David Harvey contests the notion that modernity was
a discrete and absolute break with the past. Rather, in examining Paris’
political and social perturbations across the 19th century, Harvey
shows how the city, through fits and bursts, was reimagined to become a
modernized space. We might assert this title of modernization if we, as Harvey does,
recognize that modernity is less something new under the sun, and more an emergent
conceptual shift. When does a place or a people cross the threshold into the
modern? How could we recognize this transition and what does it mean to say so?
Leaving these questions open to negotiation, Harvey examines what remains a seminal
transition.
Given Harvey’s Marxist bonafides, it is hardly
surprising that his story of Paris pits the proletariat and bourgeois against
one another. At times his work seems little more or less than a straight
application of Marx’s thoughts to the Parisian situation. This should not be
read as a denigration of his application. Rather, we cannot help but wonder to
what extent a hammer sees only nails. Perhaps, when it is all said and done,
historians will agree that the transformative powers of capital truly rendered
the 19th century most recognizable through a Marxist lens. If this
is the case Harvey convincingly posits Paris as the ideal urban
space to bring the dialogues of capital and labour, urban and rural, and nature
and production together.
The impacts of changing Parisian economics create
a patchwork quilt of evolving modernity across the city. While Haussmann and
his planners remade the city on the broad-scale rationality of
straight lines and organized services (for which we should at least be
partially thankful), they simultaneously necessitated movements and informal
livelihoods of the working classes. Perhaps this call-and-response across the social
sphere is endemic to ‘modern’ ways of being: as society becomes more rational
informal space takes on new meaning. Even though it may be the official sphere
which recognizes the designation of formal versus informal, this does not imply
that the formal will dictate the informal. Along the parkways and over the barricades
which delineated political identities, new identities and societies would be
formed. Along each side both the formal and informal, the modern and the
traditional, would play a role, respond to one another, and drive change. The
modern inhabits and invents a space that is at once new and nested. Rather than
simply break with the past, we consciously recreate and redefine it, as we
recreate and redefine ourselves.
