THE TERRITORY OE PHOTOGRAPHY:

BETWEEN MODERNITY AND UTOPIA IN

KRACAUER'S THOUGHT
Elena Gualtieri
1. Siegfried
Kracauer,
'Photography', in
The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays,
Thomas Y. Levin
(ed, trans and
introduction),
Camhridge, Harvard
UP, 1995, p61.
2. Siegfried
Kracauer, 'The Mass
Ornament', in The
Mass Ornament, op.
cit., pp80-81.
Where does photography belong in Kracauer's thought? In the Weimar
essays it is practically synonymous with modernity, one of the mass ornaments
whose surface reveals the meaning of the age. In Theory of Film it becomes the
foundation for an aesthetics of the photographic media which casts them as
redeemers of the physical reality we can no longer perceive. In History: the
Last Things Before the Last, the book which Kracauer himself saw as the summa
of his life's work, it provides both a model for historical practice and a map
for Kracauer's Utopian imaginings. Photography, then, seems to accompany
Kracauer wherever he goes, both intellectually and geographically, lending
his oeuvre the coherence of a running thread. Yet the very ubiquity of this
thread emphasises the radical dis-unity of the corpus of Kracauer's writings,
which span journalism and sociology, film history and theory, Marxism and
liberal humanism, operetta and philosophy of history, two languages, three
countries, and a long series of political crises, from the fall of Imperial
Germany to the rise of Nazism, from World War II to the Cold War. What
appears to guarantee the coherence of Kracauer's oeuvre is the consistency
of his interest in photography. But if photography unifies this heterogeneous
collection of writings under Kracauer's signature, then the question must be
asked whether what we have come to call 'Kracauer' might not in fact be a
name for the problem of photography in modernity, a vector through wbicb
tbe question of photography is raised in its intractability.
In wbat follows I propose to examine this intractability by mapping tbe
development of Kracauer's tbinking about photograpby from the 1920s to
the 1960s, in an arc that traces bis transformation from critic of modernity
to pbilosopber of utopia. This transformation tells us much not just about
Kracauer's intellectual trajectory, but also about the mobility of pbotography
as a cultural and historical signifier. Although usually subsumed under tbe
discipline of film studies, Kracauer's writings on pbotography draw mucb
of tbeir figurative arsenal and conceptual power from literary sources,
especially from those of European modernism. It is through tbese texts
that Kracauer rearticulates his original understanding of photograpby from
modern mass ornament to trace of an immaterial world located in between
existing ideological camps. In tbe process, be invites bis readers to reconsider
tbe question of tbe territory of photograpby, of where photography might
actually belong, not just in the trajectory of bis thought but also in the history
of twentieth-century politics and culture.
76 NEW FORMATIONS
MODERNITY AS VABANQUE-SPIEL
The question of photography's position within the historical process was
given a first, unambiguous answer by Kracauer in 1927: 'No different from
earlier modes of representation, photography, too, is assigned to a particular
developmental stage of practical and material life. It is a secretion of the
capitalist mode of production'.' As this emission of capitalism, pbotography
participates in that process of tbe emancipation of reason from tbe bonds of
nature wbicb Kracauer in 'Tbe Mass Ornament' posits as tbe driving force
of history.'^ But pbotography also marks a point where it is not the force of
reason but tbat of nature tbat gains tbe upper band. Stripped of its symbolic
and mytbological meaning, tbe nature from wbicb capitalism emancipates
bumanity becomes simply a 'mute', brute pbysical reality wbicb buman
consciousness cannot encompass or comprebend. It is tbis alienation of
nature from tbougbt tbat pbotograpby portrays: 'Tbe same mere nature wbicb
appears in pbotograpby flourisbes in tbe reality of tbe society produced by
tbe capitalist mode of production'.*
Altbougb Kracauer is very clear about tbe bistoricity of tbe society
portrayed by pbotograpby, bis cbaracterisation of capitalism as part of
a process of emancipation from myth is in fact bistorically a-specific, a
translation of industrial production into a metapbysical language wbicb
clearly sbows Kracauer's formation in Kantian idealism.** 'Pbotograpby' does
not specify tbe structural cbaracteristics of tbe mode of production from
wbicb pbotograpby emanates. 'Tbe Mass Ornament' makes some reference
to Taylorism and overproduction," but we bave to turn to Kracauer's study
of tbe salaried employees in Berlin, publisbed as a book in 1930, to find a
more precise description of tbe salient aspects of modern German capitalism.
Tbere Kracauer noted tbat 'structural cbanges in tbe economy' sucb as tbe
'development towards large-scale enterprise' and a 'growtb of tbe apparatus
of distribution' bad led to a demand for increased 'rationalization' of clerical
and administrative tasks. Tbese cbanges were modelled 'on tbe American
pattern' and at tbeir most intense 'from 1925 to 1928'.''Ki-acauer's precise
dating and bis reference to tbe American model of industrial organisation
trace tbis restructuring of tbe German economy back to tbe introduction
of tbe Dawes Plan in 1924. Tbe plan was meant to address tbe political
and financial crisis of 1923, wbicb saw tbe collapse of tbe mark after years
of byperinfiation' and tbe Frencb occupation of tbe Rubr in response to
Germany's inability to meet its reparation payments for World War I. Dawes
offered Germany foreign loans (mainly from tbe US) to belp tbe country
rebuild its economy and tberefore enable it to meet a newly renegotiated
scbedule of payments.
Tbe pbase of capitalist development identified by Kracauer in The Salaried
Masses was in tbe process of transforming tbe German economy into wbat
bas been called a 'penetrated system', structurally dependent upon tbe
capital flow streaming tbrougb from tbe US botb financially and politically.
