Taking Baudelaire as an example, 20th-century philosophers such as Walter

Benjamin,
Michel de Certeau, Henri Rousseau, Roland Barthes, and Henri Lefebvre adopt the
milieu of
“the streets” as a major subject of inquiry, questioning their connection to one’s
subjective
experience and identifying it as a space that encapsulates everyday existence, or
the “quotidien.”
Like Baudelaire, they isolate the act of walking as an incredibly important and
transformative
action. As Certeau argues, there is a rhetoric to the act of walking, and walking the
city streets is
“a form of utterance”; he claims, “to walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite
process of being
5
absent and in search of something of one’s own” (quoted in Sheringham 225).
Walking,
therefore, can be seen as a transformative activity, during which one is “absent”
and gains
“something of one’s own.” As Silverman states, “Like each word in language,
walking in the
streets should be about making connections between individual subjectivity and
outer ‘reality,’
between personal memory and public history. Walking should be a bridge between
the physical
topography of ‘outer’ space and the imaginary topography of ‘inner’ space” (82).
Much like 19th
century flânerie, walking the modern streets places one in direct contact with
history, both one’s
own personal history and that of the city itself.
For Jacques Réda, the “transformative process” that results from being confronted
with
these histories occurs through one’s “active” interaction with the inanimate streets;
the flâneur
and the streets themselves enter into a “reciprocal mobility” in which the streets
become an
“active partner” that acts upon the flâneur (Sheringham 331). As Rousseau
postulates, “our real
self is not entirely within us”; therefore, as Sheringham observes, if one opens
oneself to others
in the forum of everyday life, one “benefits from the open plasticity of authentic
human
existence,” and therefore realizes one’s “real self” (39). As Sheringham describes,
Breton
develops this idea further, explaining that “external reality provides a whole variety
of ‘screens’
that can serve to bring inner desire into the open, solving ‘the problem of the
passage from
subjectivity to objectivity.” (119). He continues, “subjective reality, our ‘true’ identity,
is not
hidden deep inside us so much as seated around the perceptual world, where we
can piece it
together from our sensory reactions” (Sheringham 71). Therefore, according to
these theorists,
the importance of walking and observing the city is intimately connected to self-
discovery and
self-formation, and in observing and taking in one’s surroundings, the flâneur not
only gains
experiences and memories, but forms his or her subjectivity as well.