with the actual working class (whether blue-collar or white-collar) but with the proletariat as a category of Marxist philosophy, a category of negation directed against existing conditions in their totality. As the self-sublating prototype of the proletariat, the cinematic masses are attributed a degree of homogeneity that misses the actual and unprecedented mixture of classes—as well as genders and generations—that had been observed in cinema audiences early on (notably by sociologist Emilie Altenloh in her 1914 study).82 This construction ultimately leaves the intellectual in a position outside, at best surrendering to the masses’ existence as powerful, though still unconscious, other. Where Kracauer self-consciously constructs the reality of the salaried employees through at once participatory and critical observation, Benjamin’s image of the masses, whether projected backward into the nineteenth century or forward into the not-yet of the proletarian revolution, ultimately remains a philosophical, if not aesthetic, abstraction.
One could argue that Kracauer’s analysis of mass culture as employee culture is just as one-sided as Benjamin’s linkage of film and proletariat. He himself stresses the specificity of Berlin’s leisure culture as a pronounced Angestelltenkultur, “i.e. a culture made by employees for employees and seen by most employees as a culture” (SM 32). Yet to say that this particular focus eclipses the rest of society, especially the working class, would be as misleading as to conceive of mass culture and employee culture as an opposition.83 Rather, Kracauer’s analysis recognizes the dynamic by which the subculture of the employees, with their self-image as new middle estate, was becoming hegemonic for society as a whole; in its fantasies of class transcendence and fixation on outward appearance and visuality, employee culture provided a matrix for a specifically modern, social and national, imaginary. In an article “on the actor” (occasioned by a radio lecture by Max Reinhardt), Kracauer links this process to the shift from industrial to finance capital, which makes even the executive director a salaried employee. “More and more people today turn into employees; they are employed, though, by a power that has no meaning.”84 The ostensible inevitability of the economic system encourages a social behavior of “role-playing.” Increasingly removed from the production of material goods, individuals resort to acting in a double sense: “For one thing, they have to play a role because there is no substance that would tie them to a particular part; for another, they want to play a role because they are who they are not by themselves but by means of external recognition” (S 5.2:233).
This double sense of social role-play implies the possibility of a performative self-fashioning; at the same time, it circumscribes that creativity as specular and narcissistic. The cinema facilitates both tendencies through a phantasmatic mode of perception in which the boundaries between self and heteronomous images are liquefied, revealed to be porous in the first place, allowing viewers to let themselves “be polymorphously projected” (MO 332; S 5.1:279). While in the mid-twenties this psychoperceptual mobility still beckoned Kracauer with pleasures of self-abandonment and anonymity, by the end of the decade it made him view “the unreal film fantasies” as the “daydreams of society,” and thus symptomatic of contemporary ideology: “In reality it may not oft en happen that a scullery maid marries the owner of a Rolls Royce. But don’t the Rolls Royce owners dream that the scullery maids dream of rising to their level?” (MO 292; W 6.1:309). In other words, by channeling legitimate dreams of upward mobility into a narrative dispositif that couples romance and class transcendence, the film industry organizes the “interplay of the fantasies of the ruling class with those of the ruled” (Benjamin);85 it thereby generates and perpetuates a social imaginary that prevents the recognition of—and action upon—economic and class inequality.
In granting such film fantasies—and the desire bound up in them—a substance of their own, Kracauer implicitly distances himself from more orthodox Marxist concepts of ideology. To be sure, he shares and emphatically endorses the insight “that the form of our economy determines the form of our existence. Politics, law, art, and morality are the way they are because capitalism is.”86 And while he pinpoints particular ideologies and their internal dynamics, he nevertheless recognizes the logic of ideology in the singular, as a matrix that structures social relations and the cultural practices that work to diffuse the contradictions endemic to capitalist society. But for Kracauer the systemic character of ideology is not sufficiently accounted for by the commodity form or a Lukácsian logic of reification. Rather, he identifies equally important sources of systematicity in areas that orthodox Marxists would assign to a deterministically understood superstructure, in particular language and the unconscious. “This after all is the genius of language,” he writes analyzing the signs in an unemployment office, “that it fulfills orders that were not given to it and erects bastions in the unconscious.”87
In one of his two reviews of Die Angestellten, Benjamin acclaims Kracauer’s literary, in particular satiric, forays into the psychic disposition that constitutes ideology as “false consciousness.” As long as the Marxist doctrine of the superstructure does not address the genesis of false consciousness, he glosses Kracauer, one can only resort to the Freudian model of repression (Verdrängung) to answer the key question “How can the contradictions of an economic situation give rise to a form of consciousness inappropriate to it?”88 The film fantasies not only reveal society’s repressed wishes but also participate in the repression of those aspects of reality that would disturb the illusion of imaginary plenitude and mobility: “The very things that should be projected onto the screen have been wiped away, and its surface has been filled with images that cheat us out of the image of our existence” (MO 308)—an image that includes, we might fill in, “the tiny catastrophes that make up the everyday” (SM 62; W 1:258).
Kracauer’s growing concern over the collective denial of misery and violence makes him refrain from the more dialectical argument pursued by Benjamin regarding nineteenth-century mass culture, which would read fantasies of class transcendence and abundance as at once ideological and utopian, as myths expressing the desire for a classless society. Rather, he perceives an economic nexus between the reality of mass-cultural fantasies and the missing representation of another, and other, reality: “The flight of images is a flight from revolution and from death” (SM 94). In his review, Benjamin radicalizes this insight by inverting the emphasis: “The more thoroughly [the immense desolation] is repressed from the consciousness of the strata overcome by it, the more creative it proves— according to the law of repression—in the production of images” (SW 2:308). In the economy of image production and repression, the business of distraction assumes a systematic function in capitalism’s effort to generate and perpetuate a “consciousness inappropriate to it”—that is, to invest in a mass culture that demobilizes any potential resistance on the part of its customers and inures them to contradiction.
Kracauer’s prescient insights into the functioning of mass-cultural ideology, specifically the psychoperceptual processes constituting subjectivity as a social imaginary, could well be considered in light of poststructuralist concepts of ideology, in particular film theory of the 1970s and ’80s drawing on Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault, as well as postmodern media criticism in the vein of Guy Debord and Baudrillard.89 This lineage, however, also elucidates the difference, both historical and philosophical, that speaks from his writings. The loop effect touched on earlier—“Does film imitate reality or does reality imitate film?”—is still to some extent hyperbole, troping on Oscar Wilde’s apothegm of nature imitating art.90 For one thing, Kracauer remains astonished that the cinema, itself a culturally despised phenomenon little more than a decade earlier, has assumed a key role in constructing social identity and thus has the power to marginalize and exclude whole areas of experience or to transmute any radical implications their representation might have into narratives of uplift and upward mobility. For another, as he discerns how signature fads of Weimar culture—nature worship, body culture, sports, kinky eroticism—had acquired the systematicity of a social discourse, he confronts the question (for example in the photography essay and the shopgirls series) of how the media’s simultaneous exclusion of vital realities tallies with their voracious inclusion of these realities,
