Illuminating Marshall Berman: Times Square and the Democratization of Light

Outside of the obvious, 9/11 is also the day when I lost my friend and mentor, Marshall Berman (1940-2013). Maybe another time I’ll share some more personal thoughts about Marshall, but for now, I thought I’d share a book chapter that I wrote about his work. It’s in Jennifer Corby’s excellent volume, Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman, and in many ways, it’s the piece of writing of which I’m most fond. And I’m fond of it because I know that my writing style isn’t like Marshall’s style, but this piece is probably as close as I’ve ever come, weaving together Hegel and Bruce Springsteen, Walter Benjamin and Ralph Ellison, and just about everything in between. His spirit was not only in the content but the style too, and I think he’d really have loved that.

Illuminating Marshall Berman: Times Square and the Democratization of Light

I. Georg Hegel and “The Boss”

Karl Marx was perhaps at his most poetic when he wrote of the creative and destructive forces constituting capitalism, forces which rendered modern life so inherently unstable that, now, “All that is solid melts into air.”[1] In this statement, Marx also demonstrates the difficulty in theorizing modern life, insofar as it affords us few fixed vantage points from which, and about which, to think. So, when Marshall Berman borrowed Marx’s phrase for his own magnum opus, it was, in part, this problem that he set himself to solve. In its enduring resonance several decades on, we can see just how well Marshall met that challenge. However, as his work also demonstrates, his success is easier to acknowledge than it is to emulate.

Marshall’s recent Mumford lecture is a perfect example of his ability to think through the contradictions and paradoxes of modernity, and this is immediately evident in his choice of epigrams. Borrowing the first from one of the most complex philosophers of the last two centuries, G. W. F. Hegel, and the second from New Jersey rock star, Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, Marshall’s ability to weave together the high points of German idealist philosophy with American rock and roll typifies his ability to demonstrate the rich intellectual structure that exists underneath what we might otherwise take for granted.

The first epigram comes from Hegel’s most important work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, and reads: “Spirit is a power only by looking the negative in the face and living with it. Living with it is the magic power that converts the negative into being.”[2] For Hegel, the world doesn’t think about itself, it simply exists. But when we starting thinking about the world, we negate the unthinking simplicity of the world, and begin transforming the world into ideas that make sense of it. We must lose the world to find its meaning. This is similarly true for the meaning we find in our own lives, for it is only by accepting death—it is only by accepting the finitude of our lives—that we can find their true meaning. If we lived forever, just like the unthinking world, life would lose its significance.

As for the second epigram, in Bruce Springsteen’s lamenting post-9/11 album The Rising, Marshall saw a similar insight to that of Hegel’s. From the song “My City of Ruins,” the second epigram reads: “My city’s in ruins, my city’s in ruins. Come on rise up! Come on rise up! Rise up.”[3] In an album filled with sorrowful songs, songs that express the sadness and the strength of having survived, Springsteen’s album manages to capture a sentiment that was not limited to New York City, even if it was felt more acutely there. Hardly welcoming of such destruction, Springsteen isn’t alone in recognizing that such moments of loss are also moments in which we might become more aware of our own sense of self. As Marshall was fond of mentioning, that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, which he was also fond of attributing both to Friedrich Nietzsche, and, more recently, to Kanye West (which, incidentally, Kanye borrowed from an excellent track by Daft Punk).

At face value, Marshall’s point in this juxtaposition is typical of the way he saw the world, being equally at home in the highbrow world of German Idealism as he was with American rock and roll. Throughout his vast intellectual output, Marshall wove a complex tapestry that attempted to demonstrate the interrelationship of culture and philosophy, economics and politics, and just about everything in between. In this, he partially had Hegel to thank, for one of Hegel’s lasting insights has been his ability to fully incorporate the study of history into philosophical thinking, so that we might better grasp the rich ways in which our moment in time deeply shapes every facet of our lives. That is, Hegel sought to reveal the underlying logic of history, so that we might better understand how deeply our lives are affected by it. It is little wonder, then, that Hegel provides us access into seeing the significance of a pop-culture song.

