All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity by Marshall Berman © 1982 Published in New York by Simon and Schuster. The following excerpts appear on pages 115-119 and earlier in the second chapter.

"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times.  All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify.  All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men."

— Karl Marx, "Communist Manifesto"

Faust began the day with a new hope, only to find himself thrown into a new form of despair.  He knows he cannot fall back on the claustral comforts of his childhood home – though he also knows he can't let himself drift as far from home as he has been for all these years.  He needs to make a connection between the solidity and warmth of life with people – everyday life lived within the matrix of a concrete community – and the intellectual and cultural revolution that has taken place in his head.  This is the point of his famous lament "Two souls, alas, are living in my breast."  He cannot go on living as a disembodied mind, bold and brilliant in a vacuum; he cannot go on living mindlessly in the world he left.  He must participate in society in a way that will give his adventurous spirit room to soar and grow.  But it will take "the powers of the underworld" to pull these polarities together, to make such a synthesis work.

In order to bring about the synthesis he craves, Faust will have to embrace a whole new order of paradoxes, paradoxes that are crucial to the structure of both the modern psyche and the modern economy.  Goethe's Mephistopheles materializes as the master of these paradoxes – a modern complication of his traditional Christian role as the father of lies.  In a typically Goethean irony, he appears to Faust just when Faust feels closest to God.  Faust has come back to his solitary study once again to meditate on the human condition.  He opens the Bible to the beginning of the Gospel of John:  "In the beginning was the Word."  He considers this beginning cosmically inadequate, casts about for an alternative and finally chooses and writes a new beginning:  "In the beginning was the Deed."  He is elated at the idea of a God who defines himself through action, through the primal act of creating the world; he lights up with enthusiasm for the spirit and power of this God; he declares himself ready to reconsecrate his life to creative worldly deeds.  His God will be the God of the Old Testament, of the Book of Genesis, who defines himself and proves his divinity by creating the heavens and the earth.*

It is at this point – to work out the meaning of Faust's new revelation and to give him the power to imitate the God he conceives – that the devil appears.  Mephistopheles explains that his function is to personify the dark side not only of creativity but of divinity itself.  He explicates the subtext of the Judeo-Christian myth of creation:  Can Faust be so naive as to think that God really created the world "out of nothing"?  In fact, nothing comes from nothing; it is only by virtue of "everything that you call sin, destruction, evil" that any sort of creation can go on.  (God's creation of the world itself "usurped the ancient rank and realm of Mother Night.")  Thus, says Mephisto,

I am the spirit that negates all!
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly ...

The Loss of a Halo

All the ambiguities in Marx's thought are crystallized in one of the most luminous images, the last one we will explore here:  "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every activity hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe.  It has transformed the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers."  The halo, for Marx, is a primary symbol of religious experience, the experience of something holy.  For Marx, as for his contemporary Kierkegaard, experience, rather than belief or dogma or theology, forms the core of religious life.  The halo splits life into sacred and profane: it creates an aura of holy dread and radiance around the figure who wears it; the sanctified figure is torn from the matrix of the human condition, split off inexorably from the needs and pressures that animate the men and women who surround it.

Marx believes that capitalism tends to destroy this mode of experience for everybody: "all that is holy is profaned"; nothing is sacred, no one is untouchable, life becomes thoroughly desanctified.  In some ways, Marx knows, this is frightful: modern men and women may well stop at nothing, with no dread to hold them back; free from fear and trembling, they are free to trample down everyone in their way if self-interest drives them to it.  But Marx also sees the virtue of a life without auras: it brings about a condition of spiritual equality.  Thus the modern bourgeoisie may hold vast material powers over the workers and everybody else, but it will never achieve the spiritual ascendancy that earlier ruling classes could take for granted.  For the first time in history, all confront themselves and each other on a single plane of being.

We must remember that Marx is writing at a historical moment when, especially in England and France (the Manifesto really has more to do with them than with the Germany of Marx's time), disenchantment with capitalism is pervasive and intense, and almost ready to flare up in revolutionary forms.  In the next twenty years or so, the bourgeoisie will prove remarkably inventive in constructing haloes of its own.  Marx will try to strip these away in the first volume of Capital, in his analysis of "The Fetishism of Commodities" – a mystique that disguises the intersubjective relations between men in a market society as purely physical, "objective," unalterable relations between things.  In the climate of 1848, this bourgeois pseudo-religiosity had not yet established itself.  Marx's targets here are, for both him and us, a lot closer to home: those professionals and intellectuals – "the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science" – who think they have the power to live on a higher plane than ordinary humanity, to transcend capitalism in life and work.

