Modernization and its development projects have taken over our lives and the prospect of our society and anyone within it. The human has removed far from the primal status living in balance with nature. In the course of modernization we started sacrificing ourselves to production, the mass-production of goods that would make our lives easier and make us live in progress. Nower days, we are close to reaching the climax of globalization. Technological inventions have enabled us to produce without labour and thus, the masses of people now work in large corporations, financial services, distribution (the new labour). As modernization was a project giving a better life to the masses of people and therefore "freedom", we have now outgrown this concept. And as we can learn from Goethe`s Faust, we always will. There will always be a new invention or concept that brings us up, but over time, every such project will come to a climax and fall.
As we witness today, the capitalist project has come to this point, it now has a life of its own. When banks and whole countries have to be bailed out using tax money but the bankers get away with bonuses in the millions, something is wrong. As Marshall Berman puts it in his book All that's Solid Melts in to Air the challenge today is "to create new modes of modernity, in which man will not exist for the sake of development, but development for the sake of man." Here, Berman points out the true problem not only capitalism but generally, development projects themselves. Analyzing Goethe`s Faust, he describes how Faust lives through the scenario of development and finally, outgrows himself.
Faust, being the personification of humanity at the start of industrialization, finds himself trapped in his room which can be read as the larger context, a collection of all achievements of society. Having studied pretty much every important book or subject the world has to offer, Faust finds himself lost and depressed, still with no answers to life itself and where to go from now. What finally saves him from ending his miserable life is the devil Mephisto offering his help to Faust in order to start with him the project of modernization, a project in which Faust sees the possibility to develop a new society giving freedom and happiness to people.
However, we witness how Faust and his concept finally outgrow themselves and like in any development project. Berman argues:
"It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This is how the tragedy of development works. (…) Ironically, once this developer has destroyed the pre-modern world, he has destroyed his whole reason for being in the world. (…) Goethe shows us how the category of obsolete persons, so central to modernity, swallows up the man who gave it life and power."
Inevitably, the concept of a new modernity will always erase itself because it projects an ideal. And projecting an ideal always means the erasure of the old for the ideal to be complete. The recklessness of that ideal always implies a certain cruelty. When it might have started with good intentions, there will be a point where the development accumulates a dissonance with the previously existing and thus, comes to its turning point where it kills itself by denying any other previous concept.
This dissonance between a concept and the real is something Henri Lefebvre focusses on in his book The Production of Space. He critiques the cartesian model of thinking which starts with the ideal and projects it out into the real world (he calls that "abstract space"). Effectively, a new space emerges, which he refers to as "differential space" which describes the differences between the old and new, the boundary between them.
"From a less pessimistic standpoint, it can be shown that abstract space harbours specific contradictions. Such spatial contradictions derive in part from the old contradictions thrown up by historical time. These have undergone modifications, however: some are aggravated, others blunted. Amongst them, too, completely fresh contradictions have come into being which are liable eventually to precipitate the downfall of abstract space. The reproduction of the social relations of production within this space inevitably obeys two tendencies: the dissolution of old relations on the one hand and the generation of new relations on the other. Thus, despite—or rather because of—its negativity, abstract space carries within itself the seeds of a new kind of space. I shall call that new space ‘differential space’, because, inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences."
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