MARSHALL BERMAN
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and 1917, in Berlin in 1918, in Barcelona in 1936, in Budapest in 1956,
in Paris again in 1968, and in dozens of cities all over the world, from
Baudelaire's time to our own-the boulevard will be abruptly trans–
formed into the stage for a new primal modern scene. This will not be
the sort of scene that Napoleon or Haussmann would like to see, but
nonetheless one that their mode of urbanism will have helped to make.
As we reread the old histories, memoirs and novels, or regard the old
photos or newsreels, or stir our own fugitive memories of 1968, we will
see whole classes and masses move into the street together. We will be
able
to
discern two phases in their activity. At first the people stop and
overturn the vehicles in their path and set the horses free: here they are
avenging themselves on the traffic by decomposing it into its inert
original elements. Next, they incorporate the wreckage they have
created 'into their rising barricades: they are recombining the isolated,
inanimate elements into vital new artistic and political forms. For one
luminous moment, the multitude of solitudes that make up the
modern city come together in a new kind of encoun ter,
to
make a
people.
"Th e streets belong to the people": they seize control of the
city's elemental matter and make it their own. For a little while, the
chaotic modernism of solitary brusque moves gives way to an ordered
modernism of mass movement. The "heroism of modern life" that
Baudelaire longed to see will be born from his primal scene in the
street. Baudelaire does not expect this (or any other) new life to last. But
it will be born again and again out of the street's inner contradictions.
It may burst into life at any moment, often when it is least expected.
This possibility is a vital flash of hope in the mind of the man in the
mire of the macadam, in the moving chaos, on the run.
EPILOGUE: THE HALO AND THE HIGHWAY
In
many ways, Baudelaire's primal scenes are remarkably contem–
porary; in other ways, his modern scenes and his modernism seem
almost archaic. This is not because our time has resolved the conflicts
that give
Paris Spleen
its life and energy-class and ideological
conflicts, conflicts between the individual and social forces , conflicts
within the self-but, rather, because our time has found new ways to
mask and mystify conflict. One of the great differences between the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries is that our century has created a
network of new haloes
to
replace the ones that Baudelaire's and Marx's
century stripped away.
We can see this process very clearly in the history of urban space.
