Marshall Berman: Melts in the Streets, Not in the Fields
by zunguzungu
There’s so much to say about Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air, but I should confess that much of what I have to say is really less about Berman than an expression of beefs I have more generally with the way progressive politically engaged academics imagine their engagement with “modernity.” I have a certain interest in it, I’ll admit, although I’m pretty cynical about the possibilities of positive change coming out of the things we do when we’re not in the classroom. And so does Berman; he doesn’t have a blog, but his writing has the same mixture of objective rigor and subjective engagement that makes blogging an attractive medium for me (and is part of why, I think, blogging has become so closely identified with political writing). So when the “Modernism and Culture” working group sat down to discuss two chapters from his book, I found myself (to my surprise) talking as if I really, really disliked the book, as if I had major grievances with his approach that it was really important for me to air. Maybe I do.
I found myself arguing that the book, even though it clearly is not about the relationship between urban and rural, is all about the relationship between urban and rural. This feels like an exercise in bad faith to me when I hear other people doing it; the argument that the problem with Berman is that he isn’t writing about the things I want him to write about is not a real criticism, just a bitchy expression of vanity. But I think he is talking about that spacial imaginary (or, as Raymond Williams has it, that “feeling of structure”). When he composes a dichotomy between St. Petersburg and Moscow (the modernist planned sui generis administrative capitol and the reactionary bastion of tradition), he observes that he is not interested in the vast majority of Russia (the 90+ percent of it which were famously rural masses), I want to object that this is not a choice you can make without consequences to your product. The thing you exclude is still there-as I argued with respect to the Wire here-still structures what you are able to see, and pretending it’s not there might help you create the illusion of verasimilitude, but it doesn’t actually succeed in making it not be there (if it is).
Anyway, here’s what Berman says. In the preface to the 1988 Penguin edition, he helpfully boils down his definition of modernism to “any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it.” It is interesting, and telling, that modernism already presumes modernity, that “modernists” are already “modern people,” except they’re the particular subset of modern people who are making the attempt to become “at home” in modernity (and to exert control over it, which I take to be the point of the subject/object distinction). I get all weird about this because I want to know what we call the “modern people” who don’t make the attempt, who don’t try to be at home in the modern world; presumably, they are not modernists, living in the modern world, but not at home in it.
This is an issue because while Berman waxes Baudelairian over the flaneur, that mythical street-walking city dweller much beloved by theorists of the modern, he doesn’t address the issue of why we really need streets and cities, whether the real horizon of possibility is defined by the creation of dense urban metropolitan communities. There are those who find the atomization of modernity unnatractive, who can imagine a way of living that doesn’t involve strolling along the spectacular boulevards of great modern cities, and who find no home for themselves in the privileged parts of our modern cities, but only in its dirty boiler rooms, and not because those cities are broken (in the sense Jane Jacobs would put it) but exactly because they work, because a modern city like San Francisco presumes, implies, and requires the systemic exploitative labor conditions of California’s central valley (or somewhere like it), the environmental devastation of California’s watershed, and the stark segregation of living communities that makes the center-periphery model of city planning work. I suspect, in other words, that this is not a bug, but a feature.
As James Scott points out, in his marvellous Seeing Like A State, the high modernist dream city of Brasilia–that Costa and Niemeyer carefully and significantly planned to look like an airplane from the air–was almost immediately supplemented by an enormous unplanned cloud of settlements for the workers who had to be there to build it, but who hadn’t been planned as part of the final order. As the planned city grew, so too did the shadow city around it:
“The unplanned Brasilia – that is, the real, existing Brasilia – was quite different from the original vision. Instead of a classless administrative city, it was a city marked by stark spatial segregation according to social class. The poor lived on the periphery and commuted long distances to the center, where much of the elite lived and worked. Many of the rich also created their own settlements with individual houses and private clubs, thereby replicating the affluent lifestyles found elsewhere in Brazil. The unplanned Brasilias – that of the rich and that of the poor – were not merely a footnote or an accident; one could say that the cost of this kind of order and legibility at the center of the plan virtually required that it be sustained by an unplanned Brasilia at the margins. The two Brasilias were not just different; they were symbiotic.”
Brasilia’s sort of an extreme example, of course, but that description doesn’t sound unfamiliar to anyone who’s ever lived in Washington, DC, a similarly sui generis planned administrative city built in a swamp and now surrounded by the massive cloud of its sprawling underclass. But it also sounds not a little bit like the spatial/political relationship that distinguishes Market street from East Oakland. Both are in the same modernity (because Market street and East Oakland are part of a single, unified political and economic organism) but they are certainly not equally at home in it.
Which is why it bugs me that Berman’s modernists and his (implied) non-modernists seem to inhabit the same space of “modernity” only the former “chooses” to be at home in it: presuming a choice where there’s actually an economic rationality to make the choice for you is the sort of myth that keeps the whole capitalist carnival ride going merrily round and round. But while Berman can safely imagine a purely urban space of modernity, he can do so only by carefully forgetting that there is no urban modernity without its dark double, that economically, politically, even conceptually, urban modernity cannot exist without its inverse. And by happening to fail to mention it, he participates in exactly the conceptual process of making it disappear from view.
