Throughout Schwartz’s Spectacular Realities, I was very drawn to the phenomenon of the crowd. Schwartz emphasizes the novelty of the crowd, writing, “This culture produced a new crowd as individuals joined together to delight in the transformation of everyday life into spectacle while avidly consuming spectacles of sensationalized everyday life” (12). This reversal of the Panoptic gaze through urban spectacle which Schwartz writes “urged everyone to see,” formed this new mass (5).

In my French Modernities class this past semester, we briefly explored notions of the crowd and the flâneur though rarely drew parallels between them. I’ll return to this momentarily, but I wanted to bring in Edgar Allan Poe’s canonical short story entitled The Man of the Crowd which conveys both the spectacle of the crowd and the anxieties surrounding it. The protagonist spends an evening following a mysterious-looking man only to come to the conclusion that “He noticed me not, but resumed his solemn walk, while I, ceasing to follow, remained absorbed in contemplation. “This old man,” I said at length, “is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds.” (1483)

In addition to the evident despair that Poe feels for this man of the crowd, there’s a deeper underlying element that I want to put into conversation with Spectacular Realities. Is the man of the crowd a contradiction in terms? How can we think of the spectacle of this one man in relation to the various attractions around him that do not interest the protagonist? How does spectacle contribute to, to borrow Schwartz’s term, the “heterogeneity” of the crowd?

Something else that I've been thinking about is the relationship between the flâneur and the crowd. I think that Schwartz’s assertion that “The flâneur is not so much a person as flânerie is a positionality of power—one through which the spectator assumes the position of being able to be part of the spectacle and yet command it at the same time” is very compelling (10). How can we understand this positionality of power in relation to the crowd? And how does spectacle fit into this?