Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXII • Številka/Number 2 • 2001 • 111-126 
WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE URBAN LABYRINTH 
H E I N Z PAETZOLD 
The main purpose of my essay is to discuss the relevance and fruitfulness of 
the description of cityscape as labyrinth. Within his city-centred cultural theory, 
Walter Benjamin, gave a new understanding to this powerful image which 
emerged in ancient Minoan culture and ancient Greek mythology, and which 
found a widespread return during the seventeenth century. Today, many 
theoreticians, writers, artists, designers, composers and architects are still 
inspired by the concept of the labyrinth. I cannot give a full account of this 
multi-faceted, puzzling history; GustavRené Hocke (1963), Karl Kerenyi (1950) 
and Helmut Kern (1999), among others, were better prepared for doing so 
than I. However, from the concept of the labyrinth, Benjamin made one of 
the clues for unders t and ing genuinely modern urban experiences: to 
experience urban 'landscape' as labyrinth. What were his motives? I will be 
arguing that, within Benjamin's cultural theory, the concept of the labyrinth 
is closely related to a truely urban cultural figure who emerged in 19"' century: 
the flâneur. 
Although a major part of my essay focuses on Benjamin, I am speaking 
for our times as well. Can we give a new meaning to the two afore-mentioned 
crucial notions in Benjamin's thought, or do they remain within the historical 
text? But let me begin by reminding the reader of some central features of 
philosophical reflections on landscape, before shifting from landscape to 
cityscape. 
I 
I take as my starting point the assumption that both landscape and 
cityscape have to be conceptualized not as pure givens, in the sense of natural 
phenomena, but rather as cultural phenomena. There is always an embodied 
subjectivity involved as their condition of possibility. Theorizers of landscape, 
H E I N Z PAETZOI.II 
ranging f rom Francesco Petrarch to Alexander von Humbold t , Carl Gustav 
Carus and Georg Simmel, share the conviction that landscape is an eminently 
modern phenomenon which presupposes an individualized and f ragmented 
subjectivity. Landscape exists only to the extent that there is a subjectivity 
experiencing and constituting it. A natural environment becomes a landscape 
only in so far as it is viewed and looked at. It is not p roduced by the spatially 
and temporally unmoving subjectivity, but by the moving body. Landscape is 
constituted by a culturally shaped subjectivity. 
One consequence of this is that making a landscape out of a natural 
environment is underpinned by culturally produced imagery - by paintings, 
for instance. We may experience the countryside f rom the perspective of a 
Camille Corot, a Caspar David Friedrich, a William Turner , a Jan van Goyen 
or a Vermeer van Delft. The act of constituting landscape consists in continuous 
shifts of horizons and perspectives due to the changing positions of the moving 
body. The resulting perspective view is intrinsically linked to those views which 
follow. Edmund Husserl used to talk of ' retentions ' and 'protent ions ' . 
For purposes of my following discourse, I would like to distinguish between 
two different lines in the theorizing of landscape. Drawing on Francesco 
Petrarch, Alexander von Humboldt , Carl Gustav Carus and Georg Simmel, 
the German Hegelian philosopher Joachim Ritter argued, more than one 
generation ago, that the experience of landscape is based upon m o d e r n 
society's rule and control over nature. The aesthetic pleasure of experiencing 
the natural surrounding as landscape is a specific, secularized p h e n o m e n o n 
of modern society. The contemplative view of the cosmos, the metaphysical 
' theoria tou kosmou', returns under the conditions of mode rn society in a 
completely changed meaning. What, in anc ien t times, be longed to the 
privileges of Greek priests or Roman augurs, and then was secularized as a 
metaphysical activity of philosophers, becomes, in the context of mode rn 
society, an activity performed by everyone, during leisure time. For Ritter, the 
experience of landscape is, in a word, a kind of return to metaphysical totality 
by way of aesthetic reconciliation (Ritter 1974). 
Adorno's thoughts, my second line, are closer to Benjamin. Adorno revises 
Ritter's theory on two points. First, landscape is to be conceived as natural 
history. We esteem in cultural l andscape the Utopian f igu ra t ion of a 
reconciliation of nature and culture. We project our longing for reconciliation 
onto landscape. Cultural landscape is n o t a p u r e given b u t a Utopian 
semblance. 
Second, images of cultural landscape are images o f ' a memen to ' (AT, p. 
102; AT, p. 96). Historical memory and historical mourn ing must be invested 
in order to serve the Utopian figure of reconciliation between culture and 
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WALTER BENJAMIN AND TIIE URBAN LABYRIN TH 
nature . Adorno stresses the discursive continuity between the aesthetic 
experience of nature in cultural landscape, and the aesthetic experience of 
modernist works of art (compare my essay Paetzold 1997, especially pp. 216-
222). Both have in common the fact that they are images. Nature appearing 
as beautiful is not conceived as an object of action. The purposes of self-
preservation are transcended in both the work of art and the aesthetic 
experience of landscape (AT, p. 103; AT, pp. 96-97). 
Both the theories I have referred to, from Ritter and Adorno, locate the 
exper ience of landscape outside the precincts of the city. During the 
nineteenth century however, there emerged an experience of landscape within 
the urban space. For most cultural theoreticians, Paris was the place where 
this shift occurred from landscape outside the city, to cityscape (compare 
Seel 1991, pp. 230-33). Louis-Sébastien Mercier is supposed to be one of the 
first authors looking at Paris as a 'picture', as a 'scene' (Mazlish 1994, p. 46). 
That is to say, Mercier transposed elements of Denis Diderot's concept of the 
theatre stage to the urban surrounding. 
II 
After these preliminary remarks, I can now enter the thematic analysis of 
this essay. 
As my point of departure, I take a frame of notions which was introduced 
by Benjamin. It is the correlation between, on the one hand, the landscape of 
the modern metropolis, which is labelled as a kind of labyrinth, and on the 
other hand, the strolling activity of a specifically urban cultural figure which 
emerged in modernity: the flâneur. 
In his "Arcades Project", Benjamin wrote: "The city is the realization of 
that ancient dream of humanity, the labyrinth. It is this reality to which the 
flâneur, without knowing it, devotes himself' (Benjamin 1999, p. 429, M6a,4. 
Compare p. 839, F°13, F°19). 
As Kern convincingly has shown in details, the labyrinth as a culturally 
powerful symbol underwent two historical transformations. Its original 
meaning as it surfaced in ancient Minoan culture on Crete was that of a ritual 
group dance which made of young girls and boys grown-ups by relating them 
to society and the cosmos at large. According to Kern it is important to 
understand that the labyrinth-dance was graphically drawn as a visual token 
(Kern 1999, p. 19). The first shift in the meaning of this symbol occured 
when it was absorbed in ancient Greek and Roman mythology alluding to 
Troy, as we can find in Homer 's "Iliad", later in Virgil's "Aeneid", Plutarch, 
1 1 3 
H E I N Z PAETZOI.II 
Ovid, Strabo and others. Ancient Roman culture brought about the second 
transformation of the labyrinth's meaning. The ancient Romans related the 
labyrinth-dance to the act of founding a city (Kern 1999, p. 114). As we will see 
later in this essay, Benjamin picked up especially this meaning but gave a new 
twist to it in that he attributed it not to the foundation of the city, but to the 
modern urban everyday. At any rate Benjamin took on the city-relatedness of 
the symbol of the labyrinth which belongs, to repeat, to ancient Romans' legacy. 
To come back to the Benjaminian flâneur-labyrinth constellation: In that 
the flâneur experiences the urban scene as a "cityscape", as Benjamin literally 
says, the "old Romantic sentiment for landscape" is replaced by a "new 
Romantic conception of landscape", the "cityscape" (Benjamin 1999, p. 420, 
M2a, 1). Whereas the old Romantic experience of landscape was spatially 
located outside the city, the metropolis has become "the properly sacred 
ground of flânerie" (Benjamin 1999, p. 421, M2a, 1). The flâneur, Benjamin 
argues, explores the cityscape as a dialectic between "the interior as street 
(luxury), and the street as interior (misery)" (Benjamin 1999, p. 909). That is 
to say, the flâneur is, first and foremost, interested in the "social space of the 
metropolis" (Frisby 1994, p. 84). The "sensational phenomenon of space", 
"the 'colportage phenomenon of space'", the "Kolportagephânomen des 
Raumes" is the flâneur's "basic experience" (Benjamin 1999, p. 418, Mia, 3). 
