“its jungle streets, factory massifs, and labyrinths of roofs”—the alpine panoramas, like the contemporary mountain films, proffer a presumably unmediated nature as the solution to modernity’s discontents.117 The recourse to antimodern symbols does not make this alternative any less modern: As Kracauer increasingly excoriates the return, in German films and revues, of the Alps, the Rhine, Old Vienna and Prussia, of lieutenants, fraternities, and royalty, he recognizes it as a specific version of technological modernity, an attempt to nationalize and domesticate whatever liberatory, egalitarian effects this modernity might have had.
In his earlier discovery of “Amerika,” Kracauer had hoped for a German version of mass-mediated modernity that would be capable of enduring the tensions between a capitalist economy in permanent crisis and the principles and practices of a democratic society. Crucial to this modernity would have been the ability of cinema and mass culture to function as a sensory-reflexive matrix in which a heterogeneous mass public could recognize and negotiate the contradictions they were experiencing, and in which they could confront otherness and mortality instead of repressing or aestheticizing it. Whatever stirrings of such modernity the Weimar Republic saw, it did not find a more long-term German, let alone European, elaboration—Berlin never became the capital of the twentieth century. Instead, “Berlin” was polarized into an internationalist (American, Jewish, diasporic, politically and artistically radical) modernism and a Germanic one that assimilated the most advanced technology to the reinvention of tradition, authority, community, nature, and race. When the National Socialists perfected this form of modernism into the millennial modernity of total domination and mass annihilation, “America” had to become real, for better or for worse, for Kracauer and others to survive.
PART II
Benjamin
3
Actuality, Antinomies
While Kracauer’s early writings on film, mass culture, and modernity have barely entered English-language debates, Benjamin’s presence in these debates seems hopelessly overdetermined. During the past three decades, his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936) may have been quoted more often than any other single source, in areas ranging from new-left theory to cultural studies, from film and art history to visual culture, from the postmodern art scene to debates on the fate of art, including film, in the digital world. In the context of these invocations, the essay has not become any less problematic than when it was first written, nor has it always acquired new meanings.
“Benjamin is enjoying a boom, but does he still have actuality?”1 This question is inevitable at a time when our political, social, and personal lives seem more than ever to be driven by developments in media technology, and thus by an accelerated transformation, disintegration, and reconfiguration of the structures of experience. Indeed, if we pose the question of Benjamin’s actuality in light of the tremendous changes associated with digital technology, it could easily be argued that his theses concerning the technological media, in particular their proclaimed revolutionary potential, belong to an altogether different period than ours, and that his major prognostications have been proven wrong, at the latest with the advent of the digital and the global consolidation of capitalism.2 But to reach such a conclusion is perhaps not the reason we read Benjamin today.
To begin with, Benjamin’s own, avowedly esoteric concept of Aktualität (evoked in the above quotation) should caution us not to measure him against a standard defined by the inexorable advance of media technology, especially if the latter is posited as an epistemic if not ontological apriority rather than a development inflected by economic and political conditions and cultural practices. Fusing a messianic notion of Jetztzeit, or time of the Now, with the project of a materialist historiography, Benjamin’s concept of actuality sets itself off against any unreflected contemporaneity, be it the market-driven new or the ostensibly neutral upto-date of its intellectual proponents.3 For Benjamin, actuality requires standing at once within and against one’s time, grasping the “temporal core” of the present in terms other than those supplied by the period about itself (as Kracauer put it), and above all in diametrical opposition to developments taken for granted in the name of “progress.”4
Whether we dismiss Benjamin in the name of current media theory or try to assimilate him to it, we would miss out on much of his contribution to a theory of modern culture. Benjamin’s concern with film and technological media is inseparable from, on the one hand, his philosophy of history, which pivots on the question of modernity, and, on the other, his theory of the aesthetic, which encompasses both the organization of sensory perception, understood historically, and the fate of art and artistic practice in the narrower sense. In his persistent efforts to interrelate those domains, the cinema came to figure as the linchpin between the transformations of the aesthetic and the impasses of contemporary history. Unless we keep in view these larger stakes of Benjamin’s project, we cannot fully grasp what lent his reflections on film and the technological media and their paradigmatic impact on art and culture such prescience for decades to come. In tracing the complex and oft en contradictory logic of this project, we may gain a more nuanced and more realistic purchase on his actuality for film and media theory today.
Questions of modernity, the aesthetic, and technological reproduction are nowhere as tightly entwined as in the artwork essay. As is often pointed out, Benjamin conceived of the essay in conjunction with his vast work on nineteenth-century Paris, The Arcades Project. Their common focus, articulated most clearly in the 1935 exposé of the latter, was the effects of industrial capitalism on art and the reorganization of human sense perception. He considered the essay “most intimately related” to the historiographic project, less in terms of subject matter than in its function as a methodological device: that of an epistemological “telescope,” the building of which led him to discover “some fundamental principles of materialist art theory.”5 In a letter to Max Horkheimer, he described the artwork essay as an effort “to determine the precise point in the present to which my historical construction will orient itself.”6 Far from assuming a stable observation platform (which he imputed to hermeneutical historicism), this “vanishing point” in the present was defined by the ongoing crisis—the triumph of fascism in Germany and the threat of its expansion in France, the collapse of an existing socialist alternative with the reign of Stalinism—and the challenge to imagine an all-but-impossible future.7 “If the project of the book is the fate of art in the nineteenth century, this fate has something to say to us only because it is contained in the ticking of a clock whose striking of the hour has just reached our ears.”8 The heightened stakes of the situation made Benjamin discover, as he wrote to Gretel Karplus (later Adorno) around the same time, “that aspect of art in the nineteenth-century that only ‘now’ becomes recognizable, in a way in which it has never been before and will never be again.” And he calls this discovery a “decisive example” of his concept of the “ ‘Now of recognizability [Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit],’ ” a “very esoterically” understood concept around which “crystallizes” his theory of cognition.9
The crescendo of the time machine, the tolling of the bell, the pairing of danger and cognition—such imagery attunes us to the rhetorical form of the artwork essay: a set of militant theses defined by their tactical, interventionist value rather than their validity as an empirical account, a partisan manifesto rather than a presumably neutral scholarly treatise. If Benjamin’s theses claim actuality for the time they were written, they do so because they were also, in the Nietzschean sense, untimely. This was not lost on Max Horkheimer, who recognized that Benjamin’s “fundamental statement” was directed at the “problematic of the French situation,” that is, the issue of the (in)adequacy of the cultural politics of the Popular Front against the threat of fascism; he therefore insisted on its swift publication in French in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the organ of the Institute for Social Research, then being published in Paris. At the same time, Horkheimer saw
