Benjamin's Flâneur in Japan- Urban Modernity and Conceptual Relocation

Benjamin's Flâneur in Japan: Urban Modernity and Conceptual RelocationAuthor(s): Rolf J. GoebelSource: The German Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 377-391Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of GermanStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/407733 .

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ROLF J. GOEBEL University of Alabama in Huntsville

Benjamin's Fldneur in Japan: Urban Modernity and Conceptual Relocation

I

In recent years, postmodern and (post)colonial theories have initiated a powerful re-reading of Walter Benjamin's construction of European urban modernity. Going beyond a philological model of reconstructing the immanent meaning of Benjamin's texts from the perspective of his own authorial self-understanding, critics have begun to question the European- though not necessarily Eurocentric-horizon of his subject matter, rhetoric, and phi- losophy. The goal of this interrogation is less a deconstructive critique than a hermeneutic extension of Benjamin's thought that seeks to work out certain implications whose potential the author could not fully envision himself within the parameters of high modernism and the avant-garde that most notably shaped his writings.

In Physiognomik der modernen Metro- pole, Willi Bolle proposes that the cognitive promise of Benjamin's insights into modernity should be employed for a study of the social and historical forces of postmodernity (16-20). He draws attention to the fact that the reception of Benjamin's predominantly Europe-centered work extends far beyond that continent's cultural horizon into seemingly peripheral spheres of cultural investigation such as Latin Amer- ica (19). In Benjamin's writings Bolle finds the possibility for understanding the project of an incomplete or even failed modernity that deserves to be explored from a non-European vantage point. Following Benjamin's own citational montage of his-

torical fragments, critics need to "blast" certain of his observations and reflections out of their European context in order to reassemble them according to a different conceptual design (19-20).1 Bolle convinc- ingly advocates a postcolonial re-reading of Benjamin's insights into the connections between metropolis and overseas domains. Reversing the traditional hierarchy of these geopolitical entities by proceeding from the (Third-World) periphery to the hegemonic center (23), Bolle in effect prac- tices what Edward W. Said has called a "contrapuntal" reading, a comparative approach based on a "simultaneous awareness" of the "metropolitan history" de- picted in Western literary texts and of the "specific history of colonialization, resistance, and finally native nationalism" that often shapes the subject matter, narrative strategies, and ideologies of Western cultural production (Culture and Imperialism 51).

Inscribing a postcolonial consciousness into Benjamin's modernist textuality, Bolle seeks to go beyond the confines of the representation of the non-West in European discourse by opening up an intercultural dialogue with supplementary or even oppo- sitional self-understandings of the Third World.2 The methodological and political gains of such a project are without doubt considerable. Yet I believe it is equally im- portant to trace the multiple ways in which Western writers themselves transgress the boundaries of European metropolitan consciousness by creatively employing Ben- jamin's categories within a non-Western

The German Quarterly 71.4 (Fall 1998) 377



378 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Fall 1998

context. The strategies of conceptual dislocation, "translation," and redefinition used by such writers open up an internal self- critique of Western modernist discourse. This interrogation confronts tropes used by Benjamin with non-European realities that are empowered to disturb, unsettle, and reconfigure the very perceptions, notions and ideologies of the Western archive serving to construct the Other in the first place. The project benefits from the internal dynamic of Benjamin's categories, which derive from his powerfully original reading of Western metropolitan modernity--especially Baudelaire's Paris-but dialectically include an anti-Eurocentric potential in the shape of colonial or, more generally, non-Western, implications, allu- sions, and echoes.

Few tropes reveal this dialectics more productively than the fldneur. As Keith Tester has pointed out, since Baudelaire's and Benjamin's canonical definitions, this figure has emerged as a "recurring motif in the literature, sociology and art of urban, and most especially of the metropolitan, existence," helping commentators to conceptualize the conditions of modernity and postmodernity ("Introduction" 1).3 In his posthumous magnum opus, the Passagen- Werk, Benjamin defines the flineur in the ambivalent space between the local and the cosmopolitan. As a type, Benjamin claims, the fldneur was created by Paris. A city like Rome presents itself ostensibly as a monumental site of temples, squares, and national sanctuaries, thus constituting a preferred destination for (touristic) for- eigners. By contrast, Paris contains a mul- titude of minute, seemingly trivial, but actually most significant signs--cobble- stones, storefront insignia, doorways, steps of stairways-that reflect the Parisians' sense of local identity. As Benjamin argues, the Parisians themselves, rather than the casual visitors, have defined the French capital for the fldneur as a dialectic space that resembles the open vistas of a land- scape but at the same time encloses the

fldneur like a bourgeois living room (Pas- sagen-Werk 525).

However, Benjamin also sketches a fragmentary theory of the fldneur as the privileged personification of geographic dislocation, cultural transgression, and conceptual reconfiguration. Even Baude- laire, Benjamin's literary representative of nineteenth-century modernity, suggests that the fldneur, as exemplified by the painter Constantin Guys (1802-92), tran- scends the artist's aesthetic abstention from worldly politics and roots in provin- cial particularity, becoming an avid traveler and cosmopolitan who has made travel-sketches in Spain, Turkey, and the Crimea in order to explore the entire globe's cultural diversity (6-7). Benjamin himself alludes to this dialectic of domes- ticity and desire for faraway locales; it is well known, he claims, that in the act of flanerie, "Liinder-und Zeitenfernen" in- trude "in die Landschaft und in den Augen- blick." His example are certain popular nineteenth-century genre-paintings com- bining, for example, a shepherd playing the flute and two dancing children in the fore- ground with two hunters pursuing a lion further back, while in the farthest distance a train rushes over a bridge (Passagen- Werk 528-29). For Benjamin, this romantic collage of the pastoral invaded by exotic fantasy and technological power becomes an emblem of culture as the signifying in- tersection of the axes of history and geographic space. The picture captures the dialectic of familiarity and otherness as well as the configuration of nostalgic past and fleeting modernity. In the fldneur's subjectivity, these instances of cultural and historical hybridity acquire self-reflexive significance for the interpretation of modernity.

