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

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Assemblage.

http://www.jstor.org

re:view

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-

80

re:view

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

82

re:view

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,

84

re:view

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

re:view

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