Georg Simmel's Stranger and Walter Benjamin's Flaneur's Ways of Seeing and Knowing

Abstract

Georg Simmel’s stranger and Walter Benjamin’s flaneur are social types constructed and reconstructed by modern life experiences and capitalism. Thinking each of these types as social scientists and filmmakers, the study analyzes their ways of seeing and knowing. In that sense, it lays bare that the stranger and the flaneur offer alternative ways of seeing and knowing that differ from the modernist ones. Accordingly, it investigates what the possibilities and limitations of the stranger and the flaneur’s ways of seeing and knowing are, and how these possibilities and limitations are being formed. The main question of the study is how ways of seeing and knowing of these types differentiate from the modernist ones. The study claims that even though the stranger and the flaneur’s ways of seeing and knowing can make the plurality of truth and points of view possible, they do not completely go beyond modernity’s subjectivity and its experiential forms.