hooked on kracauer
TRANSCRIPT
Hooked on KracauerAuthor(s): Juliet KossSource: Assemblage, No. 31 (Dec., 1996), pp. 80-89Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171443Accessed: 28/09/2010 17:15
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Hooked on Kracauer
by Juliet Koss
Juliet Koss is a Ph.D. Candidate in the
History, Theory, and Criticism of Art, Architecture, and Urban Form at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Having read, marked, and learned the words of Walter Benjamin, having perme- ated the discourse of cultural analysis with
reflections and illuminations, we are
emerging, groggily, from what Janet Wolff
described in 1993 as "the wholehearted
enthusiasm for Benjamin ... in contempo-
rary cultural criticism."' We have familiar-
ized ourselves with Benjamin's concepts of aura and shock, lined our bookshelves with the essential works of the Frankfurtists (as Bertolt Brecht liked to call them), and ex-
cavated Weimar culture for contextual ma-
terial. Wolff herself traced our Benjamania to the fact that "the interplay of the auto-
biographical and the critical in his work
accords well with contemporary tendencies to integrate these two modes of writing; at
the same time, the analytics of the con-
crete are very much in tune with the
current rejection of abstract theory."2 Mistrustful of abstractions, we turn to
analyses that root their authority in per- sonal experience. Gripping the subjective in an ocean of uncertain objectivity, we
sympathize with the fugitive intellectual,
cosmopolitan flaneur, who relies on a
transported collection of books and a laby- rinth of childhood memories. The fascina- tion with Weimar culture continues to
expand; after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the tumbling of the Soviet state, we sense an affiliation with the decade after World War I and the October Revolution
while, dreading a millennial apocalypse, we feel a retrospective parallel with the decades preceding World War II.
Another Weimar volume reached
anglophone waters last year in a superb translation by Thomas Y. Levin: Siegfried Kracauer's The Mass Ornament: Weimar
Essays. Published in German in 1963, it
contains contributions to the Frankfurter
Zeitung along with excerpts from other
writings. In the introduction to the English publication, Levin, assistant professor of
German at Princeton University, presents Kracauer in part as proto-Benjamin:
In his prescient essay 'Cult of Distraction,' Kracauer locates the emancipatory poten- tial of a distracted mode of perception in its capacity to retool perceptual and motor skills for the new sensorial economy of
modernity, whose most salient characteris-
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tics are its speed and its abrupt transitions - the very hallmark of cinema as the school of 'shock,' which Benjamin would celebrate almost ten years later as one of the medium's most progressive features.3
Kracauer, in other words, not only helps situate Benjamin's crucial concepts, but
also develops these ideas earlier and with
greater subtlety. According to Levin, Kracauer's essays present "an early para-
digm of. . . 'cultural studies' ... a cultural
tourist's philosophical diary of the Weimar
Republic ... a flaneurial history of visual
fascination . . . a catalogue of the phenom- ena of disenchantment and . . . a critical
phenomenology of the subject formations
of modernity."4 As if responding by reflex to
these code words, practitioners of cultural
studies generally, and particularly in the
field of modern architecture, are rushing, it
seems, to read The Mass Ornament. But
current Kracomania stems from more than
mere translation and publication of these
Weimar texts. Just what is it that makes
today's Kracauer so different, so appealing? To what does his work speak, as they say, in
contemporary cultural studies?
Until last year, Kracauer was probably best
known in the United States for his work on
Weimar film. After arriving in this country in 1941, he wrote and published only in
English, most famously his 1947 book, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological
Study of the German Film. His place in
contemporary cultural studies - and par- ticularly in architectural discourse - has been secured by his analysis of mass orna-
ment, the phenomenon of identical chorus
girls arranged in symmetrical patterns to
perform machinelike repetitions; an analy- sis encapsulated in his declaration "mass
ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the ra-
tionality to which the prevailing economic
system aspires." " The publication of The
Mass Ornament, only four chapters of
which had previously appeared in English translation, has fostered a burgeoning in-
terest in this country in Kracauer's Weimar
essays, an interest steadily encouraged by the work of such scholars as Thomas
Elsaesser, David Frisby, Miriam Hansen, Martin Jay, Patrice Petro, Heide Schliip- mann, Karsten Witte, and Anthony Vidler, who has almost single-handedly put Kracauer on the map of architectural dis-
course.6 Anticipation for Levin's transla-
tion of The Mass Ornament grew ever
stronger in the last decade (the book's im-
pending publication was announced in
1987 in the footnotes of New German Cri-
tique), the same years that witnessed both a
rapid growth of the field of cultural studies and an appraisal of postmodernism's most valued tenets. To paraphrase Kracauer, a growing interest in the Weimar essays is one historical reflex of our post- postmodern aspirations.
