Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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terms of critical subjectivity. For in his forays into the fallen world, Kracauer had no problem seeing himself as both belonging to this world and advancing its analysis and transformation.
Kracauer’s truck with the material world allowed him to experience—and to discern theoretically—a different constitution of the subject that manifested itself in that new relationship with things, in particular things modern.56 The subject that enters the movie theater with/as Kracauer is clearly not the sovereign, unitary, critically distanced subject of transcendental philosophy or the connoisseur of haut-bourgeois culture; it is, to vary on Adorno’s characterization of Kracauer, a subject “without skin,” and it knows its boundaries to be precarious. What is more, this subject seems to seek out situations in which its very sense of identity, stability, and control is threatened by the otherness of the material world, betraying a masochistic sensibility of the kind that we find stylized in Kracauer’s novel Ginster and that resurfaces in the early draft s of Theory of Film.
In his beautiful essay “Boredom” (FZ 16 Nov. 1924), for instance, Kracauer compares the effect of listening to the radio, with its boundless imperialism of bringing the whole world into our living room, to “one of those dreams provoked by an empty stomach: a tiny ball rolls toward you from very far away, expands into a close-up, and finally crashes over you; you can neither stop it nor escape, but lie there chained, a helpless little doll” (MO 333; S 5.1:280). A similar, somewhat less threatening though just as visceral encounter appears earlier in the essay when the impersonal subject of boredom takes a stroll through the nightly streets, filled “with a feeling of unfulfillment from which a fullness might sprout.” While his “body takes root in the asphalt,” his spirit “roams ceaselessly out of the night and into the night” with the luminous advertising and returns only to pull him into a movie theater—where it allows itself to be polymorphously projected: “As a fake Chinaman it squats in an opium den, turns into a well-trained dog that performs ludicrously clever tricks to please a film diva, gathers up into a storm amid towering mountain peaks, and turns into both a circus artist and a lion at the same time. How could it resist these metamorphoses? . . . One forgets oneself gawking, and the huge dark hole is animated with the illusion of a life that belongs to no one and consumes everyone” (MO 332; S 5.1:279).
Kracauer does not simply fall back on the nostalgic complaint that film destroys the sovereign subject by displacing a presumably intact, well-grounded, autonomous spirit with an invasion of alien, heteronomous images (as in Georges Duhamel’s polemic quoted by Benjamin: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images”).57 Rather, despite his ambivalence over the sense of loss and emptiness that comes with the cinema illusion, Kracauer does not disavow the pleasure in the sensory expansion it affords, along with the theoretical insights it might yield. For the passage quoted describes a form of involuntary mimetic identification operative in film viewing, a phenomenon theorized in contemporary biomechanical discourse as Carpenter’s Effect (referring to the ideomotoric phenomenon that muscular contractions of a person in motion are unconsciously imitated by another person observing the former).58 What is more, it also suggests that, inasmuch as the moving objects on screen seem to metamorphose into something other than they appeared, such psycho physiological mimesis affords the viewing subject the sensation of participating in this transformation, evoking the possibility—both threatening and liberating—of liquefying fixed structures of social, critical-intellectual, gendered identity.
The subject of experience in Kracauer’s texts cannot be said entirely to dissolve into a “subjectless” subjectivity akin to what Martin Jay discerns in Benjamin’s writing as a prose equivalent of a modernist style indirect libre.59 On the contrary, Kracauer needs the distinctions between personal pronouns for a particular rhetorical strategy—a shifting of perspectives from a third-person, impersonal distance to a more personal voice, whether first-person plural or second-person singular (the latter, as in the above example of the radio, used to evoke a sense of imminent violation).60 This rhetorical strategy more often than not signals a shift in the critic’s attitude toward the phenomenon or mode of behavior described, a revaluation of an earlier negative stance.
The shift in pronouns is particularly salient when it refers to forms of cultural consumption that were previously criticized from what appeared as an external, intellectually superior position. In his essay “Travel and Dance” (FZ 15 March 1925), for instance, Kracauer reads the rise of tourism and modern forms of dancing (“and other outgrowths of rational fantasy” like radio and “telephotography”) as symptoms of mechanization and rationalization, of “a depraved omnipresence in all dimensions that are calculable” (MO 70; S 5.1:293). Accordingly, these leisure activities are symptomatic of the “double existence” imposed on human beings cut off from the spiritual sphere. And yet, not only is this “Ersatz” real, even if compromised, but it also offers “a liberation from earthly weight [Erdenschwere], the possibility of an aesthetic behavior vis-à-vis organized toil” (MO 72; S 5.1:294). The turn from pessimistic critique to critical redemption culminates in an emphatic switch of personal pronouns:
We are like children when we travel; we playfully delight in a new velocity, the relaxed roaming and roving, the synoptic viewing of geographical complexes that previously could not be seen at once. We have fallen for the ability to have all these spaces at our disposal; we are like conquistadors who have not yet had a quiet moment to reflect on the meaning of their acquisition. Likewise, when we dance, we mark a time that did not exist before, a time prepared for us by a thousand inventions whose substance we cannot gauge, perhaps because for now their unfamiliar scale appears to us as their substance. Technology has taken us by surprise, and the regions that it has opened up are glaringly empty. (MO 49; S 5.1:296)
This almost technophile vision strikingly anticipates Benjamin’s notion of a “room-for-play” (Spiel-Raum) that has opened up with film, which allows human beings to appropriate technology in the mode of play, that is, in a sensory-somatic and nondestructive form. What is more, by acknowledging presumably stereotypical and alienated behavior as part of his own experience and imagination, Kracauer refused to let his intellectual privilege deceive him as to his actual social status— which, unlike Adorno’s, was all too close to that of the salaried masses whose habits of leisure he observed. This awareness, among other things, enabled him to recognize in these habits the emergence of a new type of public sphere.
Before shifting the focus to the social and political parameters of Weimar modernity, I wish to return to Kracauer’s attitude toward the world of things and its implications for his early film theory. How does film turn from a medium of the fallen world into a catalyst for the fascination with that very world of things, into a matrix for new forms of sensory experience, into an object of supreme aesthetic, cognitive, and political significance? As I indicated earlier, it is important that Kracauer’s “materialist turn” preceded his encounter with Marxist theory in 1925–26; that his theoretical interest in film and mass culture took shape already within the framework of his early philosophy of history. This is to say that Kracauer’s distinct brand of materialism derives from sources other than the Marxist tradition, even if he subsequently, and rather selectively, absorbed elements of that tradition. Adorno rightly sensed that his friend’s concept of material objects was not dominated by a Marxist theory of reification, as it had been formulated at the time most influentially by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923), a book that Kracauer took issue with on several counts.61 If Lukács grounds his concept of reification in Marx’s theory of the commodity, in particular the opposition of use value and exchange value, Kracauer’s approach to reification takes a more observational and experiential form. Predicated on the structure of the commodity, Lukács’s argument depends on positing an unmediated, originary substantiality of things (which is abstracted and alienated by the commodity form), as it does on the project of restoring labor as the only true source of value in the empowerment of the proletariat qua subject of history.62 Kracauer would have resented such language as nostalgic. Centering on production and reified labor, Lukács’s account of the loss of the “character of things as things” (92) and the new “thingness” (Dinghaft igkeit) that takes its place and informs the