Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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theorized in the essay on the mass ornament. Even in Die Angestellten, the pessimistic tenor of the study is punctured by the possibility, though weak at this point, of self-representation and self-reflection on a mass scale.
Rationalization and distraction dovetail specifically in the emergence of new forms of socialization and identity fashioning. Under the heading “Selection,” Kracauer examines the criteria by which individuals succeed, or fail, in a competitive labor market. In addition to youth, which is paramount to employability and accordingly fetishized in employee culture, a generally “pleasant appearance” is as important as regular physical features and proper dress. The ideal personality is “ ‘not exactly pretty,’ ” Kracauer quotes a staff manager of a Berlin department store as saying; “ ‘what’s far more crucial is . . . oh, you know, a morally pink complexion’ ” (SM 38). Neither too severely moral nor too passionately pink, the proper skin color is supposed to warrant an instantaneous legibility of inner qualities through outwardly visible features. This shift toward the visible exterior in turn encourages the cultivation of a uniform appearance on the part of the subjects under scrutiny. “It is scarcely too hazardous to assert that in Berlin a salaried type is developing, standardized in the direction of the desired complexion. Speech, clothes, gestures, and physiognomies become assimilated and the result of the process is that very same pleasant appearance which can be widely reproduced by means of photographs” (SM 39; W 1:230).
If the employees are taking on “a photographic face,” to invoke Kracauer’s photography essay (MO 59), they are assisted in this effort by the movies. The circularity of mass-cultural identity formation becomes a topos in Kracauer’s writing around this time, as in the notorious statement from the shopgirls essay: “Sensational film drama and life usually correspond to each other because the mademoiselles-typists [Tippmamsells] fashion themselves after the models on screen; it may be, however, that the most spurious models are stolen from life itself ” (MO 292; W 6.1:309). Kracauer’s observation of a loop effect in the way mass culture has come to mediate the social construction of subjectivity anticipates similar observations in postmodern media criticism.
Kracauer’s insights into the workings of mass-cultural subjectivity are thrown into relief by a comparison with Benjamin’s reflections on the masses. As I discuss in more detail in chapter 3, these reflections oscillate between a turn-of-the-century pessimistic view of the mass or crowd, as distinct from the proletariat, and his attempt (famously in the artwork essay) to reclaim a progressive concept of the masses—in the plural—as revolutionary productive force by way of a structural affinity with technological reproduction, in particular film. Indebted to Béla Balázs, the assumption of such an affinity turns on the phenomenological claim that film, in Kracauer’s paraphrase, “by breaking down the distance of the spectator that had hitherto been maintained in all the arts, is an artistic medium turned toward the masses.”81 Benjamin establishes the revolutionary potential of film from the by now familiar argument aligning the fate of art and the aesthetic with the rise of industrial-technological re/production. As a result, the masses figure primarily as the hypothetical subject of a technologically mediated mode of perception rather than an empirical entity defined by the social, psychosexual, and cultural profile of the moviegoing public. The masses that Benjamin sees structurally corresponding to the cinema do not coincide with the actual working class (whether blue-collar or white-collar) but with the proletariat as a category of Marxist philosophy, a category of negation directed against existing conditions in their totality. As the self-sublating prototype of the proletariat, the cinematic masses are attributed a degree of homogeneity that misses the actual and unprecedented mixture of classes—as well as genders and generations—that had been observed in cinema audiences early on (notably by sociologist Emilie Altenloh in her 1914 study).82 This construction ultimately leaves the intellectual in a position outside, at best surrendering to the masses’ existence as powerful, though still unconscious, other. Where Kracauer self-consciously constructs the reality of the salaried employees through at once participatory and critical observation, Benjamin’s image of the masses, whether projected backward into the nineteenth century or forward into the not-yet of the proletarian revolution, ultimately remains a philosophical, if not aesthetic, abstraction.
One could argue that Kracauer’s analysis of mass culture as employee culture is just as one-sided as Benjamin’s linkage of film and proletariat. He himself stresses the specificity of Berlin’s leisure culture as a pronounced Angestelltenkultur, “i.e. a culture made by employees for employees and seen by most employees as a culture” (SM 32). Yet to say that this particular focus eclipses the rest of society, especially the working class, would be as misleading as to conceive of mass culture and employee culture as an opposition.83 Rather, Kracauer’s analysis recognizes the dynamic by which the subculture of the employees, with their self-image as new middle estate, was becoming hegemonic for society as a whole; in its fantasies of class transcendence and fixation on outward appearance and visuality, employee culture provided a matrix for a specifically modern, social and national, imaginary. In an article “on the actor” (occasioned by a radio lecture by Max Reinhardt), Kracauer links this process to the shift from industrial to finance capital, which makes even the executive director a salaried employee. “More and more people today turn into employees; they are employed, though, by a power that has no meaning.”84 The ostensible inevitability of the economic system encourages a social behavior of “role-playing.” Increasingly removed from the production of material goods, individuals resort to acting in a double sense: “For one thing, they have to play a role because there is no substance that would tie them to a particular part; for another, they want to play a role because they are who they are not by themselves but by means of external recognition” (S 5.2:233).
This double sense of social role-play implies the possibility of a performative self-fashioning; at the same time, it circumscribes that creativity as specular and narcissistic. The cinema facilitates both tendencies through a phantasmatic mode of perception in which the boundaries between self and heteronomous images are liquefied, revealed to be porous in the first place, allowing viewers to let themselves “be polymorphously projected” (MO 332; S 5.1:279). While in the mid-twenties this psychoperceptual mobility still beckoned Kracauer with pleasures of self-abandonment and anonymity, by the end of the decade it made him view “the unreal film fantasies” as the “daydreams of society,” and thus symptomatic of contemporary ideology: “In reality it may not oft en happen that a scullery maid marries the owner of a Rolls Royce. But don’t the Rolls Royce owners dream that the scullery maids dream of rising to their level?” (MO 292; W 6.1:309). In other words, by channeling legitimate dreams of upward mobility into a narrative dispositif that couples romance and class transcendence, the film industry organizes the “interplay of the fantasies of the ruling class with those of the ruled” (Benjamin);85 it thereby generates and perpetuates a social imaginary that prevents the recognition of—and action upon—economic and class inequality.
In granting such film fantasies—and the desire bound up in them—a substance of their own, Kracauer implicitly distances himself from more orthodox Marxist concepts of ideology. To be sure, he shares and emphatically endorses the insight “that the form of our economy determines the form of our existence. Politics, law, art, and morality are the way they are because capitalism is.”86 And while he pinpoints particular ideologies and their internal dynamics, he nevertheless recognizes the logic of ideology in the singular, as a matrix that structures social relations and the cultural practices that work to diffuse the contradictions endemic to capitalist society. But for Kracauer the systemic character of ideology is not sufficiently accounted for by the commodity form or a Lukácsian logic of reification. Rather, he identifies equally important sources of systematicity in areas that orthodox Marxists would assign to a deterministically understood superstructure, in particular language and the unconscious. “This after all is the genius of language,” he writes analyzing the signs in an unemployment office, “that it fulfills orders that were not given to it and erects bastions in the unconscious.”87
In one of his two reviews of Die Angestellten, Benjamin acclaims Kracauer’s literary, in particular satiric, forays into the psychic disposition that constitutes ideology