‘Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse’. This sentence, which occurs halfway through the fifth aphorism of Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia (2005: 25), would appear to sum up a received notion about critical theory’s engagement with cinema, mass media, and spectacle. According to this line of thinking, spelled out most explicitly in the chapter on the ‘Culture Industry’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment, cinema degrades even the most critical subject. More radically and perniciously, the culture industry produces and reproduces the modern subject in the first place. Fusing a non-determinist Marxism with Freudian categories, critical theory lends significant weight to cultural processes of subject-formation. Under the conditions of industrial modernity and especially in the wake of Fascism and the Holocaust, these processes tend increasingly toward conformism and integration from above: the culture industry systematically subjects its consumers to the imperatives of sameness, the logic of identity and exchange. As this industry’s ‘central sector’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 100), film breaks down the vigilance of no less a critical subject than Adorno himself.
Although there are indications that Adorno was also attuned to the pleasurable aspects of this breakdown, as I will suggest in the final section below, the cinema epitomizes for him and Horkheimer a mass cultural form that turns individuals into unwitting consumers not only of the goods advertised through product placement and conspicuous consumption on the screen, but of the capitalist system that keeps them in check. As the cultural manifestation of organized monopoly capitalism, the culture industry subsumes cinema along with magazines, jazz, radio, and television under the commodity form, thereby transferring ‘the profit motive naked onto cultural forms’ (Adorno, 1975: 13). Favoring various kinds of ‘pseudo-realism’ as their representational mode, cinema and television feed into the systematic, totalizing reach of the culture industry to satisfy the false needs of spectator–consumers that this industry generates in the first place; in this manner, it ‘endlessly cheats the consumers out of what it endlessly promises’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 111). As Adorno and Horkheimer put it in the chapter title, the culture industry peddles ‘enlightenment as mass deception’. Harnessing all aspects of style, technique, and aesthetics to technology, profit, and an authoritarian notion of culture, the top-down system of the culture industry reinforces social hierarchies even as it levels all aesthetic differences – pseudo-differentiations between A- and B-pictures, Chrysler and General Motors, daytime soaps and ‘quality’ television notwithstanding.
Cinema, for Adorno and Horkheimer, consequently epitomizes modern media’s proximity to propaganda, a term whose meaning in the original German usage oscillates between advertising and political manipulation. This ambivalence is precisely the authors’ point: as a manifestation of highly developed capitalism, the culture industry marks the point at which sound business policy and political machination converge. Like advertising, industrial culture is entirely beholden to the commodity form; like propaganda, it constitutes an ideological machine that transforms autonomous subjects into a mass of consumers rid of the freedom and the capability of forming independent judgments: ‘the customer is not king, as the culture industry would like to have us believe, not its subject but its object’ (Adorno, 1975: 12). Where ‘to be entertained means to be in agreement’, the authors argue, conformity replaces consciousness (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 115). Spectators become interchangeable consumers who ‘must need no thoughts of [their] own’ (109) but must ensure the seamless functioning of the machine through unquestioning consumption of its products. In the negative dialectic that binds together the manifestations of culture under conditions of modernity, the culture industry is the opposing pole to notions of authentic folk art or popular culture – notions that resonate with a positivity as false and misleading as the negativity of a ‘pornographic and prudish’ industrial culture (111). In the face of this dialectic, according to Horkheimer and to Adorno especially, only a rigorous notion of autonomous art could resist cooptation by the system by virtue of its resolute negativity. ‘Ascetic and shameless’ (111), such art recognizes the broken world and dares to offer reconciliation only in the most attenuated overtones generated by its demanding form, whereas the culture industry traps its consumers in stimulus-response patterns, offering escapist fare the better to keep them yoked to the factory bench. And yet, even the concept of autonomous art cannot be considered normative or absolute, since it remains tethered to the dialectic beyond which it would gesture. As Adorno famously formulates it, in a 1936 letter to Walter Benjamin in which he commented on the latter’s drafts of the ‘Artwork’ essay: both high and low, both autonomous art and the forms of mass culture to which Benjamin would ascribe revolutionary potential, ‘bear the stigmata of capitalism…. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up’ (Adorno et al., 2007: 123).