Have you seen Ian Baucom’s essay on Cape Town Modernism (in GeoModernisms, edited by Laura Doyle). If so, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. I heard a version of the essay a few years ago, and don’t have the essay down in my head yet. But I find it provocative in thinking about/through Afro-modernity (with that wonderful figure “Black Hamlet” in mind).
I haven’t, but thanks for the tip. Given what I know about Baucom, it sounds exactly what I’d be interested in. I’ll give you a shout when I’ve read it.
Btw, again, I’m so enjoying your blog these days (though your pace is frightening!)
[...] Marshall Berman: Melts in the Streets, Not in the Fields [...]
Berman’s deliberate putting aside considerations of rural folk resonates with the summaries of dependency theory I’ve been reading of late–specifically, with those theorists’ critiques of Marx’s locating labor’s salvation in the urban proletariat while ignoring those on the “periphery.”
What, if anything, does Berman say about the relationship between modernism and colonialism? Our friend Mignolo argues that the former could not have existed without the latter.
blogmeridian, that’s simply not true about Marx. Check out the Manifesto of the Communist Party: Where he and Engels demand “, a demand that might surprise the scholars we are about to discuss, was a “gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.” Or how about where Lenin, in his Granma Encyclopedia article, “The Teachings of Karl Marx,” wrote that this was a good thing,because it “put an end both to rural backwardness, isolation and barbarism, and to the unnatural concentration of vast masses of people in big cities.” The Marxists are DECENTRISTS, blogmeridian. Berman has little clue what being a Marxist is all about.
Zungu Zungu, great blog! I will use and give you credit for the following in an article I’m writing against these so-called MetroMarxists (if you want me to use your real name, send it to me via email!):” …while Berman waxes Baudelairian over the flaneur, that mythical street-walking city dweller much beloved by theorists of the modern, he doesn’t [even] address the issue of why we really need streets and cities, [let alone] whether the real horizon of possibility is defined by the creation of dense urban metropolitan communities.”
Funny that Herman Melville, in several of his novels, MAKES FUN of the middle class flaneur: Redburn, Pierre. There’s a great book called MELVILLE’S CITIES, don’t remember the author, and too lazy to look in my filing cabinet for a complete xerox of it. You can probably find it in bookfinder. Well, Berman used to be much more radical, even in his appraisal of the metropolis. See the end of the POLITICS OF AUTHENTICITY.
“If we look into ourselves, we will see how completely our [urban] society cuts us off from ourselves, from our deepest feelings and needs and sources of happiness. And “we” here means everyone—the upper as well as the underclass, the sultans as well as the slaves. Everyone is being cheated by the system. Everyone has the power to see when he is in a box, and to try to break out. It may take a long and bitter fight, but it is at least possible to begin.”
John,
Have you read Ed White’s The Backcountry and the City? It’s one of these books I’m always trying to foist on people–and the book’s main focus on 18th Century Pennsylvania is not everyone’s cup of tea–but it’s a very smart piece of work, and the introduction is geared towards exactly this kind of problem in ways I find helpful. It might be worth a look.
Also, as you imply, it’s symptomatic that Berman doesn’t favor terms like imperialism or colonialism. In some ways, this is useful; the argument that St. Petersburg is the “Archetype” for the third world is provocative, and I think there are interesting things to be taken from that approach. But as someone in our discussion group pointed out, what he calls modernism, the third world calls imperialism, and there’s no space within Berman’s own account for considering the significance of that (or addressing what would be the Mignolo critique). It’s the sort of question I don’t think he’s specifically avoiding or averse to–and it’s easy to forget how old that book is–but it’s definitely a failing that the book doesn’t address that problem, now that we have so many other smart scholars who specifically do.
[...] Marshall Berman: Melts in the Streets, Not in the Fields « zunguzungu a persuasive critique of accounts of modernity & their implicit exclusions: '…it bugs me that Berman’s modernists and his (implied) non-modernists seem to inhabit the same space of “modernity” only the former “chooses” to be at home in it: presuming a choice where there’s actually an economic rationality to make the choice for you is the sort of myth that keeps the whole capitalist carnival ride going merrily round and round. But while Berman can safely imagine a purely urban space of modernity, he can do so only by carefully forgetting that there is no urban modernity without its dark double, that economically, politically, even conceptually, urban modernity cannot exist without its inverse. And by happening to fail to mention it, he participates in exactly the conceptual process of making it disappear from view.' (tags: modernity modernism theory critique blogpost academic urban rural brazil) [...]
[...] between a dark “native” town and a shining white city on the hill. To ruthlessly plagiarize myself, James Scott points out that the high modernist dream city of Brasilia was almost [...]
Your writing is authoritative without any of the pretentiousness so often present in academic writing, and this was an interesting piece on Berman and modernity. I’m currently doing some background reading for Dostoyevsky’s ‘Notes from the Underground’ and obviously this book is of great help.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say, except that I have felt saturated and bored with literary thinking for so long now that it’s suddenly extremely refreshing to come upon this and know that the literature world isn’t entirely done with me yet.