All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity by Marshall Berman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Marshall Berman Bronx raised by a Jewish family during the great wars. In this book is an great contribution for critical thinking and cultural studies. From the perspective of Marx's in his Communist Manifesto that immortalized the phrase "All that is solid melts into air", Bermann deciphers what Marx and other writers such as Goethe, Baudelaire, Gogol, Pushikin and,of course Dostoyeviski. In the first part he interprets the Goethe's Faust. His basic idea is that modernity brought by the rational and profitable use of technology would destroy the every naive society. Is very impressive when he compares the destructive power of Faust and Menefisto's undertaking, this comparison is latent in the whole book. Berman translates the agonies of guys like Nietzsche and Marx that were wittenessing of the post-enlightment development brought by the rationale of modernity that in the name of material progress made the faustian bargain of losing its soul dehumanizing humans in the name of progress and humanity - same what Dostoyesviski tried to denounce in the his Underground's Memories, or Demons. In the last part of the book, while describing the titan of America's post-war urbanism he compares the destructiveness of post-new deal agencies and Robert Moses is paving all American cities and bearing the suburbs. After providing his insightful interpretation on the impacts of Goethe's Faust, Bermann analysis the works of Charles de Baudelaire in parallel to the urbanistic development implemented in Napoleon III and Haussmann's Paris. The large avenues, the macadam (Mcadam) paved roads, large roads of Hausmann was a perfect place in galleries and in the bourgeois' life. The charriot's traffic, the indifference of chaotic urban life and the appearance of the blase. The description of the modernist impact of Baudelaire's work lays the ground for the book's best part the Petersburg's Prospects. This part caught my attention because I had the opportunity of experiencing places where some scenes discussed by Bermann take place. He describes how Gogol before Baudelaire already feels the weirdness of living in a modern city founded by Feudalist despot. Like Brazil's capital, Petersburg is a invented city for Russians to better link with their civilized roots away from their barbaric ascents in Moscow. Petersburg and the modernization ambitions of Czar Peter the Great planted the seeds for the dramatic leap in Russian culture and consciousness. Many privileged Russians had the chance to get scholarships abroad and after returning to Russia, where places in any bureucratic post in Petersburg. Writers like Gogol and Dostoyesviski breath the European enlightment while confront with their feudal and pre-modern roots. The moisture of a pre-capitalist world and cultural enlightenment thanks to the modernization spirit that the harbors of Petersburg receive from e XIX's Europe. The willingness to become modern reaches its crosswords when the consequences of modernity would threat the Czar's political establishment. The Peterburg Madson's Square was Nevshky Prospekt, where the burgeouis life and values could disentangle from the Russia's contradictions. Underground's Man is the man that navigates these both words, in the ideas of modernity and the reality of backward society that is the Court of Czar's civil servants. The meaninglessness of the a bureaucratic order set to translate modernity filtering its subversive values in order to keep intact the Czar's grip on the country. The book's last part is his direct analysis of Robert Moses and his faustic role in the US post-war modernisation. The good intentions for the people from a cold hearted businessman that new how to access public subsidies for the construction of post-war,metallic and exo-esquelleton running in time and space America. He praises Jane Jacobs works that valued the routines of people in a lower middle-class white neighborhood. If Jacobs sees the microcosms of the humans the megalomaniac Moses had his good intentions for the people, but didn't like person's individually all he was concerned was spend federal money with in urban undertaking that aggressively destroyed traditional neighborhoods such as New York's Bronx. In the end he analyses the prospects for modernity that might last as much as the middle ages before something critical enough happens and changes history's course.


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Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture by Roberto Schwarz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Roberto Schwarz is a culture critic and thinker. Privileged for his austrian heritage and his refined culture and biased by his critical theory. He realizes what Levi-Strauss denounced in Tristes Tropiques: The emptiness of a society. The digestion a authentic brazilian identity is slowed by a self-denying and alienated culture. Brazil is named as cheap commodity (pau-Brasil) where colonizers mostly from Latin Europe came in other to rob the land from the indigenous and put african slaves to work in the stolen land. Slave society was probably more perverse than Feudalist Russia, but how cultural and willingness of westernization evolved have some similarities. Despite Machado de Assis is not comparable to Dostoevsky, the author notices the grandeur of this great brazilian writer, and his visions on the country is ahistorical lost in space and time while the XIX century social, political and technological developments unfolds. Like today, Brazil still lives in the past far from the enlightenment and the social upheavals that shook more civilized cultures in Europe. According to Schwarz, Assis through his cynical realism tries to replicate the experience of living in a country that is ideals peacefully get along with a much different reality. Brazil was country was created by mercantilist appetite in Europe where countries that were launched fast material accumulation through sucking resources from satellite colonies. The brazilian consciousness is formed similarly like Peter's Great Russia, a huge country, unequal with a very powerful aristocracy composed of rentiers (landowners that stole big chunks of land with fraudulent papers, bankers and the senior State officer in the executive, parliament and justice) and, of course, lobbyists (politicians). He calls attention for the fact that after the Coup of 1964 a new culture was generated in order to deliver cultural comfort (while the free world was having the 1960s liberation) and the silliness and the infantile brazilian way were manifest in the Tropicalia and Jose Celso's Oficina. According to Schwarz they were just shallow cultural expression based on bourgeois need to have a superfluous contact with art in times that the brazilian aristocratic society was having a dictatorship which prevented liberty and thus true Art. In the era of mass media, the Brazilian dictatorship were keen to not only censor but also reward those media outlets that would Politically conservative + Liberal Economic Policies that made the super riches even more richers and the poor less poor. The modernization of a country led a Fascist inspired Military Junta was a hoax since it is excuse was to eliminate foreign ideas such as Marxism. How a nationalist military coup sponsored by CIA and aligned with conservative-liberal values was imbued to launch Brazil into modernity. Obviously, it was catastrophe.

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