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, and what kind of mechanisms operate in the process of their coming into discourse.91
Kracauer’s 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