كل ما هو صلب يتحول إلى أثير: تجربة الحداثة وحداثة التخلف

by Marshall Berman, فاضل جنكر (مترجم), فيصل دراج (تقديم)

A bubbling caldron of ideas . . . Enlightening and valuable. --Mervyn Jones, New Statesman. The political and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, the pivotal writings of Goethe, Marx, Dostoevsky, and others, and the creation of new environments to replace the old--all have thrust us into a modern world of contradictions and ambiguities. In this fascinating book, Marshall Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and cultures, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.

From a reinterpretation of Karl Marx to an incisive consideration of the impact of Robert Moses on modern urban living, Berman charts the progress of the twentieth-century experience. He concludes that adaptation to continual flux is possible and that therein lies our hope for achieving a truly modern society.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Theory, Politics, Art

558 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Marshall Berman (born 1940, The Bronx, New York City) is an American philosopher and Marxist Humanist writer. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The City College of New York and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, teaching Political Philosophy and Urbanism.

An alumnus of Columbia University, Berman completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1968. He is on the editorial board of Dissent and a regular contributor to The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bennington Review, New Left Review, New Politics and the Village Voice Literary Supplement.

His major work is All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience Of Modernity. His most recent publication is the anthology, New York Calling: From Blackout To Bloomberg, for which he was co-editor, with Brian Berger, and also wrote the introductory essay. In Adventures in Marxism, Berman tells of how while a Columbia University student in 1959, the chance discovery of Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 proved a revelation and inspiration, and became the foundation for all his future work. This personal tone pervades his work, linking historical trends with individual observations and inflections from the situation.


Bibliography

* The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (1970)

* All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982)

* Adventures in Marxism (1999)

* On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (2006)

* New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg (2007), edited by Marshall Berman and Brian Berger.

Reviews

[Shakiba Abedzadeh · Rating 5 out of 5]

این متن صفحه به صفحه، خط به خط، کلمه به کلمه شاهکار بود. چیزی بسا فراتر از هر چه تا این لحظه خوانده‌ام. و می‌دانم حتا اگر سال‌ها بعد دوباره به این کتاب برگردم و فرم و محتواش به نظرم ساده و بدیهی بیاید باز هم یک چیز را فراموش نمی‌کنم: اولین لحظه‌ی مواجهه.
پیش‌تر این حس را در موردِ معدود داستان‌هایی مثلِ ایاز براهنی، یا فیلم‌هایی مثلِ زیبایی بزرگِ سورنتینو تجربه کرده‌ام. احساس و هیجانی که آنی‌ست اما چه طولانی، حالتی که چیزی در درونت برای همیشه دگرگون شده، اما نه به یاد داری که پیش از آن چگونه بوده و نه می‌توانی نبودنش را تصور کنی.

اینکه چه‌طور کلماتِ این کتاب را پیمودم هم قصه‌ی غریبی‌ست. در مدت زمانی نسبتا طولانی هی صفحات را جلو و عقب بردم و خواندم و در جایی بی‌طاقت و بی‌شکیب کتاب را بستم و کنار انداختم. بعد من ماندم و سایه‌ی سنگینِ نگاهی که از قفسه‌ی بالای سرم زل زدم بود بهم که هر بار از خودم بپرسم ما چی هستیم؟ جماعتی بیکار؟ خودآزار؟ متوهم؟ عده‌ای که سر در کتاب‌ها می‌کنیم که تاب بیاوریم این تاریکی و این هوا را؟ مشتی معتاد به خواندن که چون جز این کارِ دیگری از دستش برنمی‌آید، زندگی‌اش را پای متن‌ها تباه می‌کند؟ می‌گذارد هذیانِ یک کتاب، یک نویسنده، یک مترجم، به جان‌ش رخنه کند و آرامش و خیالِ راحت را از او بقاپد؟
چند روز پیش به تمام این سوال‌ها بله گفتم و لرزان اما شادمان کتاب را دوباره به دست گرفتم، که ویران شود این آسودگیِ خیال. یا خود را به آسودگی زدن. یا خیالِ آسودگی. یا هر چه که ما ناچاریم به خوردِ خودمان بدهیم که بگوییم در همین روزها و در همین فضا، با همین سطح از بدبختی، یا همین سطح از آزادی، با همین سطح از قصاوت و دشمنی، با همین سطح از خفه‌گی هم می‌شود زندگی کرد. در زمانه‌ای که 24 سال، حکمِ حبسِ افکاری‌ست مشابه افکارِ من. شاید حتا افکاری رقیق‌تر، نرم‌تر، عاقلانه‌تر از فکرهای من.

کتاب را دوباره به دست گرفتم. می‌دانستم متنی که با شرحِ فاوست گوته می‌تواند روزها خشم و حسرت، اندوه و امید، تلخی و روشنی را همزمان به کام‌ت بریزد، وقتی به پاریسِ اواخرِ قرن نوزده و اوایلِ قرن بیست، یا سن‌پترزبورگِ چهل سال قبل از انقلاب و چهل سالِ بعد از انقلاب می‌پردازد، می‌تواند چه میزان تلخی و خشم و ویرانی و البته شگفتی، نثارت کند.
«شهری که به آهستگی در حالِ مرگ است و با این حال تا ابد زنده می‌ماند.»
چه‌طور می‌شود این را خواند به کلانشهرهای ایران، تهران یا مشهد فکر نکرد؟

«چنین به نظر می‌رسد که صعود و عروجِ انقلابی مردم، زوال و هبوط اخلاقی آنان را سرعت بخشید است؛ مردمی که به تازگی بر سرنوشتِ خویش حاکم گشته‌اند، با شتابِ هرچه بیشتر دست به کار تکرار و خلقِ مجدد سیاهترین فصول تاریخِ حکومت می‌شوند.»
چه طور می‌شود این را خواند و به تاریخِ همین چند سال اخیر فکر نکرد؟

«با این حال، همه کسانی که در شهر خویش، به لطفِ انقلابی مردمی، برای چند روز و چند هفته یا چند ماه، مزه شیرین آزادی و برادری را چشیده‌اند و از قدم زدن در فضای روشن و آفتابی جامعه‌ی انسانی که در آن همگان واجد شأن و حیثیتِ انسانی و شهروندانی آزاد و برابرند، لذت برده‌اند، و سپس بازگشتِ ظلمت استبداد و بلاهت و رذالت و شکستِ همه امیدهای روشن را تجربه کرده‌اند و بار دیگر مطرود و منزوی شده‌اند، ژرفای این یأس و اندوه را در پس همین ترجمه ناموفق حس خواهند کرد.»
چه طور می‌شود این پانویسِ مترجم را خواند و به آسودگیِ خیال ادامه داد؟

و یا این جملاتِ کوتاه کارگری را خواند که تنها پنجاه سالِ پیش، به دلیل تظاهرات و بیانِ عقیده‌اش اعدام شده است و ساکت و آرام صفحه‌ی بعد را ورق زد؟
«من در طولِ عمر آگاهم و از روزی که خود را شناختم آرزو داشته‌ام یک شهروند باشم- یعنی شخصیتی که با غرور و به آرامی اندیشه‌ی خویش را بیان می‌کند. برای ده دقیقه در طول تظاهرات، من یک شهروند بودم. با اینکه همه‌ی ما ساکت بودیم اما از اینکه دیدم کسانِ دیگری هم هستند که حاضرند اعتراض خود را همراه با من بیان کنند بسیار خوشحالم. اگر کس دیگری نمی‌بود به تنهایی به میدان سرخ پا می‌گذاشتم.»

یا وقتی نویسنده برای محله‌ی «مدرنِ» دورانِ کودکی‌اش در نیویورک که برای «مدرن‌تر شدن» دود می‌شود و به هوا می‌رود اشک می‌ریزد، چه ‌طور می‌شود هر کدام از ما از پنجره‌ی اتاقمان سرمان را بیرون نبریم و ویرانه‌ای در حالِ ساخت در محل، یا آهن‌های افراشته تا نقطه‌ای کور در آسمان را نبینیم؟

بخوانیم. حالا که برای ده دقیقه هم نمی‌توانیم چیزی باشیم و اگر واقعا این تنها کاری‌ست که از ما ساخته است.. بخوانیم. ولی نه با آسودگی خیال. نه برای کیف... که برای درک این عذاب و ویرانی.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book. Most works that try to explicate modernity seem to take the French revolution as their starting point, but Berman's intense, wide-ranging examination is rooted much more in Germanic and Russian thought. He uses Goethe, Marx, Baudilare (ok, so some french), Dostoyevsky, Bely etc. to try and show how the sensibility of modernity itself has developed largely out of literature, and how we can see that sensibility at work in our own age with issues of geography and city planning. Not only does he offer brilliant examinations of those thinkers and their works, he re-contextualizes them with an intense, deep look of their work in order to develop and back up his own assertions of modern life. Berman's analysis is a wonder to behold. There aren't many writers capable of drawing out such large, powerful assertions about such an intellectually huge topic with such sustained focus and discipline (Edward Said and Susan Sontag come to mind). The writing in this book is fiercely original and pitiless.

That being said, the books very last section, in which he tries to examine the 1960's through the 1970's struck me as a bit weak, simply because it's more autobiographical, and obviously a bit more personal to write about your own age. But this work is 30 years old, and it's assertions about modernity, about the chaotic, constant forces of change and destruction that make our world what it is today, rings even truer now than it must have in the early 1980's. I can't believe something this brilliant has been so neglected.

[Mohammad Ranjbari · Rating 5 out of 5]

سرآغاز و اعلام حضور موجود بی شاخ و دم «مدرنیته» از دل یکی از سیاه‌ترین رمان (بگوییم اسطوره یا فیکشنی باورپذیر) برمی‌خیزد. فاوستوس که قبلاً در سال 1587 شکل گرفته و در قلم گوته به اوج برجستگی می‌رسد. اما چرا این برهه و چرا این ماجرا به عنوان مجرایی برای دوران مدرن ذکر می‌شود.
شاخصۀ مهم عصر مدرن قرار گرفتن در موقعیت متزلزل و طلب‌گرانه است. چیزی که در سرتاسر رمان فاوست وجود دارد. تسخیر- تنهایی- عشق، گفتگو با خود و جهان، همه تلاش‌های متعددی است برای رهایی از تزلزل در فکر و روح. اما شیطان نیز در کمین نشسته است و مترصد فرصت است تا روح انسان را درقبضۀ اختیار خود بگیرد.
شیطان دنیای مدرن بیشتر در اقتصاد خود را نشان می‌دهد. جایی که اخلاقیات کم‌کم اهمیت خود را از دست می‌دهد و تنها صدایی که می‌ماند، صدای نیل به قدرت است که شیطان سرمایه و سرمایه‌داری صلای آن را سر می‌دهد. فاوست انسان را با تاریخچۀ نه چندان دورش مواجه می‌سازد. درست همان لحظه‌هایی که حرکت از تاریکی به تاریکی شروع شد. این بیان رمزی نیست. حقیقتی‌ست که به دست جامعه بسیار استعاری‌تر شده است.
نفس چنین جرکت و وجود چنین حالت‌هایی، هنر و جامعه و انسان را هر چه بیش‌تر به سمت تاریکی‌های درون و بیرون خواهد برد.
تا زمین هست، غول سرمایه‌داری بر آن سایه خواهد انداخت و تمامی مؤلفه‌های دیگر پسوندی خواهد شد برای توصیف دقیق‌تر، نه برتری و تسلط آن.
1399/10/28

اما پیگیری بحث در ادامۀ کتاب، و ناکامی مارکس در برقراری ایده‌ال خویش در نظم جهانی، ما را به این حقیقت رهنمون می‌شود که مؤلفه‌های بسیاری در دوران مدرن وجود دارد که نه تنها خالق آن، که تمام جهان و نظام‌های فکری را ناکام می‌گذارد. زندگی بورژوازی تصمیماتی را پیش کشیده که منجر به اتفاقات پیش‌بینی نشده‌ای شده است. در این بین، رنج و سختی انسان در زندگی دست نخورده باقی مانده است و اگر این حالات را در جهان هنر و ادبیات بررسی کنیم، خواهیم دید که مارکسیسم و هیچ مسلک فکری دیگر نیز نمی‌تواند نقش تماماً خوب داشته باشد. سرمایه‌داری سایه‌ای‌ست بر سر هنر و ادبیات و در کل، زندگی که نمی‌‌توان نه آن را مهار کرد و یا تبیین‌اش نمود.

فصول مختلف کتاب بسیار عالمانه تألیف شده است و قدرت نویسنده در تفهیم مطالب نیز زیباست. اهمیت این کتاب در فایدۀ آن برای نظام فکری معاصر کشور ماست که می‌تواند از این کتاب به عنوان یک منبع مهم برای تبیین مفهوم مدرنیسم و مدرنیزاسیون بهره ببرد. فصل «پترزبورگ» مدرنیسم توسعه نیافتگی» اگر چه فصلی مثال‌گونه و کاربردی برای مخاطب محسوب می‌شود، اما برای من بهرۀ مطالعاتی چندانی نداشت. دیگر فصول توأم با تحلیل و نقد و نمونه‌دهی مناسبی همراه بود. در کل این کتاب را، با توجه به دانش مترجم آن یعنی مراد فرهادپور که حدقل در تبیین و تعریف مفاهیم مربوط {به‌ویژه در در سال‌های اخیر و در حوزۀ هنر و ادبیات و فلسفه} بسیار موفق عمل کرده است، می‌توان کتابی موفق و مرجع دانست.

