The Text

The Mobilized and Virtual Gaze in Modernity: Flaneur/Flaneuse by Anne Friedberg

Anne Friedberg’s essay maps the genealogy of the ‘virtual’ from the panopticon through the diorama. By using the 18th century inventions of seeing Friedberg positions the rise of mobility of the vision technology as critical to our conceptions of the visuality of the virtual. Friedberg argues that the…”the trope of the flanuerie delineates a mode of visual practice coincident with – and antithetical to-the panoptic gaze…” (396). In a sense, she is arguing that the technological advances in vision technology such as the diorama, and the panorama, enabled mobility of the vision apparatus. This development for Friedberg is in dialectic to the panoptic technology of the 17th century, which created a power structure of viewership, which Friedberg frames through Foucault. In addition, the flanuer of the mobile technology while creating mobility also problematized our conceptions of viewership. Here Friedberg writes…The observer became immobile, passive, ready to receive the construction of virtual reality placed in front of his or her unmoving body…”(403). In a sense, although the panopticon was fixed, the body was active, with the emergence of vision technology that utilized the flanuer; the body becomes fixed, and passively awaits rather than actively engages.

The Technology

18th Daguerre Diorama

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon

External Sites of Interest

Anne Friedberg at USC

Jeremy Bentham Panopticon

Daguerre's Diorama