Solid Air in His Book,

Solid Air

In his book, All that is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman unfolds his unique understanding of modernism as a fundamentally dialectical system which brings together the forces of individual characters and social mechanisms. In other words, Berman believes that modernity stands for the distinct interaction between individual people and their social environment which ultimately alters both. Berman explains this notion: "These world-historical process 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." (Berman, 16). This is a particularly interesting point-of-view because it establishes that Berman is centrally aiming to develop some sort of theoretical and, indeed, historical landscape through which people today can perceive the meanings of underlying the modern world. One critic summarized his stance as three primary notions: "(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 - modernism is the post-facto reflection and intellectual / artistic / literary / material / political / etc. representation of these changes." (Jimenez-Munoz 2002). Accordingly, Berman contends, an appropriate investigation into modernism can help us to better grasp the modern age as a fusion of changing conditions and changing people.

The key idea that brings Berman's argument together is, essentially, that for current modernism to possess any substantive perspective regarding itself, the paths through which it has already traveled need to be critically looked into. He writes, "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 tomorrow and the day after tomorrow." (Berman, 36). This goal is motivated by the apparent emptiness that Berman, and many others, seem to perceive in the way society operates. Two of the driving forces in civilization, to Berman, are the oppressive forces of the government and the ruling class, and the forces of personal liberty and determination to battle oppression. Thus, "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." (Berman, 13). So, to see that our perseverance is not meaningless and that our singular ideas and works of art to have influence, it is necessary to understand the works of Goethe, Marx, and Baudelaire within his dialectical structure.

Obviously, by defining the appearance of modernity as being somewhat superficial or shallow, the works of writers who decisively stepped out of the traditional boundaries regarding social and political philosophy become particularly important subjects for Berman's discussion. It is reasonable to think that as modernization spread through human history, its literary indicators began to appear evermore readily; as changing history increasingly acted upon individuals, many individuals reciprocated this influence, in degree, by contributing to the works of literature. According to Berman, if we look at modernism as a progression of three phases -- introduction to modern life, revolutionary reactions, and the spread of modernity on a global scale -- then it is possible to understand the present as well as the future, not just within art and literature, but it philosophy and life as well.

It is notable that Marx's understanding of the metaphysical world as well as that of society is fundamentally similar to Berman's orchestration of modernity. Centrally, both men believe the modern world to be based upon similar dialectical systems. Marx held that human knowledge automatically begins from our experiences with the outside world -- from our sensations and perceptions -- consequently, interaction between man, the situation, and the material object is what conglomerates to form reality. Therefore, objective truth is not utterly attainable because these perspectives are so fundamentally unique to each individual. This premise leads Marx to the conclusion that previous philosophers were merely successful in describing the world, but the task implied by his materialistic views is that the setting in which human reality plays itself out needs to be changed if the goal is to improve life (Strathern, 52). So, although personal points-of-view are what define reality, the sum effect of these points-of-view can be altered by them to place mankind in a better state of being.

Ultimately, Marx writes, "Modern bourgeois society, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells." (Marx, 52). Marx's mentor, Hegel, took the opposite position; he believed that the routine assertion of individual freedom categorically contributed to the limitation and oppression of that freedom. The almost perfectly formulated self-doubt regarding cultural norms and commitments from the likes of Hume were the elemental causes of death and destruction in the world. His understanding of the dialectic brought him to the conclusion that massive social movements aiming to achieve personal freedoms must be seen in contrast to acquisition of social freedom, which was something utterly different. To Hegel, this represented the total fracturing of social perspective; this traveled from the almost singular social thought of the Greek philosophers, to the seemingly infinite points-of-view held by his contemporaries. Consequently, the emerging modern world was faced with a dilemma that could only be answered by looking to the social perspective: "The problem with modern life was that its rationality was not immediately apparent to its participants; for that, one required a set of reflective practices that could display and demonstrate the rationality of modern life, namely, those involved in modern art, modern religion, and, most importantly, modern philosophy." (Pinkard, 472). So, the way that actions can be designated as right or wrong is by considering one's stance relative to these prevailing social constructs of rationality.

Berman categorically backs Marx's idea that looking at modernity as Hegel did ignored the fact that even if his form of understanding is attainable, the material world surrounding humanity is inevitably altered through the process of knowing it. Berman explains, "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." (Berman, 5-6). In this way, Berman acknowledges that concepts like freedom and liberty can be corrupted into social prisons, but that the individual nature of reality is exonerated by the fact that the battle between oppression and liberation must never cease. So freedom, as it was defined and understood at one point and time, fails to carry through history without the central dialectic of modernity augmenting what true freedom is.

It is also significant that Berman investigates the works of Baudelaire; this is because Baudelaire was one of the first proponents of aestheticism, and Berman seems to suggest that this notion is one of the launching pads for modernity. Aestheticism first found its philosophical footing in the eighteenth century; it drew its understanding of nature and beauty from the writings of Immanuel Kant, who expressed his notion that art was autonomous. Just as comprehending the beauty of a tree fails to depend upon any auxiliary information about the physical properties of trees, beauty itself was perceived to be independent of everything but itself. Kant was convinced that the autonomy of the human soul permitted such internal recognitions of external beauty. For this reason, Kant was not as interested in the physical creations of art, as he was in the impressions that art could leave upon the intellect; he called this reflective judgment. (McGreal, 283).This way of understanding the world is backed by the fact that although it could be argued that people receive sensory information from the same material truths, every individual's interpretation of these external occurrences is necessarily played upon by the individual forces of perception. So, this applies to art in that the same physical piece of work cannot be expected to be understood in the same way by every person who experiences it.

From these historical and abstract foundations, Berman asserts that Baudelaire was successful in establishing the "heroism of modern life"; put differently, Berman agrees that artistic expression is a distinct facet of modernity, and that it spiritually sustains humanity by reflecting the dialectical nature of the human condition (Berman, 142-3). Berman reinterprets the apparent autonomy of art as the consequence of his definition of modernism.

So, clearly, a progression of thought has occurred to bring mankind to the brand of reality that Berman endorses; however, he seems unable to clearly delineate or characterize what this progression has been on a historical level. Doubtlessly, he is successful in pointing out some early examples of modernist thought and expression, and that such points-of-view culminated in social changes -- the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution -- but specifically what the boundaries are between his three different stages of modernity remains exceedingly vague. This may seem like an arbitrary objection to Berman's argument, but it is meaningful because his attempt to place modernism into a historical context demands that the abstract aspects of his dialectical system be grounded in physical events. If the reader is to believe that the individual social actor behaves in a way that balances the overarching power of society, then there should be some concrete guidelines for how, precisely, this was done in the past; and additionally, how such processes were different than how they will be occur in the future.

The events of history have certainly changed and progressed in certain directions. If one is prepared to define specific ages for how history has run its course, then it is necessary that the distinctions between ages be clearly illustrated. Berman asserts that this progression should be mirrored by modernist thought and social interpretation; therefore, his three stages of modernity must also be evident in world history. Yet, he defines his ages in a highly questionable manner: