Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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he rejected Simmel’s vitalist penchant to show every object as interconnected with everything else, thus making individual phenomena symbolize the infinite connectedness of the manifold as a living totality. Not only had Kracauer lost the confidence in any meaningful interconnectedness; the very breakdown of totality was for him a defining feature—and opportunity—of the historical moment, marking the difference of modernity from preceding periods. Hence, he insisted vis-à-vis Simmel on treating the sundered fragments as fragments, in their own mode of being (“Eigensein”).
Kracauer’s curiosity about contemporary realities made him drift , more radically than Simmel, toward the proliferating sites, media, and practices of consumption, including their shadow counterpart, the public yet “unseen” sites of deprivation and misery. Beginning around 1925, his articles increasingly revolve around objects of daily use, metropolitan spaces and modes of circulation, and the media, rituals, and institutions of an expanding leisure culture. As remarkable as the range of topics is the change of tone and differentiation of stance in Kracauer’s writing. Although the critique of the capitalist grounding of modernization continues—and actually becomes fiercer by the end of the decade—it is no longer linked to a metaphysically based pessimistic attitude. If in his programmatic essay of 1922, “Those Who Wait,” Kracauer had already endorsed a “hesitant openness” toward modernization, by 1925 he professes an “uncertain, hesitant affirmation of the civilizing process” (MO 138, 73). Such a stance, Kracauer argues in his essay “Travel and Dance,” is “more realistic than a radical cult of progress, be it of rationalist lineage or aimed directly at the utopian. But it is also more realistic than the condemnations by those who romantically flee the situation they have been assigned.” With an openness that does not abdicate critical awareness, the observer “views the phenomena that have freed themselves from their foundation not just categorically as deformations and distorted reflections, but accords them their own, after all positive possibilities” (MO 73; S 5.1:295).
Which particular possibilities did Kracauer perceive in Weimar modernity, especially the cultural manifestations of Americanism? What in this specific regime of modernization did he see as different and potentially liberatory? While he occasionally still deplores the “machinelike” quality of modern existence, he begins to be fascinated by new entertainment forms that turn the “fusion of people and things” into a creative principle. He first observes this principle at work in the musical revues then sweeping across German vaudeville stages: “The living approximates the mechanical, and the mechanical behaves like the living.”19 With an enthusiasm that sounds untypically close to the language of “white socialism,” Kracauer reports on the Frankfurt performance of the Tiller Girls, whose tour inaugurated the “American age” in Germany.20 “What they accomplish is an unprecedented labor of precision, a delightful Taylorism of the arms and legs, mechanized charm. They shake the tambourine, they drill to the rhythms of jazz, they come on as the boys in blue: all at once, pure duodeci-unity [Zwölfeinigkeit]. Technology whose grace is seductive, grace that is genderless because it rests on joy of precision. A representation of American virtues, a flirt by the stopwatch.”21
Kracauer’s pleasure in such precision does not rest with forms inspired by technology but with the aesthetic rendering of social and sexual configurations coarticulated with the new technological regime. It is significant that he does not conflate mechanization and rationalization with an a priori negative concept of standardization, or feel threatened by the flaunted loss of individuality. In the stylized economy of the revue, its fragmentary, serial, incessantly metamorphosing patterns, standardization translates into a sensual celebration of collectivity, a vision, perhaps a mirage, of equality, cooperation, and solidarity. It is also a vision of gender mobility and androgyny (girls dressed as sailors)—a mark of Americanism for both its proponents and enemies—though perhaps at the price of a retreat from sexuality and denial of sexual difference. Still, Kracauer’s account conveys a glimpse of a different organization of social and gender relations—different at least from the patriarchal order of the Wilhelmine family and norms of sexual behavior that clashed with both the reality of working women and Kracauer’s own sensibility.22
The Taylorist aesthetics of the revue also suggests a different conception of the body from that subtending traditional humanist notions of a unitary, autonomous self. Writing about two “excentric dancers” (Exzentriktänzer) performing live in the Ufa Theater, Kracauer asserts that the precision and grace of their act “transform the body-machine into an atmospheric instrument.” They defy physical laws of gravity, not by assimilating technology to the phantasm of a complete, masculine body (such as the armored body of the soldier-hero), but by playing with the fragmentation and dissolution of that body: “When, for instance, they throw one leg around in a wide arc . . . it is really no longer attached to the body, but the body, light as a feather, has become an appendix to the floating leg.”23 This image evokes similar visions in contemporary visual art and experimental film, such as of Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger’s Ballet méchanique, Hans Bellmer’s broken dolls, or Hannah Höch’s collages.24 Within Kracauer’s oeuvre, the aesthetic pleasure in the suspension of the “natural” body’s boundaries may also be read as a playful variant of his masochistic imagination, which (in a number of his essays and in his novel Ginster) again and again stages the violation of physical and mental identity by extraneous objects and sensations.25 As a creative critique of ideology, the jumbling of the hierarchy of center and periphery in the dancers’ bodies, their fragmentation as well as prosthetic expansion, undermines both older bourgeois notions of an “integrated personality” and ongoing attempts (in sports, in “body culture”) to reground “the spirit” in an organic, natural unity.26
Not least, Kracauer’s valorization of Taylorist revue aesthetics and the “American influence” on the genre served to excoriate the retrograde style of the show’s German numbers, with their mélange of monarchism (“Queen Luise descending from a perron in historical costume”), militarism, mother love, and Viennese Gemüt. However, when he returns to these examples in an all-round polemic against the genre a few months later, the Tiller Girls likewise fall prey to sarcastic condemnation (mindless “automata” “produced by Ford”). The refrain that ironically punctuates the essay, “in the age of technology,” highlights the gap between technological modernization and a culture not up to its challenges.27 The phrase also suggests a lack of consciousness in the very cultural products that flaunt their synchronicity and presentness, a point that anticipates his concern about the “muteness” of the mass ornament.
Kracauer’s fascination with—and growing ambivalence toward—aesthetic forms corresponding to the Americanist regime of rationalization was not limited to the serial displays of the revues. In fact, some of his most interesting writing concerning such aesthetics can be found in his articles on the circus.28 His review of Zirkus Hagenbeck, published a year before his essay “The Mass Ornament,” reads like a sketch for the latter. Kracauer introduces the appearance of the giant menagerie in Frankfurt as an “International of animals,” describing the animals as involuntary delegates from globally extended regions, united under the spell of Americanism: “The fauna moves rhythmically and forms geometrical patterns. There is nothing left of dullness. As unorganic matter snaps into crystals, mathematics seizes the limbs of living nature and sounds control the drives. The animal world, too, has fallen for jazz. . . . Every animal participates in the creation of the empire of figures according to its talents. Brahmin zebus, Tibetan black bears, and massifs of elephants: they all arrange themselves according to thoughts they did not think themselves.”29
The regime of heteronomous reason rehearsed on the backs of the animals would be merely pathetic if it weren’t for the clowns whose anarchic pranks debunk the imperialist claims of rationalization: “They too want to be elastic and linelike, but it doesn’t work; the elephants are more adroit, one has too many inner resistances, some goblin crosses out the elaborate calculation” (FT 110).30 While their antics have a long tradition, the clowns assume alterity in relation to the ongoing process of modernization; they inhabit the intermediary realm of improvisation and chance that, for Kracauer, is the redeeming supplement of that process and that has come into existence only with the