Proud Flesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture,

Politics & Consciousness

Vol. 1. 1 (2002)

REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL

THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO THE AIR: THE
EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY (New York: Pen-
guin Books, 1982).
Gladys M. Jiménez-Muñoz

Marshall Berman intends his book to be a study in the dialectics of moderniza-

tion and modernism (16). He begins by defining these two terms after having
identified what he means by modernity. For Berman, “There is a mode of vital
experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possi-
bilities and perils that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will
call this body of experience modernity (15). Modernization, however is ... the
social processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a state of per-
petual becoming...(16). While modernism is an ensemble of visions, ideas, and
values: These world-historical process have nourished an amazing variety of vi-
sions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the ob-
jects 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.
(16) In other words, it seems that, for him, (a) modernization is the social changes
that are constantly taking place in this respect, (b) modernity is the way in which
these changes are immediately lived and experienced (consciously or not), while
(c) modernism is the post-facto reflection and intellectual / artistic / literary / ma-
terial / political / etc. representation of these changes.

Berman has embarked here on an ambitious effort of sociocultural regeneration.

In light of the despair, desolation, and apparent emptiness of the current land-
scape, the author proposes a re-examination and return to the modernism of the
recent past as a way of revitalizing and transforming the present to guarantee the
future:

It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go for-
ward: That remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth
century can give us the vision and courage to create the mod-
ernisms of the twenty-first. This act of remembering can help
us bring modernism back to its roots, so that it can nourish and
renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie

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REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS 2
INTO THE AIR

ahead. To appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at

once a critique of the modernities of today and an act of faith
in the modernities and in the modern men and women of to-
morrow and the day after tomorrow. (36)

To this end, he proceeds to carry out an extensive analysis of part of the work of
Goethe and Marx as a key to understanding the spirit of modernity. This is the
context of his study of Faust and The Communist Manifesto. From there he goes
on to examine the literary representations of urban transformation as found in
part of the work of Baudelaire, Pushkin, Gogol, Chernyshevsky, Biely, and Man-
delstam, vis-a-vis Paris and St. Petersburg. Finally, in what I found one of the
most thought-provoking sections of the book, he takes a look at the engineering
career of Robert Moses and its destructive effects on New York City, ending with
a series of comments on contemporary urban blight and cultural renewal. I will
return to this issue later on.

Berman subdivides modernity into three phases: ... In the first phase, which goes
roughly from the start of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, peo-
ple are just beginning to experience modern life; they hardly know what has hit
them. (...) Our second phase begins with the great revolutionary wave of the
1790s. With the French Revolution and its reverberations, a great modern public
abruptly and dramatically comes to life. (...) In the twentieth century, our third
and final phase, the process of modernization expands to take in virtually the
whole world, and the developing world culture of modernism achieves spectacu-
lar triumphs in art and thought (16-17). At first glance, this has all the appearance
of being a very precise periodization. However, some of Berman’s analytical diffi-
culties are reflected even at this early stage of the book. For example, given that his
study is concentrated in an examination of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, one would expect the demarcations between these two phases to be evident.
But, far from it: this distinction is not convincingly established.

On the one hand, his initial delimitation of the broad outlines and origins of the
second phase are more or less clear. This phase starts as an era of social revolutions
and tensions caused by the decline but stubborn persistence of the Ancient Re-
gimes and the fragile and uncertain emergence of capitalist political power and
socioeconomic transformation. Yet and on the other hand, when does Berman
think this phase ends? I.e., when does his twentieth century / third-final phase
begin? And why? Does the second phase end with the second wave of industriali-
zation, colonial expansion, economic crises, massive demographic dislocations,
and the socio-cultural explosion of the last quarter of the nineteenth century? Or
does the second phase end with the coming of the First World War? Or does it

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REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS 3
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end with the Great Depression and the rise of the welfare / corporate states during
the 1930s? Etc., etc.

This is no secondary issue in light of the current controversy over the nature of
modernity vis-a-vis the post-modern period. Berman’s effort here is, in part, an
attempt to debunk the post-modern theorists and the theorization of
post-modernism by providing what he considers to be a more solid and alterna-
tive viewpoint:

Post-modernists may be said to have developed a paradigm that clashes

sharply with the one in this book....(9).

... Others believe that the really distinctive forms of contemporary art
and thought have made a quantum leap beyond all the diverse sensi-
bilities of modernism, and earned the right to call themselves
post-modern. I want to respond to these antithetical but complemen-
tary claims...(345).

