PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2002)
ISSN:
REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO THE AIR: THE EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY (New York: Penguin Books, 1982).
PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2002)ISSN:REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO THE AIR: THE EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). |
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Marshall Berman intends his book to be a “study in the dialectics of modernization and modernism.” (16) He begins by defining these two terms after having identified what he means by modernity. For Berman, “There is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience ‘modernity’.” (15) Modernization, however is “... the social processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a state of perpetual becoming...” (16) While modernism is an ensemble of visions, ideas, and values: “These world-historical process have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own.” (16) In other words, it seems that, for him, (a) modernization is the social changes that are constantly taking place in this respect, (b) modernity is the way in which these changes are immediately lived and experienced (consciously or not), while (c) modernism is the post-facto reflection and intellectual / artistic / literary / material / political / etc. representation of these changes.
Berman has embarked here on an ambitious effort of socio-cultural regeneration. In light of the despair, desolation, and apparent emptiness of the current landscape, the author proposes a re-examination and return to the modernism of the recent past as a way of revitalizing and transforming the present to guarantee the future:
It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go forward: That remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give us the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the twenty-first. This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so that it can nourish and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie ahead. To appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of the modernities of today and an act of faith in the modernities—and in the modern men and women—of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. (36)
To this end, he proceeds to carry out an extensive analysis of part of the work of Goethe and Marx as a key to understanding the spirit of modernity. This is the context of his study of Faust and The Communist Manifesto. From there he goes on to examine the literary representations of urban transformation as found in part of the work of Baudelaire, Pushkin, Gogol, Chernyshevsky, Biely, and Mandelstam, vis-a-vis Paris and St. Petersburg. Finally, in what I found one of the most thought-provoking sections of the book, he takes a look at the engineering career of Robert Moses and its destructive effects on New York City, ending with a series of comments on contemporary urban blight and cultural renewal. I will return to this issue later on.
Berman subdivides modernity into three phases: “... In the first phase, which goes roughly from the start of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, people are just beginning to experience modern life; they hardly know what has hit them. (...) Our second phase begins with the great revolutionary wave of the 1790’s. With the French Revolution and its reverberations, a great modern public abruptly and dramatically comes to life. (...) In the twentieth century, our third and final phase, the process of modernization expands to take in virtually the whole world, and the developing world culture of modernism achieves spectacular triumphs in art and thought (16-17). At first glance, this has all the appearance of being a very precise periodization. However, some of Berman’s analytical difficulties are reflected even at this early stage of the book. For example, given that his study is concentrated in an examination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one would expect the demarcations between these two phases to be evident. But, far from it: this distinction is not convincingly established.
On the one hand, his initial delimitation of the broad outlines and origins of the second phase are more or less clear. This phase starts as an era of social revolutions and tensions caused by the decline but stubborn persistence of the Ancient Regimes and the fragile and uncertain emergence of capitalist political power and socioeconomic transformation. Yet and on the other hand, when does Berman think this phase ends? I.e., when does his “twentieth century” / third-final phase begin? And why? Does the second phase end with the second wave of industrialization, colonial expansion, economic crises, massive demographic dislocations, and the socio-cultural explosion of the last quarter of the nineteenth century? Or does the second phase end with the coming of the First World War? Or does it end with the Great Depression and the rise of the welfare / corporate states during the 1930’s? Etc., etc.
