Page 93 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

account in any investigation of the cultural, it does not determine it nor invalidate
the power audiences have as producers of meaning at the level of consumption.
• Associated concepts Active audience, consumption, popular culture, reading,
70 resistance, television.
• Tradition(s) Cultural studies, hermeneutics, Marxism, poststructuralism.
• Reading Fiske, J. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman.

Flâneur The name given to a crucial figure of modernism as it emerged in the late
nineteenth century and early twentieth century. As understood by Baudelaire, the
flâneur or stroller was one of the heroes of modern life. A flâneur was held to be an
urban, contemporary and stylish person who walked the anonymous spaces of the
modern city. Here he experienced the complexity, disturbances and confusions of the
streets with their shops, displays, images and variety of people. This perspective
emphasizes the urban character of modernism. The flâneur took in the fleeting beauty
and vivid, if transitory, impressions of the crowds, seeing everything anew in its
immediacy yet achieving a certain detachment from it. The idea of the flâneur directs
our attention towards the way in which the urban landscape has become aestheticized
through architecture, billboards, shop displays, street signs etc., and through the
fashionable clothing, hairstyles, make-up etc. of the people who inhabit this world.
It has been argued by some feminist writers that the flâneur was a male figure
who walked spaces from which women were largely excluded and as such
demonstrates the deeply gendered character of the modernist experience. The
adventures of the flâneur and of modernism were one of male-coded public spaces
from which women were excluded (for example, the boulevards and cafés) or
entered only as objects for male consumption. Thus, the flâneur’s gaze was
frequently erotic, and women were the objects of that gaze.
Links Aesthetics, city, modernism, modernity, postmodernism

Foucault,Michel (1926–1984) Foucault is a major figure in French philosophy whose
work is associated with the ideas of poststructuralism and which has become a very
significant influence within contemporary cultural studies. Influenced by Nietzsche,
Foucault explored the varying discursive practices that exert power over human
bodies but without any commitment to any underlying structural order or finally
determinate power. Foucault attempts to identify the historical conditions and
determining rules of the formation of discourses and the operation of
power/knowledge in social practice that achieves the ordering of meaning. Much
of Foucault’s work is concerned with the historical investigation of power as a
dispersed capillary woven into the fabric of the social order that is not simply
repressive but is also productive (of, for example, subjectivity).
• Associated concepts Archaeology, discourse, episteme, genealogy,
governmentality, power/knowledge, subject position.
• Tradition(s) Postmodernism, poststructuralism.
• Reading Foucault, M. (1979) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Truth.
London: Penguin Lane.