All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity is a book by Marshall Berman written between 1971 and 1981, and published in New York City in 1982. The book examines social and economic modernization and its conflicting relationship with modernism. The title of the book is taken from Samuel Moore's 1888 translation of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.Marx and Engels, Collected Works (London, Lawrence and Wishart), vol. 6 (1976), p. 487.
Berman uses Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust as a literary interpretation of modernization, through the processes of dreaming, loving and developing. In the second section he uses Marxist texts to analyze the self-destructive nature of modernization. In the third section French poetry (especially Charles Baudelaire) is used as model of modernist writing, followed by a selection of Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Andrei Bely, Nikolai Gogol and Osip Mandelstam) in the fourth section. The book concludes with some notes on modernism in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s. New York City's subway map is said to have been designed in accordance with Berman's vision of modernity, presented in the book. Berman recalls: "It was a thrill when the man who had designed New York's marvelous Subway Map came up to me on Broadway, and said that all the time he was putting his map together, he had tried to keep my book in mind."
Part I. Goethe's Faust: The Tragedy of Development Marshall Berman begins this book by making a literary comparison between Goethe's Faust and the process and mode of Modernity claiming that "the whole movement of the work enacts the larger movement of Western society". In Berman's view, the three 'metamorphoses' which Faust passes through (the Dreamer, the Lover, and the Developer) express the journey of Modernity.
By starting "in an intellectual's lonely room, in an abstracted and isolated realm of thought; it ends in the midst of a far reaching realm of production and exchange, ruled by giant corporate bodies and complex organizations, which Faust's thought it helping to create, and which are enabling him to create more."
The main focus that Berman wishes us to glean from this Part I (which will set the tone for the rest of the book), is that Faust is the epitome of Modernity in that he is like a "sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells."
First Metamorphosis: The Dreamer In the first metamorphosis, Marshall compares Faust to being in the phase of the Dreamer. Here, Faust is a successful and intellectually gifted man detached from the world. An esteemed doctor, lawyer, theologian, philosopher, scientist, professor and college administrator, Faust is an accomplished person. Yet he feels that all his successes have been hollow, and he talks endlessly about how he hasn't lived at all.
"What makes Faust’s triumphs feel like traps to him is that up to now they have all been triumphs of inwardness. For years, through both meditation and experimentation, through reading books and taking drugs—he is a humanist in the truest sense; nothing human is alien to him—he has done all he could do to cultivate his capacity for thought and feeling and vision. And yet the further his mind has expanded, the deeper his sensitivity has grown, the more he has isolated himself, and the more impoverished have become his relationships to life outside—to other people, to nature, even to his own needs and active powers. His culture has developed by detaching itself from the totality of life."
Faust here represents the Modern Humanist who is trying to break away from the stagnant traditions of the feudal society he comes from. "As the bearer of a dynamic culture within a stagnant society, he is torn between inner and outer life."
The pain is so great that Faust nearly kills himself in this dark night of the soul, but is saved by a sort of deus ex machina where light, bells and god come from nowhere and save him. He leaves his house and joins a parade in the street where he is guided back to his old neighborhood. The old neighborhood here represents the old feudal world where he worked as an "patchwork doctor practising traditional medieval small craft medicine" with his father with whom he is sure he killed more lives than he saved. Faust in fact first began his solitary intellectual endeavors, leaving behind this old life due to the grievance of this past. Faust is now with a situation in which he realizes that he knows he cannot fall back on the claustral comforts of his childhood home—though he also knows he can’t let himself drift as far from home as he has been for all these years. He needs to make a connection between the solidity and warmth of life with people—everyday life lived within the matrix of a concrete community—and the intellectual and cultural revolution that has taken place in his head."
At this point, Mephistopheles (the symbol of the devil) and the notion of the Faustian Bargain materializes. Mephisto lets Faust know that in order to attain his cravings and desires, to find the developments of his mind in the world, we will have to work with the power of destruction. As Marshall Berman says, "In order to bring about the synthesis he craves, Faust will have to embrace a whole new order of paradoxes, paradoxes that are crucial to the structure of both the modern psyche and the modern economy. [...] Only if Faust works with and through these destructive powers will he be able to create anything in the world: in fact, it is only by working with the devil, and willing “nothing but evil,” that he can end up on God’s side and “create the good.”
Second Metamorphosis: The Lover The second metamorphosis focuses on the relationship of love and separation between the new becoming world of the Faustian Bargain, and the old dying world of stagnancy. Marshall Berman here argues that Faust's passionate love and tragedy with Gretchen "will dramatize the tragic impact - at once explosive and implosive - of modern desires and sensibilities on a traditional world."