This is no secondary issue in light of the current controversy over the nature of modernity vis-a-vis the post-modern period. Berman’s effort here is, in part, an attempt to debunk the post-modern theorists and the theorization of post-modernism by providing what he considers to be a more solid and alternative viewpoint: “Post-modernists may be said to have developed a paradigm that clashes sharply with the one in this book....” (9) “... Others believe that the really distinctive forms of contemporary art and thought have made a quantum leap beyond all the diverse sensibilities of modernism, and earned the right to call themselves ‘post-modern’.” I want to respond to these antithetical but complementary claims...” (345)
In order to further this effort, Berman would have had to identify the twentieth-century conjuncture or articulation of conjunctures that clearly distinguished the second phase from the third. In that way he would have been able to make a case for modernity as a never ending [twentieth-century] story that still presides over the present. But he fails to do this. One could have argued with his choice of conjunctures in this last case, had he gone so far as to clearly identify them. But one cannot argue with what does not exist. If one were to employ the ironic tone that Berman oftentimes uses throughout this book, one could go so far as to say that what there is of a solid analysis in Berman’s interesting discussion of nineteenth-century modernity (Goethe and Marx) begins to “melt into air” when he starts examining twentieth-century socio-cultural phenomena.
Therefore and contrary to the initial appearance of having a clear grasp of the demarcations that allow one to establish the coordinates of a historical process, Berman apparently, and in the final analysis, conceives modernity as a linear process of constant change of prolongation and extension that keeps on reproducing itself: “... modernity... is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration, and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish...” (15) His view of the modernization process is very much a part of this linear perspective: “In the twentieth century, the social process that brings this maelstrom into being and keep it in a state of perpetual becoming have come to be called ‘modernization’.” (16) The problem with this view is that there is no frame of reference in terms of historical time and periodization. This way of looking at things creates obvious difficulties to me as a historian, as a feminist, and as a woman of color. To discuss one aspect of this question, I will use part of Perry Anderson’s critique of Berman.1
Anderson establishes a contrast between the ultimately ahistorical view of modernization and the need to establish a clear periodization:
...the idea of modernization involves a conception of fundamentally planar development—a continuous-flow process in which there is no real differentiation of one conjuncture or epoch from another save in terms of the mere chronological succession of old and new, earlier and later, categories themselves subject to unceasing permutation of positions in one direction as time goes by and the later becomes earlier, the newer older. Such is, of course, an accurate account of the temporality of the market and of the commodities that circulate across it.2
In other words, the history of capitalism must be periodized, and its determinate trajectory reconstructed, if we are to have any sober understanding of what capitalist ‘development’ actually means. The concept of modernization occludes the very possibility of that.3
From these, he goes on to point out that Berman’s approach even makes difficult a precise understanding of the different aspects, concrete changes, and variations that took place within the modern period. For one thing, Berman’s perspective confuses the analysis of nineteenth-century modernism with its early twentieth century analogues:
... modernism, as a specific set of aesthetic forms, is generally dated precisely from the 20 th century, is indeed typically construed by way of contrast with realist and other classical forms of the 19 th , 18 th or earlier centuries. Virtually all of the actual literary texts analyzed so well by Berman—whether by Goethe or Baudelaire, Pushkin or Dostoevky—precede modernism proper, in this usual sense of the word: the only exceptions are fictions by Bely and Mandelstam, which precisely are 20 th -century artifacts. In other words, by more conventional criteria, modernism too needs to be framed within some more differential conception of historical time.4
But Berman also confuses and makes difficult the analysis of the socio-cultural changes that took place during the 60’s and 70’s:
A final difficulty with Berman’s account is that it is unable, from within its own terms of reference, to provide any explanation of the divarication it deplores, between the art and thought, practice and theory, of modernity in the 20 th century. Here indeed time divides in his argument, in a significant way: something like a decline has occurred, intellectually, which his book seeks to reverse with a return to the classical spirit of modernism as a whole, informing art and thought alike. But that decline remains unintelligible within his schema, once modernization is itself conceived as a linear process of prolongation and expansion, which necessarily carries with it a constant renewal of the sources of modernist art.5
In the midst of the socio-cultural and historical impasse of the present, Berman’s main politico-analytical solution is the already mentioned attempt to go “back to the future”: “In this bleak context, I want to bring the dynamic and dialectical modernism of the nineteenth century to life again. (...)” (35)
But Berman’s perspective of [non]-periodization also raises questions for me as a feminist and student of women’s history. Joan Kelly in Women, History, and Theory points out that periodization is one of the main areas of historical research that has been problematized by the new women’s history.6 Historians have traditionally studied the way history unfolds by designating specific conjunctures as turning points in historical development. Some of the descriptive markers commonly used in this regard are: military conquests, crucial battles, the political careers of major leaders, great discoveries, the rise and fall of important schools of thought, etc. But these historical references-points tend to overwhelming ignore the contributions, struggles, and everyday efforts of half the population. What is more, they tend to ignore the social conditions under which these contributions, struggles, and efforts took place. I am here referring to the inequalities between the sexes and the structural subordination of women as women. Therefore, the traditional guideposts have to be re-examined to see to what extent they are pertinent to the plural and contradictory socio / historical totality (“women” included). They also have to be re-examined to see to what extent they explain or take into account existing social differences (gender inequality, included).
