Marshall Berman (1940-2013) @ Verso / The Nation / Tablet

@ Verso website:

Political theorist, professor, and Verso author Marshall Berman passed away on 11 September 2013 at the age of 72.  

A life long New Yorker and analytical and humanist Marxist, Berman was heavily critical of the destructive effects of modernity on New York City's urban landscape.  Yet, he remained hopeful that the conditions of modernity created possibilities for creative everyday resistance.  

Berman famously articulated this optimism in his response to Perry Anderson's review of All That is Solid Melts into Air:

I think it’s an occupational hazard for intellectuals, regardless of their politics, to lose touch with the stuff and flow of everyday life. But this is a special problem for intellectuals on the Left, because we, among all political movements, take special pride in noticing people, respecting them, listening to their voices, caring about their needs, bringing them together, fighting for their freedom and happiness. (This is how we differ—or try to differ—from the world’s assorted ruling classes and their ideologues, who treat the people they rule as animals or machines or numbers or pieces on a chessboard, or who ignore their existence completely, or who dominate them all by playing them against each other, teaching them that they can be free and happy only at each other’s expense.) Intellectuals can make a special contribution to this ongoing project. If our years of study have taught us anything, we should be able to reach out further, to look and listen more closely, to see and feel beneath surfaces, to make comparisons over a wider range of space and time, to grasp hidden patterns and forces and connections, in order to show people who look and speak and think and feel differently from each other—who are oblivious to each other, or fearful of each other—that they have more in common than they think. We can contribute visions and ideas that will give people a shock of recognition, recognition of themselves and each other, that will bring their lives together. That is what we can do for solidarity and class-consciousness. But we can’t do it, we can’t generate ideas that will bind people’s lives together, if we lose contact with what those lives are like. Unless we know how to recognize people, as they look and feel and experience the world, we’ll never be able to help them recognize themselves or change the world. Reading Capital won’t help us if we don’t also know how to read the signs in the street.
 

Berman was also featured in New York: A Documentary Film by Ric Burns in a compelling segment that applied his thinking on modern destruction and creative possibility to hip hop culture and graffiti in the South Bronx:


Corey Robin, Berman's colleague at the CUNY Graduate Center, paid tribute to Berman by saying: 

Marshall was our Manhattan Socrates: not the arch dialectician but the philosopher in and of the street, not the aggressive asker of questions but the ambler in the boulevard, the man who seeks wisdom in the agora, in the conversation of Times Square, the walker in the city, the man who died among friends. 

Berman's family asks that contributions in his honor go to Dissent magazine, where he served as a long time contributor and editorial board member.

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Michael Sorkin @ The Nation website

Marshall Berman 1940–2013

For Marshall, the primal scene for self-development was always the city, and no one has been more loving or lucid in his depiction, criticism and celebration of urbanity.

In the summer of 1987, I went to Brazil for the first time to give a talk at a big conference in São Paulo. Although the local papers covered the event, their cultural pages were devoted to another—the book tour of Marshall Berman, there to discuss his masterpiece, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, published in 1982. I remember being amazed and full of admiration at all the ink being devoted to a literary event by the mass media. Wherever people were reading newspapers—in cafés, on buses, on the street—there was Marshall’s full-page face.

Marshall’s great subject, not only in that book but also throughout the nearly fifty years he devoted to writing and to teaching at City College, was the production of modern people and the contexts and conditions that offer them the powers and possibilities for finding and distinguishing their private and public destinies. For Marshall, the primal scene for this self-development was always the city, and no one has been more loving or lucid in his depiction, criticism and celebration of urbanity. The bright illumination where modernity dwells is not limited to the city’s sidewalks or subways, its girders or grids, but can encompass all the tools of consciousness with which cities are both constructed and understood. As an observer, theorist, critic, and lover, Marshall’s analytical ambit was indeedgrand, embracing with equal incisiveness, originality and nuance the Grand Concourse, Grand Central, the Grand Inquisitor and Grand Narratives.

After the conference in Brazil, a few of us decided to visit that Mecca of modernity, Brasĩlia. As we stood at the front desk waiting to deposit our passports in the hotel safe, we noticed that Marshall’s name preceded ours on the sign-in list. Sensing the ink was fresh, we turned and spotted him across the lobby and introduced ourselves. He was suffering one of modernity’s characteristic inconveniences: the airline had lost his luggage. Fortunately, Marshall was able to overcome the sartorial challenge of being without a change of clothes—if anyone would look apt in a bed sheet toga, it was Marshall, the Socrates of Hamilton Heights, the Manhattan neighborhood where he taught for so long—and he shuffled off to the next leg of his victory lap.

