All that is solid melts into air

Marshall Berman's introduction to 'All That Is Solid Melts Into Air' has the marvellous subtitle 'Modernity - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow'; for our purposes, serving to encapsulate the dynamics of thinking backwards and forwards in time in the language of the everyday. 

Early in this section he points to a dialectical conception of modernity that simultaneously unites and disunites human experience: 'it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal' (1983: 15). In this image of the maelstrom, a whirlpool effect is driven by new scientific discoveries, changes in industrial processes, the development of new technologies, and the speed of change (sounds like my washing machine). The forward and backward dynamics of Benjamin's angel of history (caught in the storm of progress) is instead described as a more spiral-like condition of being caught in the maelstrom (a large powerful whirlpool or any turbulent confusion). The definitive vision of modernity and portrayal of this 'state of perpetual becoming' (1983: 16) is referenced in the title of the book, taken from The Communist Manifesto of 1848:

'All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man [sic] is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind.' (Marx & Engels, 1985: 83)

This is a vision and a time of change where human subjects might seize the opportunity to change the world that is changing them; and where a dialectics of modernisation and modernism emerges. Berman points to the early industrial revolution as a time when the public is aware of revolutionary changes in private, social and political life, but can also remember what it is to be pre-modern. It is within these conflicting relations that the idea of modernity arises. However, there is no such coherent vision in late modernity as 'we find ourselves today in the midst of a modern age that has lost touch with the roots of its own modernity' (1983: 17). Is it only with this corresponding sense of solidity that progress might be conceived?

Otherwise we are In Modernity's Wake (Phillipson, 1989) avoiding the Maelstrom perhaps, but are still cast adrift in icy waters (both off the coast of Norway according to the dictionary):   
'In Old Norse, 'vaku' or 'vak' meant a hole in the ice. Subsequently, in its transformation into wake, 'vaku' came to refer to the stretch of smooth water left behind a moving ship, a ship moving perhaps through icy waters, an ice-breaker perhaps. Already the metaphor of wake begins to awaken us to art's experience of practice within contemporary culture; for practice does indeed find itself in arctic conditions, condemned to occupy the icy hole, to be in the freezing wake left by the engine of modernity... as that which holds art at arm's length at the culture's frozen margins: there art might be represented as a brass monkey, up to its waist in the icy waters, impotent, but still chattering.'(1989: 13) 

Rather than being condemned to the frozen relations, Marx's melting vision reveals that what appears solid is fundamentally subject to change - and influence. Thus, he maintains faith in modernism and progress because of this contradictory aspect; for instance and to paraphrase Marx, Capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction. The Communist Manifesto is fundamentally a description of this dialectical movement - what Berman calls revolutionary dynamism (1983: 20). 

Berman tells us that for Nietzsche too, 'the currents of modern history were ironic and dialectical' and revealed untold possibilities against a backdrop of the absence of certainty and truth - what he called the 'death of God' (Beyond Good and Evil, 1882, quoted in Berman, 1983: 22). Again, there is faith in change: 'We moderns, we half-barbarians. We are in the midst of our bliss only when we are most in danger. The only stimulus that tickles us is the infinite, the immeasurable' (quoted in Berman, 1983: 23). But is this coherent vision of useful irony and contradiction still in place? Berman suggests not, and suggests that our thinking about modernity has stagnated. He says:
'Modernity is either embraced with a blind and uncritical enthusiasm, or else condemned... in either case, it is conceived as a closed monolith, incapable off being shaped or changed... Open visions of modern life have been supplanted by closed ones, Both/And by Either/Or.' (1983:24) 

He is thus sceptical of many of the manifestos and cries for change if they do not embrace contradiction (such as the Manifesto of the Futurists - often seen as proto-fascist) despite the commendable wish to invent the world anew. Elsewhere, Benjamin adds that the Futurist obsession with the aesthetics of politics rather than the politics of aesthetics can lead only to one thing: war. And this is precisely what happened of course in an appropriate ironic twist where the leading figures were killed by the very machines they valorised. This rise of the 'Machine Aesthetic' and corresponding revolutionary claims for new technology appear to fall into this similar trap of uncritical enthusiasm on the one hand and condemnation on the other - unless contradiction is pursued. Berman even casts the Bauhaus, Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan as uncritical technocrats; as if humans subjects are reducible to machines too, programmed as individual and collective systems, entirely commodified. He rejects Foucault too for even casting our dreams as futile - merely a function of a discourse of power. This tendency is evident in a lot of recent talk too about the distinction between technology and biology: after all, we are only coded in DNA, our subjectivity is code too. Similarly he rejects more recent modernisms concerned with self-referentiality (pure form - the medium is the message), negation and opposition (pure revolt - auto-destruction), and post-modernism (complete and utter openness to anything, value-free). What has happened to human agency in all this? Do human subjects have little option under the all-conquering imperial advance of cultural and technological change? I'm attracted by the idea that contradiction is inherent in these processes so change on all levels is inherent too - change is built into the system.

Crucial to Berman, is this retention of progress and history as inherently unstable, restless, contradictory, dynamic and dialectical. He sees all the visions and revisions of modernity as ways of reconciling the present with the past and future, as a process of renewal: 'It may turn out, then, going back may be a way forward' (1983: 36). 

More on modernity:

In Marx, the central drama is played out between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat - a play between the solid and melting vision of modern life to Berman (1999: 90). He describes the narrative: 
'Nation states arise and accumulate great power, although that power is continually undermined by capital's international scope. Meanwhile, industrial workers gradually awaken to some sort of class consciousness and activate themselves against the acute misery and chronic oppression in which they live.' (1999: 91)

[link to Jeremy Valentine]

Berman points to the paradoxes of this transformative vision. Crisis and chaos appear to serve the vested interests of capital, strengthening it even. He explains that catastrophes are turned into lucrative opportunities for redevelopment and as an integrating force for the renewal of capital. The one real spectre is solid after all:
'In this world, stability can only mean entropy, slow death, while our sense of progress and growth is our way of knowing for sure that we are alive. To say that our society is falling apart is only to say that it is alive and well.' (Berman, 1999: 95)
The paradox is Marx, is that crisis is both the motor for the renewal of capital and the means of its demise. Similarly, Berman asks why we should believe in the solidity of a workers collective any more than we should believe in the commodities produced as a result of their labour, all produced under the conditions of capitalism itself. Here he is alluding to the critique of Marx that would see the privileging of labour and production over other creative human activities (such as in the work of Marcuse, especially in Eros and Civilisation, cited in Berman, 1999: 126). Negri would add detail here too in his expansion of the term proletariat. 

If all new forms ossify, then how can a solid new alternative form emerge without being condemned to the same fate? Berman sees this danger evident in the ways in which creative work is transformed into enterprise, and even that revolutions themselves become commodified, promoted like any other product (1999: 114).  
In dialectical style, Berman's point is that the inherent problems of modernity can only be fixed by an enhanced version of modernity, not by its demise. Modernity is filled with contradictory potentialities and so too Marxism. Berman doesn't want a way out of these contradictions but a deeper way into them: 
'in spite of all, thrown together by the same forces that pull us apart, dimly aware of all we might be together, ready to stretch ourselves to grasp new human possibilities, to develop identities and mutual bonds that can help us hold together as the fierce modern air blows hot and cold through us all.' (1999: 129)