Flattened modernity

In the introduction to his All That Is Solid Melts Into Air , Marshall Berman argues that nineteenth century critics of modernity had a much richer grasp of the costs and promise of modernity than do twentieth century observers. Modern life is, Rousseau said, a whirlwind ( le tourbillon social ), and being modernist means learning to live in the whirlwind. “The great modernists of the nineteenth century,” he suggests, citing Marx and Nietzsche, “all attack the environment pasionately, and strive to tear it down or explode it from within; yet all find themselves remarkably at home in it, alive to its possibilities, affirmative even in their radical negations, playful and ironic even in their moments of gravest seriousness and depth.” The nineteenth-century modern voice found in Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Melville, Carlyle, Dostevsky is “a voice that knows pain and dread, but believes in its power to come through,” which recognizes danger all around but does not allow the danger to stamp out the flow of energy.

By the early 20th century, however, the perspective on modernity had polarized into celebrants and enemies. Italian futurists announced that “the triumphant porgress of science makes changes in humanity inevitable, changes that are hacking an abyss between those docile slaves of tradition and us free moderns who are confident in the radiant splendor of our future.” On the other hand, Weber saw in the modern world only the iron cage that “determines the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism with irresistible force.” Futurists had none of the passionate nostalgia of a Marx, from whom Berman draws his title; Weber, at least in Protestant Ethic , had none of Marx’s hope for a new order.

Hope, if it is found at all, is to be found in those “outside” the modern system - in the ghettoes, prisons, the Southern Hemisphere. This despair concerning modernity could express itself in the radicalism of a Marcuse and student demonstrations, but it could also express itself in fascism, which asumes that somehow an elite has escaped the dulling effects of modernity and now is called to lead the soulless masses.

Post-modernism has its first appearance in this context, as a form of affirmative modernism. For writers and artists in this camp (Berman mentions John Cage, Susan Sontag, Robert Venturi), “the modernism of pure form and the modernism of pure revolt were both too narrow, too self-righteous, too constricting to the modern spirit. Their ideal was to open onself to the immense variety and richness of things, materials and ideas that the modern world inexhaustibly brought forth. They breathed fresh air and playfulness into a cultural ambience which in the 1950s had become unbearably solemn, rigid, and closed. Pop modernism recreated some of the openness to the world, the generosity of vision, of some of the great modernists of the past.” What pop modernism lacked, however, was “critical bite” that would enable it to distinguish where to affirm and where to oppose modernity.