Is Paris Yearning? (Part 2)
Learning to Want.
In Part 1 I laid out my two aims with this series— 1) resume the debate between Anderson and Berman about the definition of modernity and in so doing 2) move their speculation in the 1980s around what “a genuine socialist culture” in the 21st century would look like, into the present. -db
Paris, France
This investigation begins with Karl Marx’s 1844 manuscripts. The young Marx is much more psychological and philosophical in these texts and, when combined with Rousseau and Montesquieu, leads Berman to conclude that at the heart of our modern life is our propensity to treat our talents and abilities as “nothing but competitive assets, to be invested prudently for a maximum return.”1
In his earliest works Marx is probing not just material conditions but the motivations and worldview it incites. In discussing alienation’s role in accumulating wealth he writes, “raising wages excites in the worker the capitalist’s mania to get rich, which he, however, can only satisfy by the sacrifice of his mind and body.”2 Therefore it is never enough for workers to just agitate for higher wages under capitalism, they have to overturn the whole thing. One must irrevocably change not just the means of production but the psychology of work itself. Without this fundamental change revolution can only be a race to be the new boss, and not the elimination of bosses all together. It’ll be almost 30 years until Marx proudly proclaims that Hegel had put dialectics “on its head”3 but he is still well on his way to “discover[ing] the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”4
Marx was always motivated by total human emancipation, but the older Marx’s work tends toward the scientific and rational analysis of labor, production, and the creation of value. It lacks the verve and unadulterated passion for individual human well-being that is evident in great philosopher’s earlier works. Marxist humanists held onto the young Marx’s dedication to psychological and emotional flourishing. This approach dates as far back as the Russian émigré Raya Dunayevskaya’s editing of the first English translations of the 1844 manuscripts. From her work it is easy to draw a web of collaboration to a diverse set of thinkers including the postcolonial scholar C.L.R. James, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, cultural theorist Stuart Hall, historian E.P. Thompson, the youngest member of the Frankfurt School Herbert Marcuse, and finally the Students for a Democratic Society of which Marshall Berman was apart. In his typical sixties flare, Berman simply called his chosen tradition, “Marxism with a soul.”5
Berman’s first book, The Politics of Authenticity, is considered a major contribution to the Marxist humanist discourse. In it he traces the Enlightenment origins of modern ways of life, specifically, individuals’ “search for authenticity,” which he considers to be “one of the most politically explosive of human impulses.”6 The Politics of Authenticity encompasses humans’ searching for meaning and identity amidst modernizing forces: the liberalizing of relationships and institutions, the urbanization of nations, and the dissolution of monarchies and the rise of democracies.
Berman writes, “The search for authenticity, nearly everywhere we find it in modern times, is bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are.”7 The eighteenth century marked the beginning of the end of Europe’s rigid social hierarchies with monarchs at the top and peasants at the bottom and instead promised (though never truly delivered) the opportunity to create one’s life from whole cloth. Instead of being born into the role you would play for the rest of your life, you had to choose. This elicited feelings of both excitement and terror from anyone that had the time to think about modernity’s consequences. “The idea of authenticity” concludes Berman, “articulated men’s deepest responses to the modern world and their most intense hopes for a new life in it.”8
“In order to bring the problem of authenticity into clear focus,” writes Berman in the introduction to The Politics of Authenticity,
…we should imagine a type of social experience in which authenticity is not a problem. In a closed, static society governed by fixed norms and traditions which are accepted by all its members, authenticity has no place in the vocabulary of human ideals. Here men are satisfied with the life options which their social system provides for them: … They experience themselves as pegs, and aspire only to fill the hole that fit them best.9
Berman is using authenticity as the Enlightenment scholars he’s studying used it: a synonym for being genuine. That is, an authentic person is someone who doesn’t put up pretenses and strives for greatness “through a direct, active engagement of their whole personalities.”10 The truly authentic person charts their own way via an internal moral compass. When this definition was just being forged basing one’s life on an externally imposed set of standards was not only passé, it would have likely been interpreted as a politically charged message; an implicit endorsement of the aristocracy and the old way of doing things. To understand yourself as an individual in the sense we understand it today, with the burden and freedom to choose one’s own life, was a radical, yet increasingly popular, stance that undermined hundreds of years of received wisdom.