In order to further this effort, Berman would have had to identify the twenti-
eth-century conjuncture or articulation of conjunctures that clearly distinguished
the second phase from the third. In that way he would have been able to make a
case for modernity as a never ending [twentieth-century] story that still presides
over the present. But he fails to do this. One could have argued with his choice of
conjunctures in this last case, had he gone so far as to clearly identify them. But
one cannot argue with what does not exist. If one were to employ the ironic tone
that Berman oftentimes uses throughout this book, one could go so far as to say
that what there is of a solid analysis in Berman’s interesting discussion of nine-
teenth-century modernity (Goethe and Marx) begins to melt into air when he
starts examining twentieth-century sociocultural phenomena.

Therefore and contrary to the initial appearance of having a clear grasp of the
demarcations that allow one to establish the coordinates of a historical process,
Berman apparently, and in the final analysis, conceives modernity as a linear pro-
cess of constant change of prolongation and extension that keeps on reproducing
itself: ... modernity... is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into
a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration, and renewal, of struggle and contradic-
tion, of ambiguity and anguish... (15) His view of the modernization process is
very much a part of this linear perspective: In the twentieth century, the social
process that brings this maelstrom into being and keep it in a state of perpetual
becoming have come to be called modernization. (16) The problem with this
view is that there is no frame of reference in terms of historical time and periodi-

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REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS 4
INTO THE AIR

zation. This way of looking at things creates obvious difficulties to me as a histo-

rian, as a feminist, and as a woman of color. To discuss one aspect of this ques-
1
tion, I will use part of Perry Andersons critique of Berman.

Anderson establishes a contrast between the ultimately ahistorical view of mod-

ernization and the need to establish a clear periodization:

...the idea of modernization involves a conception of funda-

mentally planar developmenta continuous-flow process in
which there is no real differentiation of one conjuncture or ep-
och from another save in terms of the mere chronological suc-
cession of old and new, earlier and later, categories themselves
subject to unceasing permutation of positions in one direction
as time goes by and the later becomes earlier, the newer older.
Such is, of course, an accurate account of the temporality of the
2
market and of the commodities that circulate across it.

In other words, the history of capitalism must be periodized,

and its determinate trajectory reconstructed, if we are to have
any sober understanding of what capitalist development actu-
ally means. The concept of modernization occludes the very
3
possibility of that.

From these, he goes on to point out that Berman’s approach even makes difficult
a precise understanding of the different aspects, concrete changes, and variations
that took place within the modern period. For one thing, Berman’s perspective
confuses the analysis of nineteenth-century modernism with its early twentieth
century analogues:

... modernism, as a specific set of aesthetic forms, is generally

th
dated precisely from the 20 century, is indeed typically con-
strued by way of contrast with realist and other classical forms
th th
of the 19 , 18 or earlier centuries. Virtually all of the actual
literary texts analyzed so well by Berman whether by Goethe or
Baudelaire, Pushkin or Dostoevky precede modernism proper,
in this usual sense of the word: the only exceptions are fictions
th
by Bely and Mandelstam, which precisely are 20 -century ar-
tifacts. In other words, by more conventional criteria, mod-
ernism too needs to be framed within some more differential
4
conception of historical time.

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REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS 5
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But Berman also confuses and makes difficult the analysis of the socio-cultural
changes that took place during the 60s and 70s:

A final difficulty with Berman’s account is that it is unable,

from within its own terms of reference, to provide any expla-
nation of the divarication it deplores, between the art and
th
thought, practice and theory, of modernity in the 20 century.
Here indeed time divides in his argument, in a significant way:
something like a decline has occurred, intellectually, which his
book seeks to reverse with a return to the classical spirit of mod-
ernism as a whole, informing art and thought alike. But that
decline remains unintelligible within his schema, once mod-
ernization is itself conceived as a linear process of prolongation
and expansion, which necessarily carries with it a constant re-
5
newal of the sources of modernist art.

