All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
Marshall Berman
Simon & Schuster, $17.50
Positive thinking is back-among intellectuals as well as self-help writers and supply-side economists. On all sides, we hear the familiar cry: If only we think about what’s right with America, what’s right with ourselves, things will somehow work out for the best. This style of thinking has begun to spread from popular journalism to contemporary intellectual debates, especially to the continuing debate among historians, literary critics, and social scientists about the meanings of “modernity.”
What is peculiarly “modem” about modem industrial society and culture? Who are we “modems” and where are we going? For most American thinkers the answers have always been clear. We are the vanguard of modernization and we are going forward to Something Better, because Western-style modernity means not only liberation from poverty through the magic of “economic development” but also emancipation from old, oppressive social forms.
There have always been American critics of this progressive optimism, but during the 1960s and 1970s dissent became extraordinarily widespread. While ecological conservatives and agrarian communards attacked the mania for economic growth, cultural critics like Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch questioned the parallel obsession with “personal growth.” Lasch put this anti-modem critique in its most sophisticated form in The Culture of Narcissism, where he argued that the therapeutic jargon of liberation concealed new forms of coercion appropriate to a bureaucratic, corporate state.
Now the winds of intellectual fashion have shifted. Ecological concern and cultural pessimism are Out; high-tech enthusiasm and reflexive optimism are In. For example, we have Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource, celebrated in the New York Times for telling us that all the talk about resource depletion and greenhouse effects is meaningless when compared with our “ultimate ‘resource”: good old American know-how. For another example, we have Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, a determinedly upbeat celebration of modern culture, written from the perspective of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. If only we think about what’s right with modern urban life, Berman argues, if only we recognize the unique opportunities for intense experience that modern urban life provides, then we can abandon nostalgia and fare forward into the future. This is what Norman Vincent Peale would sound like if he had gone to Columbia in the 1960s.
The book is a brisk, impressionistic tour of modernity, with Berman acting as our breathless guide. He begins by presenting Goethe’s Faust as a, “tragedy of development” in which Faust’s insatiable longings for “self-development” lead him to “new frontiers” of personal and economic “growth”—but at a fearful cost to people like Faust’s castoff lover Gretchen and the old couple who are “in the way” of his mammoth construction project. Berman then turns to an analysis of the section of the Communist Manifesto that describes the “‘melting” of “all fixed fast-frozen relationships” in the bourgeois epoch. Here again Berman’s emphasis is on the “Innovative Self-Destruction” promoted by capitalist development. Berman correctly notes that capitalists themselves have usually failed to recognize the destructive revolutionary dynamism of their own economic system. Baudelaire is then ushered in to show how the modern city street promotes a curious mix of intimacy and anonymity. His testimony is followed by that of Russian writers from Pushkin to Dostoevsky to Mandelstam, all of whom are alleged to represent “the modernism of underdevelopment,” the blend of envy, admiration, and hostility that “backward” peoples feel toward modernizing, cosmopolitan cultures. Finally Berman adds a long discussion of “Modernism in New York.” After describing the modernizer Robert Moses’s destruction of older urban neighborhoods, Berman celebrates the efforts of recent modernists (Jim Dine, Twyla Tharp, Claes Oldenburg) to come to terms with the demonic “expressway world” Moses created. The subway stops. The doors open. The tour is at an end.
Berman would deny that his book is merely affirmative. He claims to take a “dialectical” approach to “the experience of modernity.” By focusing on a handful of modernist writers Berman aims to grasp modern tragedies as well as modern triumphs, to see the process of modernization in all its contradiction and perplexity. In his introduction Berman complains that twentieth-century interpretations of modernity have lost this complexity and hardened into either the “spaced-out high-tech rhapsodies” sung by Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan or the “futility and despair” of T. S. Eliot and Herbert Marcuse. According to Berman, both optimists and pessimists have lost the great nineteenth-century modernists’ view of “history as restless activity, dynamic contradiction, dialectical struggle and progress.” The problem comes with that last word. Without offering any evidence, Berman assumes that all tragedy and conflict will somehow contribute to “progress.” The result is an attitude as one-dimensional as the Marcusean pessimism Berman abhors.
Berman’s avowed aim—to restore conflict to our vision of modernity—is admirable, but he never comes close to fulfilling it. The chief difficulty is that his “dialectic” is merely a rhetorical device. Even in the introduction, where he pretends to criticize doctrinaire optimists and pessimists alike, it is clear where his sympathies lie. The only thing that bothers him about futurologists like Fuller is that their visions are really “techno-pastoral”—too static to satisfy Berman’s manic cravings for action. As for the Italian futurists, although Berman perfunctorily criticizes their disregard for “some very important kinds of human feeling,” he is “stirred by the futurists’ youthful verve and enthusiasm, by their desire to merge their energies with modern technology and create the world anew.” By contrast, he has nothing but contempt for those who are pessimistic about modern culture. Berman simply cannot confront the persistence of genuine, insoluble conflict. Social and personal devastation are acknowledged but always assimilated to Berman’s faith in endless personal and economic “growth.” For Berman, every loss—no matter how calamitous—can be converted into a new opportunity for “self-development.” The book is a self-help tract run wild, a therapeutic interpretation of the last two hundred years of Western history in which every cataclysm created by modernizing elites somehow serves to unlock new sources of “inner strength” and personal autonomy for modem men and women.
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