered around the figure of a wrapped woman, standing in the middle of the station's great hall, but what is striking about the onlookers is precisely their patience: they politely stand about, watching this bizarre spectacle; some take pictures or home movies, but from the young sailor in the lower right corner to the older women near the top of the photo, all seem to immediately recognize the theatrical nature of what they are seeing. Kaprow's event, in other words, inscribed itself only too readily into the consumer spectacle of its setting, becoming just one more sight for the throng of commuters ready for diversion while awaiting the next train home. These aspects of the Happening, its melodramatic, scripted quality and its relatively clear separation of actors from audience, would be precisely what Acconci, four years later, wished most strenuously to avoid. Whereas Kaprow tended to the sprawling and operatic, which transformed his works into a species of public theater, the latter preferred to keep his actions discreet, barely distinguishable from the everyday world around them. As he would later write in recalling this moment, "we wanted ... a region that was a section of the accustomed world that everybody knows and that you simply as a matter of course passed by, that you chose sometimes of your own accord to go through."29 The artist would, in other words, disappear into the crowd, his

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activities rejecting the ostentatious or theatrical aspects of their antecedents, so that they could now almost seamlessly blend in with the life of the city. And hence we return to those terms established by Benjamin and Baudelaire in their earlier rewritings of the the figure of the flaneur: Acconci becoming another sort of "man of the crowd," simultaneous detective and criminal; Following Piece was nothing if not his altogether contemporary attempt to "epouser la foule," with all of the ambiguities attendant on that formulation.

Acconci could arrive at a reinvention of the flaneur paradigm, in other words, simply by following to their logical conclusions certain terms provided within the self-referential aesthetic practices of the late 1960s. We should be wary, however, of constructing too neat an artistic lineage for Acconci; as significant as the implications of Minimal and post-Minimal sculptural practices were for him, there is no reason why they should have necessarily resulted in something like Following Piece. The interest embodied there in an engagement with the passerby was not simply generated from within avant-garde aesthetic discourse, but was Acconci's own particular response to the utopian promises of the counterculture of the late 1960s, and in particular its elimination of what came to be regarded as repressive public values in favor of an absolute social transparency. As Fredric Jameson described the counterculture's vocation,

[t]he Sixties ... held out the ultimate Utopian vision of a life space in which people could meet face to face in some absolute and unmediated sense, beyond all status or conventions, without recourse to preliminary identifications and independent of all the traditional formulas of conversational ritual, in short, utterly divested of all those abundant cues with which the older social groupings hedged and defused the anxieties implicit in the encounter with the Other.so0

Certainly Germano Celant was correct in positing that Acconci's early work as a whole needed to be seen against these desublimatory trends of the era, which he summarized as so many attempts "to establish a contact and a confrontation not only with thoughts but rather in such a way as to involve the entirety of human existence, from instinct to unconscious motivation."31 But just as certainly Celant was incorrect to unproblematically align the artist with such trends; far from establishing the transparent, direct communication of which the critic spoke, Acconci was rather absorbed in manipulating codes of public behavior, experimenting with the limits of the permissible at a time when those limits had been thrown into question.32 30. Fredric Jameson, "On Goffman's Frame Analysis," Theory and Society 3, no. 1 (Spring 1976), p. 122. 31. Germano Celant, "Vito Acconci," Domus 509 (April 1972), p. 55. 32. This strategy, in which the definition of public space is founded upon its transgression, is analyzed in Fredric Jameson, "On Goffman's Frame Analysis," p. 123, where he wrote that "it implies the view that social institutions are essentially negative existents, and have the being of taboos, springing into life only when we infringe them, and quite invisible and imperceptible, indeed well-



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No one had studied such codes more closely than sociologist Erving Goffman, and by all accounts, Acconci had frequent recourse to his work in these years, in particular, Goffman's groundbreaking 1959 study, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and his 1967 collection of essays, Interaction Ritual.33 Goffman had imported the imagery of the theater into sociology, using the dramatic model to analyze the everyday and routine features of social life; implied in this model was the transformation of the self into a species of actor, who through choreo- graphing body and language sought to manage an ever-mutable identity in pursuit of self-interested ends. It is not hard to understand why Acconci, with his own interest in exploring the enactment of the self outside of moral or normative obligations, might be drawn toward to this work. I am less, however, interested in adducing Goffman's influence on Acconci's performance activities than in the ground that they both unwittingly shared in the late 1960s, when each investigated the fine line separating order from disorder, the legal from the criminal, in the contemporary city.

For at the moment Acconci was stalking his marks through the streets of Manhattan, Goffman was writing his first major new book in several years, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, the final quarter of which was a long essay, titled "Normal Appearances," that was the author's own, highly ambivalent response to the disintegration of urban hierarchies and regulations that had taken place over the previous decade. Goffman wrote of the ways in which, when accepted models of decorum, propriety, and civility broke down, they were likely to be replaced, not by a trusting, egalitarian utopia, but by what he called the "classical dynamics of suspicion."34 At the time of its publication, political scientist Marshall Berman called it "a virtuoso piece, a tour de force of paranoid logic and imagination,"35 and compared its author to Kafka; we might say that, like Following Piece, it rewrote the parameters of flanerie at a moment of social crisis. Goffman revealed a post-'68 Benjaminian flaneur, a direct refutation of the reassuring model proposed by Arendt, and one that was clearly resonant with Acconci's practice.

He opened his chapter on "Normal Appearances" with a distinction between two fundamental existential states an organism might exhibit in relation to its surroundings: the experience of the ordinariness of our environment when, as he wrote, "the world immediately around the individual portends nothing out of the

nigh non-existent, when they are respected and we remain within the intangible barbed wire of a whole network of electronic eyes." Acconci may be seen, then, to be testing these limits of public and private, of legality and illegality. 33. See Kate Linker, Vito Acconci (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), pp. 46-48, for Acconci's interest in Goffman. An important overview of Goffman's thought may be found in Ulf Hannerz, Exploring the City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 202-41. 34. Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 326. 35. Marshall Berman, "Weird but brilliant light on the way we live now...," New York Times Book Review, February 27, 1972, p. 12.




ordinary, when the world appears to allow him to continue his routines... ";36 and its opposite, those moments of full mobilization, of "fight or flight,"37 when an organism was engaged in preserving its very existence. Such a formulation seemed straightforward enough, but Goffman's subject would lie in the line that separated these two states, a line whose indeterminacy was already insinuated by his use of verbs of foreboding like "portends" and "appears." The transition from a state of normality to one of panic was mediated by what he called "an alarming sign," which would intimate imminent danger; such a sign might be intentional, like an air-raid siren, or accidental, like a rustling in the brush, and only our ability to perceive and interpret it correctly kept us alive.

However, if these signs marked the moment at which the routine experience of our surroundings passed into a state of panic, the logical objective for any successful predator or assailant would be to hold off that alarming sign for as long as possible, so that our reaction would come too late. As Berman restated the argument in his review, it was imperative that "you, the victim, must suspect nothing until the last possible moment. In other words, they must hide behind what you will define as 'normal appearances."'38 This fundamental deceptiveness of our environment, the potential that all was not what it seemed, was characterized by Goffman as "the overdetermination of normalcy"; in other words, there was no reason to trust the ordinariness around one, since those who meant us harm have carefully worked, he wrote, to "find a way to cover or disguise themselves and their doings so as to give the victim the . . impression that nothing remarkable is afoot."39

The best disguise was to hide under the appearance of what Goffman called "undesigned events," that is, all those activities occurring around us that seem incidental to our own projects, that constitute the background noise of the street. It was only by assuming that most of what went on nearby was "undesigned" that we could successfully negotiate our public lives. This distinction between what was mere chance or circumstance (and hence able to be ignored) and what was purposeful or designed (and hence requiring attention) allowed the subject "a pacifying account for a broad class of events which otherwise would be alarming, events which he himself can attribute to some form or other of 'fortuitousness' .. .":40 it was, moreover, precisely the distinction upon which the art of surveillance relied. While we cannot know if any of Acconci's marks noticed that they were being tailed, we can state that any success he met with attests to the truth of Goffman's

36. Goffman, Relations in Public, p. 239. 37. A term borrowed from anthropologist Edward T. Hall, inventor of "proxemics," the study of human reactions to their environments. See his The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), especially pp. 32-40 and 185-86. Hall's book was read by Acconci as well; see Linker, Vito Acconci, p. 30. 38. Berman, "Weird but brilliant light on the way we live now...," p. 12. 39. Goffman, Relations in Public, p. 257. 40. Ibid., p. 312.