As Rob Shields has argued, the Euro- pean metropolis functions as the site where the ordinary citizen, who is not directly in- volved in colonial administration, comes into a highly mediated contact with faraway cultures through the import of foreign



GOEBEL: Benjamin 379

commodities, such as "distant and abstract news of conquest and imperial expansion," "exotic articles and foreign silks," and even jobs for the "working class who transform and transport the raw materials of the colo- nies." The flineur's visual consumption of these commodities replicates the process of mastery and control typical of colonialist policy abroad. Giving the citizens a "sense of conquest and control over distant lands and foreign Others" that they lack as direct political activity, the fldneur's "surrogate practice of the perambulating gaze" in the streets, arcades, department stores, and world exhibitions displays a form of imagi- nary colonialism at the heart of the West- ern metropolis (74-75).4

There are other ways in which Ben- jamin's fldneur mediates socially and dis- cursively between Western metropolitan subjectivity and the representation or ap- propriation of distant realities. In this essay, I wish to pursue the figure of the Euro- pean fldneur as an actual traveler to a foreign country, Japan, in which the exotic, commodifying gaze of the visitor is (re)fo- cused on the Other's original surroundings, rather than on the decontextualizing space of Western capitalist consumption. But paradoxically, it is the very experience of direct, seemingly unmediated contact with foreign reality that unmasks the goal of understanding the "authentic" meaning of non-Western urban self-signification as an ethnographic illusion. Although Japan has never constituted a Western colony in the political and military sense of the term, it has been subjected to tropes of exoticiza- tion, stereotyping, and homogenization that are characteristic of actual colonial conquest. Moreover, as Harry D. Haroo- tunian points out, inter-war Japan partici- pated in the same capitalist modernization, characterized by shock, speed, sensation, and endangered cultural remembrance, that Benjamin sought to analyze for the European situation (80).5 In Japan's hy- brid space of traditional sights and Western conceptualizations, fl&nerie therefore pro-

ceeds as a dialectical movement of familiarity and strangeness. On the one hand, the fldneur seeks to perceive things from the point of view of the "native" and even allows the foreign signs to undermine his subjective preconceptions and the univer- salistic claims of European values. On the other hand, his self-consciously aestheti- cist predisposition produces the meaning of the foreign sights as a rhetorical effect of his own cultural memory. The reflection on this dialectic of hermeneutic prejudg- ments and startlingly new encounter constitutes a particularly self-critical element in the non-European dislocation of fldnerie.

In the context ofJapan, Benjamin's own distinction between traveler and fldneur takes on a new meaning. In his review of Franz Hessel's Spazieren in Berlin (1929), he contends that the superficial impulse for writing about cities, the pursuit of the exotic and the picturesque, are attractive only to the touristic foreigner or stranger. Ap- proaching a city as a native, by contrast, calls for different, deeper motives, pursued only by someone-the genuine fidneur- who wishes to travel, not to distant lands but into the past, where his urban history and his own biography intersect ("Wie- derkehr" 194). The construction of a clas- sically 'exotic' country like Japan by West- ern visitors subtly confounds Benjamin's dichotomy between the ideal types of the fldneur and the traveler. In the Asian country, the flineur emerges as a traveling subject who must continually strive for a her- meneutics that mediates between the strange meaning of non-Western signs and the visitor's search for a recognizable cultural tradition. Whereas in Paris or Berlin, the (seemingly) natural continuity of history is accessible through the preserving activity of memory, Japan calls for a reflec- tive attitude toward the past that cannot rely on the authority of remembrance and the familiarity of one's surroundings. Here, tradition and cultural knowledge need to be arduously acquired through an




ethnographic interpretation replete with uncertainties, self-doubts, and fearful desire that constructs meanings through a self-conscious comparison of foreign sights with the fldneur's own values, recollections of myths, and conceptions of urban modernity. As Benjamin points out, for the flineur, even if he is a native like Baude- laire, his city constitutes no longer a "Hei- mat" but rather a "Schauplatz" (Passagen- Werk 437). What holds true for Paris is even more appropriate for the non-Western metropolis, where the fldneur encounters a spectacle both foreign and strange, a site that must be viewed with detachment, irony, and a sense of self-alienation.

II

Bernhard Kellermann's Ein Spazier- gang in Japan (1912), even though predat- ing Benjamin's own reflections on the subject, represents a particularly striking example of the crossover between fldnerie and traveling abroad. Wolfgang Reif has drawn attention to Kellermann's attitude as a fldneur, whose impressionistic assem- blage of sensations and effects, despite his professed cosmopolitanism, seems incapa- ble of forging a genuine dialogue with the foreign culture (438-40). Reif concludes that Kellermann aligns himself with the political imperialism of the Wilhelmine age by practicing an aesthetic imperialism that is almost completely negligent of the so- ciopolitical realities behind Japan's exotic surface attractions and erotic charms (440). Kellermann would thus appear to confirm the distinction Benjamin made in the Hessel review: unlike the author of Spazieren in Berlin, the protagonist of Ein Spaziergang in Japan could be taken less as a genuine fldneur than as a superficial tourist whose "aufgeregten Impressionis- mus" Benjamin would have rejected quite emphatically ("Wiederkehr" 194).

