The reversal by which the presence of the new markets 
and the new masses encouraged the artist to surrender the 
unique self might have seemed a final consummation for art 
and technology alike. It was a surrender made almost inevitable 
when the symbolists began to work backwards from effect to 
cause in the shaping of the art product. Yet it was just at this 
extreme moment that a new reversal occurred. The art process 
had no sooner approached the rigorous, impersonal rationale of 
the industrial process, in the period from Poe to Valéry, than 
the assembly line of symbolist art was transformed into the 
new “stream of consciousness” mode of presentation. And the 
stream of consciousness is an open “field” perception that 
reverses all aspects of the nineteenth century discovery of the 
assembly line or of the “technique of invention.” As G. H. 
Bantock writes of it: