Halos Lost, Halos Regained: Homosexual Culture as a Bourgeois Mode of Belonging Molly Dunn College

In All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman paints modernism as destructive and volatile. He discusses the role of the bourgeoisie in furthering modernism and concludes that while it has indeed (to quote Marx) “played a most revolutionary role in history,”[1] the bourgeoisie has created a system that devours structures of meaning. Capitalism values only that which can be monetized or marketed. “Everything else within us, everything nonmarketable, gets draconically repressed, or withers away for lack of use, or never has a chance to come to life at all.”[2] All that is sacred is stripped of its inherent meaning and given a monetary value. Moreover, the bourgeois fetishization of progress ensures that nothing is solid. “Everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down.”[3] The capitalist world is constantly changing; all that is solid melts into air.

This instability contributes to modern nihilism, a or the idea that “old modes of honor and dignity do not die; instead, they get incorporated into the market, take on price tags, gain a new life as commodities.”[4] Europeans reacted to this nihilism by creating new forms of meaning and modes of belonging. One of the most compelling examples of this is the...