be transcended; yet, at the same time, it mandates the materialist project of modernity’s complete and thorough discovery.71 This project is driven by a no-less-messianic motif, that of redemption—the idea that the intellectual’s task is to furnish an archive for the possibility, even if itself unrepresentable, of a utopian restoration of all things past and present as implied in the cabbalist concept of tikkun.72 The writer therefore seeks to register things as yet unnamed, as Kracauer sums up his lifelong efforts in his posthumously published book History: The Last Things Before the Last: “They all have served, and continue to serve, a single purpose: the rehabilitation of objectives and modes of being which still lack a name and hence are overlooked or misjudged.”73 However, the language in which the earlier Kracauer imagined this work of redemption— as well as the historical process that makes this work both necessary and possible—has a materialist slant to it that more specifically recalls the tradition of Jewish gnosticism.
While he found Jewish gnosticism just as suspect as other variants of religious mysticism, Kracauer seems temperamentally closer to the cool stoicism of secular or literary gnostics such as Kafka than to any messianic fervor.74 Like Weber, Simmel, Lukács, and other critics of modernity, Kracauer evokes the fallen world through images of petrification and mortification, of detritus, fragments, empty shells, larvae, and masks.75 In the gnostic tradition, such imagery marks the negative traces of the withdrawal of God, the divine as radical absence. Yet, as material evidence of the negativity of history, these traces have to be preserved and interpreted so that, when the eventual break occurs, the world can be redeemed in as complete a shape as possible, and the sparks of creation encrusted in even the most fallen matter can be released. Hence Kracauer defines the intellectual’s task as one of collecting, registering, and archiving: “The new shape [das Gestaltete] cannot be lived unless the disintegrated particles are gathered and carried along.”76 However, this ambulant archiving entails a “transformation.” In a letter to Bloch, Kracauer pinpoints as the great motif of “this kind of philosophy of history . . . the postulate that nothing must ever be forgotten and nothing that is un-forgotten must remain unchanged.”77
If modern life is envisioned in gnostic terms, it does not seem too far-fetched to discover in film and photography the contemporary media, art forms, and archives singularly suited to express such a vision—given the material, physiochemical connection of photographic images and photographically based film with the world represented (an issue to which we will return); the mortification and fragmentation involved in photographic exposure and framing; the transformation and reconfiguration of the material through cinematic editing. What is more, Kracauer’s gnostic and messianic sensibility not only attracted him to the photographic media but, more generally, made him develop a specific form of modernist materialism that puts him in the vicinity of the contemporary avant-garde, including constructivism, dadaism, and surrealism, as well as atonal music.78 At the very least, his historico-theological framing of modernity provided him with an existential stance or ethos against efforts to restore bourgeois German culture notwithstanding the shattering defeat of the nation in a war conducted in the name of that very culture, efforts he discerned in the circle around Stefan George, the academic Goethe cult (Friedrich Gundolf), and the continuing glorification of the classics on the traditional stage. Paradoxically, Kracauer’s grounding in an ancient theological tradition not only made him more receptive to the ongoing upheavals in the material world but also authorized a radical critique of values and positions that he considered perilously out of touch with contemporary social, aesthetic, and political realities.
This critical ethos can be seen in at least three distinct yet related motifs. One is the programmatic direction of Kracauer’s gaze toward material phenomena and aspects of daily life marginalized by dominant culture, whether they lack (moral, aesthetic) value in the eyes of the educated bourgeoisie (like cinema), are assigned to oblivion by the presentism of ever-changing fashion (especially in architecture and design), or elude public awareness (as do unemployment offices, homeless shelters, the organization of urban traffic, etc.). Kracauer’s penchant for the detritus of history, both literally and metaphorically, for the ephemeral and quotidian, led Benjamin to characterize him as a (Baudelairean) chiffonnier, a “ragpicker.”79 But he could just as well have compared him to contemporary artists who deliberately chose ordinary, worthless, or devalued materials for their collages (such as Hannah Höch, Marianne Brandt, or Kurt Schwitters) or to the dadaist readymades and happenings that polemically exposed the contradictions of aesthetic hierarchies of value. Likewise, Kracauer would have gone part of the way with the surrealists (though avoiding their more mystical flights), on their excursions to flea markets and through the arcades, finding there the banished props of the body, pornographic specialities, odd souvenirs, and “homeless images” reminding the passerby of long-forgotten impulses and desires.80
In an article that reads almost like an exercise in “profane illumination,” a key concept in Benjamin’s 1929 essay on surrealism, Kracauer meditates on the “gentle glow” that emanates from the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at night.81 The glow is actually a reflection, effecting a spatial interpenetration of the traditional façade with the picture palaces on the Berlin Kurfürstendamm, which, with their pillars of light, glaring posters, and mirror-glass showcases, “turn night into day in order to banish the horror of the night from the working-day of their patrons” (S 5.2:184). Playing with literal and metaphoric senses of light, Kracauer switches with unusual pathos to an allegorical reading (“a flaming protest against the darkness of our existence . . . which flows, as if by itself, into the desperate embrace of the pleasure business”) and ends with a meditation on the “mild radiance” unintentionally bestowed by “this sinister glow.” “What the spectacle of light leaves over and what business has cast out is preserved by bleak walls. The outside of the church, which is not [used as] a church, becomes the refuge of what has been spilled and forgotten and shines as beautifully as if it were the Holy of Holies. Secret tears thus find their place of memory [Gedächtnisort]. Not in the hidden interior—in the middle of the street the neglected and inconspicuous is gathered and transformed until it begins to radiate, a comfort to everyone” (S 5.2:185).
A waste product of the relentless glare of modern entertainment and advertisement, the glowing exterior of an unused site of interiority becomes a surface for remembrance (Kracauer puns on the name of the church)—a public screen or, as the title suggests, a picture postcard inviting us to reflect upon what is being eclipsed, yet also unintentionally illuminated, by modernity’s spotlights: areas as yet undefined and unspectacular. To take this Denkbild or thought-image a step further, while deriving its light from the commercial theaters, the configuration of a reflexive surface in the dark, contingent sensory effects and mnemonic impulses, anonymous emotion in a public space—this configuration could well be read as Kracauer’s minimalist utopia of Lichtspiel, or light-play, the German word for cinema.82
A second, related motif in Kracauer’s critical arsenal is his own turn to the surface (Oberfläche) and his transvaluation of that term from a locus of sheer negativity, an atomized world of mere appearances, to a site in which contemporary reality manifests itself in an iridescent multiplicity of phenomena.83 Although the very trope of the surface still implies the vertical topography of idealist philosophy—essence and appearance, the hierarchy of truth and empirical reality—in Kracauer’s critical practice the Oberfläche increasingly loses its prefix and becomes a Fläche that offers a Denkfläche, an epistemological plane for tracing new configurations (such as the one he famously dubbed the “mass ornament”) and for reading surfaces as indices of the possible directions the historical process might take.84 This is not just a matter of reversing particular idealist hierarchies (as one might infer from his focus on the inconspicuous, degraded, ephemeral). Rather, Kracauer flattens any vertical and deep-rooted hierarchies into lateral relations, often by juxtaposing unequal elements on a two-dimensional plane.
In “Analysis of a City Map” (1926), he confronts the humanly teeming yet lackluster, marginalized life of the Faubourgs with the splendor of the Paris boulevards. He