Facing the end of the millennium, we are
rethinking our eagerness to deconstruct bi-
nary oppositions; wondering whether the
homelessness of major twentieth-century writers, from Benjamin to Salman Rushdie,
compares to that of millions of American
poor; and fearing that the borderlessness of, for example, a unified Europe might harbor its own problems, from Eurocurrency to Eurocheese. While nomadic emigre theo- rists slip past intellectual and geographic
1. "Girls at a Rehearsal," 1929
81
assemblage 31
borders, less famous immigrants are increas-
ingly refused entry or confronted with de-
portation. The freedoms of simulacra are
not entirely comfortable; postmodernism,
according to last summer's October, is "a
word that appears to have radically fallen
out of favor."' The search for inspiration and legitimization, an activity of no small
importance in cultural discourse, has led
(among other destinations) to European modernism, particularly in its Weimar Ger-
man and Soviet Russian incarnations. And
Kracauer's description in 1930 of cultural
modernity echoes our own growing unease
with postmodernism:
Today the creative artist has . . . lost faith in the objective meaning of any one indi- vidual system of reference. But when this fixed coordinate grid disappears, all the curves plotted on it lose their pictorial form as well. The writer can no more ap- peal to his self than he can depend on the world for support, because these two struc- tures determine each other. The former is relativized, and the contents and figures of the latter have been thrown into an
opaque orbit.8
Seven decades later, after attending in- numerable conferences dissolving disci-
plinary boundaries and destabilizing intel-
lectual categories, we are jumping into a
post-postmodern era that will be many
things (an uncritical return to modernist
paradigms not among them, one hopes), and Kracauer effectively scripts our sense
of imminent free fall.
Clearly in awe of his teacher Georg Sim-
mel for unearthing sociological meaning from a heap of superficial reality, Kracauer
combines low culture and high theory and
reveals the depth in shallowness. Superim-
posing Simmel's sociological approach and Wilhelm Worringer's discussion of ab-
straction, his essays are simultaneously his-
torical and theoretical, inter- and meta-
disciplinary. His attention reaches from
photography to the Bible in German, from
hotel lobbies to the mass ornamental cho-
reography of the Tiller Girls, among other
topics. But while fascinated with mass cul-
ture, Kracauer hardly repudiates the high modernist tradition (in both artistic prac- tice and contemporaneous and contempo-
rary theories) according to which the
artist-genius gathers reality into abstrac-
tions to offer the viewer a unified aesthetic
whole. Neither does he belong to the
countertradition, which rejects notions of
stylistic choice, composition, and inspired
creativity to consider the artist as thinker
or worker, one making such provocative,
political, or utilitarian items as the
readymade, the photomontage, and or the
constructivist object.9 He belongs to nei-
ther side and to both, a position of en-
gaged ambivalence (like Benjamin's alternate celebration and mourning of the
loss of aura) that permeates his discussion
of mass ornament. "The minimum
achievement of the artistic entity," Kracauer writes, is "to construct a whole
out of the blindly scattered elements of a
disintegrated world."1' References to the
exalted rank of art pervade the essays; while identically limbed chorus girls form
the patterns of perfectly synchronized dances on revue stages, Kracauer explains that art reinscribes the distance between
downtrodden Real Life and the formal
perfection of High Art.
Do such opinions reveal Kracauer to be the kind of traditionalist that postmodern students were trained to combat? Do his
analyses of mass culture legitimize a con-
servative backlash while superficially echo-
ing the concerns of contemporary cultural
studies? Kracauer indeed reveals a certain
disdain for the masses' enjoyment of the
safety valve of distracted entertainment
"while the production and mindless con-
sumption of the ornamental patterns divert
them from the imperative to change the
reigning order."" But he retracts his snob-
bery almost immediately, for the elite are
no better; snubbing their noses at the re-
vues, they refuse to recognize both the
dancers' and their own unseverable link to
the economy. The masses, having "so
spontaneously adopted these patterns[,] are
superior to their detractors among the edu-
cated class to the extent that they at least
roughly acknowledge the undisguised facts." Like modern noble savages, they are
directly (if irrationally) attuned to the rela-
tions of economics and cultural produc- tion that the elite so carefully ignore.
