Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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the liberating, egalitarian impulses in which Kracauer had discerned the contours of a democratic mass public.
I will trace these movements and countermovements from two complementary angles. The present chapter deals with Kracauer’s efforts to develop an aesthetics of film from the perspective of a particular experience and critique of modernity. The following chapter focuses on his exploration of modernity as a mass-produced and mass-consumed, highly ambivalent and contested formation, in which film and cinema were playing only one, albeit a crucial, role. As a hinge between these perspectives, I discuss Kracauer’s essay “Photography” (1927), a text that displays key traits of his peculiar method—his shifting among the registers of ethnographic observation, micrological analysis, critique of ideology, and philosophy of history; his effort to grasp the historical moment in both its devastating and liberating possibilities; and the inclusion of himself as experiencing subject in the cultural practices he describes.
Kracauer’s writings prior to the mid-1920s by and large participate in the period’s pessimistic, lapsarian discourse on modernity.9 Within a predominantly philosophical and theological framework, modernity appears as the endpoint of a historical process of disintegration, spiritual loss, and withdrawal of meaning from life, a dissociation of truth and existence. Expelled from a traditional order of life and a corresponding religious sphere, the individual is “thrown into the cold infinity of empty space and empty time,” a state summed up in Georg Lukács’s phrase “transcendental homelessness.”10 Drawing on contemporary sociology, in particular that of Simmel, Max Scheler, and Max Weber, Kracauer ascribes this state to the progressive unfolding of the Ratio, a formal, abstract, instrumental rationality—or perverted form of reason—propelled by capitalist economy, modern science, and technology. With the encroachment of mechanization and rationalization on all aspects of life, human beings are alienated not only from the spiritual sphere but also from all forms of communion and community (Gemeinschaft , as opposed to Gesellschaft).11 They are thus deprived of an experiential, discursive horizon that would help them make sense of these very processes.
That Kracauer participates in this culturally pessimistic discourse on modernity, with its worn-out idealist rhetoric, is not all that surprising, nor do his early writings differ in this regard from those of other Critical Theorists, in particular Benjamin, Bloch, and the early Lukács. What is remarkable, however, is the distance that Kracauer will travel, in a rather short time, from the metaphysics of Weltzerfall (disintegration of the world) to a more sober, analytic, politically astute, and yet passionately curious attitude toward the concrete phenomena of modern life, in particular mass culture. The beginnings of this transformation can be traced back to the experience of World War I, which for Kracauer, as for many of his generation, shattered the illusions of high idealism and cast its monstrous shadow on the subsequent decade; it is no coincidence that his semiautobiographical novel, Ginster, written toward the end of the 1920s, is set during the war and its aft ermath.12 Hence Kracauer’s turn to a more materialist perspective should be imagined neither as a sudden conversion nor as a progressive development toward a more critically correct position, but rather as a process of reorientation and complication in which earlier perspectives both give rise to and persist, even if incongruently, with later ones. His interest in film and mass culture does not just emerge with his oft en-flagged turn to Marxist thought and empirical sociology around 1925–26. As I will argue, the effort to theorize film precedes that turn and has its roots in precisely the lapsarian construction of history he had initially assumed toward modernity, specifically, in the peculiar form of materialism that this construction entailed.
It is significant that Kracauer elaborates his early metaphysics of modernity in a “philosophical fragment” on the detective novel, a genre of popular fiction that thrived on serial production and that in Germany occupied a lower rank on the ladder of cultural values than in England or France.13 Rather than considering this genre from the outside, as a sociological symptom, Kracauer reads it as an allegory of contemporary life, incarnating the “idea of a thoroughly rationalized civilized society” (W 1:107). The critical distinction of the detective novel vis-à-vis mere affirmation of that society consists in the way the detective’s methods mimic the mechanisms of the autonomous Ratio: “Just as the detective reveals the secret buried between people, the detective novel discloses, in the aesthetic medium, the secret of the de-realized society and its substanceless marionettes.” It thus transforms, by virtue of its construction, “incomprehensible life” into a “counter image” of reality, a “distorting mirror” (Zerrspiegel) in which the world can begin to read its own features (W 1:119, 107).
Kracauer elaborates the trope of a distorting mirror in an essay on the circus, written around the same time, in which he attributes a similarly allegorical—and allegorizing—function to the clowns. If the acrobats miraculously triumph over the laws of gravity and the human physis, the clowns point up the “unreality” of that triumph: “While the real actors suspend the conditions of the life assigned to us, [the clowns] with their off-key seriousness in turn suspend the unreality of those actors. This should lead one to expect that they restore normal reality but, on the contrary, they are only a caricature of caricature; it feels like being in a hall of mirrors, and from the successively arranged mirrors the beholder’s own countenance radiates in ever more distorted form.”14 It should be noted that not only does the clowns’ mimicry render strange an already estranged reality but the hall-of-mirrors effect also affects the self-perception of the beholder, confronting the viewing subject with its own precarious reality.
The idea of representation as a distorting mirror is a familiar trope of modernist aesthetics, implying that, since the world is already distorted, reified, and alienated, the iteration of that distortion, as a kind of double negation, is closer to the truth than any attempt to transcend the state of affairs by traditional aesthetic means, be they classicist or realist. In Critical Theory, for instance, we find one highly influential articulation of this trope in Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), with its revision and rehabilitation of allegory, which, in contrast to the romantic symbol’s semblance of organic beauty and totality, showed the petrified, fragmented landscape of history for what it was.15 Likewise, the trope resonates in Adorno’s philosophy of modern music and aesthetic theory, in particular his insistence, against Lukács, on the distinction between objective and reflective reification, the latter being the task of any truly modern art.16 Yet, if Benjamin elaborates this idea in writings on the Baroque Trauerspiel and on Proust, and Adorno on Schönberg and Webern, Kracauer develops it in the context of popular fiction, live entertainments—and film. This to say, he insists on finding the antidote to modern mass culture within mass culture itself, by focusing on its disjunctive devices and reflexive possibilities.
While reviewing films was part of his local reporting duties from 1921 on, it was not until the fall of 1923 that Kracauer displayed a more theoretical interest in the medium. In the reviews that followed over the next few years, he frequently uses phrases like “the spirit” or “essence of film,” “film aesthetics,” “film language”; speaks of topics “proper to film” (filmgerecht); and discusses individual titles as examples from which to develop an “as yet unwritten metaphysics of film” (FZ, 16 December 1923). His earliest notions of what is and is not “proper” or specific to film actually sound remarkably like the criteria of the later, more familiar Kracauer, though there are still important differences. Reviewing two contemporary German films dealing with imposters, Der Frauenkönig (Jaap Speyer, 1923) and Die Männer der Sybill (Friedrich Zelnick, 1922), he praises them for their looseness of construction and refusal of interiority: “Compared to the historical spectacles which have recently become fashionable, [these films] after all have the advantage that they do not show carefully rehearsed scenes and elaborate plots which one could just as well see on stage but, instead, improvise thrilling events out of the quotidian and, moreover, renounce the display of soul [seelischer Gehalte] in favor of a film-specific rendering of phantomlike surface life.”17 The difference, or distance, of this position from what Theory of Film will call the “redemption of physical reality” hinges, of course, on what Kracauer means by “surface life” and which particular cinematic techniques, modes of representation, and genres