In this context, how valid is Berman’s demarcation, in terms of the origins of his second phase (which “... begins with the great revolutionary wave of the 1790’s...”), if “... the Revolution expressly excluded women from its liberty, equality, and fraternity ?”7 How much of the creativity and novelty of Baudelaire’s “heroism of modern life” -which Berman celebrates (142-143)- was actually there for the bulk of the women of Paris during the mid-nineteenth century? Could there have been female counterparts of Robert Moses?
This is not to say that some of the demarcations established by Berman are not valid. What I am pointing out here is that they are not sufficient. Furthermore and assuming that this quantitative objection is correct, Berman’s demarcations would also have to be re-examined and re-contextualized in light of the gender dimension that for the most part is missing in this book. In other words, one would also have to raise qualitative objections to this aspect of Berman’s study, notwithstanding his passing examination of the Gretchen character in Faust and of Janet Tacobs’ work regarding contemporary urban issues.
In addition to this, Berman’s approach to periodization is questionable for its Europeo-centrism, even in the case of what he perceives as the third and final phase of modernity (“... when the process of modernization expands to take in virtually the whole world, and the developing world culture of modernism achieves spectacular triumphs in art and thought”). Although he states that “Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality...” (15), he focuses his attention mainly on socioeconomic, political, and literary / artistic / philosophical / etc. processes that originate within European parameters and/or within the parameters of people of European descent (e.g., White North Americans). Where, for example, is the socio-cultural and political impact of the radical-democratic, anti-imperialistic and/or anti-colonialist struggles that immediately followed the colonial and neocolonial expansion of the late nineteenth century and continued until the sixties and early seventies? Where does Berman examine the political resistances to U.S. and European interventionism in the Caribbean during the early twentieth century and the “spectacular triumphs in art and thought” related to this resistance (e.g., José Martí, Rubén Darío, Julia de Burgos, Nilita Vientós Gastón, et al.)? Where does Berman consider the causes and effects of the demographic dislocations within the rural U.S. South at this time, the struggles of African-Americans for democratic rights, and the “spectacular triumphs in art and thought” related to these changes (e.g., the birth of Jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, etc.)? Where does Berman consider the interconnections between these two phenomena, the anti-colonialist struggles in Africa, and the “spectacular triumphs in art and thought” related to all three (e.g., the Pan-Africanist Movement, the Africanist poetry of Nicolás Guillén and Luis Palés Matos, etc.) And please note, that I have not even mentioned the Middle East and Asia. The list is very, very long.
Again, this does not deny the relevance of some of Berman’s demarcations and examples. However, it does point to the limits of his characterizations as well as call into question just how much the author himself crosses “all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality” in his analysis of modernity.
This brings us to Berman’s representation of the current urban problems and decay, already mentioned above. In the last two sections of Chapter V, Berman addresses the contradictions of city life in the U.S. during the 1960’s and 1970’s using the example of New York City. Here he examines the destruction of the old neighborhood tenements and the rise of the new commercial districts within the city, emphasizing the socioeconomic and aesthetic transformations that were brought about in this context. And despite the fact that he mentions the plight of the “millions of blacks and Hispanics”, “many of them... desperately poor, chronically unemployed, at once racial and economic outcasts...” (324-325), he apparently does not in any way see the transformations that are taking place in the urban space (physical structures, included) as being at least partially a response to the social resistances and reactions of these recently dispossessed (im)migrants, when they attempted to reconstitute their communities within the new urban environment.
In Berman’s text, the urban development policies and the mega-expressway networks mainly appear as the abstract and aesthetic effects of the “will to power” of Robert Moses and of white men such as him. I have not been able to find any passage in this book in which Berman perceives these programs and public works as also being one of the means through which capital and the state attempted to disarticulate the social cohesion and resistances of these impoverished “minorities,” while furthering their isolation / segregation with respect to the more well-off portions of the city. Berman, in this sense, ignores the politico-coercive dimension of the top-down transformation of urban space.
Mike Davis8 has already pointed this out:
The wave of ghetto insurrections between 1964 and 1969 powerfully concentrated the attention of urban developers and corporate architects on the problem of cordoning off the downtown financial districts, and other zones of high property values, from inner-city residential neighbourhoods.9
In his discussion of architectural modernism’s propensity to an elite, urban ‘pastorilism’, Marshall Berman quotes Le Corbusier’s 1929 slogan, ‘we must kill the street!’ According to Berman, the inner logic of the new urban environment, ‘from Atlanta’s Peachtree Plaza to Detroit’s Renaissance Center’, has been the functional segmentation and class segregation of the ‘old modern street, with its volatile mixture of people and traffic, businesses and homes, rich and poor’.(All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Verso, London, 1983, 168.) Unfortunately, Berman’s otherwise splendid evocation of modernist New York pays no more attention than Jameson’s portrait of postmodernist Los Angeles to the decisive role of urban counter insurgency in defining the essential terms of the contemporary built environment. Since the ghetto rebellions of the late 1960’s a racist, as well as class, imperative of spatial separation has been paramount in urban development. No wonder, then, that the contemporary American inner city resembles nothing so much as the classical colonial city, with the towers of the white rulers and colons military set off from the casbah or indigenous city.10
True, Berman makes note of some instances of urban social resistance to particular aspects of these policies. Take, for example, his brief description of the successful opposition in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to one specific Moses project (.337). He fails to realize the extent to which these policies, taken as a whole and in the context of the Second Postwar period, are themselves, per se, part of a political counter-resistance effort by city governments and big business interests. Interestingly enough and as some of the new social-historical research has shown, this type of policy or dimension is even present in some of the urban remodeling efforts that were carried out in Europe during the nineteenth century.11 Again, Berman’s treatment of Baudelaire’s Paris or Pushkin’s St. Petersburg completely overlooks this possibility. For all his claims to dialectics and dynamism and despite all his declarations in favor of freedom, justice, and the struggles in the streets, Berman does not see the rich complexity and multi-leveled relationships that lock together, in conflict, the bureaucratic and propertied forces promoting these socioeconomic and political transformations and the diverse social groups resisting them. In this sense, he oversimplifies, reduces, and underestimates the depth and extension of these resistances.
This brings us to the irony of Berman’s assault on Foucault. As part of his broadside attack on post-modernist theorists and the theorists of post-modernity, Berman makes the following observations about the work of Michel Foucault:
Just about the only writer of the past decade who has had anything substantial to say about modernity is Michel Foucault. And what he has to say is an endless, excruciating series of variations on the Weberian themes of the iron cage and the human nullities whose souls are shaped to fit the bars. Foucault is obsessed with prisons, hospitals, asylums, with what Erving Goffman has called “total institutions.” Unlike Goffman, however, Foucault denies the possibility of any sort of freedom, either outside these institutions or within their interstices. Foucault’s totalities swallow up every facet of modern life. He develops these themes, with obsessive relentlessness and, indeed, with sadistic florishes, clamping his ideas down on his readers like iron bars, twisting each dialectic into our flesh like a new turn of the screw. (...)