In the midst of the socio-cultural and historical impasse of the present, Berman’s
main politico-analytical solution is the already mentioned attempt to go back to
the future:

In this bleak context, I want to bring the dynamic and dialectical

modernism of the nineteenth century to life again. (...) (35)

But Berman’s perspective of [non]-periodization also raises questions for me as a

feminist and student of womens history. Joan Kelly in Women, History, and The-
ory points out that periodization is one of the main areas of historical research that
6
has been problematized by the new women’s history. Historians have tradition-
ally studied the way history unfolds by designating specific conjunctures as turn-
ing points in historical development. Some of the descriptive markers commonly
used in this regard are: military conquests, crucial battles, the political careers of
major leaders, great discoveries, the rise and fall of important schools of thought,
etc. But these historical references-points tend to overwhelming ignore the con-
tributions, struggles, and everyday efforts of half the population. What is more,
they tend to ignore the social conditions under which these contributions, strug-
gles, and efforts took place. I am here referring to the inequalities between the
sexes and the structural subordination of women as women. Therefore, the tradi-
tional guideposts have to be re-examined to see to what extent they are pertinent
to the plural and contradictory socio-historical totality (women included). They
also have to be re-examined to see to what extent they explain or take into ac-
count existing social differences (gender inequality, included).

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REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS 6
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In this context, how valid is Berman’s demarcation, in terms of the origins of his
second phase (which ... begins with the great revolutionary wave of the 1790s...),
if ... the Revolution expressly excluded women from its liberty, equality, and fra-
7
ternity ? How much of the creativity and novelty of Baudelaires heroism of mod-
ern life -which Berman celebrates (142-143)- was actually there for the bulk of
the women of Paris during the mid-nineteenth century? Could there have been
female counterparts of Robert Moses?

This is not to say that some of the demarcations established by Berman are not
valid. What I am pointing out here is that they are not sufficient. Furthermore and
assuming that this quantitative objection is correct, Berman’s demarcations would
also have to be re-examined and re-contextualized in light of the gender dimen-
sion that for the most part is missing in this book. In other words, one would also
have to raise qualitative objections to this aspect of Berman’s study, notwith-
standing his passing examination of the Gretchen character in Faust and of Janet
Tacob’s work regarding contemporary urban issues.

In addition to this, Berman’s approach to periodization is questionable for its

Europeo-centrism, even in the case of what he perceives as the third and final
phase of modernity (... when the process of modernization expands to take in
virtually the whole world, and the developing world culture of modernism
achieves spectacular triumphs in art and thought). Although he states that Mod-
ern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and
ethnicity, of class and nationality... (15), he focuses his attention mainly on socio-
economic, political, and literary / artistic / philosophical / etc. processes that
originate within European parameters and/or within the parameters of people of
European descent (e.g., White North Americans). Where, for example, is the
sociocultural and political impact of the radical-democratic, anti-imperialistic
and/or anti-colonialist struggles that immediately followed the colonial and neo-
colonial expansion of the late nineteenth century and continued until the sixties
and early seventies? Where does Berman examine the political resistances to U.S.
and European interventionism in the Caribbean during the early twentieth cen-
tury and the spectacular triumphs in art and thought related to this resistance
(e.g., José Martí, Rubén Darío, Julia de Burgos, Nilita Vientós Gastón, et al.)?
Where does Berman consider the causes and effects of the demographic disloca-
tions within the rural U.S. South at this time, the struggles of African-Americans
for democratic rights, and the spectacular triumphs in art and thought related to
these changes (e.g., the birth of Jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, etc.)? Where does
Berman consider the interconnections between these two phenomena, the
anti-colonialist struggles in Africa, and the spectacular triumphs in art and
thought related to all three (e.g., the Pan-Africanist Movement, the Africanist

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REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS 7
INTO THE AIR

poetry of Nicolás Guillén and Luis Palés Matos, etc.). And please note, that I
have not even mentioned the Middle East and Asia. The list is very, very long.

Again, this does not deny the relevance of some of Berman’s demarcations and
examples. However, it does point to the limits of his characterizations as well as
call into question just how much the author himself crosses all boundaries of ge-
ography and ethnicity, of class and nationality in his analysis of modernity.

This brings us to Berman’s representation of the current urban problems and

decay, already mentioned above. In the last two sections of Chapter V, Berman
addresses the contradictions of city life in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s
using the example of New York City. Here he examines the destruction of the old
neighborhood tenements and the rise of the new commercial districts within the
city, emphasizing the socioeconomic and aesthetic transformations that were
brought about in this context. And despite the fact that he mentions the plight of
the millions of blacks and Hispanics, many of them... desperately poor, chroni-
cally unemployed, at once racial and economic outcasts... (324-325), he appar-
ently does not in any way see the transformations that are taking place in the urban
space (physical structures, included) as being at least partially a response to the
social resistances and reactions of these recently dispossessed (im)migrants, when
they attempted to reconstitute their communities within the new urban envi-
ronment.