3. Kracauei',
'Photography', in
The Mass Otiiament,
op. cit., p61.
4. In ' llie Curious
Realist: On Siegfried
Kracauer' Adoi'no
remembers speuding
Saturday af'lernoous
reading The Critique
of Pure Reason witli
Kracauer (in Noteii
to Literature, Shieriy
Weber Nicholsen
(traus), New York,
Columbia, 1992,
pp58-9). For a
detailed treatment
of Kracauer's
early intellectual
formation in
existentialism and
the subsequent
pi"ogramme of
'self-modernisation'
of the early 1920s
see David Frisby,
Fragments of
Modernity: Theories of
Modernity in the Work
ofSimmel, Kracauer
and Benjamin,
Cambridge, Ml'F,
1986, pp 109-26.
5. Kracatier, 'The
Mass Ornament', op.
cit., p78.
6. Siegfried
Kracauer, The
Salaried Masses: Duly
and Distraction in
Weimar Gennany,
Quintin Hoare
(trans), London,
Verso, 1998, pp29-
30.
7. The exchange rate
mark to dollar went
from 9.44 in May
1921 to 16677.58 in
June 1923. On the
collapse of the mark
and the economic
policies that caused
it see Charles 1'.
Kindlebei^ger, A
Financial History of
Western Europe, 2nd
edition, Oxford,
Oxford UP, 1993,
pp283-318.
THE TERRITORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY 77
8. V.R. Berghahn,
Modem Germany:
Society, Economy and
Politics in the Twentieth
Century, 2nd
edition, Cambridge,
Cambridge UP,
1987, plOO.
9. Giovanni Arrighi,
Tli Long Twentieth
Century: Money,
Power, and the
Origins of Our Times,
London, Verso,
1994, p266.
10. Rndolf
Hilferding,
Finance Capital: a
Study of the Latest
Phase of Capitalist
Development, Morris
Watnick and Sam
Gordon (trans), Tom
Bottomore (ed),
London, Rontledge,
1981.
11. Arrighi, The Long
Twentieth Century, op.
cit., p286.
This dependency made Germany especially vulnerable to the sudden recall
of loans from the US after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, producing the
'bankruptcy, economic collapse and mass unemployment'* of the early 1930s
which propelled Hitler to power. The collapse of the German economy
in the last few years of the Weimar Republic effectively revealed that the
structural weaknesses that had long besieged it had not been resolved in the
post-war years. These weaknesses stemmed from the protectionist character
of German capitalism and the strong interdependence of industry and state
which protectionism had fostered. Under Bismarck the state had pursued
economic policies which encouraged the centralisation of industry and fmance
into a select number of enterprises which in their turn had helped the state
to build a unified economy and put to its service its military and industrial
capacity.*"
By the beginning of the twentieth century the impressive development of
Germany's strongly centralised economy had come to be seen as representing
a specific type of capitalist development, one that had been left unaddressed
in Das Kapital, but to which in 1910 Rudolf Hilferding gave the name of
Finanzcapital, or finance capital.'" Taking as a model the German economy,
Hilferding had argued that finance capital constituted the end towards
which modern capitalism tended, as the financial and industrial systems
developed towards an ever-closer integration that would eventually bring
the banks to control not just capital flow, but also industrial production.
Although extremely influential within the history of Marxist thought, this
teleological model of the development of capitalism has more recently been
challenged by comparative studies in the history of capitalism. Among these
studies, Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, has proposed an
alternative understanding of capitalist development that revises the linearity
of Hilferding's model into a more cyclical one. For Arrighi the history of
capitalism is composed of successive cycles of accumulation which repeat
themselves, with notable variants, across history but are essentially articulated
into two distinct phases. In the first capital is invested in the production and
trading of commodities, while in the second increasing competition leads to
the withdrawal of capital from commodities to circulate as flnance. Within
Arrighi's model, the type of centralised capitalism developed in Germany at
the end of the nineteenth century represented a response to the competitive
pressures of a world-market economy which was conceived as an alternative
to the economic liberalism promoted by British imperialism. But Germany's
answer to international competition could only 'suspend'" the eflects of
those pressures. In the long run its failure to flnd more long-lasting solutions
to world-wide competition and the dynamics of capital accumulation had
disastrous political consequences, as it set the German Reich on a collision
course with the British Empire which erupted in World War I and the collapse
of Imperial Germany.
Kracauer's Weimar essay on photography is situated, then, within a
historical moment where the economic and political history of modern
78 NEW FORMATIONS
Germany on the one hand appears to mark an entirely new phase of
development, while on the other this 'new' phase is being experienced as
a failure of capitalism itself The inability of German capitalism to develop
away from monopoly and towards international finance meant that Germany
could not complete its cycle of capital accumulation, leaving its economic
and political structure in a state of permanent crisis. In post-war Germany
capitalism presented itself as the engine of a historical process of increased
rationalisation and centralisation which nevertheless failed to renew the
stiTicture of its economy. In the late 1920s Rracauer clearly saw that the process
could not be further extended or expanded beyond the levels it had already
reached. In the terms set out by 'Photography' any further development of
the economic and cultural system ofthe late 1920s could only have led to the
triumph of the mute nature of the illustrated magazines over any remaining
shreds of human consciousness and rationality. Gonversely, the collapse
of the existing system would have turned the alienation of humanity from
nature promoted by capitalism into the starting point for the establishment
of a different social order, guided by rational principles and not the 'natural'
greed ofthe few.'^ Associated with a stage of capitalist development, that of
finance capital, which Germany is both striving for and structurally incapable
of achieving, photography marked then a point of crisis in the historical
dialectic.
Photography is, then, risky business, part of a historical process that has
reached the end ofthe line and which can only inaugurate its own demise. The
apocalyptic character of Kracauer's warning that 'the turn to photography is
the go-for-broke game [Vabanque-Spiel] of history''^ must be understood within
the specific context ofthe development of German capitalism. Yet Kracauer's
choice of words to characterise this particular moment of crisis - the Vabanque-
Spiel of modernity - locates it not in the halls of power or the corridors of
industry but in the world of the casino and of the card-table, the world of
gambling. This choice certainly conveys the specific flavour of Germany's
economic and political position in the late 1920s. But it also suggests a
parallel with Kracauer's later analysis of nineteenth-century French society,
where gambling and financial speculation are the hallmarks of a society
caught in the illusion of capitalist accumulation. In the narrative Kracauer
developed in Orpheus in Paris, nineteenth-century France was the location of
a historical process that saw gambling transformed from leisure occupation
of the aristocracy to structural principle underlying the economic activity
and development of the country. From the reign of Louis-Philippe, during
which 'speculation became the religion of the state, with the Bourse as its
temple','* Kracauer traces a spiral of ever increasing capital accumulation
which exposes the instability ofthe bourgeois regimes constituted as bulwarks
against the revolutionary forces agitating within nineteenth-century France.
Louis-Philippe's reign was terminated by a series of economic disasters
which brought down the rentes of the very bourgeois class on which the
regime relied for support and thus opened up the door for the bourgeoisie's
12. Kracauer, 'The
Mass Ornament', op.
cit., pp80-81.
13. Kracauer,
'Photography', op.
cit., p61.
14. Kracauer,
Orpheus in Paris:
Offenbach and the
Paris of His Time,
Gwenda David and
Eric Mosbacher
(trans). New York,
Knopf, 1938,
pp91-2.
THE TERRITORY OF PHOTOCRAPHY 79
alliance with the insurgent workers of 1848. In its turn Louis Napol eon' s
regi me was under mi ned precisely by t he r ampant corrupt i on which its
own economic policies had done much to promot e, provoking the rising of
the Communards in 1871 on the ashes of t he Second Empi re defeated by
Bismarck's Prussia. Whet her at the tables of t he casino or in the Bourse, in
the historical narrative o Orpheus in Paris gambl i ng is always t be harbi nger
of a revolution to come.
While explicitly devised by Kracauer for ni net eent h-cent ury France,
this narrative of unstable government s resting on reckless economi c and
monet ary policies which t hen produce revolutionary upri si ngs was also
clearly informed by his under st andi ng of the history of twentieth-centuiy
Germany. Writing Orpheus in Paris as an exile from Nazi Germany in 1934-37,
Kracauer could not fail to perceive t he parallels between t he chronic social
and political instability of ni net eent h-cent ury France and t he cont emporai y
situation of post-WWI Germany. Like t he France of t he 1830s to 1850s,
in the last quart er of the ni net eent h century Germany had under gone a
rapi d process of industrial and economi c expansi on, which had t hen been
followed by World War I, the collapse of Imperial Germany, and the workers'
revolutions of 1918-19. These, like t he French one that br ought about t he
demise of Louis-Philippe, were brutally squashed by the bourgeoisie. Greated
out of t he ashes of Imperi al Germany, t he Weimar Republic represent ed
t he realisation of a democrat i c dream which was nevertheless constantly
t hreat ened by t he social tensions whicb the suppression of t he revolution
bad failed to resolve, and whicb were exacerbat ed by economi c instability.
By the time Kracauer came to write his book on Offenbach, t he democrat i c
aspirations of the Weimar Republic bad already been defeated by Hitler' s
rise to power first as Ger man Ghancellor and t hen as Fhrer, in a parallel
with Louis Napol eon' s trajectoiy that Kracauer could not have failed to
notice.
These parallels invite us to consider whether photography might not stand
to Weimar Germany in the same relation as Offenbacb' s operetta stood to
the Second Empire. In Kracauer' s analysis the operetta was born precisely
of t he historical t rauma of tbe suppression of t he 1848 revolution, when t he
bourgeoisie had t urned against the proletariat, their former ally in the battle
for democratic rights:
The breacb of t he bourgeoisie with tbe proletariat was also a breach with
its own conscience. A violent reaction then set in ... the desire for ' order'
and a ' strong man' was heard on eveiy side. The bourgeois desire for a
strong man was the result of shock. The events and experiences that had
led to it, the whole role played by the proletariat, their own alliance with
it, and the reasons why they had liquidated it were deliberately repressed
into the unconscious, where they formed a complex. People simply refused
to face the facts, which they shamelessly suppressed and falsified ... It was
15. Ibid., piO6. this complex that led to the Second Empire.'"'
80 NEW FORMATIONS
Founded on the repression of the truth ahout itself, the Second Empire was in
Kracauer's account a dictatorship paradoxically horn of the desire for freedom
and democracy hut driven hy the need to distract its suhjects from the loss of
the rights they had willingly ahrogated. Puhlic works such as the expansion of
the railways, of the shipping industry and the effective rehuilding of Paris were
not the hasis on which Louis Napoleon's regime rested, hut rather necessary
props to the staging of an illusoiy grandeur hehind which lay the corpses of
the workers victim of the 1848 repression."" 16. ibid., pi27.
Offenbach's operetta had emerged precisely from this separation between
the faade of wealth and prosperity erected hy the Second Empire and the
reality of its origin in the bourgeoisie's betrayal of its former allies. It had
occupied the space left empty hy the 'social reality [that] had heen hanished
by the Emperor's orders', enabling it to reflect back the glamorous surface
of the Second Empire with distortions that satirised the 'corruption and
authoritarianism' hiding beneath it. Dressed 'in a garment of frivolity
and concealed in an atmosphere of intoxication' the satire of Offenhach's
operettas had acted as a conduit for the revolutionary energies which neither
the hourgeoisie, 'politically stagnant', nor the 'impotent' Left had heen able
to harness: 'it released gusts of laughter, which shattered the compulsory
silence and lured the public towards opposition, while seeming only to amuse
jhem' ." I7.ibid.,p289.
Kracauer' s insistence upon the ever-widening gap that separated the reality
of the society of the Second Empire from its ideological self-representation has
clear echoes of the analysis of phot ography he had proposed almost ten years
earlier. If operetta inserted itself in the gap hetween appearance and reality
on which the Second Empire was founded, phot ography takes root in the
alienation of nature from human consciousness produced hy industrialisation
and advanced capitalism. In hoth cases a fracture has opened up between
realities that had previously seemed to coincide - in Erance, the economic
and political structures, in Germany the natural and human orders. Out of
this fracture have emerged modes of ent ert ai nment - Offenhach' s operettas,
the phot ographs of illustrated magazines - which have given this particular
historical j unct ure a material representation; they have, in ot her words, made
it visible. Operet t a had exposed the corrupt heart of the Second Empire hy
pushi ng to its limit the faade of frivolity behi nd which it hid. Eor their part,
the illustrated magazines of the Weimar Republic reflect hack to its society
the alienated nature produced hy the capitalist system on which its democracy
precariously rests: ' One can certainly imagine a society that has fallen prey
to a mut e nat ure which has no meani ng no mat t er how ahstract its silence.
The contours of such a society emerge in the illustrated journals'.'.^ 18. Kracauer,
This confrontation hetween the social reality produced by the system J
of advanced capi t ali sm and its di st ort ed appear ance is art i culat ed in
' Phot ography' t hrough the comparison hetween the phot ogr aph of t he film
diva and that of the gr andmot her which opens t he essay. The difference
between Weimar and the Second Empire rests on a radical inversion of the
THE TERRITORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY 81
19. Ibid., p47.
20. Ibid., p48.
d., p47.
22. Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, The
Communist Manifesto,
with an introduction
by A J P Taylor,
Harmondsworth,
Pfenguin, 1967, p79.
relation between appearance and reality, for which photography is held to
be responsible. The film diva snapped on the steps of the Lido may well be a
contemporary incarnation of the divas who had graced the operetta stages in
nineteenth-century Paris, hut she is no deceptive mirage. She is in fact one of
the Tiller Girls, part of those mass ornaments which continually perform the
reduction of humanity to the Ratio of capitalism, the metamorphosis of'flesh
and blood', of legs, hangs and eyelashes into the clockwork mechanism of the
assembly line. Materially the dots that make up her image in the illustrated
magazine are indistinguishable from those that make up 'the waves, the
hotel''^ against which she stands. The photograph of the grandmother, on
the other hand, appears to he made of quite different stufl^, signifying perhaps
the continued survival of family relations in a private realm left untouched
by Tiller Girls or fllm divas. Yet the grandmother can only be identified with
her photograph hy the oral tradition, itself unreliable since 'none of her
contemporaries are still alive'. Since the referent of her photograph has not
survived, the photograph itself cannot be said to have captured her likeness.
The grandmother could in fact be 'any young girl in 1864'.^" Eternally fixed in
the same position and with the same expression, the presumed grandmother
of 1864 is in fact as lifeless as a mannequin modelling the fashion of her
time. Rather than capturing her image forever, the photograph has ripped
that image out of its context and reduced it to an empty husk, leaving just a
hollowed crinoline to hold the shape of the grandmother.
The photograph of the grandmother reified into a crinoline is the
precursor of that of the demonic diva, its obverse side. We can have divas
only because grandmothers have all heen killed off, reduced to a hollow
externality. The grandmother's photograph already displays the mute nature
without meaning which is then inhabited, taken over hy 'our demonic diva
[unsere dmonische Diva]'\" better still, it is the mute nature which becomes
itself the demon. The diva is demonic because she has taken over the shell
of the grandmother, an empty husk that can be occupied by an insubstantial
being made up of dots. But she is also demonic because she has turned
the grandmother inside out, to reveal what had been lurking beneath the
surface of bourgeois respectahihty all along. As the demon of the bourgeois
grandmother of the 1860s, the photograph of the mass ornament, of
Septemher 1927, represents the historical truth hehind the photograph of
nineteenth-century bourgeois family relations.
The mute nature which comes to face us in photography may then
present itself not as an absence or eradication of consciousness, but as an
interior demon. Under the guise of the mass ornament, photography reveals
the being that hides within the capitalist mode of production as its secret
genie, in Marx's words, 'the spectre that is haunting Europe', revolutionary
Communism.^^ If photography is the Vabanque-Spiel of capitalism, its ultimate
gamble, it is because it gives substance to the proletariat, the mute nature
produced hy capitalism. But this is not the classical proletariat of the workers,
hut that of the mass ornament, a proletariat which is itself heing reduced to
82 NEW FORMATIONS
a machine. Under the appearance of a democracy united in its consumption
of the entertainment industry lies in fact a society that is always threatened
from within by the emergence of the mass as the unthinking, un-conscious
form humanity takes under advanced capitalism.^'^
SANCHO PANZA'S UTOPIA
The proletariat that photography reveals as the genie of capitalism is the one
Kracauer set out to describe in The Salaried Masses, a proletariat that does not
know itself if not in the distorted reflections of the beer halls, cinema theatres
and sport arenas of the entertainment industry. What distinguishes this new
proletariat of salaried employees from the classical one of the workers is, in
Kracauer's analysis, their heing 'spiritually homeless'. Unlike 'the average
worker' whose 'life as a class-conscious proletarian is roofed over with vulgar-
Marxist concepts that do at least tell him what his intended role is',^'' salaried
employees are torn hetween the economic reality of their existence - which
is proletarian at best - and their ideological positioning as the middle class
'of the newest Germany', as the original suhtitle to The Salaried Masses had
it. Since their ideology does not match their reality, they find themselves
stranded in a world they cannot comprehend, within which they cannot find
their 'proper' place.