To be concerned about the politics of authenticity then, was to discern whether your expectations and dreams match up with where the average person is likely to end up. And if you’re going to lead a political movement you had to speak to both material and humanist concerns. As a socialist or communist, what were you going to do to ensure that revolutionary struggle taps into the hearts and minds of the people as much as the pocketbook? If fighting for liberation doesn’t free your soul, why should anyone else follow you? Or, to quote Jewel, “And who will save your soul? / If you won't save your own?”
The humanist approach was all about balancing the individual’s relationship to changing circumstances (i.e. modernity), with the need to change circumstances in order to improve the individual’s chances at a better life. This comes through in their historical analysis. All political clashes over resources must be in service of creating opportunities for individuals’ happiness because, the humanists argued, losing sight of the human was the original sin of the Soviet Union.
As Berman describes it, the inability of French revolutionaries between 1848 and 1851 to establish a free republic amidst several royal restorations and finally Emperor Bonaparte meant that “for a whole century, the politics of authenticity virtually disappeared from Western imagination.”11 And so there was a split, with the Soviet Union and its defenders over-valuing collectivism just as Westerners assumed that individual autonomy and self-realization could only be delivered through reforming liberal capitalist democracies. It was this false choice between strict soviet collectivism and liberal individualism, Berman argued, that stunted leftist thought and contributed to the twin deadly tragedies of Stalinism and liberal reformism the latter of which was already metastasizing into neoliberalism. Under Stalin the comfort and liberty of the individual was thrown away in favor of the development of the industrial capacity of the state. Leader of the Red Army Leon Trotsky —whom Dunayevskaya worked with during his exile in Mexico—was one of the first and most high-profile detractors of Stalin’s Soviet Union calling it a “degenerated workers’ state.” Workers, Trotsky argued in his 1936 book The Revolution Betrayed, had seized control of government, but had lost it again to a small clique of powerful Stalinist apparatchiks who terrorized the union with secret police enforcing seemingly arbitrary industrial production goals.
Dunayevskaya, in a short essay published in News & Letters on September 30, 1958 commenting on colonial revolts in Egypt and China, gave one of the more succinct examples of Marxist humanist thought in action. She was skeptical of the Third World movement —particularly those led by Mao and Nasser— and their reliance on party order and militarism: “The idea that Mao and his bureaucrats will lead China to a truly new human order” she went on, “is sheer fantasy. … The only possible progress among a billion people in Asia and the awakened millions in Africa will come from the creative untapped energies of these billions. No military might will decide the question. The question that has been posed by the colonial revolutions is the creativity, the self-activity of the people themselves. Nothing on earth will prevent this solution from winning in the end.”12
The western left was in much worse shape. Not only were they losing power, they’d become obsessed with the very Third Worldist governments and cultures that the Marxist humanists thought were too rigid. The New Left, became obsessed with individual guilt and the search for a culture “outside” of Americana. After lengthy quotes from fellow marxist humanist Herbert Marcuse on the role of the oppressed masses’ “outside the democratic process” role in the revolution, Berman makes a dour assessment of his comrades: “one of our deepest drives has been to get outside of ourselves. So much of the paraphernalia of the sixties—from beads to psychedelic drugs to sentimental idealizations of the ‘Third World’— expresses an archetypical modern impulse: a desperate longing for any world, any culture, any life but our own.”13
Berman’s Politics of Authenticity traces the beginnings of this listless search for meaning outside the self to eighteenth century France. It is here that Montesquieu lambasted his fellow aristocrats in an epistolary novel titled The Persian Letters in 1721. The Persian Letters follows a pair of Persian aristocrats named Usbek, a sultan, and his noble traveling companion Rica. Together they tour France and marvel at the strange emerging culture they find. To be clear, Motesquieu’s Persia says much more about pre-Enlightenment France than the actually existing Safavid Empire of the time. Usbek and Rica are time-travelers of sorts, looking upon a country that is at the tail end of the Era of Enlightenment and (unbeknownst to both the author and the main character) primed for revolution. Usbek’s harem has been left in the charge of loyal eunuchs, all of which lament his absence. Their letters at the beginning of the story are full of love and longing. His role is not only to love them and rule them, but to give them purpose relative to his own. Without him, the gravity of the universe feels off.
