takes. The protagonists of the resulting theory film, so to speak, are two photographs that the writer introduces by way of juxtaposition: the contemporary image of a film star (caption: “our demonic diva”) on the cover of an illustrated journal and the portrait, more than six decades old, of an unspecified grandmother, possibly Kracauer’s own, cast in the private setting of family viewing. Both images show women twenty-four years old; both images become the respective focus of later sections; and both metamorphose in the course of the essay—until they are united, in the eighth and last section, in the surreal panorama of modernity’s “general inventory” or “main archive” (Hauptarchiv).
The image of the film star, posing in front of the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido, embodies the present moment (“time: the present”)—not just a fashionable cosmopolitan modernity but also a culture of presence, performance, perfection: “The bangs, the seductive tilt of the head, and the twelve eyelashes right and left —all these details, diligently enumerated by the camera, are in their proper place, a flawless appearance” (MO 47). Kracauer emphasizes the photograph’s double status as a material object that can be perceived in its sensory texture and a symbolic representation whose referent is elsewhere. Looking through a magnifying glass, one would see “the grain, the millions of dots that constitute the diva, the waves, and the hotel” (MO 47); at the same time, the image is an “optical sign” (MO 54) whose function it is to evoke the star as a unique, corporeal being. However, the referent that validates the sign in the eyes of the general public is not the star in person but her appearance in another medium: “Everyone recognizes her with delight, since everyone has already seen the original on the screen” (MO 47). Resuming the duodecimal figure of the well-groomed eyelashes, Kracauer goes on to assert the paradoxical effect of the star’s mass-mediated individuality with recourse to yet another entertainment intertext, that of the revue: “It is such a good likeness that she cannot be confused with anyone else, even if she is perhaps only one-twelfth of a dozen Tiller girls.”93 And he concludes the presentation of the star photograph with a deadpan refrain of the beginning of the paragraph: “Dreamily she stands in front of the Hotel Excelsior, which basks in her fame—a being of flesh and blood, our demonic diva, twenty-four years old, on the Lido. The date is September” (MO 47).
As he mounts his case against the ideology of presence and personality connoted by the mass-addressed image, Kracauer’s writing already punctures that effect, even before the passage of time will have disintegrated the photograph and relegated it to history’s vast central archive. The microscopic look that reveals “the millions of dots that constitute the diva, the waves, and the hotel” evokes the materialist, egalitarian pathos of Kracauer’s frequent observation that in film, the actor is nothing but “a thing among things.” The abstraction of the image into minimal units—halft one dots, a precursor to pixels94—defamiliarizes the resemblance with a particular living being; it also deflates the authority of the indexical bond (in the narrow sense of referring to the photochemical process of inscription) by foregrounding the image’s mediation, if not de/composition, at the level of raster reproduction. The image’s claim to depicting a singular referent is further undercut by the tongue-in-cheek remark that attributes its recognizability to the slippage between the image of the actual person and her representation in another medium—film—just as the suggestion that the star might be “only one-twelft h of a dozen Tiller girls” corrodes the aura of her uniqueness. Yet, lest the object of critique be prematurely demolished, Kracauer restores her image by closing the paragraph with a refrain of the opening lines.
The photograph of the diva functions as a synecdoche for the emerging mass culture of industrial-capitalist image production that Kracauer saw flourishing in the illustrated journals and weekly newsreels. By 1927, the term illustrated magazine was actually becoming something of a misnomer: the main purpose of the photograph, according to publisher Hermann Ullstein, was “no longer to illustrate a written text but to allow events to be seen directly in pictures, to render the world comprehensible through the photograph.”95 In Kracauer’s analysis, such ideological investment in photographic representation corresponds to the false concreteness by which the individual image mimics the logic of the commodity form; it goes hand in hand with the massive increase—not simply mass reproduction—of photographic images on an imperial, global scale. “The aim of the illustrated magazines is the complete reproduction of the world accessible to the photographic apparatus” (MO 57–58).96
Kracauer sees in the relentless “blizzard” of photographic images a form of social blinding and amnesia, a regime of knowledge production that makes for a structural “indifference” toward the meanings and history of the things depicted. “Never before has an age known so much about itself, if knowing means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense. . . . Never before has an age known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful weapons in the strike [Streikmittel] against understanding” (MO 58; S 5.2:93).
Understanding is prevented above all by the contiguous arrangement of the images—“without any gaps”—thereby systematically occluding reflection on things in their relationality (Zusammenhang) and history, which would require the work of consciousness. The illustrated magazines, like the weekly newsreels, advance a social imaginary of complete coverage (anticipating later media genres such as twenty-four-hour cable news and online news services) that affords an illusory sense of omniscience and control. The surface coherence of the layout glosses over the randomness of the arrangement and, with it, the arbitrariness of the social conditions it assumes and perpetuates; the illustrated magazines offer an image of the world that domesticates otherness, disjunctions, and contradictions. But, Kracauer adds, “it does not have to be this way” (MO 58).
Kracauer’s critique of these practices should not be mistaken for a lapsarian complaint that the media of technical reproduction are distorting an ostensibly unmediated reality. Rather, “photographability” has become the condition under which social reality constitutes itself: “The world itself has taken on a ‘photographic face’; it can be photographed because it strives to be absorbed into the spatial continuum which yields to snapshots” (MO 59). Here he works toward a medium- and institution-specific account of what Heidegger, a decade later, will call the “age of the world picture”—“world picture” understood not as a picture of the world, “but the world conceived and grasped as picture.”97 From this condition, there is no way back, either conceptually or ontologically, to an unmediated state of being that would release us from the obligation to engage contemporary reality precisely where it is most “picture”-driven—which for Kracauer is as much a political as a philosophical and psychotheological concern.98
Let me note parenthetically that Kracauer’s critique of illustrated magazines was not exactly fashionable at the time. Avant-garde artistic and intellectual circles— for example, the Berlin group assembled around the magazine G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung (1923–26), an important platform of German constructivism—valorized mass-marketed journals such as the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung for their innovative layout, the dynamic integration of photographs, text, and typography.99 The pedagogic potential of this graphic form inspired not only the layout of G and other avant-garde journals but also László Moholy-Nagy’s famous book Malerei, Fotografie, Film (1925; 1927). And Benjamin, a member of the G group, wrote a defense of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, “Nichts gegen die ‘Illustrirte’ ” (1925), that praised the journal for its contemporaneity, its “aura of actuality,” documentary precision, and conscientious technological reproductions.100
If Kracauer remains skeptical toward the illustrated magazines, it is for the same reason that he indicts the vernacular style of New Objectivity in his analysis of the Berlin entertainment malls: “Like the denial of old age, it arises from dread of confronting death” (SM 92). Benjamin, too, comments on the juncture of photography and death, as do later writers such as André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Georges Didi-Huberman.