1399/11/09

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx writes the following passage, from which the title of this book is taken:

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

What Marx was referring to was the nature of modern capitalist economies to mercilessly remake society again and again, taking human beings along for the ride and forcing them to adapt their own external and internal lives to the new world that comes into existence. In such a maelstrom no venerable old culture or metaphysics can last very long, being rapidly torn down and replaced just like the buildings and streets around us, driven at root by the dictates of the market.

Berman's book is a tour of modernism in thought, art and architecture, routed through the writings of Goethe, Marx and Baudelaire, and ending with reflections on two quintessentially modern places: St. Petersburg and New York. The fundamental argument of this book echoes Marx, pointing out that that capitalism as a mode of organizing society is geared for a perpetual revolution in society, both in the external environment and in the internal lives of men and women. "All that is solid melts into air," as the deliberate and conscientious upheavals that accompany capitalist modernity manufacture new types of people and societies just as it manufactures new products and fashions.

Transformations in literature and political writing offer a window into how human beings first encountered and were shaped by the forces of modernity. In Goethe's Faust, we are shown the cruelties of the old world, but also the angst of the modernizer, who feels driven to build grand projects that offer an opportunity for self-expansion, but also try to annihilate every last vestige of antiquity, haunted as they are by memories of the world they have lost and not wanting to be reminded of it. In this approach to development we see the entire ideology of modernity, not just indifferent but even hostile to memory, which it sees as, if not a threat, then a reproach to what they have created. In his reflections on Marx's writings, Berman describes the modern neoliberal elite as the authors of many great accomplishments, but also "the most destructive elite in human history" committed to burning down even their own most beautiful constructions in the name of profitable depreciation, demolition and replacement. The modern world treats its greatest monuments more like "temporary encampments" than the Pyramids or Coliseums of past civilizations. We are committed to an almost nihilistic view of life, based on a profitable "creative destruction" of our own achievements.

To this point, I really appreciated Berman's focus on the built environment as the site of modern experience, as this is the place where all of us are actually confronted and formed by the modern world - for both good and bad. The book focuses a lot on the "modernism of the streets," and how the very modern phenomena of boulevards, sidewalks and superhighways have shaped different types of modern experience. Le Corbusier's blasting open of the streets of Paris and the construction of the Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg both led to entirely new forms of human experience and interaction. In time they would even lead to earthquakes in political and social thought that no architect could ever envision. The structure of the modern city and its traffic compels a certain way of life out of its inhabitants. Movements that have sought to obstruct this traffic have a deep political semblance, taking ownership of their society by blocking its arteries and reclaiming its space. The "Underground Man" who gingerly took his first steps onto the Nevsky ended up changing the world, giving form to an entirely new type of modern human being who was, in turn, unable to maintain a stable identity in the modern world for long, as the nature of modernity itself compels.

All this change has had serious implications for the internal lives of human beings. In fairness, it is difficult for anyone to adapt to living in a world of perpetual revolution, and we all struggle with this to some degree whether we're cognizant of it or not. But these difficulties have also at times led whole societies into violent reaction. In one passage Berman writes of a type of modern man who "throws himself into parodies of the past; he needs history because that is where all the costumes are kept," a line which couldn't help but remind me of ISIS, neo-Crusaders, neo-Nazis and other terrifying, farcical responses to modern dilemmas. Keeping in mind such extreme examples of failed responses to modernity, it seems that our goal should be helping bring into being a type of human being comfortable with the idea of change, but still grounded in values that can give them identity and a sense of meaning.

The last section, examining the "modernization" of the author's own home of New York under the influence of Robert Moses is particularly touching, showing how the ideology of our modernism takes away even its own gifts (i.e. destroying beautiful modern boulevards in the Bronx to build a new expressway), when not checked by the active resistance of the people. Without a vision, modernism can, and often has, used the miracles of technology to create "grim, inexorable necessities and crushing routines" for human beings, rather than beauty and enchantment. Berman ends by writing, "I believe that we and those who come after us will go on fighting to make ourselves at home in this world, even as the homes we have made, the modern street, the modern spirit, go melting into air."

This is a fairly dense book, but its density contains a lot of value. Almost 200 years after the Communist Manifesto and three decades after this book, the dilemma entailed in "making our home" in such a world of constant change and vanishing certainties has not disappeared. But a good starting point for us would be to look at modernity and its products as something to examine, critique and engage with, rather than just passively consume or haughtily reject.

[Maziyar Yf · Rating 2 out of 5]

کتاب تجربه مدرنیته کاملا از برداشتی که در ذهن راجع به مدرنیته داشتم دور و بیگانه بود . تمرکز اصلی کتاب بر موضوعاتی بود که من هیچ گونه دانشی در مورد آنها نداشتم و به نظر من فهمیدن مفاهیم کتاب نیاز به خواندن کتابهای دیگر یا دانستن اطلاعاتی نه در حد مقدماتی بلکه کمی پیچیده راجع به مفاهیم کتاب داشت .
تمرکز اصلی کتاب در مورد اثرات مدرنیته در ادبیات ، شهرسازی و معماری ایست ، کتاب به صورت مفصل و کامل داستان فاوست اثر گوته را بررسی می کند و شرح می دهد ، داستانی که به نظر جالب می آید ولی من ترجیح می دادم جداگانه و نه در دل کتابی دیگر آنرا بخوانم .
در جایی دیگر ، کتاب در مورد پاریس و مدرن سازی آن می گوید ، از هوسمان کبیر ، کسی که محلات کهنه ، قدیمی و کثیف پاریس را از بین برد و به جای آن بلوارهای بزرگ با ساختمانهایی هم اندازه و کاملا متناسب با هم ساخت ، به گونه ای که بالکن همه خانه ها در یک راستا هست و اصولا معماری پاریس را از همه جا متمایز کرده است .( بعید می دانم کسی عکس یکی از محلات پاریس را ببیند وبه اشتباه شهر را مثلا مادرید یا برلین یا مارسی حدس بزند. ) اما انبوه جزییات کتاب در مورد پاریس مدرن شاید مناسب کسی با دانش معماری یا شهر سازی باشد
سپس در یکی از طولانی ترین فصل های کتاب به احداث شهر پترزبورگ در روسیه می پردازد و یکی از بلوارهای بسیار معروف آن به نام نووسکی و بعد نویسنده کتاب با جزئیات فراوان به نقش این بلوار در ادبیات روسیه ، کتابهای داستایوسکی ، گوگول و پوشکین می پردازد که برای فهم منظور نویسنده باید اشراف فراوان بر ادبیات بسیار غنی و شاید پیچیده روسیه داشت .
و در آخر سر آقای برمن سراغ محله برانکس ، زادگاه خود و محله دوران کودکی خود می رود و به گونه ای شاید تلخ از نابودی بافت قدیمی آن و احداث آزادرا ه های جدید می گوید .
کتاب خواننده بی اطلاعی مانند من را گمراه می کند ، به گونه ای که شاید متوجه نشود که کدام نوع مدرنیته مطلوب نویسنده است ، تعریف ساده و قابل فهمی از مدرنیته ، مدرن سازی و دیگر مفاهیم ابتدایی ارائه نمی دهد، به مانند کلاس درس پیچیده ای می ماند که خواننده کتاب انگار اوایل و اواسط درس را از دست داده و فقط به آخر کلاس رسیده است .

[Amir · Rating 4 out of 5]

یکی از خوندنی‌ترین منابع برای درک مدرنیته که هرچند سی و اندی سال می‌گذره از نوشته شدنش هنوز حرف‌هاش تازه‌ست. کتاب نه تجربه‌ی سرنگونی اتحاد جماهیر شوروی رو از سر گذرونده، نه انفجار اطلاعات و اینترنت رو و نه فرو ریختن برج‌های دوقلو رو. اما قضیه وقتی جالب میشه که می‌فهمی نویسنده در فصل مربوط به فاوست گوته گریزی هم می‌زنه به انقلاب کشور ما. مارشال برمن برای تجربه کردن مدرنیته سر زده به سرچشمه‌ها و اسلاف و همین راز موندگاری این کتاب هست.
این کتاب خوش‌خون رو و مخصوصا شاهکار کتاب، فصل مربوط به فاوست رو به همه توصیه می‌کنم. در کنار این کتاب سری هم بزنید به "کتاب ادبیات و فلسفه"ای که در سال 1380 چاپ شده. (توی سایت نورمگز موجود هست) میزگردی هست با حضور مترجم کتاب و دکتر میرسپاسی و یوسف اباذری که کمک می‌کنه به درک جایگاه کتاب و نویسنده
.

[Nazli_maza · Rating 4 out of 5]

چندین روز است که کتاب را تمام کردم
فیلتر شکن یاری نمی‌کرد تا پستش کنم ..
  مدرنیته توسعه نیافتگی را زندگی نمی‌کنیم ؟
در همین اول کار  بگویم این کتاب از آن تجربه های فکری بی نظیر است ،
شبیه یک سفر مابین چندین و چند اثر هنری ماجرای تاریخی و انگار روی نقاط عطف دنیای مدرن گام می زدیم
از اسطوره فاوست و با نگاه شاید مثبت گوته به مدرنیسم شروع میکنه
به جایگاه مارکس
مسئله روشنفکران و خود فروختگی مخصوص ایشان در نظام سرمایه
اینکه بلاخره مارکس و مانیفست کمونیسم رو کنار جریان مدرن شدن ببینیم یا در مقابلش رو هم بحث میکنه
و بعد بودلر
تصویر ضد پاستورال
سوارکار مفرقین پوشکین و تمام این روس ها با مدرنیسم فرمایشی نیم بندشون تقابل شهر های مسکو و سنت پترزبورگ
تقلای جامعه برای رسیدن به آزادی ماجرای
بلوار نوسکی چشم اندازه شهری
گوگول
رسیدن به نیورک
محله برانکس و انگار کتاب در این جا به یک جور اوج میرسه
با این جمله که سنت برانکس ؟:بزن به چاک
فقط یاد خودمان و این تکاپو فرار و اپلای افتادم
خلاصه که چیزی که این جا نوشتم
ته مانده آنچیزی بود که کتاب بخاطرم ماند
حجم زیاد همذات پنداریم
و حجم زیاد اطلاعات که به مغزم روان کرده بود قطعا عوامل ایجاد وجد و ادامه دادش بود
خواندش را هم حسابی توصیه میکنم

[محمدحسین بنـکدارتهرانی · Rating 4 out of 5]

مارشال برمن از زاویه فرهنگ وهنر و ادبیات به مراتب شکل‌
گیری مدرنیته ورود کرده. کتاب با فاووست گوته آغاز می‌شود و با مارکس و بودلر و سن‌پطرزبورگ و نیویورک تمام می‌شود. مراد فرهادپور هم در ترجمه تلاش فراوان کرده.