Describing the context of this metamorphosis, Marshall writes, "We began with Faust intellectually detached from the traditional world he grew up in, but physically still in its grip. Then, through the mediation of Mephisto and his money, he was able to become physically as well as spiritually free. Now he is clearly disengaged from “the little world”; he can return to it as a stranger, survey it as a whole from his emancipated perspective—and, ironically, fall in love with it. Gretchen—the young girl who becomes Faust’s first lay, then his first love, finally his first casualty—strikes him first of all as a symbol of everything most beautiful in the world he has left and lost. He is enthralled with her childlike innocence, her small-town simplicity, her Christian humility."
Faust falls in love with Gretchen, the symbol of the traditional world and Gretchen is strongly affected seeking to change in order to find a place in Faust's life, in the modern world - "she is forced to develop a new sense of herself in a hurry". As she grows and develops she becomes more and more deeply in love with Faust to the point that Faust cannot bear it and he takes off in escape, returning to nature to sit in meditation and write poetry. Yet, here Mephisto comes and tortures the calm balance of Faust's life 'delivering a caustic critique' claiming that if Faust wants true nature, "he had better confront the human consequences of his own emerging nature."
In the meantime, Gretchen's traditional world community has found out about her changing faith and turns on her with "cruelty and vindictive fury." When she turns to the church to be saved, she only receives 'the day of wrath, that day shall dissolve the world in fire'. Marshall Berman makes the insight here that, "Once, perhaps, the Gothic vision might have offered mankind an ideal of life and activity, of heroic striving toward heaven; now, however, as Goethe presents it at the end of the eighteenth century, all it has to offer is dead weight pressing down on its subjects, crushing their bodies and strangling their souls."
The end comes fast and tragedy strikes Gretchen placing her in a cell to be executed (her baby had died and she was blamed as a murderess). Faust tries to save her from the prison but she simply refuses, her Christian tradition and visions of her mother barring her way to escape.
Here Marshall invokes the Communist Manifesto (a big influence on his work as per the title of the entire book) and its first goal of, "put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic conditions," as being the symbol of this Metamorphosis. Here Marshall writes, "The first part of Faust takes place at a moment when, after centuries, these feudal, patriarchal social conditions are breaking down. The vast majority of people still live in “little worlds” like Gretchen’s, and those worlds, as we have seen, are formidable enough. Nevertheless, these cellular small towns are beginning to crack: first of all, through contact with explosive marginal figures from outside—Faust and Mephisto, bursting with money, sexuality and ideas, are the classical “outside agitators”.
Third Metamorphosis: The Developer In synoptic overview, Marshall Berman tells us, "In his first phase, as we saw, he lived alone and dreamed. In his second period, he intertwined his life with the life of another person, and learned to love. Now, in his last incarnation, he connects his personal drives with the economic, political and social forces that drive the world; he learns to build and to destroy. He expands the horizon of his being from private to public life, from intimacy to activism, from communion to organization. He pits all his powers against nature and society; he strives to change not only his own life but everyone else’s as well. Now he finds a way to act effectively against the feudal and patriarchal world: to construct a radically new social environment that will empty the old world out or break it down."
This metamorphosis begins with a scene in which Faust is inspired to make man more powerful than the elements. Looking over the sea Faust is outraged claiming, "Why should men let things go on being the way they have always been? Isn't it about time for mankind to assert itself against nature's tyrannical arrogance, to confront natural forces in the name of "the free spirit that protects all rights"?
Faust now has a vision to transform the entire landscape around him into a great series of projects and developments to harness nature and turn civilization into the master of nature. Marshall writes, "We suddenly find ourselves at a nodal point in the history of modern self-awareness. We are witnessing the birth of a new social division of labor, a new vocation, a new relationship between ideas and practical life. Two radically different historical movements are converging and beginning to flow together. A great spiritual and cultural ideal is merging into an emerging material and social reality."
In order for Faust to do his work of development, he must align himself with the powers that be (for access to land and capital) - these powers being the remains of the Medieval Kingdoms ruled by an emperor or a "gang of pseudo-revolutionaries" backed by the church. He chooses to align himself with the Emperor. "Its main function is to give Faust and Mephisto an easy rationale for the political bargain they make: they lend their minds and their magic to the Emperor, to help him make his power newly solid and efficient. He, in exchange, will give them unlimited rights to develop the whole coastal region, including carte blanche to exploit whatever workers they need and displace whatever indigenous people are in their way."