The condition of spiritual homelessness which Kracauer ascribes to
the new proletariat of the salaried employees represents his adaptation of
Lukcs's coinage of'transcendental homelessness' in Theory of the Novel, a
book to which Kracauer's generation looked as their manifesto.^'' Written
in the winter of 1914-15 and puhlished in book form in 1920, Theory of the
Novel reflected, hy Lukcs's own admission, his sense of mounting despair
at the historical situation of World War I, a despair which clearly coloured
his vision of Western civilisation as a fall from grace since the age of
Homer's epic heroes. Eor Lukcs transcendental homelessness denoted the
condition of art forms in what he calls 'problematic' civilisations, where the
fundamental immanence of meaning to life has been lost, so that art must
create its forms ex-novo rather than fmding them in the world. Although
Kracauer was later to remonstrate with Bloch about Lukcs's disregard for
materialist analysis,^'' nevertheless his conception of photography in the
1927 essay and heyond resonates very strongly with Lukcs's theory of a loss
of inherent meaning in the world of modernity. When Lukcs wrote that
in the integrated civilisation of archaic Greece 'the mind's attitude within
such a home is a passive visionary acceptance of ready-made, ever-present
meaning',^' or that 'totality of being is possible only ... where beauty is the
meaning of the world made visible',^^ he was writing about the world from
which Kracauer's 'mute nature' had been expelled. But Kracauer in his turn
brought to Lukcs's Romantic world-view of a seamless fit between external
and internal reality an insistence on the historical specificity and material
manifestations of transcendental homelessness. The salaried employees of
23. Heide
Schliipmann's
reading of Theory of
Film has also shown
how Kracatier's
understanding of
physical reality
as camera-made
implies the notion
of the mass as the
absence of tlie
human; see her ' The
Stibject of Survival:
On Kracauer's
Theory of Film' in Netii
Geniian Critique 54
(1991): 125-26.
24. Kracatier, The
Salaried Masses, op.
cit., p88.
25. In 'As I
Remember Friedel'
Leo Lowenthal notes
that 'Lukcs's 'Theory
of the Novel was a
cult book for us all,
which we practically
knew by heart' (Ne^it
Centuin Critique 54
(1991): 8.)
26. The exchange
with Bloch on
Luk.1cs is analysed
in detail both in
Frisby, Fragments of
Modernity, op. cit.,
pp 122-23 and in
Dagmar Barnotiw,
Critical Realism:
History, Photography,
and the Work of
Siegfried Kracauer,
Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins UP, 1994,
pp37-4l .
27. Geoi-g Luk.ics,
The Theoiy of the
Novel: A Histrico-
Philosophical Fssay
on the Foniwi of Crai
Epic Literature, Anna
Bostock (trans),
London, Merlin,
1971, p32.
28. Ibid., p34.
THE TERRITORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY 83
29. Kracauer,
Salaried Masses, op.
cit., p88.
30. Siegfried
Kracauer, Theory of
Film: The Redemption
of Physical Reality,
introduction by
Miriam Bratu
Hansen, Princeton,
Princeton UP, 1997,
p299.
31. Marcel Proust,
Remembrance of
Things Past, C.K.
Scott MoncriefF
(trans), vol. I,
pp814-15, quoted
in Kracauer, Theory
of Film, p 14. The
episode quoted
by Kracauer bad
been recognised as
fundamental to tbe
Proustian discourse
on perception from
very early on, see
for instance Samuel
Beckett's 1931
essay, in Proust and
Three Dialogues witb
Georges Duthuit,
London, Calder,
1999, pp44-5.
The episode also
figures prominently
in Brassai's 1998
study of Proust's
deployment
of tbe motif of
photography in the
Recherche {translated
into English by
Ricbard Howard
as Proust Under the
Power of Photography,
Cbicago, University
of Cbicago Press,
2001). For an
analysis of tbe
episode in relation
to Proust's treatment
of temporality
see also my 'Tbe
Grammar of Time:
Pbotograpby,
Modernism, History'
in Literature and
Visual Technologies:
Writing after Cinema,
Julian Murphet
and Lydia Rainford
(eds), Basingstoke,
Palgrave Macmillan,
2003.
the 'newest Germany' lack a transcendental home not because their lives
find no correspondence in the natural world around them, but because
tbe objective reality of their proletarian existence has not modified tbeir
ideological identification witb tbe bourgeoisie: 'tbe house of bourgeois
ideas and feelings in wbicb tbey used to live bas collapsed, its foundations
eroded by economic development'.^"
But by tbe time Kracauer came to write tbe epilogue of Theory of Film in
tbe late 1950s being 'ideologically sbelterless' became generalised from tbe
socio-economic condition of a specific sector of society into tbe existential
position of bumanity in tbe modern age. Tbis generalisation appears to
renounce Kracauer's earlier insistence on material and bistorical specificity
and to recover instead tbe aestbetic and cognitive bent of Lukcs's neo-
Hegelianism. Ratber tban being rooted in tbe divergence between social
reality and ideological representation specific to tbe salaried employees
of Weimar Germany, transcendental bomelessness is now seen to be tbe
effect of tbe development of scientific tbougbt wbicb emerged from tbe
Enligbtenment. For tbe Kracauer o Theory of Film our alienation from
material reality is not produced by tbe capitalist mode of production but
by its superstructural manifestation, tbe intellectual babit of abstraction
associated witb tbe predominance of science and tecbnology. Abstraction
prevents us from actually seeing tbe physical reality tbat surrounds us:
'altbougb streets, faces, railway stations, etc. be before our eyes, tbey have
remained largely invisible so far'.^" Wbile it is religious or ideological
beliefs tbat are often invoked as remedies against intellectual abstraction,
Kracauer points out tbese bave also been fatally undermined by tbe
development of science, leaving bumanity stranded witbout spiritual
guidance in a world it cannot perceive, let alone understand.
Tbis sbift in Kracauer's understanding of transcendental bomelessness
from class-bound to existential condition signals also a profound cbange
in bis tbinking about pbotograpby. Wbile in tbe work of tbe 1920s and
1930s pbotograpby bad been conceptualised as tbe tecbnology tbat gives
material substance to the new social reality of tbe mass, in Theory of Film tbis
social reality in fact metamorpboses into a pbysical reality wbicb abstraction
prevents us from perceiving. Tbis radical re-writing of pbotograpby is based
on Ki acauer's reading of tbe episode from Proust's In Search of Lost Time
wbicb bad already been implied in bis discussion of tbe pbotograpb of tbe
grandmotber in 'Pbotograpby'. In Theory of Film tbe reaction of Proust's
narrator to seeing bis grandmother stripped of tbe veil of bis loving memories
is taken to encapsulate wbat is distinctive about tbe pbotograpbic medium,
its ability to present tbe world tbat surrounds us as if seen by 'tbe witness, tbe
observer witb a bat and travelling coat, tbe stranger wbo does not belong to
tbe bouse, tbe pbotograpber wbo bas called to take a pbotograpb of places
wbicb one will never see again'.^' Tbe estranging, de-familiarising power of
pbotograpby wbicb bad once signified tbe alienation of tbe mass from its
own consciousness bas now become wbat makes it possible for pbotograpby
84 NEW FORMATIONS
to bring physical reality into consciousness: 'We literally redeem this world
from its dormant state, its state of virtual nonexistence by endeavouring to
experience it through the camera'.''^
Through Proust, then, the condition of transcendental homelessness finds
a technological solution rather than a social or political one. Proust marks
a shift that allows Kracauer to move away from his apocalyptic vision of
photography as the Vabanque-Spiel of capitalism, as materialisation ofthe new
proletariat ofthe transcendentally homeless.^^ Photography is transformed
instead into a means of redemption from the modern condition of alienation
- whether from physical or from social reality - wbich in its turn also implies
a changed evaluation ofthe meaning of alienation itself. Still understood as
the malaise of modern life in Theory of Film, alienation will in fact become in
Kracauer's last book the condition of possibility for a modern utopia.
History: the Last Things Before the Last marks the last step in Kracauer's
modulation of the motif of transcendental homelessness, though this step
is in fact a qualitative leap into a very different dimension. Returning once
more to the Proustian episode that had been at the centre of Theory of Film,
in History Kracauer offered a third interpretation of it which emphasises the
camera's work of distancing and estrangement not from the physical object
but more precisely (and in keeping witb its meaning in Proust) from time.
The camera experience of Proust's protagonist no longer signifies our failure
to perceive a physical reality from which we are alienated through the habit
of abstract tbinking. It bas rather become tbe model for an experience of
radical discontinuity witb one's own past which for Kracauer is embodied in
tbe condition of tbe exile. The exile has lived through a drastic interruption
in the continuity of his existence which cannot simply be remedied by a
process of integration into bis new life, his new territory: 'since the self he
was continues to smoulder beneatb the person he is about to become, his
identity is bound to be in a state of fiux; and tbe odds are that he will never
fully belong to the community to which he now in a way belongs'.'"' In History
the alienating powers of photography are re-conceptualised as exile from the
fiow of time that guarantees the continuity of one's identity. To this condition
of temporal disjunction Kracauer gives the name of 'the near-vacuum of
extra-territoriality, the very no-man's land which Marcel entered when he
first caught sight of his grandmother'.^*
It has often been argued that History represents an essentially
autobiograpbical text,^" though its form is more akin to that of the self-
portrait than to a narrative account of Kracauer's life. It is with the aid of
the camera he borrows from Proust that Kracauer crafts for himself the
final image which summarises his life-history. If Eckart's monogram is
fidelity, as 'Photography' had suggested, Kracauer's is extra-territoriality,
the concept-image that has come to identify him in his posthumous life. In
1966 Adorno had already used it in his obituary to describe Kracauer's face,
but it was Martin Jay's 1976 biographical essay' that sealed its fate as 'the
last image'** of Kracauer's life. Kracauer's own use of the image in History
32. Kracauer, Theory
of Film, op. cit.,
p300.
33. On the role
of Proust iu
Kracauer's process
of detachment from
his Weimar-year
position see also
Heide Schlpmann,
'The Subject of
Sui"vival', in Ne^o
German Critique, op.
cit., ppl 14-15.
34. Siegfried
Kracauer, History: the
Last Things Before tlie
Last, completed by
Paul Oskar Kristeller,
Princeton, Markus
Wiener, 1995, p83.
35. Ibid..
36. On History as
autobiography
see Gertmd Koch,
Siegfried Kracauer: an
Introduction, Jeremy
Gaines (trans),
Princeton, Princeton
UP, 2000, ppl 14-17
and Inka Mlder-
Bach, 'History as
Autobiography: The
Last Things Before
the Last', New
German Gritique 54
(1991), 139-57.
37. Theodor W.
Adorno, 'Siegfried
Kracauer Tot,'
Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (December
1, 1966), quoted
in Martin Jay, ' llie
Extraterritorial
Life' in Pennanent
Exiles: Essays on the
Intellectual Migration
from Germany to
America, Columbia
University Press,
1985, pl53.