"The aesthetic pleasure gained from orna-
mental mass movements is legitimate," Kracauer insists, deftly fusing the twin no-
tions of legitimate pleasure and legitimate object of study.12 His intellectual attention
certainly rationalizes his (and the public's)
pleasure, while discomfort with the legiti-
macy of mass culture lurks behind his ev-
ery word. "No matter how one gauges the
value of the mass ornament," he states, "its
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degree of reality is still higher than that of
artistic productions which cultivate out-
dated noble sentiments in obsolete forms
- even if it means nothing more than
that." Self-aware trash is far preferable to
pretentious trash, in other words; but an
elision, nestled in contradictory justifica- tions, lies in the phrase "degree of reality." While possessing the arguments to con-
demn mass ornament, Kracauer enjoys the
performance, and so sanctions his interest
in chorus girls with sociocultural analysis. This elision covers our own ambivalence in 1997: the words nostalgia, authentic, and essence are no longer anathema, but
having discarded their thrones we no
longer know where they should sit. Unwill-
ing merely to learn from Las Vegas but
aware of our inability to leave it, unable to
sustain an ironic embrace but believing firmly in the reality of the simulacrum, we
need a model for our moderation. Calling for the transcendence of shallowness by means of intellectual confrontation, Kracauer offers a celebratory critique of
capitalist mass culture finely attuned to our
own conflicted attitudes.13
Observing rationalized expenditures of en-
ergy on stage, Kracauer distills, through reasoned analysis, cultural significance from mute abstractions. Rosalind Krauss has analyzed the dependence within mod- ernist visual art on the grid form, which
"states the autonomy of the realm of art," to
represent the absence of composition. 4
With its "capacity to serve as a paradigm for the antidevelopmental, the antinarrative, the antihistorical," the grid also operates
in other fields, in the guise of ready-made structures that obviate the need to com-
pose. As a painter (Josef Albers, say, in a
Bauhaus set of nesting rectangles) might use the canvas shape to determine the ap-
pearance of its surfaces, switching colors at
preset increments to create the final work, the Tiller Girls' choreography operates ac-
cording to the deductive system of a chorus
line. Where a Soviet constructivist might fetishize utilitarian construction, the Tiller
Girls perform the fetishization of the ma-
chine aesthetic. The rational grid removes the artist and artwork from their respective
pedestals of solo creativity and unique cre-
ation while retaining the construct of aes-
thetics itself.
While modernism garners aesthetic whole-
ness from grid formations, modern citizens
seek structures for their own lives. Accord-
ing to Kracauer, one option is to pursue the twin activities of travel and dance, each
indulged in for its own sake rather than for
any known end. The very process of dis-
location becomes a goal, the craving for
defamiliarization a hallmark of modernity. Kracauer extends Simmel's description of
the impact of the money economy on
mechanized metropolitan personalities to
include mindless entertainment and des-
perate forays beyond city limits. The only escape is the indulgence in pure rhythm, in manic movement - both between cit- ies and on the dance floor. "Travel and dance have taken on a theological exist-
ence," Kracauer asserts; they permit "those in the grip of mechanization [to] live (al- beit inauthentically) the double existence
that is the foundation of reality."" While
duplicity is clearly deplorable, to under-
stand its operation is to defuse the sin.
With authentic pleasure no longer possible, conscious indulgence in defamiliarization is at least better than mindless distraction.
"The secret aim of jazz tunes," Kracauer
reveals, "is a tempo that is concerned with
nothing but itself."'6 Uncovering this se-
cret, he frees concerned Weimar audi-
ences to indulge, consciously and without
guilt, in modern pleasures.
