Week 6 - Marshall Berman 'All that is solid melt into Air'

The more I read of 'All that is solid melt into air' by Marshall Berman the more I think that this is more a diary, it is deeply personal to the author growing up and watching the world change around him. Berman took in everything around him and in his book Berman distinguishes between three key ideas:

Modernisation - being the constant changes that go off around us every day.

Modernity - the way in which such changes are experienced and lived through.

Modernism - the reflection and representation of these changes.

Berman wants to make modernists of his readers; he wants them to feel at home in the world for which they live in. For this very reason, he argues that it's crucial to understand contemporary modernism as the product of two earlier modern periods, represented by Goethe and Marx and many others.

He uses Marx, Dostoyevsky, Baudilare,Goethe, Bely etc. to try and show how the quality of being able to appreciate and respond to 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 examinations of those thinkers and their works, he places them in a different context with an intense, deep look of their work in order to develop and back up his own assertions of modern life.

Faust is the idea of going together cultural self-development and the real social movement towards economic movement to help bring about mans modern development. For a transformation to take place changes need to happen in both areas to make changes to the moral, social and physical world. Further in he goes even further to say that to create anything new he must let everything go. That for modern man to move forward everything already needs to be destroyed. I think this is a bit drastic, I mean to me as humans we build on what we already have and learn from our mistakes. If we destroyed everything we already have and rebuilt then there would be no record of mistakes and so man would repeat them again and again. Thats not developing thats going in a circle....