Journey Into the Mind of the South Bronx

[ish mailian]

More from Marshall Berman's classic on modernism:



 the hallmark of twentieth-century urbanism has been the highway, a
means for putting them asunder. We see a strange dialectic here, in
which one mode of modernism both energizes and exhausts itself trying
to annihilate another, all in modernism's name. (165)

Ten minutes on this road, an ordeal for anyone, is especially dreadful
for people who remember the Bronx as it used to be: who remember these
neighborhoods as they once lived and thrived, until this road itself
cut through their heart and made the Bronx, above all, a place to get
out of. For children of the Bronx like myself, this road bears a load
of special irony: as we race through our childhood world, rushing to
get out, relieved to see the end in sight, we are not merely
spectators but active participants in the process of destruction that
tears our hearts. We fight back the tears, and step on the gas. (291)

As I saw one of the loveliest of these buildings being wrecked for the
road, I felt a grief that, I can see now, is endemic to modern life.
So often the price of ongoing and expanding modernity is the
destruction not merely of "traditional" and "pre-modern" institutions
and environments but—and here is the real tragedy—of everything most
vital and beautiful in the modern world itself. (295)

The motive forces in this reconstruction were the multibillion-dollar
Federal Highway Program and the vast suburban housing initiatives of
the Federal Housing Administration. This new order integrated the
whole nation into a unified flow whose lifeblood was the automobile.
It conceived of cities principally as obstructions to the flow of
traffic, and as junkyards of substandard housing and decaying
neighborhoods from which Americans should be given every chance to
escape. Thousands of urban neighborhoods were obliterated by this new
order; what happened to my Bronx was only the largest and most
dramatic instance of something that was happening all over. (307)

Why did the futurologists's laughter make me want to cry? He was
laughing off what struck me as one of the starkest facts of modern
life: that the split in the minds and the wound in the hearts of the
men and women on the move—like him, like me—were just as real and just
as deep as the drives and dreams that made us go. His laughter carried
all the easy confidence of our official culture, the civic faith that
America could overcome its inner contradictions simply by driving away
from them.

As I thought this over, it made me see more clearly what my friends
and I were up to when we blocked traffic throughout the decade. We
were trying to open up our society's inner wounds, to show that they
were still there, sealed but never healed, that they were spreading
and festering, that unless they were faced fast they would get worse.
We knew that the glittering lives of the people in the fast lane were
just as deeply maimed as the battered and buried lives of the people
in the way. We knew, because we ourselves were just learning to live
in that lane, and to love the pace. But this mean that our project was
shot through with paradox from the start. We were working to help
other people, and other peoples—blacks, Hispanics, poor whites,
Vietnamese—to fight for their homes, even as we fled our own. We, who
knew so well how it felt to pull up roots, were throwing ourselves
against a state and a social system that seemed to be pulling up, or
blowing up, the roots of the whole word. In blocking the way, we were
blocking our own way. So long as we grasped our self-divisions, they
infused the New Left with a deep sense of irony, a tragic irony that
haunted all our spectacular productions of political comedy and
melodrama and surreal farce. Our political theater aimed to force the
audience to see that they, too, were participants in a developing
American tragedy: all of us, all Americans, all moderns, were plunging
forward on a thrilling but disastrous course. Individually and
collectively, we needed to ask who we were and what we wanted to be,
and where we were racing to, and at what human cost. But there was no
way to think any of this through under pressure of the traffic that
was driving us all on: hence the traffic had to be brought to a halt.
(328)

Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.
Where, then, are we going? Always to our home. —Norvalis, Fragments
(on p. 329 of Berman)

Many of us who demonstrated in those streets allowed ourselves to
hope, even as the trucks and police bore down on us, that out of all
these struggles a new synthesis might someday be born, a new mode of
modernity through which we all could harmoniously move, in which we
all could feel at home. That hope was one of the vital signs of the
'60s. It did not last long. Even before the decade ended, it was clear
that no dialectical synthesis was in the works, and that we should
have to put all such hopes on "hold," a long hold, if we were going to
get through the years ahead. (329-330)

Rumstick Road suggests that this is the kind of liberation and
reconciliation that is possible for human beings in the world. For
Gray, and for us insofar as we can identify ourselves with him, the
liberation is never total; but it is real, and earned: he has not
merely looked into the abyss but gone into it and brought its depths
up into the light for us all. (336)

Many of these blocks are so comfortably ordinary that we can almost
feel ourselves blending in, nearly lulled to sleep—till we turn a
corner and the full nightmare of devastation—a block of black
burnt-out hulks, a street of rubble and glass where no man goes—surges
up in front of us and jars us awake. Then we may begin to understand
what we saw on the street before. It has taken the most extraordinary
labors to rescue these ordinary streets from death, to begin everyday
life here again from the ground up. This collective work springs form
a fusion of the government's money with the people's labor—"sweat
equity," it is called—and spirit. It is a risky and precarious
enterprise—we can feel the risks when we see the horror just around
the corner—and it takes a Faustian vision, energy and courage to carry
through. These are the people of Faust's new town, who know that they
must win their life and freedom every day anew. (344)

To be modern, I said, is to experience personal and social life as a
maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration
and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be
part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. 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. (346)

On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 3:21 PM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> All those cars in Vineland got me thinking about the Bronx.
>
> And RR's theocratic police state America c 1984.
>
> And Berman.
>
>
>
> https://newleftreview.org/issues/I144/articles/marshall-berman-the-signs-in-the-street-a-response-to-perry-anderson