Abstract
In “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism,” Raymond Williams demonstrates how the historical symbiosis between the modern and the urban can be reconstructed, both historically and conceptually, in five successive steps. It all starts with an historical experience whose novelty has all but escaped us: a “crowd of strangers” on the street which is unknown, indeed, mysterious. Within this crowd emerges the lonely individual, whose paradox of selfrealization in isolation culminates in an “extreme and precarious form of consciousness,” namely the monad of subjectivity. The third moment can be found in the imagined objectivity confronting the new-born subjectivity, which Williams calls the “concealment” and “impenetrability” of the city. This would be the London in Conan Doyle—foggy, dark, intricate, a huge crime scene necessitating an isolated but penetrating rational intelligence that finds its form in the detective novel.1 Williams’s conceptualization of the city/modernity then takes a sharp, dialectic turn, as the alienating concentration of men and women in the city also gives rise to a new unity or “human solidarity.” Cast in this light, the image of the mob turns into that of the “masses” and the “multitude” with democratic and revolutionary potentials. Finally, the modern metropolis becomes “the place where new social and economic and cultural relations, beyond both city and nation in their older senses, were beginning to be formed” (MP 44). The initial strangeness seems to
Published Version
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