Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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the rhetorical movement of Kracauer’s essay, part of a larger, more dialectical argument that turns on the constellation of photography, historical contingency, and film. As we have seen, the corrosive, allegorical gaze that drains the pretension of life and coherent meaning from contemporary media culture—a sensibility germane to Benjamin’s treatise on the baroque Trauerspiel—is a function of critical reading, beginning with the opening section.105 Yet at least as important is the essay’s effort to ascribe this effect to the temporality and historicity of the medium itself, performed by the two photographs as material objects. For much as photography and film were becoming complicit with the social denial of death, Kracauer still discerned in them the unprecedented possibility of confronting the subject with contingency and mortality, and of challenging the natural appearance of the prevailing social order.
Kracauer builds up to this turn from his meditation on the portrait of the grandmother, viewed as part of the family archive by the grandchildren. Because of its age, the temporal gap of more than sixty years that separates the moment of recording from its reception, the image of the grandmother poses the question of photographic referentiality in a different way from that of the diva. With the death of the “ur-image,” the connection with the living person may survive for a while by way of oral history but is ultimately loosened, literally defamiliarized, to the point of randomness—“it’s any young girl in 1864” (MO 48). Barely remembering the grandmother and the fragmentary stories about her, the children perceive in her photograph only a “mannequin” in an outmoded costume or, rather, a collection of once-fashionable accessories—the chignons, the tightly corseted dress—that have outlived their bearer. What makes the grandchildren giggle and at the same time gives them the creeps, Kracauer suggests, is that the photograph amalgamates these remnants with the incongruous assertion of a living presence. It is this “terrible association” that haunts the beholder like a ghostly apparition and makes him “shudder”; like the early films screened in the “Studio des Ursulines” in Paris, the aged photograph conjures up a disintegrated unity, a reality that is “unredeemed.” The configuration of its elements “is so far from necessary that one could just as well imagine a different organization of these elements” (MO 56).
Kracauer relates photography’s precarious afterlife to the split-second nature of photographic exposure—that is, he locates the problem precisely in the technologically supported indexical bond traditionally invoked to assert the photograph’s accuracy and authority. In the mechanical reduction of time to the moment of its origin, Kracauer observes, the photograph is intrinsically more vulnerable (than, for instance, film) to the subsequent passage of time: “If photography is a function of the flow of time, then its substantive meaning will change depending upon whether it belongs to the domain of the present or to some phase of the past” (MO 54). While the photograph of the diva maintains a tenuous connection, mediated by film, between the corporeal existence of the original and her still-vacillating memory image, the grandmother’s photograph affords no such comfort. In the measure that the photograph ages and outlives its referential context, the objects or persons depicted appear to be shrinking or diminishing in significance—in inverse proportion to memory images, which “enlarge themselves into monograms of remembered life.” The photograph represents merely the dregs that have “settled from the monogram”; it captures the remnants “that history has discharged” (MO 55). However, in the tension between history and that which history has discarded, photography begins to occupy the intermediary zone that appeals to Kracauer: the ragpicker, the intellectual seeking to gather the refuse and debris, the ephemeral, neglected, and marginal, the no longer functional.
Kracauer aligns the temporality of photography with that of fashion and discerns in both a characteristic feature of capitalist modernity—a connection already implicit in the German word for fashion, Mode.106 Like Benjamin, Kracauer is interested in fashion here primarily for its paradoxical imbrication of novelty and accelerated obsolescence, the moment when both photography and fashion, like all outdated commodities, join the ever-faster-growing garbage pile of modern history.107 While the very old traditional costume, which has lost all contact with the present, may attain “the beauty of a ruin,” the recently outmoded dress, pretending to photographic life, appears merely comical (MO 55).
The grandchildren’s giggles are a defense against dread, a shocklike, visceral recognition of their own contingency and mortality, of a history that does not include them. In a rhetorical gesture discussed earlier, Kracauer switches from the third person to the first, assuming the grandchildren’s shudder as his own: “This once clung to us like our skin, and this is the way our property clings to us even today. We are contained in nothing and photography assembles fragments around a nothing” (MO 56). Rather than affording a prosthetic extension into a period not lived by consciousness, the photograph irrupts into the beholder’s living present in an unsettling way, signaling his own physical transience along with the instability of the social and economic ground of his existence. In its emphasis on discontinuity and estrangement, this account anticipates Kracauer’s later discussions, in Theory of Film and his posthumously published History, of a passage from Proust in which the narrator, describing a visit to his grandmother after a long absence, actually equates the sudden, terrifying sight of her as a sick, dejected old woman with a photograph. For Kracauer, this passage marks photography as a “product of complete alienation,” epitomized by the view of a stranger unclouded by incessant love and memories, but also the vision of the exile who “has ceased to ‘belong’ ” (T 15; H 83).
Benjamin, too, in his “Little History of Photography” (1931), comments on the haunting quality of early photographs—something that remains in them “that cannot be silenced.”108 Likewise, he attributes this haunting quality to the photograph’s association with death, as in his evocation of the portrait of the nineteenth-century photographer Dauthendey and his fiancé, who was to commit suicide aft er the birth of their sixth child. But where Benjamin suggests the mystical possibility of a spark that leaps across the gap between the photograph’s time and his own, Kracauer stresses irreversible disjuncture and dissociation into dissimilarity. (It is important to note that he is talking less about the physical, chemically based process of decay than about a disintegration of the depicted material elements.) The photograph of the young grandmother-to-be does not return the gaze across generations. For Kracauer, the chilly breeze of the future that makes the beholder shudder conveys not only intimations of his own mortality but also the liberating sense of the passing of a history that is already dead, depriving the bourgeois social order of its appearance of coherence and continuity, necessity and legitimacy.109
More than an existential memento mori, the outdated photograph assumes the status of evidence in the historical process (or “trial,” as Benjamin will pun).110 What up to this point in the essay has remained a private, individual encounter emerges as a public and political possibility toward the end of the essay. It is precisely because of the medium’s negativity—its affinity with contingency, opacity to meaning, and tendency toward disintegration—that Kracauer attributes to photography a decisive role in the historical confrontation between human consciousness and nature. Shifting to the historico-philosophical register, he sees photography assigned to that stage of practical and material life at which an at once liberated and alienated consciousness confronts, as its objectified, seemingly autonomous opposite, “the foundation of nature devoid of meaning” (MO 61). In other words, it is the problematic indexicality at the heart of photographic representation that enables it to function as an index in the sense of deixis, an emblem pointing to— and pointing up—a critical juncture of modernity.111
As a category inseparable from history, nature refers both to the historically altered physis (including its ostensibly untouched preserves) and to the “second nature” of a society “[secreted by] the capitalist-industrial mode of production”— a social order that “regulates itself according to economic laws of nature” (MO 61).112 I’d like to stress that in this phase of Kracauer’s work his concept of nature, including the bodily and instinctual nature of human beings, has a ferociously pejorative valence, lacking the philosophical solidarity with nature as an object of domination and reification one finds, for instance, in Benjamin and Adorno and,