The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  The modernists of the street, for their part, cultivate a combination of distraction and concentration that is the inverse of Eliot’s commuters’. The modernists of the street, too, are fixated on their feet, in the sense of being actively committed to the creative possibilities with which simply walking about the streets are replete; but this attitude entails seeing their feet, instead, as the fundamental means of opening up their embodied consciousness to what Berman, to cite the subtitle of another of his books, captures in terms of ‘the experience of modernity’.17 Their state of distraction, their refusal to focus on any one thing amongst the ‘harmony of irrelevant facts’, whether this be their feet or the destination to which they are thoughtfully or thoughtlessly travelling, is the precondition for a relationship of profound openness and receptiveness towards the city, one that effectively frees them (in Miller’s language again) to attend to the accidental and the incidental, to the dreams and dramas of the street. Their consciousness is in a state of distraction that, as in a dream, entails a certain fugitive form of concentration.

  Here perhaps is an instance of what Benjamin, groping towards an understanding of the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility, and thinking in particular of the mentality inculcated by both cinema and urban architecture in the early twentieth century, calls ‘reception in distraction’.18 The modernists of the street promote a mode of attention that is neither that of the bourgeois spectator absorbed by the artefact before which he stands in contemplation, nor that of the mass of proletarian spectators seeking escape through the cinema screen. They distinguish ‘productive distraction’, as Howard Eiland characterizes it in an article on Benjamin, from ‘mere distraction’; ‘distraction as a spur to new ways of perceiving’ from ‘distraction as a skewing of attention, or as abandonment to diversion.’19 Walking is, precisely, an act of productive distraction. Or it should be.

  In contrast to the masses condemned by Eliot in ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936), who are ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’, these heroes of modernity use their alertness to the intrusion of accidents or random incidents in the street to distract them from their distraction.20 Benjamin mentions that G. K. Chesterton, in his book on Dickens, ‘has masterfully captured the man who roams the big city lost in thought’. Benjamin’s point here is that the pedestrian who is ‘lost in thought’ is not for this reason necessarily immune to the city’s stimulations or provocations. On the contrary, he is utterly alive to them. Indeed, the most ‘revealing representations of the big city’, as Benjamin avers, have come from ‘those who have traversed the city absently, as it were, lost in thought or worry’.21 Concentration in distraction.

  Distracted consciousness is of course a necessary, if not compulsory means of coping with the ceaselessly demanding, stimulating conditions of city life. It protects us more or less effectively from what the German sociologist Georg Simmel, in his seminal essay on ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), enumerates as ‘the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions’ that constitute ‘the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates’. Simmel famously characterizes this psychic defence mechanism in terms of the ‘blasé attitude’ that – mirroring the levelling effects of exchange-value in the capitalist economy – renders everything ‘in an evenly flat and grey tone’ and thus safely neutralizes the images and impressions with which the city permanently bombards its inhabitants.22

  In effect, Simmel is saying that if we don’t learn spontaneously to adopt this attitude, if we don’t walk about the metropolis in a state of distraction, insulated from the danger of what he nicely terms an attitude of ‘indiscriminate suggestibility’, we will collapse in the face of its monstrous colourfulness and multi-dimensionality.23 Constant attentiveness galvanizes us to the point at which, crackling like electricity, our nerve ends finally burn out. It takes a heroic constitution, it still needs to be insisted, to live modernity.

  In this specific sense, then, distracted walking is imperative in the conditions of the modern city. The pedestrian must be ‘lost in thought,’ as Benjamin puts it, if they are to survive its onslaughts. This is why the phrase ‘unlost steps’, enclosing that uncancelled allusion to the lost, in contrast to cognate formulations like ‘found’ or ‘saved’ steps, should be retained if we are to understand the dynamics of walking intrinsic to those writers, including Dickens, Chesterton and Benjamin, who are modernists of the street.

