All That is Solid Melts into Air (Marshall Berman, 1982)

What can a guy who came of age in Sweden at the turn of the Millenium have to say about someone like Marshall Berman? A name he ignored for 10 years when it came up in sociology class, and again later in his research on art history. Berman belonged to a shadow period (which is his name for stretches of time that are out of favor with a person’s particular cohort and zeitgeist, for him one of these are the early 80s). But recently he took it upon himself to read it. He wanted to buff up on modernity theory. A friend had once asked him, what is modernity, and he felt he came up short on his answer even thought he was confident he had a good grasp on it. Whatthehell was modernity then? It’s a mode. What? It’s a process. Everything’s a process these days. It’s a condition. Oh, ok.

My best shot to define it is that it is the feeling of life under a certain set of structural and cultural settings. Like the idea of equality and individual sovereignty. City life. Secularism? Belief in progress? It leads to an economic organization geared towards maximized growth. Severed ties with tradition. On top of that comes the confusing term postmodernity, which reigned supreme in cultural discussions for something like 25 years. Nowadays it is increasingly seen as unwieldy and lacking in explanatory power… But back to Berman.

All that is Solid was translated into several languages. Most international reviews were negative, and the book was not very well recieved. It was said that its thesis was muddled. The French scoffed at his way of describing Baudelaire. They were of the opinion that he had “mal compris” their hero. Russian scholars thought he cherry-picked and misrepresented their sonderweg (or rather oсобый путь). A lot of Marxists found his thesis confusing. I understand this claim, because it is confusing. He wanted to “re-claim” modernism for socialism. He was, in contrast to thinkers in vogue at the time (Foucault, Goffman) intent on instilling some hope in the cold air of the post-sixties left. He started writing the book in 1971 and developed the ideas over the next decade – during which a lot of things happened.
He was also dismissed by non-leftists, for not being original and having erroneous views. A contemporary review by Hilton Kramer from Commentary Magazine mentions his failure to recognize the absurdity of equating modernism and radicalism by claiming that the “tutelary deities of the counterculture of the 60’s” didn’t have much in common with Eliot, Stravinsky, Proust, Mondrian or Mies van der Rohe. The only one who seemingly really gave a positive review was Robert Christgau in the Village Voice. He was also present at the New School’s memorial event after Berman’s passing in 2017. More about that in a minute.

The book is structured in five parts, not immediately connected to each other. It’s really more a collection of essays, that touch on various aspects of what Berman considers to be modernity. He leans on Marx‘s 1844 manuscripts, and the title of the book is a hint at a passage in the Manifesto. All that is solid melts into air – the sense of modernity when the centre does not hold, the old is dying and the new is not yet born. The interregnum of ideas… I don’t know. The idea of using water physics as metaphor for societal transformation has continued with Zygmunt Bauman in his formulation about the “liquid society” and “liquid fear”. Others have taken it even further and says our current hypermodernity is “gaseous”…

His first theme is an analysis of Faust. The crux of modernity is (according to Berman) formulated in the story of Faust, who sells his soul to be granted access to knowledge. This idea is also present in Oswald Spengler‘s “Decline of the West” (1923) where his term for Western culture is “Faustian” (the others are magian, apollonian, etc). Spengler is however not present in Berman’s book. He scarcely has any references to any Goethe scholarship, relying rather on his own associations.

He goes on to discuss Marx, and frames him as a full-on bourgeois (which, to my knowledge, is correct). He also has an idea about creative destruction which reads like a garbled version of Schumpeter.

Chapter three is on Baudelaire, where he discusses various statements about the painter as a cultural type, street life as a new form of sociality. There is much talk about the emergence of a new public sphere, which Baudelaire chronicled and analyzed.

Next is the penultimate chapter, over 100 pages on Russian literature. Berman proposes the idea of “modernism of underdevelopment”, which reminds me of Svetlana Boym‘s idea of the “off-modern”, which is her term for how modernism developed in the more unknown parts of the world, particularly Soviet and post-soviet Russia. Berman seems to mean that modernism developed a particular flavor in Russia where the economic situation wasn’t as blooming as in the dutch-english world. He guides us through stories by Pushkin, Gogol, Chernyshevsky, Doestoevsky, Bely and Mandelstam. I’m happy to have a certain familiarity with these authors. I didn’t have sufficient background on Notes from underground when I read it as a teenager, so it was instructive to learn that it was written as a comment on Chervyshevsky.

