All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity

Marshall Berman

 

On Being Modern:

"To be modern," Marshall Berman writes, "is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air’" (15). Reading across a wide range of modernist moments and texts, from Goethe’s Faust to Robert Moses’ New York Parkway highways, Berman looks for a shared set of "distinctly modern concerns":

They are moved at once by a will to change—to transform both themselves and their world—and by a terror of disorientation and disintegration, of life falling apart. They all know the thrill and the dread of a world in which "all that is solid melts into air."

        To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often to destroy all communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something real even as everything melts. We might even say that to be fully modern is to be anti-modern: from Marx’s and Dostoevsky’s time to our own, it has been impossible to grasp and embrace the modern world’s potentialities without loathing and fighting against some of its most palpable realities. No wonder then that, as the great modernist and anti-modernist Keirkegaard said, the deepest modern seriousness must express itself through irony. Modern irony animates so many great works of art and thought over the past century; at the same time, it infuses millions of ordinary people’s lives. This book aims to bring these works and these lives together, to restore the spiritual wealth of modernist culture to the modern man and woman in the street, to show how, for all of us, modernism is realism. (13-14)

 

On Modernism:

In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I define modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it. This is a broader and more inclusive idea of modernism than those generally found in scholarly books. It implies an open and expansive way of understanding culture; very different from the curatorial approach that breaks up human activity into fragments and locks the fragments into separate cases, labeled by time, place, language, genre and academic discipline.

The broad and open way is only one of many possible ways, but it has advantages. It enables us to see all sorts of artistic, intellectual, religious and political activities as part of one dialectical process, and to develop creative interplay among them. It creates conditions for dialogue among the past, the present and the future. It cuts across physical and social space, and reveals solidarities between great artists and ordinary people, and between residents of what we clumsily call the Old, the New and the Third Worlds. It unites people across the bounds of ethnicity and nationality, of sex and class and race. It enlarges our vision of our own experience, shows that there is more to our lives than we thought, gives our days a new resonance and depth.

Certainly this is not the only way to interpret modern culture, or culture in general. But it make sense if we want culture to be a source of nourishment for ongoing life, rather than a cult of the dead.

If we think of modernism as a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world, we will realize that no one mode of modernism can ever be definitive. Our most creative constructions and achievements are bound to turn into prisons and white sepulchers that we, or our children, will have to escape or transcend if life is to go on. (5-6)