"A vlslonory work which by oil ri ghts ought to hove the lmpoct of such sixties bibles os Growing Up Rbsurd ond Life Rgolnst Death" -Robert Chrlstgou. Thtl VI/loge \blce All Tl1at Is Solid Mt:lts ll'ltoAir All That Is Marshall Berman S Welts Into Air The Experience of Modernity PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England First published in the United States of America by Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1982 This edition with a new preface published in Penguin Books 1988 Published simultaneously in Canada 20 19 18 17 16 Copyright© Marshall Berman, 1982, 1988 All rights reserved Parts of All TllaJ Is Solid Melts Into Air were previously published in slightly different form in Dissent magazine, Winter 1978; American Review #19, 1974; and Berkshire &view, October 1981. The author is grateful for permission to use excerpts from the following wor/cs: Mminetti: Selected Writings, edited and with an introduction by R. W Flint, translated by R. W Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. Copyright © 1971, 1972 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., and reprinted with their permission. Beyond Good and Evil by Fredrik Nietzsche, translated by Marianne Cowan, Regnery Gateway, 1967. Futurist Manifestos, English language translation copyright © 1973 by Thames and Hudson, Ltd. Reprinted by permission ofthe Viking Press, Inc. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Berman, Marshall, 1940- All that is solid melts into air. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Civilization, Modern-20th century. 2. Civilization, Modern -19th century. I. Title. CB425.B458 1988 909.82 87-29174 ISBN 0 14 01.0962 5 Printed in the United States of America Set in Baskerville Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. In Memory of Marc Joseph Berman 1975-1980 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This is far from a confessional book. Still, as I carried it for years inside me, I felt that in some sense it was the story of my life. It is impossible here to acknowledge all those who lived through the book with me and who helped make it what it is: the subjects would be too many, the predicates too complex, the emotions too intense; the work of making the list would never begin, or else would never end. What follows is no more than a start. For energy, ideas, sup- port and love, my deepest thanks to Betty and Diane Berman, Morris and Lore Dickstein, Sam Girgus, Todd Gitlin, Denise Green, Irving Howe, Leonard Kriegel, Meredith and Corey Tax, Gaye Tuchman, Michael Walzer; to Georges Borchardt and Michel Radomisli; to Erwin Glikes, Barbara Grossman and Susan Dwyer at Simon and Schuster; to Allen Ballard, George Fischer and Richard Wortman, who gave me special help with St. Petersburg; to my stu- dents and colleagues at the City College and the City University of New York, and at Stanford and the University of New Mexico; to the members of the Columbia University seminar in Political and Social Thought, and of the NYU seminar in the Culture of Cities; to the National Endowment for the Humanities; to the Purple Circle Day Care Center; to Lionel Trilling and Henry Pachter, who encouraged me to begin this book, and to keep at it, but who did not live to see it in print; and to many others, not named here, but not forgotten, who helped. Contents Preface to the Penguin Edition: The Broad and Open Way 5 Preface 13 Introduction: Modernity-Yesterday, Today and 15 Tomorrow I. Goethe's Fawt: The Tragedy of Development 37 First Metamorphosis: The Dreamer 41 Second Metamorphosis: The Lover 51 Third Metamorphosis: The Developer 60 Epilogue: The Faustian and Pseudo-Faustian Age 71 II. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Marx, Modernism 87 and Modernization 1. The Melting Vision and Its Dialectic 90 2. Innovative Self-Destruction 98 8. Nakedness: The Unaccommodated Man 105 4. The Metamorphosis of Values 111 5. The Loss of a Halo 115 Conclusion: Culture and the Contradictions of 120 Capitalism III. Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streets 131 1. Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral Modernism 134 2. The Heroism of Modem Life 142 8. The Family of Eyes 148 4. The Mire of the Macadam 155 5. The Twentieth Century: The Halo and the 164 Highway IV. Petersburg: The Modernism of Underdevelopment 173 1. The Real and Unreal City 176 "Geometry Has Appeared": The City in the 176 Swamps Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman": The Clerk and 181 the Tsar AIIThHIIs Petersburg Under Nicholas 1: Palace vs. 189 Prospect Gogol: The Real and Surreal Street 195 Words and Shoes: The Young Dostoevsky 206 Sold llelts 2. The 1860s: The New Man in the Street 212 Chernyshevsky: The Street as Frontier 215 The Underground Man in the Street 219 Into Air Petersburg vs. Paris: Two Modes of Modernism 229 in the Streets The Political Prospect 232 Afterword: The Crystal Palace, Fact and Symbol 235 3. The Twentieth Century: The City Rises, the 249 City Fades 1905: More Light, More Shadows 249 Biely's Petersburg: The Shadow Passport 255 Mandelstam: The Blessed Word With 270 No Meaning Conclusion: The Petersburg Prospect 284 v. In the Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on 