Adorno and Horkheimer’s influential account of the culture industry is inexorably totalizing: as any reader of ‘Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ can attest, the text is relentless in shoring up the image of a fully administered, closed cultural system, from which there can be no escape and whose only logical culmination is in fascism. Both Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia were originally written in Californian exile from the Nazis. Against this backdrop, the bleakness of Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of mass media is of course historically contingent; but it is also in keeping with their overall diagnosis of enlightenment as generating its own antitheses – a dialectic that they trace back to the age of myth and forward into the mythologizing tendencies of bourgeois enlightenment. Consequently, they detect this dialectic even in the most remote corners of the culture industry. Adorno and Horkheimer see even the seemingly harmless laughter generated by cartoons as a regressive response to the sadism with which animated figures treat each other, are flattened, pummeled, run over. Or as Walter Benjamin would put it elsewhere, Disney films from a certain point onwards revealed the ‘cozy acceptance of bestiality and violence as inevitable concomitants of existence’ under modernity (Benjamin, 2008: 130, n30). In the frantic pursuits of cartoon characters, then, Adorno and Horkheimer see the incipient pogrom (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 110), in the invention of radio they already hear the Führer’s voice (129). As the authors put it in a distant echo of Siegfried Kracauer’s contemporaneous argument in From Caligari to Hitler (1947), ‘in Germany, even the most carefree films of democracy were overhung already by the graveyard stillness of dictatorship’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 99). In the dialectic of enlightenment, even fun ‘is a medicinal bath (Stahlbad) which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe’ (112). The enlightenment ideals of reason and emancipation yield a rationalized cultural system that ensures complete social control.
In the decades since its inception (first as a set of mimeographed ‘philosophical fragments’ completed in 1944, then as a book published in 1947, and only much later as one of the iconic texts of critical theory),1 Dialectic of Enlightenment has often been reduced to readily repeatable soundbytes: enlightenment as unmitigated disaster leading to fascism, cinema as mass manipulation, audiences as dupes of the culture industry’s spectacle. These are strong claims that gave critical theory an edge of combative ideology critique in the cultural arena during the 1960s, when Dialectic of Enlightenment was taken up by the student movements. At the same time, critical theorists would have been the first to balk at the reduction of complex arguments to bald theses about mass media manipulation; such reductionist accounts could render those arguments all but indistinguishable from a ‘hypodermic needle’ model of mass communication – anathema to the dialectical approach elaborated by Adorno and Horkheimer, who originally had intended to follow up on the ‘philosophical fragments’ with additional material. Of the section on the culture industry, in particular, they noted in 1944 that it remained more fragmentary than the other parts; they had already completed significant work on ‘the positive aspects of mass culture’, suggesting a far more nuanced concept of the latter than the one condensed in received images of Adorno in particular as a mandarin thinker with only disdain for mass culture and the media (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 254, n. xix). By the turn of the twenty-first century, the editors of a volume devoted to ‘rethinking the Frankfurt School’ could consequently observe that ‘reconsiderations of Adorno have proceeded at such a pace that a renovated, re-published and poststructuralist-friendly Adorno (as opposed to the cranky modernist of Dialectic of Enlightenment) has become the leading figure of the second-generation Frankfurt School’ (Nealon and Irr, 2002: 2).
