Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media

217 Pages·2015·4.87 MB·English

by  Marit Grøtta

Baudelaire’s Media
Aesthetics
ii
Baudelaire’s Media
Aesthetics
The Gaze of the Flâneur and
19th-Century Media
Marit Grøtta
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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First published 2015
© Marit Grøtta, 2015
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The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo translated by Lloyd (2001) 1767w from
pp. 30–2, 36–41, 44–5, 49–52, 55–6, 59–63, 73–7, 87, 91, 98–101, 103–5.
By permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grøtta, Marit.
Baudelaire’s media aesthetics: the gaze of the Flâneur and 19th century media/Marit Grøtta.
pages cm
Summary: “Investigates the writings of Charles Baudelaire in light of 19th-century media
technology, with perspectives from Walter Benjamin and
Giorgio Agamben”– Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62892-440-4 (hardback)
1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867–Criticism and interpretation.
2. Mass media and literature. 3. French poetry–History and criticism. 4. Flaneurs. I. Title.
PQ2191.Z5G755 2015
841’.8–dc23
2014041009
ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2440-4
ePub: 978-1-6289-2441-1
ePDF: 978-1-6289-2443-5
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
ConTenTs
Acknowledgments vii
List of illustrations viii
Introduction 1
The gaze of the flâneur and nineteenth-century media 3
Paris: Capital of modernity 3
A lyric poet in the age of new media 6
Art and technology: Theories of mediation 10
Media technology and ideology criticism 10
Media technology and aesthetics: Theories of mediation 12
Dispositives: Frames of perception 15
Play in the era of technological reproducibility 17
Baudelaire’s media aesthetics 19
1 Newspapers 23
A duel: Journalism versus poetry 24
Newspaper aesthetics 26
Interaction: The circulation between literature and journalism 27
A dedicated newspaper reader 30
A letter to the editor 33
Making sense of modern life: Between anecdote and allegory 38
Poetry goes incognito 41
2 Photographs 47
The cult of images 48
Framed vision: Windows and photography 54
Reading/developing images 59
Visual desire: Portrait photography and fetishism 62
Traffic in souls: Arresting/escaping identity 66
Making images move 69
vi ConTenTs
3 Precinematic devices 73
Opening a new field of vision 74
Optical toys as initiation into art 80
The modern experience: Flickering life and movement 86
How to capture movement? 91
Kaleidoscopic vision 96
Virtual images: The visual attraction of modern life 100
4 Corporeality 103
The bodily apparatus: Perception and technology 104
The impulsion to act 107
Violence: Bodies in motion 109
Enjoying the crowd is an art 116
Multitude: Crowds, commonplaces, and mass communication 119
5 Toys 123
Interfaces: Toys, dispositives, and transitional objects 124
The toy fairy: A childhood memory 126
How toys come alive 130
The uncertain status of objects 135
Play and profanation 138
6 Media imagery and modernity 143
Baudelaire’s media aesthetics recapitulated 146
Media imagery in theories of modernity 148
Marx: The phantasmagoria of commodities 150
Benjamin: Paris as a phantasmagoria 152
Freud: The psyche as a photographic apparatus 156
Benjamin: Time as a photographer 159
Benjamin: The stereoscope and the dialectical image 161
Benjamin: The kaleidoscope must be smashed 163
Media aesthetics and modernity 165
Notes 169
Bibliography 193
Index 201
ACknowledGMenTs
My interest in Baudelaire began many years ago. It all started with his
prose poems and their relationship to newspapers, and over the years, the
scope of my research has expanded to include a wider range of Baudelaire’s
writings and a wider range of media. In Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics, my
research interests come together: my devotion to Baudelaire’s writings, my
fascination with nineteenth-century visual culture, my admiration for the
works of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, and my interest in the
category of “play” in aesthetic theory.
I would like to express my gratitude to those who offered support,
guidance, and inspiration during my work on this book. I thank the Faculty
of Humanities at the University of Oslo for awarding me a postdoctoral
fellowship that enabled me to research and write it. My heartfelt thanks to all
my colleagues at the University of Oslo for responding to my presentations
of the book’s material at various occasions during the writing process. I
am especially grateful to Christian Refsum and Ragnhild E. Reinton, who
read and commented on parts of the manuscript. Furthermore, I would like