287 Modernism in New York 1. Robert Moses: The Expressway World 290 2. The 1960s: A Shout in the Street 312 3. The 1970s: Bringing It All Back Home 329 Notes 349 Index 370 Preface To The Penguin Edition: The Broad and Open Way 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 them- selves 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 atnong the past, the present and the future. It cuts across physical and social space, and reveals solidarities between great art- ists and ordinary people, and between residents of what we clumsily 6 ALL THAT Is SoLID MELTS INTO AIR 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. enlarges our vision of our own experience, shows us 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 makes 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 no mode. of mod- ernism can ever be definitive. Our most creative constructions and achievements are bound to turn into prisons and whited sepulchres that we or our children, will have to escape or transform if life is to go on. 'Dostoevsky's Underground Man suggests this in his inex- haustible dialogue with himself: You gentlemen perhaps think I am mad? Allow me to defend myself. I agree that man is preeminently a creative tined to consciously strive toward a goal, and to engage m engmeer- ing, that is, eternally and incessantly, to build new roads, they may lead .... Man loves to create .is dis- pute. But ... may it not be .... that he afra1? of attaining his goal and completmg the edifice he How do you know, perhaps he only likes that edifice from a dis- tance and not at all at a close range, perhaps he only likes to build it, and does not want to live in it. I experienced the dash of modernisms dramatically, indeed participated in it, when I Braztl 1987 to dis- cuss this book. My first stop was Brasilia, the capital city that was cre- ated ex nihilo by fiat of President juscelino Kubitschek, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the exact geographical center of the coun- try. It was planned and designed by Costa Niemeyer, left-wing disciples of Le Corbus1er. From the air, Brasi!Ia looked dynamic and exciting: in fact, it was to resemble the plane from which I (and virtually all other VISitors) first observed It. From the ground level, however, where people actual.ly. live and work, it is one of the most dismal cities in the world. This IS not the place for a detailed account of Brasilia's design, but one's overall Preface to the Penguin Edition 7 feeling-confirmed by every Brazilian I met-is of immense empty spaces in which the individual feels lost, as alone as a man on the moon. There is a deliberate absence of public space in which people can meet and talk, or simply look at each other and hang around. The great tradition of Latin urbanism, in which city life is organized around a plaza mayor, is explicitly rejected. Brasilia's design might have made perfect sense for the capital of a military dictatorship, ruled by generals who wanted the people kept at a distance, kept apart and kept down. As the capital of a democ- racy, however, it is a scandal. If Brazil is going to stay democratic, I argued in public discussions and the mass media, it needs demo- cratic public space where people can come and assemble freely from all over the country, to talk to each other and address their govern- ment-because, in a democracy, it is after all their government-and debate their needs and desires, and communicate their will. Before long, Niemeyer began to respond. After saying various uncomplimentary things about me, he made a more interesting statement: Brasilia symbolized the aspirations and hopes of the Bra- zilian people and any attack on its design was an assault on the peo- ple themselves. One of his followers added that I revealed my inner vacuity by pretending to be a modernist while attacking a work that is one of the supreme embodiments of modernism. All this gave me pause. Niemeyer was right about one thing: when Brasilia was conceived and planned, in the 1950s and early 1960s, it really did embody the hopes of the Brazilian people; in particular, their desire for modernity. The great gulf between these hopes and their realization seems to illustrate the Underground Man's point: it can be a creative adventure for modern men to build a palace, and yet a nightmare to have to live in it. This problem is especially acute for a modernism that forecloses or is hostile to change-or, rather, a modernism that seeks one great change, and then no more. Niemeyer and Costa, following Le Cor- busier, believed that the modern architect should use technology to construct a material embodiment of certain ideal, eternal classic forms. If this could be done for a whole city, that city would be per- fect and complete; its boundaries might extend, but it would never develop from within. Like the Crystal Palace, as it is imagined in Notes from Underground, Costa and Niemeyer's Brasilia left its citi- zens-and those of the country as a whole- "with nothing left to do." 8 ALL THAT Is Souo MELTS INTO AIR In 1964, shortly after the new capital opened, Brazilian democ- racy was overthrown by a military dictatorship. In the years of the dictatorship (which Niemeyer opposed), people had far