instability of the social and economic ground of his existence. In its emphasis on discontinuity and estrangement, this account anticipates Kracauer’s later discussions, in Theory of Film and his posthumously published History, of a passage from Proust in which the narrator, describing a visit to his grandmother after a long absence, actually equates the sudden, terrifying sight of her as a sick, dejected old woman with a photograph. For Kracauer, this passage marks photography as a “product of complete alienation,” epitomized by the view of a stranger unclouded by incessant love and memories, but also the vision of the exile who “has ceased to ‘belong’ ” (T 15; H 83).
Benjamin, too, in his “Little History of Photography” (1931), comments on the haunting quality of early photographs—something that remains in them “that cannot be silenced.”108 Likewise, he attributes this haunting quality to the photograph’s association with death, as in his evocation of the portrait of the nineteenth-century photographer Dauthendey and his fiancé, who was to commit suicide aft er the birth of their sixth child. But where Benjamin suggests the mystical possibility of a spark that leaps across the gap between the photograph’s time and his own, Kracauer stresses irreversible disjuncture and dissociation into dissimilarity. (It is important to note that he is talking less about the physical, chemically based process of decay than about a disintegration of the depicted material elements.) The photograph of the young grandmother-to-be does not return the gaze across generations. For Kracauer, the chilly breeze of the future that makes the beholder shudder conveys not only intimations of his own mortality but also the liberating sense of the passing of a history that is already dead, depriving the bourgeois social order of its appearance of coherence and continuity, necessity and legitimacy.109
More than an existential memento mori, the outdated photograph assumes the status of evidence in the historical process (or “trial,” as Benjamin will pun).110 What up to this point in the essay has remained a private, individual encounter emerges as a public and political possibility toward the end of the essay. It is precisely because of the medium’s negativity—its affinity with contingency, opacity to meaning, and tendency toward disintegration—that Kracauer attributes to photography a decisive role in the historical confrontation between human consciousness and nature. Shifting to the historico-philosophical register, he sees photography assigned to that stage of practical and material life at which an at once liberated and alienated consciousness confronts, as its objectified, seemingly autonomous opposite, “the foundation of nature devoid of meaning” (MO 61). In other words, it is the problematic indexicality at the heart of photographic representation that enables it to function as an index in the sense of deixis, an emblem pointing to— and pointing up—a critical juncture of modernity.111
As a category inseparable from history, nature refers both to the historically altered physis (including its ostensibly untouched preserves) and to the “second nature” of a society “[secreted by] the capitalist-industrial mode of production”— a social order that “regulates itself according to economic laws of nature” (MO 61).112 I’d like to stress that in this phase of Kracauer’s work his concept of nature, including the bodily and instinctual nature of human beings, has a ferociously pejorative valence, lacking the philosophical solidarity with nature as an object of domination and reification one finds, for instance, in Benjamin and Adorno and, with a different slant, in Kracauer’s own Theory of Film. As in the essay on the “mass ornament” (published earlier the same year), nature becomes the allegorical name for any reality that posits itself as given and immutable, a social formation that remains “mute,” correlating with a consciousness “unable to see its own material base.” “One can certainly imagine a society that has fallen prey to a mute nature which has no meaning however abstract its silence. The contours of such a society emerge in the illustrated journals. Were it to endure, the emancipation of consciousness would result in the eradication of consciousness; the nature that it failed to penetrate would sit down at the very table that consciousness had abandoned” (MO 61).
However, if historically emancipation and reification have gone hand in hand, consciousness is also given an unprecedented opportunity to reoccupy the place at the table with a different agenda: “Less enmeshed in the natural bonds than ever before, it could prove its power in dealing with them.” In this alternative, Kracauer pinpoints the significance of the photographic media for the direction of the present, the fate of modernity: “The turn to photography is the go-for-broke game of history.”
In the eighth and final section of the essay, Kracauer steps up the rhetorical stakes of this gamble to highlight the historical chance that presents itself with photography, an argument that turns into a case for the photographic foundation of film. In a vast panoramic collage, he evokes the image of a “general inventory” or “main archive” (Hauptarchiv) that assembles the infinite totality of outdated photographs. “For the first time in history, photography brings to light the entire natural cocoon; for the first time, it lends presence to the world of death in its independence from human beings” (MO 62; S 5.2:96). In the dialectics of presence effect and disintegration, the medium-specific negativity of photography comes to define its politically progressive potential, indeed its task “to disclose this previously unexamined foundation of nature“ (MO 61–62). In the confrontation with “the unabashedly displayed mechanics of industrial society,” photography enables consciousness to view “the reflection [Widerschein] of the reality that has slipped away from it” (MO 62).
Understood as a general warehousing of nature, photography provides an archive that makes visible, in a sensually and bodily experienced way, both the fallout of modernity and the possibility of doing it over, of organizing things differently. This archive, though, is anything but easy to access and navigate; it is rather an an-archive—a heap of broken images—that lends itself to the task precisely because it lacks any obvious and coherent organizational system.113 It is closer in spirit to dadaist or surrealist montage (or, for that matter, the essay’s epigraph from Grimm’s Fairy Tales and “Calico-World”):
Photography shows cities in aerial shots, brings crockets [Krabben] and figures from the Gothic cathedrals. All spatial configurations are incorporated into the main archive in unusual overlaps [Überschneidungen] that distance them from human proximity. Once the grandmother’s costume has lost its relationship to the present, it will no longer be funny; it will be peculiar, like a submarine octopus. One day the diva will lose her demonic quality and her bangs will go the same way as the chignons. This is how the elements crumble since they are not held together. The photographic archive assembles in effigy the last elements of a nature alienated from meaning. (MO 62; S 5.2:96–97)
From a future vantage point that shows the present intermingled with everything else that’s past, and the human nonhierarchically cohabitating with the nonhuman, even the illustrated magazines lose their market-driven actuality and coverage effect; their images become as random, fragmentary, and ephemeral as the portraits and snapshots in the family album. Kracauer’s photographic an-archive evokes Benjamin’s image of the backward-flying Angel of History facing the wreckage piled up by a storm from paradise, written at a time when the historical gamble seemed all but lost. Kracauer’s vision is not quite as desperate: it still discerns concrete images of disfiguration, assembled in a textual bricolage.
The passage cited reinforces the essay’s programmatic subordination of photographic resemblance or iconicity to the idea that photographs do not simply replicate but are themselves part of nature; they are material objects like the commodities they depict in their configuration of and with the human.114 More than that, Kracauer’s text materializes the photographs of the star and the grandmother as “things”—in the emphatic sense of “thingness” theorized by Heidegger.115 Like Heidegger’s famous jug, the two exemplary images take on an amazing plasticity, tactility, and agency; they spawn and participate in public life and disclose their meanings through social usage and cultural practices. Unlike the jug, however, which seems to exist—and endure—in