In Berman’s text, the urban development policies and the mega-expressway net-
works mainly appear as the abstract and aesthetic effects of the will to power of
Robert Moses and of white men such as him. I have not been able to find any
passage in this book in which Berman perceives these programs and public works
as also being one of the means through which capital and the state attempted to
disarticulate the social cohesion and resistances of these impoverished minorities,
while furthering their isolation / segregation with respect to the more well-off
portions of the city. Berman, in this sense, ignores the politico-coercive dimension
of the top-down transformation of urban space.
8
Mike Davis has already pointed this out:

The wave of ghetto insurrections between 1964 and 1969

powerfully concentrated the attention of urban developers and
corporate architects on the problem of cordoning off the
downtown financial districts, and other zones of high property
9
values, from inner-city residential neighbourhoods.

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 Proud Flesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture,
Politics & Consciousness
Vol. 1. 1 (2002)

In his discussion of architectural modernisms propensity to an elite, urban pasto-

rilism, Marshall Berman quotes Le Corbusiers 1929 slogan, we must kill the
street! According to Berman, the inner logic of the new urban environment, from
Atlantas Peachtree Plaza to Detroit’s Renaissance Center, has been the functional
segmentation and class segregation of the old modern street, with its volatile
mixture of people and traffic, businesses and homes, rich and poor. (All That is
Solid Melts Into Air, Verso, London, 1983, 168.) Unfortunately, Berman’s oth-
erwise splendid evocation of modernist New York pays no more attention than
Jameson’s portrait of postmodernist Los Angeles to the decisive role of urban
counter insurgency in defining the essential terms of the contemporary built envi-
ronment. Since the ghetto rebellions of the late 1960s a racist, as well as class,
imperative of spatial separation has been paramount in urban development. No
wonder, then, that the contemporary American inner city resembles nothing so
much as the classical colonial city, with the towers of the white rulers and colons
10
military set off from the casbah or indigenous city.

True, Berman makes note of some instances of urban social resistance to particu-
lar aspects of these policies. Take, for example, his brief description of the suc-
cessful opposition in Manhattans Lower East Side to one specific Moses project
(.337). He fails to realize the extent to which these policies, taken as a whole and
in the context of the Second Postwar period, are themselves, per se, part of a po-
litical counter-resistance effort by city governments and big business interests.
Interestingly enough and as some of the new social-historical research has shown,
this type of policy or dimension is even present in some of the urban remodeling
11
efforts that were carried out in Europe during the nineteenth century. Again,
Berman’s treatment of Baudelaire’s Paris or Pushkin’s St. Petersburg completely
overlooks this possibility. For all his claims to dialectics and dynamism and de-
spite all his declarations in favor of freedom, justice, and the struggles in the
streets, Berman does not see the rich complexity and multi-leveled relationships
that lock together, in conflict, the bureaucratic and propertied forces promoting
these socioeconomic and political transformations and the diverse social groups
resisting them. In this sense, he oversimplifies, reduces, and underestimates the
depth and extension of these resistances.

This brings us to the irony of Berman’s assault on Foucault. As part of his broad-
side attack on post-modernist theorists and the theorists of post-modernity, Ber-
man makes the following observations about the work of Michel Foucault:

Just about the only writer of the past decade who has had anything sub-
stantial to say about modernity is Michel Foucault. And what he has to say

© Africa Resource Center, Inc., 2002

 Proud Flesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture,
Politics & Consciousness
Vol. 1. 1 (2002)
is an endless, excruciating series of variations on the Weberian themes of
the iron cage and the human nullities whose souls are shaped to fit the
bars. Foucault is obsessed with prisons, hospitals, asylums, with what
Erving Goffman has called total institutions. Unlike Goffman, however,
Foucault denies the possibility of any sort of freedom, either outside these
institutions or within their interstices. Foucault’s totalities swallow up
every facet of modern life. He develops these themes, with obsessive re-
lentlessness and, indeed, with sadistic flourishes, clamping his ideas down
on his readers like iron bars, twisting each dialectic into our flesh like a
new turn of the screw.

