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Solid Melts (changes)

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Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air (1932)

Introduction and General Theses

• What is the book?
  • Open-ended, not exhaustive
  • Modernism: “a mode of vital experience”
    • Cultural responses to modernity as a dialectic between modernism and modernization
      • Both negative and affirmative (“modernolatry” and “cultural despair”)
      • Modernism can be for modernization or against it
  • From Goethe Pushkin and Doestoevsky to the 1960s Bronx
    • Everything from late Romanticism to postmodernism AS MODERNISM
  • Not just about literary production
    • About lives, spaces, city planning, texts, social movements
    • Modernism as an entire cultural movement, not just for artists
  • “No definitive mode of modernism”
  • Why this extended modernism?
    • Today, we can learn how to deal with our lives by looking at the modernists and their responses to their world, for we all live in that very same world of modernity
  • Why the title?
    • Modernism is willing to annihilate everything it has created in order to make room for further creation
• What is modernity?
  • Science, communications, city planning, transportation, technology, creation of world market, urban growth, mass social movements movements, bureaucracy
  • 1590-1790: growing but unaware
  • 1790-1900: bursts into flower and consciousness
  • 1900-2000: fully bloomed, loses touch with its roots
• Call to ally materialist interpretation with aesthetic interpretation when dealing with modernism

One: Faust, Tragedy of Development

• Faust is the insatiable drive for development despite the human cost
  • Can’t create without letting everything go
  • Compact with devil = human cost
• Stages of Faust: isolated, lover, developer
• Development of nature is “the new romance”
• Bad comes out of the good, good comes out of the bad
  • Dialectical movement where the devil makes Faust better, but Faust’s development kills people
• Faust has been interpreted as a capitalist entrepreneur (Lukacs), but Berman sees him as a socialist planner

Two: Marxism, Modernism, and Modernization

• Berman reads Manifesto as a work of art, looking at style, tone, images, paradoxes, and themes; finds many contradictions in it, but still trusts Marx in the end due to his dialecticism; and believes that modernism is Marxist, and Marxism is modernist
  • “Modernism as the realism of our time” (122)
  • Marx as “one of the first and greatest of modernists” (129)
• Marx seen as a theorist of modernization, but needs to be seen also as a modernist and in terms of modernism
  • Similarities between Marxism and modernism
    • Internationalism
    • “Both are attempts to evoke and grasp a distinctively modern experience.
    • “Both confront this realm with mixed emotions, awe and elation fused with a sense of horror.
    • “Both see modern life as shot through with contradictory impulses and potentialities,
    • “and both embrace a vision of ultimate or ultramodernity.”
  • Marx as a modernist
    • “He develops the themes by which modernism will come to define itself.”
      • Uncertainty, vortex, nihilism, hope, energy
      • Heat, cold, halos, nakedness, veils
    • Communist Manifesto
      • as a model for all the modernist manifestos
      • “the first great modernist work of art.”
    • Style and tone
      • Apocalyptic, ambiguous, dramatic, visionary
      • “Reckless,” “frantic rhythm” “luminous,” “incandescent”
  • The Marxism of modernism
    • Modernism’s “characteristic energy, insights and anxieties spring from the drives and strains of modern economic life.”
      • Volatility and destruction, relentlessness, insatiability of desires
    • Theme of the desacrilization: “all that is holy is profaned”
      • Modernists are not as far from the bourgeois as they think (“stripped the halo off every occupation”—every occupation
      • Artists, intellectuals, priests, doctors, lawyers, scientists are also in the pay of the bourgeois
      • Historically, these professions seen as genteel, apart from wage-labor
      • We do not escape having to meet the demands of the market, the commodification of our goods
      • Poor us: dependent on market not only for actual subsistence, but for “spiritual subsistence” because you have to sell your ideas (very personalized stuff)
  • Marx characterizes modernity as frantic, uncertain, constant overthrow and change
    • Catastrophes are written into the deal, used by capitalism to make itself stronger
  • Modernist cult of the new is another type of the capitalist need for different, new commodities
• Culture of Contradictions
  • Bourgeois feeds off chaos and crisis, gets even stronger
  • Dread and wonder, manic depressive
  • Revolutionary activity that will overthrow the bourgeois will itself be the result of bourgeois energies and efforts
    • They create the proletariat
    • (Me:) Aren’t the stories of rebellion (Isherwood’s All the Conspirators, for example) really just family romances where the young rejects the old, therefore showing how one thing creates in its own actions its opposite?
  • Marx likes and dislikes this modern world
    • Doesn’t want to go back in time to a premodern world, but wants to reach a fuller modernity, with fuller freedom, fuller democracy, and freer production
    • The development of the human being itself is a bourgeois value he appreciates
      • He constantly stresses the “free development of the human being” as the value of communism
      • Reaching human potential requires the end of the division of labor, so we can all be Renaissance men if we want (no specialization)
    • The bourgeois world is one of great human achievement
      • Buildings, technologies, labor force unparalleled in history
      • Has freed people from feudal, religious, and other outdated responsibilities
    • Built-in obsolescence
      • Capitalism requires novelty, so it makes things only to destroy them
      • They create to destroy (contradiction!)
    • Free market capitalism includes free market of ideas
      • In capitalism’s best interest to allow anti-capitalist talk to circulate
      • As long as you can sell the ideas and generate capital, it’s allowable
      • Revolution, the commodity: Marx is okay with it b/c believes it will eventually work
• It’s all exchange value
  • “Resolving into exchange value” doesn’t mean that it disappears, but instead appears as a subset in the pay of cash value
    • Morals now judged according to if they make money
    • Honor, justice, etc become commodities rather than just disappear
  • The “loss of the halo” under the regime of money-equality
    • Nothing is sacred because it all is seen in terms of the same criterion: money
      • Quality disappears in the face of quantity
    • cf Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” about loss of aura
      • Idea of reproduction of art killing the aura is the same process of exchange value leveling everything (“no original” = “no higher criterion than money”)
• Arguments against Marx
  • Berman’s own
    • How could the proletariat possibly transcend a strong, chaos-resistant organization such as the bourgeoisie?
    • How could any communist organization remain without morphing into something else?
    • The bourgeoisie protect their markets too well to allow the circulation of truly revolutionary wares.
  • Herbert Marcuse
    • Marx valorizes labor too much
    • Human relaxation and passivity is a beautiful thing
    • Why can’t you be happy with existence instead of trying to “master” it?
  • Hannah Arendt
    • If you achieve a truly communist state where all are “freely” developing, how do these individuals actually continue to care about community?
    • Won’t people just obey their individual instincts?
• Upshot: What does Marx give us? Not a way to avoid or back out of the contradictions of capitalism, but instead a way deeper into those contradictions.

