Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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emerging in contemporary urban society evoke a concrete, sensorily experienced materiality that complicates Marxist concepts of commodity fetishism and reification.
What I wish to argue here is that Kracauer’s modernist materialism was at least as much shaped, in its basic assumptions, motifs, and obsessions, by the traditions of Jewish messianism and gnosticism, however secular the implications and the issues that were at stake. Like other Critical Theorists whose intellectual socialization took place during World War I, in particular Bloch, Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Leo Löwenthal, Kracauer has to be read in the context of modern, secular Jewish messianism. As Anson Rabinbach has shown with regard to Bloch and Benjamin, this tradition is impossible to describe in any pure form, as it persisted in a variety of radical sensibilities, hermeneutical motifs, and combinations with other discourses (psychoanalysis, Marxism, libertarian anarchism, Zionism, etc.).63
Kracauer’s relation to Jewish messianism is a complex issue. Raised in a practicing Jewish environment and briefly active in the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (a Frankfurt circle of learning and debate surrounding Rabbi Nehemiah Nobel and crucially shaped by its first director, Franz Rosenzweig),64 Kracauer began to voice vehement criticism of the ongoing revival of messianic thought, especially in its combination with a socialist (in Kracauer’s reading, protestant) mystique of community. In his programmatic essay of 1922, “Those Who Wait” (“Die Wartenden”), for instance, he castigates the “messianic Sturm und Drang types of the communist persuasion,” a label most likely referring to Bloch, whose book on Thomas Münzer he had savaged in a review earlier that year.65 Like other contemporary movements of religious renewal, the Jewish messianists, in Kracauer’s view, superimposed a transcendental reality upon an immanent historical process and thus, by abstracting from the real world “filled with corporeal things and people,” ended up just as ignorant of the divine that they presumed to know so well (MO 140; S 5.1:169). Kracauer’s politics of “waiting,” of a “hesitant openness” (MO 138), was directed against the absolutism with which messianic thinkers leaped over the imperfect yet existing reality from the perspective of a future break; by contrast, he turned his gaze toward the changing realm of the here and now, the mundane zone of the ordinary and ephemeral. “Access to truth is now in the profane,” he proclaimed at the end of his 1926 polemical review of Martin Buber and Rosenzweig’s translation of the Bible (MO 201; S 5.1:365).66
Nonetheless, Kracauer participated in the discourse of secular Jewish messianism in significant ways. Much as he abhorred notions of an imminent and immanent instantiation of the Messiah, an “aura of eschatological longing” emanates, as Michael Schröter observes, from the “luminous metaphors” of his texts.67 And even when he updates his metaphysical language with concepts indebted to the Enlightenment (the French materialist lineage rather than the German idealist one) and to early Marx, a distinctly apocalyptic undercurrent continues to characterize his observations of contemporary life—a perception of modernity as a traumatic upheaval heading toward catastrophe. Like Benjamin at this point, Kracauer rejects all promises of immanent and gradual change and defers any envisioning of a different order to history’s inevitable cataclysmic break. Accordingly, the only attitude available to the Jewish intellectual is a hesitant form of waiting, as opposed to more fervent anticipation or even active intervention. As he writes to Löwenthal in 1924: “We must remain hidden, quietistic, inactive, a thorn in the side of others, preferring to drive them (with us) to despair rather than give them hope.”68 This “revolutionary negativity,” which Kracauer still endorsed as late as 1929, is theologically grounded in the axiom to refrain from direct assertions and to preserve empty spaces (Hohlräume) for the “unsaid”—and as yet unsayable—positive.69
In his 1925 essay “The Artist in This Time” (published in the first issue of the Jewish journal Der Morgen), Kracauer unfolds the implications of this stance with recourse, as already mentioned, to Grune’s film Die Straße. Reflecting on the dilemma of the modern artist, Kracauer extrapolates from Die Straße an intellectual attitude that spells out the politics of his own earlier implicit identification with the film. He argues that the film’s grim view is shared by “people who seriously engage with reality and hence are doubly and profoundly affected by the power of the forces that today deform the world into a city street.” Knowing “that only the taking along and transforming [Mitnahme und Verwandlung] of the unreal life will lead to reality and that disintegrated ideals cannot be patched up or hypocritically asserted,” these contemporaries “strictly resist the romantic attempt to gloss over the realities of technology and economy and to inhibit the unfolding of the civilizing process with means that are not up to its magnitude.” Instead, Kracauer continues, “they will do anything in their power to make the world disclose its phantom character, to let nothingness reign as far as it may. They are nihilists for the sake of the potential positive and hasten toward the end of despair lest a ‘yes’ might halfway impede that process ineffectively. . . . [T]hey hyperbolize the negation, stretch the void, and reject soul where it is only make-up. They believe that America will disappear only when it completely discovers itself.”70 Obviously, Kracauer leans toward the party of these “nihilists,” even as he urges them not to abandon hope for the revelation of the absent divine (which would amount to perpetuating the abyss between “film image and prophecy”).
The often-cited last sentence of the passage expresses the eschatologically tinged hope that disenchanted modernity, troped in the Weimar period’s popular catchword Amerika, can and will be transcended; yet, at the same time, it mandates the materialist project of modernity’s complete and thorough discovery.71 This project is driven by a no-less-messianic motif, that of redemption—the idea that the intellectual’s task is to furnish an archive for the possibility, even if itself unrepresentable, of a utopian restoration of all things past and present as implied in the cabbalist concept of tikkun.72 The writer therefore seeks to register things as yet unnamed, as Kracauer sums up his lifelong efforts in his posthumously published book History: The Last Things Before the Last: “They all have served, and continue to serve, a single purpose: the rehabilitation of objectives and modes of being which still lack a name and hence are overlooked or misjudged.”73 However, the language in which the earlier Kracauer imagined this work of redemption— as well as the historical process that makes this work both necessary and possible—has a materialist slant to it that more specifically recalls the tradition of Jewish gnosticism.
While he found Jewish gnosticism just as suspect as other variants of religious mysticism, Kracauer seems temperamentally closer to the cool stoicism of secular or literary gnostics such as Kafka than to any messianic fervor.74 Like Weber, Simmel, Lukács, and other critics of modernity, Kracauer evokes the fallen world through images of petrification and mortification, of detritus, fragments, empty shells, larvae, and masks.75 In the gnostic tradition, such imagery marks the negative traces of the withdrawal of God, the divine as radical absence. Yet, as material evidence of the negativity of history, these traces have to be preserved and interpreted so that, when the eventual break occurs, the world can be redeemed in as complete a shape as possible, and the sparks of creation encrusted in even the most fallen matter can be released. Hence Kracauer defines the intellectual’s task as one of collecting, registering, and archiving: “The new shape [das Gestaltete] cannot be lived unless the disintegrated particles are gathered and carried along.”76 However, this ambulant archiving entails a “transformation.” In a letter to Bloch, Kracauer pinpoints as the great motif of “this kind of philosophy of history . . . the postulate that nothing must ever be forgotten and nothing that is un-forgotten must remain unchanged.”77
If modern life is envisioned in gnostic terms, it does not seem too far-fetched to discover in film and photography the contemporary media, art forms, and archives singularly suited to express such a vision—given the material, physiochemical connection of photographic images and photographically based film with the world represented (an issue to which we will return); the mortification and fragmentation involved in photographic exposure and framing; the transformation and reconfiguration of the material through cinematic editing. What is more, Kracauer’s gnostic and messianic sensibility not only attracted him to the photographic media but, more generally,