Several months ago, I couldn’t find my battered copy of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air and ordered another. What arrived was a more recent edition, and it had a new preface that evoked, to my delight, the Brazilian trip. Brasĩlia had been Marshall’s first stop, and he described the place as the antithesis of the kind of urban form and culture he held most dear. Marshall famously wrote about his transformative youthful discovery of the young Marx, conveying not simply the deep relevance of Marxian analysis for the city but its fundamental humanity and connection to an indispensably ethical happiness. He returned to a phrase of Marx’s that was also his own credo and goad: “The free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.” In Brasĩlia, a dogmatic idea of order—the brutalism of concrete, glass, and vast windswept spaces—obliterates the kinds of intimacy and diversity that truly conduce public engagement in a city. Marshall’s trip became a conversation with Brasĩlia and the architect of many of its buildings, Oscar Niemeyer, in which Marshall argued, as he did so lucidly for so long, for a dialogic, not a deterministic vision of urban form and life, for a city of expansive opportunities and encounters.

Last month I spent a day in Athens. Walking through the Plaka to a rooftop restaurant with a panoramic view of the Acropolis, I passed along a street lined on one side with al fresco diners and on the other with a public transit line. Beyond the tracks lay the remains of the agora. The section drawn through these three conditions—in both their cooperation and antagonism—was pure Marshall. Here were three visions of public interaction—ideal types of urban pleasure, mobility and governance—that represented 2,500 years of work on the project of giving shape to urbanity and to producing the habits of citizenship that give it life.

Whenever we visit such places, we’ll always have Marshall with us. We’ll sense how graffiti denouncing the interventions of the Troika in the contested politics of Greece would have sparked his fascination and solidarity. We’ll feel his delight when we hear the sounds of Hellenic hip-hop played in the street and long for him to trace its genealogical tributaries back to its source in the Bronx, where he was born and which always remained both his spiritual home and a barometer of the conditions of modern urban life. We’ll know how the slow ambling of crowds of people from all over the world would have sparked his joy in the collusion of difference that only cities can induce. We’ll wonder at how the rumbling train in its cutting might have sparked reflections on the ruinous trench dug through the Tremont neighborhood of his childhood to clear a path for a freeway. And we’ll thrill in the way the proximity of the agora—the true locus classicus of so much he held dear—would have quickened his heart, recalled conversations with his ancient contemporaries Plato and Aristotle. In his remarkable writing, his wonderful teaching and the sweet emanations of his great spirit, Marshall Berman led us all towards this dream of freedom for the city and ourselves.

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Todd Gitlin @ Tabletmag : Marshall Berman, Marxist Humanist Mensch

The cover of his 1999 essay collection, Adventures in Marxism, containing twenty years of his essays, depicted a cartoon of the full-bearded Marx, stubby arms flailing, one hand in a fist, the other, waving, in a mid-jamboree dance step like some sort of hybrid of hora andkazatzka. Change the face from Karl Marx’s to Marshall Berman’s (as bushy-bearded as big-craniumed as Karl’s, but warmer-eyed) and you’d have a logo for the collected works of Berman, bear-like sage of the Upper West Side, who was often found on the street wearing a T-shirt bearing the visage of Marx or Nietzsche, and who could explain to you with great flair why you were mistaken if you thought those two 19th-century guys were not a dynamic duo.

Characteristically, Marshall introduced those twenty years of essays on Marx with a story about his father, who made his living in various garment industry jobs, then wrote and sold ads at Women’s Wear Daily, which led him into a failed magazine start-up from which his partner took the money and ran. This story led to a riff on the brutality of cutthroat capitalism. The personal was political. From there, he hastened to Marx, but not Marx the prophet of surplus value and the expropriation of the expropriators; rather the Marx who was “part of a great cultural tradition, a comrade of modern masters like Keats, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence (readers are free to fill in their personal favorites) in his feeling for the suffering modern man on the rack.” Leave it to Marshall Berman to swing from the garment district (where the rack was literal) to Marx’sEconomic-Philosophical Essays of 1844 (where he rightly celebrates Marx’s “feeling for the individual”) in fewer pages than it would have taken Marx to amass factory inspector reports or to clear his throat going after Hegel hammer and tongs.

What Marshall will likely be most remembered for—and deservedly—was his visionary 1982 book All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. This was truly a revelation, an evocation and sometimes a prose-poem with footnotes. Here he embraced Marx as a prophet—guided not so much by Old Testament wrath as by the idea (written by Marx and his pal Friedrich Engels at a peak revolutionary moment) that what might just be heaving into sight would be “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” This Marx, to him, was “one of the first and greatest of modernists.” By modernism he meant “any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it.” But in All That Is Solid, despite the title beautifully lifted from The Communist Manifesto, Marshall was not so much heralding a visionary future as celebrating, and worrying about, the possibilities of the present. “To be modern,” he wrote, “is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom … 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.”