  In the twenty-first century, however, the phrase ‘distracted walking’ has acquired a rather different, frankly unsettling, significance. For today it denotes the widespread practice among pedestrians – sometimes dubbed ‘smombies’, smartphone zombies – of blundering through the streets and crossing roads while absorbed in their phones. This practice routinely causes fatal traffic accidents. The National Safety Council has for example indicated that in the United States nearly 6,000 pedestrians were struck and killed by motor vehicles in 2017, a number that seems to be rising each year at least in part because of people’s dependence on using smartphones in the street.24

  As the industrial engineers Jun-Ming Lu and Yi-Chin Lo have proposed in a preliminary analysis of what they identify as the ‘gaze behavior’ of people using smartphones, it is the ‘need for multitasking’ that has driven this rise in ‘distracted walking’, a habit that results in ‘behavioral changes in body movements, gaze patterns, allocation of attention resource and reaction time to unexpected stimulus’. They further report that ‘the impaired situation awareness and the occurrence of inattentional blindness could be also some of the reasons of accidents’.25

  But, as phrases such as ‘impaired situation awareness’ and ‘inattentional blindness’ indicate clearly enough, in spite of their clotted quality, ‘distracted walking’ has other, less material effects. Most importantly, it insulates the individual pedestrian from the sensorium of the city, impoverishing their everyday experience of its physical and social life by funnelling their attention through the screen. This screen, it might be claimed, serves as little more than a portal into the virtual space of what Guy Debord, in ways that seem startlingly relevant once again, described as ‘the spectacle’, a regime of commodity relations that he summarizes as ‘capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image’.26

  The spectacular virtual space of the smartphone screen, whether it functions as the domain of work or leisure, of production or consumption, or whether it deconstructs precisely this distinction, is structured by the profit motive. The ‘addiction to distraction’ to which the Frankfurt School thinker Siegfried Kracauer alludes in The Mass Ornament, which ‘fills [the working masses’] day fully without making it fulfilling’, here reaches its apotheosis. ‘The form of free-time busy-ness,’ Kracauer continues, ‘necessarily corresponds to the form of business.’27 Pedestrians’ use of their hand-held devices to send emails or texts, even to purchase products online, conforms exactly to the commodified logic of the society of the spectacle in its latest phase of development. If the flâneur, according to Baudelaire, was a ‘kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness’, then the distracted walker is a smartphone endowed with consciousness.28

  What are the consequences of this conditioning for the lives of individuals and collectives in cities today? For the city’s ‘laws of collective motion’, in Carpentier’s lovely formulation? The urbanist Adam Greenfield has recently argued that ‘when someone moves through the world while simultaneously engaged in some remote interaction,’ the two spatial experiences, one actual, one virtual, compete directly with each other. ‘Only one mode of spatial experience can be privileged at a given time,’ he explains; ‘and if it’s impossible to participate fully in both of these realms at once, one of them must lose out.’29 Inevitably, Greenfield insists, it is the actual that in these circumstances capitulates to the virtual.

  The example Greenfield offers, though he doesn’t use the term, is that of
‘distracted walking’:

  Watch what happens when a pedestrian first becomes conscious of receiving a call or a text message, the immediate disruption they cause in the flow of movement as they pause to respond to it. Whether the call is hands-free or otherwise doesn’t really seem to matter; the cognitive and emotional investment we make in it is what counts, and this investment is generally so much greater than that we make in our surroundings that street life clearly suffers as a result.30

  Street life suffers … The community of people on the street, even if this amounts to little more than the sum of those individuals that happen provisionally to be present in its precincts at a particular time, is undermined by the introversion fostered by those virtual spatial experiences delivered by smartphones and other mobile devices. The collective life of the street is thus fatally vitiated.

  Certainly, in distracting pedestrians, this technology renders the relatively benign, democratic sort of surveillance once advocated by Jane Jacobs in the interests of making cities safer, which was dependent on what she called the community’s ‘eyes on the street’, almost impossible.31 In the contemporary city, the eyes on screens often outnumber those on the street. And this redirection of attention makes our surroundings susceptible to malign, undemocratic forms of surveillance.

  Staring at a phone, people fail to notice the increasingly authoritarian mechanisms through which the state and various private interests police their activities as citizens and monitor and manipulate them as consumers. They become the twenty-first-century equivalent of what nineteenth-century Parisiens knew as les badauds, those onlookers or ‘gawkers’ whose gormless attitude to events taking place in the streets was credulous and irredeemably passive.32 Except that, where les badauds were senselessly, unreflexively fixated on actual, physical events, and often spontaneously coalesced into crowds because of the spectacle, distracted walkers are senselessly, unreflexively fixated on virtual ones, and remain almost completely atomized. No doubt this makes today’s pedestrian monads – who only seem spontaneously to form collectives when, with sociopathic calm, they stop and use their phones to film some horrifying drama as it unfolds before them – even more susceptible to more or less covert forms of manipulation than their Victorian predecessors.

  Greenfield usefully lists some of the ‘networked information-gathering devices’ that – in addition to CCTV, which is a comparatively, indeed deliberately, visible presence on the street – have already been implemented in public space:

  cameras, load cells and other devices for sensing the presence of pedestrians and vehicles; automated gunshot-detection microphones and other audio-spectrum surveillance grids; advertisements and vending machines equipped with biometric sensors; and the indoor micropositioning systems known as ‘beacons,’ which transact directly with smartphones.

  In these and other more or less surreptitious ways, the ‘contemporary streetscape’, like our homes and our bodies, has become ‘comprehensively instrumented’.33 To distracted walkers, no doubt, the intrusive devices listed above are more redolent of a vaguely distant dystopian future than of the hidden matrix of everyday life, commodified and instrumentalized as it is, in the present.

  Pedestrians’ cognitive and emotional investment in the virtual domain thus has grave social and political, as well as aesthetic, implications. It desensitizes them to the latest modes of surveillance. Moreover, it also prevents them from perceiving the insidious ways in which, physically, legally and symbolically, their cityscapes are currently being altered and appropriated by capital. Distracted walkers insulate themselves – to potentially calamitous effect at both an individual and a collective level – not only from its politics but from its economics.

  When we use our smartphones as we circumambulate the streets, perhaps simply in order to navigate them with a virtual map, we fail to notice the ways in which public space is covertly being colonized by corporate interests and reinvented as an archipelago of private spaces to which ordinary citizens have at best limited access. Recently, as the urban anthropologist Setha Low summarizes it, and to an accelerating extent, ‘the boundaries of what is private or public have become less clear, and increasingly incursions by privatization and other neoliberal practices have been transforming public space, placing it back in corporate or commercial hands.’34 There is a sense, then, in which the steps traced by distracted walkers in cities today, in so far as they are rendered automatic or semi-automatic by a persistent displacement of mental attention from the physical to the virtual, do entail a serious cost. These footsteps, to paraphrase Sheringham, are emblematic of the unfree everyday as opposed to the free everyday. Truly, they are lost steps.

  The philosopher Michel de Certeau, in his famous chapter on ‘Walking in the City’ from The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), outlining a ‘rhetorics’ of pedestrian spatial practice, provides some of the terms in which, for all that it is a more recent phenomenon, ‘distracted walking’ might be both understood and, ultimately, combated. ‘Distracted walking’ is perhaps an extreme, malign instance of what de Certeau – in the course of his attempt to theorize the distinction between authoritarian, aerial perspectives on urban space, on the one hand, and demotic, pedestrian perspectives, on the other – calls at one point the ‘opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city’.

