Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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engage rationalization on, as it were, its own turf was of course the cinema, which assured them an audience far beyond local and live performances. In numerous reviews, Kracauer early on praised slapstick comedy (Groteske) as a cultural form in which Americanism supplied a popular and public antidote to its own system. Like no other genre, slapstick comedy seemed to subvert the economically imposed regime in well-improvised orgies of destruction, confusion, and parody. “One has to hand this to the Americans: with slapstick films they have created a form that offers a counterweight to their reality: if in that reality they subject the world to an often unbearable discipline, the film in turn dismantles this self-imposed order quite forcefully.”32
To the extent that Kracauer’s theorizing of slapstick concerns the assimilation of human beings to the mechanical, it harks back to Bergson’s famous essay on laughter, Le rire (1900). However, Kracauer’s interest in the genre is decisively more anarchistic and iconoclastic. He extolled slapstick as a creative critique not only of the regime of the assembly line but also of a culture predicated on bourgeois individualism and anthropocentrism. Thus he emphasizes the mutual imbrication of the living and the mechanical, the “revolt of the slaves” (Simmel) that animates material objects and puts them on a par with human agents.33 Human beings in turn assume a thinglike physiognomy (a case in point is Keaton’s deadpan face); lacking the authority and interiority of a sovereign ego, they are vulnerable to the push and pull, the malice of objects as well as people.34 Reviewing Chaplin’s Gold Rush, Kracauer writes: “He [Chaplin] shrinks back from the door that leaps ajar behind his back because it too is an ego; everything that asserts itself, dead and living things alike, possesses a power over him toward whom one has to take off one’s hat, and so he keeps taking off his hat.”35
Kracauer was only one among a great number of European avant-garde artists and intellectuals (such as dadaists and surrealists) who celebrated slapstick film, and their numbers grew with the particular inflection of the genre by Chaplin.36 Benjamin, too, ascribed to slapstick comedy a radical social and political significance, which complemented his often dutiful and at best sporadic endorsements of Soviet film. He considered Chaplin an exemplary figure primarily because of his mimetic “innervation” of assembly-line technology, a “gestic” rendering of the experience of perceptual and bodily fragmentation. In abstracting the human body and making its alienation readable, Chaplin joins Kafka and other figures in which Benjamin discerned a return of the allegorical mode in modernity—except that Chaplin’s appeal combines melancholy with the force of involuntary collective laughter.
Where Benjamin emphasizes self-fragmentation and “self-alienation” in Chaplin, Kracauer locates the figure’s appeal in an already missing self: “The human being that Chaplin embodies or, rather, does not embody but lets go of, is a hole. . . . He has no will; in the place of the drive toward self-preservation or the hunger for power there is nothing inside him but a void that is as blank as the snow fields of Alaska” (W 6.1:270, 269). In this regard, Chaplin resembles the protagonist of Kracauer’s novel Ginster (1928), a connection first made by Joseph Roth: “Ginster in the War—that’s Chaplin in the department store!”37
Whether from lack of identity or inability to distinguish between self and multiplied self-images (as Kracauer observes with reference to the hall-of-mirror scene from Circus), Chaplin instantiates a “schizophrenic” vision in which the habitual relations among people and things are shattered and different configurations appear possible (W 6.1:269); like a flash of lightning, Chaplin’s laughter “welds together madness and happiness.”38 The absent center of Chaplin’s persona allows for a reconstruction of humanity under alienated conditions—“from this hole the purely human radiates discontinuously . . . the human that is otherwise stifled below the surface, that cannot shimmer through the shells of ego consciousness” (W 6.1:269–70). A key aspect of this humanity is a form of mimetic behavior that disarms the aggressor or malicious object by way of mimicry and adaptation, and that assures the temporary victory of the weak, marginalized, and disadvantaged, of David over Goliath.39
For Kracauer, Chaplin is both a diasporic figure and “the pariah of the fairy tale,” a genre that makes happy endings imaginable and at the same time puts them under erasure. The vagabond again and again learns “that the fairy tale does not last, that the world is the world, and that home [die Heimat] is not home” (W 6.2:494). If Chaplin has messianic connotations for Kracauer, it is in the sense that he represents at once the appeal of a utopian humanism and its impossibility, the realization that the world “could be different and still continues to exist” (W 6.2:34).40 Chaplin exemplifies this humanism under erasure both in his films and by his worldwide and ostensibly class-transcendent popularity. While Kracauer is skeptical as to the ideological function of reports that, for instance, the film City Lights managed to move both prisoners in a New York penitentiary to laughter and George Bernard Shaw to tears, he nonetheless tackles the question of Chaplin’s “power” to reach human beings across class, nations, and generations (W 6.2:492)41—the possibility, ultimately, of a universal language of mimetic transformation that would make mass culture an imaginative horizon for people trying to live a life in the war zones of modernization.
Compared to Benjamin’s, Kracauer’s interest in Chaplin and slapstick comedy— as in cinema in general—was less focused on the question of technology, either in the Marxist sense as a productive force or as a Heideggerian enframing or Gestell. He was primarily concerned with the ways in which Fordist-Taylorist technology gave rise to a distinct socioeconomic and cultural formation that, more systematically than any previous form of modernization, addressed itself to the masses, thus constituting a specifically modern form of subjectivity. Since I focus on this concern in the following sections, I refrain from offering any general definition of Kracauer’s concept of the mass, or masses, not least because that concept is subject to significant fluctuation and ambiguity. Suffice it to note that, explicitly and implicitly, Kracauer’s exploration of this particular aspect of “Amerika” sets itself off, on the conservative side, against the long-standing lament about mass-marketed culture as well as late-nineteenth-century elitist-pessimistic theories of the crowd (as synthesized by Gustave Le Bon) that essentialized, psychologized, pathologized, and demonized the crowd, or mass in the singular, as an atavistic force that required a leader.42 On the politically progressive side, as we shall see, Kracauer tries to complicate leftist conceptions of the masses predicated on the industrial working class and the idea of a revolutionary proletariat. The metaphor of “discovering America,” after all, refers not simply to an object of exploration but to a heuristic strategy for discovering whatever might be qualitatively and historically distinct, as yet unrecognized and undefined, in a subject so overdetermined by competing discourses. Accordingly, rather than engaging directly with sociological, psychological, or political debates on the nature of the modern masses, Kracauer takes the detour through the ephemeral phenomena of the burgeoning entertainment culture—as configurations that at once spawn and respond to a new type of collective.
THE MASS AS ORNAMENT AND PUBLIC
The locus classicus of Kracauer’s analysis of Fordist mass culture is his 1927 essay “The Mass Ornament.” In this essay, the Tiller Girls have evolved into a historicophilosophical allegory that, as is often noted, anticipates key arguments of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947).43 Once exuberantly portrayed, the dance troupe now figures as a critical emblem of displays that proliferate internationally in cabarets, stadiums, and newsreels, patterns formed by thousands of anonymous, uniform, de-eroticized bodies (“sexless bodies in bathing suits” [MO 76]). The abstraction of the individual body into elements or building blocks for the composition of larger geometrical figures corresponds, as an “aesthetic reflex,” to the Taylorist principle of breaking down human labor into calculable units and refunctioning them in the form of working masses that can be globally deployed (MO 79). As a figure of capitalist rationality, Kracauer argues, the mass ornament is as profoundly ambivalent or ambiguous (zweideutig) as the historical process that brought it forth. On the one hand, it participates in the “process of demythologization” that emancipates humanity from the forces of nature and that, in Kracauer’s