discovery of film and mass culture around 1923–24 reaches back into the lapsarian layer of his earlier writings, for the most part philosophical and sociological reflections on the problem of modernity. When he begins to develop a theoretical interest in film, he hails it as the perfect medium for a fallen world, an at once sensory and reflexive discourse uniquely suited to capturing the experience of a disintegrating world, a “life deprived of substance.”8 In this capacity, film assumes an important function from the perspective of Kracauer’s philosophy or, if you will, theology of history: specifically, the eschatologically tinged idea that modernity could be overcome—and could overcome itself—only by fully realizing all its disintegrating and destructive potential. Paradoxically, as we shall see, this desire to transcend modernity prompts a turn to a postmetaphysical politics of immanence, in which film figures as both symptom of the historical process and sensory-reflexive horizon for dealing with its effects. Accompanying this turn is Kracauer’s discovery of the institution of cinema, including but exceeding the projected film, as an alternative public sphere—alternative, that is, to the institutions of both bourgeois culture and the labor movement. Many of Kracauer’s early film reviews are actually cinema reviews, in the sense that they include remarks on theater design, performance practices, musical accompaniment, and audience response. From 1925 on he began to reflect on the cinema more generally as a catalyst of a new kind of public, symptomatic of the culture of leisure and consumption that he saw emerge in Germany with the introduction of principles of mass production and the concurrent mushrooming of the class of white-collar workers or employees. When, toward the end of the decade, his writings on film and cinema increasingly shifted from a materialist physiognomy of modernity to a critique of ideology—prefiguring the approach of From Caligari to Hitler (1947)—it was because, in the face of the mounting political crisis, contemporary cinema was failing on two counts: it neither advanced the negativity of the historical process, or “self-sublation” of modernity, nor lived up to the liberating, egalitarian impulses in which Kracauer had discerned the contours of a democratic mass public.
I will trace these movements and countermovements from two complementary angles. The present chapter deals with Kracauer’s efforts to develop an aesthetics of film from the perspective of a particular experience and critique of modernity. The following chapter focuses on his exploration of modernity as a mass-produced and mass-consumed, highly ambivalent and contested formation, in which film and cinema were playing only one, albeit a crucial, role. As a hinge between these perspectives, I discuss Kracauer’s essay “Photography” (1927), a text that displays key traits of his peculiar method—his shifting among the registers of ethnographic observation, micrological analysis, critique of ideology, and philosophy of history; his effort to grasp the historical moment in both its devastating and liberating possibilities; and the inclusion of himself as experiencing subject in the cultural practices he describes.
Kracauer’s writings prior to the mid-1920s by and large participate in the period’s pessimistic, lapsarian discourse on modernity.9 Within a predominantly philosophical and theological framework, modernity appears as the endpoint of a historical process of disintegration, spiritual loss, and withdrawal of meaning from life, a dissociation of truth and existence. Expelled from a traditional order of life and a corresponding religious sphere, the individual is “thrown into the cold infinity of empty space and empty time,” a state summed up in Georg Lukács’s phrase “transcendental homelessness.”10 Drawing on contemporary sociology, in particular that of Simmel, Max Scheler, and Max Weber, Kracauer ascribes this state to the progressive unfolding of the Ratio, a formal, abstract, instrumental rationality—or perverted form of reason—propelled by capitalist economy, modern science, and technology. With the encroachment of mechanization and rationalization on all aspects of life, human beings are alienated not only from the spiritual sphere but also from all forms of communion and community (Gemeinschaft , as opposed to Gesellschaft).11 They are thus deprived of an experiential, discursive horizon that would help them make sense of these very processes.
That Kracauer participates in this culturally pessimistic discourse on modernity, with its worn-out idealist rhetoric, is not all that surprising, nor do his early writings differ in this regard from those of other Critical Theorists, in particular Benjamin, Bloch, and the early Lukács. What is remarkable, however, is the distance that Kracauer will travel, in a rather short time, from the metaphysics of Weltzerfall (disintegration of the world) to a more sober, analytic, politically astute, and yet passionately curious attitude toward the concrete phenomena of modern life, in particular mass culture. The beginnings of this transformation can be traced back to the experience of World War I, which for Kracauer, as for many of his generation, shattered the illusions of high idealism and cast its monstrous shadow on the subsequent decade; it is no coincidence that his semiautobiographical novel, Ginster, written toward the end of the 1920s, is set during the war and its aft ermath.12 Hence Kracauer’s turn to a more materialist perspective should be imagined neither as a sudden conversion nor as a progressive development toward a more critically correct position, but rather as a process of reorientation and complication in which earlier perspectives both give rise to and persist, even if incongruently, with later ones. His interest in film and mass culture does not just emerge with his oft en-flagged turn to Marxist thought and empirical sociology around 1925–26. As I will argue, the effort to theorize film precedes that turn and has its roots in precisely the lapsarian construction of history he had initially assumed toward modernity, specifically, in the peculiar form of materialism that this construction entailed.
It is significant that Kracauer elaborates his early metaphysics of modernity in a “philosophical fragment” on the detective novel, a genre of popular fiction that thrived on serial production and that in Germany occupied a lower rank on the ladder of cultural values than in England or France.13 Rather than considering this genre from the outside, as a sociological symptom, Kracauer reads it as an allegory of contemporary life, incarnating the “idea of a thoroughly rationalized civilized society” (W 1:107). The critical distinction of the detective novel vis-à-vis mere affirmation of that society consists in the way the detective’s methods mimic the mechanisms of the autonomous Ratio: “Just as the detective reveals the secret buried between people, the detective novel discloses, in the aesthetic medium, the secret of the de-realized society and its substanceless marionettes.” It thus transforms, by virtue of its construction, “incomprehensible life” into a “counter image” of reality, a “distorting mirror” (Zerrspiegel) in which the world can begin to read its own features (W 1:119, 107).
Kracauer elaborates the trope of a distorting mirror in an essay on the circus, written around the same time, in which he attributes a similarly allegorical—and allegorizing—function to the clowns. If the acrobats miraculously triumph over the laws of gravity and the human physis, the clowns point up the “unreality” of that triumph: “While the real actors suspend the conditions of the life assigned to us, [the clowns] with their off-key seriousness in turn suspend the unreality of those actors. This should lead one to expect that they restore normal reality but, on the contrary, they are only a caricature of caricature; it feels like being in a hall of mirrors, and from the successively arranged mirrors the beholder’s own countenance radiates in ever more distorted form.”14 It should be noted that not only does the clowns’ mimicry render strange an already estranged reality but the hall-of-mirrors effect also affects the self-perception of the beholder, confronting the viewing subject with its own precarious reality.
The idea of representation as a distorting mirror is a familiar trope of modernist aesthetics, implying that, since the world is already distorted, reified, and alienated, the iteration of that distortion, as a kind of double negation, is closer to the truth than any attempt to transcend the state of affairs by traditional aesthetic means, be they classicist or realist. In Critical Theory, for instance, we find one highly influential articulation of this trope in Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), with its revision and rehabilitation of allegory, which, in contrast to the romantic symbol’s semblance of organic beauty and totality, showed the petrified, fragmented landscape of history for what it was.15 Likewise,
