in particular his notion that cinematic technique is capable of conveying the “expressive” quality of material objects, landscapes, and faces; likewise, there are important resonances with the writings of Jean Epstein.52 Indebted like Balázs to Simmel’s philosophy of art, Kracauer assumes that what animates the cinematic representation of things has as much to do with the emotion of the subject as with the moving object.53 Film’s physiognomic capacity offers a mode of perceptual experience that blurs analytic distinctions between subject and object and allows things to appear in their otherness. But while Balázs, even as a Marxist, adheres to the romantic and idealist undercurrents of Lebensphilosophie, or the philosophy of life, Kracauer, as we shall see, enlists film’s physiognomic ability in a materialist philosophy of death.
TOWARD A MODERNIST MATERIALISM
That Kracauer’s film theory has its motor in a particular relationship to the world of things is one of the many insights in Adorno’s ambivalent homage to his old friend and mentor on the latter’s seventy-fift h birthday.54 As shrewd as it is condescending, Adorno’s portrait of Kracauer concludes with the observation that the “primacy of the optical” in him was not just, as suggested earlier in the essay, a matter of his architectural training or talent: “Presumably, [it] is not something inborn but rather the result of this relationship to the world of objects.” Adorno speculates that Kracauer’s special penchant for visuality has its roots in a “fixation on childhood, as a fixation on play,” that compensates for the suffering inflicted upon the self by human beings with a “fixation on the benignness of things.” This translates, in Adorno’s judgment, into a major theoretical and political deficiency: “One looks in vain in the storehouse of Kracauer’s intellectual motifs for rebellion against reification.” Considering that the concept of reification is a cornerstone of Adorno’s own theory of modernity, we can easily imagine how Kracauer’s engagement with the world of things seemed tantamount to a critical sellout, a nostalgic yearning for a place beyond critique: “The state of innocence would be the condition of needy objects, shabby, despised objects alienated from their purposes.”55
What eludes Adorno is that Kracauer’s allegedly uncritical immersion into the world of things, his lack of protest or indignation vis-à-vis reification, is perhaps responsible for the enormous historiographic and cognitive wealth his writings yield, his careful registering of modernity’s multifaceted and contradictory realities. And what Adorno elides is the extent to which this immersion also allowed Kracauer to revise and reconfigure the terms of critical subjectivity. For in his forays into the fallen world, Kracauer had no problem seeing himself as both belonging to this world and advancing its analysis and transformation.
Kracauer’s truck with the material world allowed him to experience—and to discern theoretically—a different constitution of the subject that manifested itself in that new relationship with things, in particular things modern.56 The subject that enters the movie theater with/as Kracauer is clearly not the sovereign, unitary, critically distanced subject of transcendental philosophy or the connoisseur of haut-bourgeois culture; it is, to vary on Adorno’s characterization of Kracauer, a subject “without skin,” and it knows its boundaries to be precarious. What is more, this subject seems to seek out situations in which its very sense of identity, stability, and control is threatened by the otherness of the material world, betraying a masochistic sensibility of the kind that we find stylized in Kracauer’s novel Ginster and that resurfaces in the early draft s of Theory of Film.
In his beautiful essay “Boredom” (FZ 16 Nov. 1924), for instance, Kracauer compares the effect of listening to the radio, with its boundless imperialism of bringing the whole world into our living room, to “one of those dreams provoked by an empty stomach: a tiny ball rolls toward you from very far away, expands into a close-up, and finally crashes over you; you can neither stop it nor escape, but lie there chained, a helpless little doll” (MO 333; S 5.1:280). A similar, somewhat less threatening though just as visceral encounter appears earlier in the essay when the impersonal subject of boredom takes a stroll through the nightly streets, filled “with a feeling of unfulfillment from which a fullness might sprout.” While his “body takes root in the asphalt,” his spirit “roams ceaselessly out of the night and into the night” with the luminous advertising and returns only to pull him into a movie theater—where it allows itself to be polymorphously projected: “As a fake Chinaman it squats in an opium den, turns into a well-trained dog that performs ludicrously clever tricks to please a film diva, gathers up into a storm amid towering mountain peaks, and turns into both a circus artist and a lion at the same time. How could it resist these metamorphoses? . . . One forgets oneself gawking, and the huge dark hole is animated with the illusion of a life that belongs to no one and consumes everyone” (MO 332; S 5.1:279).
Kracauer does not simply fall back on the nostalgic complaint that film destroys the sovereign subject by displacing a presumably intact, well-grounded, autonomous spirit with an invasion of alien, heteronomous images (as in Georges Duhamel’s polemic quoted by Benjamin: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images”).57 Rather, despite his ambivalence over the sense of loss and emptiness that comes with the cinema illusion, Kracauer does not disavow the pleasure in the sensory expansion it affords, along with the theoretical insights it might yield. For the passage quoted describes a form of involuntary mimetic identification operative in film viewing, a phenomenon theorized in contemporary biomechanical discourse as Carpenter’s Effect (referring to the ideomotoric phenomenon that muscular contractions of a person in motion are unconsciously imitated by another person observing the former).58 What is more, it also suggests that, inasmuch as the moving objects on screen seem to metamorphose into something other than they appeared, such psycho physiological mimesis affords the viewing subject the sensation of participating in this transformation, evoking the possibility—both threatening and liberating—of liquefying fixed structures of social, critical-intellectual, gendered identity.
The subject of experience in Kracauer’s texts cannot be said entirely to dissolve into a “subjectless” subjectivity akin to what Martin Jay discerns in Benjamin’s writing as a prose equivalent of a modernist style indirect libre.59 On the contrary, Kracauer needs the distinctions between personal pronouns for a particular rhetorical strategy—a shifting of perspectives from a third-person, impersonal distance to a more personal voice, whether first-person plural or second-person singular (the latter, as in the above example of the radio, used to evoke a sense of imminent violation).60 This rhetorical strategy more often than not signals a shift in the critic’s attitude toward the phenomenon or mode of behavior described, a revaluation of an earlier negative stance.
The shift in pronouns is particularly salient when it refers to forms of cultural consumption that were previously criticized from what appeared as an external, intellectually superior position. In his essay “Travel and Dance” (FZ 15 March 1925), for instance, Kracauer reads the rise of tourism and modern forms of dancing (“and other outgrowths of rational fantasy” like radio and “telephotography”) as symptoms of mechanization and rationalization, of “a depraved omnipresence in all dimensions that are calculable” (MO 70; S 5.1:293). Accordingly, these leisure activities are symptomatic of the “double existence” imposed on human beings cut off from the spiritual sphere. And yet, not only is this “Ersatz” real, even if compromised, but it also offers “a liberation from earthly weight [Erdenschwere], the possibility of an aesthetic behavior vis-à-vis organized toil” (MO 72; S 5.1:294). The turn from pessimistic critique to critical redemption culminates in an emphatic switch of personal pronouns:
We are like children when we travel; we playfully delight in a new velocity, the relaxed roaming and roving, the synoptic viewing of geographical complexes that previously could not be seen at once. We have fallen for the ability to have all these spaces at our disposal; we are like conquistadors who have not yet had a quiet moment to reflect on the meaning of their acquisition. Likewise, when we dance, we mark a time that did not exist before, a time
