Modernism in the Streets. Marshall Berman
in affirming other people’s lives, to turn against and deny and negate our own. It is only too typically modern that the New Left of the 1960s should gain at once a three-dimensional vision of so many other kinds of people—blacks, Indians, the Third World, women, homosexuals, schizophrenics, and on and on—and a one-dimensional view of themselves. This is only the latest punchline in a sick joke that gives some of the flavor of modern society’s sickness, and yet, ironically, manages to express some of its health as well.
To understand the modern predicament, it might be useful to look at Rousseau, for he was the first truly modern radical. Living in the midst of the first great wave of modernization, he was the first radical thinker to address himself directly to the problems springing up in its wake. He was the first to get the jokes that modern men were playing on themselves. Unfortunately, some of Rousseau’s radical impulses led him up a blind alley, one which prefigures and may illuminate the impasse in which the New Left is stuck today. But Rousseau also found in himself the insight and imagination to see beyond his impasse, and I believe that those of us on the Left may find in him a way to see through—and, hopefully, to break through—our own.
II
Among the many notes in Rousseau’s writings that strike close to home, one of the most arresting is the uninhibited rage and violence with which he attacks the modern city, its culture and its people. A typical remark: “In this age of calculators, it’s remarkable that no one should see that France would be far more powerful if Paris were annihilated.” Burn it down! Rousseau’s tone here is far more typical of the 1960s than of the 1760s. (Typical of the 1960s too, that he should be shocked and perplexed when some Parisians treat him as a menace.) But he insists that his feelings about Paris are nothing personal; he aims his malevolence at the modern city per se: “A big city, full of scheming, idle people, without religion or principle, whose imagination, depraved by sloth, inactivity, the love of pleasure, and great needs, engenders only monsters and inspires only crimes.” Thus, “Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-heaps; they should be scattered over the earth which they have to cultivate. The more they gather together, the more they corrupt themselves.” We can see here the birth of a distinctively modern apocalyptic language and one-dimensional vision—a language which we survivors of the 1960s have heard, and a vision we have seen, all too well. This language and vision borrow the rhetoric and imagery of Jewish, early Christian, and medieval apocalypse, raging against the Great Whore of Babylon (an image of which the Black Panthers and their white followers are particularly fond), hoping for its destruction. But the perspective now is secular and post-Christian: These radicals yearn not for a transcendental, purely spiritual redemption, but for a kingdom that will be immanent, material, in and of this world.
In fact, Rousseau’s one-dimensional view of the city was only a small part of a much larger one-dimensional picture. He was well aware that, at the very moment he was condemning the “great cities,” they were just emerging as the centers of energy in a vast social, political, and cultural evolutionary process—a process of development which is still going on today. In condemning them, Rousseau was condemning the esprit générale of modern society and the historical movement that was bringing this society into being.
We can find somewhere in Rousseau’s work just about every objection to modern society that anyone has thought of, left, right or center, in the last two hundred years: It is too free, it is not free enough; men are too “leveled,” they are too unequal; people cannot get close to each other, they are thrown into intense and indecent intimacy. But Rousseau’s most concrete account of his confrontation with modern society is in his romantic and political novel, The New Eloise, in which Saint-Preux, the young, sensitive, intellectual hero, who is stifled by the rigid class prejudices and emotional deadness of his native petit-bourgeois provincial society, comes to Paris, in search of a place to which he and his love, Julie, can flee, a social structure into which individualistic and romantic people can be integrated, can build and live a life. Rousseau’s treatment of the trip is perhaps the first modern instance of what has since become an archetypical modern theme, both in art and in life: The Young Man from the Provinces Comes to the City. As Lionel Trilling points out, Rousseau himself—“a shiftless boy from Geneva, a starveling and a lackey, who becomes the admiration of the French aristocracy, and is permitted by Europe to manipulate its assumptions in every department of life”—is “the father of all Young Men from the Provinces, including the one from Corsica.”3 Confrontation with the great city, exposure of the self to its promises and perils, is an ultimate test of who a person is, of all that he or she can be.
Saint-Preux is immediately thrilled by the energy and vitality of Paris, the “great spectacles,” the “enormous diversity of things,” the “many attractions which offer so many charms to the newcomer.” The most striking thing about life here is its fluidity. He feels himself “thrown into a torrent” that overruns all social barriers and generates an unprecedented social mobility. Everyone is approachable and accessible; thought and speech in this city lead to action; there is a seemingly infinite range of opportunity. “Nothing is shocking, for everyone is accustomed to everything.” No society has ever been more “full of original men,” because none has ever opened up so much social space for individuality to develop.
Why should anyone want to burn down a place like this, in which all human potentialities can be fulfilled? This potentiality itself turns out to be the city’s greatest pitfall. In an age when individuality has become freer and more important than ever, Rousseau sees nothing more precious, more valuable, than the wholehearted commitment of one individual to another. Personal commitment, for him, is what gives romantic love a moral dignity. Indeed, by virtue of its power to generate commitment, romantic love acquires a political dignity as well: The romantic couple is the primary community, the nucleus of the social contract. Early in The New Eloise, after the young lovers have secretly slept together and pledged themselves to one another, Julie is racked with guilt; she considers rejecting the man she loves and marrying instead the noble lord her father is trying to force on her. But Saint-Preux insists that her guilt is misplaced: Their love springs not from immorality, but from a new morality, in which fidelity becomes the highest virtue, a political as well as sexual issue. Lovers must be steadfastly, monogamously devoted to one another, in the same way, and for the same reasons, that the true citizen must be faithfully devoted to his community. Moreover, for lovers and citizens alike, fidelity will be valuable only if it is freely given, given out of “the soul of a free man,” given by a person who has the power to withhold it. For modern men and women, in the modern metropolis, at a time when a bourgeois economy and society is just coming to life—in other words, in a world of infinite options—fidelity takes on a unique, irreplaceable human value. Ironically, however, the same social conditions that make free personal commitment possible seem at the same time to make it impossible. This contradiction is what makes Saint-Preux and Rousseau feel that modernity has got to go.
“Everyone,” says Saint-Preux, “constantly places himself in contradiction with himself … and this opposition doesn’t bother anyone”—because self-contradiction is what makes this world go round. But indeed, if “nothing is shocking, because everyone is accustomed to everything,” doesn’t it follow that “everything is absurd”? Amid all these quick changes, what is worth hanging onto? If anything (or anyone) that is here today can be gone tomorrow, what standards can we legitimately use to decide what is right? For that matter, in the great city, do words like legitimate and right have any meaning at all? All the old moral touchstones seem to crumble in this new world. “Of all the things that strike me, none of them holds my heart, but the totality disturbs my heart, and dislocates my feelings, to the point that I forget what I am and whom I belong to.” The modern city enables the self to expand its activity enormously; but where is the self to find a center, a core that will hold its identity together? The endless parade of possibilities which modernity presents disturbs the heart, dislocates the feelings, and forces the individual to choose, to decide, every day, every night, not only where he or she is going to go, whom he or she is going to belong to, but what he or she is going to be.
Paradoxically, the enormous range of possibilities destroys the possibility of a stable, integrated, indissoluble “being” which the self can securely call its own.
When