more griev- ous crimes to worry about than any defects in the capital's design. But once Brazilians regained their freedom, at the end ofthe 1970s and in the early 1980s, it was inevitable that many of them would come to resent a capital that seemed to be designed to keep them quiet. Niemeyer should have known that a modernist work that deprived people of some of the basic modern prerogatives-to speak, to assemble, to argue, to communicate their needs-would be bound to make numerous enemies. As I spoke in Rio, Sao Paulo, Recife, I found myself serving as a conduit for widespread indigna- tion toward a city that, as so many Brazilians told me, had no place for them. And yet, how much was Niemeyer to blame? If some other archi- tect had won the competition for the city's design, isn't it likely that it would be more or less as alien a scene as it is now? Didn't everything most deadening in Brasilia spring from a worldwide consensus among enlightened planners and designers? It was only in the 1960s and 1970s, after the generation that built proto-Brasilias every- where-not least in my own country's cities and suburb,-had a chance to live in them, that they discovered how much was missing from the world these modernists had made. Then, like the Under- ground Man in the Crystal Palace, they (and their children) began to make rude gestures and Bronx cheers, and to create an alternative modernism that would assert the presence and the dignity of all the people who had been left out. My sense of what Brasilia lacked brought me back to one of my book's central themes, a theme that seemed so salient to me that I didn't state it as clearly as it deserved: the importance of communica- tion and dialogue. There may not seem to be anything particularly modern about these activities, which go back to-indeed, which help to define-the beginnings of civilization, and which were celebrated as primary human values by the Prophets and Socrates more than two thousand years ago. But I believe that communication and dia- logue have taken on a new specific weight and urgency in modern times, because subjectivity and inwardness have become at once richer and more intensely developed, and more lonely and entrapped, than they ever were before. In such a context, communi- Preface to the Penguin Edition 9 cation and become both a desperate need and a primary of dehght. In a world where meanings melt into air, these expenences are among the few solid sources of meaning we can count on. One of the can make modern life worth living is the enhanced opportumt1es It offers us-and sometimes even forces on us-to talk together, to reach and understand each other. We need to make the most of these possibilities; they should shape the way we organize our cities and our lives. • Many readers have wondered why I didn't write about all sorts of people: places, ideas and movements that would seem to fit my over- all proJect at. least as well as the subjects I chose. Why no Proust or Freud, Berhn or Shanghai, Mishima or Sembene, New York's Abstract or the Plastic People of Prague? The sim- plest IS that I wanted All That Is Solid Melts Into Air to appear m my hfet1me. That meant I had to decide, at a certain point, not so much to end the book as to stop it. Besides, I never intended to write .encyclopedia modernity. I hoped, rather, to develop a series of and could enable people to explore their own expenence and history m greater detail and depth. I wanted to write a book that would be open and stay open, a book in which readers would be able to write chapters of their own. Some readers may think that I give short shrift to the vast accumu- co.ntemporary discourse around the idea of post-moder- mty. Th1s d1scourse began to emanate from France in the late 1970s largely disillusioned rebels of.1968, moving in the orbit of structuralism: Roland Barthes, M1chel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and their legions of fol- lowers. In the 1980s, post-modernism became a staple of aesthetic and literary discussion in the U.S.A. 1 Post-modernists may be said to have developed a paradigm that sharply with the one in this book. I have argued that modern hfe and art and thought have the capacity for perpetual self-critique and self-renewal. Post-modernists maintain that the horizon of modernity is closed, its energies exhausted-in effect, that moder- nity is yasse. Post-modernist social thought pours scorn on all the collective hopes for moral and social progress, for personal freedom and public happiness, that were bequeathed to us by the modernists of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. These hopes, post- moderns say, have been shown to be bankrupt, at best vain and futile 10 ALL THAT Is Souo MELTS INTO AIR fantasies, at worst engines of domination and monstrous ment. Post-modernists claim to see through the "grand narratives" of modern culture, especially "the narrative of humanity as the hero ofliberty." It is the mark of post-modern sophistication to have "lost even nostalgia for the lost narrative." 