expressions” of modern life were guided, though, by the theoretical objective to determine “the position that an epoch occupies in the historical process,” that is, the direction(s) that modernity would or could take.11 Key to this project was the critique of capitalism, without which the critique of modernity would have remained marooned in metaphysical pessimism. As is often noted, Kracauer’s reading of Marx and Marxist theory beginning in 1925 radicalized his earlier materialist impulses into a critical program. At the same time, actual developments in the process of modernization, in particular the implementation of Fordist-Taylorist methods of production and the increased circulation of American entertainment products from the mid-twenties on, both confirmed and challenged the Marxist analysis of capitalism in specific ways.
The effort to grasp the ongoing transformations posed heuristic and methodological problems—concerning the relationship of theory and empirical reality and that of totality and the particular—to which Kracauer found no satisfactory answers in the established academic disciplines, least of all philosophy, in particular German idealist thought in the tradition of Kant and Hegel.12 Theoretical thinking schooled in that tradition, he felt, proved increasingly incapable of grasping a changed and changing reality, a “reality filled with corporeal things and people” (MO 140; S 5.1:169). Accordingly, his earlier despair over the direction of the historical process turned into a concern over the lack of a heuristic discourse, over the fact that “the objectively-curious [das Objektiv-Neugierige] lacks a countenance.”13
Neither did he find such a discourse in the discipline of sociology and social theory, which should have been the place for conceptualizing concrete changes in social organization and social behavior under the conditions of capitalist modernity.14 It was not that the critique of Western rationality, notably Max Weber’s, ignored capitalist modes of production and exchange. In Kracauer’s view, however, this critique still operated at an idealist level of abstraction because it posited the Ratio as a transhistorical, ontological category of which the current phase of capitalism was just a particular inevitable and unalterable incarnation. He extended this reproach even to Georg Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness (1923) had persuasively fused Weber’s theory of rationalization with Marx’s theory of the commodity and was to become major impulse for Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School. Kracauer not only rejected Lukács’s notion of the proletariat as both object and subject of a Hegelian dialectics of history but also balked at the conception of reality as a totality.15 For Kracauer, the diagnosis of the historical process required the construction of categories from within the material; bringing Marx up to date, he wrote to Ernst Bloch, required “a dissociation of Marxism in the direction of the realities.”16
In this regard, Kracauer, like many of his generation, found inspiration in Georg Simmel, a thinker who moved between, across, and beyond the disciplines of philosophy and sociology and who, as early as 1903, had asserted the significance of the “seemingly insignificant traits on the surface of life.”17 Having attended Simmel’s lectures and corresponded with him, Kracauer devoted a substantial monograph to him in 1919: “Simmel was the first to open for us the gateway to the world of reality.”18 He authorized the exploration of the quotidian, ephemeral, and coincidental, the mundane reality of everyday life and leisure and attendant modes of social interaction. Unlike “thinkers rooted in transcendental idealism who try to capture the material manifold of the world by means of a few wide-meshed general concepts” and end up missing precisely the “existential plenitude of these phenomena,” Simmel, according to Kracauer, “snuggles much closer to his objects” (MO 242). He offered a theorizing mode of description grounded in “perceptual experience”—“he observes [the material] with an inner eye and describes what he sees” (MO 257)—that is, an aesthetic disposition to which Kracauer was to add the eye for spatial dynamics and precision of an architect, the kinaesthetic imagination of a moviegoer, and a literary sensibility closer to Kafka, dada, and surrealism.
However, he rejected Simmel’s vitalist penchant to show every object as interconnected with everything else, thus making individual phenomena symbolize the infinite connectedness of the manifold as a living totality. Not only had Kracauer lost the confidence in any meaningful interconnectedness; the very breakdown of totality was for him a defining feature—and opportunity—of the historical moment, marking the difference of modernity from preceding periods. Hence, he insisted vis-à-vis Simmel on treating the sundered fragments as fragments, in their own mode of being (“Eigensein”).
Kracauer’s curiosity about contemporary realities made him drift , more radically than Simmel, toward the proliferating sites, media, and practices of consumption, including their shadow counterpart, the public yet “unseen” sites of deprivation and misery. Beginning around 1925, his articles increasingly revolve around objects of daily use, metropolitan spaces and modes of circulation, and the media, rituals, and institutions of an expanding leisure culture. As remarkable as the range of topics is the change of tone and differentiation of stance in Kracauer’s writing. Although the critique of the capitalist grounding of modernization continues—and actually becomes fiercer by the end of the decade—it is no longer linked to a metaphysically based pessimistic attitude. If in his programmatic essay of 1922, “Those Who Wait,” Kracauer had already endorsed a “hesitant openness” toward modernization, by 1925 he professes an “uncertain, hesitant affirmation of the civilizing process” (MO 138, 73). Such a stance, Kracauer argues in his essay “Travel and Dance,” is “more realistic than a radical cult of progress, be it of rationalist lineage or aimed directly at the utopian. But it is also more realistic than the condemnations by those who romantically flee the situation they have been assigned.” With an openness that does not abdicate critical awareness, the observer “views the phenomena that have freed themselves from their foundation not just categorically as deformations and distorted reflections, but accords them their own, after all positive possibilities” (MO 73; S 5.1:295).
Which particular possibilities did Kracauer perceive in Weimar modernity, especially the cultural manifestations of Americanism? What in this specific regime of modernization did he see as different and potentially liberatory? While he occasionally still deplores the “machinelike” quality of modern existence, he begins to be fascinated by new entertainment forms that turn the “fusion of people and things” into a creative principle. He first observes this principle at work in the musical revues then sweeping across German vaudeville stages: “The living approximates the mechanical, and the mechanical behaves like the living.”19 With an enthusiasm that sounds untypically close to the language of “white socialism,” Kracauer reports on the Frankfurt performance of the Tiller Girls, whose tour inaugurated the “American age” in Germany.20 “What they accomplish is an unprecedented labor of precision, a delightful Taylorism of the arms and legs, mechanized charm. They shake the tambourine, they drill to the rhythms of jazz, they come on as the boys in blue: all at once, pure duodeci-unity [Zwölfeinigkeit]. Technology whose grace is seductive, grace that is genderless because it rests on joy of precision. A representation of American virtues, a flirt by the stopwatch.”21
Kracauer’s pleasure in such precision does not rest with forms inspired by technology but with the aesthetic rendering of social and sexual configurations coarticulated with the new technological regime. It is significant that he does not conflate mechanization and rationalization with an a priori negative concept of standardization, or feel threatened by the flaunted loss of individuality. In the stylized economy of the revue, its fragmentary, serial, incessantly metamorphosing patterns, standardization translates into a sensual celebration of collectivity, a vision, perhaps a mirage, of equality, cooperation, and solidarity. It is also a vision of gender mobility and androgyny (girls dressed as sailors)—a mark of Americanism for both its proponents and enemies—though perhaps at the price of a retreat from sexuality and denial of sexual difference. Still, Kracauer’s account conveys a glimpse of a different organization of social and gender relations—different at least from the patriarchal order of the Wilhelmine family and norms of sexual behavior that clashed with both the reality of working women and
