Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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name for any reality that posits itself as given and immutable, a social formation that remains “mute,” correlating with a consciousness “unable to see its own material base.” “One can certainly imagine a society that has fallen prey to a mute nature which has no meaning however abstract its silence. The contours of such a society emerge in the illustrated journals. Were it to endure, the emancipation of consciousness would result in the eradication of consciousness; the nature that it failed to penetrate would sit down at the very table that consciousness had abandoned” (MO 61).
However, if historically emancipation and reification have gone hand in hand, consciousness is also given an unprecedented opportunity to reoccupy the place at the table with a different agenda: “Less enmeshed in the natural bonds than ever before, it could prove its power in dealing with them.” In this alternative, Kracauer pinpoints the significance of the photographic media for the direction of the present, the fate of modernity: “The turn to photography is the go-for-broke game of history.”
In the eighth and final section of the essay, Kracauer steps up the rhetorical stakes of this gamble to highlight the historical chance that presents itself with photography, an argument that turns into a case for the photographic foundation of film. In a vast panoramic collage, he evokes the image of a “general inventory” or “main archive” (Hauptarchiv) that assembles the infinite totality of outdated photographs. “For the first time in history, photography brings to light the entire natural cocoon; for the first time, it lends presence to the world of death in its independence from human beings” (MO 62; S 5.2:96). In the dialectics of presence effect and disintegration, the medium-specific negativity of photography comes to define its politically progressive potential, indeed its task “to disclose this previously unexamined foundation of nature“ (MO 61–62). In the confrontation with “the unabashedly displayed mechanics of industrial society,” photography enables consciousness to view “the reflection [Widerschein] of the reality that has slipped away from it” (MO 62).
Understood as a general warehousing of nature, photography provides an archive that makes visible, in a sensually and bodily experienced way, both the fallout of modernity and the possibility of doing it over, of organizing things differently. This archive, though, is anything but easy to access and navigate; it is rather an an-archive—a heap of broken images—that lends itself to the task precisely because it lacks any obvious and coherent organizational system.113 It is closer in spirit to dadaist or surrealist montage (or, for that matter, the essay’s epigraph from Grimm’s Fairy Tales and “Calico-World”):
Photography shows cities in aerial shots, brings crockets [Krabben] and figures from the Gothic cathedrals. All spatial configurations are incorporated into the main archive in unusual overlaps [Überschneidungen] that distance them from human proximity. Once the grandmother’s costume has lost its relationship to the present, it will no longer be funny; it will be peculiar, like a submarine octopus. One day the diva will lose her demonic quality and her bangs will go the same way as the chignons. This is how the elements crumble since they are not held together. The photographic archive assembles in effigy the last elements of a nature alienated from meaning. (MO 62; S 5.2:96–97)
From a future vantage point that shows the present intermingled with everything else that’s past, and the human nonhierarchically cohabitating with the nonhuman, even the illustrated magazines lose their market-driven actuality and coverage effect; their images become as random, fragmentary, and ephemeral as the portraits and snapshots in the family album. Kracauer’s photographic an-archive evokes Benjamin’s image of the backward-flying Angel of History facing the wreckage piled up by a storm from paradise, written at a time when the historical gamble seemed all but lost. Kracauer’s vision is not quite as desperate: it still discerns concrete images of disfiguration, assembled in a textual bricolage.
The passage cited reinforces the essay’s programmatic subordination of photographic resemblance or iconicity to the idea that photographs do not simply replicate but are themselves part of nature; they are material objects like the commodities they depict in their configuration of and with the human.114 More than that, Kracauer’s text materializes the photographs of the star and the grandmother as “things”—in the emphatic sense of “thingness” theorized by Heidegger.115 Like Heidegger’s famous jug, the two exemplary images take on an amazing plasticity, tactility, and agency; they spawn and participate in public life and disclose their meanings through social usage and cultural practices. Unlike the jug, however, which seems to exist—and endure—in an abstract timeless, if not mythic, space, Kracauer’s photo-things are temporal and transient; their very thingness emerges in the dynamics of split-second exposure, commodified presence effect, and archival aft erlife. The encounter with aged photographs does not put the beholder in touch with a reality repressed by scientific reason and capitalist appropriation, let alone with nature, but rather with the historical reality of irreducible mediation and alienation.
Kracauer’s investment in photographic negativity is fueled by photography’s potential to point up the disintegration of traditional and reinvented unities, the arbitrariness of social and cultural arrangements at the level of both the individual image and the protocols of public media. Once the bonds that sustained the memory image are no longer given, the task of artistic and critical practice is “to establish the provisional status of all given configurations.” Kracauer finds a model of writing that “demolishes natural reality and displaces the fragments against each other” (MO 62; S 5.2:97) in the works of Franz Kafka, whose novel The Castle he had reviewed enthusiastically a year earlier.116 If that review reads like a blueprint for Kracauer’s early gnostic-modernist theory of film, the photography essay makes this connection explicit. By putting techniques of framing and editing to defamiliarizing effect (associating “parts and segments to create strange figurations”), film has the capacity not only to make evident the “disorder of the detritus reflected in photography” by suspending “every habitual relationship among the elements of nature,” but also to “stir up,” to mobilize and reconfigure those elements (MO 62–63; S 5.2:97). Combining photographic contingency with cinematic montage, film can “play” with “the pieces of disjointed nature” in a manner “reminiscent of dreams“ (MO 63). In other words, similar to the oneiric imbrication of the remains of the most recent and ordinary with the hidden logic of the unconscious, film could animate and reassemble the inert, mortified fragments of photographic nature to suggest the possibility of a different history.
Although film becomes the overt object of Kracauer’s reflections only at the end, the whole essay is central to his emerging film theory, if not conceived from this vantage point.117 In that sense, it provides the foundation for his later effort, in Theory of Film, to ground a “material aesthetics” of the cinema in the photographic basis of film. In that text, the earlier essay remains curiously unmentioned, perhaps relegated to forgetting by the catastrophic defeat in modernity’s hitherto most extreme gamble. Nonetheless, as I argue in chapter 9, whatever cinema’s potential for “the redemption of physical reality,” Kracauer’s advocacy of realism in the later book remains tied to a historical understanding of physis and a concept of reality that depends as much on the estranging and metamorphic effects of cinematic representation as on the role of the viewer. As the photography essay makes sufficiently clear, Kracauer’s conception of film’s relationship with photography is not grounded in any simple or “naive” referential realism. On the contrary, it turns on film’s ability to mobilize and play with the reified, unmoored, multiply mediated fragments of the modern physis, a historically transformed world that includes the viewer as materially contingent, embodied subject. The concept of realism at stake is therefore less a referential than an experiential one, predicated on the encounter with that world under radically changed and changing conditions of referentiality.
Kracauer does not posit the relationship between photography and film in evolutionary terms, but seeks to articulate an aesthetic of film in the interstices of the two media. In this intermedial space, film does not “remediate” photography by way of containing it;118 rather, photography, running alongside and intersecting with film both institutionally and ideologically, provides