However, beyond this, both epigrams explore the same theme: rebirth. Whether it is Hegel’s understanding that the loss of immediate reality allows us an understanding of both the world and ourselves, or Springsteen’s rallying cry to rediscover ourselves in the aftermath of 9/11, this phoenix’s story has always been central to Marshall’s work. We can see this in the topic of his lecture, urbicide, insofar as the death of cities had preoccupied Marshall for decades, and was the subject of his next, unfinished manuscript. Ever with the Bronx of his childhood in mind, Marshall had experienced the death of a city, and lived long enough to see its slow rebirth. Underlying All That Is Solid is this same theme, found in his now classic description of the modern world, for this world “pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.”[4] For Marshall, renewal is always present, but renewal, unfortunately, is almost always predicated on terrible destruction. If we could do without some of that sorrow, if we could do a better job of learning from our mistakes, I’m sure Marshall would have thought his work a success.

While, in many ways Hegel stands as a forerunner for the type of intellectual project we find in Marshall’s work—a project that attempts to think through the lives we actually live—it is typically Karl Marx to whom Marshall’s lineage is traced. Whereas Hegel’s concern lies in articulating the intellectual structures by which we might understand the unfolding of history, Marx was similarly a deeply systematic philosopher, if he lent the necessary materialist bent to Hegel’s thought. That is, Marx brought Hegel a little more down to earth. Yet, unlike Marx, Marshall’s work never aspired to the type of systematic analysis of the objective historical forces under which we live, as he was instead preoccupied with helping weave together a complex tapestry that explored how those forces unfolded, and how we then came to experience them. If Hegel and Marx spent most of their time exploring the underlying logic of history, Marshall spent much of his time charting how this logic then changed us. And, in this, Marshall’s true forerunner was Walter Benjamin.

II. A New Materialism and the History of Light

For anyone familiar with Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project, it is easy to imagine that had Benjamin lived to finish his work we would have something in the style of Marshall’s All That Is Solid. Instead, what we do have is an exhaustive collection of impressions, borrowed from sources far and wide, that together paint one of the most complete pictures of nineteenth-century European life available to us, as Benjamin charts the transformation of Paris into a world much like our own. Yet, we don’t find any systematic philosophy within it, but rather, we find a panoramic and in-depth picture in which the philosophical structure lies implicitly within the work but is never engaged explicitly. That is, Benjamin offers us Bruce Springsteen, and in such a way that in Springsteen we recognize Hegel too.

Benjamin also shares many thematic interests with Marshall. Organized into sections, or convolutes, one section of Benjamin’s work is of particular relevance: a convolute entitled “Modes of Lighting.” In this section, Benjamin charts the rapid introduction of streetlights in the French capital, from Napoleon’s own gas lamp to the introduction of gas lit streetlamps, and, finally, the introduction of electric streetlights, beginning with those outside the Louvre.[5] Easy to take for granted, despite how radically transformative the abundance of light has been, Benjamin seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the advance of illumination has transformed modern life (and modern urban life, in particular). To this end, he ties together its many diverse elements, such as the ways in which economic life changed to meet the productive needs of these new forms of light, while simultaneously demonstrating the cultural effects of living with this newfound illumination.

As was Benjamin’s way, in an otherwise banal facet of life he manages to demonstrate the deep transformations unfolding in history, and the subsequent effects on us. For all its ubiquity, light is easy to miss; without it, there is nothing, but with it there is everything else. However, the ease with which we can overlook light testifies to its democratization, which itself has taken millennia to achieve. For instance, in a 1998 paper, economist William Nordhaus helps demonstrate some of this history by charting the cost of light over time, dating back to humanity’s prehistory. Whereas in Babylonian times, for instance, a day’s work would buy so little light that only the temples could be illuminated, light is now so inexpensive that we rarely take note of its cost at all.[6] Moreover, with the small handful of stars that currently illuminate New York City’s night sky, like so many other metropolises the world over, we have such an abundance of light that we often consider it an unwanted form of pollution.