[محمد شکری · Rating 5 out of 5]

تجربه خواندن «تجربه مدرنیته» یک تجربه ناب است: تجربه یک مواجهه از بالا بدون خُرد کردن متن؛ تجربه مواجهه با «خوانش» به معنای اصیل و دست اول آن؛ و تجربه مواجهه با تاریخ بدون جدا کردن آن از متن زندگی
هر بخش این کتاب، به اندازه کل کتاب عالی بود (هرچند بخش اول، دوم و چهارم درخشش بیشتری داشت). در جای جای آن نکات بدیع و افقهای بسیاری برای خواننده ای که ذهن خودش مانند مولف مشوش و دلمشغول نسبت طرحواره های انتزاعی زندگی اصیل با روایت واقعی و درهم زندگی مدرن است یافت میشود (بخصوص برای خواننده ایرانی که هنوز در «مدرنیسم توسعه نیافتگی» زندگی میکند)ر
دغدغه اصلی برمن در کتاب، نشان دادن نوعی زندگی اصیل و مدرن است: نوعی مدرنیسم که در متن زندگی مدرن که در آن «هر آنچه سخت و استوار است، دود می شود و به هوا میرود» اصالت و ریشه داری خود را حفظ میکند. راه حل شیرین اما قابل تردید برمن را با بیان محتوای کتاب بیان میکنم

درباره محتوا
کتاب برمن از یک مقدمه (به مثابه نقشه راه) و پنج بخش اصلی تشکیل شده است
مقدمه اثر به نقد کل گرایی درتفسیر مدرنیته (نقدی متوجه سنت گرایان و پست-مدرنها)، نقد نخبه گرایی افراطی (نقدی متوجه نهضت چپ نو) و نتیجتاً تلاش برای مهم جلوه دادن بازگشت به ریشه های انشقاق و عرضه امکان بازسازی نوعی مدرنیته اصیل، فعال و ریشه دار میپردازد
بخش اول با نام «فاوست گوته: تراژدی توسعه و رشد» با خوانشی تمام عیار از فاوست گوته (با حجم یک سوم اما شیوایی دو چندان نسبت به اثر پراهمیتی مثل خوانش فاست لوکاچ) سعی میکند نشان دهد که چگونه مدرنیته از دل عمیق ترین نیازهای انسان سربلند می کند. از نظر برمن همین نگاه عمیق گوته است که فاوست او را از نمونه های قبلی فاوست متمایز کرده است
بخش دوم عنوانی دارد که زیرعنوان اصلی کتاب هم هست: «هرآنچه سخت و استوار است، دود می شود و به هوا می رود: مارکس، مدرنیسم مدرنیزاسیون». چهره ای که برمن در این بخش از مارکس ترسیم میکند، در مقام ستایشگر تمام قد بورژوازی، چهره ای بسیار جالب توجه و (حداقل بر مبنای مانیفست) درست-نماست. برمن سعی میکند در این فصل با توسل به نبوغ ذهنی مارکس به خوبی نشان دهد که چگونه مدرنیته از هرآنچه نقد و حتی ضد اوست برای تغذیه و غنا و توسعه خود استفاده میکند
بخش سوم: «بودلر: مدرنیسم در خیابان». برمن که در فصل قبل، در-هم-تنیدگی مدرنیسم و مدرنیزاسیون را نشان داده، در این بخش با کمک تفسیر جالبی از اشعار بودلر نشان میدهد که چگونه مدرنیسم خود را در هنر و روزمره مردم بازسازی میکند و به توانمندسازی آن مدد میرساند. نشان میدهد چگونه فردی که قصد مقابله با آشوب ذاتی مدرنیته را دارد، خود به ایجاد این آشوب کمک میکند
بخش چهارم که «پترزبورگ: مدرنیسم و توسعه نیافتگی» نام دارد، با توجه به مولفه های عمیقی که در دوبخش پیش، رو شده است، در پی آن است که مواجهه توسعه نیافتگی با مدرنیسم، یعنی سرگذشت تمام جوامع درحال گذار را با تمرکز بر ادبیات روس (از پوشکین تا ماندلشتام) در کف خیابانها و شهرها (که قهرمانان واقعی روایتهای تاریخی این جوامعند) و تقلای این جوامع برای یافتن مدرنیسم اصیل خود به تصویر بکشد. این بخش در خوانش آثار روسی حقیقتا بی نظیر است
و اما بخش آخر که با تجربه زیسته مولف درآمیخته و او هم صمیمانه خود را در مرکز آن قرار میدهد درباره «جنگل نمادها: نکاتی پیرامون مدرنیسم در نیویورک» است. رابرت موزز ضدقهرمان این فصل، دربرابر قهرمان بخش سه، هوسمان، قرار میگیرد: بزرگراه در برابر خیابان (بلوار). برمن قصد دارد با نشانه شناسی بزرگراه، از تحریف مدرنیته سخن بگوید: شهر یعنی خیابان، و بزرگراه یعنی نه خیابانی و نه مردمی. خیابان یعنی محل اجتماع، روبروشدن، مواجهه، الهام، دسترسی به مردم و صدالبته آگاهی؛ اما بزرگراه یعنی عبور محض، عدم مواجهه، دسترسی به صرف فضا و گرفتن زمینی که زمینه حضور مردم را فراهم میکرد (همه انقلابها در خیابان رخ داد است). برمن در یک تقریر بسیار کوچک اما بسیار درخشان فمینیستی، حتی نوع جدید از بازسازی مدرنیته و مقابله با بزرگراه را نشان میدهد: توجه به خانه درمقابل توجه به بزرگراه و حتی خیابان

بازسازی مدرنیسم برای برمن که گویی احیای مدرنیسم قرن نوزدهم را القا میکند، ممکن است مخاطب را به یاد فیلم متوسط الحال وودی آلن، نیمه شب در پاریس، بیاندازد. شاید برمن را با قهرمان داستان، جیل (و یا حتی قهرمان داستانی که جیل میخواهد آن را بنویسد) اشتباه بگیرید. اما این مقایسه قطعا نادرست است. برمن در پی «احیا»ی مدرنیسم قرن نوزدهمی نیست، او نمیخواهد مانند جیل به گذشته بازگردد یا گذشته را زنده کند، برعکس به نظر او «مدرن بودن یعنی تجربه زندگی شخصی و اجتماعی به مثابه گردابی عظیم و رویارویی با این واقعیت که آدمی و جهان او پیوسته درحال فروپاشی و تجدید حیات و آمیخته به رنج، عذاب و تناقض و ابهام است: مدرن بودن یعنی تعلق داشتن ه جهانی که در آن هرآنچه سخت و استوار است دود میشود و به هوا میرود. و مدرنیست بودن یعنی خوگرفتن با این گرداب، پیروی از ضرب آهنگهای آن و حرکت در بطن جریانهای درونی آن به قصد یافتن آن صوری از واقعیت، زیبایی، آزادی و عدالت که چرخش توفنده و مهلک گرداب مجاز میشمارد.»ر
پس تا اینجا برمن اصیل بودن مردنیسم را به مشارکت میداند و مشارکت یعنی دو چیز: پذیرش قاعده بازی (فروپاشی مدام) و فعال بودن (به قصد یافتن آن صور حرکت کردن). پس برمن جیل نیست. اما شباهت زیادی با راوی داستان (وودی آلن) دارد چون میداند هرچند به عقب برگشتن هیچ پاسخی برای ما ارائه نمیکند، اما به عقب نگریستن ما را در یافتن پاسخ کمک میکند: «تداوم حیات مدرنیست به این معناست که مدرنیستها هرگز نمیتوانند پیوند خود را گذشته را به طور کلی قطع کنند: سایه گذشته همیشه همراه آنها خواهد بود و آنان نیز به رهاسازی اشباح گذشته و بازآفرینی آن ادامه خواهند داد، حتی به هنگامی که سرگرم دوباره سازی نفس و جهان خویشند».ر
برمن گام سومی هم برمیدارد که اینبار او را از خود وودی آلن هم پیش میدارد و آن پی جویی فهم معضل است: برمن از طرفی معتقد است ما یک مدرنیسم نداریم، و جریانهای مدرنیستی میتوانند خوب، بد یا برای شرایطی خوب و برای شرایطی بد باشند. از طرف دیگر برمن همراه گودمن (و بعدها هابرماس، همراه برمن) معتقد است که «اگر زندگی جوانان امروزی پوچ شده است و هیچ آینده پرافتخار یا حتی بامعنایی در انتظار آنان نیست، دلیل آن روح جامعه مدرن نیست، بلکه برعکس، علت اصلی آن است که این روح هنوز به قدر کافی تحقق نیافته است». این جسارت برمن را باید کنار فراست او در نقد کل نگری مدرنیته بگذاریم تا دقت او را (حتی فراتر از گودمن) متوجه شویم: جریان مدرنیته نه جای فرار دارد و نه حتی جای تاسف، اما مدرنیسم ممکن است به انحراف کشیده شود و این ماییم که میتوانیم آن را به جای اصیل خود بازگردانیم. راه حل برمن، بیش از حد کلاسیک اما بنظرمن موثر است: راه حل بیش از اعتراضات خیابانی اشکال جدید و موثر هنر است. راه حلی که از شلینگ تا آدورنو تکرار شده و هنوز میشود

نکته آخر توجه به یک مسئله تاریک است: هراس نهفته در این مواجهه. تجربه ای که هرگونه امید به ثبات را به نا امیدی میکشاند. اما بنظر شاید بهترین راه حل مواجهه هرچه زودتر با همین نا امید باشد. بهتر از نظر من می توان نظر فیلسوف سیاسی معاصر، جورجیو آگامبن، را جویا شد: «برای من تفكر چنین معنایی دارد: شجاعت ناامیدی. آیا این بالاتر از امیدواری نیست؟»ر



درباره ترجمه
حقیقتا باید گفت مراد فرهادپور در این ترجمه (مثل باقی ترجمه هایی که از او خواندم و فراتر از همه) سنگ تمام گذاشته است. بجز یکی دو مورد نادر، معادلها، ساختار جمله ها و پانویسهای توضیحی همگی عالیست. از همه مهمتر لحن ترجمه است که به فراخور هیجانات برمن، کاملا منتقل میشود و از این رو باید بدون هرگونه تکلف مترجم را قدر شناخت


پی نوشت: نشریه آسمان این شماره، «تجربه شهری» دیوید هاروی را با «تجربه مدرنیته» برمن مقایسه کرده و هاروی را برمن چپها خوانده است. گذشته از این مقایسه (برمن چپها!) علاقه من را به خواندن تجربه شهری بیشتر کرد

[Amirsaman · Rating 4 out of 5]

• زمانی که مجله‌ام‌ را بیرون می‌دادم، در آن از فلسفه و مکانیک کوانتوم گرفته، تا فمینیسم و سینما، ستون می‌نوشتم. دنیای مدرن، درهای متعددی را نشانت می‌دهند و انسان مدرن وسوسه می‌شود هر دری را مقداری باز کند؛ مقداری، و نه بیشتر. ما مدرنیم و هیچ نقش اجتماعی‌ای ما را به طور کامل نمی‌تواند توصیف کند؛ پس حرص کسب هویت‌های بیشتر درمان می‌جوشد.
همه‌مان تا حدی غذا پختن بلدیم، کار با ماشین‌لباس‌شویی، درمان سرماخوردگی، و رانندگی.
(و به شکل متناقضی، صنعت در دنیای نو، تخصصی شده. دیگر صفر تا صدِ کشت برنج در زمین کشاورزی را یک نفر انجام نمی‌دهد؛ یکی شغلش تراکتوررانی است، دیگری درگونی‌کردنِ محصول.)

• در عصر مدرن، باید از همه‌چیز بی‌رحمانه کار کشید و به سوی تولید هجوم برد. و همین است حرفِ طرفداران محیط‌زیست و جماعت ضدفاوستی، که بس است بهره‌کشی از طبیعت. کسانی که به تعبیر برمن، می‌خواهند «کوچک فکر کنیم». اما در جامعه‌ی مدرن، تنها «بزرگ فکر کردن» می‌تواند منجر به کوچک فکرکردن و تمرکززدایی شود.
توسعه‌ی مدرن فاوستی، به معنای راندن نیاز، فقر، گناه و دلسوزی است. اما گوته مزایایی هم برای عصر مدرن برمی‌شمارد. گرچن (دختری که بکارتش قربانی خواست فاوستِ مدرن‌طلب می‌شود)، از دنیای کوچک و سنتی خود جدا می‌شود تا از قیدوبندهای (مثلاً جنسی) آن جدا شود و به رهایی برسد. بقول مارشال برمن، بنابراین نمی‌شود نوستالژیک‌وار، خواهان عصر پیشامدرن و همه‌ی عقب‌ماندگی‌های فرهنگی‌اش بود. جامعه، خود میل شدیدی دارد به این توسعه‌ی مدرنیستی.

• عصر مدرن، عصر پیشرفت و تکاپوی بدون ملاحظه است؛ ایستایی برابر با نابودی است (قرارداد فاوست و شیطان). و نسل بعد --دهه‌ی ۱۹۶۰--، نسل آدم‌هایی است که به لحظه‌ی حال می‌گویند بمان، نسل هیپی‌ها.
در واقع برخلاف دوران بعد از جنگ جهانی که «مدرنیزاسیون» در صنعت و پل‌سازی‌های عظیم شدت گرفتند، و پیاده‌روها و زندگی روزمره طرد شدند، دهه‌ی شصت، تاکیدش بر «مدرنیسم» هنری بود؛ درهم‌آمیزی هنر و زندگی روزمره. همان‌طور که در فیلم‌های خیابان‌محورِ ژان لوک گدار یا آهنگ‌های باب دیلن یا بعدتر در اشعار بوکوفسکی می‌بینیم. (برمن اعتقادی به پست‌مدرن ندارد و عصر مدرن را تمام‌نشده می‌داند.)
از همان قرن نوزدهم، خیابان معنای ویژه‌ای در فرهنگ مدرن داشت. خیابان‌های مدرن، جایی هستند که دست معشوقت را می‌گیری و «خلوت» خود را به نمایش «عمومی» می‌گذاری. کافه‌های کنار پیاده‌روها مهیاکننده‌ی حریم شخصی در یک فضای عمومی اند. جایی که بقیه باید در مورد شما دو نفرْ غریبه، در ذهنشان داستانی بسازند. فرم امروزی شبکه‌های اجتماعی هم ادامه‌ی همین سنّت است؛ چشم‌چرانیِ خیابانی حالا به عرصه‌ی صفحات مجازی و عکس‌های اینستاگرامی منتقل شده است.

• «تقدس‌زدایی» یک ویژگی عمده‌ی دنیای مدرن است. ‌مارکس در مانیفست کمونیست، هنگامی که دارد فواید بورژوازی را برمی‌شمرد، می‌گوید بورژوازی آن تقدسی را که شغل‌هایی مثل پزشکی و وکالت داشتند، زدود، و پزشکان را به کارگران مزدگیر خود تبدیل کرد.
مارشال برمن همین مفهوم را در شعر «گل و لای مکادامِ» بودلر می‌یابد. زمانی که هاله‌ی دور سر شاعری در گل و لای می‌افتد، و به عبارتی هنر مدرن، بجای تحقیر توده‌ی مردم، حیات خود را از آن‌ها و زندگی روزمره می‌گیرد.

• از ویژگی‌های دیگر مدرنیسم، کارمند زیرزمینی‌ای است که خواهان برابری با افسران است، و تلاش می‌کند تا با تنه زدن به مافوقان خویش در بلوار نوسکی، از حقارت موش‌وارانه‌ی خود بکاهد. مضمون رهایی از بردگی، پیش از داستایوفسکی هم برای قرن‌ها در ادبیات موجود بوده. اما نامه‌های زیرزمینی، دیده‌نشدنِ پایین‌دستی‌ها را در دنیای جدیدی بررسی می‌کند که ظاهراً رای به لغو بردگی داده است.

[Andrew]

First off, subject matter aside, Marshall Berman is a beautiful damn writer. He can take four weighty, academic ideas-- the relationship between Faust and modern technology, Baudelaire's conception of Paris, the role of St. Petersburg in Russian modernization, and the effects of modernist planning on New York-- and make them sing and dance. Especially the New York essay. He's on home turf, and he is as rapturous as Woody Allen in the opening scenes of Manhattan.

In the introduction, he denounces Foucault. As a Foucault fan, I am keen to read negative criticism of the man's works. However, he doesn't denounce the godless postmoderns as many old modernists are wont to do. Rather, he lets the merits of modernism stand on their own right. He merely wants to show us the process. Let Baudelaire, Goethe, Bely, and Dostoyevsky speak for themselves. The result of this is that his thesis and his actual material don't really match up. It's best not to read it as an argument, but as an exposition.

So he doesn't sound like a curmudgeon. He does, however, sound like a tragic. While it's supposed to be a clarion call for modernism, it sounds more like a eulogy. Not that this is a bad thing; I think modernism deserves a fitting eulogy, but maybe this isn't what he intended.

[Sepehr · Rating 4 out of 5]

اگر بخوام درجه سختی نوشتارش رو بگم، میتونم بگم که نه به سخت خوانی کتاب‌های فلسفه یا فلسفه‌ی سیاسیه و نه به راحت خوانی جستارها یا این کتابهای هم‌خوان فلسفی. بطور کلی تمرکز میطلبه و دغدغه‌ی مرتبط، وگرنه خوندنش ممکنه اذیت کننده باشه.
اما در بخش بدیع و جدید بودن، تقریبا خلاف جریان خیلی از تئوری‌های مدرنیستی حرکت می‌کنه. مملو از ایده‌ها و زوایای دید جدیده و نوع پرداختش به مسئله مدرنیته و فصل‌بندی‌ کتاب هم خیلی برای من جذاب بود.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

CRITIQUE:

Dialectical Hegelian Epigraph (Tarrying with the Negative)

"Spirit is a power only by looking the negative in the face and living with it. Living with it is the magical power that converts the negative into being."

Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

"A Rich and Complex, Trenchant and Compelling Perspective"

"All That is Solid" is a superlative exercise in both literary and cultural criticism, that somehow unexpectedly, but consistently with its overall (Marxist) perspective, morphs into a polemic on urban and environmental planning.

While contemplating what adjectives I could use to describe the style of the book, I recalled some comments that Berman had made on other non-fiction (Marx and Engels, Jane Jacobs) or poetry and fiction (Goethe, Baudelaire, Pushkin, Gogol, Chernyshevsky, Dostoyevsky, Bely and Mandelstam) in his work. On reflection, these descriptions apply equally to his own book, perhaps because they reflect his predilections and priorities:

"It is fascinating and beautifully realised..." (275)

"I want to convey the richness of [her/his] thought." (315)

"[Her/His] perspective is rich and complex, trenchant and compelling..." (322)

"[She/He] has the ability to create individual scenes - whether actual or mythical, past or present, imagined or directly experienced - with a remarkable directness and luminous clarity." (334)

Modern Roots

The subtitle of the work is "The Experience of Modernity". This is broader in scope than what I had subconsciously expected, which was an analysis of Modernism. In fact, Berman analyses three related subjects, each of which has its root in the word "modern". They are:

* Modernisation;

* Modernity; and

* Modernism.

Berman doesn't define all three of these words in any one place in his book. However, this is what I gleaned about how he intended to use them, at least comparatively.

Modernisation is the economic, technological, social and cultural development of society. Berman's description reveals his Marxist perspective:

"The industrialisation of production, which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, creates new human environments and destroys old ones, speeds up the whole tempo of life, generates new forms of corporate power and class struggle; immense demographic upheavals, severing millions of people from their ancestral habitats, hurtling them half-way across the globe into new lives; rapid and often cataclysmic urban growth; systems of mass communication, dynamic in their development, enveloping and binding together the most diverse people and societies; increasingly powerful national states, bureaucratically structured and operated, constantly striving to expand their powers; mass social movements of people, and peoples, challenging their political and economic rulers, striving to gain some control over their lives; finally, bearing and driving all these people and institutions along, an ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating capitalist world market." (16)

Modernity, therefore, is the present stage of development, i.e., the stage of development at which we now find ourselves, especially in the global capitalist West.

Modernism is a/the cultural response to Modernisation:

"[The world-historical processes of Modernisation] have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernisation, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own...This book is a study in the dialectics of Modernisation and Modernism." (16)

"[Early Modernists] used Modernisation as a source of creative material and energy. Marx, Baudelaire and many others strove to grasp this world-historical process and appropriate it for mankind: to transform the chaotic energies of economic and social change into new forms of meaning and beauty, of freedom and solidarity; to help their fellow men and help themselves to become the subjects as well as objects of Modernisation." (174)

Phases of Modernity

Berman divides the history of Modernity into three phases:

1. From the start of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century (early Modernity);

2. From the American and French Revolutions to the end of the nineteenth century (classical Modernity); and

3. The twentieth century to the present (late Modernity).


Wide and tree-lined Boulevard Montmartre, Paris, 1906

Descended From Holy Ghosts Into the Maelstrom

Initially, Berman focuses on phase 2, within which he places Karl Marx and "The Communist Manifesto" (from which he derives the title of the book):

"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face...the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men." (21)

In his discussion of Modernism, Berman suggests that "to be modern [or a Modernist] is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction; to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a Modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one's own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows." (346)

Berman highlights the dialectic of Modernism:

"Modernists can never be done with the past: they must go on forever haunted by it, digging up its ghosts, recreating it even as they remake their world and themselves."

Modernism Survives the Threat of Post-Modernism

This leads Berman to assess Post-Modernism (which he seems to comprehend as a wrong-headed variety of Modernism):

"The Modernism of the 1970s was distinguished by its desire and power to remember, to remember so much of what modern societies - regardless of what their ideologies and who their ruling classes are - want to forget. But when contemporary Modernists lose touch with and deny their own Modernity, they only echo the ruling class self-delusion that it has conquered the troubles and perils of the past, and meanwhile they cut themselves off, and cut us off, from a primary source of their own strength." (346)

In contrast, Berman argues that Modernism will survive and continue to develop:

"The culture of Modernism will go on developing new visions and expressions of life: for the same economic and social drives that endlessly transform the world around us, both for good and for evil, also transform the inner lives of the men and women who fill this world and make it go.

"The process of Modernisation, even as it exploits and torments us, brings our energies and imaginations to life, drives us to grasp and confront the world that Modernisation makes, and to strive to make it our own. I believe that we and those who come after us will go on fighting to make ourselves at home in this world, even as the homes we have made, the modern street, the modern spirit, go on melting into air." (348)

"Realism in literature and thought must develop into Modernism, in order to grasp the unfolding, fragmenting, decomposing and increasingly shadowy ealities of modern life." (257)

The ideologues of Post-Modernism will continue to lament "Modernity's stubborn refusal to fade out...The modern economy is likely to go on growing, though probably in new directions, adapting itself to the chronic energy and environmental crises that its success has created. Future adaptations will require great social and political turmoil; but Modernisation has always thrived on trouble, on an atmosphere of 'everlasting uncertainty and agitation' in which, as The Communist Manifesto says, 'All fixed, fast-frozen relations...are swept away.' " (347)


Construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, 1950

Modernisation and the Environment

Berman tries to show "a dialectical interplay between unfolding Modernisation of the environment - particularly the urban environment - and the development of Modernist art and thought."

He argues that this dialogue had stopped dead by the 1950s, when Robert Moses created an "expressway world", particularly the Cross-Bronx Expressway that tore the Bronx in two, and displaced 1,500 families.

"So often the price of ongoing and expanding Modernity is the destruction not merely of 'traditional' and 'pre-Modern' institutions and environments but - and here is the real strategy - of everything most vital and beautiful in the Modern world itself." (295)

"One of the crucial tasks for Modernists in the 1960s was to confront the expressway world; another was to show that this was not the only possible modern world, that there were other, better directions in which the modern spirit could move." (313)

In contrast to his experience with inter-city development, Robert Moses would say of the residents of the Bronx and their homes:

"There are more houses in the way...more people in the way...that's all."

Whatever environment, lifestyle and culture they had established for themselves was irrelevant to him and his project. He was more interested in cars, commuters and traffic.

Modernism can inspire citizens "with visions of symbolic action and interaction that can help them to act as men [and women] and citizens there: modes of passionately intense encounter and conflict and dialogue through which they can at once assert themselves and confront each other and challenge the powers that control them all. It can help them to become...both personally and politically 'more alive' in the elusively shifting light and shadow of the city streets." (286)

The Dual Character of Modernism

Berman argues that, particularly in the developed world, Modernism must both support and protest against Modernisation, whichever is more appropriate. The same applies in the underdeveloped world, where development can be motivated and driven by Stalinist tyranny.

"The Modernism of underdevelopment is forced to build on fantasies and dreams of Modernity, to nourish itself on an intimacy and a struggle with mirages and ghosts." (232)

"All forms of Modernist art and thought have a dual character: they are at once expressions of and protests against the process of Modernisation." (235)

Likewise, Marshall Berman's book is both articulate expression and protest, a Modernist work in its own right, as well as a Marxist one.


Epilogue




SOUNDTRACK:

Bob Dylan - "Subterranean Homesick Blues"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGxjI...

Leonard Cohen - "Stories of the Street"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H63dZ...

Lou Reed - "Dirty Boulevard"

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xokqel

Robert Caro on Robert Moses (how infrastructure projects fueled discrimination)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uOWD...

Marshall Berman on Robert Moses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9b5U...

Jane Jacobs vs Robert Moses: Urban Fight of the Century

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUeuQ...

[Jeroen Vandenbossche · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the greatest works of 20th century literary cum social criticism in my opinion, right up there with Roland Barthes’s S/Z, Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky and Lukács Theory of the Novel.

The chapter on the images of St. Petersburg in the works of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky is probably the least great and still very good; the one on Goethe’s Faust is very illuminating and the one on Baudelaire’s experience of modernity is absolutely masterful. Strolling down the Paris boulevards will never be same again.

Highly recommended.

[Talie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"هر آنچه سخت و استوار است دود می شود."
در شهر کوچکی که زندگی می کنم هر روز تعداد بیشتری از خانه های قدیمی محو می شوند و جایشان را به آپارتمان ها ی چند طبقه و آسمان خراش ها می دهند. صدای چکش و مته و دستگاه جوش و... موسیقی زمینه ی زندگی ام شدند. اما این تراژدی رشد و توسعه فاوستی نیست. بساز بفروش های شهر من به دنبال  توسعه اقتصادی نیستند. فاضلاب های آسمان خراش ها در دریا و کف خیابان رها شده اند. در گوشه ی دیگری از شهر کوچک من حلبی آبادها قارچ وار در حال گسترش هستند. بساز بفروش ها مثل رابرت موزز آمریکایی نیستند که گرچه "راه خود را با ساطور باز می کرد"، التفاتی هم به فضاهای عمومی داشت. اینجا تنها فضایی که  به آن عنوان پارک می شد داد، برای ساختن پلی تخریب شد که سال ها است در حال ساخت است. من این پل را پل خودکشی می نامم. یک سمت پل با تخریب و قطع درخت های پلاک دار  ساخته شده اما سمت دیگر پل در هوا معلق است و مناسب برای خودکشی و پرت شدن در رودخانه. اینجا مدرنیزاسیونی در کار نیست تنها ثروتمند شدن خواص است از خرید و فروش زمین و بساز بفروشی. اینجا از  مدرنیسم توسعه نیافتگی پترزبورگی هم خبری نیست. " مدرنیسمی که علیه خود می شورد و خود را شکنجه می دهد که چرا قادر نیست یک تنه تاریخ را عوض کند‌" به جای انسان های زیرزمینی پترزبورگی، اینجا آدم ها لب دریا سلفی می گیرند و پوست خربزه پرت می کنند.

[Alialiarya · Rating 5 out of 5]

تجربه‌ی مدرنیته کتابی‌ست منتشر شده در دهه هشتاد برای شرح مدرنیته که در نظر برمن و بسیاری از متفکران در تمامی مناسبات زندگی نسل معاصر حاضر است. افراد بسیاری سعی در بسط آن داشته‌اند اما اهمیت کتاب برمن جدا از هوش فوق‌العاده‌ی او این است که برمن برای شرح مدرنیته در دهه هفتاد و هشتاد میلادی از زمان خودش فاصله می‌گیرد و به دهه‌ها قبل باز می‌گردد. برمن سراغ متفکرانی می‌رود که تنها بخشی از زندگی‌شان با مدرنیته درگیر بوده و سعی دارد با بررسی آثار و پیش‌بینی‌های کسانی مانند گوته مارکس داستایفسکی و دیگران به شرحی جامع از زمانه‌ی خود برسد. در این بازگشت زمانی برمن سراغ شاعران نویسندگان متفکران و حتی معماران می‌رود. کتاب از شرح مدرنیسم در قرن بیستم فراتر می‌رود و ریشه‌هایش را کشف می‌کند و هم‌چنین نشان می‌دهد چگونه متفکران بزرگ قرن اخیر در مقابل این اتفاق دچار تضادهای زیادی بودند. بنظر می‌رسد تمامی هنرمندان و متفکران به این جمله رسیده بودند: مدرن
.بودن یعنی زیستن یک زندگی سرشار از معما و تناقض
در پایان مقدمه‌ برمن اشاره می‌کند: پس شاید نهایتا معلوم شود عقب رفتن، خود می‌تواند نوعی جلو رفتن باشد: اینکه به خاطر آوردن مدرنیسمهای قرن نوزدهم می‌تواند قدرت خیال و شجاعت خلق مدرنیسمهای قرن بیست و یکم را به ما عطا کند. این کنش به خاطر آوردن می‌تواند به ما کمک کند تا مدرنیسم را به
.ریشه‌هایش بازگردانیم، تا از این طریق بتواند خود را تغذیه و احیا کند، و با ماجرا و خطرات که در پیش است، روبرو شود

[Foroogh · Rating 5 out of 5]

بهترین کتاب در‌ زمینه شناخت تأثیر مدرنیته بر شهر و انسان.
سیر مدرن شدن هر انسان از دید برمن باید فردی باشد، یعنی مدرنیسم یک تجربه شخصی است.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, loved its provocations on how capitalism and literature and our strivings in the world are intertwined, loved how a new dialectic is brought into Marxist thought and this is tied into our dreams for the future and our visions for a full life, loved that its is grounded in the pain, and yet excitement and vision too, of capitalist destruction. Entirely dialectical, restless, searching, wary of solutions and 'end stages' and static utopias. It is also entirely based on the voices of white men, frustrating, especially in the chapter on under-development. At the same time it manages to capture, I think, what is both great and what is terrifying about capitalism and its visions, and since these emerge from white men I forgive it this focus. I'm glad it's done. I don't think it needs to be done again.

It's based around this wonderful quote from Marx:

To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often to destroy all communities, value, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face those forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities (13) for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something even as everything melts (13-14).

What I love about Marx, this book, and this aspect of Modernism itself I suppose, is the understanding that the drive to profit through exploitation must be fought, yet that everything is flux and process and overwhelming odds and even so we must 'be undeterred in our determination to face those forces, to fight to change the world and make it our own'. I agree in the feeling that this is something that has slipped away from many Marxists and many post-Modernists alike. Berman continues:

Meanwhile, social scientists, embarrassed by critical attacks on their techno-pastoral models, have fled from the task of building a model that might be truer to modern life. Instead, they have split modernity into a series of separate components – industrialization, state-building, urbanization, development of markets, elite formation – and resisted any attempt to integrate them into a whole. This has freed them from extravagant generalizations and vague totalities—but also from thought that might engage their own lives and works and their place in history (33-34)

He critiques the over-totalisation of Foucault as well, its all-encompassing microcosms of power without discussion of struggle against them, and this is where my own frustrations lie. I am all about how we fight I realise:

Foucault’s totalities swallow up every facet of modern life. He develops these themes with obsessive relentlessness and, indeed, with sadistic flourishes, clamping his ideas down on his readers like iron bars, twisting each dialectic into our flesh like the turn of the screw (34).

Berman has also convinced me to re-read Goethe. I was at most 17 when I last/first read it, and only remember it wasn't the camp devil-meets-man-who-sells-his-soul I was expecting, so I am curious to see what I think now. Especially after Berman's uncovering of so much of the soul of capitalist dreams here, their beauty along with their deadliness. This is such an amazing attempt to really grapple with the fascinations and promises of capitalism, so much a part of its longevity, surely one of its great supports alongside the misery and destitution and destruction it creates.

Faust begins in an epoch whose thought and sensibility are modern in a way that twentieth-century readers can recognize at once, but whose material and social conditions are still medieval; the work ends in the midst of the spiritual and material upheavals of an industrial revolution. It starts 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 is helping to create, and which are enabling him to create more (39).

This is an interesting insight as well, about how this process took place:

One of the most original and fruitful ideas in Goethe’s Faust is the idea of an affinity between the cultural ideal of self-development and the real social movement toward economic development (40).

There is a freedom for self-development promised by all of these vast and tumultuous changes capitalism was bringing to the landscape. I am sad that the only voice of women in here is via Goethe in the form of Faust's love Gretchen, but Berman does draw out the tragedy of her situation and that of all women in the period bound up in strong webs of social rules and limits. She is a fairly flat and pathetic construction (I shake my fist at the sky), but embodies this process of modern times that is still happening today. I left home too, didn't I:

Gretchen’s successors will get the point: where she stayed and died, they will leave and live. In the two centuries between Gretchen's time and ours, thousands of "little worlds" will be emptied out, transformed into hollow shells, while their young people head for great cities, for open frontiers, for new nations, in search of freedom to think and love and grow...Unwilling or unable to develop along with its children, the closed town will become a ghost town. Its victims' ghosts will be left with the last laugh (59).

Modernity contains this promise of self-fulfillment, that we can be

...like Faust himself, tätig-frei, free to act, freely active. They have come together to form a new kind of community: a community that thrives not on the repression of free individuality in order to maintain a closed social system, but on free constructive action in common to protect the collective resources that enable every individual to become tätig-frei (66).

Of course, this comes with huge cost. People stand in the way of progress, refuse to sell their land or give up their traditions. Two older people are murdered to pave the way for Faust's plans, revealing that

It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This is how the tragedy of development works (68).

An interesting window opened up into why people do bad things, and how that stays within them. It is a personal choice, but also something larger:

But there is another motive for the murder that springs not merely from Faust's personality, but from a collective, impersonal drive that seems to be endemic to modernization: the drive to create a homogenous environment, a totally modernized space, in which the look and feel of the old world have disappeared without a trace (68).

I love, too, the understanding that it is not just greed or self-interest driving Faust, but vision. This seems to me one of the most important insights Berman gives us, allowing us to understand not just the tragedy of capitalism, but also the tragedy of those initially socialist societies we have known in our times:

If we want to locate Faustian visions and designs in the aged Goethe's time, the place to look is not in the economic and social realities of that age but in its radical and Utopian dreams; and, moreover, not in the capitalism of that age, but in its socialism (72).

He uses Saint-Simon as an example, with his 'long-range development projects on an enormous scale', and states:

It is only in the twentieth century that Faustian development has come into its own. In the capitalist world it has emerged most vividly in the proliferation of "public authorities" and superagencies designed to organize immense construction projects, especially in transportation and energy... (74)

The section ends with this, a sentence that challenges us to think about where we stand ourselves:

Faust's unfinished construction site is the vibrant but shaky ground on which we must all stake out and build up our lives (86).

Then he turns to Marx in a most innovative and provocative way that I loved as much as his analysis of Goethe. A few choice quotes that turn around traditional understandings of Marxist thought:

We will soon see how the real force and originality of Marx's "historical materialism" is the light it sheds on modern spiritual life (88).

Marx can shine new light...he can clarify the relationship between modernist culture and the bourgeois economy and society--the world of "modernization"--from which it has sprung (90).

Although Marx identifies himself as a materialist, he is not primarily interested in the things that the bourgeoisie creates. What matters to him is the processes, the powers, the expressions of human life and energy: men working, moving, cultivating, communicating, organizing and reworking nature and themselves--the new and endlessly renewed modes of activity that the bourgeoisie brings into being (93).

I think this is precisely the power of Marx's thought. And I love where this insight takes us:

Alas to the bourgeois' embarrassment, they cannot afford to look down the roads they have opened up: the great wide vistas may turn into abysses. They can go on playing their revolutionary role only by denying its full extent and depth. But radical thinkers and workers are free to see where the roads lead, and to take them. If the good life is a life of action, why should the range of human activities be limited to those that are profitable? And why should modern men, who have seen what men's activity can bring about, passively accept the structure of their society as it is given? Since organized and concerted action can change the world in so many ways, why not organize and work together and fight to change it still more? (94).

Going back to the main quote about melting into air, I think this understanding of what we fight is pivotal, because change is intrinsic to capitalism which benefits from it, but as part of our own interior selves it must also be part of what we build to replace it:

Our lives are controlled by a ruling class with vested interests not merely in change but in crisis and chaos. "Uninterrupted disturbance, everlasting uncertainty and agitation," instead of subverting the society, actually serve to strengthen it. Catastrophes are transformed into lucrative opportunities for redevelopment and renewal; disintegration works as a mobilizing and hence an integrating force (95).

If we look behind the sober scenes that the members of our bourgeoisie create, and see the way they really work and act, we see that these solid citizens would tear down the world if it paid (100).

Thus where Marx sees a stable communist, collective sharing society that needs to be formed, Berman argues that these dynamic forces within us will still work to destabilize any future solidity, and any attempts to hold and control this change will only serve to damage and ossify what we have won.

But the problem is that, given the nihilistic thrust of modern personal and social development, it is not at all clear what political bonds modern men can create. Thus the trouble in Marx's thought turns out to be a trouble that runs through the whole structure of modern life itself (128).

Another key understanding is the way that capitalism changes and survives through incorporation and subsummation:

When Marx says that other values are "resolved into" exchange value, his point is that bourgeois society does not efface old structures of value but subsumes them. Old modes of honor and dignity do not die; instead, they get incorporated into the market, take on price tags, gain a new life as commodities. Thus, any imaginable mode of human conduct becomes morally permissible the moment it becomes economically possible, becomes "valuable"; anything goes if it pays. This is what modern nihilism is all about (111).

This is just a lovely quote that summarises modern society:

How Marx 'develops the themes by which modernism will come to define itself: the glory of modern energy and dynamism, the ravages of modern disintegration and nihilism, the strange intimacy between them: the sense of being caught in a vortex where all facts and values are whirled, exploded, decomposed, recombined: a basic uncertainty about what is basic, what is valuable, even what is real; a flaring up of the most radical hopes in the midst of their radical negations (121).

Berman returns to literature specific to Paris as he examines Haussman and Baudelaire, the tensions between celebrating everyday life of the people, making the city better, redeveloping some things out of existence while creating the possibility for growth and positive change. This is from the poet Theodore de Banville's tribute at Baudelaire's grave:

He accepted modern man in his entirety, with his weakness, his aspirations and his despair. He had thus been able to give beauty to sights that did not possess beauty in themselves, not by making them romantically picturesque, but by bringing to light the portion of the human soul hidden in them; he had thus revealed the sad and often tragic heart of the modern city. That was why he haunted, and would always haunt, the minds of modern men, and move them when other artists left them cold (132).

On Haussman's work in Paris:

...it opened up the whole of the city, for the first time in its history, to all its inhabitants. Now, at last, it was possible to move not only within neighborhoods, but through them. Now, after centuries of life as a cluster of isolated cells, Paris was becoming a unified physical and human space (151).

And it is here in Paris we meet the 'modern man' (and man it is), see the obsession with crowds, traffic, movement, change:

The archetypal modern man, as we see him here, is a pedestrian thrown into the maelstrom of modern city traffic, a man alone contending against an agglomeration of mass and energy that is heavy, fast and lethal. The burgeoning street and boulevard traffic knows no spatial or temporal bounds, spills over into every urban space, imposes its tempo on everybody's time, transforms the whole modern environment into a "moving chaos." The chaos here lies not in the movers themselves...but in their interaction, in the totality of their movements in a common space. This makes the boulevard a perfect symbol of capitalism's inner contradictions: rationality in each capitalistic unit, leading to anarchic irrationality in the social system that brings all these units together (157).

