refusal to confront the experience of mass death in the lost war. (This refusal is not incompatible with the fascination with disasters, crashes, and catastrophe that Kracauer observes in the media’s sensationalist exploitation of violence and death.)101 “What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image.” Yet the more the world seeks to immortalize itself qua “photographable present,” the less it succeeds: “Seemingly ripped from the clutches of death, in reality it has succumbed to it” (MO 59).
The concept of the “memory image” appears to furnish an epistemological and spiritual counterpoint to photography, especially in its mass proliferation. As an immaterial, unstable, and degenerative image, it belongs to a different order of reality and works on a fundamentally different principle of organization. From the perspective of photographic representation, with its claims to accuracy and fullness, memory is fragmentary, discontinuous, affectively distorted and exaggerating; from the perspective of memory, however, “photography appears as a jumble that partly consists of garbage” (MO 51). The memory image relates to those traits of a person that resist being rendered in the spatiotemporal dimensions of photographic representation, and that in fragmentary form may survive aft er death as the person’s actual or proper “history.” In a photograph, by contrast, “a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of snow” (MO 51).
The opposition between photography and memory image participates in a broader discourse, associated with Lebensphilosophie, that sought to reconceptualize perception, time, and memory in response to modernity’s alleged reduction of experience to spatiotemporal terms. While Kracauer does not mention Bergson by name, the notion of durée resonates in the essay’s critique of pretensions to chronological and spatial continuity, as manifested, respectively, in historicism and photography.102 Likewise, he assumes the Proustian distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory, which Benjamin was to mobilize in his work on Baudelaire. Benjamin links the “increasing atrophy of experience” to the fact that devices like photography and film “extend the range of the mémoire volontaire.” But this expansion comes at a cost: “The perpetual readiness of voluntary, discursive memory, encouraged by the technology of reproduction, reduces the imagination’s scope for play [Spielraum].”103 Similarly, Kracauer warns that, instead of serving as an aid to memory, “the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. The assault of these collections of images is so powerful that it threatens to destroy the potentially existing awareness of crucial traits” (MO 58).
The problem with this kind of argument is that it casts memory and technological reproduction as antithetical, exclusive terms, rather than analyzing their complex interactions.104 What’s more, it assumes an economic logic by which the expansion of the photographic (and, for that matter, phonographic) regime inevitably entails the withering away of human capacities of memory, reflection, and imagination. Given the exponential growth of media technologies, this logic cannot but imply a trajectory of cultural decline. It occludes the possibility that film and photography have also enabled new and qualitatively different types of experience—a possibility in which both Kracauer and Benjamin had a great stake.
I take the opposition of photographic and memory image to be only one element in the rhetorical movement of Kracauer’s essay, part of a larger, more dialectical argument that turns on the constellation of photography, historical contingency, and film. As we have seen, the corrosive, allegorical gaze that drains the pretension of life and coherent meaning from contemporary media culture—a sensibility germane to Benjamin’s treatise on the baroque Trauerspiel—is a function of critical reading, beginning with the opening section.105 Yet at least as important is the essay’s effort to ascribe this effect to the temporality and historicity of the medium itself, performed by the two photographs as material objects. For much as photography and film were becoming complicit with the social denial of death, Kracauer still discerned in them the unprecedented possibility of confronting the subject with contingency and mortality, and of challenging the natural appearance of the prevailing social order.
Kracauer builds up to this turn from his meditation on the portrait of the grandmother, viewed as part of the family archive by the grandchildren. Because of its age, the temporal gap of more than sixty years that separates the moment of recording from its reception, the image of the grandmother poses the question of photographic referentiality in a different way from that of the diva. With the death of the “ur-image,” the connection with the living person may survive for a while by way of oral history but is ultimately loosened, literally defamiliarized, to the point of randomness—“it’s any young girl in 1864” (MO 48). Barely remembering the grandmother and the fragmentary stories about her, the children perceive in her photograph only a “mannequin” in an outmoded costume or, rather, a collection of once-fashionable accessories—the chignons, the tightly corseted dress—that have outlived their bearer. What makes the grandchildren giggle and at the same time gives them the creeps, Kracauer suggests, is that the photograph amalgamates these remnants with the incongruous assertion of a living presence. It is this “terrible association” that haunts the beholder like a ghostly apparition and makes him “shudder”; like the early films screened in the “Studio des Ursulines” in Paris, the aged photograph conjures up a disintegrated unity, a reality that is “unredeemed.” The configuration of its elements “is so far from necessary that one could just as well imagine a different organization of these elements” (MO 56).
Kracauer relates photography’s precarious afterlife to the split-second nature of photographic exposure—that is, he locates the problem precisely in the technologically supported indexical bond traditionally invoked to assert the photograph’s accuracy and authority. In the mechanical reduction of time to the moment of its origin, Kracauer observes, the photograph is intrinsically more vulnerable (than, for instance, film) to the subsequent passage of time: “If photography is a function of the flow of time, then its substantive meaning will change depending upon whether it belongs to the domain of the present or to some phase of the past” (MO 54). While the photograph of the diva maintains a tenuous connection, mediated by film, between the corporeal existence of the original and her still-vacillating memory image, the grandmother’s photograph affords no such comfort. In the measure that the photograph ages and outlives its referential context, the objects or persons depicted appear to be shrinking or diminishing in significance—in inverse proportion to memory images, which “enlarge themselves into monograms of remembered life.” The photograph represents merely the dregs that have “settled from the monogram”; it captures the remnants “that history has discharged” (MO 55). However, in the tension between history and that which history has discarded, photography begins to occupy the intermediary zone that appeals to Kracauer: the ragpicker, the intellectual seeking to gather the refuse and debris, the ephemeral, neglected, and marginal, the no longer functional.
Kracauer aligns the temporality of photography with that of fashion and discerns in both a characteristic feature of capitalist modernity—a connection already implicit in the German word for fashion, Mode.106 Like Benjamin, Kracauer is interested in fashion here primarily for its paradoxical imbrication of novelty and accelerated obsolescence, the moment when both photography and fashion, like all outdated commodities, join the ever-faster-growing garbage pile of modern history.107 While the very old traditional costume, which has lost all contact with the present, may attain “the beauty of a ruin,” the recently outmoded dress, pretending to photographic life, appears merely comical (MO 55).
The grandchildren’s giggles are a defense against dread, a shocklike, visceral recognition of their own contingency and mortality, of a history that does not include them. In a rhetorical gesture discussed earlier, Kracauer switches from the third person to the first, assuming the grandchildren’s shudder as his own: “This once clung to us like our skin, and this is the way our property clings to us even today. We are contained in nothing and photography assembles fragments around a nothing” (MO 56). Rather than affording a prosthetic extension into a period