Although Benjamin's use of the notions of the flâneur and of flânerie is 
often ambivalent and contradictory, I would like to suggest the following 
interpretation. The simplistic origins of flânerie exercised by the 'physiologists' 
(M. Bon-Homme's "Le Flâneur au saison" [1806], Louis Huart 's "Physiologie 
du Flâneur" [1841] among others) were set aside by writers like Honoré de 
Balzac and Victor Hugo, who celebrated the "artist-flâneur", and of course by 
Charles Baudelaire, who became Benjamin's favorite model (Ferguson 1994, 
pp. 22-42; Burton 1994, pp. 2-6). They - especially Balzac and Baudelaire -
revealed the reality of the modern metropolis as an endangered, contradictory 
totality. 
Ifwe compose Benjamin's various reflections on flânerie into one concept, 
then it could be shown that he had a cultural history in mind leading from 
the soothing cityscapes of the physiologists through the urban allegories of 
Baudelaire, and ending in Baron de Haussmann. The dialectic of flânerie 
which had related the interior of the houses to the public spaces of the streets, 
and which had its urban site in the arcades, came to an end. It was caused by 
the introduction of the grand boulevards of Haussmann, on the one hand, 
and by the emergence of the department stores on the other. Both these 
shifts in the urban fabric destroyed the sources of flânerie which were, to 
reiterate, deriving from the entwinement of the interior as house and as street. 
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WALTER BENJAMIN AND TIIE URBAN LABYRIN TH 
In "Charles Baudelaire" (1938), Benjamin gave the following description 
of the highlight and decline of flânerie: "If the arcade is the classical form of 
the interior, which is how the flâneur sees the street, the department store is 
the form of the interior's decay. The bazaar (Warenhaus) is the last hangout of 
the flâneur. If in the beginning the street had become an interior for him, 
now this interior turned into a street, and he roamed through the labyrinth of 
merchandise (Labyrinth der Ware) as he had once through the labyrinth of 
the city" (Benjamin 1973, p. 54). 
It is noticeable here that Benjamin relates the strolling activity of the 
flâneur to the labyrinthian structure of the city. According to Benjamin, the 
flâneur experiences the crowds of the modern metropolis as a kind of shield 
but also as an object of observation. The flâneur is not only drawn to the 
streets and their architecture, but also to the social spaces where crowds gather, 
like railway stations, exhibition halls and department stores. The flâneur 
explores the 'labyrinth of the populace' , the 'human labyrinth' of the 
metropolitan masses. 
As Benjamin says: The "masses" "stretch before the flâneur as a veil: they 
are the newest drug for the solitary. - Second, they efface all traces of the 
individual: they are the newest asylum for the reprobate and the proscript. — 
Finally, within the labyrinth of the city, the masses are the newest and most 
inscrutable labyrinth." (Benjamin 1999, p. 446, M16,3). 
I would now like to summarize my discussion of the flâneur, before moving 
on to look at the notion of the labyrinth. It is my contention, that we have to 
understand flânerie as an ambivalent cultural and political activity, which 
emerged in the run of the nineteenth century, but continues into our own 
times. The flâneur is related to the detective in sharing the latter's concern 
with observing the crowds in the streets. For this reason, a flâneur could become 
an agent of the state's secret service. The flâneur shares with the photographer 
an interest in the visual culture of city life. He produces literature and works 
of art, as exemplified by Baudelaite, Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe, 
and also Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Flânerie is also the origin of modern 
sociology. The genre of urban ethnography, in particular, is rooted in the 
urban activity of strolling, as the examples of Siegfried Kracauer, Franz Hessel, 
Georg Simmel, Robert Ezard Park, and Henry Mayhew can show (see Frisby 
1994). For my argument here, it is important to recognize that flânerie is not 
just strolling around and gaping, but it transforms urban observation into 
cultural work. If we include Benjamin himself in the group of passionate 
flâneurs, then we can conclude that flânerie is related to a critical cultural 
theory of city life. As Chris Jenks wrote: "The flâneur, though grounded in 
everyday life, is an analytic form, a narrative device, an attitude towards 
1 1 5 
H E I N / . PAETZOUJ 
knowledge and its social context." (Jenks 1996, p. 148). The moving body is 
involved here, strolling through the labyrinth of the modern metropolis, but 
the phenomenological experiences must be linked to the symbolic structure 
of culture. 
Speaking in terms of philosophy, we may argue that the flâneur portrayed 
by Benjamin is a post-metaphysical subjectivity. He is to be clearly distinguished 
from Plato's Socrates in that he has no guaranteed community to whom to 
address his reflections. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 'promeneur ' was as lonely as 
the flâneur, but found his moral identity at the borderline between city and 
countryside. Nietzsche's Zarathustra did not even enter the metropolitan city. 