As is the way with materialist histories like Benjamin’s, its significance emerges in often unexpected places. For instance, Albert Camus once spoke of Moby-Dick as being the prototypical absurdist novel, given Ahab’s futile, but inexorable, quest to subdue nature.[7] For Camus, in a world in which meaning is ever more elusive, a world in which all that is solid melts into air, our desire for meaning only grows, and this leads to lives like Ahab’s. In this, there is more than a passing similarity to Marshall’s own use of the story of Faust, who was himself caught up in the inexorable quest to make the world meaningful, albeit in the materially embodied sense that Faust sought to physically transform the world.[8] Obviously, Ahab’s quest lends itself to rich interpretations, such as Camus’s thoroughly modern existential take, and Camus’s claim offers more than a little truth. Yet, if we read his story with a more materialist bent, there is something to Ahab that is not quite modern, but truly pre- or early-modern: his job was to provide light.

Published in 1851, Moby-Dick is actually three years late, if judged from the point of view of the economic history of light. Ahab and his crew testify to the major productive effort involved in providing light, insofar as the whaling trade provided the oil needed to illuminate the growing American republic. Yet, the 1851 publication followed just three short years after the discovery of kerosene, which was to replace whale oil. As Nordhaus notes, kerosene was five times more efficient than whale oil, so that illumination finally came within reach of many.[9] Ahab was truly to be a relic of economic history, as once again the world was to melt, not only taking with it its meaning but, as Karl Marx would note, taking with it those who depended on it for their very material subsistence.

However, even kerosene was not to last. As Benjamin notes, Paris’s first electric streetlights could be found outside the Louvre as early as 1857.[10] More dramatically, in 1879, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison made his first public demonstration of electric light. More important than this demonstration, however, was his 1882 demonstration in New York City, which unveiled the generator that would provide the electricity to power wide-scale illumination. Yet, given the outlay of capital required to fund such a project, at the time of the test Edison could be found in the offices of one of his major financial backers, J. P. Morgan.[11] It is unclear if Edison ever made the statement popularly attributed to him—“We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles”—but this conventional mythology gets at the essential point: Edison’s importance lies not only with the light bulb, for which he actually had many peers making similar discoveries, but in his ability to provide light cheaply.

Like Ahab, Edison’s hidden history is an economic one. Ahab would not have been to sea without those who would pay for whale oil, nor would Edison’s light have been lit without Morgan’s backing. Yet, as both Marx and Marshall knew well, with every advance there are those who fall behind. Had Ahab lived, Edison’s advances would have cost the sea captain his job, had he even managed to keep it beyond the introduction of kerosene.

III. The Crowds of Times Square

Marshall’s homage to New York City’s agora, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square, is in many ways the work that was the culmination of much of his thought. At once a hymn to a place that was for his family a sacred place,[12] the very place where his parents met and fell in love,[13] and the place that is the beating public heart of the city that was often indistinguishable from the man who wrote about it, Times Square was, and is, a place of light.

Evident immediately, much of Marshall’s story of Times Square is the story of light. Introducing the preface, one of the books first epigrams comes by way of Marshall’s mother, Betty Berman, and reads: “Let’s take a bath of light.”[14] As Marshall explains, it was in this way that a visit to Times Square would be introduced by his mother, after a family day spent at a matinee and dinner, as she prepared them for the thrilling experience of Times Square at night.[15] Further describing the experience of those lights, Marshall recounts an exchange with his Aunt Ida, sometime in the 1960s, when he attempted to explain what the experience of drugs was like, and tells her it is “something like this,” gesturing to the light.[16] To this, she responds that he’s just proven he doesn’t need drugs at all.[17]

To anyone who has visited Times Square at night, this same thrill does not disappoint. Like an electrified and multicolored midnight sun, it cannot help but delight, as the visceral experience of daytime in the middle of the night—and a multicolored and blinking daytime at that—can be a rejuvenating experience. Without fail, the faces of those at the square are almost ubiquitously painted with smiles of joy and wonder.