Usbek seemingly has everything he could ever want and is confident in his status at the top of society. He has a harem that he describes as among his “most precious … worldly possessions.”14 He is curious but not so much as to be willing to take risks. Usbek, in short, typifies the French aristocrat most likely to read Montesquieu’s work and, according to Berman, Usbek’s “fate prefigures their own.”15 That fate, is to lose control of their country because their subjects put into action what the aristocracy has only debated. Usbek and Rica hesitate to even bother going back to prevent such a rebellion because they too have seen the (en)light(enmet). They start to question how authentic the love of their wives or the obedience of their subjects truly are. How can, for example, a woman who is the property of a man, ever truly show her love for him? Or as Rica puts it, “such calm possessions leaves us nothing to desire or fear.”16 This is the first hint of many that authenticity contains contradictions: to be truly recognized as genuine and authentic requires the possibility that such recognition can be freely revoked. Its only with the possibility of loss, that life’s gains are satisfying.
Usbek agrees, writing to Rica, “Everything smells of obedience and duty. Even the pleasures are sober, and the joys severe, and they are practically never relished except as manifestations of authority and subservience.”17 Here, Berman insists, Montesquieu has hit on a deeply unsettling (for aristocrats, anyway) idea: authoritarian societies aren’t fun for anyone, even the ones with all the authority. The people on the bottom have no material comforts and few freedoms, those at the top have every material comfort available to them, and can do almost whatever they like, but there is never any recognition of their existence as people, only their authority as monarchs. To be recognized for who you are requires other free people around you, and their freedom is predicated on the ability to revoke love and approval when they judge you no longer deserving of it.
Usbek and Rica lose their grip on the old ways, and with it goes their empire. In a sense they are allured by all the vices that are still commonly associated with The Big City: casual sex, drugs, fast-paced life, and the ability to flee into the anonymity of the crowd. In his letters back home to his wives he extolls the Parisians’ freedom to make their own lives and enter into relationships as equals. These ideas are eventually put into practice by the eunuchs and wives who recognize themselves as subjugated individuals who now demand their freedom. Usbek, so completely lost in his ennui that he barely bothers to convince them out of it.
Authenticity for Montesquieu, we learn in The Politics of Authenticity, is about stripping away contrivances and trappings of office and being who you always wanted to be. But first you have to learn to want to be anything. Before want, you just are— a peg looking for a hole that has been described to you in detail since birth. This carving out of a want where there was once infinite complacency is a terrifying kind of liberation. Almost a kind of societal trauma that can only be overcome by eliminating the world that taught you to want. In a way, this is replacing many wants with one big one— something to spend your life striving for, and never getting.
Berman is careful to show that anyone who thought deeply about authenticity and the autonomy it brings, would eventually come to the conclusion that these ideas are very disruptive. Not in the over-inflated marketing speak of Silicon Valley but actually disruptive of people’s material and emotional well-being. Montesquieu essentially draws a straight line from self-awareness to revolution. If you know in your heart of hearts that you’re more than a member of a harem, a worker in a factory, or a social media personality, you can start to question the institutions that keep those identities in place. You divorce your husband, unionize your workplace, and log off to show your oppressors that you are much more than your relationship to them. Berman concludes The Politics of Authenticity with a clarion call to every class of society: “If we look into ourselves, we will see how completely our society cuts us off from ourselves, from our deepest feelings and needs and sources of happiness. And ‘we’ here means everyone—the upper as well as the underclass, the sultans as well as the slaves. Everyone is being cheated by the system.”18
And so All that is Solid Melts into Air —the book we began this series with— picks up where The Politics of Authenticity left off, arguing that it is these “modernisms of the past [that] can give us back a sense of our modern roots.”19 In so doing, Berman reveals that our seemingly contemporary problems are actually quite old. He does this by setting up a dialectic with, on one side, Marxian historical materialism describing the conditions and consequences of the bourgeois’ will to power through unsentimental detachment from both tradition and the physical form of things. On the other is modernism— a consequence of everyone’s imperfect coping amidst the turmoil. As capitalists’ quest for accumulation melts everything that is solid into air, modernist interpretations give the liminal spaces and conditions form, texture, and a bit of sense.
