the Faubourgs as the domain of use value and neighborhood community. Rather, he puts into question the very opposition of use value and exchange value with an account of the new sites of consumption that, while critical, concludes, “Nevertheless, the streets that lead to the center must be traveled, for its emptiness today is real” (MO 44). By interrelating phenomena on a lateral force field, he draws attention to competing orders of significance and to the mechanisms that regulate public visibility and invisibility. The meaning of the phenomena themselves is no longer given or is as yet undefined; they are symptoms that need to be observed, described, deciphered, and interpreted.85
Kracauer’s turn to the surface is more than a methodological device; it marks a political move that derives its ethos from his historico-theological stance. Against the conservative denigration of the new entertainment and leisure culture, he defends the “modern urban surface culture” that mushroomed in Berlin between 1924 and 1929 in picture palaces and shopwindow displays.86 In his signal essay “Cult of Distraction” (FZ 4 March 1926) he valorizes the superficial glamour, the “pure externality” that draws the urban masses into the picture palaces, for no other purpose than Zerstreuung, or distraction—all pejorative terms in the dictionary of the educated bourgeoisie (probably the majority of the readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung, where the article was first published).87 He does not even like the new picture palaces (the article entails a critique of the gentrification of exhibition practices); but he insists on the cultural significance of these sites because they make visible to society and to the patrons themselves a new public and a new form of mass subjectivity. The polemical edge is directed against all and any attempts to resurrect forms of subjectivity, interiority, and individuality that have been rendered anachronistic by the traumatic impact of war and inflation.
It is not externality that poses a threat to truth. Truth is threatened only by the naive affirmation of cultural values that have become unreal and by the careless misuse of concepts such as personality, inwardness, tragedy, and so on—terms that in themselves certainly refer to lofty ideas but that have lost much of their scope along with their supporting foundations, due to social changes. . . . In a profound sense, Berlin audiences act truthfully when increasingly they shun these art events (which, for good reason, remain caught in mere pretension), preferring instead the surface glamour of the stars, films, revues, and production values. (MO 326; W 6.1:210–11)
Similar to artistic avant-garde movements dating back to the war, Kracauer’s attack is aimed at the hypocrisy of bourgeois-idealist culture, specifically efforts to restore “the spirit” against the onslaught of mechanization, which was oft en used as a synonym for standardization, mass production, and mass consumption. Even if technology was not Kracauer’s primary theoretical focus (as it was for Benjamin), he would never have conceived of technically produced, mediated, and disseminated culture as a contradiction in terms, let alone a social disgrace or moral abomination.
Finally, a third motif characteristic of Kracauer’s historico-theological stance returns us to Adorno’s complaint about his friend’s insufficient rebellion against reification, pointing up a different deployment of gnostic imagery in their respective theorizing of modernity. Adorno, reared on the same sociological discourse as Kracauer, was wont to evoke the effects of reification in images of mortification, rigidification, and death by freezing (Kältetod), just as he often invoked Ferdinand Kürnberger’s dictum “Das Leben lebt nicht” (life does not live) as the fundamental experience of his generation.88 Kracauer, not quite as threatened by the contamination with the inanimate as his younger friend, visualized the process of petrification and withdrawal of meaning in modern society as a process of fragmentation and disintegration that simultaneously entailed a mobilization of fixed arrangements and conditions. Once he had moved beyond an account of modernity as the penultimate stop in a history of decline, Kracauer could see the fracturing of all familiar, “natural” relations and shapes, the “perforation” of traditional forms of living, increasingly as an opportunity—a chance to point up the “provisional status of all given configurations,” to highlight their transitory and transitional character.89 Focusing on sites of flux and improvisation, the historian of the present will watch the fragments reconfigure themselves, perhaps into something more livable.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE VABANQUE GAME OF HISTORY
The paradoxical relation between mortification and transformation emerges most strikingly in Kracauer’s major essay “Photography” (FZ, 28 Oct. 1927) and may help us to understand the centrality of the photographic to his theory of film. This text entwines several strands of his early film theory: lapsarian critique of modernity; phenomenological description of quotidian and ephemeral phenomena impelled by a gnostic-modernist materialism; avant-garde iconoclasm; and critique of ideology that resonates with the more immanent political approach his writings take from the mid-1920s on. It is also exemplary of the way in which he traces alternative perspectives and possibilities within the phenomena under critique, leaving room for an ambivalence grounded in the material, for stereoscopic and conflicted views. Finally, the essay commands attention as a mode of theoretical writing that enacts its argument as much in its stylistic procedures as in conceptual terms.
A common reading of Kracauer’s essay “Photography” takes its most important insight to be the opposition between the photographic image and the memory image, including the claim that the proliferation of technologically produced images threatens the very possibility and truth character of images preserved by memory.90 Against such a reading, which effectively assimilates Kracauer to a genealogy of media pessimism (from Baudelaire and Proust through Virilio and Baudrillard), I contend that the essay’s radical insights lie elsewhere. For Kracauer does not simply puncture the ideologically available assumption that the meaning of photographs is given in their analog, iconic relation to the object depicted; rather, he examines how meanings are constituted at the pragmatic level, in the usage and circulation of photographic images in both domestic and public media practices. Another, equally far-reaching concern of the essay is with the aging and aft erlife of photographs, the transformation they undergo over time, especially once they have lost their original reference and presence effect. In the precarious temporality and historicity of photography, its alienation from human intention and control, Kracauer traces a countervailing potential, neither positivistic nor nostalgic, that he believes can be actualized in the medium of film. It is this potential that places photography at the crossroads of modernity: “The turn to photography is the gofor-broke game [Vabanque-Spiel] of history” (MO 61; S 5.2:96).
The question of historicity no less concerns the aging and afterlife of the text itself. It takes the by now ritual form of asking whether and how an essay that emphatically seeks to theorize photography in relation to the historical moment— Weimar democracy between economic stabilization and crisis, the larger trajectory of technological capitalist modernity—can speak to a present in which the photographic paradigm, to the extent that it props its claims to authenticity and accuracy on an indexical (physical or existential) relation with the object depicted (the registration of reflected light on a photochemical surface at a particular point in space and time), seems to have been radically displaced and reframed by digital modes of imaging.91 What’s more, since the digital is not just another, more current medium, it has challenged traditional concepts of mediality and has made the idea of medium specificity, commonly taken to be central to classical film theory, appear as a high-modernist preoccupation.92 As I hope to show, Kracauer’s photography essay, much as it responds to a particular stage of media culture, points up issues of technological image production and usage, proliferation and storage that persist, in different forms and infinitely vaster dimensions, in the ostensibly postphotographic age; it likewise complicates key concepts of this debate—such as indexicality—by unfolding them as historically contingent and mutable. Finally, with a view to film theory and, not least, Kracauer’s own Theory of Film, the photography essay projects a film aesthetics that compels us to rethink the question of cinematic realism.
Like Benjamin’s artwork essay, which