However, the experience of Times Square is not just an experience of light, it is an experience of what that light reveals: others. As another of On the Town’s epigrams reads, this one by longtime New York resident, and noted poet and writer, Thomas Disch:

And any night you can see Times Square

Tremulous with its busloads

Of tourists who are seeing all of this

For the first and last time

Before they are flown

Back to the republic of Azerbaidzhan

On the shore of the Caspian

Where for weeks they will dream of our faces

Drenched with unbelievable light.[18]

It’s little surprise that Marshall would choose this epigram to begin his own work on Times Square, as it weaves together so many of the themes with which he was interested. Disch writes of people coming together from across great distances, a theme that recurs in Marshall’s own work on Times Square;[19] it speaks to the role that the wonderful lights of Times Square play in making it what it is; and, ultimately, it speaks to how, in the light of the square, and in the crowds that descend on it from all corners of the globe, people come to see one another.

One of the things over which Marshall and I would argue was the work of Søren Kierkegaard. I am a real admirer, and Marshall, an admirer too, but a little more circumspect. One point of contention revolved around Kierkegaard’s portrayal of “the crowd.” For Kierkegaard, the crowd was everything that stood in opposition to the values he wanted to cultivate: individuality, freedom, and responsibility; for Kierkegaard, the crowd was the very mass organism to which we lost them.[20] And so, writing in his Socratic style—dialectically writing what he thought we most needed to hear—Kierkegaard attempted to cultivate individuation in the midst of a world that offered ever new temptations into which we might lose ourselves. I continue to think that there is a deep form of sociality in Kierkegaard, one that does not come at the expense of our individuality, but for Marshall, Kierkegaard’s denunciations of the crowd rang a little too true.

However, if I like to draw on Kierkegaard, it is no surprise that Rousseau loomed large in Marshall’s imagination, given that his first work, The Politics of Authenticity, was a study of him. In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau has a wonderfully different description of the crowd, one that helps sketch out the modern dialectic of the crowd, with greater attention to actual crowds—rather than to Kierkegaard’s metaphorical crowd. Differing from Kierkegaard, for Rousseau the crowd is where we become human: “When there is a riot or a street brawl, the populace gathers together; the prudent man withdraws from the scene. It is the rabble, the women of the marketplace, who separate the combatants and prevent decent people from killing one another.”[21] For Rousseau, it is in mingling with one another that we overcome the ideas that we have of one another (the ideas of the “prudent” rational man), allowing our natural sense of compassion to draw us toward a truer recognition of one another. It is this crowd that Marshall hoped we’d find in Times Square.

IV. Illumination and the Invisible Man

One long chapter of On the Town is devoted to the role that sailors have played in the history of Times Square. Like nautical Athens, whose commercial empire brought sailors from far and wide, exposing the Athenians to a “global” culture, New York City is likewise a commercial city with a long history of seafaring cultural exchange. Tying together many of these themes, Marshall begins this chapter with words from Ahab himself: “Close! Stand close to me, Starbuck, and let me look into a human eye . . .”[22] In a truly Benjaminian fashion, Marshall uses a single epigram to draw together a host of far reaching themes, demonstrating how these universal themes are evident in a single particular. Playing off the history of light, and Ahab’s role in it, while simultaneously connecting this history—in all its commercial and nautical significance—to the lights of Times Square, Marshall hints at one of modernity’s deepest dialectics. In the endless creative quest unlocked by Marx’s description of the forces of capital, in Ahab’s update of Faust’s interminable destructive creativity, and in the intermix of people thrown together by the global exchange that occurs at the very heart of the commercial center of the world, we can either lose ourselves in the crowd, as Kierkegaard worried, or we can find ourselves there, as Rousseau hoped. That is, we can either lose ourselves to the dark depths of the ocean, or we can find ourselves in the brightness of Starbuck’s eye—or, in the lights of Times Square.

At this point, I’d like to conclude by bringing this all back to where we began: G. W. F. Hegel. In many ways the very beginning of contemporary thought, and also the too infrequently acknowledged foundation upon which Western Marxism is built, the real centerpiece of Hegel’s thought is an eloquent philosophy of freedom. For Hegel, the history of the world is the history of freedom, and it is a freedom made manifest through a complex process of recognition. It is in learning to see both ourselves and others as free that we truly become so, as we live through the ideas that we have of ourselves. To this, Marx famously added a materialist dimension, making us aware of the degree to which our social, political, and economic reality can impede this progress, in more ways than simply through the ideas that we have. But at the end of it all, after all the misconceptions about ourselves are overcome, and the material impediments are likewise cleared away, we can finally emerge, and see ourselves and one another for the free, creative, creatures that we are.

And yet, in the work of Walter Benjamin, and his late twentieth-century comrade Marshall Berman, we find a way to think this reality in all of its materially embodied complexity. We might struggle for recognition, but recognition is not purely an intellectual category, it is a materially embodied experience. For all of our struggles to be recognized, and to recognize others, recognition depends on our ability to perceive others—it depends on our very ability to see them—and this requires light.

In Ralph Ellison’s seminal novel, his eponymous invisible man—whose invisibility is not a “biochemical accident” of his “epidermis” but “a peculiar disposition of the eyes” of those around him—leaves the Jim Crow South for New York City, in search of the dignity that is his birthright.[23] However, as his peculiar invisibility implies, he doesn’t find the recognition that he seeks, and instead hides away, a twentieth-century Underground Man, in the hidden basement room of a whites-only building. Stealing electricity from Monopolated Light and Power, who only offer it to those who can afford it, in place of recognition from others he instead finds the solitary illumination of 1,369 fugitive light bulbs.[24] As he writes: “Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.”[25] But Marshall didn’t think it strange at all.

When we go to Times Square, at any time of the day or night, and we see others, and are seen by them, for absolutely no cost to ourselves, there is an important triumph of democracy that we might otherwise miss. Marshall was never fond of the argument that Times Square had become irreparably “Disneyfied,” partially because he remembered how inhospitable Times Square used to be, especially to women. This new Times Square, safe for all and filled with light, might be just as dependent on capital as Edison was on J. P. Morgan. Yet, at the same time as the destruction that some of Times Square’s corporate sponsors might be doing elsewhere, it is important to remember that, in the midst of our legitimate ideological disputes with them, there continues to exist, in one small part of New York City, a place where all of us can go to be seen. Times Square, a democracy of light.

[1] Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 06, Marx and Engels: 1845-1848 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 487.

[2] I have included the translation that Marshall uses in his lecture, but I am unsure from which translation he quoted. In A. V. Miller’s translation, it reads: “Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 19.

[3] Bruce Springsteen, “My City of Ruins,” from The Rising, Columbia Records, 2002.

[4] Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 13.

[5] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 562-563.

[6] William D. Nordhaus, “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not” (New Haven, CT: Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University, 1998), p. 33, 52.

[7] Albert Camus, “Herman Melville,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1970), pp. 288-294.

[8] Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, pp. 37-41.

[9] Nordhaus, “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not,” pp. 34-37.

[10] Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 562.

[11] Randall Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World (New York, NY: Random House, 2007), p. 133.

[12] Marshall Berman, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (New York, NY: Random House, 2006), p. xxvii.

[13] Ibid., p. xxv.

[14] Ibid., p. xix.

[15] Ibid., pp. xxvi-xxvii.

[16] Ibid., p. xxvii.

[17] Ibid.

[18] From Thomas Disch’s poem “In Praise of New York,” as quoted in Berman’s On the Town, p. xiii.

[19] For instance, On the Town devotes an entire chapter to the history of sailors and Times Square. See pp. 43-102.

[20] Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and The Present Age, A Literary Review, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 62-64.

[21] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” in The Basic Political Writings, ed. Peter Gay (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 55.

[22] Berman, On the Town, p. 43.

[23] Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 1994), p. 3.

[24] Ibid., pp. 5-7.

[25] Ibid., p. 6