This was so reminiscent of the film Cairo Drive it was a little spooky. This life and art to be found in traffic is such an interesting thing:

...poets will become more deeply and authentically poetic by becoming more like ordinary men. If he throws himself into the moving chaos of everyday life in the modern world -- a life of which the new traffic is a primary symbol -- he can appropriate this life for art (160).

And I love this way of thinking about streets, how they have changed, how they are defined by us and define us, how they make new ideas of collectivity possible:

For one luminous moment, the multitude of solitudes that make up the modern city come together in a new kind of encounter, to make a people. "The streets belong to the people": they seize control of the city's elemental matter and make it their own. For a little while the chaotic modernism of solitary brusque moves gives way to an ordered modernism of mass movement (164).

I like thinking about the shifts in how encounters take place in the street:

for most of our century, urban spaces have been systematically designed and organized to ensure that collisions and confrontations will not take place here. The distinctive sign of nineteenth-century urbanism was the boulevard, a medium for bringing explosive material and human forces together; the hallmark of twentieth-century urbanism has been the highway, a means for putting them asunder. We see a strange dialectic here, in which one mode of mdoernism both energizes and exhausts itself trying to annihilate another, all in modernism's name (165).

And I really like what he likes about Baudelaire, though there is more to dislike:

a will to wrestle to the end of his energy with modern life's complexities and contradictions, to find and create himself in the midst of the anguish and beauty of its moving chaos (170).

It is a desire to live openly with the split and unreconciled character of our lives, and to draw energy from our inner struggles, wherever they may lead us in the end. If we learned through modernism to construct halos around our spaces and ourselves, we can learn from another modernism -- one of the oldest but also, we can see now, one of the newest -- to lose our halos and find ourselves anew (171).

There's a whole chapter on St Petersburg, which gave me a long list of Russian authors to read or revisit (you know I loved that), and was interesting but I didn't feel it compared to the first two chapters. Perhaps because it is looking at those societies who haven't gone through this upheaval, who are stuck or behind in terms of development. A good thing to do, but he tries to make the same kind of sweeping statements, using Russia to potentially understand the rest of the world which I think is a really bad idea. Really. Bad.I won't go into vastly different histories of 'discovery', colonialism, slavery, genocide, centuries of outside exploitation, the solidifying of structural racism and etc.

That said, I was quite delighted to find a discussion of the impact that Crystal Palace, South London's own Crystal Palace, had on some key Russian authors (why don't I remember this from Dostoevsky?) and utopian thought. I'm looking forward to thinking more about that. There was also an amazing word brought from English into Russian: infiltrazya - Soviet word expressing the fear of the 'flow of new words and things from other shores'. Awesome.

Anyway, this comes back to its own when it comes back to NY and Berman's beloved Bronx, destroyed through these very forces he is working to describe. He wrestles here with what made the destruction of his neighbourhood possible, and I haven't really read people wrestling with this before though I think it is so vital...

Out of space! Finish it here and Berman's thoughts on being a committed intellectual here.

[Maru Kun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Modernism: that dull old Boomer dad who's always telling his Postmodern teenage son they should be reading some decent books occasionally instead of endlessly watching Tik Tok videos because Tik Tok videos aren’t clever or ironic or self-referential or anything much because in fact they're crap.

I doubt there are many books being written about Modernism these days, which is a shame as all the best literature and art work of the past century or two could be called Modernist. This book is a rare exception, and despite sounding as though it was written by an ex-hippy in full possession of an old-age pension it still has some interesting and relevant things to say. I only need to substitute a few words in a forty or so year old passage - “information highway” for “expressway” - to bring it up to date:

“...The [information highway] world, the modern environment that emerged after the [invention of the internet] would reach a pinnacle of power and self confidence in the [early 21st century]...the developers and devotees of the [information highway] presented it as the only possible modern world; to oppose them and their works was to oppose modernity itself, to fight history and progress, to be a Luddite, an escapist, afraid of life and adventure and change and growth. This strategy was effective because, in fact, the vast majority of modern men and women do not want to resist modernity: they feel its excitement and believe in its promise, even when they find themselves in its way…”

The books looks at the idea of Modernism as expressed in, mainly, works of Modernist literature: Goethe’s Faust (I didn’t know that this was a Modernist work either, but the case is made), The Communist Manifesto, Russian literature focusing on St Petersburg as a city conceived by Peter the Great as the greatest Modernist work of art ever, and ending with a look at New York including how Robert Moses impacted the city. The section on St Petersburg was by far the best and has persuaded me to read Andrei Bely’s book of the same name.

I would have liked to have given this five stars based on the Petersburg section alone, but I always mark a book down one percent of a star every time the word “dialectic” appears which, in combination with the rather dull and overly academic parts, brings the final tally back to three.

[Miss Ravi · Rating 4 out of 5]

‌
مارشال برمن ایده‌ی اصلی‌ کتابش را از این گزاره از مانیفست کمونیست مارکس گرفته که:‌ «هر آن‌چه سخت و استوار است، دود می‌شود و به هوا می‌رود. هر آن‌چه مقدس است دنیوی می‌شود و دست آخر آدمیان ناچار می‌شوند با صبر و عقل با وضعیت واقعی زندگی و روابط با همنوعان خویش روبه‌رو گردند».
قرائت مارشال برمن از مدرنیته برای من تازه بود. دست‌کم این‌که چیزهای سخت‌واستوار که مدت‌هاست دود شده و به هوا رفته‌اند و چیزهای مقدس که در حال دنیوی شدن‌اند را می‌توانم با وضوح بیش‌تری ببینم. این کتاب با شرح تجربه‌ای طولانی از مدرنیته که با نگاهی به ادبیات و آثار چند نویسنده رخ داده، تعریف مدرنیته را در ذهن خواننده شفاف می‌کند. برمن از خلال روایت راویان داستانی به اشکال مختلف مدرنیته می‌پردازد که در جغرافیایی متفاوت رخ می‌دهند. جذاب‌ترین تفسیر قطعاً متعلق به فاوست گوته است و روایت برمن از چند برهه‌ که فاوست از آن عبور می‌کند؛ رويابین، عاشق، توسعه‌گر. برمن بعد به سراغ داستایفسکی می‌رود و با یادداشت‌های زیرزمینی، نحوه‌ی مواجهه‌ی آدم‌های خیابان نوسکی را با مدرنیته شرح می‌دهد. جالب این‌که مدرنیته‌ای که پترزبورگ و مسکو شاهد آن است، همان مدرنیته‌ای نیست که نیویورک تجربه‌اش می‌کند. شاید همین باعث شود که آدمی به فکر برود و حسرت بخورد که چطور کسی مثل برمن در ایران نیست که آن شکل خاص از تجربه‌ی مدرنیته را در ایران بجورد و بررسی و ثبت کند. ما چطور به استقبال مدرنیته رفته‌ایم؟ برمن می‌گوید مدرن بودن یعنی تعلق داشتن به جهانی که در آن هر آ‌ن‌چه سخت و استوار است، دود می‌شود و به هوا می‌رود و مدرنیست بودن یعنی خو گرفتن با این گرداب، پیروی از ضرب‌آهنگ‌های آن و حرکت در بطن جریان‌های درونی آن به قصد یافتن آن صوری از واقعیت، زیبایی، آزادی و عدالت که چرخش توفنده و مهلک گرداب مجاز می‌شمارد.

[محمد شفیعی · Rating 4 out of 5]

از اولین کتابهایی که خوندم در زمانی که داشتم از فنی به انسانی تغییر فاز میدادم، خیلی سال پیش بود، باید دوباره بخونم تا بتونم نظر دقیق بدم، اون ستاره ها رو هم بر اساس حسی که بهش دارم دادم... بازم میخونمش اگر خدا بخواد تو همین سال

[منوچهر محور]

این کتاب سعی دارد از خلال بررسی ادبیات و شهرسازی، جهانِ مدرن را تبیین کند. تکنولوژی و انقلاب صنعتی در تغییر دنیا نقشی داشتند که به آن مدرنیزاسیون می‌گویند و نمود آن در شهرسازی دیده می‌شود. انقلاب فرانسه و عصر روشنگری هم بر فرهنگ اثری داشتند که مدرنیته نامیده شده و می‌توان نمودش را در هنر و ادبیات دید. کتاب ایده خوبی دارد که خوب هم اجرا شده است. گویا ادبیات و معماری شهری دو موضوع مورد علاقه مارشال برمن بودند و او آنها را در این کتاب پیوند می‌زند تا مطلب خود را ارائه دهد.
دو فصل اول را بابت دید تازه‌اش به دو اثر معروف، فاوست گوته و مانیفست کمونیست مارکس، پسندیدم. اما خواندن فصل سوم مربوط به شهر سن پترزبورگ لذت بیشتری داشت هرچند در بعضی بخش‌ها افول می‌کرد چون درباره کتاب‌هایی صحبت می‌کرد که برای من جالب نبودند. فصل مربوط به نیویورک جذابیت کمتری داشت. آیا پترزبورگ ذاتاً از نیویورک جذاب‌تر است؟ یا فصل آخر خیلی شخصی و آمریکایی یا حتی زیادی نیویورکی نوشته شده است و ما غیرنیویورکی‌ها کمتر می‌توانیم با آن همراه شویم؟ شاید باید بیشتر جهانی می‌بود و از بیرون به نیویورک نگاه می‌کرد مثل جوری که بیرون از زمان و مکان اصلی به پترزبورگ قرن نوزدهم نگاه می‌کند. شاید سال ۱۹۸۰ برای نوشتن درباره دهه‌های ۱۹۶۰ و ۷۰ نیویورک هنوز خیلی زود بود؛ هنوز دیدها به درستی شکل نگرفته بودند. آن ایده نقاشی دیواری آخر کتاب هم چنگی به دل ما نزد؛ تجربه ما از تهران نشان می‌دهد که نقاشی دیواری به تنهایی فضای شهری را چشم‌نواز نمی‌کند۰
در نهایت باید بگویم از خواندن این کتاب لذت بسیار بردم، فکرم را مشغول کرد و کتاب‌های زیادی به لیست خواندنم اضافه کرد؛ حتی وسوسه شدم به آن ۴ ستاره بدهم (مدتی است ستاره دادن را کنار گذاشته‌ام.) آدم دیگر از مطالعه چه می‌خواهد؟

و در پایان توجه می‌دهم به دو پانویس از آقای مترجم:
ص ۳۴۳ درباره شعر لنینگراد از ماندلشتایم:

هیچ یک از دو ترجمه فارسی در بیان اندوه نهفته در این شعر موفق نیستند... با این حال، همه کسانیکه در شهر خویش، به لطف انقلابی مردمی، برای چند روز یا چند ماه، مزه شیرین آزادی و برادری را چشیده‌اند و از قدم زدن در فضای روشن و آفتابی جامعه‌ای انسانی که در آن همگان واجد شأن و حیثیت انسانی و شهروندانی آزاد و برابرند، لذت برده‌اند، و سپس بازگشت ظلمت استبداد و بلاهت و رذالت و شکست همه امیدهای روشن را تجربه کرده‌اند و بار دیگر مطرود و منزوی شده‌اند، ژرفای این یأس و اندوه را در پس همین ترجمه ناموفق نیز حس خواهند کرد.

ص ۳۴۷ درباره فروپاشی شوروی:

چند سال پس از انتشار این کتاب [تجربه مدرنیته]، این «صدای تنها» نه فقط همه میادین مسکو و پترزبورگ بلکه همه میدانهای همه شهرهای «اردوگاه» و امپراطوری شوروی را پر کرد و طنین نیرومندش حتی در میدان مرکزی پکن نیز شنیده شد. فکر این نکته به صاحبان قدرت هیچ‌گاه خالی از فایده نیست؛ زیرا هم به نفع آنان و هم به نفع مردم است که هر چند سال یک بار در فضای آرام انتخاباتی آزاد «حساب پس دهند» تا در فضای پرجوش و خروش میادین پر از جمعیت و یا حتی در شرایطی از آن هم بدتر.

من چاپ پنجم مربوط به سال ۱۳۸۴ را خواندم.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found Berman's analysis to be lacking in the rigor necessary for this type of project to really turn out well. The culling of literary texts and historical moments for archetypes of the experience of modernity is already, in my mind, a dubious enterprise; to then use these archetypes to form normative judgments which mask themselves as historical description - St. Petersburg as a model of "the modernism of underdevelopment" - only strengthens my skepticism of Berman's conclusions.
I heard someone describe Berman's text as an enactment of the very modernity it is seeking to capture and move away from, and that seems accurate to me.
And while the writing is not bad, Berman's style and the general lack of focus in his argument led me to skim through a lot of it.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the Marx quote that this book is titled after and centred around:

All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and men at last are forced to face… the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.