But insofar as the flâneur depends upon walking, he is also clearly distinguished 
from Rorty's postmodern ironist. At the end of my essay I shall come back to 
this point. 
Although the flâneur takes the distancing position of the visual observer, 
he is by no means the dispassionate cognitive subjectivity of modernity, but 
rather the organ of modern culture. Contrary to the modern urbanist whose 
theorizing of the city aims at practical intervention in the design of the city -
if we think of Ildefonso Cerda, Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann and Le 
Corbusier - the flâneur attempts images of modernity. A flâneur might be a 
poet, a painter, a journalist, a sociologist or a cultural theorist (see my essay 
Paetzold 1995). 
It is true, and has often been pointed out, that the nineteenth-century 
flâneur was largely a male gendered cultural figure (compare Shields 1994, 
especially pp. 63, 66-67. Wolff 1994, especially, pp. 124-130). But if we look at 
the many traces in Benjamin's writing which leave the male-centredness of 
culture behind, we can even find access to feminist approaches, especially if 
we bring to bear Julia Kristeva's theory of culture (Weigel 1996, pp. 63-79). 
Ill 
Now I can pick up the thread of my discourse. The flâneur experiences 
the modern metropolis as a labyrinth. Benjamin has called the labyrinth "that 
ancient dream of humanity" which has been realized in the m o d e m city. How 
should we understand this? The labyrinth of the metropolis is a pregnant 
Gestalt the symbolic meaning of which is mythically underpinned. The image 
points towards daily encounters with metropolitan reality. The big city in which 
we live, day in and day out, appears in the image of a labyrinth. This image 
refers not least to the opacity and impenetrability of everyday urban life. 
A look at Joseph Rykwert's "The Idea of a Town. The Anthropology of 
1 1 6 
WALTER BENJAMIN AND TIIE URBAN LABYRIN TH 
Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World" (1985) may help to clarify 
the meaning of Benjamin's notion of the labyrinth. According to Rykwert, 
the foundational myths of the city comprise not only the fixing of an axial 
cross (cardo, decumanus), of a centre (mundusj, of borders and gates, but 
also the image of a labyrinth (Rykwert 1985, pp. 148-153). The myth of the 
labyrinth is mostly about how to find access to the city. A riddle must be solved 
or a heroic action is required, before one is allowed to enter the centre, that 
is: the world. Usually, the mythic hero needs the aid of a woman who is later 
left in the lurch, or is going to be killed; Ariadne, for instance, guiding Theseus 
through the Cretan labyrinth. Without doing injustice to Rykwert's theory, 
we may take a clue from it. We can distinguish between foundational myths 
(Romulus and Remus or Cain, as heoic founders of cities) and those which 
refer to the maintenance of a city life. The myth of the labyrinth can be 
attributed to the latter category. It presupposes the foundation of a city to 
which access must be gained, or even regained. 
The symbol and myth of the labyrinth, as Kern, Rykwert, and Karl Kerenyi 
have shown, were often accompanied with dance; the maze dance, by which 
the victory of the hero is ritually celebrated. The dancers perform and position 
themselves in a spiral form. Generally speaking, we can distinguish between 
the spiral or double-spiral form, and the rectangular form, as abstract graphic 
representations of the labyrinth. The point is, however, that the moving body 
within a labyrinth does not 'know' of this overview, and is puzzled by the 
choices to be made at each newjunction. 
Benjamin's image of the labyrinthian city is not about the question of the 
foundation of the city, but on the contrary seeks to describe the everyday life 
of the modern metropolis. The labyrinth is a convincing Gestalt, by which city 
life can be captured. The city is not a jungle but a labyrinth. Due to the 
labyrinthian structure of the metropolis, the conduct and behaviour of the 
city-dweller is slowed down. "The labyrinth", Benjamin says, "is the home of 
the hesitant. The path of someone shy of arrival at a goal easily takes the form 
of a labyrinth." (Benjamin 1985a, pp. 30-55, here: p. 40). We should not, in 
the first instance, think of problems by which to orientate ourselves; rather, 
the experience of city life by way of aimless strolling is what is at issue here. 
Although Paris with its arcades were Benjamin's original source for thinking 
about city life in terms of the labyrinth, he nevertheless applied this idea to his 
"Berlin Childhood around 1900". Here he states that to experience the city as 
a labyrinth requires "schooling". It is a kind of "art". He wants to make a parallel 
between his personal memories and an intersubjectively valid 'image' of the 
city of Berlin: "Not to be able to find one's way in a city doesn't mean much. To 
stray in a city as one strays in a forest, however, requires training. 
