All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
Author
Marshall Berman (1940–2013), American philosopher and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. A lifelong New Yorker, he wrote about the city he lived in as both scholar and inhabitant.
Publication Details
All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982; Penguin, 1988. 383 pp.
Description
Berman distinguishes three things routinely conflated: modernisation, the social and economic processes — industrialisation, urbanisation, mass communication, capital; modernism, the artistic and intellectual responses to them; and modernity, the lived experience of being caught between the two. His subject is the third.
That experience he characterises as fundamentally contradictory: modernity promises adventure, growth, transformation and the remaking of the world, and simultaneously threatens to destroy everything one has, knows and is. Its characteristic condition is a "maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal" that people are both agents of and subject to.
The book proceeds through readings: Goethe's Faust as the tragedy of the developer, whose vision requires the destruction of Philemon and Baucis; Marx as a modernist writer rather than only an economist; Baudelaire on the boulevards and the birth of the modern street; the Petersburg tradition from Pushkin and Gogol through Dostoevsky and Mandelstam, as modernity experienced from a place that was modernised by decree without being modern; and finally New York, where Berman sets Robert Moses's expressways against Jane Jacobs's streets — a chapter that is partly memoir, since the Cross-Bronx Expressway destroyed the neighbourhood he grew up in.
Key Ideas
- Modernity as contradiction, not condition. The refusal to resolve the promise and the threat into a verdict is the book's method.
- The tragedy of development. Faust as the type of the modern developer: genuinely visionary, genuinely liberating, and unable to build without destroying, including things he loves.
- Modernism in the streets. Berman's insistence that modernism is not confined to museums and difficult books but is lived in ordinary urban experience.
- Against the postmodern dismissal. Written against the emerging position that modernity was over and its aspirations naive, Berman's argument is that the project of using its energies to make a better common life is unfinished rather than discredited. His public dispute with Perry Anderson over this is a landmark exchange in New Left Review.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Berman supplies the emotional and historical register that technology writing usually lacks — an account of what it feels like to live in a world being continuously rebuilt around you, and a refusal to settle into either enthusiasm or lament. His Faustian analysis of development applies with almost no adjustment to platform building: a genuine vision, a genuine liberation, and a destruction of existing arrangements that the builder regards as regrettable and unavoidable.
The book also makes the useful historical point that the sense of everything dissolving too quickly to be understood is not a diagnosis of the present. It is the constitutive experience of modernity, and it is nearly two centuries old. Compare Bauman, who describes the same dissolution as a new stage rather than a continuation.
