Page 240 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

228 STUART HALL

The title of Berman’s book All That Is Solid Melts into Air—a quotation
from the Communist Manifesto—reminds us that Marx was one of
the earliest people to grasp the revolutionary connection between capitalism
and modernity. In the Manifesto, he spoke of the ‘constant revolutionizing
of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation’ which distinguished ‘the bourgeois epoch from
all earlier times’. ‘All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of
venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become
obsolete before they can ossify. All that is Solid Melts into Air.’
Indeed, as Berman points out, Marx considered the revolution of modern
industry and production the necessary precondition for that Promethean or
Romantic conception of the social individual which towers over his early
writings, with its prospect of the many-sided development of human
capacities. In this context, it was not the commodities which the
bourgeoisie created which impressed Marx, so much as ‘the processes, the
powers, the expressions of human life and energy; men (sic) working,
moving, cultivating, communicating, organizing and reorganizing nature
and themselves’ (Berman: 93). Of course, Marx also understood the one-
sided and distorted character of the modernity and type of modern
individual produced by this development—how the forms of bourgeois
appropriation destroyed the human possibilities it created. But he did not,
on this count, refuse it. What he argued was that only socialism could
complete the revolution of modernity which capitalism had initiated. As
Berman puts it, he hoped ‘to heal the wounds of modernity through a fuller
and deeper modernity’.
Now here exactly is the rub about ‘New Times’ for the left. The
‘promise’ of modernity has become, at the end of the twentieth century,
considerably more ambiguous, its links with socialism and the left much
more tenuous. We have become more aware of the double-edged and
problematic character of modernity: what Theodore Adorno called the
‘negative dialectic’ of enlightenment. Of course, to be ‘modern’ has always
meant

to live a life of paradox and contradiction…alive to new possibilities
for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to
which so many modern adventures lead (e.g. the line from Nietzsche
and Wagner to the death camps), longing to create and hold onto
something real even as everything melts.
Some theorists argue—the German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas is one—
that this is too pessimistic a reading of ‘Enlightenment’ and that the project
of modernity is not yet completed. But it is difficult to deny that, at the end
of the twentieth century, the paradoxes of modernity seem even more
extreme. ‘Modernity’ has acquired a relentlessly uneven and contradictory