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Concept
All That Is Solid Melts into Air
Summary
All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity is a book by Marshall Berman written between 1971 and 1981, and published in New York City in 1982. The book examines social and economic modernization and its conflicting relationship with modernism. The title of the book is taken from Samuel Moore's 1888 translation of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Berman uses Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust as a literary interpretation of modernization, through the processes of dreaming, loving and developing. In the second section he uses Marxist texts to analyze the self-destructive nature of modernization. In the third section French poetry (especially Charles Baudelaire) is used as model of modernist writing, followed by a selection of Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Andrei Bely, Nikolai Gogol, and Osip Mandelstam) in the fourth section. The book concludes with some notes on modernism in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s. New York City's subway map is said to have been designed in accordance with Berman's vision of modernity, presented in the book. Berman recalls: "It was a thrill when the man who had designed New York's marvelous Subway Map came up to me on Broadway, and said that all the time he was putting his map together, he had tried to keep my book in mind."
Marshall Berman begins this book by making a literary comparison between Goethe's Faust and the process and mode of Modernity claiming that "the whole movement of the work enacts the larger movement of Western society". In Berman's view, the three 'metamorphoses' which Faust passes through (the Dreamer, the Lover, and the Developer) express the journey of Modernity.
By starting "in an intellectual's lonely room, in an abstracted and isolated realm of thought; it ends in the midst of a far reaching realm of production and exchange, ruled by giant corporate bodies and complex organizations, which Faust's thought it helping to create, and which are enabling him to create more.
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