1 1 7 
H E I N Z PAKTZOLD 
The street names must speak to the wanderer like the snapping of dry 
twigs, and the little streets in the heart of the city should reflect the times of 
day to him as clearly as does a hollow on a mountainside. I learned this art 
late; it fulfilled the dream of which the first traces were labyrinths scrawled on 
the blotting paper of my notebooks... The path into this labyrinth... led over 
the Bendler Bridge..." (Benjamin 1991, Vol. IV1, p. 237. Translation according 
to Weigel 1996, p. 137). 
Within a labyrinth we are aware of all our actual steps and moves. We are 
deprived, however, of an overview of the whole. We give ourselves over to the 
topographies of the space we are in. We become motivated to come to grips 
with the whole - it emerges, at any rate. But we cannot afford to meet this 
demand. Orientation within the city has much to do with the magic of the 
street names. It is this magic which gives the locations within a city a cultural 
inscription, and at the same time it is the magic of street names and of urban 
areas which prompt us to wander through the city. 
In his essay on post-revolutionary Moscow, Benjamin says that he had 
already made an image for himself of the topography of the city before he 
entered it. But bodily contact with the streets and houses, during his flânerie, 
only made him experience the labyrinthian structure of the city (Benjamin 
1991, Vol. IV 1, pp. 318-19). We touch, here, upon an important point. In 
order to reveal the city as a labyrinth, it is necessary for a meeting to take 
place between a layer of experience which can be described phenomeno-
logically, and a symbolic level. Phenomenology must receive a symbolic 
structure in order to become historical and critical (Benjamin 1985b, p. 175; 
compare Gilloch 1996 pp.135-139, 149-167, 171-177. Compare Weigel 1996, 
pp. 48, 119). 
TV 
As far as I can see, Benjamin himself has given three explanations for the 
labyrinth of the modern metropolis: 
First, the labyrinth is connected with the market as the prevailing model 
of sociality. It is the market which structures the actions and conduct of men. 
"The labyrinth is the correct route for those who always arrive at their goal 
anyway. The goal is the market." (Benjamin 1985a, pp. 30-5, here: p. 40). In 
this context we must think of the curiosity provoked by the passages and the 
luxurious commodities displayed in them; the impeded actions caused by the 
need to look at the prices of the goods. The rules of the market, however, are 
also valid for the cultural productions to which the flâneur is devoted. The 
1 1 8 
WALTER BENJAMIN AND TIIE URBAN LABYRIN TH 
flâneur as producer must look to the value of the cultural commodities he 
offers, and how he can sell them to his advantage. 
Secondly, Benjamin offers a drive-based economic explanation for the 
labyrinth (of the metropolis). According to Freud, before it can be satisfied a 
drive leads a life in episodes (Benjamin 1985a, p. 40). The drive shifts its goal; 
it must pass th rough d i f fe ren t instances before it is satisfied. Freud's 
psychoanalysis, which Benjamin appropriated during the 1920's, starts from 
the principle that there is no substantial core to the self, it is decentred. For 
this reason, within the biography of a self there are always only temporary 
compromises to be found between the claims of the drives and the cultural 
instance of the 'I'. Within flânerie, which reveals the labyrinthian aspect of 
the metropolis, the modern subjectivity, without a substantial centre, finds its 
adequate expression. The flâneur experiences the contemporary as episodes 
of the 'Now'; as instances or moments which are unconnected. 
Sigrid Weigel has pointed out that Benjamin uses the image of the 
labyrinth as an image for reconstructing a person's biography. A spatialization 
of memory is presupposed here. It replaces genealogy in terms of origin, and 
family in terms of scenes and locations by passages and pathways (Weigel 
1996, pp. 123-124). 
Thirdly, the labyrinthian of the metropolis can be interpreted as an image 
for a mankind which does not wish to know where things are leading (Benjamin 
1985a, p. 40). Here, of course, we find Marx' idea that the capitalist mode of 
sociality has created a second nature, by which human beings are determined 
in reverse. Dreams and images brought forward by culture are necessary in 
order to keep open the process of social change. But Benjamin attempts to 
penetrate dream images with the rationality of the concept, in order to reach 
an awakening. 
In this context, one has to remind oneself of Benjamin's distancing from 
Surrealism. According to Benjamin, the cultural strength of Surrealism 
consisted in the rehabil i tat ion of the dream-world. Dreams had been 
categorically rejected by Descartes and modern rationalism. Benjamin did 
not favour simply the flourishing of dreams, like the Surrealists. He took 
capitalism to be a kind of dreaming sleep into which humankind had fallen 
during modernity, and from which it should be awakened. "Capitalism was a 
natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, 
and through it, a reactivation of mythic forces. The first tremors of awakening 
serve to deepen sleep." (Benjamin 1999, p. 391, Kla,8 and Kla,9; see Buck-
Morss 1997, pp. 270-274). 
For Benjamin, the rise of socialist movements produced just such tremors 
or stimuli for an awakening. They needed to be strengthened. He wanted to 
1 1 9 
H E I N Z PAETZOI. I I 
reach a "constellation of awakening", whereas the Surrealists remained in the 
world of dreams. This constellation of awakening was projected by Benjamin 
as 'paralleling', as convergence between the rational notion and the sensuous 
image. In his "Arcades Project" he stated: "Delimination of the tendency of 
this project with respect to Aragon: whereas Aragon persists within the realm 
of dream, here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening. While 
in Aragon there remains an impressionistic element, namely the 'mythology'.., 
here it is a question of the dissolution of'mythology' into the space of history." 
(Benjamin 1999, p. 458; Nl,9). 
Benjamin's theory of the collective dream has a parallel in Ernst Bloch's 
thinking. According to Bloch, daydreams are characterized by the features of 
enrichment of subjectivity, of opening up new horizons, and of pointing to a 
telos of successful 'endings'. Daydreams want to be 'realized'. Like Benjamin, 
Bloch interpreted the daydream as something which is not rational in its own 
terms, but which is nonetheless accessible to a collective rationality. 
y 
Let us return to the labyrinthian of the metropolis. As I have said, the 
labyrinthian is connoted with concepts such as the market, the psychic life of 
drives in episodes and finally the capitalist character of society. How can the 
labyrinthian function as a clue for an unders tanding of concrete urban 
phenomena? I would like to point to at least two aspects. 
The first is related to the street. According to Benjamin, the labyrinthian 
of the city receives profile as a synthesis of two different 'horrors ' or 'dreads'. 
The modern street, the infinite 'asphalt tape' on which the flâneur tramps, is 
characterized by monotony and aimlessness. It never ends, but this very 
endlessness is attractive and fascinating. The way (Weg), on the other hand, 
refers to a mythical horror. We do not know where it is leading and this makes 
us anxious. It could be a maze. The labyrinth of the city synthesizes both of 
these structures, the 'way' and the 'street'. Benjamin writes: "'Street' to be 
understood, has to be profiled against the older term 'way'. With respect to 
their mythological natures the two words are entirely distinct. The way brings 
with it the terrors of wandering (German: Irrgang HP), some reverberation 
of which must have struck the leaders of nomadic tribes. In the incalculable 
turnings and resolutions of the way, there is even today, for the solitary 
wanderer, a detectable trace of the power of ancient directives over wandering 
hordes. But the person who travels a street, it would seem, has no need of any 
waywise guiding hand. It is not in wandering that man takes to the street, but 
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WALTER BENJAMIN AND TIIE URBAN LABYRIN TH 
rather in submitting to the monotonous, fascinating, constantly unrolling band 
of asphalt. The synthesis of these twin terrors, however - monotonous 
wandering —is represented in the labyrinth." (Benjamin 1999, p. 519; P2,l). 
Here we have an excellent example of the way that Benjamin brings 
together the phenomenological 'essence' of a way, a pathway, in contrast to 
the street, and the symbolic inscription of this essence into cultural history 
and collective memory. The way is a horror because it is embedded in the 
process of the migration of tribes. The asphalt tape induces not just a funny 
walk, in the lonely stroller, the flâneur, but also a dread. As a modern 
phenomenon the urban labyrinth is nurtured by both of these aspects, it offers 
a paradoxical pleasure and at the time it causes a threat. 
The modern metropolis has a labyrinthian structure in that it relates the 
'Inside' and the 'Outside' , as well as the 'Above' and the 'Beneath', of the 
urban geography in a new way. We need to distinguish between a gate and a 
triumphal arch; both signify thresholds, that is, modes of passages. The city 
gate mediates the entrance to the world; triumphal arches, on the other hand, 
transform those who pass through them in that the glory of the conquering 
hero is mirrored onto the passer-by. However, both gate and arch have lost 
their mythical strength as either initiation rite or as elevation (Benjamin 1999, 
pp. 86-87; C2a,S). 
Not only does the modern metropolis redesign the relationship between 
the 'Outside' and the 'Inside', it also relates the passages 'Beneath' - the 
underground tunnels, the grottoes, the arcades - with life on the ground 
'Above'. For this reason, the metaphysical dichotomies of a central core and 
a per iphery outside, a hierarchical 'Above' and a seductive 'Beneath ' , 
disappear. Benjamin compares the correspondence between 'Up' and 'Down' 
with dreaming and waking: "One knew of places in ancient Greece where the 
way led down into the underworld - a land full of inconspicuous places from 
which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them by, but no 
sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose 
ourselves in the dark corridors. By day, the labyrinth of urban dwellings 
resembles consciousness; the arcades (which are galleries leading into the 
city's past) issue unremarked onto the streets. At night, however, under the 
tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness bursts forth like a threat, 
and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past-unless, that is, we have emboldened 
him to turn into the narrow lane." (Benjamin 1999, p. 875; a°,5). 
The second aspect: The experience of the labyrinth implies that one's 
location is well determined, although it cannot be inscribed into a co-
ordinating network. This double-layered structure characterizes the passage 
th rough the labyrinth. The city-dweller experiences the differences in 
1 2 1 
H E I N / . PAET/.OLD 
atmospheric tuning between urban quarters, but they are not integrated into 
a unified scheme. The metaphysical significance of the quarters vanish, since 
the centre as the site o f ' t ru th ' is devalued. 
Nevertheless, boundaries remain; thresholds which give structure to the 
regions. Benjamin refers, in this context, to the modes by which we experience 
borders within the dream. They are experienced as cuts, which cause surprise, 
but these cuts do not follow a rational, bu t ra ther a poetic order . The 
experience of the metropolis is interwoven with such dream traces. It is 
precisely this which constitutes the labyrinthian of the metropolis. 
"The city", Benjamin says, "is only apparently homogeneous. Even its name 
takes on a different sound from one district to the next. Nowhere, unless in 
dreams, can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced in a more 
originary way than in cities. To know them means to know those lines that, 
running alongside railroad crossings and across privately owned lots, within 
the park and along the riverbank, function as limits; it means to know these 
confines, together with the enclaves of the various districts. As threshold, the 
boundary stretches across streets; a new precinct begins like a step into the 
void - as though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step on a flight of stairs." 
(Benjamin 1999, p. 88; C3,3). 
W 
Now we have some essential structures of Benjaminian theory of the urban 
lifeworld at hand. In the concluding part of my essay I would like to outline a 
position which maintains some distance from Benjamin, whilst remaining 
faithful to his 'Critical Theory', by transforming it. 
Benjamin's question as to whether we should continue the social dreams 
of the nineteenth century, or bid farewell to them, is only to be answered 
from the position of our situation today, that is, in the decline of functionalist 
urbanism, to which Benjamin subscribed. 
In the 1960's, the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck introduced the vision of 
a 'labyrinthian clarity', in order to characterize the mutual relationship 
between the architectural building and its site within the urban texture. He 
published a manifesto-like text in the "Situationist Times" (No. 4, October 
1963), starting from the tradition of Dutch structuralism and opposing Le 
Corbusier's functionalist creeds. The programmatic core of his manifesto was: 
"The large house - little city statement (the one that says: a house is a tiny city 
a city a huge house) can get on very well... It possesses a kind of clarity that 
never quite relinquishes the secret it guards. It is above all... a kind neither 
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WALTER BENJAMIN AND TIIE URBAN LABYRIN TH 
house nor city can do without. Let me call it labyrinthian clarity." (van Eyck 
1963, p. 84). 
Not only did Aldo van Eyck inspire architects in their designs, such as 
Herman Hertzberger, Lucien Lafour, or Theo Bosch, he was actively engaged 
in the urban renewal of Amsterdam's Nieuwmarkt during the 1970's and 
1980's. On the other hand, in his "La Production de l'espace" (1974) which 
has been translated to English in 1991 Henri Lefebvre traced the symbolic 
meaning of the labyrinth back to a "military and political structure", designed 
to trap enemies inextricably in a maze, before it served as "palace", 
"fortification", "refuge" and "shelter". The labyrinth expresses a "natural 
principle" within the Greek idea of Logos/Cosmos (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 233, 
240). 
What these references are arguing for is the thesis that cityscape as 
labyrinth is still an inspiring idea, beyond Benjamin. As I have argued, the 
labyrinth and the flâneur are related concepts. That is to say, only by strolling 
do we experience the city as a labyrinth. 
Today we find different theories which can give new meaning to the notion 
of flânerie. I would like to single out just two new modes of understanding 
flânerie: 
On the one hand we have Michel de Certeau's "Walking in the City" (De 
Certeau 1993, pp. 151-160). De Certeau develops a "rhetoric ofwalking" (De 
Certeau 1993, p. 158). His is a strategy of concentrating on everyday life and 
focusing on walking in order to overcome the functionalist view of the city as 
a view f rom above, in o rder to control: "urban life", he emphasizes, 
"increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic 
project excluded, 'walking'" (De Certeau 1993, p. 155), that is to say the accent 
is on the "chorus of footsteps" (De Certeau 1994, p. 157). A rhetoric of walking 
is a "style of use", that is "a way of being" and "away of operating". De Certeau's 
walker makes use of the urban spaces by bringing in h is /her own body in 
movement. But this walking activity aims at a "poetic geography" of urban 
sites (De Certeau 1993, p. 159). A rediscovery of "local legends (legenda: what 
is to be read but also what can be read)" (De Certeau 1993, p. 160) emerges; that 
is to say, a phenomenological level. Merleau-Ponty spoke of a 'style' of bodily 
moves; we experience the body insofar as it is put into action: Physical motion 
and symbolic level are intertwined. De Certeau makes use of two Benjaminian 
notions in this respect, the 'labyrinth' (De Certeau 1993, p. 152) and the 
'dream' , as means of clarifying the "pedestrian rhetoric" (De Certeau 1993, 
p. 160). 
What is important here is die fact that de Certeau's walker aims at a 'poetic 
geography'. That is to say, 'narratives' which reveal cityscapes in cultural 
1 2 3 
HEINZ PAETZOi.ii 
'works', undermining both the functionalist view of the city f rom above and 
the 'disciplinary' power structures which supervise the city-dwellers through 
the official, administrative politics of the state institutions. Michel de Certeau 
is in favour of micro-narratives linked to the moving and strolling body. He 
gives a new meaning to the concept of the flâneur. 
Another stimulating model is involved in Jinnai Hidenobu ' s 'spatial 
anthropology'. In his book "Tokyo" Jinnai Hidenobu tells the cultural story 
of Tokyo. The story makes use of city walks. These walks, however, are to be 
related to a scholarly reading of city maps from different periods, as well as to 
a scholarly reading of the poetic narratives of the specific sites of the city, the 
water-side, the former commoners' houses, the backstreets etc. "We have 
become so accustomed to travelling by subway or elevated highway that we 
have become insensitive to the rich variety of features found in everyday life. 
'Reading the city', requires us to walk in streets and experience its spaces for 
ourselves. Only then do we acquire a feel for the deve lopment of its 
neighbourhoods." (Hidenobu, 1995, p. 9). 
VII 
This brings me to a concluding remark: Richard Rorty has launched an 
influential view of postmodern culture, which describes it as being inhibited 
by ironists who are in search of continuous redescriptions of their lives and of 
the moral state of society, and who are restlessly reading and consuming books. 
Philosophy is replaced by literary criticism in order to improve the morality 
and the political culture of the liberal community. The philosopher emerges 
in the guise of a 'polypragmatic' who has to link the various discourses together 
in order to keep the conversation of society on relevant issues going. Against 
this elitist and bodiless idea of a community, I would like to propose a 
revitalized 'Critical Theory' which is anchored in urban culture and in cultural 
workers (see for a step in that direction Paetzold 2000). These bear the imprints 
of city walks exercised by real bodies. They are curious about urban affairs, 
and want to make sense of city life today in that they produce at the same time 
city-related poetic matters. 
The Benjaminian project is not at all confined to Baudelaire. It has been 
continued by a remarkable chain of writing city-dwellers, ranging from literary 
figures, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Peter Handke, Rons tan tin Kafavis, 
Eric de Kuyper to Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon (Lehan 1998). They all 
are inspired by city life and bring to surface what its specific culture is. 
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WALTER BENJAMIN AND TIIE URBAN LABYRIN TH 
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[A previous version of this essay has been published as "The city as labyrinth. 
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