The New Direction of Time

When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat axe. Im going to keep right on building. You do the best you can to stop it. Robert Moses All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a book that teaches you nearly everything you need to know about 20th century culture possible to convey in a work of its size. Throughout the work Berman manages to provide both an encyclopedic account of modernist culture, while at the same time synthesize a prodigious amount of material into a both cogent statement and a persuasive vision of a new direction for society. Berman has written a book that the reader will want to read again with great interest, but also a book that will serve as a nexus points to numerous other literary, sociological, historical and scientific works and even art manifestos. Following up the myriad of references would provide a reader with at least the knowledge base of a standard degree in the humanities with an added emphasis on texts that might be beyond the scope of a standard curriculum. Who in college, if ever, read Le Corbusier or Giedions Time, Space and Architecture? According to Berman, in order to get modernism we should have. The introduction begins by setting out the purpose of the work: to explore and chart the adventures and horrors, the ambiguities and ironies of modern life. He says that, to be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. Then Berman draws on Marx and Nietzsche, two thinkers not normally thought of as having much affinity. He shows how they were able to understand the modern epoch in anticipation of the actual experience of the twentieth century. Since the basic fact of life as Marx experiences it, is that this life is radically contradictory at its base and of course Nietzsche is the philosopher of the now de-centered reality. After he has developed the basic insights that characterize the 20th century according to Marx and Nietzsche, he moves on to show how two attitudes toward modernity flowed separate from each other from the first decades onwards; two attitudes that might vaguely be designated as the Marxian and Nietzschean. The first tendency is the uncritical acceptance of the seismic changes that modernism is inflicting on our social reality. This is the exuberance of futurismo the delight in speed, the machine, change, in the breaking up of all that is traditional, and a full acceptance of the Metropolis.

Berman charts this attitude as finding something of a beginning in Marx, who looks forward to a utopia in which the higher development of social-productive forces emancipates humanity from the realm of necessity. Whereas Nietzsches sensibility is, in contrast, pessimistic even if what he advocates is a personal style characterized by yes-saying to existence. What is pessimistic about Nietzsche is his distrust of the herd, and so subsequently of any attempt to create an ideal collective. In the genealogical line of this basic mistrust is Max Weber, and even later figures like Clement Greenburg and Roland Barthes, the later exponent of art for arts sake in the respective fields of visual art and literature. Berman looks at Goethes Faust as a literary analysis of modernization. This is perhaps the lengthiest and weakest part of the book. It might have been placed strategically more to the center to avoid losing the readers attention from what is going to be otherwise such an important text. Obviously though, this discussion of the beginnings of modernism needs to be somewhere near the opening of the work. The surprise in this section is the way Berman highlights two features of the modern mentality that we might have taken for granted as innate features of the human mind. The first of these two mentalities is the expectation that the future is going to be fundamentally different from the past. That is to say either better or worse, depending on what trend in modernity one falls into, but in any case what is going on out there is understood to basically be dynamic and not static. This is a unique way of understanding the world. And the Faust myth is emblematic of this self-understanding par excellence. The second related mentality is one of self-perception. A uniquely modern way of perceiving oneself is as a work in progress, capable of constant upwards improvement, selfrevelations, widening unfolding and so on. There is what might be called a Faustiandaring in the way a human subject confronts life, an attitude formerly relegated to Kings or Emperors, but now cultivated by anyone who is literate and capable of their own agency. But even at this earlier period, a shadow hung over modernism, one that the Faust myth also treats. This is the potential disaster that lurks behind excess or surplus negation in the modern project. Faust loses himself in his intoxication with his own plans to remake the world. Later chapters show how this threat became more and more acute, especially as technological power increased in its ability to transform life as it had been hitherto known. The second section, alliteratively entitled Marx, Modernism and Modernization deals with the self-negating quality of contemporary experience. In this section Berman sets

out to correct we he sees as the failure to recognize Marx as a modernist. He affirms that Marxs view of reality as essentially a reality of movement and change is precisely what is quintessentially modern. And Berman reminds us that it is in The Communist Manifesto that Marx identifies the bourgeoisie order as the most revolutionary agent in history. And yet it must be remembered that the key to Marxs interpretation of modernism, the aspect that makes it different from the way it would be manifested in later writers, is that Marx is teleological. He sees not only a world in chaos, in which the center cannot hold, but also the inexorable re-creation of that chaos by the agency of the working class. In the section Modernism in the Streets, the city comes to the foreground as the manifestation that is most expositive of modernism, especially the city as portrayed in the prose-poetry of Baudelaire. What emerges in the 19th century, especially in France, is an ambivalence about modern life. Baudelaire is typical of a writer who both revels in the exotic and multi-various offerings of the new world city, while at the same time suddenly finding himself in a state of spiritual crisis, lonely in the midst of the crowd. This is a theme that will be taken up by many writers from this point onwards. Then there is a long fourth section the identifies Petersburg as the most emblematic city of modernist development, especially focusing on the road The Nevsky Prospect as the epicenter of modernist cosmopolitanism. The writers whose work focuses on Petersburg include Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Golgol, Bely and Mandelstam. Petersburg is an interesting city because it has been built by imperial decree literally out of the mud river. It stands in contrast therefore with Moscow, the traditional center of Russian religion and imperial power. Through the works of the aforementioned writers Berman charts how this emergent metropolis struggled to distinguish its own unique form of universalism against the atavistic gravitation of traditional Russian absolutism. The story begins with a story by Pushkin, and ultimately ends in tragedy in the works of Mandelstam and Bely, the final flowering of culture before the Stalinist dark age. The final section deals with modernism in NYC moving from literature to the physical planning of the city itself. It treats the way poor planning embodied in building projects of Robert Moses, carried out on an Ozymandian scale, played an important role in turning neighborhoods like The Bronx into slums. We see how slumification is the result of definite choices, not some inevitable or natural happenstance. What is interesting about this section is Bermans insight that to really understand what is happening in modernism in the later 20th century we have to become versed in the writings not only of

those who shape its mind, but also the writings of those to whom technology has given the ability to shape the physical structure of reality. Berman thus points to the essential importance of the writings of architects like Giedion and Le Corbusier, as well as the city planners like Jane Jacobs. Berman is important because he is trying to change the world rather than just interpret it by writing a history of culture. Again and again he comes back to the point that we can revitalize our social life by comprehending that there was a more central version of what modernism meant as a hope for universal betterment, for the achievement of a non-alienated society as Marx wrote of especially in his earlier phase. Bermans hope is that we can return to that project, founded upon the sense the modern life comprises a coherent whole against the various temptations to stray from the path into more enervating or destructively narcissistic versions of modernism.

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