116 OCTOBER

claim. Perhaps our young woman in the bright orange jacket saw Acconci in the background during her shopping trip downtown; doubtless she wrote off his presence in the same stores as mere coincidence. Only from such illusions, Goffman contended, was our sense of public order of everyday "normality" built.

On one hand, then, Goffman allows us to understand the "paranoiac" element in Acconci's work, the means through which it, too, came to see the street as a site of potential threat rather than of comfortable adaptation. But Goffman's long essay did more than simply posit that we have come to function in urban space only by living in a state of constant suspicion, just as Following Piece was more than an exercise in terrorizing the public. The continual accumulation of evidence in Normal Appearances, the collage of newspaper clippings, book excerpts, and personal accounts of pickpockets, spies, snipers, detectives, mobsters, stranglers, and assassins together reveals the author's profound fascination with this under- world. His concern with public disorder, endemic to the period in everything from a generalized fear of crime to the occupation with designing "defensible space,"41 was pervaded not only by terror but also by attraction; witness the fact that at several points in the essay he found the closest parallel to his own examinations of everyday life in the very criminal world that was his subject. Only by studying normal appearances with an almost anthropological exactitude could one come to imitate them so well, to "act natural." Those with nefarious designs on someone "will have to have some conscious conception of what is natural for the subject so that they might set the scene in accordance with it," Goffman wrote. "They are forced to become phenomenologists, close students of everyday life.... Whereas experience leads him [i.e., the mark] to become decreasingly aware of what he is taking for granted, experience leads them to become increasingly aware ... ."42 Fear, then, but also desire motivated his seemingly scientific project, and if sociology generally had played a role comparable to the detective literature of the nineteenth century- interposing a transparency in the opaque matter of the crowd-Goffman seems to have chosen another position, one analogous to that of Acconci: an ambivalent identification with the source of threat itself.

That source of threat haunted the bourgeois imaginary as a concatenation of all those forces-from ghetto uprisings to the more diffuse spread of a counterculture with its rejection of normative models of social behavior-that threatened the middle-class hold over the city. Yet even greater than these political fears, and to a considerable extent acting as a mask for them, was the social anxiety that dominated the urban imaginary of this class: a fear of crime. This essay began with a quote from Benjamin, to the effect that "no matter what trail the flaneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime," and it has been the double reading this quote invites-the possibility of the flaneur as both detective and

41. Goffman cited the studies that would lead to Oscar Newman's Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972) several times in his essay; see Goffman, Relations in Public, pp. 255, 287, and 299. 42. Ibid., p. 260.




criminal-that has motivated my examination of the urban discourses of Acconci and Goffman. That double reading was inscribed as well in the final practice to be analyzed, the series of experimental drawings by Bernard Tschumi titled "The Park." Completed in 1977, these are the earliest segment of his extended theoretical project The Manhattan Transcripts; and like all of the drawings associated with that project, those for "The Park" constitute an expansive exploration of the act of architectural notation itself. It consists of a continuous sequence of twenty-four panels arranged horizontally, in the manner of a film strip, and each panel shares the tripartite organization of The Manhattan Transcripts drawings in their entirety. An individual panel, that is, is composed of three elements: an appropriated photograph depicting a location or an action (the physical space of perception); a plan (the mental space of architectural conception); and a diagram of the movements of the protagonists (the social space of bodily experience).

Certainly for the architect this violation of the norms of architectural drawing was crucial to the project, but I would like perhaps more modestly to consider what is there represented, for these twenty-four panels together compose a rather classical, even formulaic, narrative: a tale of murder, hunt, and arrest made familiar in the endless permutations of the detective story. Tschumi's references are filmic rather than textual, so "The Park" opens on what we might call an establishing shot: a first panel depicting a tranquil lake in Central Park; a plan of that space, with its hybrid of urban and natural forms; and the itinerary of a solitary figure, the future victim, as he wanders along its winding paths. In the following five panels the anonymous stalker enters the park and begins trailing his prey; this is a sequence of building suspense and increasingly complicated choreography that ends in a climactic murder. After a pause in the seventh panel to survey the corpse, the story resumes as the body is discovered and detectives begin to track the killer. In the eighth through the nineteenth panel, they search for clues, and so the photographic documentation is here replete with indexical signs: circled evidence, pointing fingers, arrows, and the like. As

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evidence is accumulated, the character of the plans and diagrams changes: from an initial confusion, increasing order is obtained. The hunt entails a rational division of space, the gridding of the landscape ensuring the thoroughness of the detectives' investigation. And we cannot help contrasting this strict orthogonal logic with the intricate choreography of the early panels, as stalker and prey mirrored each other's movements through the labyrinthine spaces of the park. (The conjunction of fingerprint and Cartesian grid in the nineteenth panel is telling: identity is established and motion becomes transparent.) Three panels of chase follow, with the fugitive attempting to outwit the police dragnet, but escape proves impossible and in the final two panels he is arrested and incarcerated.