Contemporary interest in Kracauer stems
not only from the content of his essays but
also from his position as a Weimar cultural
critic, a messenger from the land of politi- cized aesthetics and aestheticized politics. The relationship of Kracauer's work to that
of Benjamin will most likely be the sharp- est spur for future explorations of The Mass
Ornament. The essays are packed with
cherished Weimar themes: loss of commu-
nity in the face of civilization, growing cal-
culation, rationalization, mechanization,
frictionlessness, and estrangement. "Com-
munity and personality perish when what is demanded is calculability," Kracauer
writes; "it is only as a tiny piece of the mass that an individual can clamber up the charts and can service machines without
any friction."" Such calculability is visible in the staged arrangements of female body parts in chorus lines. The distracted atten- tion of Weimar audiences, a topic raised
by Kracauer long before Benjamin's 1936
essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Me- chanical Reproduction," is only one of
many fertile grounds for comparing the
83
assemblage 31
two authors. But while Kracauer may have beaten Benjamin to the topics of distrac- tion and automatized perception, he himself was not the first to tread on this
territory. Several years earlier, the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky addressed the same themes, lamenting that "we do not sense the familiar, we do not see it, but
[merely] recognize it. We do not see the walls of our rooms, it is so hard to spot a
misprint in a proof - particularly if it is
written in a language well known to us.""8 Kracauer's essays exist not only in relation to Benjamin's work, but also within an-
other context: framed between Shklovsky's radical theories for high art and the Soviet
extension of these theories to mass culture. While Sergei Eisenstein criticized the aimless use of montage in Soviet cinema, Kracauer bemoaned the German embrace
of aimless distraction, complaining that
"civilized people ... are unable to extend
themselves beyond the forms of perception to the perception of the forms."'9 From our
current perspective, Kracauer's Weimar
essays face the Soviet Union as much as
Western Europe; accompanied by a prolif- eration of secondary material, their place- ment in the literature of modernity will
help continue the expansion of that canon.
In "The Group as Bearer of Ideas," Kracauer argues that the modern group (whether political, social, or performing) behaves increasingly like the static entity that individuals once were thought to be, its members repressing all differences to conform to a larger design, while modern individuals increasingly seem to possess the internal discrepancies once thought char-
" acteristic of the group. But Kracauer's aim is not merely to oppose group and indi-
vidual, or rational and irrational; what lifts him to Simmel's tightrope, balancing the
exigencies of the historical moment against a universalizing sociological analysis to walk along a line of taut prose, is his argu- ment that binary oppositions of rational
thought and emotional behavior, variously recoded as classical and romantic, Enlight- enment and myth, are in fact foils for a
complex phenomenon contained within a
third term: Ratio. Embodied in the homog- enous pattern of the abstract group, Ratio is not rationalism itself, but its simulation. "This unleashed Ratio" is unreason in dis-
guise; it "cannot simply be designated as in-
tellect, has so little in common with reason
that, like a demon of nature, it overpowers
everything reasonable. And it is precisely this powerlessness of reason which enables Ratio to prevail so unrestrainedly today."20
Cracking this Weimar code, causing these mute patterns to speak, Kracauer calls to us in 1997 as we search for reason among the abstractions of postmodern thought.
Despite their apparent rationalism, Kracauer explains, the ornamental patterns of the Tiller Girls are in fact illustrations of Ratio. On stage is nothing less than "a
mythological cult ... masquerading in the
garb of abstraction," he writes; "compared to the concrete immediacy of other corpo- real presentations, the ornament's confor-
mity to reason is thus an illusion."21 Where traditional choreography revels in the cor-
poreality of the individual, the isolated
body parts of chorus girls form mecha- nized movements to create the abstracted
image of a hyperrationalism opposing rea- soned thought and discourse. "Ratio flees from reason and takes refuge in the ab-
stract," and while abstraction was once
("among primitive peoples") a legitimate language, in the context of modern civili- zation it is mute, its primitivism gro- tesquely anachronistic.22 Kracauer's power to squeeze reasoned discourse from such ornamental abstractions, to translate primi- tivism into the civilized language of cultural analysis, is thus all the more im-
pressive. Unlike the modern group, the in-
dividual harbors the potential for morality and reasonable, albeit unconscious and in-
comprehensible, behavior. The possibility of the individual as repository of values in
a world increasingly dominated by mecha- nization endears Kracauer to our post-
postmodern hearts. Having used identity politics to strengthen our positions within
groups, the prospect of communicating as
reasonable individuals is welcome. May the achievements of the past decades - an
expanded canon for an expanded audi-
ence, with attention to wider fields of study - serve to invigorate, rather than collapse, academic scholarship.
The abstractions on stage reflect the Ratio characteristic of capitalism, Kracauer ar-
gues, insofar as "the unchecked develop- ment of the capitalist system fosters the
unchecked growth of abstract thinking."23 Reason is dissociated from Ratio not only within mass cultural distraction and the
capitalist economy but also within histori- cal interpretation. Kracauer refutes, for
example, the view of World War I as the
culmination of Enlightenment reason,
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mocking another author's assertion that
"'in the name of this reason millions of
people have died.' A closer examination
would presumably reveal," Kracauer adds, "that the very forces of unreason ... were
responsible for unleashing the world
war."24 The Great War did not mark the in-
evitable end point of the rational outlook
of the spirit of Western European capital- ism; it therefore provides no excuse for re-
jecting the concept of reason as a value.
