Methodologies of Vision

The visual worlds of Baudelaire and Certeau can both be found in this image of the Moscow International Business Center (also known as Moscow-City).  In an over-expression of both of their theories, the towering structures loom over the flat, expansive city, juxtaposing the "solar Eye" and the world of the flâneur.

“For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.”

-Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (9)

“To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp.  One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to anonymous law…When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators…His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was “possessed” into a text that lies before one’s eyes”

-Michel de Certeau, “The Practice of Everyday Life” (111).

The grand Bazaar in Istanbul, which came into existence after three covered markets gradually grew together, offers a nice example of how urban sites develop horizontally.  Setting up one's stall or shop in this cavernous maze is somewhat reminiscent of Baudelaire's phrase "to set up house in the heart of the multitude."

Pertinent to any academic discipline with a non-empirical component, the question of vision—the angle and position from which one examines—has been intertwined with urban studies even before its inception.  Preceding urban studies was urban life, and in the two above quotes from pieces of writing on the more quotidian aspects of cities, one can see distinct methodologies of vision beginning to form despite the similar subject matter.  While the flâneur of Charles Baudelaire relishes in vision from within the crowd, a sort of communion with the city in all its complexity and transience, Certeau distances his spectator from the surface world.  His voyeur has a “solar Eye, looking down like a god,” and dislikes being “possessed” unlike the flâneur, for whom this word would likely take on its spiritual definition (Certeau 111).  A natural consequence of living in the city, the question of whether to look at the city from within or from above proves to be the crux of urban studies.  Any urban theorist must reconcile the presence of both gazes as choosing only one limits the discipline from the start.  However, on an even closer inspection, it is unclear if the two gazes are actually so diametrically opposed in the first place as each gaze is only made possible by using urban form as a scaffolding: the public labyrinth of the city at ground level for Baudelaire, framing the city in alleys and crowds, and the World Trade center for Certeau, lifting the viewer above the fray to enjoy a privileged view.  In this hybridization of the human and the urban, gaze becomes less anthropological, empirical, or aesthetic than something more uniquely metropological.  Despite reasoning to this term in a discussion of sight, the term metropological, by virtue of its inclusion of the inanimate, may not be a term of vision at all but a study of visual obstruction.