Why does Marx place that halo on the heads of modern professionals and intellectuals in the first place?  To bring out one of the paradoxes of their historical role: even though they tend to pride themselves on their emancipated and thoroughly secular minds, they turn out to be just about the only moderns who really believe that they are called to their vocations and that their work is holy.  It is obvious to any reader of Marx that in his commitment to his work he shares this faith.  And yet he is suggesting here that in some sense it is a bad faith, a self-deception.  This passage is so arresting because, as we see Marx identifying himself with the critical force and insight of the bourgeoisie, and reaching out to tear the haloes from modern intellectuals' heads, we realize that in some sense it is his own head he is laying bare.

The basic fact of life for these intellectuals, as Marx sees them, is that they are "paid wage-laborers" of the bourgeoisie, members of "the modern working class, the proletariat."  They may deny this identity – after all, who wants to belong to the proletariat? – but they are thrown into the working class by the historically defined conditions under which they are forced to work.  When Marx describes intellectuals as wage earners, he is trying to make us see modern culture as part of modern industry.  Art, physical science, social theory like Marx's own, all are modes of production; the bourgeoisie controls the means of production in culture, as in everything else, and anyone who wants to create must work in the orbit of its power.

Modern professionals, intellectuals and artists, insofar as they are members of the proletariat,

live only so long as they find work, and ... find work only so long as their labor increases capital.  These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Intellectuals occupy a peculiar position in the working class, one that generates special privileges, but also special ironies.  They are beneficiaries of the bourgeois demand for perpetual innovation, which vastly expands the market for their products and skills, often stimulates their creative audacity and imagination, and – if they are shrewd enough and lucky enough to exploit the need for brains – enables them to escape the chronic poverty in which most workers live.  On the other hand, because they are personally involved in their work – unlike most wage laborers, who are alienated and indifferent – the fluctuations of the market place strike them in a far deeper way.  In "selling themselves piecemeal," they are selling not merely their physical energy but their minds, their sensibilities, their deepest feelings, their visionary and imaginative powers, virtually the whole of themselves.  Goethe's Faust gave us the archetype of a modern intellectual forced to "sell himself" in order to make a difference in the world.  Faust also embodied a complex of needs endemic to intellectuals: they are driven not only by a need to live, which they share with all men, but by a desire to communicate, to engage in dialogue with their fellow men.  But the cultural commodity market offers the only media in which dialogue on a public scale can take place: no idea can reach or change moderns unless it can be marketed and sold to them.  Hence they turn out to be dependent on the market not for bread alone but for spiritual sustenance – a sustenance they know the market cannot be counted on to provide.

It is easy to see why modern intellectuals, trapped in these ambiguities, would imagine radical ways out: in their situation, revolutionary ideas would spring from the most direct and intense personal needs.  But the social conditions that inspire their radicalism also serve to frustrate it.  We saw that even the most subversive ideas must manifest themselves through the media of the market.  Insofar as these ideas attract and arouse people, they will expand and enrich the market, and so "increase capital."  Now, if Marx's vision of bourgeois society is at all accurate, there is every reason to think that it will generate a market for radical ideas.  This system requires constant revolutionizing, disturbance, agitation; it needs to be perpetually pushed and pressed in order to maintain its elasticity and resilience, to appropriate and assimilate new energies, to drive itself to new heights of activity and growth.  This means, however, that men and movements that proclaim their enmity to capitalism may be just the sort of stimulants capitalism needs.  Bourgeois society, through its insatiable drive for destruction and development, and its need to satisfy the insatiable needs it creates, inevitably produces radical ideas and movements that aim to destroy it.  But its very capacity for development enables it to negate its own inner negations: to nourish itself and thrive on opposition, to become stronger amid pressure and crisis than it could ever be in peace, to transform enmity into intimacy and attackers into inadvertent allies.