I have never been a flaneur but a peripatetic, yes.
Reading, and remembering the claustrophobia I would feel reading, Benjamin, under the eyes of professional readers of Benjamin. I guess it’s the Marxism, more specifically, the strict adherence to history, (or to what they call history, history always being what somebody calls history), which imposes an ontological opacity, a dull thud in my intellectual imagination, the thinking-sensation of too many walls.
(Never a problem with Baudelaire, though I fought many battles with him too. <3)
A trauma response to World War 2, maybe. And then the fetish they made out of 19th and 20th century Europe. An arbitrary designation of “our historical situatedness” that, once viewed from outside academic halls, appears naive, classist, colonialist, absurd, the humorless inability to see one’s own irony. Snapshots of the arcades are exhausted, a nostalgia that’s barely worth the effort anymore, the amour-propre of an empire on the brink of fully embracing its decline. (Instagram.)
Or maybe it’s just me who escaped. Is obsolete now, unseen, uninterpreted, having gathered enough manufactured scraps to contentedly erase myself from history. (Cheers.) Or maybe I am the revolution Benjamin was waiting for, (is a self-deprecating joke), who knows. …I am hardly alone.
You can be a ragpicker, but I think you can’t see the city from inside the walls. There needs to be some glimpse of sky mixed in. Or ocean, or fire, or (in Baudelaire’s terms), fils sacré du Soleil.
So back to you, Héraclite.