"The Ratio of the capitalist economic sys- tem is not reason itself but a murky rea-
son," Kracauer famously states, before
naming "capitalism's core defect: it ratio-
nalizes not too much but rather too
little."25 Even filled with contradictions, the individual, honoring the fundamental
liberal concept of moderation, outranks
the repressed and distracted group.
Now that communism has failed to main-
tain itself even as a mute abstraction, its
connotations of rationalism and order are
likewise being questioned. Four years ago - which is to say, four years after the au-
tumn of 1989 - historian of science Loren
Graham contested Vaclav Havel's convic-
tion that "Marxism ... was committed to
'arrogant, absolutist reason."'26 What was
called rationality and reason was only its
image, Graham argues; Havel had incor-
rectly assessed Soviet communism. As Graham demands:
Was the building of the White Sea Canal in the wrong place and by the most primi- tive methods, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of prisoners' lives, the blossom-
ing of rationality? ... What was Stalin's imperious demand for industrial expan-
sion at a rate that was technically unfea- sible and shockingly wasteful of human lives, if not a flight of rank subjectivity?
With rhetorical flourish, Graham takes on
the Czech dissident and former president who, through decades of Soviet domina-
tion of his country, misunderstood the So-
viet state's dependence on irrationality. For
what was Soviet communism if not Ratio, the abstracted surface of the reason for
which it wished to be taken?
To extricate reason from Ratio is to align Left and Right, communism and capitalism, in ways that Cold Warmongers never al-
lowed. Indeed, contemporary fascination
with Weimar culture, now that notions of
Left and Right seem equally bankrupt, stems
in part from its conflation of these very con-
cepts. Rather than comparing leftist and
rightist versions of Weimar socialism, Kracauer examines their conceptual affini-
ties, which include a hatred of bourgeois values and an advocacy of abstract ideals. In
his analysis of Die Tat (a periodical that, Levin notes, in advocating "an authoritarian
synthesis of nationalism and socialism ...
paved an ideological path for the nascent
National Socialism")," Kracauer discusses
the use and abuse of these abstractions.
While they have never been experienced -
"they are not the point of departure but
rather the objective that must be achieved""' - their existence as factors in Weimar poli- tics is incontrovertible: "Volk, state, myth -
these thoroughly interrelated concepts refer
to a substantive reality."'29 The terms share
their phantom status with the ideals of leftist
socialism, and Kracauer links Germany's National Socialism to the socialism of the
Soviet Union. "The messianic Sturm und
Drang types of the communist persuasion who inhabit a world of apocalyptic notions," that is, are equally irrational and base their
beliefs just as firmly on theoretical entities.30
At any point along the political spectrum, the restructuring of a society on the basis of
an embrace of distant ideals is reprehen- sible. But just as the abstracted, synchro- nized movements of chorus girls can be
caused to speak, the very phantomness of
the terms used by members of the Tat circle
may be interpreted, Kracauer believes; they can be coaxed to the safer territory of reason
by a competent analyst.
Having found the central ideals of the Tat
circle to be mythical, Kracauer finds the
presence there of one of his own favored
concepts to be utterly illogical: "By invok-
ing myth and nevertheless maintaining the concept of the individual, Die Tat is
guilty of a contradiction that could hardly be more complete," he states with indig- nation.3' But whereas his enjoyment of
mass ornament encourages him to justify the performance with cultural critique, his disapproval of Die Tat's politics seems
to block his usual powers of reason and he
offers little explanation beyond the label of "contradictory." Kracauer never sug-
gests, for example, that the individual
might itself be a concept with mythical status - for both National Socialism and "authentic liberalism." He likewise be- moans the fact that the journal "is advo-
cating a state that arises out of organic growth, yet... wants to achieve a kind of socialism by means of a planned economy," but he does not allow that or-
85
assemblage 31
ganic growth might be the rhetoric at- tached to the myth supporting a planned economy. Where National Socialism seemed a logical impossibility, in hind-
sight it cannot be dismissed as such. As in Kracauer's own writing, elisions and con- tradictions often shelter deep-rooted and fundamental convictions.
