Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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where things show their double face, holding the shrunken skyscrapers in their open hand; they have been liberated from a world whose splendor they nevertheless know.113
In the shrieks of the riders as they plunge into the abyss, Kracauer perceives not just fear but ecstasy, the bliss of “traversing a New York whose existence is suspended, which has ceased to be a threat.” This image evokes a vision of modernity whose spell as progress is broken, whose disintegrating elements become available in a form of collective reception in which self-abandonment and jouissance provide the impulse for critical reflection.
Two years later, in an article entitled “Organized Happiness,” Kracauer reports on the reopening of the same amusement park after major reconstruction. Now the attractions have been rationalized, and “an invisible organization sees to it that the amusements push themselves onto the masses in prescribed sequence,” he writes, anticipating Adorno as much as Disney World.114 Contrasting the behavior of these administered masses with the unregulated whirl of people at the Paris foires, Kracauer makes the familiar reference to the regime of the assembly line. Like the rationalized Sarrasani Circus, where the space for improvisation and playful parody has disappeared with “the elimination [Ausfall] of the clowns,” the organization of the refurbished Luna Park does not leave “the slightest gap.”115 When he arrives at the newly refurbished roller coaster, the scene has changed accordingly. Most of the cars are driven by young girls, “poor young things who are straight out of the many films in which salesgirls end up as millionaire wives.” They relish the “illusion” of power and control, and their screams are no longer that liberatory. “[Life] is worth living if one plunges into the depth only to dash upward again as a couple [zu zweit].” The seriality of the girl cult is no longer linked to visions of gender mobility and equality, but to the reproduction of private dreams of heterosexual coupledom and fantasies of upward mobility. Nor is this critique of the girl cult available, let alone articulated, in the same sphere or medium as the phenomenon itself (unlike Hollywood’s own demontage of the girl cult that Kracauer had celebrated in his review of Frank Urson’s film Chicago116); rather, it speaks the language of a critique of ideology in which the male intellectual remains outside and above the largely female, and feminized, public of mass consumption.
The hallmark of stabilized entertainment, however, is that the symbol of the illusion has been replaced. Instead of the Manhattan skyline, the façade is now painted with an “alpine landscape whose peaks defy any depression [Baisse].” All over the amusement park, in fact, Kracauer notes the popularity of “alpine panoramas”—“a striking sign of the upper regions that one rarely reaches from the social lowlands.” The image of the Alps not only naturalizes and mythifies economic and social inequity but also asserts an untouched, timeless nature, a place beyond contradiction and political crisis. Against the mass-mediated “urban nature”—with “its jungle streets, factory massifs, and labyrinths of roofs”—the alpine panoramas, like the contemporary mountain films, proffer a presumably unmediated nature as the solution to modernity’s discontents.117 The recourse to antimodern symbols does not make this alternative any less modern: As Kracauer increasingly excoriates the return, in German films and revues, of the Alps, the Rhine, Old Vienna and Prussia, of lieutenants, fraternities, and royalty, he recognizes it as a specific version of technological modernity, an attempt to nationalize and domesticate whatever liberatory, egalitarian effects this modernity might have had.
In his earlier discovery of “Amerika,” Kracauer had hoped for a German version of mass-mediated modernity that would be capable of enduring the tensions between a capitalist economy in permanent crisis and the principles and practices of a democratic society. Crucial to this modernity would have been the ability of cinema and mass culture to function as a sensory-reflexive matrix in which a heterogeneous mass public could recognize and negotiate the contradictions they were experiencing, and in which they could confront otherness and mortality instead of repressing or aestheticizing it. Whatever stirrings of such modernity the Weimar Republic saw, it did not find a more long-term German, let alone European, elaboration—Berlin never became the capital of the twentieth century. Instead, “Berlin” was polarized into an internationalist (American, Jewish, diasporic, politically and artistically radical) modernism and a Germanic one that assimilated the most advanced technology to the reinvention of tradition, authority, community, nature, and race. When the National Socialists perfected this form of modernism into the millennial modernity of total domination and mass annihilation, “America” had to become real, for better or for worse, for Kracauer and others to survive.
PART II
Benjamin
3
Actuality, Antinomies
While Kracauer’s early writings on film, mass culture, and modernity have barely entered English-language debates, Benjamin’s presence in these debates seems hopelessly overdetermined. During the past three decades, his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936) may have been quoted more often than any other single source, in areas ranging from new-left theory to cultural studies, from film and art history to visual culture, from the postmodern art scene to debates on the fate of art, including film, in the digital world. In the context of these invocations, the essay has not become any less problematic than when it was first written, nor has it always acquired new meanings.
“Benjamin is enjoying a boom, but does he still have actuality?”1 This question is inevitable at a time when our political, social, and personal lives seem more than ever to be driven by developments in media technology, and thus by an accelerated transformation, disintegration, and reconfiguration of the structures of experience. Indeed, if we pose the question of Benjamin’s actuality in light of the tremendous changes associated with digital technology, it could easily be argued that his theses concerning the technological media, in particular their proclaimed revolutionary potential, belong to an altogether different period than ours, and that his major prognostications have been proven wrong, at the latest with the advent of the digital and the global consolidation of capitalism.2 But to reach such a conclusion is perhaps not the reason we read Benjamin today.
To begin with, Benjamin’s own, avowedly esoteric concept of Aktualität (evoked in the above quotation) should caution us not to measure him against a standard defined by the inexorable advance of media technology, especially if the latter is posited as an epistemic if not ontological apriority rather than a development inflected by economic and political conditions and cultural practices. Fusing a messianic notion of Jetztzeit, or time of the Now, with the project of a materialist historiography, Benjamin’s concept of actuality sets itself off against any unreflected contemporaneity, be it the market-driven new or the ostensibly neutral upto-date of its intellectual proponents.3 For Benjamin, actuality requires standing at once within and against one’s time, grasping the “temporal core” of the present in terms other than those supplied by the period about itself (as Kracauer put it), and above all in diametrical opposition to developments taken for granted in the name of “progress.”4
Whether we dismiss Benjamin in the name of current media theory or try to assimilate him to it, we would miss out on much of his contribution to a theory of modern culture. Benjamin’s concern with film and technological media is inseparable from, on the one hand, his philosophy of history, which pivots on the question of modernity, and, on the other, his theory of the aesthetic, which encompasses both the organization of sensory perception, understood historically, and the fate of art and artistic practice in the narrower sense. In his persistent efforts to interrelate those domains, the cinema came to figure as the linchpin between the transformations of the aesthetic and the impasses of contemporary history. Unless we keep in view these larger stakes of Benjamin’s project, we cannot fully grasp what lent his reflections on film and the technological media and their paradigmatic impact on art and culture such prescience for decades to come. In tracing the complex and oft en contradictory logic of this project, we may gain a more nuanced and more realistic purchase on his actuality for film and media theory today.
Questions of modernity, the aesthetic, and technological reproduction are nowhere as