The image of the ‘cranky modernist’, however, did have its own efficacy in the reception history of critical theory, and the somewhat one-dimensional notion of the culture industry as pure manipulation came in for revision even by some of the Frankfurt School’s most well-meaning critics. The rise of British Cultural Studies from the 1960s on, for example, and its further elaboration in North America in particular, more or less directly implicated the thesis of enlightenment as ‘mass deception’ in its own challenge to the ‘hypodermic needle’ model of cultural communication. Given the distinct contexts out of which the two schools of thought emerged, it would be wrong to think of Cultural Studies as a direct ‘reply’ to the cultural theories of the Frankfurt School. Nonetheless, the rise of cultural studies was predicated in certain ways upon the work of the latter – if only by negation and in a ‘particularly difficult’ relationship of ‘skeptical distance’ (Nealon and Irr, 2002: 3). Though many practitioners of cultural studies from Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall onwards shared the materialist and even Marxist bent of the Frankfurt School, and although the two intellectual traditions overlapped in a number of other significant ways as well (cf. Kellner, 2015), the British Marxists and subsequent critics did not adopt the Frankfurt School’s totalizing dialectics, whether Hegelian or negative.2 Nor did they share critical theory’s totalizing dismissal of the working class as hopelessly coopted by the system. Responding to post-Fordist developments in capitalism, the more sociologically oriented studies of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies implicitly also displaced the Frankfurt School’s model of the culture industry. In its place, Cultural Studies developed more differentiated notions of cultural encoding and decoding on the part of audiences that were increasingly conceptualized as active (Fiske, 1989; Hall, 1993).3
As I have already begun to suggest, however, such critiques of Adorno and Horkheimer’s model of culture did not come only from the outside, as it were, but were formulated within the context of critical theory itself. On cinema and modernity, on the spectacle of the culture industry, critical theorists did not speak with one voice – particularly if one includes here two of the most articulate contributors who were never de facto members of the Institute for Social Research, but who are today generally considered key figures in this intellectual tradition: Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.4 From their influential writings emerge related but different conceptualizations of cinema, spectacle, and modernity that crystallize around the configuration of media and a complex notion, yet to be defined, of experience. Taking these contributions into account – which have been gaining increasing attention ever since the rediscovery of Benjamin’s writings during the 1980s and 90s, and more recently with the revaluation of the full breadth of Kracauer’s work – we can then also return to Adorno to reconsider various nuances in his assessment of technological media that the more well-known theorization of the culture industry and its reception have tended to occlude. Here, too, recent scholarship has opened significant revisionist avenues.
‘One of the oldest motifs of Critical Theory’, notes Detlev Claussen, is ‘the experience of the loss of experience’ (2008: 7; cf. also Jay, 2005). It is a motif central not only to Adorno’s aesthetic and cultural theory, but also to the work of Walter Benjamin in particular. In essays such as ‘The Storyteller’ (Benjamin, 2006b), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (Benjamin, 2008), and ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (Benjamin, 2006a), as well as in his unfinished work on the Arcades project, Benjamin considers it axiomatic that under conditions of modernity, ‘experience has fallen in value’ (Benjamin, 2006b: 143). In this regard, Benjamin’s writings contribute, in Miriam Hansen’s words, to a ‘theory of experience in the age of its declining communicability’ (Hansen, 1987: 186).
What exactly did it mean for experience to be on the decline, and what were the impediments to its communication? Has not the concept of experience in fact become increasingly ubiquitous, the quintessential object of our mobile, urban, and cosmopolitan modernity, in which we chase after ever new thrills and sensations that we collect in order to assure ourselves of having truly lived (Greif, 2016)? In order to understand how Benjamin and the Frankfurt School arrive at the diagnosis of an ‘increasing atrophy of experience’ (Benjamin, 2006a: 316), and in order to understand the specificity of this diagnosis in its relation to cinema and other media of modernity, we need to distinguish with Benjamin between two different notions of experience. This distinction is facilitated in the German language by the fact that it has two different words to designate Erlebnis and Erfahrung as fundamentally different kinds of experience. Benjamin associates the former with fleeting, momentary impressions, with the impact of a shock or thrill. These short bursts of affect, which arguably define our contemporary, commonplace concept of experience (cf. Greif, 2016), lack what is central, by contrast, to the emphatic notion of experience as Erfahrung: a longitudinal temporal aspect that ‘accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and articulates time’ (Benjamin, 2006a: 331). As Erfahrung, experience becomes a temporal medium in which memory and history are woven together. ‘Where there is experience in [this] strict sense of the word’, writes Benjamin, ‘certain contents of the individual past combine in the memory with material from the collective past’ (Benjamin, 2006a: 316).
