All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity

Rating:
Summary: fluid transparency test
Review: . The artistic project of modernity was often expressed as being singular, insular, self-referential, utopian, and dogmatic. While none of these categories are accurate representations of the project of modernity in the late 19th or early 20th century, Berman's contestations and arguments for Modernity nevertheless paint it in overly fluid, dynamic, and defensive turns. In order to deflect the criticism of modernism as a project with a singular, definitive trajectory, Berman redefines the stories and actions of modernism to be chaotic, Protean and indestructible. Berman's argument succeeds in poetically expressing the energies that are at work in modernization, which is by its nature always an unfinished process. But in using literature as a fulcrum from which to discuss the plurality and multivocality of the Modernist Project, he continually constructs characteristically dark and ambient visions of modernism's bleak toil with reality while at the same time attempting to regain and reconcile a beauty and energy within Modernity that wills it towards democratic processes and relationships. This is an often contradictory enterprise.

Rating:
Summary: fluid transparency test
Review: . The artistic project of modernity was often expressed as being singular, insular, self-referential, utopian, and dogmatic. While none of these categories are accurate representations of the project of modernity in the late 19th or early 20th century, Berman's contestations and arguments for Modernity nevertheless paint it in overly fluid, dynamic, and defensive turns. In order to deflect the criticism of modernism as a project with a singular, definitive trajectory, Berman redefines the stories and actions of modernism to be chaotic, Protean and indestructible. Berman's argument succeeds in poetically expressing the energies that are at work in modernization, which is by its nature always an unfinished process. But in using literature as a fulcrum from which to discuss the plurality and multivocality of the Modernist Project, he continually constructs characteristically dark and ambient visions of modernism's bleak toil with reality while at the same time attempting to regain and reconcile a beauty and energy within Modernity that wills it towards democratic processes and relationships. This is an often contradictory enterprise.

Rating:
Summary: Well Written
Review: Berman weaves an intricate tale of Marxism and modernism. His text leaves out what I feel are important views and experiences, specifically gender, but despite this his work is thought provoking and valuable in understanding Marx's project.

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Summary: whither the modern?
Review: Goethe and Marx, these are cardinal figures in the history of modernity. Goethe, the spiritual father of its grand visions and inexhaustible hope. Marx, the outsider, the witness to the sorcery of its soul and that of its organizing principle, Capital. His charge-- it is an artifice of progressively concentrating energy that will not be bound by any responsibility or shared purpose. The practical result is a constant breakdown of community and institutions as they are offered to the flame of re-invention. This is the core of the book's message. Nothing is permanent in the modernist domain. Art, city, ideals, country-- all are subsumed into new solids that immediately fracture and evaporate under pressure of another oncoming order, crashing in with waves of reorganization. The technologies of its own genius are its tools. The post-structural epoch is merely another phase of modernism's relentless push to incinerate the old and recreate society in its own frenzied image. Iconoclasm becomes the coordinating edict. The erasure of all cultural memory is implicit; moral purpose is desanctified; Capital's own ethos is elevated to the realm of faith.

Berman moves from the literary and intellectual movements of France and Russia into the streets. The building of St. Petersburg, with its imposed occidental face on Russia's traditionally oriental sensibilities, the boulevards of Paris's reconstruction of the 1870's, and the highways of the irrepressible Robert Moses-- the urban landscape has chronicled modernism's advance. The breadth of this thesis in choosing such disparate symbols to exemplify the progression is impressive, as is Berman's ability to synthesize them. When the book was written twenty years ago Communism had not yet collapsed, but its moral failure was evident, its material demise imminent. Berman's more romantic notions of a merging of modernism and Marxism, harnessing the creative impulse to popularly reasoned objectives, might have passed from any realistic possibility. His relationship with both is clearly one of fascination and alienation. All that seems to have gone down in flames, in annihilating contradictions, and, in the infinite actualization of modernism's belief in itself. It will tolerate no governance. A persistent anti- modernist insurgency, fragmented and cleaved onto disparate political structures, provides a cowed conscience at best. But with its illimitable dominion seemingly secure, Berman's proposal is thought provoking indeed-- that all of Marx's characterizations of its nature are true, and that no sustainable alternative has yet been conceived.

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Summary: One of the best I've read
Review: I read this book a long time ago in college for a lit crit class. While admittedly I don't recall much detail of it, I do remember that it was one of few books I read in that class and many other lit crit classes that was lucid, cogent and clear in its argument and analysis. As a testament to its merit, it has remained on my bookshelf after all the others have been sold off to used bookstores. Moreover, it gave me one of the key insights about modernity that have remained with me to this day, and which has been useful in understanding why certain anti-modern societies resist modernization and why our contemporary society is so schizophrenic. That insight is that no tradition, which inherently protects realms of privilege, can be maintained in the face of the onslaught of the profit-driven motive underlying capitalism, which will always seek out new markets to exploit, such as the unexploited market as protected by tradition.

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Summary: Who says Modernity is dead?
Review: When one picks up this book, as we do with all books, we ask: What is this book REALLY about? Among the choice subjects he includes Goethe's Faust, the vibrance of city streets, Marx and Engels in the examination of The Communist Manifesto (treated as a literary piece), the enigmatic Crystal Palace, Baudelaire, the Czars, Nietzsche and the whole hearted destruction of the inner cities such as the Bronx. It is a sort of eclectic mix that both confuses and informs. There are however a few glitches.... Berman, devotes much space to Czarist Russia as a case of 'modernism with underdevelopment' and somehow reduces the Soviet Regime as 'despotic, inquisitorial' and other such reductions to the point of contradicting his thesis of creative modernity. Maybe there is some comparison that can be drawn within the framework of this analysis to put Robert Moses and Stalin as figures of great destruction as opposed to builders of grand empires. In the end, all that is solid melts into air, and we are left more cultured. For those of us who have been dropped into (much to our confusion) into a deliberately cryptic and confusing postmodern world, this piece a vibrant introduction to modernity and should be used as a prime mover for much discussion of the troubles and wonders of modernity.

Miguel Llora