| Abstract: | Modernists have represented the world and its history as divided into ‘medieval’ (or traditional) and ‘modern’, ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, and claimed that they will bring about humanity's ‘emancipation’ from the medieval. I argue that the world which modernists wish to bring into existence, far from entailing the erasure of the medieval, as claimed, involves the complex rearticulation of the medieval. Vital to the modern is not just the secularization of a previously sacred realm, upon which scholars have concentrated, but the sacralization of the mundane, pointed to by Foucault. The agent of modernist emancipation is a hypostatized sovereign Agent. The medievals engaged in certain practices which were supposed to embody a transcendent God in the human world and lead them to a celestial paradise. the moderns, silently transposing that god intoa foundational reason, assert that its manifesation in enlightened institutios will take them to a utopia which is none other than the surreptitious imporatation of the medieval paradise on earth. Imperial progresses and religious processions were, I argue, the foremost paractices by which medieval polities embodied the transcendent and attained to heaven. Modern polities, While treating them as mere ‘rituals’, have sublimated those very practices into an abstract material progress emanating from the economic practices of the entire nation represented as a vehicle on the move. Developed countries represented themselves, after recovering from World War II, as already moving at a fast clip and as living in a productionist and consumerist utopia. Underdeveloped countries like India, considered medieval, were represented as only beginning to move. They were to transfrom themselves into modern utopias through central planning andmassive projects such as dam building. |