to thank Arne Melberg, Jonathan Monroe, and Jonathan Culler for their
interest and advice in the early phase of this project. Also, my thanks to
Kjetil Jakobsen for sharing his knowledge of intermediality and to Knut
Ove Eliassen for sharing his knowledge of Foucault. I would further like
to thank my students at the University of Oslo, who followed my seminar
on Baudelaire, the flâneur, and the city, in Autumn 2013, and whose
dedication and enthusiasm were truly inspirational. In addition to this, I
am most grateful to Bloomsbury’s readers Catherine Nesci and Kathrin
Yacavone, whose feedback has been invaluable. Lastly, but certainly not
least, I would like to thank my editor at Bloomsbury, Haaris Naqvi, and his
editorial assistant, Mary Al-Sayed, for their advice and assistance during the
publication process.
An early version of Chapter 1 was published in Norsk litteraturvitenskapelig
tidsskrift, no. 1, 2004. An early version of Chapter 2 was published in
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol 41, nos. 1–2, Fall/Winter 2012–13
and is reused here with kind permission from the University of Nebraska
Press.
lisT oF illusTrATions
Figure 1 La Presse, August 26, 1862, comprising a series of prose poems
by Baudelaire preceded by a dedication to the newspaper’s editor,
Arsène Houssaye (Bibliothèque de France) 36
Figure 2 Portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Nadar (Photo (C) BnF, Dist.
RMN-Grand Palais/image BnF) 52
Figure 3 Kaleidoscopic images by David Brewster and Charles
Wheatstone 75
Figure 4 Joseph Plateau’s phenakistiscope 77
Figure 5 David Brewster’s stereoscope and the optical principle of its
operation 78
Figure 6 Phenakistiscope disks by Jean-Baptiste Madou 84
Figure 7 “Galloping horse” by Eadweard Muybridge. Example of
chronophotography (Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand
Palais/Patrice Schmidt) 94
Figure 8 “Coupé attelé d’un cheval allant vers la droite” by Constantin
Guys. (Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Michèle
Bellot) 98
Figure 9 The phantasmagoria of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson. Frontispiece
in: Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatives, scientifiques
et anecdotiques (Paris, 1831) 151
introduction
Montages, moving images, and three-dimensional (3-D) images are usually
considered features specific to twentieth-century aesthetics, developed after
the advent of film and the experiments of the avant-garde movements. Yet
these aesthetic techniques were also available in the nineteenth century due
to the invention of new media technology and the emergence of a new media
culture: newspapers presenting disconnected prose pieces on the pages,
precinematic toys producing effects of motion and 3-D vision, photographs
offering a new perception of the world, as well as numerous other media
phenomena. Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) experienced this media culture
more intensely than any other writer of his day. Although he maintained
ambivalence with respect to the new media, he was fascinated by their
techniques and sensitive to the ways in which they changed our perception.
My contention is that that Baudelaire’s aesthetics can be conceived, to a
large degree, as a media aesthetics, and that montages, moving images, and
3-D images are features that are central to Baudelaire’s aesthetics.
Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics is a book about Baudelaire’s writing and
its connection to the new media technology emerging in the nineteenth
century. It explores not merely the forms of art, but also the forms of media
technology, considering the way they shape and guide our perception of
the world. It is thus a book that deals with literature, perception, and the
configuration of the senses in the first phase of modernity. The book takes
as its point of departure the observation that there is a gap between literary
and visual approaches to Baudelaire. In literary studies, Baudelaire’s writings
have long been recognized as masterpieces of the modernist period—he is
a benchmark one cannot overlook and an influence one cannot deny. Yet,
in cinema and media studies, Baudelaire is also a prominent figure. Inspired
by Walter Benjamin’s remarkable writings on Baudelaire, researchers in
these fields have recognized the figure of the flâneur as the emblem of urban
spectatorship and a precursor to twentieth-century conceptions of virtual
and mediated vision.1 Still, in cinema and media studies, Baudelaire has
largely been seen through Benjamin’s perspective, and he has been hailed
as Benjamin’s muse and source. Baudelaire “himself” has in fact remained
a minor figure whose name tends to appear in opening paragraphs and
footnotes.