But although Reif correctly notes Kel- lermann's ethnographic limitations, he un-

derestimates the author's decisively self- critical moments that subvert the ideologi- cal confidence of his own cultural colonialism, a dialectical attitude close to Ben- jamin's notion of the genuine flanerie. As Benjamin observes, the fldneur is inter- ested more in the suggestiveness of small reality fragments of urban life than in the monumental plenitude of meaning in- scribed in national landmarks. He is all too happy to leave "die groBen Reminiszenzen, de[n] historische[n] Schauer" for his an- tipode, the touristic traveler, who believes he can unlock the secrets of the foreign culture's "genius loci" with a "militirischen Pal3wort." Here Benjamin alludes unmis- takably to the complicity of modern world- tourism with (cultural) colonialism and imperialistic conquest. By contrast, the flineur seeks to decipher the "Winke und Weisungen" that buildings and streets, though "sprachlos, geistlos" themselves, offer to someone obsessed with the hidden significance of wayward, half-forgotten details of the cityscape. For example, Ben- jamin claims that the flineur would gladly trade in all his knowledge about Balzac's or Gavarni's residences, the site of a rob- ber's attack, or even a revolutionary barri- cade for the smell of the threshold of a house or the "Tastbewuf3tsein" of a floor tile as felt by any ordinary house dog (Pas- sagen-Werk 524; see also Weidmann 75- 77).

As Reif notes, Kellermann's fldnerie es- chews premeditated travel destinations, remaining forever open to new experiences of the moment. Trying to avoid the beaten track of tourism, he ventures into an ordinary port town and remote parts of the country (439-40). But what Reif seems to underestimate is that the very indetermi- nacy and receptivity of Kellermann's attitude enables him to denounce the colonialist power that he, like Benjamin, associates with touristic superficiality and speedy traveling. He declares Yokohama, Tokyo's port city, to be the site where the West de- posits the "Segnungen seiner Kultur,




Strohhfite, Hosen, Fahrrider, Ndh- maschinen, Pastoren etc." among the ho- tels, banks, consular offices and other European buildings (23). The ironic string of words reflects Kellermann's disapproval of the haphazard intrusion of disparate Western icons into the social homogeneity of traditional Japan. For him, the authentic Japan is as much removed from the banal- ity of these all too familiar sights as it is from the auratic promises of historical monuments: "Es gibt Reisende, die noch warm vom Zug in Museen und Tempel stiirzen, wie Fieberkranke mit Bichern in der Hand aus einer Tiire heraus-und in die andere hineinrennen-zu diesen gehbre ich nicht" (24). The author offers this statement as a general program of all his travels, but it pertains especially to his exploration of Japan. In Tokyo, Kyoto, and elsewhere, of course, Kellermann visits the obligatory series of temples, which he describes at great length. Nonetheless, as he stresses, the first thing he does in a new city "ist, daB ich sie regelrecht in Besitz nehme." This statement reflects the ambiguity of colonialist stereotype and its self-critical subversion that is characteristic of Keller- mann's discourse. For although it echoes the ideology of imperialistic conquest and hermeneutic mastery, it also emphasizes the cultivation of a self-immersion into the foreign reality through the concentration on quotidian but highly significant details that according to Benjamin distinguishes the fldneur from the tourist's quasi-colonial forays into a foreign culture.

Even Kellermann's choice of vocabu- lary is strikingly similar to Benjamin's. If the Parisian fldneur is attracted to the sen- suous feeling of floor tiles, Kellermann begins "mit dem Pflaster sozusagen." He pre- fers to visit a local pub; he sits "wie ein Einheimischer" on a bridge railing in order to watch the foreign visitors with the curious gaze typical ofthefldneur; he continues his leisurely walk for a while only to stop by again at the next pub; and just before leaving town he quickly pays a perfunctory

visit to a museum (24-25). Thus, for days Kellermann's entire activities consist of roaming through the streets of Yokohama, especially its "Japanese" town, away from the European quarter. Curious and amazed, he wants to explore "das ganze Leben Japans" (25). If Benjamin suggests that for the fldneur the streets of Paris turn into the domestic familiarity of a residen- tial apartment (Passagen-Werk 531), Kel- lermann employs a similar metaphor; act- ing as an insider, as a quasi-native, he experiences the Japanese reality as a precious and enticing interior: "man sieht in Japans Herz, das so alt und so nobel ist, wie durch ein Fenster in ein Haus" (25).

However, Kellermann's ethnographic pose of participant-observer in the unfa- miliar context ofYokohoma is counteracted by the power of orientalist stereotype. Evoking the "exteriority" that, as Said has argued, separates the colonialist observer morally and existentially from the lived reality of the non-West (Orientalism 20-21), Kellermann's stroll through the port city begins with a view that is as panoramic as it is homogenizing. Unable to decipher the distinguishing diversity of the labyrinthine urban scenery, he seemingly encounters the same streets, the same houses, the same faces and colors everywhere. None- theless, the author realizes that the in- commensurable uniformity of the Other can be made familiar and comprehensible through a comparison with a single distinct phenomenon that he remembers from Paris, the fl&neur's hometown. As Keller- mann notices, the clacking, even singing sound ofgeta, the traditional wooden clogs, can be heard everywhere in the streets of Yokohama; for the author, this noise sticks out as a characteristic sign of Japanese life, just as "das ewige Bimmeln" of the cab- horse's little bell always accompanies the stroller in the streets of the French capital (25). This surprising consonance between foreign signifiers and his own cultural memory across the boundaries between different geographic spaces suggests that




Kellermann is able to penetrate through the myth of Oriental monotony and, like the typical flcaneur, discovers the distinguishing particularities within the apparent sameness of street life.

Benjamin writes that the "Passagen," the fashionable shopping arcades, with their connotations of leisurely commercial- ism, luxury, and elegance, were the privileged haunts of the fldneur in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Protecting the stroller from the hectic traffic at a time when walk- ways for the pedestrians were scarce and nar- row, they constituted a median space between street and interior ("Paris" 538-39). In fact, as noted in an illustrated Paris guidebook cited by Benjamin, such an ar- cade formed a miniature city, indeed a miniature world ("Paris" 538). Similarly, for Kellermann, a typical street in Yokohama figures as a microcosmic reflection of Japa- nese society in its entirety. Through a long, almost cinematic catalogue of observations, the author seeks to capture the authentic atmosphere and colorful diversity ofYokohama's bustling street life: rick- shas and sweating coolies, the singing shouts of itinerant salesmen, the open storefronts of Japanese houses, and the busy activities of barbers, tailors, woodcut- ters and other craftsmen. Thus, Keller- mann's flanerie combines an ironic distance from this "ewiger Jahrmarkt" (26) with a view of the urban masses as a veil that, as Benjamin argues, turns the social horrors of modern city life into a charming effect ("Paris" 562); this function of the enticing crowds as a reconciliatory medium between visitor and social reality may ex- plain the impressionistic aestheticism and lack of penetrating political commentary that Reif notes in Ein Spaziergang in Ja- pan.

Kellermann's travelogue constitutes the intriguing attempt of a Western writer to extricate the concept of fldnerie both from the geographical confines (Paris, Ber- lin) and the historical specificity (the nineteenth century) to which Benjamin, follow-

ing Baudelaire, had consigned this activity. Even Benjamin himself, however, already sensed the precarious position of the flineur. In the German capital, as Ben- jamin remarks towards the end of his review of Hessel, people view the fldneur with suspicion, turning him into something like a monster, a werewolf in the social wilder- ness ("Wiederkehr" 198; see also Shields 68-72). Essentially, Benjamin believed, when the idyllic gas lamps were replaced by electric light and the ferries across the Seine were made obsolete by bridges, when the arcades closed and the modern department stores opened, the flineur had be- come an anachronistic figure, a victim of increasing commercialization, hectic traffic, anonymous crowds, and the spread of industrial production during the second half of the nineteenth century ("Paris" 553-57; "Motive" 627-29). These socio- economic changes point to the fact that the fldneur's seemingly natural belonging to the French capital of the nineteenth century, as Benjamin calls Paris, cannot be taken for granted at a time of rapidly spreading modernity. In a more positive light, however, this very uncertainty of the fl&neur's territorial and historical position also allows for the figure's re-territoriali- zation outside the parameters of European urbanity.

In Kellermann's Japan, the fldneur still seems to be able to survive, if only in an obviously idealized, orientalist space. Al- ready well on its way to the modern mega- lopolis that it is today, Meiji-period Tokyo sports telegraph poles, European-style public buildings, and an electric streetcar from the factory of Siemens & Halske (41). To the Western newcomer, the capital presents itself as bustling anthill, a sea of low, gray rooftops, a labyrinth of streets, a con- glomerate of interconnected cities, where even the ricksha coolies fear to get lost. And yet, people have not (yet) lapsed into what Benjamin, referring to Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Man of the Crowd" (1840-45), describes as the de-subjectivized, almost




schizophrenic misery of the anonymous, rushing, and mechanically polite crowds of professionals in London, where the slow, contemplative movement of fldnerie turns into hallucinatory, erratic restlessness ("Paris" 550-56; "Motive" 624-27). By contrast, in Kellermann's depiction of Tokyo, although it was written more than half a century later than Poe's story, the Western visitor can still cultivate the pose of the leisurely fldneur. As if to emulate Baude- laire's suggestion-echoed by Benjamin-- that this urban spectator figuratively sets up his house in the midst of the flowing, fugitive movement of the city (Baudelaire 9; see also Benjamin, "Paris" 550), Keller- mann remarks: "Nach und nach ffihlte ich mich in Japan zu Hause" (41). His sense of belonging is paradoxically predicated both on a sense of Eurocentric recognition- Tokyo looks almost, though not quite, like a modern Western metropolis-and an equally strong impression of cultural/historical difference, as if the Japan of 1912, despite its superficial signs of modernity, appears, after all, comfortably "backward" when seen from the perspective of self-consciously exotic appreciation. Kellermann observes two gentlemen walking in the street chat amiably and suddenly bowing several times, but "nicht gegeneinander, sondern nebeneinander." If this gesture may appear somewhat strange to the West- ern visitor, it has nothing of the discon- nected manner of greeting typical of Poe's London employees; rather, it is a genuinely personal ritual of communication that matches the leisurely way in which two other men squat on their heels while talk- ing and resting (41-42).

"Ich unterschied Physiognomien, ja ich erkannte Leute wieder" (42). Keller- mann's triumphant statement evokes Ben- jamin's comments on thephysiologies that were popular in the 1840s. Portraits of Pa- risian types such as itinerant merchants in the boulevards or the dandies at the opera, depictions of the French capital in its entirety, and even characteristics of ethnici-

ties and animals, they perfectly correspond to the leisurely pace of the flcaneur. Sug- gesting that professions, character, bio- graphic origins and lifestyles could be read off the surface features of the pedestrians, physiologies promised the comforting but illusory feeling that one could cope with the increasingly uncanny shocks and dangers of the urban jungle by deciphering the workings of human nature ("Paris" 537- 42). Similarly, Kellermann's recognition of individual faces, together with his improv- ing "Technik im Besteigen von Jinrikishas und in der freundlichen Verabschiedung von chinesischen Schneidern und japani- schen Kunsthindlern, die meine Tiire be- lagerten" (42), reflect his earnest attempts to cope with the shocks of an orientalized homogeneity of Japanese masses by seek- ing to go "native," to establish some sense of genuine contact and dialogue with specific representatives of the foreign country's economy. Nonetheless, the Western fldneur's ambiguous cultural hermeneu- tics ultimately remains suspended, as it were, between the desire for the (re-) cognition of Japan's authentic meaning and the self-critical awareness of the insur- mountable limits of genuine understanding. Departing from Japan, Keller- mann concedes, in a telling phrase that si- multaneously reiterates and questions the rhetoric of exotic stereotype: "Und wdih- rend mich Sehnsucht nach jenem merk- wiirdigen Lande ergriff, wurde es mir klarer und klarer, daB ich es nicht im ge- ringsten verstanden hatte" (272; see also Reif 440-41).

III

Compared with early twentieth-century Japan, the country's contemporary scene demands an even greater effort of self-conscious cultural translation for the fldneur to expand the horizon of his specifically European activity. In his intriguing essay "Uber die Macht und tiber verges-




sene Zimmer," Stephan Wackwitz offers a postmodern response to the problem of res- cuing the fldneur from possible oblivion. In Benjamin's portrayal, the figure is something of a poseur, a self-ironic character who demonstrated his playful and deliberately artificial opposition against the hectic speed of modern traffic by strolling down the boulevards of Paris with a tortoise on a leash ("Paris" 556).6 Even more ostensibly, Wackwitz cultivates his non-Western fldnerie as a self-reflexive act of simulation, as the imitative pose of a pose, thus aligning himself with the citational approach to tradition and conventional discourses typical of the postmodern condition.

In fact, much of Wackwitz's depiction of Japan, not unlike Benjamin's construction of Paris, consists of a montage of subjective responses to diverse reality fragments, ref- erences to other texts, and sociohistorical commentary. Watching the incessant shower of golf balls rattling down on the lawn and plastic courses of the "Shiba Golf Driving Range" in Tokyo, the author lapses into "theoretische Triumereien" (53). Rec- ognizing the physiognomy of the quasi- aristocratic fldneur in its sociological Other, the class of company employees, Wackwitz contends that the Japanese businessmen play their game of golf as a decorative spectacle, as a movement that leads them to put on a "Landedelmanns- pose" (54). To conceptualize their activity, the author evokes Michel Foucault, Ernst Jiinger,7 and Jean Baudrillard, citing slo- gans like the "totale Mobilmachung," "An- tiquiertheit des Menschen," and "Agonie des Realen" to describe the Japanese golf players' fiercely mechanical obsession and apparent loss of human attributes. But he preserves a self-critical distance from his own discursive constructions that one already encounters, if less ironically, in Kel- lermann's allusion to Japan's resistance to facile, essentializing conceptualizations. Wackwitz pokes fun at his own use of "weitausholenden Verallgemeinerungsge- birden der verschiedenen Sozialkritik-

schulen"; these, as he notes, he displays with exactly the same degree of "dekora- tiver Grandezza" as the locals handle their expensive golf clubs (55). Like the would-be gentrified men-about-town on the golf course, Wackwitz wants to escape from the life of hardworking company employees, but his dreams are self-consciously literary: "[I]ch dagegen habe mich in die Figur eines letzten Europders hineinstilisiert, Biurger, Flaneur und Flaschenpostaussen- der, der Bescheid weiB, sich lichelnd ab- wendet und in der Dimmerung durch die StraB3en geht wie in T. S. Eliots 'Lovesong [sic] of J. Alfred Prufrock."' (56).

In a few lines from Eliot's poem that Wackwitz quotes as the epigraph to his essay (53), Prufrock appears as a counter-figure to Hamlet; a cautious, sententious, and slightly ridiculous intellectual, he is the perfect model for the postmodern, self- questioning fldneur who is aware of his marginal position but nonetheless refuses to take Prufrock's embarrassments and hesitations too seriously. Playing the aes- theticist exponent of cosmopolitan Euro- pean culture, Wackwitz knows that his urban fldnerie is outdated but seeks to re- cover it as an ironic self-stylization and nostalgic performance act in the foreign but uncannily familiar surroundings of To- kyo's homogenizing world of bureaucrats and company men. For him, the fldneur preserves a counterspace of culture self- consciously opposed to the pragmatic sphere of the bourgeoisie, which in his analysis is quite as anachronistic as fl&nerie itself.

Japan's masses of employees appear as the geographically displaced radicalization of Poe's London crowds. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Wackwitz argues, the bourgeois principles of reason and hu- manity have been criticized for masking claims of power, and the economic ideas of that class are said to delay the development of productive forces. Further threatened by movements such as fascism, Stalinism, and the American way of life, the bourgeoisie




nonetheless survives as a restored, if endangered lifestyle in the masses of employees, as an image or formal convention that unites employees all over the world across the boundaries of nationality and culture (56). Today's denizens of the big cities in Europe and Japan are the belated, deficient inheritors of the bourgeois legacy, its intri- cate network of political, economic, relig- ious, and cultural (self-) limitations, its work ethic and acquisitiveness. These qualities serve to control and subdue what Wackwitz calls "power," a sociologically un- specified medium of irrational, archaic terror and dissolution (57-58). All precautions notwithstanding, however, power continues to haunt the subconscious of the modern individual and perpetually threatens to reassert its presence in contemporary, seemingly rationalized society.

Overcrowded Tokyo, the center of Ja- pan's economic and political machinery, with its sprawling subway system, hectic traffic, and uniform crowds of employees, presents itself as an urban jungle where this uncanny correspondence of archaic myth and modernity displays itself to the gaze of the Western fldneur in a particularly unsettling manner. Citing John Ber- ger's comments on the business suit as a signifier of idealized administrative power as well as Thomas Mann's depiction of Thomas Buddenbrook as a self-conscious actor of bourgeois discipline, Wackwitz observes how masses of employees leaving the underground station are forced to drop their masks of carefully groomed elegance, composure, and self-pride. Abandoning their flanerie-like stroll, these failing ac- tors of bourgeois propriety deteriorate into sweating, panic-stricken, pitiful yet mildly ludicrous victims of their dehumanizing company schedules (61-65).

The rules of excessive economic production and bureaucratic efficiency turn the employees into the mechanical, anonymous crowds that Wackwitz, echoing Ben- jamin, finds typical of urban progress. Paradoxically, these modern conditions

force the employees to regress to the level of myth and nature. Among the splendid office buildings in Tokyo, one finds tiny, overcrowded drinking spots, which in Wackwitz's eyes assume the horrifying aura of "Relikte einer Vorzeit," of cavern- ous localities of an "unerl-sten Natiir- lichkeit," as if their back rooms were occu- pied by hetaera-like beings dating from ma- triarchal times, whose existence is meant to remain a secret to the foreigner. These grotesque creatures turn out to be the company men; having been deprived by corporate pressure of their leisure time, privacy, and desire, they abandon themselves completely to madly collective activities--excessive drinking, laughing, funny storytel- ling- that only further accelerate their pitiful psychosocial dissolution (65-66).

For Wackwitz, doubly marked as an ethnographic outsider by his Western cultural memory and by his cultivation of the anachronistic pose of the fldneur, the non- Western metropolis serves as a site of (re)- cognition, as a defamiliarizing locale that allows the German intellectual to gain deeper insight into urban modernity's re- pressed, half-forgotten, mythic Other. The reduction of the private sphere, the loss of leisure time, and the "Totalisierung des Biiros" in Tokyo lead to the violent rupture of the exhausted surfaces of bourgeois con- ventionality by the elementary images of archaic power and spectral decay. Wack- witz associates this condition with Sieg- fried Kracauer's comment on the aura of horror surrounding certain aging employees in E. T. A. Hoffmann as well as with Jiinger's mythic vision of the subversion of the bourgeois sphere by elemental powers and of technology as a form of mobilizing the world by the workers (67-68). Neither the bourgeois pursuit of individual existen- tial meaning, as articulated by Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, nor Abraham Lincoln's idea of democratic participation, nor the proletariat's struggle for a socialist future, Wackwitz believes, offer acceptable models for Tokyo's employees (69). They descend




even further into what Benjamin's reading of Franz Kafka identifies as a "Vorwelt," a premythic, irrational realm of infinite cor- ruption, fate, and impenetrable laws, which uncannily survives in the modern world of the novelist's court councils, castle bureaucracy, and father-figures ("Franz Kafka" 409-16). Yet another modern-day reincarnation of Kafka's pre-worldly creatures, unable to afford houses of their own, the uprooted slaves of Japan's post-bourgeois economic efficiency deteriorate to the level of those prehistoric swamp creatures which Benjamin had discovered in Kafka.

Wackwitz quotes a reference in Ben- jamin's Kafka essay to the assistants inDas Schlof). Childlike, playful, and inarticulate beings that appear as if they had not been fully released from their mother's womb, they prefer to dwell in a dark corner on old women's skirts. Only for those "Unfertigen und Ungeschickten" (in the sense of both 'awkward' and 'unsent' or 'uncalled-for' ones), Benjamin claims, Kafka has re- served hope and the prospect of escape from the archaic "Vorwelt," which has been promised redemption by the younger world of myth ("Franz Kafka" 414-16; see also Miller 11-56). Wackwitz associates the en- slaved Japanese company men in their drinking-spots with these strangely unde- finable creatures (69), but, by stressing their (as yet) unredeemed existence, elimi- nates the Benjaminian element of hope and escape. No bourgeois self-mastery, only Hellenistic or Buddhist techniques of en- durance, it seems, are appropriate techniques for surviving in Tokyo's modernity (71).

Although Wackwitz's reading of hyper- modern Tokyo in the context of the post- bourgeois return of prehistoric violence is intriguing, his vision tends to reinstate the classical orientalist topos of the faceless, desubjectivized Japanese and even the image of the "yellow peril." As Endymion Wilkinson has pointed out, these images became especially popular after Japan's de- feat of China (1895) and Russia (1905),

when the Asian nation was seen to "throw off its veneer of Westernization and revert to its supposedly Mongolian past to lead the Chinese against the West, launching a mas- sive war of Orientals against Occidentals" (125-26). Later, since the 1950s, Wilkinson continues, this stereotype was revived in the context of memories ofJapan's military threat during the Pacific War and of the country's rapidly expanding industrial and financial power: "hordes of cheap labour" were once again feared to be "attacking the industrial bastions of the West" (135-36). Although explicitly comparing the modern Japanese bureaucrats with a canonical Western source- the visions of displaced masses of people in Virgil's first eclogue- Wackwitz also evokes the rhetoric of these orientalist clich6s when he writes: "Bilder antiker Volkerwanderungen suchen mich auf den U-Bahnh6fen von Tokyo heim, Phantasien iiber Nomadenstr ime, Zwang- sumsiedlung, grol3e, stummverzweifelte Trecks" (70).

It needs to be noted, however, that Wackwitz, in keeping with his self-ironic demeanor as a latter-day flineur, employs orientalist and mythic imagery in a highly mediated manner that is closely affiliated with Benjamin's own interpretation of Kafka. As Bernd Miller has suggested, it is more than likely that Benjamin regarded the presence of the archaic in modernity as a citation, as a deliberately imitative or de- rivative echo, rather than as an originary or authentic substance. For Miiller, this raises the interesting question of whether Kafka's texts evokes actually prehistorical forces, or, rather, whether he depicts historical ones that are merely considered analogous to prehistorical counterparts (42). A similar ambiguity permeates Wack- witz's discourse. While there can be no doubt that he is genuinely horrified by the loss of individual freedom and other bourgeois values in Tokyo's bureaucratic machinery, he repeatedly suggests that for him, mythic and orientalist tropes are lan- guage-games of fears, fantasies, and specu-




lations that he associates with postmodern Japanese society in a figurative, rather than mimetic-realistic, sense. The employ- ment of phrases like "Bilder," "scheint," and "mir scheint" suggest that Wackwitz self-consciously presents his comparative juxtaposition of Tokyo modernity and (Western) mythic subtexts as a literary construction, as an intellectual experiment, rather than as a sociological statement of empirical truth. When he writes, "Die fir europaisches Empfinden entsetzliche An- strengung, Trostlosigkeit und Sinnleere dieses Lebens scheint die Korper der Angestellten langsam aufzulisen" (66, emphasis mine), he conveys a sense of surre- alistic terror that combines the observation of undeniably real misery in urban life with a self-reflexive emphasis on the subjective impression and the larger ethnographic context that contributes to this and other instances of the "Vorschein" of pre-bourgeois and archaic images in corporate life (67).

To stress that the inscription of the archaic in Tokyo's modernity find its most appropriate expression in Wackwitz's thoroughly parodic borrowings from the ar- chives of orientalism and mythology is not to say that his essay lacks sincerity and genuine insight. On the contrary, I mean to suggest that the author deliberately opens up a discursive gap, a differential space between his textual construct and its referent, Japan's urban hypermodernity, in which readers may insert their own critical acumen, (dis)agreement, or alternative interpretations. Moreover, Wackwitz's ironic distance from his own construction of the non-Western Other intersects with his self-definition in the archive of multiple literary models and influences, and especially with his self-historicizing theory of "fake essayism" (the English term is the author's), which postulates that the genre of the essay, as practiced by Benjamin, Louis Aragon, Siegfried Kracauer, Gott- fried Benn and others, is actually a bygone form that the younger, belated writer must

inhabit in a self-consciously epigonal manner (72).

In an intriguing passage, Wackwitz summarizes his unidentified fldnerie part- ner's "Tokyoter Theorie des Gliicks," according to which happiness resides in the difference built into everything that appears familiar to Europeans or Americans in Japan (72). The meaning of this enig- matic theory is a bit elusive; it seems that Wackwitz wants to suggest that the Euro- pean fldneur's attitude toward Tokyo, this phantasmagoric intensification of Western urban alienation, is predicated on an uncanny but liberating dialectic of recognition and distance. Living in Tokyo, roaming through its streets, the fldneur participates in the daily disasters of bourgeois dissolution, but as a self-reflexively literary subject, he is constantly aware of the cultural distance, the channels of textual media- tion, and the ironic strategies of critical opposition that separate him from the terri- fying scenarios of Japan's corporate machinery. The indirectness of his experiences affords the detached fldneur an-illusory-sense ofblissful escape, a "Gliick wie nach der Sintflut oder wie nach Barbaren- einf'illen" (72). Happiness is seen as pre- senting itself never in the lived moment of the 'here and now' but only in remem- brances, in the longing for the future, or in one's thinking about a place never visited. Therefore, Wackwitz remarks, it is pre- cisely when one is happy that one consists of citations (72-73). If bourgeois rationality, the cultivation of inviolate private spheres, and humanistic notions of individual selfhood have increasingly proven insufficient or even anachronistic as pro- tective zones in the modern economy of mythic-bureaucratic power, then the fl7- neur's postmodern recovery or utopian projection of other times, other locales, or other discourses promises the only road to sentiments of fulfillment, content, and joy. Melancholy yet content in his role as intellectual-flaneur, Wackwitz reflects on his se- cluded life in a predominantly foreign resi-




dential quarter of Tokyo, where patient reading and writing furnishes the author with an idyllic refuge from the anarchic power of machines, highways, enslaving working hours, and murderously high prices that are typical of the life in the Japa- nese capital. Only this artificial and tem- porary space of "fake essayism, fake-Bfir- gertum, fake-Stoa" preserves residual possibilities for the postmodern intellectual to protect himself against power (73-74).

Obviously, Wackwitz's position constitutes a pastiche-like recapitulation of the idealist notion of the bourgeois intellectual's retreat from the vicissitudes of political power and social constraints into an "unzerstdrbaren Innenraum" (74) ofphilo- sophical contemplation or artistic auton- omy. However, the relegitimation of aestheticism inherent in this position avoids the dangers of exoticist escapism because its postmodern redefinition of flanerie opens up possibilities of anti-colonial critique, thus continuing the polemic against the hegemony of Western trade, technology, and religion advanced by an early modernist like Kellermann. In his essay "Die dritte Welt," Wackwitz describes a shantytown-like settlement near his own resi- dence, a group of huts dating from the nine- teen-twenties or thirties. Their wooden construction has been cheaply "modern- ized" by additions of corrugated sheet iron and plastic, and their balconies, terraces and balustrades overflow with trash and sundry electric household appliances. In- itially horrified by this affront against his love of order and tidiness, Wackwitz soon rejects his aversion as a Eurocentric obstacle to understanding the different sociohistorical formation of Japan's modernity. Here one can see, he contends, that the lifestyle of the rural village has been directly connected with Japan's highly advanced technology, without taking what the author calls the detour through the rise of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat typical of old Europe (86-90). Whereas in the earlier essay, Wackwitz evokes a premodern past,

dissolution and unredeemed nature in the midst of Tokyo's tightly organized bureaucratic machinery, he now argues that although equally horrifying, a district like this shantytown opens up "Perspektiven ins Glfick" (90). For what Wackwitz believes to discover here is a lifestyle of basically unquestioning, community-ori- ented harmony and communicative rituals similar to those which had already im- pressed Kellermann. The fldneur-physiog- nomist witnesses conversations involving body gestures and dialogue that almost playfully question an all-encompassing, quasi-hermeneutic "Selbstverstdndlichkeits- horizont" only to restore it without delay so as to assure social order and perma- nence. Despite their exhausted looks after a day of hard work, Wackwitz notes, the Japanese physiognomies do not show the doubts and anxieties that haunt so many Europeans who have lost their own re- source of social self-evidence (90-94).

Clearly, Wackwitz conjures up orientalist images of Japan as a paradise of a natural, organic, and homogenous life that in the West has been displaced by the frag- mentizing effects of bourgeois individual- ism, technological advances, or capitalist competition. On the other hand, he con- nects this nostalgic desire for romantic stereotypes with a postcolonial critique of the master-narratives of Western philoso- phy. From the notion of the "All-Eine" of Platonic tradition to Habermas's "ratio- nalisierte Lebenswelt," Wackwitz argues, such "idealisierte Zustdinde der Fraglosig- keit" have been defined as normative con- cepts for the goal of the modernization process, the global society. But, as the author suggests, the contemplation of a human microcosm like this Japanese housing district-and, by extension, other East Asian or Southeast Asian, Indian, Russian, or Nigerian villages as well-allows for a dramatically different view of global modernization. Instead of the Western linear conception of world-history, according to which the traditional village community,




superseded by modernity, figures as an object of nostalgia, Wackwitz envisions the globalization of a thoroughly decentered village-modernity that is perfectly content with its many local instances of self-evidence and truth. Interconnected merely by technical norms, this modernity resists the homogenizing hegemony of European rationality, aesthetics, and moral absolutes; it is a vaguely Nietzschean "Third World" beyond (Western) rationality and dichoto- mies of good and evil (94-95; 99).8

Wackwitz points out-not unreason- ably-that the seemingly unquestionable truths of the Western bourgeoisie may be more of an obstacle to radical modernity's "Erfordernissen einer entfesselten Pro- duktivitit" than the virtues of a global village based on the formation of non-Western societies, a village that has either never heard of European ideals such as liberty, equality, and fraternity, or rejects them as justifications of colonialist ambitions. De- spite such postcolonial arguments, however, he seems to abandon, or at least re- strict, his advocacy of global diversity and multicultural particularity, for he trans- forms the local principles of Tokyo village life into "Universalien eines zukiinftigen Weltwirtschaftswunders": "Zahigkeit, Grup- penloyalitat, Skrupellosigkeit, Realismus, Hiflichkeit, Schlauheit, Verzicht auf Indi- viduation, auf Platz und Freizeit" (95-96). Although tempered by notions of self-discipline and civility, the values of ruthless conformism included in this list are the very ones that Wackwitz himself de- nounces as being directly connected to modern Japan's recapitulation of irrational power and mythic de-subjectiviza- tion. Privileging the Asian perspective as a normative model for global society, the author tends to reverse the rhetoric of cultural colonialism and to reinstate the eth- nocentric ideology that his own fldnerie seeks to overcome. At the end, Wackwitz evokes Tokyo as an industrial wasteland whose combination of computerization and rural life-world has made it the determin-

ing model for the development of other ar- eas of the global society. Other metropolitan centers following Tokyo's path of elec- tronic industrialization may not gain in beauty, he muses, but at least one would find a safe place at night to enjoy poetic and strange vistas, such as that of a fashionable young woman leaving from her parents' crammed, tatami-equipped house located next to a small temple in her fancy Mer- cedes sports-coupe (96-100). With its inter- secting discourses of tradition and cosmopolitan aura, this scene seems typical of the literary imagination of the postcolonial fldneur, who ingeniously combines the nostalgic desire for a more humane, aestheti- cized, and peaceful Oriental tradition with a keen eye for the most drastic icons of capitalist consumerism.

Like Kellermann's travelogue, Wack- witz's essays re-appropriate the figure of Benjamin's fldneur as the object of a self- reflexive process of cultural translation and conceptual relocation. Both authors re- define fldnerie as an activity of ethnographic exploration that is neither limited to one particular historical and geographic context-the nineteenth-century Euro- pean metropolis-nor uncritically univer- salized as a free-floating notion of cosmopolitan tourism, as a mere attitude that anyone may randomly assume at any time and in any place. On the contrary, Keller- mann and Wackwitz self-consciously fore- ground the intellectual work-with all its contradictions, questionable assumptions, idealizations and stereotypes-by which fldnerie resituates itself in the interstice between European metropolis and the non- West, effectively extricating the latter from its classical notion of "periphery." As a re- sult, the flAneur re-emerges as a privileged medium through which the complicated is- sue of the Western representation of Asian or Third World (post)modernities may be debated anew from a decentered Ben- jaminian perspective. Thus it is through the self-ironical contact with cultural otherness that fldnerie receives a second




chance to survive as a powerful category of cultural critique in the present.

Notes

1 Toward the end of her monumental study of the Passagen-Werk, Buck-Morss makes a similar suggestion (340), without, however, considering specifically non-Western contexts. For remarks on the flineur, see 185-87, 304-07, and passim.

2 Using Benjamin's notion of brushing against the grain of the official history, Lowy proposes to re-read a colonial history such as the discovery of the Americas, not from the viewpoint of the Spanish conquerors and present imperial rulers, but from that of the de- feated and oppressed cultures (212-13).

3 The excellent collection of critical essays edited by Tester documents the wide range of contexts and themes connected to the flineur; among others, these include the streets and shopping arcades of Baudelaire's and Ben- jamin's Paris, department stores, Disneyland, the culture and politics of food, gender issues, and the role of women. See also Bolle's discussion of the fldneur (354-88) which precedes his concluding comparative remarks on the metropolis as viewed from the peripheral position of the depossessed and marginalized; a project that Benjamin shares with a non-European writer like the Brasilian Guimaries Rosa and his vision of the sertdo (379-82).

4 See also Hinsley's analysis of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 in light of Benjamin's views of catastrophic history and modern phantasmagoria; as Hinsley argues, the fair- goer becomes a fldneur strolling through a colonial display of commodified exotic cultures that are subsumed under the homogenizing rubrics of steady human progress and cosmopolitan inclusiveness.

5 Harootunian appropriates Benjamin's views of history, memory, and repetition to ex- plain the efforts of inter-war Japanese intellec- tuals to rescue a half-forgotten world of authentic nativist traditions and "concrete experience" outside the changes and "social ab- stractions" of their own capitalist present (80-87).

6 See Gilloch's insightful comments on the

fldneur's phantasmagoric, even sham self- presentation (148-57).

7 For comments of Jiinger's theory of the worker in the context of Benjamin, see Bolle 202-06.

8 For an insightful discussion of the postwar German representation of the Third World as utopian Other, unreason, nature, etc., either in the rhetoric of universal rationality and eman- cipation or in self-examining, discontinuous counterdiscourses, see Teraoka.

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Benjamin's Flâneur in Japan- Urban Modernity and Conceptual Relocation

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