has taken us by surprise, and the regions that it has opened up are glaringly empty. (MO 49; S 5.1:296)
This almost technophile vision strikingly anticipates Benjamin’s notion of a “room-for-play” (Spiel-Raum) that has opened up with film, which allows human beings to appropriate technology in the mode of play, that is, in a sensory-somatic and nondestructive form. What is more, by acknowledging presumably stereotypical and alienated behavior as part of his own experience and imagination, Kracauer refused to let his intellectual privilege deceive him as to his actual social status— which, unlike Adorno’s, was all too close to that of the salaried masses whose habits of leisure he observed. This awareness, among other things, enabled him to recognize in these habits the emergence of a new type of public sphere.
Before shifting the focus to the social and political parameters of Weimar modernity, I wish to return to Kracauer’s attitude toward the world of things and its implications for his early film theory. How does film turn from a medium of the fallen world into a catalyst for the fascination with that very world of things, into a matrix for new forms of sensory experience, into an object of supreme aesthetic, cognitive, and political significance? As I indicated earlier, it is important that Kracauer’s “materialist turn” preceded his encounter with Marxist theory in 1925–26; that his theoretical interest in film and mass culture took shape already within the framework of his early philosophy of history. This is to say that Kracauer’s distinct brand of materialism derives from sources other than the Marxist tradition, even if he subsequently, and rather selectively, absorbed elements of that tradition. Adorno rightly sensed that his friend’s concept of material objects was not dominated by a Marxist theory of reification, as it had been formulated at the time most influentially by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923), a book that Kracauer took issue with on several counts.61 If Lukács grounds his concept of reification in Marx’s theory of the commodity, in particular the opposition of use value and exchange value, Kracauer’s approach to reification takes a more observational and experiential form. Predicated on the structure of the commodity, Lukács’s argument depends on positing an unmediated, originary substantiality of things (which is abstracted and alienated by the commodity form), as it does on the project of restoring labor as the only true source of value in the empowerment of the proletariat qua subject of history.62 Kracauer would have resented such language as nostalgic. Centering on production and reified labor, Lukács’s account of the loss of the “character of things as things” (92) and the new “thingness” (Dinghaft igkeit) that takes its place and informs the totality of social life and consciousness remains philosophically abstract. By contrast, Kracauer’s descriptions of practices of consumption emerging in contemporary urban society evoke a concrete, sensorily experienced materiality that complicates Marxist concepts of commodity fetishism and reification.
What I wish to argue here is that Kracauer’s modernist materialism was at least as much shaped, in its basic assumptions, motifs, and obsessions, by the traditions of Jewish messianism and gnosticism, however secular the implications and the issues that were at stake. Like other Critical Theorists whose intellectual socialization took place during World War I, in particular Bloch, Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Leo Löwenthal, Kracauer has to be read in the context of modern, secular Jewish messianism. As Anson Rabinbach has shown with regard to Bloch and Benjamin, this tradition is impossible to describe in any pure form, as it persisted in a variety of radical sensibilities, hermeneutical motifs, and combinations with other discourses (psychoanalysis, Marxism, libertarian anarchism, Zionism, etc.).63
Kracauer’s relation to Jewish messianism is a complex issue. Raised in a practicing Jewish environment and briefly active in the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (a Frankfurt circle of learning and debate surrounding Rabbi Nehemiah Nobel and crucially shaped by its first director, Franz Rosenzweig),64 Kracauer began to voice vehement criticism of the ongoing revival of messianic thought, especially in its combination with a socialist (in Kracauer’s reading, protestant) mystique of community. In his programmatic essay of 1922, “Those Who Wait” (“Die Wartenden”), for instance, he castigates the “messianic Sturm und Drang types of the communist persuasion,” a label most likely referring to Bloch, whose book on Thomas Münzer he had savaged in a review earlier that year.65 Like other contemporary movements of religious renewal, the Jewish messianists, in Kracauer’s view, superimposed a transcendental reality upon an immanent historical process and thus, by abstracting from the real world “filled with corporeal things and people,” ended up just as ignorant of the divine that they presumed to know so well (MO 140; S 5.1:169). Kracauer’s politics of “waiting,” of a “hesitant openness” (MO 138), was directed against the absolutism with which messianic thinkers leaped over the imperfect yet existing reality from the perspective of a future break; by contrast, he turned his gaze toward the changing realm of the here and now, the mundane zone of the ordinary and ephemeral. “Access to truth is now in the profane,” he proclaimed at the end of his 1926 polemical review of Martin Buber and Rosenzweig’s translation of the Bible (MO 201; S 5.1:365).66
Nonetheless, Kracauer participated in the discourse of secular Jewish messianism in significant ways. Much as he abhorred notions of an imminent and immanent instantiation of the Messiah, an “aura of eschatological longing” emanates, as Michael Schröter observes, from the “luminous metaphors” of his texts.67 And even when he updates his metaphysical language with concepts indebted to the Enlightenment (the French materialist lineage rather than the German idealist one) and to early Marx, a distinctly apocalyptic undercurrent continues to characterize his observations of contemporary life—a perception of modernity as a traumatic upheaval heading toward catastrophe. Like Benjamin at this point, Kracauer rejects all promises of immanent and gradual change and defers any envisioning of a different order to history’s inevitable cataclysmic break. Accordingly, the only attitude available to the Jewish intellectual is a hesitant form of waiting, as opposed to more fervent anticipation or even active intervention. As he writes to Löwenthal in 1924: “We must remain hidden, quietistic, inactive, a thorn in the side of others, preferring to drive them (with us) to despair rather than give them hope.”68 This “revolutionary negativity,” which Kracauer still endorsed as late as 1929, is theologically grounded in the axiom to refrain from direct assertions and to preserve empty spaces (Hohlräume) for the “unsaid”—and as yet unsayable—positive.69
In his 1925 essay “The Artist in This Time” (published in the first issue of the Jewish journal Der Morgen), Kracauer unfolds the implications of this stance with recourse, as already mentioned, to Grune’s film Die Straße. Reflecting on the dilemma of the modern artist, Kracauer extrapolates from Die Straße an intellectual attitude that spells out the politics of his own earlier implicit identification with the film. He argues that the film’s grim view is shared by “people who seriously engage with reality and hence are doubly and profoundly affected by the power of the forces that today deform the world into a city street.” Knowing “that only the taking along and transforming [Mitnahme und Verwandlung] of the unreal life will lead to reality and that disintegrated ideals cannot be patched up or hypocritically asserted,” these contemporaries “strictly resist the romantic attempt to gloss over the realities of technology and economy and to inhibit the unfolding of the civilizing process with means that are not up to its magnitude.” Instead, Kracauer continues, “they will do anything in their power to make the world disclose its phantom character, to let nothingness reign as far as it may. They are nihilists for the sake of the potential positive and hasten toward the end of despair lest a ‘yes’ might halfway impede that process ineffectively. . . . [T]hey hyperbolize the negation, stretch the void, and reject soul where it is only make-up. They believe that America will disappear only when it completely discovers itself.”70 Obviously, Kracauer leans toward the party of these “nihilists,” even as he urges them not to abandon hope for the revelation of the absent divine (which would amount to perpetuating the abyss between “film image and prophecy”).
The often-cited last sentence of the passage expresses the eschatologically tinged