The saga of All That is Solid concerned a lot more than theory—it concerned taking seriously the whole onrush of modern life. It was, in a way, a self-help book to end all self-help books—a book that said that you’re not alone in knowing you need help to place yourself in a swarming, self-undermining, change-crazy world. He began with Goethe’s Faust, emphasizing the usually neglected Part II, where the eponymous hero-villain transmogrifies into a ruthless real-estate developer, a personification of “the tragedy of development” and an anticipation of Stalin, Le Corbusier, and the hometown urban wrecker Robert Moses, whose gash of a Cross Bronx Expressway sliced through the Berman family’s original neighborhood in the South Bronx. It was in his ability to move through levels that the book was a life-changer, for me and many others. He imagined an eight-mile-long mural that might, in some glowing future, be painted onto the walls of the Cross Bronx, He always knew that, even in a poisoned world there was still, and always, a same old story to be told, of “a fight for love and glory,” when In the closing chapters of All That Is Solid, he swept triumphantly into the present with tributes to Jane Jacobs, Spalding Gray, and graffiti artists without number or, often enough, public names. Later he welcomed Cyndi Lauper, Queen Latifah, and the Beastie Boys into his personal pantheon. He called Times Square a place where “Cubism is realism.” He proclaimed “the right to the city” and “the right to be part of the city spectacle.” He was a one-man jazz band.

Get your eyes down from the skyscrapers (whether of steel or of “theory”), he was always saying, and look down at the street, which is not only a place where the traffic passes but a place where the city, that great human invention, lives. For years, we would get together to talk about life, love, the Sixties, the endless post-Sixties, Dissent, and what was wrong with postmodernism, but often enough the first thing he wanted to talk about was a down-on-his-luck (or down-on-capitalism) cabbie he’d just met who needed some money quick for some worthy purpose—refusing, like his father, to believe that he might be getting hustled, like his father.

His first book was called The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society, in which the streets and thoughts of 18th-century French-speaking Europe were the incubators of “festivals of democracy” as imagined or anticipated by Montesquieu and Rousseau. “Whoever you are or want to be,” he wrote at the end of that book, paraphrasing Trotsky, “you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.” Sometimes his “authenticity” could be blunt, sentimental, and even, on rare occasions, unforgiving. He could be kinder to grandparents or great-grandparents than to parental types. In 1975, in a harsh, awkwardly “balanced” front-page New York Times Book Review, he accused Erik Erikson of acting in bad faith, hiding in a closet, by effacing his Jewish identity. He could be tough on other people’s sentimentality, and equally on snobbery: When Susan Sontag once told him she would have had a better life if she had been born into medieval Europe, where an intellectual could get proper respect, he reminded her that things were not then so great for women.

“Marxist humanism” was sometimes his label of choice, but he was not much into labels, feeling no qualms about recruiting his Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud into some discordance if not concordance. He wanted “a synthesis of the culture of the Fifties with that of the Sixties: a feeling for complexity, irony, and paradox, combined with a desire for breakthrough and ecstasy; a fusion of ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ and ‘We Want the World and We Want it Now.’” That was a lot to ask and no one could sustain these tensions beyond their breaking points.

He mellowed, ripened, and kept going to demonstrations. He was primed to know that modernity was no picnic, and so, with immense stamina, he was able to outlive personal tragedy (he lost his first son at age 5) and a Jobian sequence of ailments, to father and help raise two boys to manhood. In later work, as when he came to write On the Town, about Times Square, he mostly refused to let distaste for 21st-century Disneyfication drown him in nostalgia, though he could bend over backwards toward populist enthusiasm for any sign of insurgent life anywhere, however obscure. He liked to say that the great New York experience—in fact, the great achievement of New York art—was the street, which always remained busy with self-creation. He “hurled little streets upon the great,” as Yeats wrote of his beloved revolutionary Maud Gonne. When, in 1987, he lectured on All That Is Solid in Brazil, he made front pages when he attacked the country’s supermodernist architect and disciple of the street-hating Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer. But in a 1988 preface, he could even find understanding words for Niemeyer.

He died of an out-of-the-blue heart attack in one of his favorite schmoozing sites, the West Side’s Metro. Metro. He was a true metropolitan. All that was solid in his heart and mind refuses to melt into air.

Marshall Berman on The Communist Manifesto @ The Nation (1998)