As well as having a beautiful ring to it, this statement proves fruitful as a means of discussing what modernism and modernisation are in different historical, geographical, and disciplinary contexts, as well as the dialectic between them. Berman writes in a thoughtful, readable style, using a series of case studies to examine modernity. These include Goethe’s ‘Faust’, Baudelaire’s writings on the streets of Paris, and New York city planning in the 20th century. The eclectic mixture of sources is a joy in itself - poets, planners, and revolutionaries all crop up. My favourite section, the longest, is concerned with the political and literary history of St Petersburg. I was fascinated to learn about this strange city, built by order of Tsar Peter I and an illusionary outpost of modernism in pre-modern Russia. In fact, this section reads well with Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, which discusses contemporary manifestations of Russian unreality.

Although published in 1982, this book has important resonances today. Many of Berman’s insights still seem very apposite, for example:

The first point here is the immense power of the market in modern men’s inner lives: they look to the price list for answers to questions not merely economic but metaphysical - questions of what is worthwhile, what is honorable, even what is real. When Marx says that other values are ‘resolved into’ exchange value, his point is that bourgeois society does not efface old structures of value but subsumes them. Old modes of honor and dignity do not die; instead, they get incorporated into the market, take on price tags, gain new life as commodities. Thus, any imaginable mode of human contact becomes morally permissible the moment it becomes economically possible, becomes ‘valuable’; anything goes if it pays. This is what modern nihilism is all about.

There are plenty of other quote-worthy points to be found, however that was the most memorable to me. What I was left wondering, however, is what would constitute an end to modernism. Berman is dismissive of postmodernism as misinterpretation and seems to believe that, although it evolves continually, the essential character of modernism remains dominant. I suppose this is due to its paradoxical nature as constant change, everything solid melting into air. Perhaps the only end to modernism as Berman describes it would be an end to change, a freezing of the built environment, social relations, and economic activity into stasis. (cf The End of History and the Last Man? Which proved extremely premature.) I am not particularly comfortable with the term late modernity, though. What can come next - later modernity? Very late modernity? Post-modernity? The choice seems to depend on whether there is sufficient continuity between past and present. Clearly I need to read some more books on this, as the cross-disciplinary perspective taken by Berman is very thought-provoking. I was especially pleased that he supports a point I make in my PhD thesis - that the constant movement enabled by cars is a key characteristic of modernity. However, I argued that technology and behaviour were changing this and that the social significance of cars was evolving. After all, this book was written before I was born and a lot can alter in 34 years. If modernity is constant redevelopment and change, then I suppose it is still with us. If the ways that we think about it in politics and literature have also changed (as is undoubtedly the case), is that a sign of some new modernity? Like I said, evidently more reading is needed.

[Armin ard · Rating 5 out of 5]

این کتاب اولین مواجهه ی روشمند من با مارکسیسم بود
هنوز ضربه ی عمیقی که ازش خوردم رو یادم نمیره..
به معنی واقعی معرکه ست

[Sepehr Omidvaar · Rating 5 out of 5]

یکی از بهترین کتاب‌هایی است که خواندم. درس‌های زیادی ازش گرفتم و بهم کمک فراوانی کرد تا برخی از آثار مهم جهان ادبیات را هم بهتر بشناسم و بفهمم و هم در آینده سراغشان بروم.

[Matthew Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most endearing things about this book is its hugely ambitious scope and range, sampling from all kinds of artistic, literary, and political movements as well as theories of urban life and architecture throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It feels like a relic in its own right, since so much scholarly writing now is forced by academic imperatives to constrain itself to some subfield of an already hyper-specific discipline.

It’s a shame, because this kind of thing is fun as hell to read even when you aren’t totally on board—there was plenty I found unconvincing, especially aspects of his ‘reinterpretation’ of Marx, but those still never felt like a demerit to the project as a whole. The St. Petersburg section—the longest in the book—was a high point and would be worth reading on its own.

The book’s central argument about modernism and modernization isn’t mind blowing in and of itself, but the way it’s used as the connective tissue between so many figures and places and historical moments that don’t seem at first glance to belong together in the same book is consistently exciting.

[Hamid · Rating 2 out of 5]

کتاب تجربه مدرنیته را در تابستان ۱۴۰۴، با دوستانم در گروه کتابخوانی معماران منظر، خواندم.
کتابی سخت خوان، با ترجمه سخت که شاید اگر به تنهایی آن را شروع به خواندن کرده بودم، هیچگاه تمام نمی‌شد و نیمه کاره رها می‌شد.
به نظرم کل حرف کتاب را می‌شد در یک سوم این صفحات هم زد و نیاز به این مثال و توضیح و اشاره به ادبیات روس و آمریکا و فرانسه نبود.
بالاخره خواندن کتاب ۵۳۰ صفحه‌ای هم لذتی دارد که در خواندن کتاب های کوتاه نبست!
به نظرم از سال ۱۹۸۰ تاکنون که ۲۰۲۵ هستیم و ۴۵ سال گذشته است، خیلی حرف‌های جدیدتری می‌توانست به این کتاب اضافه شود.

[Burcu]

Let me tell you this much, it gets even better the second time around. I read this years ago as I was still trying to figure out where my thesis was going, it provided some valuable paths for research. Now that all that is past and then some, it provided me a lot of insight that becomes even more meaningful with life experience and in our current times.

[zeyno · Rating 5 out of 5]

modernizmi, sürekli değişen bir dünyada kendimizi evimizde hissetmek için yapılan bir mücadele olarak düşündüğümüzde, modernizmin hiçbir tarzının asla tanımalayıcı olamayacağını görürüz. kurduklarımız ve başardıklarımız arasında en yaratıcı olanları bile, eğer hayat devam edecekse, bizim ya da çocuklarımızın onlardan kaçmayı ya da dönüştürmeyi isteyeceğimiz hapishanelere ya da kabirlere dönecektir. / 12

iletişim / 16

saint-preux, metropoldeki hayata ilişkin deneyimini şöyle anlatır: 'her daim çarpışıp duran gruplar ve hizipler, durmaksızın ortaya çıkıveren, yenilenen önyargılar ve çatışan kanaatler... herkes sürekli kendisiyle çelişkide,' ve 'her şey saçma ama hiçbir şey çarpıcı değil, çünkü herkes her şeyi kanıksamış.' öyle bir dünya ki bu 'iyi, kötü, güzel, çirkin, hakikat, erdem sadece yerel ve sınırlı olarak varoluyor.' ... 'gözlerimin önünden geçip duran böylesine çok sayıda nesne başımı döndürüyor. beni etkileyen tüm bu şeyler arasında yüreğimi saran bir tek şey bile yok. yine de hepsi birden hislerimi sarsıyor; öyle ki ne olduğumu, neye ait olduğumu unutuyorum.' / 31

marx, nietzsche / 38

gretchen, faust / 83

gretchen'in ardından gelenler meseleyi kavrayacaklardır: gretchen kalmış ve ölmüştü; onlarsa gidecek ve yaşayacaklardır. gretchen'in zamanından bizimkine iki yüzyıl içinde binlerce 'küçük dünya' boşalmış, içi oyuk kabuklara dönüşmüş, buralardaki genç insanlarsa düşünme, sevme ve büyüme özgürlüğü peşinde büyük şehirlere, açık sınırlara, yeni uluslara doğru yola koyulacaklardır gretchen'in küçük dünya tarafından yıkımı, ironik bir biçimde, bizzat küçük dünyanın yıkımında hayati bir evredir. çocuklarıyla birlikte gelişmeyen veya gelişmek istemeyen kapalı kasaba bir hayalet kasaba halini alacak, son gülen ise onun kurbanlarının hayaletleri olacaktır. / 90

milyonlarca insan, megalomanyakça tasarlanan, vahşice ve duyarsızca icra edilen ve sonuçta yöneticilerin servet ve iktidarını arttırmaktan başka işe yaramayan, sonu felaketle bitmiş gelişim projelerine kurban edildi. üçüncü dünyanın sahte faustları, ancak bir kuşağın ömrünü kaplayan bir zaman dilimi içinde ilerlemenin imaj ve sembollerini manipule etmekte dikkate değer bir beceri kazandılar. ... ama doğurdukları gerçek sefalet ve tahribatı telafi edecek gerçek bir ilerleme sağlamakta gözle görülür bir biçimde beceriksizdiler. zaman zaman şu veya bu halk, tepesindeki sahte geliştiriciyi devirmeyi başarabiliyor, ... eğer pek şansları yoksa, kısa süren devrimci eylem anları hiçbir yere götürmeyen yeni acılar yaratır sonunda. / 113

dünyanın en gelişmiş bölgelerinde bile tüm bireyler, gruplar ve topluluklar sürekli olarak kendilerini yeniden inşaya zorlarnıyorlar; bir an durdular mı, ne olursa olsunlar, süpürülüp atılırlar. faust'un şeytanla yaptığı anlaşmanın en önemli maddesi -bir an olsun durup 'verweile doch, du bist so schön' dediğinde yokolacağı şartı- her gün milyonların hayatında acı sonu yaratıyor. / 114

norman o. brown'un ölüme karşı yaşam'ı (life against death, 1958) faustçu gelişme idealinin çarpıcı bir eleştirisini sunuyordu: 'insanın tarih içinderi faustvari huzursuzluğu gösteriyor ki, insanlar bilinçli arzularının tatmin edilmesiyle tatmin olmazlar.' brown, radikal biçimde yorumlanan psikanalitik düşüncenin 'bitmek bilmez 'ilerleme' karabasanından ve bitmek bilmez faust huzursuzluğundan bir çıkış yolu, insan nevrozundan bir çıkış yolu, tarihten bir çıkış yolu' önereceğini umuyordu. brown faust'u esas olarak tarihsel eylem ve endişenin bir simgesi olarak görüyordu. 'faustvari insan tarih yapan insandır.' ama, cinsel ve psişik basıtırma bir şekilde altedilebilirse -brown'un umudu buydu- o zaman 'insan tarih yapmak yerine yaşamaya hazır olabilir.' o zaman 'faustvari insanın huzursuz kariyeri son bulacaktır, çünkü tatmin olacak ve verweile doch, du bist so schön diyebilecektir.' / 115

modern egemen sınıfa gerçekten korku salan ve onun kendi imgesinde yarattığı dünyauı gerçekten tehdit eden tek bir hayalet var ki bu, geleneksel elitlerin (ve dolayısıyla geleneksel kitlelerin) hep özleyip durdukları şey: kalıcı, katı istikrar. bu dünyada istikrarın tek anlamı, antropi ve yavaş yavaş ölmek. ilerleme ve büyüme hissimiz ise yaşadığımızı bilemenin tek yolu. toplumumuzun çözülmekte olduğunu söylemek, onun canlı kanlı olduğunu söylemekten başka bir şey değil aslında.
... hangi sınıftan olursa olsun, insanların modern toplumda varlıklarını sürdürebilmeleri için kişiliklerin de bu toplumun akışkan ve açık biçimine girmesi gerekiyor. modern insanlar değişimi arzulamayı öğrenmek, kişisel ve toplumsal hayatlarında değişikliğe açık olmaktan öte, onu pozitif anlamda istemek, aktif olarak peşinde koşmak ve ona uymak zorundalar. gerçek ya da fantazileşmiş bir geçmişin 'yerleşik, donuk ilişkileri'ne nostaljik göz yaşları dökmek yerine, hareketlilikten haz duymayı, yenilenme peşinde koşmayı; yaşam koşulları ve diğer insanlarla ilişkilerinde ileriye, gelecekteki gelişmelere bakmayı öğrenmek zorundalar.

kapitalizmin sorunu, her şeyde olduğu gibi burada da, yarattığı insani olanakları yoketmesindedir. herkesin kendini geliştirmesini teşvik eder, hatta bunu zorlar. ama insanlar ancak sınırlı ve çarpıtılmış şekillerde gelişebilirler. piyasanın kullanabileceği özellik, güdü ve yetenekler (çoğu zaman yeterince olgunlaşmaya fırsat bulamadan) gelişmeye itelenir ve geride hiçbir şey kalmayana değin sıkılır, suyu çıkarılır. bunun dışında, içimizde pazarlanması mümkün olmayan ne varsa ya zorbaca bastırılır, ya kullanılmamaktan körelir ya da hayata geçecek fırsatı bile bulamaz. / 136 - 137 / özgünlüğün politikası 145-159

18. yüzyılda, hakikat anlamında çıplaklık ve kendini keşfetme anlamında soyunma metaforları, yeni bir politik tını kazanır. montesquieu’nün pers mektupları’nda iranlı kadınların giymeye zorlandığı peçeler, geleneksel toplumsal hiyerarşilerin insanlara uyguladığı baskıyı simgeler. paris sokaklarında peçelerin olmayışı ise, tam tersine, yeni tür bir toplumu, ‘özgürlük ve eşitliğin hüküm sürdüğü’ bir toplumu simgeler; bundan dolayı ‘her şey açıkça dile gelir, her şey görünür, her şey duyulur. yürek kendini yüz gibi açıklıkla gösterir.’ rousseau ise sanat ve bilim üzerine söylevler’inde çağını gizleyen ‘kibarlığın birörnek ve aldatıcı peçesi’ni eleştirir ve der ki ‘iyi insan çırılçıplak boğuşmayı seven bir atlettir; güçlerinin kullanımını engelleyen tüm o iğrenç süslerden nefret eder.’ / 153

