Reoccurring Progression

In the reading, The Painter of Modern Life: And Other Essays by Charles Baudelaire, it is noticed that he is a keen observer of the changes occurring in Paris during the 1800s. His writings often documented the current events in France at the time. In all Baudelaire is responding to this movement that would be later termed Modernity, and he takes the appearance of art and societal changes and explains the progress these structural events have on what was known as “reality.” Charles Baudelaire lays the groundwork for progression by critically examining his surroundings.

The knowledge we can extract from historical writings published by these deep, thinking theorist’s gives us an insight of what may reoccur in the future. From the perspective given by Marshall Berman’s, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, he agrees that what we learn in the past can easily transcend into what we can prepare for in the future, again and again. Berman says, “This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so that it can nourish, and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie ahead.” Many of these adventures and dangers were looked at in class during the power point Dr. Cummings presentation in my Critical Frameworks class. Events such as the dropping of the atom bomb, 9/11, the Berlin wall demolition, et cetera give the way for new perspectives to be seen critically by societies around the world. (Berman p.36)

“To appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of the modernities of today and an act of faith in the modernities—and in the modern men and women—of tomorrow and the day after.” -Marshall Berman

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