This emphasis on the historical dimension of experience consequently also entails an insistence on its more-than-individual quality as a site (or, again, a medium)5 for the dialectical encounter between subject and object. Experience in this sense is not simply a subjective capacity to register sense data as if on a blank slate, for ‘[t]he relation to experience … is a relation to all of history; merely individual experience, in which consciousness begins with what is nearest to it, is itself mediated by the all-encompassing experience of historical humanity’ (Adorno, 1984: 158). As Miriam Hansen, one of the most important commentators on media and experience in the Frankfurt School, put it: experience as Erfahrung is ‘that which mediates individual perception with social meaning, conscious with unconscious processes, loss of self with self-reflexivity’; with Benjamin and Adorno, she consequently defines experience ‘as the capacity to see connections and relations (Zusammenhang); … as the matrix of conflicting temporalities, of memory and hope, including the historical loss of these dimensions’ (Hansen, 2004: 12–13). Benjamin himself formulates this dialectic in countless and varied discussions of experience in relation to color, childhood, language, writing, storytelling, and more (cf. Jay, 2005: chapter 8). In these discussions, the emphatic notion of Erfahrung tends to imply ‘a point of indifference between subject and object, an equiprimordiality prior to their differentiation’ (Jay, 1998: 51) or, as Jürgen Habermas put it in an early appraisal of Benjamin: in experience (Erfahrung), the object metamorphizes ‘into a counterpart. Thereby a whole field of surprising correspondences between animate and inanimate nature is opened up, wherein even things encounter us in the structures of frail intersubjectivity’ (Habermas, 1979: 45–6).
These two qualities of experience – its temporal reach into memory and history, and its dialectical mobilization of subject–object relations – come under threat in modernity, according to critical theory. Whether through the loss of orality or the loss of aura, modernization shifts the balance away from narrative Zusammenhang and toward mere information, and consequently from Erfahrung to Erlebnis. Technological media – and cinema, in particular – are integral to this process. But unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, who consider the culture industry symptomatic at best (and instrumental at worst) in the creeping reification wrought by capitalist modernity, and who hold out hope only for the most demanding forms of autonomous art, Benjamin locates responses to the loss of experience within modern media culture as well.6 While the author of the ‘Artwork’ essay is keenly aware of Fascism’s power to aestheticize politics through spectacle, he attributes ‘social significance’ to film, which – in a far cry from Adorno and Horkheimer – he deems ‘the artwork most capable of improvement’ (Benjamin, 2008: 109). Alienation and reification provide the context for Benjamin’s media theory as much as for The Dialectic of Enlightenment, to be sure; but Benjamin (and Kracauer, too, as we shall see) allows for the fact that as an apparatus, the cinema makes possible ‘a highly productive use of the human being’s self-alienation’. For Benjamin, who insists at every turn on the historicity of the senses, the rise of photography and film in modernity index a profound shift in the human sensorium and consequently to aesthetics conceived as a matter of sense perception (aesthesis). In this context, cinema becomes a training ground on which to adjust to the progressive loss of ‘aura’ in modernity, to familiarize ourselves with the increasing penetration of the human world by technology or ‘second nature’, and to practice new modes of seeing. Famously considered by Benjamin the purveyor of our ‘optical unconscious’ (Benjamin, 2008: 117), film serves ‘to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding daily’ (108). Viewed from this perspective, the loss of aura – of which cinema is both the engine and the index – is but a facet of modernity’s ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Max Weber). The concomitant loss of experience, then, would not be cause for lament but would be welcomed as productive and progressive.
