In his essay on the post-human, Amit Chaudhuri describes modernist sense-perception as Romanticism “renovated” in order to manage a crisis of banality. Such perception is marked by a contradictory “simultaneous suppression and indispensability of religious wonder” (Clearing a Space 282-283).

He demonstrates this via Proust’s reconstruction of a scene in which the narrator stops at a hawthorn hedge.

There, the narrator makes a series of comparisons between the hedges and church imagery vis-à-vis the sunlight that affects him in a particular manner at that moment. Additionally, presented in an apposite manner alongside the hawthorns are dog-roses that would be climbing the same path in a few weeks’ time.

As a poetic image, the Proust passage has a presence that cannot be shared other than in a general sense of the symbol that would permit participation as a self-same part. The narrator’s observation serves as commentary on the effect of endlessly replicated delimitation, producing a severe restriction of movement for any iteration that is to come. And, while this presence cannot be shared, it can be symbolically extended to accommodate the multitude, as is suggested by the content represented in its throbbing abundance, a mountainous heap presented in its overwhelming materiality.

Insofar as this image permits of an awareness of individuality but only to the extent that this awareness is restricted to a participatory decision in the image, it can be read as a critique of the general image conceived as inclusive of a diverse multitude, which is to say you can count yourself among those included, but only as a part that resembles every other part in the constitution of a whole. How does such a division promote distinction or discernment: only in the way specified or as miscellany? There can be a sameness that overwhelms and an overwhelming diversity.

To illustrate, it is said that an idea results if something can be numbered and abstracted; that information can then be communicated and disseminated to that extent, constitutive of interpenetration understood as the new ‘depth’, which is but the same information.

If there is difference this would be constituted by differences in sensibility. The question thus seems to be whether the multitude anywhere demonstrate such differences, but this can’t be other than rhetorical insofar as the dog-roses in their overwhelming material abundance are trained after the manner of the hawthorns and gathered and bound as are fascia. In that case, to infer the multitude have a desire for goodness of fit, to say just the thing that grants passage, can be readily confirmed. They are given away by their lateness with respect to the by-now-absence of the original, i.e., that opening in time in which such words and mannerisms effected movement or resonated in some meaningful way, which lateness from another perspective (that has forgotten there ever was an original) would be considered apposite, just so, timely.

It must then be Chaudhuri’s ‘stop’, and not that of Proust, that silences and arrests, quiets and placates the multitudinous proliferation of copies. Where Proust’s narrator observes, predicts, and observes some more, it is left to Chaudhuri to intervene in modernity’s drunken-elitist frame of reference being imported at deep discounts into modernism, where it would otherwise take on a pronounced ridiculousness from without.

This highlights modernism’s other characteristic in which universality has been attained in terms of Wordsworth’s “visionary dreariness”: an already condition in which the sacred is placed among the sensuous for you to discover, and this on the way to the commodification of miracles which the post-9/11 theorists had no trouble prophesying.

The perception of such resemblances between the hedges and a series of chapels, to the Lady-altar, to those hawthorns framing the stairway of the rood-loft to the church, Proust must speak of these in terms of resemblance because of (Aristotle’s civilizational posit) the structuring contradictions that persist, forever barring identification of the form with its effect, forever necessitating the sacred as original referent. All of which must have been a conceit at the same time as it posited a contestatory stance against a market which would call it that. In a similar vein Chaudhuri goes on in his next chapter to cite contestation as a practice in Lawrence.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2018 Shumi Ferguson