Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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same pace, and thorough rationalization remained largely an aspiration.6 But to the extent that it was becoming a reality, the American system of mass production and consumption signaled a paradigmatically distinct set of values, visions, sensibilities—less a dichotomously understood assault of modern civilization on traditional culture than a specific material, perceptual, and social regime of modernization that competed with European versions of modernity.
I am less interested here in situating Kracauer within canonical Weimar debates on modernity than in tracing his engagement with American-style mass and media culture as it evolved between 1924 and 1933—not only as a response to the mounting political crisis and bourgeois culture’s failure to address it but also as an elaboration of issues that point beyond both the historical moment and the national frame of reference. During the brief period between the great inflation and the end of the Weimar Republic, Kracauer turned “Amerika” from a metaphysically grounded metaphor of disenchanted modernity into a diagnostic framework for exploring the manifold and contradictory realities of modern life under the conditions of advanced capitalism. As elaborated in chapter 1, the materialist impulse to register, transcribe, and archive the surface manifestations of modernity was initially motivated—as well as licensed—by the eschatologically tinged hope that modernity could and would be overcome: “America will disappear only when it completely discovers itself.”7 However, the self-reflexive construction of this phrase also suggests that the object of discovery harbors its own means and media of cognition and self-understanding; by the same logic, it implies that the discovering subject cannot remain outside or above the terrain explored. Accordingly, the more Kracauer immersed himself in the project, the less sanguine he became about the possibility of transcending modernity, and the more passionately he engaged in immanent critique. Thus, in the face of rising National Socialism, he sought to describe the particular ways in which technologically mediated and market-based culture seemed at once to furnish the conditions for self-reflexivity and self-determination on a mass scale and to neutralize and undermine those very principles.
In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the connection between Americanism qua industrial rationalization and the new mass-mediated culture, in particular cinema, was by no means established—at least not until the implementation of the Dawes Plan in 1924, which ushered in at once a large-scale campaign of rationalization and the consolidation of Hollywood’s hegemony in the German market.8 In a report for the Frankfurter Zeitung on a conference of the Deutsche Werkbund in July 1924, Kracauer presents this gathering of designers, industrialists, educators, and politicians as a site of missed connections. The conference was devoted to two main topics, “the fact of Americanism, which seems to advance like a natural force,” and the “artistic significance of the fiction film.”9 Kracauer observes a major shortcoming in the speakers’ basic approach to Americanism: they went all out to explore its “total spiritual disposition,” but, true to the Werkbund’s professed status as an “apolitical organization,” they left the “economic and political conditions upon which rationalization . . . is based substantially untouched.” While both proponents and critics of rationalization seemed to articulate their positions with great conviction and ostensible clarity, the second topic of the conference, concerning the fiction film, remained shrouded in confusion. “Curiously, perhaps due to deep-seated prejudices, the problem of film was dealt with in a much more biased and impressionistic way than the fact of mechanization, even though both phenomena, Americanism and film composition, after all belong to the same sphere of surface life.”
The metaphysically grounded concern over the “disintegration” of the world had prompted Kracauer to turn his attention to that very “sphere of surface life,” to the seemingly inconspicuous phenomena of the modern urban everyday and the culturally despised practices of popular literature and entertainment. This turn entailed an epistemological valorization of the term surface, previously associated with lapsarian laments over mechanization and the hegemony of instrumental reason or rationality (Ratio), the ascendance of Gesellschaft over Gemeinschaft , the crisis of the self-determined individual, and the breakdown of traditional belief and value systems (“transcendental homelessness”). Instead, Kracauer increasingly came to view the surface or Oberfläche as a Denkfläche, or plane for thinking, an as-yet-uncharted map for the exploration of contemporary life.10
Kracauer’s empirical efforts to trace “the inconspicuous surface-level expressions” of modern life were guided, though, by the theoretical objective to determine “the position that an epoch occupies in the historical process,” that is, the direction(s) that modernity would or could take.11 Key to this project was the critique of capitalism, without which the critique of modernity would have remained marooned in metaphysical pessimism. As is often noted, Kracauer’s reading of Marx and Marxist theory beginning in 1925 radicalized his earlier materialist impulses into a critical program. At the same time, actual developments in the process of modernization, in particular the implementation of Fordist-Taylorist methods of production and the increased circulation of American entertainment products from the mid-twenties on, both confirmed and challenged the Marxist analysis of capitalism in specific ways.
The effort to grasp the ongoing transformations posed heuristic and methodological problems—concerning the relationship of theory and empirical reality and that of totality and the particular—to which Kracauer found no satisfactory answers in the established academic disciplines, least of all philosophy, in particular German idealist thought in the tradition of Kant and Hegel.12 Theoretical thinking schooled in that tradition, he felt, proved increasingly incapable of grasping a changed and changing reality, a “reality filled with corporeal things and people” (MO 140; S 5.1:169). Accordingly, his earlier despair over the direction of the historical process turned into a concern over the lack of a heuristic discourse, over the fact that “the objectively-curious [das Objektiv-Neugierige] lacks a countenance.”13
Neither did he find such a discourse in the discipline of sociology and social theory, which should have been the place for conceptualizing concrete changes in social organization and social behavior under the conditions of capitalist modernity.14 It was not that the critique of Western rationality, notably Max Weber’s, ignored capitalist modes of production and exchange. In Kracauer’s view, however, this critique still operated at an idealist level of abstraction because it posited the Ratio as a transhistorical, ontological category of which the current phase of capitalism was just a particular inevitable and unalterable incarnation. He extended this reproach even to Georg Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness (1923) had persuasively fused Weber’s theory of rationalization with Marx’s theory of the commodity and was to become major impulse for Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School. Kracauer not only rejected Lukács’s notion of the proletariat as both object and subject of a Hegelian dialectics of history but also balked at the conception of reality as a totality.15 For Kracauer, the diagnosis of the historical process required the construction of categories from within the material; bringing Marx up to date, he wrote to Ernst Bloch, required “a dissociation of Marxism in the direction of the realities.”16
In this regard, Kracauer, like many of his generation, found inspiration in Georg Simmel, a thinker who moved between, across, and beyond the disciplines of philosophy and sociology and who, as early as 1903, had asserted the significance of the “seemingly insignificant traits on the surface of life.”17 Having attended Simmel’s lectures and corresponded with him, Kracauer devoted a substantial monograph to him in 1919: “Simmel was the first to open for us the gateway to the world of reality.”18 He authorized the exploration of the quotidian, ephemeral, and coincidental, the mundane reality of everyday life and leisure and attendant modes of social interaction. Unlike “thinkers rooted in transcendental idealism who try to capture the material manifold of the world by means of a few wide-meshed general concepts” and end up missing precisely the “existential plenitude of these phenomena,” Simmel, according to Kracauer, “snuggles much closer to his objects” (MO 242). He offered a theorizing mode of description grounded in “perceptual experience”—“he observes [the material] with an inner eye and describes what he sees” (MO 257)—that is, an aesthetic disposition to which Kracauer was to add the eye for spatial dynamics and