AtD and Chicago as "urban utopia" #2

[Paul Nightingale]

Curtis M. Hinsley (1996) "Strolling through the Colonies" in Michael P.
Steinberg ed Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, Cornell University
Press

Hinsley's reading of the Chicago Fair is based, in particular, on Benjamin's
description of the flâneur:

"The effect is one of linear equivalences, as successive image experiences
move film-like past the stroller. The fairgoer does not stop to inquire
deeply but, rather, strolls, window shopping in the exposition's department
store of exotic cultures. The White City's Midway was originally intended to
be a covered arcade, an attempt to combine the interiority of the department
store and the exteriority of the street, inviting Benjamin's flâneur to
stroll through the colonies: 'The bazaar is the last hangout of the flâneur.
In the beginning the street had become an interieur for him, now this
interieur turned into a street, and he roamed through the labyrinth as he
had once roamed through the labyrinth of the city.' In the labyrinthine side
streets of the Midway the exotic and the forbidden erotic finally emerge as
commodity." (127-128, Benjamin quotation from Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric
Poet in the Ear of High Capitalism)

Also interesting, given that Loell notes the absence of the Ferris Wheel
from painterly representation, is the role of the "panoptic" Wheel as a
vantage point (139).