The last chapter takes a personal turn, where Berman talks about his own neighbourhood being ruined by midcentury urban planning masterminded by Robert Moses. Here he gets into some socialist ideas about the rights to the city (a theme continued by David Harvey, also inspired by Henri Lefebvre). Late in life, he was working on a book about public space, in which he traced the concept back to the garden of Eden. In this book he digs on the Master Builder whose work ruined his childhood arcadia. “A cleaving axe” right through the Bronx (which reminds me of the “sword thrust” through the historical centre of Stockholm in the 1960 where a new motorway was established (where tens of thousands of cars still pass every day, whooshing by a 13th century church and the whole historical centre of medieval Stockholm).

I think he does mention the term postmodernity, but it is still in quotes, as something a bit unfamiliar and new. This is interesting. I’ll take this moment to elaborate my own view that this term has lost a lot of its meaning and should be reconsidered. It’s one of those terms that keeps getting bandied about to refer to anything that the speaker dislikes, without really pinning it down. And lately, it’s been even more broad in its use, as writers on the right use it as “everything that is wrong with the left”. This brings us back to Berman’s idea of reclaiming modernism – what does he mean? What were the connotations of that term in 1972 or 1982? Nowadays it brings to mind postwar enthusiasm and maybe 30s functionalism (maybe this is an idiosyncrasy of the Swedish discourse). In literary circles it’s about stream-of-consciousness and experimental methods (but experimentalism was of course already since long a thing, with the symbolists, surrealists, etc). In the art world modernism is also dead. What does it mean to reclaim modernism for the left? I don’t really understand.

Berman also criticizes capitalism (which reminds me of Zadie Smith‘s NYRB review of Facebook from 15 years ago:

The trouble with capitalism is that, here as elsewhere, it destroys the human possibilities it creates. It fosters, indeed forces, self-development for everybody; but people can develop only in restricted and dis­torted ways. Those traits, impulses and talents that the market can use are rushed (often prematurely) into development and squeezed desperately till there is nothing left; everything else within us, everything nonmarketable, gets draconically repressed, or withers away for lack of use, or never has a chance to come to life at all.

All That is Solid…, p. 96

Everything nonmarketable is repressed! That’s something that really applies to platform capitalism. Wendy Brown says neoliberalism urges us to compete in all spheres of life. Another thinker on this that might be illuminating is Daniel Bell, particularly “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” from 1976.

A passage that struck me as particularly important:

One of the central themes in the culture of the 1970s was the rehabilitation of ethnic memory and history as a vital part of per­sonal identity. This has been a striking development in the history of modernity. Modernists today no longer insist, as the modernists of yesterday so often did, that we must cease to be Jewish, or black, or Italian, or anything, in order to be modern. If whole societies can be said to learn anything, the modern societies of the 1 970s seemed to have learned that ethnic identity-not only one’s own but everyone’s-was essential to the depth and fullness of self that modern life opens up and promises to all. This awareness brought to Alex Haley’s Roots and, a year later, Gerald Green’s Holocaust audiences that were not only immense-the largest in the history of television-but actively involved and genuinely moved. The responses to Roots and Holocaust, not only in America but around the world, suggested that, whatever qualities contemporary man­ kind may lack, our capacity for empathy was great. Unfortunately, presentations like Roots and Holocaust lack the depth to transform empathy into real understanding.

All That is Solid…, p.341

This illustrates a view that is still current in my home country. A lot of older-generation Swedes still subscribe to this idea of ethnicity-blindness, which to an increasing part of the population is deemed untenable. This is an interesting passage to understand the current focus on identities.

My overall feeling is that the concept of modernity is too big to cover fully. It is elusive, maybe intrinsically evades strict definition. But reading this book moved my dial for how I understand the idea of modernity.

Berman mentions at some points in the book modernist architecture, but my feeling is that the trajectory of the term within architectural discourse is quite far removed from its use in social theory. Maybe this divide is more discernable nowadays, compared to 1982 when this book was published.

After Berman’s passing a book with his articles and reviews were collected by his wife and one of his protegés. Speakers at the book launch were the don of rock criticism Robert Christgau, Todd Gitlin, Michael Walzer (both well-known academics who knew Berman) and Andrea Simon, a documentary filmmaker and friend of Berman, as well as Marta Gutman, an urban historian with whom Berman collaborated. The book launched at the event was a collection of Berman’s best work, like his spate with Perry Anderson, and his theory of public spaces. Also his account of his first time reading Marx’s 1844 manuscript which convinced him to be a card-carrying Marxist for the rest of his life. He loved the working class. For him it was personal, and he never forgave the modernist reworking of New York which ruined his neighborhood. From the vantagepoint of today’s standards that seems a bit excessive.

I’ve been trying to understand the word modernity for 15 years now, and it’s proven to be quite the Sisyphean task. Further investigations would be aided by consultation of works by Jürgen Habermas, Peter Osborne, Matei Calinescu and/or Charles Taylor.