Although a citation from Georges Bataille provided the immediate provo- cation for this narrative,43 Acconci's example lurked nearby; indeed "The Park" opened on a particularly Acconcian scenario: a lone figure stalking his unsuspecting victim. This echo of Following Piece should not surprise us: Tschumi met the artist during his 1976 tenure at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York, but it is likely that even before this direct contact he would have known the work through its extensive coverage in the European art press and, perhaps, through exhibitions in Paris.44 Tschumi was one of the most astute readers of Acconci's work in these years, and "The Park" learned much from the skeletal framework provided by the artist's 1969 performance. Not least of those lessons was a close attention to the connotations of site: As Acconci had played on the "normal appearances" of the street, Tschumi matched his story to Central Park, which by the mid-seventies had become the repository for an entire mythology of bourgeois fears and desires, a place of illegality but also of illicit sexual behavior.

But most significant was Tschumi's attention to the reversibility of the positions of pursuer and pursued. Our perspective throughout the opening sequence leading up to the murder was that of the stalker, catching fleeting glimpses of our quarry as he is trailed along the pathways of the park.

43. Kate Linker, in her early article on Tschumi's theoretical projects, noted that "The Park extends a phrase from [Bataille's] architectural texts-a Murder in the Park-into a mythology of transgression" (Kate Linker, "Bernard Tschumi: Architecture, Eroticism, and Art," Arts Magazine 53, no. 3 [November 1978], p. 108). Bataille's significance for architectural discourse had been established firmly only a few years previously, with the publication of Denis Hollier, Against Architecture (1974), trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1989).

We might also mention here another obvious precedent for "The Park": Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (U.S.A., 1966), with its conjunction of amorous playfulness and murder in a secluded London park. For a review of the architectural iconography of Antonioni's films, see Frank P. Tomasulo, "The Architectonics of Alienation: Antonioni's Edifice Complex," Wide Angle 15, no. 3 (July 1993), pp. 3-20. 44. Notably, Linker ended her article by citing the resonance of Tschumi's designs with "the sensual fields of Acconci," along with Bachelard, Piranesi, and Poe. Given the overall reliance of this article on the information from the architect himself, it is likely this parallel was suggested by Tschumi. See Kate Linker, "Bernard Tschumi: Architecture, Eroticism, and Art," p. 109.



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Afterward the point of view shifts to that of the detectives, guaranteeing that as readers we are always engaged in pursuit. In fact, the very formal structure of the drawings reinforces this sense; given the often oblique relations between the three images on a panel, the result was to transform the process of reading into something discontinuous and uncertain-into, in other words, a process akin to that of following a mark, or hunting down a criminal. Regardless of whether we are stalker or police, our movement is always placed in the footsteps of the other, with desire and surveillance no longer opposites but mirror images. Order may indeed be restored at the conclusion of "The Park," the criminal locked away and his movement proscribed within the mute walls of the prison (depicted as an apartment house, which raises the possibility that the whole adventure was some sort of Walter Mitty fantasy, dreamed by the wanderer through the park); but this order is shown to be subtended by its very transgression. The flaneur of "The Park" is literally both detective and criminal, an ambiguous figure of urban authority and its collapse.

The Manhattan Transcripts, begun a decade after Benjamin's flaneur essay appeared in print, marks the culmination of these extended reflections on the conjunction of desire and anxiety threatening, in the wake of the 1960s, to overwhelm the social transparency that guaranteed a confident appropriation of space for the masculine, bourgeois subject. In Tschumi's drawings, in Acconci's activities, and in Goffman's sociology, pursuer and pursued were denied their distinct identities, a shared desire for the other now provoking their mutual choreography through the city. The rediscovery of this model of the Benjaminian flaneur (itself an earlier twentieth-century meditation on a nineteenth-century type), that is, would coincide with its reinscription in spatial practice at just this moment. Yet to align these "crimes of the flaneur" with Baudelaire's "fatal, irresistible passion" is not to propose some transhistorical category of flanerie; it is, rather, to claim a discursive reality for that practice, one that proved available for reinvention (or more precisely, perhaps, contestation) at specific historical junctures. The decade stretching roughly from 1967 to 1977 was then one such moment, when a broader social crisis, which manifested itself as, among other things, a breakdown in the normative, bourgeois conception of urban order, provoked a return of the street's repressed: the reappearance of a twinned libidinal attraction to and visceral fear of the stranger. Nowhere were those symptoms more trenchantly apparent than in the practices analyzed here.