Miriam Hansen has noted the ‘belated’ character of Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’ essay, which she locates in the fact that Benjamin still invests the cinema with avant-gardist hopes at a period when for other critical theorists the advances of capitalism and fascism alike have squashed any residual cause for optimism (Hansen, 1987: 182). Against the bleaker diagnoses of the 1940s, Benjamin allies himself with both Dada and Brecht in embracing the cinema’s destruction of aura and its political, mass-oriented functions. This position brings him into explicit conflict with Adorno who, in the above-mentioned important exchange of letters about the ‘Artwork’ essay, accuses Benjamin of romanticizing Chaplin, the proletariat, and popular culture more generally (Adorno et al., 1977: 110–41). Demanding ‘more dialectics’ (124), Adorno chides Benjamin for investing Mickey Mouse, the cinema, and the laughing audience with excessive emancipatory potential at the expense of high art and aesthetic autonomy. At stake in this correspondence is again the question whether to embrace or lament the profound cultural shift that becomes particularly palpable in the cinema – and whether to welcome the latter as a medium of shocks and thrills (Erlebnis) or to hold it responsible, pars pro toto, for the loss of experience (Erfahrung) in modernity.
In the correspondence, Benjamin does concede several of Adorno’s points. Indeed, as Hansen has shown, Benjamin harbors considerably greater ambivalence on this issue than the combative, Brecht-inspired stance of the ‘Artwork’ essay would lead us to believe (Hansen, 1987). While he clearly welcomes the politicization of the aesthetic with Brecht, in several other writings Benjamin simultaneously invests hope in a re-auratization of modernity. Hansen traces this hope in the way Benjamin develops notions of innervation, play, mimesis, and physiognomy (Hansen, 1987; Hansen, 2012: 130–204). These concepts are as central to Benjamin’s media theory as the vaunted loss of aura, and they combine to suggest the possibility not only of losing but also of regaining an emphatic form of Erfahrung at the movies. ‘Although film as a medium enhances the historical demolition of the aura’, Hansen writes, ‘its particular form of indexical mediation enables it to lend a physiognomic expression to objects, to make second nature return the look, similar to auratic experience in the first’ (1987: 209–10). In this more nuanced view of Benjamin’s work on cinema, the latter holds out the promise ‘that it might give the technologically altered sensorium access to a contemporary, materially based, and collective form of reflexivity that would not have to surrender the mimetic and temporal dimensions of experience’ (2012: 161). In other words, Benjamin theorizes cinema not only as the locus classicus for the destruction of aura but also as a site for the reconfiguration of experience in modernity. At stake, then, is the question of whether cinema can also be a medium of experience rather than simply the medium of its destruction: can we expect from the cinema, in other words, the re-integration of fragmentary Erlebnisse (including, notably, the shocks and thrills produced by cinema’s own techniques of cinematography and montage) into a coherent, enduring form of Erfahrung –whether aesthetic or political, social or individual? And can the cinema help to dissolve the rigid opposition of subject and object? Can it become, in other words, a site where ‘even things encounter us in the structures of frail intersubjectivity’ (Habermas, 1979)?
To the degree that Benjamin’s essays and letters begin to suggest affirmative answers to these central questions, his writings on media arguably communicate as closely with the writings of Siegfried Kracauer as with those of Adorno, the importance of the correspondence with the latter notwithstanding. For it is Kracauer who will eventually formulate a full-fledged theory of film that culminates explicitly in a strong notion of experience – reformulated in relation to the representation of reality – as the medium’s defining term. In another significant departure from the culture industry paradigm, according to which modern media function precisely to ‘strip away’ experience (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 135), Kracauer will argue that cinema ‘incorporate[s] aspects of physical reality with a view to making us experience them’ (1997: 40). Rather than a mere symptom of modernity and an instrument of late capitalism, cinema appears to Kracauer as the antidote to a prevailing sense of abstraction. Cinematic spectatorship becomes a site for experience regained.
This is the position that emerges, in any event, from Kracauer’s late work (though it was decades in the making, Theory of Film was completed in 1960, only six years before his death). Though there are strong lines of continuity in Kracauer’s thinking,7 these develop over a lifetime of crossing disciplinary and national borders, from his early training as an architect in Germany to his work as an émigré scholar in the United States. He does occasionally try to avoid being pigeonholed as a film critic and theorist, to be sure; but thinking about the medium remains central to his work from his copious film reviews in the Frankfurter Zeitung during the 1920s through his final, posthumous publication, which draws extensively on his own insights about film as a template for thinking about (the writing of) history. Kracauer is the only one among the first generation of critical theorists, in other words, who can claim any significant expertise in matters of cinema. One of the leading film critics of the Weimar Republic, he goes on in American exile to write two of the most influential books in the history of so-called classical film theory: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) and the above-mentioned Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960).
