distress over what and how this discourse excludes is not necessarily synonymous with an endorsement of representational realism, to which his position was reduced by later critics. As I argue with regard to the photography essay, the reality in transition that he insisted mandated acknowledgment crucially included the experience of the materially contingent subject. The transformations he was tracking in everyday existence, labor, and leisure culture revolved around the nexus between forms of subjectivity symptomatic of modern mass culture and the social and economic conditions that both enabled and regulated them. If he discerned in the cinema a powerful agent of these changes, he also imagined it as a sensory-perceptual dispositif that allowed a new kind of audience to grasp and engage with the discontinuities and contradictions of modern experience, and to do so in a public and collective form.
COMPETING MODERNITIES, NARROWING OPTIONS
I have traced Kracauer’s reflections on mass culture from his welcoming of Americanist entertainment forms as surface phenomena more truthful to contemporary reality than efforts to restore bourgeois culture and as playful relief from traditional social norms; through his perception of the mass as public and of mass culture as a form of collective self-representation; to a more critical assessment of mass culture as an ideological matrix that advances an imaginary social and national identity. While these shifts do not necessarily mark an evolution toward a more “mature,” realistic stance that would cancel out the earlier positions, they clearly respond to acute political and economic developments.
After the 1929 stock market crash and a sharp rise in unemployment internationally, American cultural imports such as jazz and chorus lines could not but seem inadequate and posthumous. As Kracauer writes in “Girls and Crisis” (1931), “as much as they may enthusiastically swing their legs, they come as a procession of phantoms out of a dead past.”92 At this point, the “muteness” of the mass ornament seems absolute, irredeemable; the chances that American-style entertainments could provide a critical supplement to rationalization were dwindling. Devoid of promises of abundance and equality, Fordist-Taylorist technology assumed a more sinister face; as Bloch put it regarding James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), the “golem” represents “technology with false consciousness, the fear of an America, without prosperity, of itself.”93 At the same time, the crisis of liberal democracy and rise of National Socialism brought into sharper view different national variants of modernization, whether adaptations of the American model or indigenous modernities competing with it.
In concluding this chapter, I sketch Kracauer’s attempts to delineate alternative modernities and to assess them in light of mounting political pressure and diminishing options. The onset of the Great Depression reinforced Kracauer’s critical stance toward technological modernization unaccompanied by changes in property relations and a public reflection on its psychosocial effects. Resuming his earlier critique of rationalization as a regime that seizes all domains of experience and reduces them to spatiotemporal coordinates, he increasingly assails the destruction of memory advanced as much by modern architecture and urban planning as by illustrated magazines and the entertainment business. While occasionally still echoing the pessimistic critique of mechanization and a mechanistic reduction of life by the natural sciences on the part of Lebensphilosophie, Kracauer directs his misgivings not at technology as such but at the social conditions and protocols that regulate its uses and abuses. Praising Battleship Potemkin for, among other things, showing the “matter-of-fact interaction between humans and technology” in Soviet Russia, he pinpoints the separation of technological and spiritual spheres as a specifically German, and bourgeois, problem: “Where we engage in ‘interiority’ [Innerlichkeit], anything machinic meets with contempt. Where technology is the thing, spiritual matters are not exactly a concern. Cars travel through geographical space; the soul is cultivated in the parlor” (W 6.1:236). This split, in Kracauer’s analysis, advanced a development in which the discourse of technological rationality increasingly served to naturalize the contradictions of capitalist modernity and turn it into a new mythical eternity.
It is not surprising that Kracauer rejected the tabula rasa mentality of what came to be called “hegemonic modernism.” He remained skeptical throughout of aesthetic efforts to ground visions of social change in the model of technology, in particular as elaborated by the functionalist school of modern architecture and urban planning (Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, the Bauhaus). The “culture of glass” that Benjamin so desperately welcomed as the deathblow to bourgeois culture (and attendant concepts of “interiority,” “trace,” “experience,” “aura”) leaves Kracauer, an architect by training, filled with “scurrilous grief ” over the historical-political impasse that prevents the construction of housing responsive to human needs.94 He counters the functionalist crusade against the ornament (initiated by Adolf Loos) by showing how the repressed ornament returns in the very aesthetics of technology that ordains the mass spectacles of chorus lines, sports events, and party rallies. And he criticizes the knockoff Bauhaus style of Neue Sachlichkeit in the Berlin entertainment malls and picture palaces for its secret complicity with the business of distraction and the social repression of the fear of aging and death.
The site and symbol of modernist contemporaneity, simultaneity, and presentness is the city of Berlin, the “frontier” of America in Europe.95 “Berlin is the place where one quickly forgets; indeed, it appears as if this city has a magical means of wiping out all memories. It is the present and puts its ambition into being absolutely present. . . . Elsewhere, too, the appearance of squares, company names, and stores change; but only in Berlin these transformations tear the past so radically from memory.”96 This tendency is particularly relentless on the city’s major commercial boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm, which Kracauer dubs “street without memory.” Its façades, from which “the ornaments have been knocked off,” “now stand without a foothold in time and are a symbol of the ahistorical change that takes place behind them.”97 The spatialization of time and memory into a seemingly timeless present, its uncoupling from temporality in the emphatic sense, blocks from public view any sites of actual decay, failure, and misery.
Like Benjamin, Kracauer found a counterimage to contemporary Berlin in the city of Paris. There, the “web”—“maze,” “mesentry”—of streets allows him to be a real flâneur, to indulge in a veritable “street high” (Straßenrausch).98 There, history is allowed to live on, and the present in turn has a glimmer of the past, inspiring memories “in which reality blends with the multistory [vielstöckigen] dream we have of it and garbage mingles with celestial constellations.”99 There, the crowds are constantly in motion, circulating, unstable, unpredictable, an “improvised mosaic” that never congeals into “readable patterns.”100 The impression of flux and liquidity in Kracauer’s writings on Paris is enhanced, again and again, by textual superimpositions of ocean imagery (reminiscent of Louis Aragon’s vision of the Passage de l’Opéra in Paris Peasant) and evocations of the maritime tradition and milieu. The Paris masses display a process of mingling that does not suppress gradations and heterogeneity and which goes so far that, as Kracauer somewhat naively asserts, even people of African descent can be at home—and be themselves—without being “jazzified” or otherwise exoticized.101 There, too, the effects of Americanization seem powerless, deflected into aesthetic surplus, as in the case of the electric advertisements that project undecipherable hieroglyphs onto the Paris sky: “It darts beyond the economy, and what was intended as advertising turns into an illumination. This is what happens when businessmen meddle with lighting effects.”102 In Kracauer’s play with literal and metaphoric senses of illumination, the aesthetic surplus eludes commercial intention and opens up a space for experience.
Paris, for Kracauer, is also the city of surrealism and the site of a film production that stages the jinxed relations between people and things in ways different from films adapting to the regime of the stopwatch. In the films of René Clair, Jacques Feyder, and Jean Vigo, Kracauer praises a physiognomic capacity that endows inanimate objects—buildings, streets, furniture—with memory and speech, an argument that
