MODERNISM IN
THE STREETS
A Life and Times in Essays
MARSHALL BERMAN
Edited by
David Marcus and Shellie Sclan
First published by Verso 2017
© Marshall Berman 2017
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-498-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-499-7 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-500-0 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Fournier MT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the US by Maple Press
Contents
Introduction by David Marcus
I. Origin Stories
1.Caught Up in the Mix
II. Radical Times
2.The Politics of Authenticity
3.Alienation, Community, Freedom
4.Notes Toward a New Society
5.Unchained Melody
III. Living for the City
6.Take It to the Streets
7.Buildings Are Judgment, or “What Man Can Build”
8.Views from the Burning Bridge
9.New York Calling
IV. Jay Talking
10.The Dancer and the Dance (Karl Marx)
11.Still Waiting at the Station (Edmund Wilson)
12.Angel in the City (Walter Benjamin)
13.Cosmic Chutzpah (Georg Lukács)
V. The Bright Book of Life
14.The Jewish Patient (Franz Kafka)
15.Waiting for the Barbarians (Isaac Babel)
16.In the Night Kitchen (Alfred Kazin)
17.The Bright Book of Life (Orhan Pamuk)
VI. Signs in the Street
18.Signs in the Street
19.Underground Man
20.Broadway, Love, and Theft
21.“Justice / Just Us”
VII. The Romance of Public Space
Introduction by Shellie Sclan
22.The Romance of Public Space
23.The Bible and Public Space
VIII. From the Ruins
24.Emerging from the Ruins
Notes
Index
Marxism with Soul: On the Life and Times of Marshall Berman
Marshall Berman was born in the South Bronx in 1940. Over the next three decades, he watched his lower-middle-class neighborhood turn to ruin. Between 1948 and 1972, Robert Moses—who years later became the Faustian villain of Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air—built the Cross Bronx Expressway. It ravaged the South Bronx, cutting it up into bits and pieces and bombing out other areas completely, including much of Berman’s own neighborhood, Tremont. In the 1970s, the less systematic destruction began. New York City was broke and its outer boroughs were in a state of neglect and disrepair. “The Bronx finally made it into the media,” as Marshall recalled in an essay about the ’70s. The headline: “The Bronx Is Burning!”
The self-destructive tendencies of New York City—and, more generally, of modern urban life—were to become the central preoccupation in Berman’s work. His first book, The Politics of Authenticity (1970), took eighteenth-century Paris and its two most brilliant thinkers, Montesquieu and Rousseau as a case study for what culminated in the revolutionary violence at the end of the century. All That Is Solid, which came twelve years later, was something less and something more. It marked the end of a promising, though contained, academic career in the vein of his college and early graduate school mentors—Peter Gay, Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin—and the blossoming of a startling and radical new voice in social criticism. Tracing an arc of violence and destruction from Goethe’s Faust to New York City’s Moses, Berman argued that modernism, when coupled with the toxic tendencies of industrial capitalism, wreaked havoc on man’s psychic and spiritual life as well as his social and economic conditions.
Both works and the many essays that came before and after also insisted there was another side of modern life. A figure like Robert Moses, eschewing the humanist impulses of city life and modernist aesthetics, sought to rid New York of its creative chaos. But the modern city could also be a place for human creativity and rebirth and Berman was drawn to those figures who embodied this vision. From Marx to Lukács, Baudelaire to Run-DMC, the intellectual and creative brilliance of modern urban life, fractured and chaotic as it is, could help build us anew. From alienation came freedom, and from modernity’s ruins came new life. “All that is solid melts into air” was Marx and Engels’s lament about what had happened to life under capital; for Berman this was also a credo for how to rebel against it.
The opening chapter of Politics of Authenticity is titled “The Personal is Political.” I’ve always wondered about this title—it being, even then, somewhat of a flat-tire turn of phrase. But I think what Berman meant was something more nuanced: that the political should be personal. As Corey Robin and others have pointed out, Berman’s historical and philosophical narratives were almost always suffused with personal trauma. This, perhaps, reached its fullest expression in All That Is Solid, where he moved from eighteenth-century Paris to his own midcentury New York, and also in his later essays collected in Adventures in Marxism. But his turn to the personal went well beyond the fact that he was now writing from his home turf; it was, rather, an attempt to make our politics more personal, more felt.
For Berman the failure of modern capitalism—in both its industrial and postindustrial phases—was as much about the emotional suffering