Çıplaklık diyalektiğine Marx’ınki kadar güzel olmayan, ama en az onun kadar olası başka sonlar da tahayyül etmek mümkündür. Modem insanlar Rousseau tarzı koşullanmamış bir benliğin yalnızlık içindeki pathos ve görkemini ya da Burke tarzı politik maskenin kollektif ve birörnek rahatlığını, Marx’ın bu ikisini en iyi şekilde kaynaştırma çabasına tercih edebilirler pekala. Hatta, diğer insanlarla olan bağlarını benliğin bütünlüğüne yöneltilmiş bir tehdit olarak görüp onlardan ürken ve kaçınan türden bir bireycilik veya benliği toplumsal rolü içinde eritmeyi amaçlayan türden bir kollektivizm, entelektüel ve duygusal açıdan daha kolay olduğu için Marksçı sentezden daha cazip görünebilir. / 154-155

Nihilizm sorunu Marx’m, bir sonraki satırında yine ortaya çıkar: “Burjuvazi her türlü kişisel onur ve saygınlığı değişim değeri içinde eritti; insanların uğruna savaştığı tüm özgürlüklerin yerine ilkesiz bir tek özgürlüğü koydu: serbest ticaret.” Burada ilk önemli nokta piyasanın modern insanların iç yaşamları üzerindeki müthiş etkisidir: insanlar sadece ekonomik soruların değil, metafizik soruların -neyin değerli, neyin onurlu, hatta neyin gerçek olduğu gibi soruların- yanıtlarını bulmak için de fiyat listesine bakmaktadırlar. Marx’ın diğer değerlerin değişim değeri içinde “çözündüğünü” söylerken vurguladığı nokta, burjuva toplumunun eski değer yapılarını silmeyip massetmiş olduğudur. Eski tarz onur ve saygınlık ölmemiş; bilakis piyasayla bütünleşmiş, üstlerine fiyat etiketleri konmuş, emtia niteliğiyle yeni bir yaşama kavuşmuşlardır. Bu yüzden, akla gelebilecek her türden insan davranışı ekonomik açıdan mümkün, “değerli” olduğu andan itibaren ahlaki açıdan kabul edilebilir hale gelir; kazanç sağladıktan sonra her şey uyar. Modern nihilizm budur işte. Dostoyevski, Nietzsche ve 20. yüzyıldaki ardılları bu derdin kaynağını bilimde, rasyonalizmde, Tanrı’nın ölümünde göreceklerdir. Marx ise bunun temelinin çok daha somut ve dünyevi olduğunu söyler: burjuva ekonomik düzeninin -insani değerimizi piyasa fiyatımıza, ne eksik ne fazla bu fiyata eşit gören ve bizleri, fiyatımızı olabildiğince yükseltmek için genişlemeye zorlayan düzenin- sıradan gündelik işleyişinin bir parçasıdır bu. / 156 - 157

ancak iş bulabildikleri müddetçe yaşarlar ve ... ancak emekleri sermayeyi arttırdığı müddetçe iş bulabilirler. Kendilerini parça parça satmak zorunda olan bu işçiler diğer her ticari mal gibi birer metadırlar dolayısıyla rekabetin iniş çıkışlarına, piyasanın dalgalanmalarına tabidirler. (479)
Bu yüzden, ancak sermayesi olan birileri onlara para verdiği sürece kitap yazabilir, resim yapabilir, fizik veya tarih yasalarını keşfedebilir, hayatlarını idame ettirebilirler. Ama burjuva toplumun baskıları o düzeydedir ki karşılığını vermeden, yani eserleriyle şu veya bu şekilde “sermayeyi arttırmadan” kimse onlara para vermez. Onların beyinlerim sömürerek kâr sağlamaya istekli bir işverene “kendilerini parça parça satmak” zorundadırlar. Kendilerini en kârlı şekilde arz edebilmek için uğraşıp didinmeleri gerekir; sırf çalışmalarını sürdürebilmek için satın alınma imtiyazı uğruna (çoğu kez amansız ve acımasızca) rekabet etmek zorundadırlar. Eser tamamlandığında onlar da, diğer tüm işçiler gibi kendi emeklerinin ürününden koparılmış olurlar. / 164

Baudelaire’e göre alınması gereken ders şudur: Modern hayatın ayırdedici ve otantik bir güzelliği olmasına karşın, bu onun doğasından kaynaklanan sefalet ve kaygı duygusundan, modern insanın ödemesi gereken faturadan ayrılamaz.

Ortaya koyduğu yeni zevkler ölçüsünde insanlığı zarifleştiren sınırsız ilerlemenin en zalim ve en saf işkence olup olamayacağı sorusunu bir yana bırakıyorum; kendi kendini yadsıyarak ilerleyişinin durmaksızın yenilenen bir intihar biçimi olup olmadığı sorusunu hummalı ilahi mantık çemberine hapsedilmiş, kendini bizzat kendi kuyruğuyla sokan bir akrep olup olmaya cağı sorusunu da- ilerleme, bizzat kendi ebedi kederi ne dönüşen o ebedi arzu! / 195

Benjamin’in Paris yazıları Greta Garbo’nun Ninotchka'sına şaşırtıcı bir benzerlik gösteren dramatik bir performans sergilemektedir. Yüreği ve duyarlığı, karşı konulmaz bir şekilde şehrin parlak ışıklarına, güzel kadınlarına, moda dünyasına, lükse, parıltılı yüzeylerin ve ışıltılı sahnelerin akışına çeker onu; Marksist vicdanıysa onu bu tutkudan alıkoyar, tüm bu parıltılı dünyanın çökmüş, boş, içeriksiz, ruhsuz, proletaryayı ezici, tarih tarafından mahkum edilmiş olduğunu söyler durur ona. Paris tutkusundan korunabilmek için ardarda ideolojik açıklamalar sıralar- ama, dönüp bulvara ya da şehrin ışıklarına son bir kez daha bakmadan edemez; kurtarılmak istemektedir, ama henüz değil. / 201

Haussmann, Ortaçağdan kalma eski teneke mahalleleri yıkarken, farkında olmadan geleneksel kent yoksullannın içe dönük ve dışarıya sımsıkı kapalı dünyasını da yıkmıştır. En yoksul mahallelerin ortasında kocaman delikler açan bulvarlar yoksulların bu deliklerden geçip kendi yıkık dökük mahallelerinden çıkmasını, ilk kez şehrin ve hayatın geri kalan kısmının neye benzediğini keşfetmelerini sağlar. Ve görürken görülürler de: görüntü, tezahür iki yönlüdür. Büyük mekânların ortasında, parlak ışıkların altında görmezden gelmek mümkün değildir. Işıltı, yıkıntıları aydınlatır ve bu parlak ışıkların bedelini ödeyen insanların karanlık hayatlarını ortaya serer.* Balzac bu eski mahalleleri Afrika’nın en karanlık cangılına benzetir, Eugène Sue ise “Paris’in Esrarları” diyordu onlara. Haussmann’m bulvarları egzotik olanı yakma getirmektedir; bir zamanlar bir esrar olan sefalet artık bir olgudur.
Modern şehirdeki sınıf bölünmelerinin ortaya çıkması modern benlik içinde yeni bölünmeler doğurur. Aşıklar ansızın yanı başlarında biten bu partal insanları nasıl karşılayacaklardır? Bu noktada modern aşk masumiyetini yitirir. Yoksulların varlığı şehrin ışıltısının üzerine acımasız bir gölge düşürür. Büyülü biçimde aşkı esinleyen dekor artık bir ters büyü yapmakta, aşıkları kendi romantik sınırlarından çekip daha geniş ve daha az özgür ağların içine yerleştirmektedir. Bu yeni ışıkta kişisel mutluluk bir sınıf imtiyazı gibi görünür. Bulvar politik davranmaya zorlar onlan. / 209 - 210

Baudelaire, adamın da kadının da tepkilerinin, liberal duyarlılıkla gerici acımasızlığın, aynı derecede çıkmaz olduğunu bilmektedir. Bir yanda, yoksulları rahat insanlar ailesine katmanın bir yolu yoktur; öte yanda, onlan uzun süre göz önünden uzaklaştıracak bir baskı biçimi de mevcut değildir - daima geri döneceklerdir. Ancak modern toplumun kökten bir yeniden inşası bulvarın aydınlığa çıkarttığı yaralan -toplumsal olduğu kadar kişisel yaralan- iyi edebilir. Ama, ne var ki köklü çözüm de çoğu kez yıkımdan pek farklı olmuyor: Bulvarlan yıkmak, parlak ışıklan söndürmek, insanları oradan oraya gönderip yeniden yerleştirmek, modem şehrin var ettiği güzellik ve coşku kaynaklarını öldürmek. Baudelaire’in bir zamanlar umduğunu bizler de umabiliriz, şehir ışıkları gibi güzellik ve coşkunun herkesçe paylaşıldığı bir geleceği. Ama bu umudumuz, Baudelaire’in şehrinin atmosferini dolduran o ironik üzüntüden arınamaz bir türlü. / 211 - 212

Meta ekonomisinin önde gelen özelliklerinden biri, Marx’in açıkladığına göre, piyasa değerlerinin sonsuz başkalaşımıdır. Bu ekonomide kazanç sağladıktan sonra her şey uyar ve hiçbir insanî olanak kitaplardan silinmez; kültür bir gün tekrar satılabilir umuduyla her şeyin stokta tutulduğu devasa bir depo halini alır. / 220 - 221

Bir aydınlanma anında, modern şehri oluşturan yalnızlıklar yığını yeni bir ilişkiyle bir araya gelerek bir halk oluşturur. “Sokaklar halka aittir”: şehrin unsurlarına el koyar ve onu kendilerinin kılarlar. Kısa bir süre için, yalnız ve tek tek ani hareketlerin modernizminin yerini kitle hareketinin düzenli modernizmi alır. / 222

Mitolojik “vahşi batı”nın önemli bir özelliği de sınıfsızlığıdır. İki adam, bireysel olarak, bir boşluk içinde karşı karşıya gelirler. Vahşi batı mitolojisini güçlü ve çekici kılan medeniyet öncesi “doğa insanlar”ı demokrasisi hayalidir. / 293

Azgelişmişliğin modernizmi modernliğin düşlem ve hayallerine dayanmaya, seraplar ve hayaletlerle yakınlık kurarak, savaşarak beslenmeye zorlanıyor. Kaynaklandığı hayat biçimi ve sadık kalabilmek için sorunlu, tuhaf, tutarsız olmak zorunda kalıyor. Kolayca tarih yapamadığı için kendi içine kapanıp kendine eziyet ediyor - ya da tarihin tüm yükünü üstlenmek için ölçüsüz girişimlere atılıyor. Çılgına dönmüşçesine kendini aşağılıyor ve ancak öz-ironi yetisiyle ayakta kalabiliyor. Ama bu modernizmin içinden doğup büyüdüğü tuhaf gerçeklik ve altında yaşayıp hareket ettiği tahammül edilmez baskılar -toplumsal ve politik olduğu kadar ruhsal baskılar- bu dünyada yerini bulmuş olan Batı modernizminin hiç ulaşamadığı gözükara bir ışıltıyla dolduruyor onu. / 311

“Kamuyu severdi o, halkı değil”: Dostoyevski, “insanlığa” duyulan sevginin, gerçek insanlara duyulan nefretle birlikte gitmesinin modern politikanın ölümcül tersliklerinden biri olduğu konusunda defalarca uyarmıştı bizi. / 404

Birinci Dünya Savaşı’nın ardından gelen bolluk döneminde çağdaşlığın önde gelen simgesi yeşil ışıktı. İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrası olağanüstü bolluğun temel simgesi, federal ekspresyol sistemiydi. Sürücüler, bu ekspresyol üzerinde bir kıyıdan bir kıyıya hiçbir ışığa rastlamadan gidebilirdi. Ama 1970’lerin çağdaş toplumları, hız sının ve dur işaretinin gölgesi altında yaşamak durumundaydı. Toplumsal hareketliliğin azaldığı bu yeni dönemde modern insanlar gitmek istedikleri yön ve uzaklık konusunda derin derin düşünmek, onlan bir yerlere götürebilecek araçların peşine düşmek zorundaydı. / 439

Söylediğim şuydu: Modern olmak, kişisel ve toplumsal yaşamı bir girdap deneyimi gibi yaşamak; insanın kendini ve dünyasını sürekli bir çözülüş, yenilenme, sıkıntı, kaygı, belirsizlik ve çelişki içinde bulması demektir. Kısaca, katı olan her şeyin ergiyip havaya karıştığı bir evrenin parçalan olmak... Öte yandan bir modernist olmak, insanın kendini bu girdabın içinde bile bir şekilde evinde hissetmeyi başarması, bu girdabın ritimlerini özümsemesi; bu girdabın akıntılan arasında, mahvedici akışının ortaya çıkmasına izin verdiği gerçeklik, güzellik, özgürlük ve adalet biçimleri arayışında olmak demektir. / 460