In the face of the mute abstractions of revue
performances or the rhetorical contradic- tions of political arguments, Kracauer aims to turn his subjects into language, to coax them from Ratio to reason. "The historical
process becomes a process ofdemythologiza- tion which effects a radical deconstruction of positions that the natural continually re-
occupied," he argues, clearly positioning his own work within this process and him- self as radical deconstructor.32 His faith in
the power of reason is striking. With an op- timism we cannot muster in 1997, he ex-
plains that "the struggle ... between reason
and the mythological delusions that have
invaded the domains of religion and politics ... continues, and in the course of history it
may be that nature, increasingly stripped of
its magic, will become more and more per- vious to reason." By labeling as Ratio what others have termed the overdependence on
rationalism, Kracauer can use reason to at-
tack the myths leading his contemporaries astray. He maintains hopefully that his en-
deavors will treat, if not cure, his nation's
unconscious need for distraction and its un-
thinking acceptance of contradiction. In
the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis (and Freud's legacy haunts the essays), Kracauer
performs the talking cure on behalf of
Weimar culture, turning mute abstractions and irrational beliefs into the discourse of reason.
In his role as analyst, Kracauer translates various forms of cultural expression into written language. The language of signs is thus an interpretable entity, not a frighten- ing form of empty semiotic play; the Tiller
Girls' performances constitute a form of
language not in themselves, but because
Kracauer causes them to speak. The trans- lation of meaning into form and, subse-
quently, from form into language - this latter process the author's achievement -
is one of the central themes of The Mass Ornament. Kracauer writes in relation to the first phase that "the aesthetic rendering of... a life bereft of reality, a life that has lost the power of self-observation, may be able to restore to it a sort of language; for even if the artist does not force all that has become mute and illusory directly up into
reality, he does express his directed self by
giving form to this life.""33 After the initial
phase of artistic creation, the task is com-
pleted by the cultural critic; namely Kracauer, who continues: "The unity of the aesthetic construct... gives a voice to the inexpressive world, gives meaning to the themes broached within it. Just what these themes mean, however, must still be
brought out through translation and de-
pends to no small extent on the level of re-
ality evinced by their creator." The morass of themes contained in these passages -
including, but not exclusively, the inter-
penetration of aesthetics and politics, for- mal and written languages, creation and
interpretation, translation and representa- tion, reality and illusion, the analysis of
one's own and foreign cultures - pervade Kracauer's Weimar essays.
Kracauer's view of his work as part of a
general "process of demythologization" ac-
cords well with his German intellectual
heritage (especially Friedrich Nietzsche) and rebounds productively off the ideas of
his contemporaries (particularly, besides
Benjamin, Max Weber, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer). For Kracauer as
well, the course of time is teleological, al-
though, he confides in 1927, "prevailing abstractness reveals that the process of
demythologization has not come to an
end.""34 His argument differs from those of
his forebears by positing a present that, while clearly a culminating and critical
moment, does not necessarily mark the
process's final stage; offering the possibility of the recuperation of reason by way of the
vilification of Ratio, Kracauer retains the
hope of renewal. "Present-day thinking is
confronted with the question as to whether
it should open itself up to reason or con-
tinue to push on against it without opening
up at all," he explains. With his assistance, Weimar culture might still be capable of
enlightenment. To choose his words as in-
spiration for our own cultural analyses is to
show sympathy with the very concept of
reason as an ideal.
Perhaps the last moment when a genuine belief in utopian socialism was possible, the
Weimar era offers a lapsarian narrative for the end of the millennium. Our nostalgia
86
re:view
for Weimar, which feeds our interest in
Kracauer, wraps his words like the largest
figure in a set of Russian matryoshka dolls. His own nostalgia reaches back yet further, to an assumed premodern wholeness and
authenticity. Writing that "the real person, who has not capitulated to being a tool of
mechanized industry, resists being dissolved into space and time," for example, he
mourns the loss of the unified subject by
positing at some past moment a healthy, au-
tonomous existence.3s (Walter Benjamin re-
veals similar beliefs in the Origin of German
Tragic Drama.) In traveling, dancing, and
watching the performances of chorus girls, in other words, we seek the authenticity we
lost when we entered modernity and found ourselves estranged. In "Travel and Dance," writing that "what is at stake in this very en-
joyment is a distortion of an increasingly un- available real existence," Kracauer does not
describe what constituted the reality of this
existence, or precisely when (and to whom) it was available.36
With two dozen essays and excerpts in The
Mass Ornament - admirably translated and accompanied by a substantial intro- duction and forty-five pages of additional notes - anglophone scholars in the field of cultural studies can now explore Kra- cauer's Weimar essays for themselves. (Be- cause the essays are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, the volume
provides an overview of his Weimar work rather than a record of his intellectual de-
velopment in these years.) Having aban- doned an architectural practice after ten
years, Kracauer attends to structures both
built and implied and provides a plethora of thematic material and an abundance of
design metaphors. Divining deep meaning in forms and constructions, he presents es-
says that call out for interpretation in the
context of the literature of modern archi-
tecture. Decriminalizing ornament -
celebrating it, even, in its mass-cultural
incarnation - Kracauer adds another
theoretical spin to architectural modern-
ism. Above all, his writing is beautiful. "In
the centers of night life the illumination is so harsh that one has to hold one's hands over one's ears," he intones, with a quirki- ness Simmel would never indulge and a
voice too impersonal for Benjamin.37
Behind the rhetorical beauty lies an affin-
ity with contemporary cultural studies, an
approach that, while no synchronized per- formance of like-minded scholars, adheres to a general set of principles in sifting through cultural forms, hardly distinguish- ing high and low, and interpreting the re-
lationship between aesthetics and politics. (Kracauer does not share all of the values of contemporary scholarship. Those with multicultural sympathies should be pre- pared for disappointment, for example.) When Kracauer refers to the "ideational homelessness" of the German middle classes in 1931, a predicament that
"stem[s] from the fact that they feel unable to find refuge in the liberal system so shaken by economic crisis but are also un-
willing to take shelter within Marxism," we are reminded, decades later, of con-
temporary dilemmas.38 Transience and
homelessness, acceptable in theory, is less
appealing outside the academy; leftist ide-
als, meanwhile, toppled in the Soviet
Union like the slogans mounted on public
buildings, seem increasingly utopian. In
our post-Benjamanic, post-postmodern mood, Kracauer's words are eerily timely:
The overburdening of theoretical thinking has allowed us, to a horrifying degree, to become distanced from reality - a reality that is filled with incarnate things and
people and that therefore clearly demands to be seen concretely. Anyone who tries to attune himself to this reality and to be- friend it... may . . . discover . . . for ex-
ample, that life with his fellow man and the real world in all its breadth is subject to a multitude of determinations which can neither be gauged by theoretical-concep- tual means nor explained as merely the fruit of subjective arbitrariness.39
Exhausted by theoretical thinking yet un-
willing to rely entirely on our personal voices, we are no longer capable of believ-
ing in large ideals, yet want to leave open the possibility of their existence as un- named and unknown entities. According to Kracauer, "Perhaps the only remaining attitude is one of waiting. By committing oneself to waiting, one neither blocks one's
path toward faith (like those who defiantly affirm the void) nor besieges this faith. ... One waits, and one's waiting is a hesitant
openness, albeit of a sort that is difficult to
explain."4' Having affirmed the void for too
many decades, and lacking sufficient faith to withstand siege, our only recourse is to
wait, warily but hopefully, fortified by words that, while written by Kracauer, could well have been penned this year.
87
assemblage 31
Notes
My thanks to Sarah Whiting for expert editorial advice.
1. Janet Wolff, "Memoirs and Micrologies: Walter Benjamin, Feminism, and Cultural
Analysis," The Actuality of Walter Benjamin, New Formations 20 (Summer 1993): 113.
2. Ibid., 116.
3. Thomas Y. Levin, introduction to Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 26.
4. Levin, introduction, 29.
5. Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament" (1927), in The Mass Ornament, 79.
6. Barbara Correll and Jack Zipes's translation of"The Mass Ornament" appeared in New Ger- man Critique 5 (Spring 1975): 67-76; Levin's translation of "Cult of Distraction: On Berlin's Picture Palaces" appeared in New German Cri-
tique 40, special issue on Weimar Film Theory (Winter 1987): 91-96; "Farewell to the Linden Arcade" was published in Johann Friedrich Geist, Arcades: The History of a Building Type (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983), 158-60; and Levin's translation of"Photogra- phy" appeared in Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3
(Spring 1993): 421-36. See also Tom Levin's "Siegfried Kracauer in English: A Bibliogra- phy," New German Critique 41 (Spring-Sum- mer 1987): 140-50. Six essays by Kracauer
previously unpublished in English can be found in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward
Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1994). For secondary material, see Karsten Witte, "Introduction to Siegfried Kracauer's 'The Mass Ornament,"' New Ger- man Critique 5 (Spring 1975): 59-66; Thomas
Elsaesser, "Cinema - The Irresponsible Signi- fier or 'The Gamble with History': Film Theory or Cinema Theory," and Heide Schltipmann, "Phenomenology of Film: On Siegfried Kracauer's Writings of the 1920s," both in New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 65-90 and 97-114; as well as Martin Jay, "The Extraterrito- rial Life of Siegfried Kracauer," Salmagundi
31-32 (Fall 1975-Winter 1976): 49-106, and David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986). A special issue of New German
Critique devoted to Kracauer's work, 54 (Fall 1991), includes essays by Miriam Hansen, "Decentric Perspectives: Kracauer's Early Writ-
ings on Film and Mass Culture," 47-76, Patrice Petro, "Kracauer's Epistemological Shift," 127- 38, and Anthony Vidler, "Agoraphobia: Spatial Estrangement in Simmel and Kracauer," 31-45.