I’ll conclude this part with Berman’s treatment of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen #26. (“If we had to nominate a first modernist, Baudelaire would surely be the man”20) It is this part of All that is Solid Melts into Air that earns the book a place in contemporary urban studies classes. It is also Berman at his most materialist, even as he is dissecting literature. Berman draws deep connections between the built form of capitalism (i.e. Haussmann’s Paris) and the psychology of the modern individual.
It goes like this: A young couple are on a date in one of Paris’s new and popular boulevard café’s when a family of beggars comes to the window and stares at the treats they’re about to enjoy. The man looks at the “family of eyes” and sees all the injustice of this new world and feels shame. His partner, however, only demands that the café’s manager be summoned to remove them. Berman: “Baudelaire knows that the man’s and the woman’s responses liberal sentimentality and reactionary ruthlessness, are equally futile. On one hand, there is no way to assimilate the poor into any family of the comfortable; on the other hand, there is no form of repression that can get rid of them for long---they’ll always be back.”21
The rebuilding of Paris is a common touchpoint for many scholars in disciplines as wide-ranging as philosophy to urban planning. It is at Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s hand that Paris’s medieval alley-ways and crooked streets are formalized, expanded, and rectified into radiating boulevards crisscrossed by macadam-paved streets. Lining the new thoroughfares are ritzy new buildings with, on their ground floor, the cafés and shops that the city is still so well known for. The radical changes serve financial, defensive, and cultural ends. The rebuilding of Paris was, to borrow David Harvey’s term, a useful spatial fix for plundered imperial gains. The wide boulevards also made it more difficult for angry citizens to block traffic with their barricades while making the projection of state power easier because more mounted officers could march abreast down the new modern streets. And finally, the cultural change meant that not only are the poor, the wealthy, and the burgeoning middle classes all seeing each other in the street, they are experimenting with new spatial configurations like the boulevard café’s invitation for conspicuous consumption. These interventions come together in a new kind of city that fosters a new kind of person: one that knows their identity is a story you tell yourself about yourself. That there are props and scenes throughout the city that can be used in telling this story and showing it to others.
The corpus of Marshall Berman’s work, which extends far beyond the two books I’ve chosen to focus on always came back to the individual and their potential to find solidarity and meaning in creative efforts. That is also a through line that goes all the way back to Dunayevskaya and can be found in just about everyone recognized as a Marxist humanist.
In the next section we’ll look at a very different kind of Paris. Paris Hilton. Our modern day Usbek.
Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society, New ed (London ; New York: Verso, 2009), 313.
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan. Great Books in Philosophy Series. Amherst,N.Y: Prometheus Books, 1988, 23.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Capital, Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy (Mineola N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2011), 25.
ibid.
Berman, The Politics of Authenticity, xix.
Berman, xxvii.
ibid.
ibid.
Berman, 313.
Berman, 312.
Berman, xxvii.
Raya Dunayevskaya, “Colonial Revolts and the Creativity of People,” News & Letters, September 30, 1958, marxists.org, https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1958/colonial-revolts.htm.
Marshall Berman, David Marcus, and Shellie Sclan, “Notes Toward a New Society,” in Modernism in the Streets: A Life and Times in Essays (London ; New York: Verso, 2017), 44.
Berman, The Politics of Authenticity, 17.
ibid.
Berman, 21.
ibid.
Berman, 324.
Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 35.
Berman, 133
Berman, 154.