Kracauer’s work on these books is preceded by a decade-long career in film and cultural criticism at the Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as by his eight years in French exile, during which he continues watching, thinking about, and working on film – as well as on the related questions of spectacle and propaganda. Kracauer scholarship has grappled with the continuities and ruptures that characterize this work, tending to separate out the materialist, occasionally even Marxist-influenced writings of the late 1920s and early 1930s (see e.g. Mülder, 1985) from the far more muted politics of the texts written in the United States during the Cold War (see e.g. von Moltke, 2015). And in several respects it does indeed remain difficult to reconcile the dialectical concepts of abstractness and rationalization in landmark essays such as ‘The Mass Ornament’ (1996a) and ‘Photography’ (1996b) with the flat-out critique of ornamentation in the Caligari book or of abstraction and the scientific world view at the end of Theory of Film. Whereas the earlier work was guided by a desire to push through the surface expressions of popular culture by means of a socially committed ideology critique, the two film books would appear to develop comparatively undialectical, normative frameworks to criticize Weimar cinema as proto-fascist, and to extol neorealist cinema as redemptive, respectively.
And yet, underlying these apparent discontinuities and reversals is an abiding sense of the promise of cinema – coupled, to be sure, with an acute sensitivity for illiberal, if not totalitarian, abuses of the medium. One way to grasp these continuities is to note the persistent concern with alienation in the cinema. In his earliest film reviews, Kracauer spells out the power of cinema to estrange our perception of reality; photographic media as well as early cinematic forms such as slapstick or the kinetic chase scene, he insists here, are alienating in both senses of the word – taking spectators away from their lived reality, but thereby also laying bare that reality in its ideological construction. This is the upshot of the 1927 essay on photography, which concludes with the suggestion that film has a unique power to ‘stir up the elements of nature’ (Kracauer, 1996b: 62). With the advent of photographic media, in other words, the world presents itself for the first time in history ‘in its independence from human beings’. A similar argument underpins the famous essay on ‘The Mass Ornament’, which formulates a dialectical theory of spectacle and mass culture in terms of rationalization and abstraction (Kracauer, 1996a): the epitome of the rational, objectifying organization of humans – whether workers on the factory floor, gymnasts in the sports stadium, or the Tiller Girls on the vaudeville stage – the mass ornament yields an abstract, geometrical pattern. As such it both alienates us from outmoded notions of individuality and interiority and intimates a different, enlightened order, in which the rational organization of society would become, in Kracauer’s terms, humane and concrete. Hence Kracauer’s conclusion that ‘the aesthetic pleasure gained from ornamental movements is legitimate’ (79; emphasis in original): in the geometrical abstractions of their forms, spectacle and popular culture allow insight into the process of rationalization, which has enthroned abstract ratio in place of the rational telos of enlightenment: Vernunft. The solution, then, cannot be to turn back the clock to pre-enlightened notions of organic tradition, myth, ritual, or what Benjamin termed aura; like Adorno and Horkheimer, whose argument ‘The Mass Ornament’ anticipates by two decades, Kracauer sees the dialectic of enlightenment to lead inextricably through the mass ornament. Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, however, he considers the abstraction, reification, and alienation of popular culture to be ‘legitimate’ in that they point the way forward. Capitalism’s ‘core defect’, Kracauer consequently claims, is that ‘it rationalizes not too much but rather too little’ (1996a: 81; emphasis in the original).