7. Responding to a "Visual Culture Question- naire" (actually, a set of four statements), Helen Molesworth writes that, until recently, "postmodernism stood for the introduction of con- tinental theory into art-historical discourse, the
engagement of mass culture by critical art and theory, and a renewed sense of art as a site of cul- tural critique. It also stood for the proliferation of
compelling new versions of modernism - indeed, for an emboldened and engaged art history. ... It is as if we have lost faith in the concept post- modernism" (October 77 [Summer 1996]: 54).
8. Siegfried Kracauer, "The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie" (1930), in The Mass Ornament, 102.
9. Parallel concerns in current scholarship in- clude the work of Yve-Alain Bois on modernist
non-composition. See his Painting as Model
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990), as well as the catalogue, written jointly with Rosalind Krauss, of the Informe exhibition at
Beaubourg, summer 1996. In architectural dis- course, recent increased interest in the notion of tectonics may be seen as a related phenomenon.
10. Siegfried Kracauer, "The Hotel Lobby" (1922-25), in The Mass Ornament, 174-75.
11. Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," 85.
12. Ibid., 79 (italics in the original).
13. As Levin puts it, "one finds, for example, an
explicit anticipation of Adorno's 'Dialectic of
Enlightenment' thesis, but inflected in a way that leads to a refreshing rehabilitation of popu- lar culture and 'distraction' in defiance of po- lemically dismissive accounts of mass culture" (Levin, introduction, 3).
14. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Grids," in The Origi- nality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985), 22.
15. Siegfried Kracauer, "Travel and Dance" (1925), in The Mass Ornament, 71.
16. Ibid., 67.
17. Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," 78.
18. Viktor Shklovsky, "Resurrection of the Word," trans. Richard Sherwood, in Russian Formalism, ed. Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 41-42. Shklovsky's and Kracauer's essays frequently overlap thematically, sharing, for
example, an interest in the genre of detective fiction.
19. Kracauer, "Travel and Dance," 71.
20. Siegfried Kracauer, "Revolt of the Middle Classes: An Examination of the Tat Circle"
(1931), in The Mass Ornament, 112.
21. Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," 83 (italics in the original).
22. Ibid., 84.
23. Ibid., 82.
24. Kracauer, "Revolt of the Middle Classes," 111. The author he mocks is the editor of Die Tat, Hans Zehrer, who had written an essay in the October 1931 issue of the journal.
25. Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," 81 (italics in the original). "Ratio has a much greater affin-
ity with barbarism than with reason, including liberal reason," he patiently explains; "only rea- son can restrain this boundless Ratio - a rea- son whose characteristics include an awareness of its own limitations" (Kracauer, "Revolt of the Middle Classes," 127).
26. Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Ex- ecuted Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1993), 99. Havel's essay, "The End of the Modern Era," appeared in The New York Times, 1 March 1992, 15.
27. Levin, notes to "Revolt of the Middle Classes," 359.
88
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2. "Spectators at a Sports Event," 1933
Assemblage 31: 80-89 ? 1997 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
28. Kracauer, "Revolt of the Middle Classes," 113.
29. Ibid., 111.
30. Siegfried Kracauer, "Those Who Wait"
(1922), in The Mass Ornament, 133 (italics in the original).
31. Kracauer, "Revolt of the Middle Classes," 121.
32. Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," 80 (italics in the original).
33. Kracauer, "The Hotel Lobby," 173.
34. Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," 82.
35. Kracauer, "Travel and Dance," 68 (italics original).
36. Ibid., 72.
37. Siegfried Kracauer, "Analysis of a City Map" (1926), in The Mass Ornament, 43.
38. Kracauer, "Revolt of the Middle Classes," 123.
39. Kracauer, "Those Who Wait," 140.
40. Ibid., 138 (italics in the original).
Figure Credits
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
89