38. Kracauer,
'Photography', op.
cit., p51.
THE TERRITORY OE PHOTOGRAPHY 85
already anticipated its post humous fortune, as if his last book had in fact been
written from beyond the grave. As Kracauer' s monogr am, extra-territoriality
bridges the distance between autobiography and his search for a place within
the intellectual panor ama of t he twentieth century. In t he i nt roduct i on
to History, this search is explicitly modelled on the historical exampl e of
Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose equivocations between Catholic Church and
Reformation are celebrated by Kracauer as reflecting his own rejection of
the fixity of ideological positionings. While seen by his cont emporari es as
evidence of Erasmus' s tendency towards unprincipled compromise, Erasmus' s
unwillingness to align himself with either Church or Reform represents for
Kracauer a positive choice of ' the mi ddl e way [as] the direct road to Utopia
39. Kracauer, //story, - the Way of the humane' . ' ^ Erasmus' s example provides for Kracauer evidence
^' '^"' '' ' of the futility of ideological struggles which always inevitably miss what is
essential in the cause at stake. Access to and underst andi ng of t he 'last issues'
is only attained t hrough 'a way of thinking and living ... which for lack of a
better word, or a word at all, may be called humane' . It is this rejection of
absolute truths that Erasmus' s utopia shares with Kracauer' s underst andi ng of
historical knowledge as a form of exile from both time and certainty, uneasily
40. Ibid., p8. located between past and present, 'in the interstices' between them.'"'
This attention to what lies between firm ideological and philosophical
positions chimes in with t he rejection of absolutes whicb Kracauer had
commended to Lowenthal already in the early 1920s: 'We have to remai n
secret, quietistic, inactive, a t horn in t he side of others, preferring to drive
t hem (with us) into despair rat her t ban give t hem hope - that seems to me
41. Lowenthal, 'As I the Only possible posture' .' " But it is in tbe context of the Cold War and its
Remember Friedel', , , . . . . . i , . , , . . >
op. cit., p9. siarV. division into ideological and geo-political territories that this rejection
of ideology takes on its historical significance. It would be easy to dismiss
Kracauer's celebration ofthe humane in History as a lapse and retrenchment
into liberalism, itself clearly an ideology, though also the one that pretends to
be non-ideological. But something far more significant is being attempted in
History, where the no-man's land, the unattributed space between ideological
terrains and philosophical absolutes is being reclaimed not in the negative
mode of a renunciation of ideologies but in the positive form of a utopia.
Tbis Utopia represents a return to Kracauer's preoccupations in the Weimar
essays. It is predicated on his rethinking of photography as a form of exile
from temporal continuity rather than of physical alienation. This shift in bis
conception of photography certainly jettisons the historical and materialist
specificity of his earlier analysis, but it does so in order to recover tbose
Utopian possibilities that in 'Photography' had been hidden behind the threat
of the Vhbanque-Spiel. I have tried in tbe previous section to tease out those
possibilities in the identification of photography with the demonic character
ofthe mass as ornament, a mass that uncannily resembles Marx's Communist
spectre. In History, though, those possibilities are reactivated not through the
language of philosophical Marxism, but through that of modernist fiction.
It is in the unlikely shape of Kafka's Sancho Panza that Kracauer finds an
86 NEW FORMATIONS
image for the Utopian promise of photography:
Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of
years, by devouring a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure
in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon,
whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon set out in
perfect freedom on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack
of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza bimself,
harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don
Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had
of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end.'*^
The fmal image of Kracauer's 'Utopia ofthe in-between - a terra incognita in
the hollows between the lands we know"*'^ - is quite appropriately itself located
in the interstices of Kafka's story, in that apposition of'free man' to a Sancho
Panza refashioned in the shape of Don Quixote's chronicler.
Like Proust's grandmother, Kafka's Sancho Panza is one of the images
to which Kracauer constantly returned in the course of his writing. As with
Proust, Kracauer's interpretation of Kafka's short piece never fossilised itself
into a stable form, but underwent a series of significant transformations in
the course of his career. In Kracauer's 1931 review of Kafka's posthumous
works, 'The Truth about Sancho Panza' had been interpreted as offering a
complete reversal of the world of adventure stories, 'since here, instead of
the hero conquering the world, the world becomes completely unhinged in
the course of his wanderings'.'*'' This world coming apart at the seams and
featuring labourers trapped within the buildings they have erected, silence
as the only adequate answer to interpellation, and a 'completely skewed'
relationship between objects and people, represented for Kracauer an implicit
commentary on 'the years ofthe war, the revolution, and the inflation' during
which Kafka's last pieces had been written. While recognising that Kafka's
posthumous writings still offered 'premonitions of a state of freedom''"" that
were Utopian in character, in 1931 Kracauer had sombrely observed that
these Utopias were normally located by Kafka not in the future, but in a past
to which we have long since lost access.
The Utopian promise that seemed to be buried in Kafka's Sancho Panza
in 1931 was however reactivated a few years later under circumstances which
appeared to match in darkness those in which the piece had been written.
During his forced stay in Marseille in f 940 waiting for a safe passage out of
Vichy France, Kracauer had started sketching out the first drafts of a study
of film aesthetics that was later to become Theory of Film.'"' Sancho Panza
resurfaced once more in these notebooks, but not just to signify the disjunction
ofthe world he had marked in the 1931 review, but rather as an intimation of
what could be gained from the falling apart ofthe old order: 'Insofar as film,
by representing materiality, promotes the work of disenchantment, can it be
called the Sancho Panza who exposes the Donquichoteries of ideologies and
42. Franz Kaflca,
'The Ti-uth About
Sancho Panza',
quoted in History,
op. cit., p217.