Three: Baudelaire and the Streets

• Baudelaire as the first modernist via “Painter of Modern Life” (1863)
  • Ephemeral, fleeting
  • Need to see the beauty in everyday modern life: look around you, he says
  • New aspects of daily life will lead to archetypes or mythology suitable for art (that’s the connex with eternity that he also wants from art)
  • All walks of life, not just the “noble”
• Streets
  • His Paris is the newly redesigned Haussman boulevards
    • They tear down medieval slums (now the poor are just free to walk around)
    • Makes it possible for fast traffic, for going through Paris end to end
    • Creates mixed-use areas, especially arcades, shopping, and corner cafes
    • Later, Le Corbusier would want to abolish these, end the “chaos” of these dirty, unsafe, yet so exciting streets
    • Prompts Berman to say that some modernisms congeal into orthodoxies
  • Fluid, vaporous, chaotic
  • Energy of the crowd should be channeled for artistic purposes
• Champion of free thought
• Modernity as “elusive…hard to pin down”
• He mixes modernolatry with despair (love of modernity with antimodernism)
  • Modernity is attractive and horrifying
  • Berman accuses him of loving consumer items too lavishly and innocently
    • Also accuses him of loving the military shows (ie, many modernists show affinity for military, so we should understand/investigate that trend)
  • Yet Baudelaire is also doubtful of progress narratives
    • “On the Idea of Progress as Applied to the Fine Arts” (1855)
    • Progress lets men off responsibility and duty
    • Progress leads to moral decadence (which he condemns)
    • Don’t confuse material with spiritual progress (159)
• Wants beauty, not truth, in art (anti-realist, anti-photography)
• Beauty of modernity inseparable from its anxieties
• Progress sometimes more like constant suicide
• Artist loses halo
  • Likes Marx saying that all professions are desanctified (incl. clergy, poets, etc)
  • Artists should go to the underworld for inspiration
  • Artists are just like everyone else

Four: Petersburg

• A completely artificial, planned city
  • Makes for a “warped modernity” because you have none of the personal freedoms associated with capitalism, yet you have the Nevsky Prospect that looks like Paris and London
• Both antimodernists and modernists live in the same world
  • One wants a way out, while the other feels at home in it
• Berman here moves from the solitary hero of the 1840s and 1860s (Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky) to the social movements of 1867, 1905, 1917 revolutions and various protests and demonstrations
• Realism and modernism are prompted in the same moment in historical time because adjacent spaces can partake of different cultural milieus
  • Nevsky Prospect is a buzzing modernity
  • Side streets are the same old rules of structure, coherence, meaning-making
  • Two adjacent places come from two different times
  • Therefore, they inspire two different arts, realism and modernism
    • Will help to prove relation of space to art
• Spaces as the sites for modernism developing
  • Streets are what inspire modernist aesthetic flights

Words

• Disorienting
• Adventure
• Possibility
• Nonstop
• Compulsory flexibility
• Transformation
• Restless

Quotes

• Marx: “The atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone like a 20,000 pound force, but do you feel it?”
• Social movements as “modernism from below”
• “You can’t step into the same modernity twice” (143)
• “Baudelaire wants art that will be born in the midst of traffic” (160)
• Modernist art as a mix of “romantic surrender and critical perspective” (174)
• One genre of modernism: “the romance of the city street” (195)
• Modernity “annihilates all it creates…in order to create more” (288)