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May 20, 2010
Romanticism has been under siege in recent formulations of Anglo-American cultural history by modernism and postmodernism. The Romantic movement's overturning of the Enlightenment is now commonly reduced to emotionalism, sentimentality, idealism and pretty pictures in the style of National Geographic.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, reeds, Port Philip Bay, Melbourne, 2010
WJ. T Mitchell in 'Romanticism and the Life of Things' in Critical Inquiry (vol.28, no.1, 2001) says that not so surprising that the romantic image should turn out to be a combination of fossilism and totemism, a dialectical figure of animation and a ruinous trace of and a "vital sign".
After all, he says, romanticism itself plays something like this double role in our sense of cultural and history:
Is not romanticism itself a fossil formation in the history of culture, not only because of its obsession with lost worlds, ruins, archaism, childhood, and idealistic notions of feeling and imagination, but because it is itself a lost world, swept away by the floods of modernity it attempted to criticize? And is not romanticism therefore itself a totem object, a figure of collective identification for a tribe of cultural historians called romanticists and, beyond that, for a structure of feeling more generally available to anyone who identifies him- or herself as a romantic?
And yet the grand modernizing narratives of endless progress through technical or instrumental rationality seem to collide visibly with the resurgence of the primitive, the irrational, and the archaic.
Update
Mitchell's account of the romantic image is a composite of two concrete concepts, the fossil and the totem. Totemism is the figure of the longing for an intimate relationship with nature and the greeting of natural objects as "friends and companions"--the entire panoply of tutelary spirits from Wordsworth's daffodils to Coleridge's albatross to Shelley's west wind. It is also, as these examples should remind us, the figure of the kind of guilt, loss, and tragic transgression that only becomes imaginable when natural objects enter into a family romance with human consciousness. The totem animal must not be killed; the nightingale was not born for death, and so of course the albatross is killed, and everything that lives must die, even the nightingale.
If totemism adumbrates the romantic longing for a reunification with nature then fossilism expresses the ironic and catastrophic consciousness of modernity and revolution:
If the romantic desire for an image to secure an intimate communion with nature is itself a form of totemism, the inevitable defeat of this desire is named by the fossil, which turns out to be a name for the dead images that make up language as such.
Mitchell adds that among the many lessons we might learn from the simultaneous onset of fossilism and totemism in the romantic era is that:
when new objects appear in the world, they also bring with them new orders of temporality, new dialectical images that interfere with and com-plicate one another. Just when we think that things are safely dead, fossilzed, petrified, and consigned to the past, they rise from their graves of natural extinction and cultural obsolescence.
So Mitchell's romantic image is a dialectical figure of animation and petrification, a ruinous trace of catastrophe, and a "vital sign." He finishes by saying that the critique of modernity that runs through Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to Benjamin and Adorno would be unthinkable without the special form of natural history bequeathed to us by the romantics, captured in its particularity by the figures of the fossil and the totem.
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I dunno, but I think the only way we can live with this juggernaut of modernity is to sneak in a little Coleridge when the blossoms start to bloom. Make living in NYC easier for me!