  De Certeau conceptualizes the reinscription of the city that is enacted by footsteps, at the level of the pavement, as a horizontal alternative to the all-seeing or panoptic control of urban space embodied in those ‘geometrical’ and ‘geographical’ views of the streets that he associates with the vertical perspective of corporate buildings such as the World Trade Center. Naturally, de Certeau was not in a position to understand the extent to which, in the twenty-first century, the opaque and blind mobility of pedestrians, in so far as it corresponds to the ‘impaired situation awareness’ and ‘inattentional blindness’ of distracted walkers, reinforces rather than resists the disciplinary disposition of space. But his insistence on foregrounding the ‘migrational, or metaphorical, city’, which he identifies with walkers, as a means of disrupting ‘the clear text of the planned and readable city’, points to how a kind of ‘undistracted walking’ might be fostered.35

  It comes down to cultivating an undistracted way of walking that mobilizes what de Certeau calls ‘surreptitious creativities’. This self-consciously undistracted walking, alert to the operations of capital and its surveillance mechanisms in the street, and committed if possible to subverting them, insinuates ‘a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden, or permitted meaning’ imposed by the ‘functionalist and historical order of movement’. It reinvents urban space not simply by treading it attentively, or in a state of ‘productive distraction’, but by recovering memories and stories of the public, collectively lived city that private interests seek systematically to eliminate. It also preserves and reinvents it, of course, by militantly defending these public spaces when they come directly under threat from private development. Undistracted walking, to appropriate de Certeau’s words once again, carves creative, subversive spaces, equivalent to ‘ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning’ in discourse, from ‘the accepted framework, the imposed order’.36

  ‘Haunted places are the only ones people can live in,’ de Certeau concludes, adding that, because they accommodate memories and secrets, these places invert ‘the schema of the Panopticon’. Instead of distracted walking, then, we need a kind of walking that creates and cultivates these haunted places. In a double sense, we need to haunt the streets of the city in order to preserve and protect and reinvent them. In order to make them accountable to those who inhabit them rather than those who seek to monetize them, we need both to frequent them as familiar places and, like spectres, to disturb them and make them seem unfamiliar. If they are to remain our homes – the word ‘haunt’, incidentally, is related to the Old English hām, meaning ‘home’ – the streets need to be rendered unhomely. We need to be
committed to what Virginia Woolf, in a justly famous essay of that title from 1930, called ‘Street Haunting’.37

  In the fight for the city’s future, we need to function like ghosts. In this way, through undistracted walking, we might be able to redeem all those lost steps we currently trace through the city while reasserting the value of those unlost steps that the modernists of the street promoted. Let’s haunt the streets …

  It is from a conviction that the politics of walking, along with its aesthetics or poetics, have recently acquired a renewed sense of urgency and importance – principally because of the distracted forms it frequently seems to take – that this book returns to the pedestrian practices of, roughly, the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

  The Walker explores a series of texts, arranged for the most part chronologically, in which more or less canonical authors, from Poe and Dickens in the early 1840s to Ray Bradbury in the early 1950s, explore the significance of solitary walking, especially in a metropolitan setting. They offer what Susan Sontag, writing about Robert Walser, author of ‘The Walk’ (1917), refers to in a felicitous phrase as ‘portraits of consciousness walking about in the world’.38 The book’s premise, then, is that the different kinds of walking these writers represent in their prose fiction and non-fiction have a good deal to tell us about the experience of modernity, specifically capitalist modernity, that has shaped everyday lives over the last century and a half; and that continues to shape our everyday lives.

  I regard all of these authors as modernists of the street (even though only Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf are commonly classified as ‘modernists’). They are modernists of the street because, like Breton and Benjamin, they are committed to the idea that, in a society in which individuals who travel by foot seem increasingly outdated, the pedestrian’s experience is peculiarly symptomatic of certain social tensions. The walker, for these authors, is a sort of ‘indicator species’ – a term biologists use to designate an organism whose health reveals the qualitative conditions of life that prevail in a given environment. The pedestrian’s experience is for them of diagnostic value in their ongoing attempt to understand the ways in which capitalist modernity both alienates and oppresses people and, conversely, offers them unprecedented opportunities for escaping or transcending that alienation or oppression in creative, experimental forms.