I Burn Paris (Bruno Jasienski, 1929)

Uncorking both test tubes, he carefully poured their contents into the wildly splashing larynx of the funnel.
Down below, the water burbled in rhythmic time to the heat of the diesel pistons, a measured rising and falling like the valve of a gigantic heart, forever pumping new supplies of clear, transparent blood into the starving arteries of faraway, slumbering Paris.

In the decadent 1920s Paris, a desperate man down on his luck decides to poison the water system. This action leads to a widespread pandemic and near-global panic. People start dying inexplicably in the streets, and soon everyone who wants to survive needs to introduce strenuous hygienic regimes. This might remind readers of our own situation these past years, and that is also a reason why this book has been dug out into renewed actuality.

The book is structured around several characters, in addition to the poisoner Pierre, we meet Chinese communist P’an Tsiang-kuei, Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi and British diplomat David Lingslay. The world after the outbreak enters battle conditions and the Parisians divide into ethnic enclaves within the city, a little like the national zones in Berlin or Vienna in the aftermath of WW2.

It is a strange book, and Jasienski seems to have been a strange person. He was a pioneer of Polish futurism, then moved to Paris and became a revolutionary communist. He wrote this book, which was considered dangerous and was banned by French authorities – and even led to Jasienski being kicked out of the country. He resurfaced in Moscow, where he continued to challenge the authorities which led to his deportation to a GULAG where he sadly also died in 1939. The title “I Burn Paris” (“Je brûle Paris”) was meant as a riposte to right-wing French writer Paul Morand and his work “Je brûle Moscou” – which Jasienski took as an attack on socialism. What he didn’t realise was that brûle also has an applied sense of being “burned through” in the meaning of going through something quickly, as can be done when visiting a city where one wants to see lots of things in a short period of time. But the title inspired Jasienski to conjure up this story of a person who wanted to burn or destroy what he saw as the decadent culture of Paris – possibly in order to instate another political order.

The tone of the prose is quite ominous. It contains lots of pregnant metaphors, like this one: “a perfect cube of musty air you could cut with a knife, like a gigantic magical Maggi bouillon cube.” (p. 28).

A German translation of the book.

In the end, one of the groups plan to charter a ship to America, where the plague is not as widespread. Maybe the plague is metaphorical (as it is in so many works, from Camus to Sontag)? Jasienski doesn’t seem to have a clear agenda with this book, which is a welcome tack for a socialist novel, which often can be so didactic and weakly constructed. The most well-known ones are How the Steel was Tempered (Ostrovsky, 1932-4), Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” (1906) and maybe Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914).

This also leads us to think about the theme of plague literature. In the beginning of the Covid crisis several examples of plague literature were bandied about. The Decameron, Daniel Defoe’s “The Plague Year” and Katherine Anne Porter’s short stories. And Camus, obviously. Lesser known ones were J.P. Jacobsen’s novella about a pestilent Bergamo, and “I sposati” by Alessandro Manzoni (about the plague outbreak in Milan 1630).

There was a corresponding mini-canon emerging for movies: Outbreak (1995), Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), and older ones like Panic in the Streets (1949), Hamburger Krankheit (1979) and Ultimate Warrior (1975).

Now that the COVID crisis looks like it might be integrated into our everyday life, and maybe also partly replaced by new crises (energy, climate, large scale military invasion), I notice a trend of a new kind of book. Writers have been using this break in the regular rhythm of things to think big thoughts. Both eminent biographer George Prochnik and fêted essayist Olivia Laing have written books about the power of culture in a crisis. Maybe that is exactly what we need after two-plus years of living suspended in mid-air?

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About the 1929 Club (which should have a collective name, because its name changes for every iteration): it is a internet-based collective review project where everyone who participates reviews a book published in a particular year. It is hosted and organised by Simon at StuckinaBook and Kaggsy. This blog has participated in five of these (1920, 1956, 1936, 1976, 1954) and I really like the concept, both doing the research and then reading the other reviews! I have started to include some thoughts on what I considered reading, and why I went with what I ultimately chose. 1929 was a particularly rich year, with lots to choose from. There were probably many writers who looked to make sense of the uncertain situation of the world at the time. I chose Jasienski because I was drawn to its title, and that it then upon further inspection sounded interesting.

The other works considered: Platonov – The Pit, Robert Graves – Goodbye to All That, Taha Hussein – The Days Vol 1, Agnes Smedley – Daughter of the Earth, Egon Erwin Kisch, Franz Werfel, Albert Londres, Roberto Arlt, Caragiale, Stefan Zweig’s Buchmendel, John Rodker, Döblin, Axel Munthe, Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdomeros, Vicki Baum, Nabokov, Wallace Thurman, Khrzikhanovsky, Faulkner.