derived from Lukács’s theory of reification that would become axiomatic both in Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry and, with a more positive slant, in Benjamin’s theses on art and technological reproducibility. For one thing, Kracauer does not condemn commodification, serial production, and standardization as such, as can be seen in his many positive reviews of popular fiction, especially detective and adventure novels, as well as in his repeated, if sometimes grudging, statements of admiration for Hollywood over UfA products.57 For another, Kracauer would not have presumed that people who watched the same thing necessarily were thinking the same way; and if they did pattern their appearance and behavior on the figures and fables of the screen, the problem was primarily with the German film industry’s circulation of escapist ideology on screen and the compensatory gentrification of exhibition. Again and again, in daily reviews as well as the series reprinted under the titles “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies” and “Film 1928,” Kracauer castigated films that advanced their audience’s denial of growing economic uncertainty and social volatility.58 In other words, his critique was directed less against the lure of cinematic identification in general, as an ideological effect of the apparatus, than against the economic and political conditions responsible for the unrealistic tendency of such identification.59
The cinema is a signature of modernity for Kracauer not simply because it attracts and represents the masses but because it is the most advanced cultural institution in which the masses, as a relatively heterogeneous, undefined, and as yet little understood form of collectivity, constitute a new form of public (Öffentlichkeit). Lacking the coherence and familiarity of a traditional community, the metropolitan cinema audience represents a formation of primarily strangers defined by the terms of publicness. As Kracauer writes approvingly of Helmuth Plessner’s Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (Limits of Community, 1924), “The forms and relations in the realm of the public . . . are rules of the game that forgo investing the real ‘I’ and, before anything else, grant respect to all players.”60 Strangers gather at the motion picture shows as spectators; that is, they engage in relatively anonymous yet collective acts of reception and aesthetic judgment in which they may recognize and mobilize their own experience in the mode of play. As Heide Schlüpmann has argued, Kracauer sketches a theory of a specifically modern public sphere that resists thinking of the masses and the idea of the public as an opposition (as still upheld by Jürgen Habermas in his 1962 study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). Kracauer “neither asserts the idea of the public against its [actual or putative] disintegration and decline, nor does he resort to a concept of an oppositional public sphere” (in the sense of Negt and Kluge).61 Rather, Kracauer sees in the cinema a blueprint for an alternative public sphere that can realize itself only through the destruction of the dominant, bourgeois public sphere that draws legitimation from institutions of high art, education, and culture no longer in touch with reality.
Alternative too, I would add, because, unlike the partial publics of the traditional labor movement, the cinema offers a public sphere of a different kind. Epitomizing the multiplication and interpenetration of spaces already advanced by other media of urban commercial culture (shop windows, billboards), the cinema systematically intersects two different types of space, the local space of the theater and the deterritorialized space of the film projected on the screen. It thus represents an instance of what Michel Foucault has dubbed “heterotopias”: places that “are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about.” Sites of transportation like trains and planes, sites of temporary relaxation like cafés, beaches, and movie theaters function, in Foucault’s words, as “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which . . . all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”62 Taking our cue from Foucault, we could read Kracauer’s acknowledgment of the specifically modern type of publicness of cinema not just as sociological observation but also as a theoretical insight into the significance of the cinema’s intersection of an anonymous yet collective theater experience with a product whose simultaneous mass circulation exceeded the local, national, and temporal boundaries of live events.63
As can be expected, Kracauer’s leap of faith into a commercially based collectivity has earned him the charge that he naively tries to resurrect the liberal public sphere, thus unwittingly subscribing to the ideology of the marketplace.64 To be sure, he insists on political principles of general access, equality, and justice and—perhaps more steadfastly than some of his Marxist, specifically Leninist, contemporaries—on the right to self-determination and democratic forms of living and organization. Yet Kracauer is materialist enough to know that these principles do not miraculously emerge from the rational discourse of inner-directed subjects, let alone from efforts to restore the authority of a literary public sphere. Rather, cognition has to be grounded in the very sphere of experience in which modernization is most palpable and most destructive—in a sensory-perceptual, aesthetic discourse that allows for “a self-representation of the masses subject to the process of mechanization.”
As I suggested earlier, Kracauer’s concept of the masses developed within a force field defined by, on the on hand, elitist-pessimistic crowd theory (popularized by Le Bon and adapted by thinkers as disparate as Spengler and Freud) and, on the other, socialist and communist conceptions of the masses as traditional or revolutionary heroic working class. If Kracauer shared with crowd theory the assumption that the modern mass blurred traditional boundaries of class, he linked that assumption with the recognition of a new kind of publicness and a passionate inquiry into the conditions of possibility of mass democracy (in that sense pointing forward to Hardt and Negri’s concept of the “multitude”).65 Where conservative crowd theory turns on the bourgeois intellectual’s fear of the mass as powerful other, Kracauer displays an amazing lack of fear—fear of touch, violence, contagion—toward a social formation that he knew himself to be part of, whose experience he shared in a number of respects. Like his protagonist Ginster, he felt drawn to transitional, heterotopic spaces—such as train stations, harbors, and movie theaters—that allowed him to disappear in the anonymous, amorphous, circulating crowd, to be “between people” rather than “with them.”66 While going some way toward accounting for his cinephilia, Kracauer’s nonphobic relation to the modern mass also made him a kind of seismograph, attuned as much to what was new and promising in this formation as to its political volatility.
The specifically modern mass that Kracauer was to track began to enter public awareness in Germany with World War I. Industrialized warfare, mass killing and death, mass starvation and epidemics had brought into view the masses as object of violence and disease (rather than, as in crowd theory, their putative subject and source). While social privilege protected to some extent against these ravages, the sheer scale made suffering as much a statistical probability as a matter of class. Following the revolution of 1919, which mobilized the image of the masses as a powerful agent, mass existence continued to be associated with the stigma of misery, culminating in the 1923 hyperinflation, which spread the experience of destitution far beyond the industrial working class. During the short-lived phase of economic recovery, however, the masses began to appear less as a suffering and more as a consuming mass—a mass that became visible as a social formation in collective acts of consumption.67 And since consumer goods that might have helped improve living conditions (for instance, refrigerators) were still a lot less affordable than in the United States,68 major objects of consumption were the fantasy productions, images of consumer goods, and environments of the new leisure culture. In these phenomena Kracauer discerned the contours of an emerging mass society that, for better or for worse, was productive in its very need and acts of consumption.
MASS CULTURE, CLASS, SUBJECTIVITY
The essay on the mass ornament invokes the language of conservative crowd theory while effectively undermining it. Seemingly rehearsing the standard oppositions, Kracauer delineates the mass against the organic community of the people qua Volk; against the higher, “fateful” unity of the nation; and, for that matter, against socialist and communist notions of the collective. While the community had secreted
