of the body from that subtending traditional humanist notions of a unitary, autonomous self. Writing about two “excentric dancers” (Exzentriktänzer) performing live in the Ufa Theater, Kracauer asserts that the precision and grace of their act “transform the body-machine into an atmospheric instrument.” They defy physical laws of gravity, not by assimilating technology to the phantasm of a complete, masculine body (such as the armored body of the soldier-hero), but by playing with the fragmentation and dissolution of that body: “When, for instance, they throw one leg around in a wide arc . . . it is really no longer attached to the body, but the body, light as a feather, has become an appendix to the floating leg.”23 This image evokes similar visions in contemporary visual art and experimental film, such as of Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger’s Ballet méchanique, Hans Bellmer’s broken dolls, or Hannah Höch’s collages.24 Within Kracauer’s oeuvre, the aesthetic pleasure in the suspension of the “natural” body’s boundaries may also be read as a playful variant of his masochistic imagination, which (in a number of his essays and in his novel Ginster) again and again stages the violation of physical and mental identity by extraneous objects and sensations.25 As a creative critique of ideology, the jumbling of the hierarchy of center and periphery in the dancers’ bodies, their fragmentation as well as prosthetic expansion, undermines both older bourgeois notions of an “integrated personality” and ongoing attempts (in sports, in “body culture”) to reground “the spirit” in an organic, natural unity.26
Not least, Kracauer’s valorization of Taylorist revue aesthetics and the “American influence” on the genre served to excoriate the retrograde style of the show’s German numbers, with their mélange of monarchism (“Queen Luise descending from a perron in historical costume”), militarism, mother love, and Viennese Gemüt. However, when he returns to these examples in an all-round polemic against the genre a few months later, the Tiller Girls likewise fall prey to sarcastic condemnation (mindless “automata” “produced by Ford”). The refrain that ironically punctuates the essay, “in the age of technology,” highlights the gap between technological modernization and a culture not up to its challenges.27 The phrase also suggests a lack of consciousness in the very cultural products that flaunt their synchronicity and presentness, a point that anticipates his concern about the “muteness” of the mass ornament.
Kracauer’s fascination with—and growing ambivalence toward—aesthetic forms corresponding to the Americanist regime of rationalization was not limited to the serial displays of the revues. In fact, some of his most interesting writing concerning such aesthetics can be found in his articles on the circus.28 His review of Zirkus Hagenbeck, published a year before his essay “The Mass Ornament,” reads like a sketch for the latter. Kracauer introduces the appearance of the giant menagerie in Frankfurt as an “International of animals,” describing the animals as involuntary delegates from globally extended regions, united under the spell of Americanism: “The fauna moves rhythmically and forms geometrical patterns. There is nothing left of dullness. As unorganic matter snaps into crystals, mathematics seizes the limbs of living nature and sounds control the drives. The animal world, too, has fallen for jazz. . . . Every animal participates in the creation of the empire of figures according to its talents. Brahmin zebus, Tibetan black bears, and massifs of elephants: they all arrange themselves according to thoughts they did not think themselves.”29
The regime of heteronomous reason rehearsed on the backs of the animals would be merely pathetic if it weren’t for the clowns whose anarchic pranks debunk the imperialist claims of rationalization: “They too want to be elastic and linelike, but it doesn’t work; the elephants are more adroit, one has too many inner resistances, some goblin crosses out the elaborate calculation” (FT 110).30 While their antics have a long tradition, the clowns assume alterity in relation to the ongoing process of modernization; they inhabit the intermediary realm of improvisation and chance that, for Kracauer, is the redeeming supplement of that process and that has come into existence only with the loss of “foundations” or a stable order.31
The institution in which the clowns could engage rationalization on, as it were, its own turf was of course the cinema, which assured them an audience far beyond local and live performances. In numerous reviews, Kracauer early on praised slapstick comedy (Groteske) as a cultural form in which Americanism supplied a popular and public antidote to its own system. Like no other genre, slapstick comedy seemed to subvert the economically imposed regime in well-improvised orgies of destruction, confusion, and parody. “One has to hand this to the Americans: with slapstick films they have created a form that offers a counterweight to their reality: if in that reality they subject the world to an often unbearable discipline, the film in turn dismantles this self-imposed order quite forcefully.”32
To the extent that Kracauer’s theorizing of slapstick concerns the assimilation of human beings to the mechanical, it harks back to Bergson’s famous essay on laughter, Le rire (1900). However, Kracauer’s interest in the genre is decisively more anarchistic and iconoclastic. He extolled slapstick as a creative critique not only of the regime of the assembly line but also of a culture predicated on bourgeois individualism and anthropocentrism. Thus he emphasizes the mutual imbrication of the living and the mechanical, the “revolt of the slaves” (Simmel) that animates material objects and puts them on a par with human agents.33 Human beings in turn assume a thinglike physiognomy (a case in point is Keaton’s deadpan face); lacking the authority and interiority of a sovereign ego, they are vulnerable to the push and pull, the malice of objects as well as people.34 Reviewing Chaplin’s Gold Rush, Kracauer writes: “He [Chaplin] shrinks back from the door that leaps ajar behind his back because it too is an ego; everything that asserts itself, dead and living things alike, possesses a power over him toward whom one has to take off one’s hat, and so he keeps taking off his hat.”35
Kracauer was only one among a great number of European avant-garde artists and intellectuals (such as dadaists and surrealists) who celebrated slapstick film, and their numbers grew with the particular inflection of the genre by Chaplin.36 Benjamin, too, ascribed to slapstick comedy a radical social and political significance, which complemented his often dutiful and at best sporadic endorsements of Soviet film. He considered Chaplin an exemplary figure primarily because of his mimetic “innervation” of assembly-line technology, a “gestic” rendering of the experience of perceptual and bodily fragmentation. In abstracting the human body and making its alienation readable, Chaplin joins Kafka and other figures in which Benjamin discerned a return of the allegorical mode in modernity—except that Chaplin’s appeal combines melancholy with the force of involuntary collective laughter.
Where Benjamin emphasizes self-fragmentation and “self-alienation” in Chaplin, Kracauer locates the figure’s appeal in an already missing self: “The human being that Chaplin embodies or, rather, does not embody but lets go of, is a hole. . . . He has no will; in the place of the drive toward self-preservation or the hunger for power there is nothing inside him but a void that is as blank as the snow fields of Alaska” (W 6.1:270, 269). In this regard, Chaplin resembles the protagonist of Kracauer’s novel Ginster (1928), a connection first made by Joseph Roth: “Ginster in the War—that’s Chaplin in the department store!”37
Whether from lack of identity or inability to distinguish between self and multiplied self-images (as Kracauer observes with reference to the hall-of-mirror scene from Circus), Chaplin instantiates a “schizophrenic” vision in which the habitual relations among people and things are shattered and different configurations appear possible (W 6.1:269); like a flash of lightning, Chaplin’s laughter “welds together madness and happiness.”38 The absent center of Chaplin’s persona allows for a reconstruction of humanity under alienated conditions—“from this hole the purely human radiates discontinuously . . . the human that is otherwise stifled below the surface, that cannot shimmer through the shells of ego consciousness” (W 6.1:269–70). A key aspect of this humanity is a form of mimetic behavior that disarms the aggressor or malicious
