Modernity without Prometheus: on re-reading Marshall Berman's All that is Solid Melts into Air

Abstract

This essay revisits Marshall Berman's extremely influential book, All that is Solid Melts into Air, some thirty years after its first publication. Berman provided an analysis of modernity as something including, but not limited to, capitalism, and as something which encompassed not just `social processes' but also new subjectivities, not just new world(s) but new ways of inhabiting them. He also offered a passionate defense of modernity an its possibilities, and of modernism as a mode of engaging and affirming these possibilities. In asking how well this analysis reads 30 years later, this essay provides a sympathetic critique, in the course of which it provides elements of an alternative, postcolonial reading of modernity.

Notes

1 M Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

2 I refer in particular to J Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, trans T McCarthy, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984. The English translation was published a year after All That Is Solid, but I read Habermas's book first.

3 Quoting Paul Goodman towards the end of his book, Berman concludes that our contemporary malaise arises not from the spirit of modern society, but because ‘this spirit has not sufficiently realized itself’ (p 347).

4 For those who may be interested, signposts of my own intellectual trajectory include S Seth, ‘Interpreting revolutionary excess: the Naxalite movement in India, 1967–71’, Positions: East Asia Critique, 3(2), 1995, pp 481–507; Seth, ‘Back to the future?’, Third World Quarterly, 23(3), 2002, pp 565–575; Seth, ‘Reason or reasoning? Clio or Siva?’, Social Text, 78, 2004, pp 85–101; Seth, ‘Historical sociology and postcolonial theory: two strategies for challenging Eurocentrism’, International Political Sociology, 3(3), 2009, pp 334–338; and Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, the epilogue of which addresses the question of modernity.

5 G Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, Boston, MA: mit Press, 1971, pp 133–34. In a very large literature on the Bildungsroman, see also F Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, London: Verso 2000; J Hardin (ed), Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991; R Shaffner, The Apprenticeship Novel, New York: Peter Lang, 1984; and M Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.

6 This is what Johannes Fabian has described and decried as the ‘denial of coevalness’. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Fabian's argument is specific to the discipline of anthropology, and a critique of its ‘tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than that of the producer of anthropological discourse’, but the phenomenon he refers to, I am suggesting, is much wider than the discipline of anthropology.

7 I refer to at least two bodies of literature: that on ‘alternative’ or ‘multiple’ modernities, and that undertaken under the sign of postcolonial theory.

8 Taylor, ‘Two theories of modernity’, Public Culture, 11(1), 1999, p 154.

9 Ibid, p 170.

10 Ibid, pp 161–162.

11 Berman even states that ‘it would be stupid to deny that modernization can proceed along a number of different roads…There is no reason that every modern city must look and think like New York or Los Angeles or Tokyo’ (pp 124–125). But the context of this remark is a polemical aside against Third World elites who presume to protect their people from the depredations of modernity, and any possibility of pursuing the insight that modernities might be different is ferociously foreclosed: the posited governments and elites merely seek to keep a ‘political and spiritual lid on their people’, but the lid will inevitably blow, and the ‘modernist spirit’ will come out as ‘the return of the repressed’ (p 125).

12 D Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, p 63.

13 Ibid, p 66.

14 Not to mention Foucault, Barthes and others, all of whom, in Berman's view, revel in the powerlessness they posit.

15 J Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans SCG Middlemore, New York: Mentor, 1960, p 121.

16 Finally free, in Berman's words, of ‘the cruelty and brutality of so many of the forms of life that modernization has wiped out’ (p 60).