2 Jiirgen Habermas's recent book, The Philosophical of Modernity, exposes the weaknesses of post-modern thought m mci- sive detail. I will be writing more in this vein in the coming year. The best I can do for now is to reaffirm the overall vision of modernity that I have developed in this book. Readers can ask themselves if the world of Goethe, Marx, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, et al., as I have con- structed it, is radically different from our own. Have we really out- grown the dilemmas that arise when "all that is solid melts air," or the dream of a life in which "the free development of each IS the condition of the free development of all"? I do not think so. But I hope this book will better equip readers to make judgments of their own. There is one modern sentiment that I regret not exploring in greater depth. I am talking about the widespread and often ate fear of the freedom that modernity opens up for every mdtvtd- ual, and the desire to escape from freedom (this was Erich Fromm's apt phrase in 1941) by any means possible. This distinctively modern darkness was first mapped by Dostoevsky in his parable of the Grand Inquisitor (The Brothers Karamazov, 1881). "Man peace," the Inquisitor says, "and even death, to freedom of chmce m the knowl- edge of good and evil. There is nothing more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing that is a greater cause of suf- fering." He then steps out of his story, set in Counter-Reformation Seville, and directly addresses Dostoevsky's late-nineteenth-century audience: "Look now, today, people are persuaded that they are freer than ever before, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet." The Grand Inquisitor has cast a somber shadow over the politics of the twentieth century. So many demagogues and demagogic movements have won power and mass adoration by relieving the peoples they rule of the burden offreedom. (Iran's current holy des- pot even looks like the Grand Inquisitor.) The Fascist regimes of 1922-1945 may turn out to be only a first chapter in the still unfold- ing history of radical authoritarianism. Many in this mold actually celebrate modern technology, commumcattons and Preface to the Penguin Edition II techniques of mass mobilization, and use them to crush modern freedoms. Some of these movements have won ardent support from great modernists: Ezra Pound, Heidegger, Celine. The paradoxes and perils in all this are dark and deep. It strikes me that an honest modernist needs to look longer and deeper into this abyss than I have done so far. I felt this very acutely in early 1981, asAllThatls SolidMeltsintoAir was going to press and Ronald Reagan was entering the White House. One of the most powerful forces in the coalition that brought Reagan to power was a drive to annihilate all traces of "secular humanism" and turn the U.S.A. into a theocratic police state. The frenzied (and lavishly funded) militancy of this drive convinced many people, including passionate opponents, that it was the wave of the future. But now, seven years later, Reagan's inquisitorial zealots are being decisively rebuffed in Congress, in the courts (even the "Reagan Court") and in the court of public opinion. The American people may have been deluded enough to vote for him, but they are clearly unwilling to lay their freedoms at the President's feet. They will not say goodbye to due process of law (not even in the name of a war on crime), or to civil rights (even if they fear and distrust blacks), or to freedom of expression (even if they don't like pornography), or to the right of privacy and the freedom to make sexual choices (even if they disapprove of abortion and abhor homosexuals). Even Ameri- cans who consider themselves deeply religious have recoiled against a theocratic crusade that would force them to their knees. This resis- tance-even among Reagan supporters-to the Reagan "social agenda" testifies to the depth of ordinary people's commitment to modernity and its deepest values. It shows, too, that people can be modernists even if they've never heard the word in their lives. In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air I tried to open up a perspective that will reveal all sorts of cultural and political movements as part of one process: modern men and women asserting their dignity in the present-even a wretched and oppressive present-and their right to control their future; striving to make a place for themselves in the modern world, a place where they can feel at home. From this point of view, the struggles for democracy that are going on all over the contemporary world are central to modernism's meaning and power. The masses of anonymous people who are putting their lives on the line-from Gdansk to Manila, from Soweto to Seoul-are 12 ALL THAT Is SoLID MELTS INTO AIR creating new forms of collective expression .. and Power are modernist breakthroughs as stunmng as The or "Guernica." The book is far from closed on the "grand that presents "humanity as the hero of liberty": new subJeCts and new acts are appearing all the time. The great critic Lionel Trilling coined a phrase m 1968: "Modern- ism in the streets." I hope that readers of this book will remember that the streets, our streets, are where modernism belongs. The open way leads to the public square. • This theme suggests connections with thinkers like Georg Simmel, Martin Buber and J ilrgen Habermas. Prefuce For most of my life, since I learned that I was living in "a modern building" and growing up as part of "a modern family," in the Bronx of thirty years ago, I have been fascinated by the meanings of modernity. In this book I have tried to open up some of these dimensions of meaning, to explore and chart the adventures and horrors, the ambiguities and ironies of modern life. The book moves and develops through a number of ways of reading: of texts -Goethe's Faust, the Communist Manifesto, Notes from Underground, and many more; but also I try to read spatial and social environ- ments-small towns, big construction sites, dams and power plants, Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, Haussmann's Parisian bou- levards, Petersburg prospects, Robert Moses' highways through New York; and finally, reading fictional and actual people's lives, from Goethe's time through Marx's and Baudelaire's and into our own. I have tried to show how all these people share, and all these books and environments express, certain distinctively modern con- cerns. 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 imme_nse 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 theh world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibil- 13 14 Preface ities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to cre- ate and to hold on to something real even as everything melts. We might even say that to be fully modern is be from Marx's and Dostoevsky's time to our own, 1t has been 1mposs1ble to grasp and embrace the modern potentialities loathing and fighting against some of Its most palpable reahues. No wonder then that, as the great modernist and anti-modernist Kierkegaard 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 everyday lives. This book aims to bring these works and these lives together, to restore the spiritual wealth of modernist culture to the modern woman in the street, to show how, for all of us, modermsm IS realism. This will not resolve the contradictions that pervade mod- ern life; but it should help us to understand them, so that we can be clear and honest in facing and sorting out and working through the forces that make us what we are. Shortly after I finished this book, my dear son Marc, five years old, was taken from me. I dedicate All That Is Solid Melts into Air to him. His life and death bring so many of its ideas and themes close to home: the idea that those who are most happily at home in the modern world, as he was, may be most vulnerable to the demons that haunt it; the idea that the daily routine of playgrounds and bicycles, of shopping and eating and cleaning up, of ordinary hugs and kisses, may be not only infinitely joyous and beautiful but also infinitely precarious and fragile; that it may take desperate and heroic struggles to sustain this life, and sometimes we lose. I van Karamazov says that, more than anything else, the death of chil- dren makes him want to give back his ticket to the universe. But he does not give it back. He keeps on fighting and loving; he keeps on keeping on. New York City January 1981 Introduction Modernity-Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow IS a mode of vital experience-experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils-that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience "modernity." To be modern is to find ourselves in an that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world-and, at the same time, that to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everythmg we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and na- religion ideology: in this sense, modernity can be t? all But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of 1t pours us all mto a maelstrom of perpetual disintegra- tion renewal, of and contradiction, of ambiguity and angUish. To be modern IS to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, "all that is solid melts into air." People who find themselves in the midst of this maelstrom are apt to feel that they are the first ones, and maybe the only ones, to be going through it; this feeling has engendered numerous nos- talgic of P.re-modern Paradise Lost. In fact, however, great and ever-mcreasmg numbers of people have been going through 15 16 ALL THAT Is Souo MELTS INTO AIR it for close to five hundred years. Although most of these people have probably experienced modernity as a radical threat to all their histQry and traditions, it has, in the course of five centuries, developed a rich history and a plenitude of traditions of its own. I want to explore and chart these traditions, to understand the ways in which they can nourish and enrich our own modernity, and the ways in which they may obscure or impoverish our sense of what modernity is and what it can be. The maelstrom of modern life has been fed from many sources: great discoveries in the physical sciences, changing our images of the universe and our place in it; the industrialization of produc- tion, which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, cre- ates new human environments and destroys old ones, speeds up the whole tempo of life, generates new forms of corporate power and class immense demographic upheavals, severing mil- lions of people from their ancestral habitats, hurtling them half- way across the world into new lives; rapid and often cataclysmic urban growth; systems of mass communication, dynamic in their development, enveloping and binding together the most diverse people and societies; increasingly powerful national states, bureau- cratically structured and operated, constantly striving to expand their powers; mass social movements of people, and peoples, chal- lenging their political and economic rulers, striving to gain some control over their lives; finally, bearing and driving all these peo- ple and institutions along, an ever-expanding, drastically fluctuat- ing capitalist world market. In the twentieth century, the social processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a state of perpetual becoming, have come to be called "moderniza- tion." These world-historical processes have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own. Over the past century, these visions and values have come to be loosely grouped together under the name of "modernism." This book is a study in the dialectics of modernization and modernism. In the hope of getting a grip on something as vast as the history of modernity, I have divided it into three phases. In the first phase, which goes roughly from the start of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, people are just beginning to experience Introduction 17 modern life; they hardly know what has hit them. They grope, but half blindly, for an adequate vocabulary; they have no sense of a modern public or community within which the1r trtals and h?pes can be shared. Our second phase begins with the great revolutiOnary wave of the 1790s. With the French Revo- lution its modern public abruptly and comes to ltfe. Th1s publtc shares the feeling of living a age, an age that generates explosive upheavals m d1mens1.on of personal, social and political life. At the same the m.neteenth-century modern public can remember what It IS ltke to ltve, materially and spiritually, in worlds that are modern at al.l. From this inner this sense of living m two worlds Simultaneously, the 1deas of modernization and m?dernism emerge and unfold. In the twentieth century, our th1rd. final phase, the process of modernization expands to take tn vtrt';lally whole world, and the developing world culture of modermsm ach1eves spectacular triumphs in art and thought. On other hand, as the modern public expands, it shatters into a multttude ?f fragments, speaking incommensurable private lan- guages; the 1dea of modernity, conceived in numerous fragmen- tary much of. its vividness, resonance and depth, and loses Its to orgamze and give meaning to people's lives. As a result of all th1s, we find ourselves today in the midst of a modern age that lost touch with the roots of its own modernity. If the.re IS one archetypal. modern voice in the early phase of before the Amencan and French revolutions, it is the vo1ce of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau is the first to use the word moderni.ste in the ways in which the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will use it; and he is the source of some of our most vital from nostalgic reverie to psychoanalytic self- scrutmy to part1c1patory democracy. Rousseau was, as everyone knows, a man. of his anguish springs from sources pecultar to h1s own stramed life; but some of it derives from his acute responsiveness to social conditions that were com- ing to shape millions of people's lives. Rousseau astounded his contemporaries by proclaiming that European society was "at the edge of the abyss," on the verge of the most explosive revolution- ary. .. experienced everyday life in that society-es- pecially m Pans, Its capital-as a whirlwind, le tourbillon social. 1 How was the self to move and live in the whirlwind? 18 ALL THAT Is Souo MELTS INTO AIR In Rousseau's romantic novel The New Eloise, his young hero, Saint-Preux, makes an exploratory move-an archetypal move for millions of young people in the centuries to come-from the coun- try to the city. He writes to his love, Julie, from the depths le tourbillon social, and tries to convey his wonder and dread. Samt- Preux experiences metropolitan life as "a of groups and cabals, a continual flux and reflux of and conflicting opinions ... Everyone places himself m. tradiction with himself," and "everything IS absurd, but nothmg 1s shocking, because everyone is accustomed to everything." This is a workl in which "the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, truth, virtue, have only a local and limited existence." A multitude. of new experiences offer themselves; but anyone who wants to enJo_y them "must be more pliable than Alcibiades, ready to change h1s principles with his audience, to adjust his spirit with every step." After a few months in this environment, I'm beginning to feel the drunkenness that this agitated, tumul- tuous life plunges you into. With such a multitude of objects passing before my eyes, I'm getting dizzy. Of all the things that strike me, there is none that holds my heart, yet all of them together disturb my feelings, so that I forget what I am and who I belong to. He reaffirms his commitment to his first love; yet even as he says it, he fears that "I don't know one day what I'm going to love the next." He longs desperately for something solid to cling to, yet "I see only phantoms that strike my eye, but as soon as I try to grasp them." 2 This atmosphere-of and lence, psychic dizziness and drunkenness, expansiOn of expenen- ti:al possibilities and destruction of moral boundaries and personal bonds, self-enlargement and self-derangement, phantoms in the street and in the soul-is the atmosphere in which modern sensi- bility is born. If we move forward a hundred years or so and try to identify the distinctive rhythms and timbres of nineteenth-century mo- dernity, the first thing we will notice is the highly developed, dif- ferentiated and dynamic new landscape in which modern experience place. This is a landscape of steam engines, tomatic factories, railroads• vast new industrial zones; of teemmg cities that have grown overnight, often with dreadful human con: Introduction 19 sequences; of daily newspapers, telegraphs, telephones and other mass media, communicating on an ever wider scale; of increasingly strong national states and multinational aggregations of capital; of mass social movements fighting these modernizations from above with their own modes of modernization from below; of an ever- expanding world market embracing all, capable of the most spectacular growth, capable of appalling waste and devastation, capable of everything except solidity and stability. The great modernists of the nineteenth century all attack this environment passionately, and strive to tear it down or explode it from within; yet all find themselves remarkably at home in it, alive to its pos- sibilities, affirmative even in their radical negations, playful and ironic even in their moments of gravest seriousness and depth. We can get a feeling for the complexity and richness of nine- teenth-century modernism, and for the unities that infuse its di- versity, if we listen briefly to two of its most distinctive voices: Nietzsche, who is generally perceived as a primary source of many of the modernisms of our time, and Marx, who is not ordinarily associated with any sort of modernism at all. Here is Marx, speaking in awkward but powerful English in London in 1856. 5 "The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents," he begins, "small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. But they denounced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock." The ruling classes of the reactionary 1850s tell the world that all is solid again; but it is not clear if even they themselves believe it. In fact, Marx says, "the atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a 20,000-pound force, but do you feel it?" One of Marx's most urgent aims is to make people "feel it"; is why his ideas are expressed in such intense and extravagant 1mages-abysses, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, crushing gravi- tational force-images that will continue to resonate in our own century's modernist art and thought. Marx goes on: "There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny." The basic fact of modern life, as Marx experiences it, is that this life is radically contradictory at its base: On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and sci- entific forces which no epoch of human history had ever sus- 20 ALL THAT Is SoLID MELTs INTO AIR pected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, .far surpassing the horrors of the latter times of the Roman Emp1re. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Ma- chinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fruc- tifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and stultifying human life into a material force. These miseries and mysteries fill many moderns with despair. Some would "get rid of modern arts, in order to get rid of modern conflicts"; others will tr'y to balance progress in industry with a neofeudal or neoabsolutist regression in politics. Marx, however, proclaims a paradigmatically modernist faith: "On our part, we do not mistake the shrewd spirit that continues to mark all these con- tradictions. We know that to work well ... the new-fangled forces of society want only to be mastered by new-fangled men-and such are the working men. They are as much the invention of modern time as machinery itself." Thus a class of "new men," men who are thoroughly modern, will be able to resolve the contradic- tions of modernity, to overcome the crushing pressures, earth- quakes, weird spells, personal and social abysses, in whose midst all modern men and women are forced to live. Having said this, Marx turns abruptly playful and connects his vision of the future with the past-with English folklore, with Shakespeare: "In the signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy and the poor prophets of regression, we recognize our brave friend Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer-the Revolution." Marx's writing is famous for its endings. But if we see him as a modernist, we will notice the dialectical motion that underlies and animates his thought, a motion that is open-ended, and that flows against the current of his own concepts and desires. Thus, in the Communist Manifesto, we s