Editing Creative destruction (section)

=== Marshall Berman ===
In his 1987 book ''All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity'',<ref name="isbn0-86091-785-1" /> particularly in the chapter entitled "Innovative Self-Destruction" (pp.&nbsp;98–104), [[Marshall Berman]] provides a reading of Marxist "creative destruction" to explain key processes at work within modernity. The title of the book is taken from a well-known passage from ''The Communist Manifesto''. Berman elaborates this into something of a ''[[Zeitgeist]]'' which has profound social and cultural consequences:

{{Blockquote|The truth of the matter, as Marx sees, is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down. "All that is solid"—from the clothes on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men and women who work the machines, to the houses and neighborhoods the workers live in, to the firms and corporations that exploit the workers, to the towns and cities and whole regions and even nations that embrace them all—all these are made to be broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or dissolved, so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms. The pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually count for nothing and carry no weight at all, that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate. Even the most beautiful and impressive bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for fast depreciation and planned to be obsolete, closer in their social functions to tents and encampments than to "Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Berman |first=Marshall |title=All That is Solid Melts into Air |year=1987 |page=99}}</ref>}}

Here Berman emphasizes Marx's perception of the fragility and evanescence of capitalism's immense creative forces, and makes this apparent contradiction into one of the key explanatory figures of modernity.

In 2021, Berman's younger son applied the elder's conception of creative destruction to the field of art history, writing in Hunter College's graduate art history journal. The essay reconsiders the modern media of photography, photomontage, and collage through the lens of "creative destruction". In doing so, the younger Berman attempts to show that in certain works of art of the above-mentioned media, referents (such as nature, real people, other works of art, newspaper clippings, etc.) can be given new and unique significance even while necessarily being obscured by the very nature of their presentation.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Berman |first=Daniel |title=Looking the Negative in the Face: Creative Destruction and the Modern Spirit in Photography, Photomontage, and Collage |url=https://www.assemblagejournal.org/issue-2-spring-2021/daniel-berman |url-status=usurped |journal=Assemblage |volume=2 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210518153649/https://www.assemblagejournal.org/issue-2-spring-2021/daniel-berman |archive-date=2021-05-18}}</ref>