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In Kracauer’s case, these theoretical perspectives evolved both with and against the pragmatic pressures of daily journalistic writing. Between 1921 and 1933, the year of his forced exile, Kracauer published close to two thousand articles—notices, reviews, essays—most of them in the Frankfurter Zeitung, a liberal daily of which he became feuilleton (arts and culture) editor in 1924.2 Having abandoned his job as an architect to join the paper as a local reporter, he covered just about everything that figured under the rubric of culture—and increasingly areas and topics that did not. In addition to reviewing films on a regular basis (about one-third of the articles), he wrote on urban space and spaces: on streets, squares, and buildings; on train stations, subways, underpasses, and traffic lights; on bars, hotel lobbies, department stores, trade fairs, and arcades; homeless shelters and unemployment agencies; on picture palaces, the circus, and the variety stage; on radio and photography; on electric advertising and illustrated magazines; on courtroom trials, traffic, tourism, and sports; on typewriters and suspenders, pianellas and umbrellas. Kracauer’s interest in the quotidian and ephemeral phenomena of modern life was no doubt indebted to the philosopher-sociologist Georg Simmel, but his exploration of the artifacts, sites, and rituals of an emerging consumer culture also points forward to semiological analyses such as Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) and more recent work in urban ethnography and the critique of everyday life.3
While film and cinema held a special position among Kracauer’s topics, they were part and parcel of his larger project to read the “inconspicuous surface-level expressions” of the time as indices of historical change, in an effort to “determine the place” that the present “occupie[d] in the historical process.”4 His attempts to grasp the specificity of film and cinema were bound up with the historicophilosophical inquiry into modernity or, more precisely, with the question of how the struggle over the directions of modernity took shape, and was being played out, in the photographic media and their respective institutions. This approach crucially distinguishes his early writings on film from the more standard debates over whether or not film was “Art,” for the most part associated with, or opposed to, the movement of Kinoreform, or cinema reform, and over how film could and should become art if it ever was to gain cultural and social legitimacy.5 Kracauer’s bypassing of the art question, however, makes him no less interesting from the vantage point of film aesthetics or an aesthetic theory of cinema. On the contrary, if Kracauer still speaks to issues closer to current concerns, it is because he approached the question of the aesthetic in the more comprehensive sense that Benjamin, too, was to insist upon—as relating to the organization of human sense perception and its transformation in industrial-capitalist modernity. Both writers discerned the aesthetic significance of cinema in the possibility of a new sensory relationship with the material world; yet, while Benjamin’s interest in the photographic media was part of his larger engagement with the question of technology, Kracauer’s exploration of new modes of mimetic experience, identification, and sociability was guided by questions of a more sociological and ethnographic nature.
In the following, I trace the development of Kracauer’s thinking on cinema and modernity in some detail, not only because most of his early texts are scarcely known in English, compared to the relatively greater availability of texts in translation by Benjamin and Adorno. This attention is also warranted because Kracauer’s early speculations on film decisively counter his long-standing reputation in cinema studies as a “naive realist,” a reputation based largely on a reductive reading of his later works written in English.6 In addition to the tradition of film theory in the narrow sense, my frame of reference will be Kracauer’s conversation, actual or virtual, with other Critical Theorists. Therefore, I will try to highlight particular concepts and theoretical tropes in Kracauer’s early texts—such as the motif of an aesthetics of reification, the turn to the surface, the valorization of distraction, the notion of film’s particular capacity to reanimate and reconfigure material objects—that were taken up (though this was for the most part unacknowledged), elaborated, and revised by Benjamin, Bloch, Adorno, and others.
Nonetheless, such conceptual distillation should not make us forget that Kracauer was not a systematic theorist in the manner of, for instance, Marcuse or even Horkheimer and Adorno. By philosophical standards, Kracauer’s mode of analysis sometimes appears slippery and inconsistent, if not contradictory. This is not simply or necessarily a shortcoming. Rather, what ensures continued fascination with Kracauer’s texts is that they are suffused with another kind of logic, a style of theorizing that we might call writerly or poetic. Kracauer argues as much through images and tropes, through figures of chiasmus, paradox, understatement, and literalization, as through analytic reasoning and allegorical abstraction. While his academic background included philosophy and sociology (in addition to professional training as an architect), he never held an academic position; he was a critical intellectual for whom journalism was not a default career but a chance and challenge to engage in writing as a public medium. No less, though, was Kracauer’s choice of theoretical style(s), like Benjamin’s, motivated by a critique of the academic discipline of philosophy as a totalizing, systematic discourse that could not adequately address the contemporary transformation and crisis of experience.7 As I hope to show, this critique translates into critical practice not only by virtue of its turn to noncanonical topics but also because of a rhetorical mode that persistently undermines the traditional distance between the perceiving/describing/analyzing subject and the (mass-cultural) objects under scrutiny.
Kracauer’s 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