...there is no freedom in Foucault’s world. because his language

forms a seamless web, a cage far more airtight than anything
Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break. The
mystery is why so many of today’s intellectuals seem to want to
choke in there with him. The answer, I suspect, is that Foucault
offers a generation of refugees from the 1960s a world-historical
alibi for the sense of passivity and helplessness that gripped so
many of us in the 1970s. There is no point in trying to resist
the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our
dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains; however,
once we grasp the total futility of it all, at least we can relax.
(.34-35)

If Foucault in effect denied the possibility of any sort of freedom, either outside
these institutions or within their interstices, then how does Berman account for
Foucault’s analysis of the popular illegalities that constantly subvert this panopti-
12
cism in the case of the prison? If Berman is right, then how does he account for
Foucault’s resistance on the inevitability of resistance within any form of power
13
relationship? To my mind, the main discrepancy here is between: (a) Berman’s
defense of the abstract and ahistorical social subject of [bourgeois] juridical ideol-
ogy, namely, the essentialist view of the free individual, born as such with inalien-
able rights, relating to power as an external object in whose distribution each in-
dividual has or should have the right of participation, etc.; and (b) Foucault’s em-
phasis on the discontinuous historicity of this process of subjectification and of
the discursive and socioeconomic practices involved in the construction of such
subjects, their rights, the power relations in which they/we are all caught up, the
institutions that reproduce and regulate these power relations, and the corollary
and multiple resistances that occur in each and everyone of these institutions and
moments of domination.

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REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS 10
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If the possibility of freedom is the same thing as the possibility of social resistance,
then as I have tried to show Berman’s critique of Foucault is off the mark. If, on
the other hand, the possibility of freedom is the same thing as the rights of this
abstract and ahistorical social subject (the essentialists free individual), then Ber-
man is right when he says that ...there is no freedom in Foucault’s world..., but
not ...because his language forms a seamless web, a cage for more airtight than
anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break... Berman is right
because this is the freedom that was proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and the Citizen. I.e., the freedom that excluded women, slaves, the prop-
ertyless, et al. This is the freedom of the liberal-bourgeois constitutions, of practi-
cally all existing governments that only recognize that which can be politically
guaranteed and legitimized by Nation-States, i.e., the freedom that ultimately ex-
cludes the everyday-life struggles of the plural and decentered subjectivities that as
resistances have no possibility of growing unchecked under such a juridical
framework (e.g., the homeless, the poor, gays and lesbians, various ethnic minori-
ties, women, etc.) and at best are at the mercy of the paternalist protection/charity
of such governments. This is the freedom whose abstraction started being materi-
ally dismantled by the social forces that superseded and have been substituting the
modernity that Berman wants to recall to life.

Endnotes
1. Perry Anderson, "Modernity and Revolution," New Left Review, no. 144
(March-April 1984): 96-113.
2. Ibid., 101.
3. Ibid., 102.
4. ibid.
5. ìbid., 103.
6. Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory. Chicago: The University of
Chicago press, 1968, 2-4.
7. Ibid., 3.
8. Mike Davis, "The Postmodernist City," New Left Review, no. 151
(May-June 1985): 106-113.
9. Ibid., 111.
10. Ibid.
11. Cf., E.J. Hobsbawm, "Cities and Insurrections," Architectural Design,
vol. 38 (December 1968): 579-588.
12. Cf., Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
New York: Vintage Books, 1979, 271-293.
13. Michel Foucault, Historia de la sexualidad, vol. I. Mè·©co: Siglo XXI

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REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS 11
INTO THE AIR

Editores, S.A., 1977, 104-117; Power and Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings 1972-1977. Colin Gordon (Ed.) New York: Pantheon
Books, 1980, pp.59, 97-98, 118, 137-138, 142, 183-184, 188-190; "The
Subject and Power" in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Be-
yond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983, 212, 219.

References
Perry Anderson, Modernity and Revolution, New Left Review, no. 144
(March-April 1984): 96-113.
Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory. Chicago: The University of
Chicago press, 1968, 2-4.
Mike Davis, The Postmodernist City, New Left Review, no. 151 (May-June
1985): 106-113.
E.J. Hobsbawm, Cities and Insurrections, Architectural Design, vol. 38
(December 1968): 579-588.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:
Vintage Books, 1979.
---------. Historia de la sexualidad, vol. I. México: Siglo XXI Editores, S.A.,
1977.
---------. Power and Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972-1977. Colin Gordon (Ed.) New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
----------. The Subject and Power in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1983).

Citation Format

Jiménez-Muñoz, Gladys M. (2002). Review Essay: Marshall Berman, All That is

Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books,
1982). PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness
: 1, 1.

© Africa Resource Center, Inc., 2002