However, this culmination also demarcated an end point, for the years that saw the completion of "The Park" also witnessed the first steps toward the architectural reassertion of normative control over urban space. Arendt's vision of the city-as-interior would be reinscribed in its late-capitalist form as the interior- as-city, and in megastructures like John Portman & Associates' Bonaventura Hotel, flanerie could once again become the site of pleasurable strolling under the benevolent gaze of the commodity. Such huge, multipurpose complexes, which sprang up throughout the United States in the later 1970s, combined




offices, hotels, and shops into wholly contained environments-"urban fortresses," in the words of William H. Whyte, which represented the latest stage of a white, middle-class flight from the street.45 Architects like Portman undertook developments in Atlanta, Detroit, and Los Angeles that were in the city, but hardly of the city. Their backs turned to the street, their entrances designed to favor automotive over pedestrian access, these massive revitalization projects provided a controlled, suburban atmosphere, free of "undesirable" elements, in the heart of downtown. The promotional literature accompanying these developments could hardly have been more direct; their aim was nothing less than the abolition of public space. Describing a 1973 Portman proposal for a hotel to be located in Times Square, one commentator wrote that the visitor "is contained in a micro-universe. The older, existing city is closed out-its noise, dirt, crime, and bad air forgotten."46

Fredric Jameson has famously read these megastructures as paradigmatic instances of postmodern space; the Bonaventura, he wrote, "aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city," one that did not so much take its place within the larger urban fabric but which acted as replacement or substitute for the latter.47 These buildings might be described as compensatory simulacra of the city for that class that had been traumatized by the social contestation of the sixties, when various excluded communities had declared what French sociologist Henri Lefebvre called their legitimate "right to the city" in often militant terms. Inside this artificial city the pleasures of the street reappeared, but only in a transformed state; so our movement became scripted, even disciplined, by a spectacular technology of movement: the elevators and escalators that carried visitors through this disorienting space. "Here," Jameson noted, "the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reified, and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own"48-a proscription enforced, we may assume, for our own safety.

Yet, as Whyte noted over twenty years ago, these megastructures utterly lacked a sense of the city as a site of encounter; in removing them from contact

45. William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Washington, D.C.: Conservation Press, 1980), pp. 82-89. 46. Peter Wolf, The Future of the City (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1974), p. 124. The author continues that such "enclaves of enclosed, protected urban spaces replace the street, the older public meeting place and shopping artery.... People will be able to use the city as a central, regional meeting spot or cultural and shopping resource without ever really being in the city." The most pertinent response to this city planning as class strategy remains Henri Lefebvre, "Right to the City" (1968), in Writings on Cities, ed. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), pp. 61-181. 47. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 40. But see also Mike Davis's response to Jameson, in which he rightly emphasizes "the decisive role of urban counter-insurgency [against the ghetto insurrections of 1964 and 1969] in defining the essential terms of the contemporary built environment" (Mike Davis, "Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism," New Left Review 151 [May/June 1985], pp. 106-13). 48. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 42.



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with the local street, their designers also eliminated any memory of its volatile mixtures of people and uses. With a truly prophetic remark, he predicted the developers' attempts to re-create this lost urban vitality in future projects precisely by creating "facsimiles of streets" within the complexes. Artificial streets would naturally require an artificial street life, and in a conclusion of unconcealed and biting sarcasm, Whyte even foresaw the reintegration of the excluded urban other, now in the guise of nostalgic entertainment: "With similar showmanship, indoor theme parks could be set up to give an experience of the city without the dangers of it. In addition to such physical features as sidewalks and gas lights, barber poles, cigar-store Indians, and the like, streetlike activities could be programmed, with costumed players acting as street people."49 Against this closing of the horizon of experience, which the last quarter-century of American city life has abundantly confirmed, "The Park" stands as a memorial to other practices, other possibilities that lurk beneath this placid surface.

49. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, p. 88.



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The Crimes of the Flaneur

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