Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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avant-garde, including constructivism, dadaism, and surrealism, as well as atonal music.78 At the very least, his historico-theological framing of modernity provided him with an existential stance or ethos against efforts to restore bourgeois German culture notwithstanding the shattering defeat of the nation in a war conducted in the name of that very culture, efforts he discerned in the circle around Stefan George, the academic Goethe cult (Friedrich Gundolf), and the continuing glorification of the classics on the traditional stage. Paradoxically, Kracauer’s grounding in an ancient theological tradition not only made him more receptive to the ongoing upheavals in the material world but also authorized a radical critique of values and positions that he considered perilously out of touch with contemporary social, aesthetic, and political realities.
This critical ethos can be seen in at least three distinct yet related motifs. One is the programmatic direction of Kracauer’s gaze toward material phenomena and aspects of daily life marginalized by dominant culture, whether they lack (moral, aesthetic) value in the eyes of the educated bourgeoisie (like cinema), are assigned to oblivion by the presentism of ever-changing fashion (especially in architecture and design), or elude public awareness (as do unemployment offices, homeless shelters, the organization of urban traffic, etc.). Kracauer’s penchant for the detritus of history, both literally and metaphorically, for the ephemeral and quotidian, led Benjamin to characterize him as a (Baudelairean) chiffonnier, a “ragpicker.”79 But he could just as well have compared him to contemporary artists who deliberately chose ordinary, worthless, or devalued materials for their collages (such as Hannah Höch, Marianne Brandt, or Kurt Schwitters) or to the dadaist readymades and happenings that polemically exposed the contradictions of aesthetic hierarchies of value. Likewise, Kracauer would have gone part of the way with the surrealists (though avoiding their more mystical flights), on their excursions to flea markets and through the arcades, finding there the banished props of the body, pornographic specialities, odd souvenirs, and “homeless images” reminding the passerby of long-forgotten impulses and desires.80
In an article that reads almost like an exercise in “profane illumination,” a key concept in Benjamin’s 1929 essay on surrealism, Kracauer meditates on the “gentle glow” that emanates from the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at night.81 The glow is actually a reflection, effecting a spatial interpenetration of the traditional façade with the picture palaces on the Berlin Kurfürstendamm, which, with their pillars of light, glaring posters, and mirror-glass showcases, “turn night into day in order to banish the horror of the night from the working-day of their patrons” (S 5.2:184). Playing with literal and metaphoric senses of light, Kracauer switches with unusual pathos to an allegorical reading (“a flaming protest against the darkness of our existence . . . which flows, as if by itself, into the desperate embrace of the pleasure business”) and ends with a meditation on the “mild radiance” unintentionally bestowed by “this sinister glow.” “What the spectacle of light leaves over and what business has cast out is preserved by bleak walls. The outside of the church, which is not [used as] a church, becomes the refuge of what has been spilled and forgotten and shines as beautifully as if it were the Holy of Holies. Secret tears thus find their place of memory [Gedächtnisort]. Not in the hidden interior—in the middle of the street the neglected and inconspicuous is gathered and transformed until it begins to radiate, a comfort to everyone” (S 5.2:185).
A waste product of the relentless glare of modern entertainment and advertisement, the glowing exterior of an unused site of interiority becomes a surface for remembrance (Kracauer puns on the name of the church)—a public screen or, as the title suggests, a picture postcard inviting us to reflect upon what is being eclipsed, yet also unintentionally illuminated, by modernity’s spotlights: areas as yet undefined and unspectacular. To take this Denkbild or thought-image a step further, while deriving its light from the commercial theaters, the configuration of a reflexive surface in the dark, contingent sensory effects and mnemonic impulses, anonymous emotion in a public space—this configuration could well be read as Kracauer’s minimalist utopia of Lichtspiel, or light-play, the German word for cinema.82
A second, related motif in Kracauer’s critical arsenal is his own turn to the surface (Oberfläche) and his transvaluation of that term from a locus of sheer negativity, an atomized world of mere appearances, to a site in which contemporary reality manifests itself in an iridescent multiplicity of phenomena.83 Although the very trope of the surface still implies the vertical topography of idealist philosophy—essence and appearance, the hierarchy of truth and empirical reality—in Kracauer’s critical practice the Oberfläche increasingly loses its prefix and becomes a Fläche that offers a Denkfläche, an epistemological plane for tracing new configurations (such as the one he famously dubbed the “mass ornament”) and for reading surfaces as indices of the possible directions the historical process might take.84 This is not just a matter of reversing particular idealist hierarchies (as one might infer from his focus on the inconspicuous, degraded, ephemeral). Rather, Kracauer flattens any vertical and deep-rooted hierarchies into lateral relations, often by juxtaposing unequal elements on a two-dimensional plane.
In “Analysis of a City Map” (1926), he confronts the humanly teeming yet lackluster, marginalized life of the Faubourgs with the splendor of the Paris boulevards. He does not simply invert the hierarchy of center and periphery, for example, by nostalgically idealizing the Faubourgs as the domain of use value and neighborhood community. Rather, he puts into question the very opposition of use value and exchange value with an account of the new sites of consumption that, while critical, concludes, “Nevertheless, the streets that lead to the center must be traveled, for its emptiness today is real” (MO 44). By interrelating phenomena on a lateral force field, he draws attention to competing orders of significance and to the mechanisms that regulate public visibility and invisibility. The meaning of the phenomena themselves is no longer given or is as yet undefined; they are symptoms that need to be observed, described, deciphered, and interpreted.85
Kracauer’s turn to the surface is more than a methodological device; it marks a political move that derives its ethos from his historico-theological stance. Against the conservative denigration of the new entertainment and leisure culture, he defends the “modern urban surface culture” that mushroomed in Berlin between 1924 and 1929 in picture palaces and shopwindow displays.86 In his signal essay “Cult of Distraction” (FZ 4 March 1926) he valorizes the superficial glamour, the “pure externality” that draws the urban masses into the picture palaces, for no other purpose than Zerstreuung, or distraction—all pejorative terms in the dictionary of the educated bourgeoisie (probably the majority of the readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung, where the article was first published).87 He does not even like the new picture palaces (the article entails a critique of the gentrification of exhibition practices); but he insists on the cultural significance of these sites because they make visible to society and to the patrons themselves a new public and a new form of mass subjectivity. The polemical edge is directed against all and any attempts to resurrect forms of subjectivity, interiority, and individuality that have been rendered anachronistic by the traumatic impact of war and inflation.
It is not externality that poses a threat to truth. Truth is threatened only by the naive affirmation of cultural values that have become unreal and by the careless misuse of concepts such as personality, inwardness, tragedy, and so on—terms that in themselves certainly refer to lofty ideas but that have lost much of their scope along with their supporting foundations, due to social changes. . . . In a profound sense, Berlin audiences act truthfully when increasingly they shun these art events (which, for good reason, remain caught in mere pretension), preferring instead the surface glamour of the stars, films, revues, and production values. (MO 326; W 6.1:210–11)
Similar to artistic avant-garde movements dating back to the war, Kracauer’s attack is aimed at the hypocrisy of bourgeois-idealist culture, specifically efforts to restore “the spirit” against the onslaught of mechanization, which was oft en used as a synonym for standardization, mass production, and mass consumption. Even if technology was not Kracauer’s primary theoretical focus (as it was for Benjamin), he would never have conceived of technically produced, mediated, and disseminated culture as a contradiction in terms, let alone