Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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historico-theological stance returns us to Adorno’s complaint about his friend’s insufficient rebellion against reification, pointing up a different deployment of gnostic imagery in their respective theorizing of modernity. Adorno, reared on the same sociological discourse as Kracauer, was wont to evoke the effects of reification in images of mortification, rigidification, and death by freezing (Kältetod), just as he often invoked Ferdinand Kürnberger’s dictum “Das Leben lebt nicht” (life does not live) as the fundamental experience of his generation.88 Kracauer, not quite as threatened by the contamination with the inanimate as his younger friend, visualized the process of petrification and withdrawal of meaning in modern society as a process of fragmentation and disintegration that simultaneously entailed a mobilization of fixed arrangements and conditions. Once he had moved beyond an account of modernity as the penultimate stop in a history of decline, Kracauer could see the fracturing of all familiar, “natural” relations and shapes, the “perforation” of traditional forms of living, increasingly as an opportunity—a chance to point up the “provisional status of all given configurations,” to highlight their transitory and transitional character.89 Focusing on sites of flux and improvisation, the historian of the present will watch the fragments reconfigure themselves, perhaps into something more livable.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE VABANQUE GAME OF HISTORY
The paradoxical relation between mortification and transformation emerges most strikingly in Kracauer’s major essay “Photography” (FZ, 28 Oct. 1927) and may help us to understand the centrality of the photographic to his theory of film. This text entwines several strands of his early film theory: lapsarian critique of modernity; phenomenological description of quotidian and ephemeral phenomena impelled by a gnostic-modernist materialism; avant-garde iconoclasm; and critique of ideology that resonates with the more immanent political approach his writings take from the mid-1920s on. It is also exemplary of the way in which he traces alternative perspectives and possibilities within the phenomena under critique, leaving room for an ambivalence grounded in the material, for stereoscopic and conflicted views. Finally, the essay commands attention as a mode of theoretical writing that enacts its argument as much in its stylistic procedures as in conceptual terms.
A common reading of Kracauer’s essay “Photography” takes its most important insight to be the opposition between the photographic image and the memory image, including the claim that the proliferation of technologically produced images threatens the very possibility and truth character of images preserved by memory.90 Against such a reading, which effectively assimilates Kracauer to a genealogy of media pessimism (from Baudelaire and Proust through Virilio and Baudrillard), I contend that the essay’s radical insights lie elsewhere. For Kracauer does not simply puncture the ideologically available assumption that the meaning of photographs is given in their analog, iconic relation to the object depicted; rather, he examines how meanings are constituted at the pragmatic level, in the usage and circulation of photographic images in both domestic and public media practices. Another, equally far-reaching concern of the essay is with the aging and aft erlife of photographs, the transformation they undergo over time, especially once they have lost their original reference and presence effect. In the precarious temporality and historicity of photography, its alienation from human intention and control, Kracauer traces a countervailing potential, neither positivistic nor nostalgic, that he believes can be actualized in the medium of film. It is this potential that places photography at the crossroads of modernity: “The turn to photography is the gofor-broke game [Vabanque-Spiel] of history” (MO 61; S 5.2:96).
The question of historicity no less concerns the aging and afterlife of the text itself. It takes the by now ritual form of asking whether and how an essay that emphatically seeks to theorize photography in relation to the historical moment— Weimar democracy between economic stabilization and crisis, the larger trajectory of technological capitalist modernity—can speak to a present in which the photographic paradigm, to the extent that it props its claims to authenticity and accuracy on an indexical (physical or existential) relation with the object depicted (the registration of reflected light on a photochemical surface at a particular point in space and time), seems to have been radically displaced and reframed by digital modes of imaging.91 What’s more, since the digital is not just another, more current medium, it has challenged traditional concepts of mediality and has made the idea of medium specificity, commonly taken to be central to classical film theory, appear as a high-modernist preoccupation.92 As I hope to show, Kracauer’s photography essay, much as it responds to a particular stage of media culture, points up issues of technological image production and usage, proliferation and storage that persist, in different forms and infinitely vaster dimensions, in the ostensibly postphotographic age; it likewise complicates key concepts of this debate—such as indexicality—by unfolding them as historically contingent and mutable. Finally, with a view to film theory and, not least, Kracauer’s own Theory of Film, the photography essay projects a film aesthetics that compels us to rethink the question of cinematic realism.
Like Benjamin’s artwork essay, which it prefigures in important ways, Kracauer’s photography essay is organized in discrete sections that frame the object of investigation in the manner of different camera positions or separate takes. The protagonists of the resulting theory film, so to speak, are two photographs that the writer introduces by way of juxtaposition: the contemporary image of a film star (caption: “our demonic diva”) on the cover of an illustrated journal and the portrait, more than six decades old, of an unspecified grandmother, possibly Kracauer’s own, cast in the private setting of family viewing. Both images show women twenty-four years old; both images become the respective focus of later sections; and both metamorphose in the course of the essay—until they are united, in the eighth and last section, in the surreal panorama of modernity’s “general inventory” or “main archive” (Hauptarchiv).
The image of the film star, posing in front of the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido, embodies the present moment (“time: the present”)—not just a fashionable cosmopolitan modernity but also a culture of presence, performance, perfection: “The bangs, the seductive tilt of the head, and the twelve eyelashes right and left —all these details, diligently enumerated by the camera, are in their proper place, a flawless appearance” (MO 47). Kracauer emphasizes the photograph’s double status as a material object that can be perceived in its sensory texture and a symbolic representation whose referent is elsewhere. Looking through a magnifying glass, one would see “the grain, the millions of dots that constitute the diva, the waves, and the hotel” (MO 47); at the same time, the image is an “optical sign” (MO 54) whose function it is to evoke the star as a unique, corporeal being. However, the referent that validates the sign in the eyes of the general public is not the star in person but her appearance in another medium: “Everyone recognizes her with delight, since everyone has already seen the original on the screen” (MO 47). Resuming the duodecimal figure of the well-groomed eyelashes, Kracauer goes on to assert the paradoxical effect of the star’s mass-mediated individuality with recourse to yet another entertainment intertext, that of the revue: “It is such a good likeness that she cannot be confused with anyone else, even if she is perhaps only one-twelfth of a dozen Tiller girls.”93 And he concludes the presentation of the star photograph with a deadpan refrain of the beginning of the paragraph: “Dreamily she stands in front of the Hotel Excelsior, which basks in her fame—a being of flesh and blood, our demonic diva, twenty-four years old, on the Lido. The date is September” (MO 47).
As he mounts his case against the ideology of presence and personality connoted by the mass-addressed image, Kracauer’s writing already punctures that effect, even before the passage of time will have disintegrated the photograph and relegated it to history’s vast central archive. The microscopic look that reveals “the millions of dots that constitute the diva, the waves, and the hotel” evokes the materialist, egalitarian pathos of Kracauer’s frequent observation that in film, the actor is nothing but “a thing among things.” The abstraction of the image into minimal units—halft one dots, a precursor to pixels94—defamiliarizes the resemblance with a particular living being; it also deflates the authority of the indexical bond (in the narrow sense of referring to the photochemical process of inscription) by foregrounding the image’s