...there is no freedom in Foucault’s world. because his language forms a seamless web, a cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break. The mystery is why so many of today’s intellectuals seem to want to choke in there with him. The answer, I suspect, is that Foucault offers a generation of refugees from the 1960s a world-historical alibi for the sense of passivity and helplessness that gripped so many of us in the 1970s. There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains; however, once we grasp the total futility of it all, at least we can relax. (.34-35)
If Foucault in effect denied “the possibility of any sort of freedom, either outside these institutions or within their interstices,” then how does Berman account for Foucault’s analysis of the popular illegalities that constantly subvert this panopticism in the case of the prison?12 If Berman is right, then how does he account for Foucault’s resistance on the inevitability of resistance within any form of power relationship?13 To my mind, the main discrepancy here is between: (a) Berman’s defense of the abstract and ahistorical social subject of [bourgeois] juridical ideology, namely, the essentialist view of the free individual, born as such with inalienable rights, relating to power as an external object in whose distribution each individual has or should have the right of participation, etc.; and (b) Foucault’s emphasis on the discontinuous historicity of this process of subjectification and of the discursive and socioeconomic practices involved in the construction of such subjects, their rights, the power relations in which they/we are all caught up, the institutions that reproduce and regulate these power relations, and the corollary and multiple resistances that occur in each and everyone of these institutions and moments of domination.
If the possibility of freedom is the same thing as the possibility of social resistance, then as I have tried to show Berman’s critique of Foucault is off the mark. If, on the other hand, the possibility of freedom is the same thing as the rights of this abstract and ahistorical social subject (the essentialist’s free individual), then Berman is right when he says that “...there is no freedom in Foucault’s world...,” but not “...because his language forms a seamless web, a cage for more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break...” Berman is right because this is the freedom that was proclaimed in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”. I.e., the freedom that excluded women, slaves, the propertyless, et al. This is the freedom of the liberal-bourgeois constitutions, of practically all existing governments that only recognize that which can be politically guaranteed and legitimized by Nation-States, i.e., the freedom that ultimately excludes the everyday-life struggles of the plural and decentered subjectivities that as resistances have no possibility of growing unchecked under such a juridical framework (e.g., the homeless, the poor, gays and lesbians, various ethnic “minorities,” women, etc.) and at best are at the mercy of the paternalist protection/charity of such governments. This is the freedom whose abstraction started being materially dismantled by the social forces that superseded and have been substituting the modernity that Berman wants to recall to life.
Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review, no. 144 (March-April 1984): 96-113.
Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago press, 1968, 2-4.
Mike Davis, “The Postmodernist City,” New Left Review, no. 151 (May-June 1985): 106-113.
E.J. Hobsbawm, “Cities and Insurrections,” Architectural Design, vol. 38 (December 1968): 579-588.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
---------. Historia de la sexualidad, vol. I. México: Siglo XXI Editores, S.A., 1977.
---------. Power and Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Colin Gordon (Ed.) New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
----------. “The Subject and Power” in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
1. Perry Anderson, "Modernity and Revolution," New Left Review, no. 144 (March-April 1984): 96-113.
2. Ibid., 101.
3. Ibid., 102.
4. ibid.
5. ìbid., 103.
6. Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago press, 1968, 2-4.
7. Ibid., 3.
8. Mike Davis, "The Postmodernist City," New Left Review, no. 151 (May-June 1985): 106-113.
9. Ibid., 111.
10. Ibid.
11. Cf., E.J. Hobsbawm, "Cities and Insurrections," Architectural Design, vol. 38 (December 1968): 579-588.
12. Cf., Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1979, 271-293.
13. Michel Foucault, Historia de la sexualidad, vol. I. Mè·©co: Siglo XXI Editores, S.A., 1977, 104-117; Power and Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Colin Gordon (Ed.) New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, pp.59, 97-98, 118, 137-138, 142, 183-184, 188-190; "The Subject and Power" in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 212, 219.
Copyright 2002 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
Citation Format
Jiménez-Muñoz, Gladys M. (2002). Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982).. PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness : 1, 1