43. Kracauer, Hutory,
op. cit., p217.
44. Kracauer, 'Franz
Kafka', in The Mass
Ornament, op. cit.,
p273.
45. Ibid., p269.
46. For an account
of the Marseille
notebooks as
an important
transitional stage in
Kracauer's thought
see Miriam Hansen,
"'With Skin and
Hair": Kracauer's
Theory of Film,
Marseille 1940',
Critical Inquiry, 19
(Spring 1993):
437-69.
THE TERRITORY OE PHOTOGRAPHY 87
47. Kracauer,
Marseille
Notebooks, 1:42,
quoted in Miriam
Hansen, "'With Skin
and Hair"', op. cit.,
pp 450-51, n. 20.
48. Kracauer, 'The
Little Shopgirls Go
to the Movies', in
The Mass Ornament,
op. cit., p292.
intentional eonstructions'. This is an undoubtedly more positive reading of
Sancho Panza's role than the one Kracauer had originally proposed in 1931,
even with the addition of the warning that 'to which end [film] evokes and
takes into account the material sphere remains to be seen'."" But its optimism
is based effectively on a form of forgetting, whieh overlays Kafka's piece
with the original source in Cervantes, annihilating the reversal of roles that
is Kafka's devastating revelation. In the Marseille notebooks Sancho Panza
remains Don Quixote's side-kick, the dismantler of his master's anachronistic
fantasies, rather than their creator.
The Sancho Panza oi History lies half-way between the 1931 review and
the Marseille notebooks. On the surface an apparently more optimistic
interpretation of tbe disjointed world created by Kafka, it is in fact much
less sanguine about tbe potential for deflation in the Cold War era, when
freedom from ideological fixities can only be imagined as an unknown utopia.
This Utopia is not even projected in the past, as Kracauer bad observed of
Kafka's aspirations in 1931, but in a parallel universe wbere the original
relationships of Cervantes's epic are reversed. In making the knight errant
into Sancho Panza's inner demon, Kafka effectively turns inside out the
ideological value o Don Quixote. Rather tban being a satire on tbe outmoded
ideological investments ofthe dying aristocracy in seventeenth-century Spain,
Kafka's Cervantes becomes a celebration of the downtrodden peasants, the
appropriation of a literary milestone for those whose labour made it possible
but who could never have claimed its authorship. 'The Trutb About Sancbo
Panza' offers in fact an adaptation of Cervantes's founding realist epic for
the age of mass culture wbich undoes the relationship between class ideology
and the subjects interpelled by it which Kracauer himself had oudined in
'The Little Shopgirls Go To the Movies'. Back in 1927 Kracauer bad argued
that the ideological content of mass-produced movies reflected the dreams
not of its audiences, but of tbose who controlled the means of production:
'doesn't every Rolls Royce owner dream that scullery maids dream of rising
to bis stature?'"** Kafka's Sancho Panza is, though, no shopgirl, the passive
consumer of bis master's fantasies; he is in fact the producer of the dream
which bis master believes to be his world. Through this reversal in tbe
authorship of Don Quixote's fantastic world, Kafka operates precisely tbe
kind of demytbologisation which Kracauer bad attributed to Sancbo Panza
in the Marseille notebooks. 'The Truth About Sancho Panza' shows us tbe
ideological conditions under wbich Don Quixote got produced, conditions
that could only become visible after tbe book bad been written. It offers us
a snapsbot of the birtb of capitalism seen from the point of view of tbose
whose labour has made capitalism possible, but wbo will never appear as
prime actors in tbe representation of its bistory.
I use the word snapsbot advisedly here, botb because it captures tbe
epigrammatic quality of Kafka's dry humour in rewriting the ponderous
epic for the modern age, but especially because tbe question of photography
is never far from these considerations, when Kracauer is concerned. If in
NEW FORMATIONS
Kafka a flip of the pen can reveal the truth behind three hundred years of
bourgeois cultural hegemony, for Kracauer photography' s historical mission is
to perform a similar task in the realm ofthe visible. By reversing the relation
between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote Kafka effectively exposed the shaky
foundations of a culture for which the visible and the real are identical. In
the Marseille notebooks Kracauer bad thought that tbe truth about Sancho
Panza lay in bis ability to show us the windmills whicb Don Quixote has spun
into mythical giants. But by tbe time of History Kracauer bad come to realise
Kafka's devastating lesson, that Don Quixote's fantasies are themselves tbe
products of Sancho Panza's windmills, tbat wbat is visible may not be the
entire truth but may indeed constitute an 'irreality [that] is not a dream; on
tbe contrary, it is real'.'"' 49. Kracauer, 'Franz
Having spent most of his life insisting upon photography' s affinity to the ^'^!^^ ' ''' "' "
natural world, in History Kracauer then turns photography into a tecbnology
that signifies not materiality but the immaterial middle ground of the in-
between. The alienation whicb pbotograpby both produces and represents
is not alienation from consciousness, as it used to be in ' Photography' or,
later, in Theory of Film. It is rather alienation from territory, from belonging,
from grounding; it is alienation as extra-territoriality, undermi ni ng tbe very
ground we walk on. This photography does not present us with the physical
reality wbich abstract thought prevents us from seeing. Its function is ratber
that of shaking our belief in tbe visible, and in tbe presumption that the
visible exhausts tbe real. Tbe terra incognita wbich Kracauer envisages as the
location of his utopia cannot be a physical entity, since it only exists in the
interstices between establisbed trutbs or dogmas. This immaterial, invisible
terrain is wbere photography belongs within Kracauer's thought, its proper
territory.
THE TERRITORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY