Adonia E.

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Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology
University of California, Irvine

From Observer to Ethnographer: Flnerie on a Bicycle

Paper presented at a workshop entitled Urbanity on the Move: Planning, Mobility, and
Displacement, held at the University of California, Irvine on May 21, 2010.
As bicycling gains traction as a solution to growing environmental problems caused by
car dependence, it remains somewhat obscure in Los Angeles. Who commutes by bike in LA?
This act is so marginalized that one must be either a political or cultural radical or downright too
poor to own a car. While activist cyclists organize themselves and lobby for policy changes, they
are a world apart from the many cyclists who bike out of economic necessity. How can a
bicycling ethnographer reconcile the vast social and economic differences between different
types of cyclists in order to investigate the intentions of alternative mobilities in Los Angeles?
Because it is grounded in total immersion of the individual in polysemiotic urban spaces, the
literary concept of flnerie offers a potentially fruitful method for engaging with mobile subjects.
However, in Los Angeles, even flneurs drive.
First I will describe the legacy of the flneur, and then I will talk about flnerie that has
represented a particularly automotive Los Angeles.
The flneur tradition comes down to us from nineteenth century writers such as Charles
Baudelaire and Thomas de Quincey. Wandering through cities, experiencing what stimuli were
to be had (or whatever opium remained in their systems), these sophisticated male observers
wrote up fantastic observations of their emotional experiences of the material city, just as these
cities came to be seen as manipulable on a grand scale. De Quincey noted that the street where
he once bade farewell to his beloved no longer existed by the time he wrote his Confessions of an

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English Opium-Eater in 1821. Baudelaire grappled with the transformation of Paris through
Georges Haussmanns all-encompassing urban plan that forever changed the look of that city.
Walter Benjamin picked up on the idea of flnerie in the new century and used it in his
unfinished Arcades Project, documenting the life of markets or arcades that had resulted from
Haussmanns plans. Benjamin critiqued the flneur for not understanding his relation to the
market, and even called him a spy for capitalists. Benjamin did recognize, however, the flneurs
ability to embody the city as a passionate participant-observer.
In the1950s the Situationist International artist collective in Paris again embraced the
concept of flnerie, this time with explicitly political ends. They wished to expose the capitalist
spectacle sanitizing cities in the name of modernity by illustrating their passage through parts of
the city considered ready for redevelopment. Unlike Baudelaire and Benjamin, whose flneurs
existed in the halls of commerce and dwelled on surface appearances while claiming a deeper
understanding of people, the situationists flnerie recalled the critical De Quincey, who wrote
proudly of his associations with those other street walkers, prostitutes. De Quinceys flnerie
rejected what he saw as the cruelty of polite society, just as the situationists meant to critique the
modern project of city planning that was engaging in a state-sanctioned destruction of their Paris.
These journeys, called psychogeographic drifts, sent young people, usually men, into
unfamiliar parts of the city, where they made mental notes, and later created representations of
those places. The situationists turned to the drift because, according to Simon Sadler, "one only
appreciated the desperate need to take action over the city once one had seen through the veil of
refinement draped over it by planning and capital. If one peeled away this official representation
of modernity and urbanism--this 'spectacle'--one discovered the authentic life of the city teeming
underneath" (Sadler 1998: 15).

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This search for the authentic life of the city brings to mind the anthropological project
of creating, through ethnography, some memory of real life played out in the field. As James
Clifford detailed in his essay on Ethnographic Surrealism, the projects of ethnography and
surrealism did grow together in Paris in the 1930s, meaning there are conceptual links between
the work of Benjamin, an occasional Surrealist, the situationists, who drew on their legacy and
art forms, and anthropologists, who think through the juxtapositions of the urban, the surreal, and
the ethnographic. The anthropologist manages to reconcile the simultaneous desire to capture life
unobserved as Malinowskis fly on the wall and to see culture and its normsbeauty, truth,
realityas artificial arrangements, susceptible to detached analysis and comparison with other
possible dispositions (Clifford 1981: 541). The consciousness of cultural relativism, while also
recognizing that people fight to have one vision of space win over another, highlights the
parallels between situationism and ethnography.
But it is the call to action in the psychogeographic drift that I find most productive. In the
situationists evocation, the flneur became an urban activist, no longer floating on the capitalist
surface of imagery as described by Benjamin. The situationists recognized that the city is
contested, polyphonic, and malleable, for better or for worse.
The situationists mission to escape from capitalist spectacle through absorption in the
slums of Paris recognized the meaningful spatial practices of the poor, even if the poor
themselves did not enter into the picture. Their radical emphasis on the role of place in social life
was akin to Henri Lefebvres work on the ways in which space gets produced in everyday life,
though he was too academic for leading situationist Guy Debords taste.
Los Angeles has been represented in the tone of flnerie, but without even an attempt at
engaging with life on the street. The first writer in this tradition was Reyner Banham, an

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Englishman who descended upon LA in the late 1960s to characterize what he termed its four
ecologies. He foregrounded the automobile as a feature of everyday life here, calling the freeway
system Autopia after the Disneyland ride. This both steeped LA in fantasy and started the trend
of taking the car seriously and uncritically as an inherent feature of life in Los Angeles. David
Brodsly, writing in 1981, went so far in his book LA Freeway to claim that, Driving the freeway
is absolutely central to the experience of living in Los Angeles, and any anthropologist studying
our city would head for the nearest onramp, for nowhere else would he or she observe such
large-scale public activity (Brodsly 1981: 2).
Accepting driving as the best way to get to know Los Angeles happened at the same time
that Americans embraced the private automobile as the best, most democratic way of moving
through the city. This condition, known as automobility, has led to a sea change in social
relations, with drivers allowed to dominate cities and a profound skepticism of public space. Key
to representing automobilized Los Angeles is noting the absence of the crowd on surface streets,
but instead of critiquing this state of affairs, suggesting that Angelenos have invented a radically
new way of living on freeways. This has hyperindividualized of the project of flnerie here.
Traveling individually in cars became the predominant mode for describing the region. This
concession to automobility progressed to the point that Edward Soja, leading postmodern
geographer of Los Angeles, wrote a book in 1996 that is half a paean to Lefebvres project of
understanding the space of everyday life, and half about his own individual spatial fantasies of
Los Angeles. The street does not exist in Sojas book; the flnerie portion takes place in a
museum and in an unused plaza.
To erase the street in the face of the freeway means ignoring the bustling life of LAs
core neighborhoods. Reyner Banham referred to this section of the city as the Plains of Id, the

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ecology he found most unappealing. So, if I want to use flnerie to talk about bicycling in Los
Angeles, I need to not only grapple with its emphasis on the privileged wanderer passing
unhindered and unquestioned through various sectors of the city, but I will also need to argue for
a return to crowded streets in a city whose inhabitants and interpreters prefers isolated, luxe
interiors.
In Los Angeles, mobility can be hard to see because we desire to erase the distances
between locations in our vast city. But what if the commute is also a place? Following in the
wake of Michel de Certeau, who emphasized the affective differences between walking through
a city and passing through in other ways, writers like Nigel Thrift, Tim Ingold, and the Cycling
and Society group in Great Britain have been focusing on movement as a meaningful act. Ingold
argues that perceptions of our environments actually get formed through passage from one place
to another in the act of wayfinding. The flneur in a car cannot get at the life of a city in the way
that a bicyclist can because planners and engineers have done such a good job of making the city
bypassable by car. Effectively, in a car, youre not supposed to have to deal with urban disorder.
You can study life in the car, but this just perpetuates the idea that life does not exist outside of
cars in LA.
And the bicycle has long been tied to flnerie. In its heyday in the 1890s it allowed men
and, often unchaperoned for the first time, women to accelerate their strolls through cities
(Mackintosh and Norcliffe 2006). Bicycling democratized flnerie. Using the bicycle to conduct
urban ethnography makes sense in light of its utility as a tool for urban observation, but in my
project I go further.
I propose making the radical move of claiming that all bicyclists in Los Angeles are
engaging in flnerie because they use city streets instead of bypassing them on freeways. Justin

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Spinney looks to the bicycle as a way of understanding placemaking. Bicyclists must pay close
attention to the streets around them because traffic conditions are always changing. If places are
where things happen, and on a bicycle one is always engaged with the environment through
which one passes, what place is empty of life? Their routes through the city actually carve out
new places of everyday life, even if they are in motion rather than geographically fixed. So there
are two key features of bicycle flnerie: closely observing streets to safely pass through them
(wayfinding), and making new places through cycling (placemaking). My own use of flnerie as
a researcher will involve wandering through the bike rides created by my interlocutors, following
them through the places their trajectories make.
The move to call all bicyclists flneurs solves several dilemmas. One, it breaks down the
artificial barrier between the observer/ethnographer/outsider and the everyday user of urban
space. It would be one thing for me to propose conducting ethnography from a bicycle as a
flneuse, but I want to move beyond that to suggest that those who travel by bicycle daily in Los
Angeles actually engage with the city in a uniquely creative way. This foregrounds local, situated
knowledge over the technical expertise of urban planners, architects, and engineers.
Would it be folly to conflate the especial interest of the flneur in everyday life and the
mundane attention paid by commuters as they pass through the city? Surely ones plans for the
day impact ones experience of the places visited; the flneur observes the city from a place of
privilege, a place of leisure, the psychogeographic drifter has no 2 pm appointment. I think this
legacy should be challenged; in asking interlocutors to reflect on their bike rides through Los
Angeles, I acknowledge that they draw meaning from their everyday commutes, whether they
plan to create representations of them or not. Should some cyclists time and attention be more
valuable than others?

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Getting to the classed heart of the matter, elevating all cyclists rides to the cosmopolitan
status of flnerie helps me treat cyclists as comparable even though there are important
differences between those who bike out of economic necessity and those who bike for
ideological reasons. And I must pay attention to the intentions of cyclists in order to
acknowledge them as agents in a landscape ideologically hegemonized by the automobile. Many
of them would rather be driving. While I cant say that every cyclist rides by choice, I can say
that every cyclist rides through the city, developing what Shu-Mei Shih called vernacular
cosmopolitanisms (Shih 2007). It is this passage through a landscape dominated by drivers that
makes them flneurs, not their engagements with art or academe. This is my ethnographic
intervention in flnerie: instead of claiming the right to represent the vibrant life of the urban
poor, I suggest that they co-produce the city and then I investigate how they do this actively as
bicycling flneurs.
In framing bicycling as flnerie, and thus all cyclists as flneurs, Im trying to make what
has become an increasingly individualized project into something collective. Rehumanizing
mobility in Los Angeles is an ongoing project, and bicycles will play an important role in this.

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References
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2009[1971]. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Los Angeles: University
of California Press.
Baudelaire, Charles.
1970[1863]. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. New York: Phaidon.
Benjamin, Walter.
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Brodsly, David.
1981. L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Clifford, James.
1981. On Ethnographic Surrealism. Comparative Studies in Society and History
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De Certeau, Michel.
1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Horton, David, Paul Rosen, and Peter Cox, eds.
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