This position is formulated during the 1920s and prior to the rise of Hitler, to be sure. Kracauer would become more skeptical about the emancipatory potential of the ornament in his writings during the 1930s and 40s. The two key texts here are a long essay entitled ‘Totalitarian Propaganda’ that he writes in Paris during the 1930s for the Institute for Social Research (which, however, declined to publish it in its journal8) and From Caligari to Hitler, the ‘psychological history of the German film’ written in New York. The two texts are linked: the propaganda analysis provides the backdrop for Kracauer’s analyses of ‘wartime communications’ in New York, which in turn feeds into his re-viewing of Weimar cinema as ‘premonition’ of Hitler. Here, the dialectical promise of the ornament yields to an alarmed assessment of cinema’s power to yoke ornamentalism to mass deception and tyranny. Once he studies Nazi propaganda films, including Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Triumph of the Will, Kracauer also re-evaluates the films of the Weimar era, now detecting in them anticipatory versions of the paralysis and terror that he finds in totalitarian propaganda. Here, too, alienation has become total.
And yet, by the time the world emerges from Fascism (albeit into the Cold War) and Kracauer completes Theory of Film, cinema’s powers of alienation have regained some of their capacity to help point (popular) culture out of the entanglement of enlightenment’s dialectic. Even though Theory of Film is written from a completely changed geopolitical vantage point and with knowledge of the Holocaust, the book insists, like the earlier essays, on the productive aspect of cinema conceived as a ‘product of complete alienation’ (Kracauer, 1997: 15). The difference is that Theory of Film now links alienation to a renewed valorization of experience after its virtual erasure by war, genocide, and the atom bomb – if not the culture industry. Cinema, in Kracauer’s theoretical summa, provides a site for working through alienation and regaining – if not ‘redeeming’ –experience in an increasingly abstract, cold war world. Inspired by Italian neorealist films such as Rossellini’s Paisà, Kracauer sees film as a conduit for reconnecting with reality. ‘We literally redeem [the] world from its dormant state’, Kracauer writes, ‘by endeavoring to experience it through the cinema’ (1997: 300).
Given the distance that apparently separates Kracauer and Adorno on the issue of cinema, spectacle, and popular culture (with Benjamin situated somewhere in between), it comes as something of a surprise that, late in his career, Adorno does appear to concede aspects of Kracauer’s argument in an article entitled ‘Transparencies on Film’ (Adorno, 1981/82). Occasioned by an encounter with the early works of what would become known as the New German Cinema, the article happens to appear in Die Zeit just a week before Kracauer’s death in late November of 1966; its debt to the older critic is explicit, as Adorno attributes to Kracauer ‘the most plausible theory of film technique’ (200). In doing so, he alights on the importance of experience at the heart of cinema. Whereas the (co)author of ‘Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ had considered cinema ‘the central sector of the culture industry’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 100), inimical to experience and diametrically opposed to any substantive notion of the aesthetic, he now argues for an aesthetics of film based precisely ‘on a subjective mode of experience which film resembles and which constitutes its artistic character’ (Adorno, 1981/82: 201). Adorno’s own elaboration of this defining characteristic bears a striking resemblance to Benjamin’s definition of the ‘aura’ that has supposedly withered, along with experience, under conditions of modernity: ‘A person who, after a year in the city, spends a few weeks in the mountains abstaining from all work, may unexpectedly experience colorful images of landscapes consolingly coming over him or her in dreams or daydreams. These images do not merge into one another in a continuous flow, but are rather set off against each other in the course of their appearance, much like the magic lantern slides of our childhood. […] Such movement of interior images may be to film what the visible world is to painting or the acoustic world to music. As the objectifying recreation of this type of experience, film may become art’ (Adorno, 1981/82: 201).
Adorno’s concession that, rather than annihilating experience, film may in some respects be its medium opens up possibilities of reading his mandarin aesthetic theory against the grain, as a theory of cinema and the media as well. A number of critics have begun to do just that in recent years, noting the breadth of Adorno’s engagement with audiovisual media and technological reproducibility well beyond the canonical treatment they receive in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia. This has to do partly with the recovery of certain biographical aspects of Adorno’s work: both Thomas Wheatland and David Jenneman have usefully located Adorno in the specificities of American exile, and the latter in particular has rightly insisted that ‘during this period, Adorno immersed himself fully in American culture’, and in America’s ‘myriad forms of entertainment and communication’ (Jenneman, 2007: xv/xvii; cf. Wheatland, 2009). Reconstructing Adorno’s extensive work on radio and his involvement in a social scientific film experiment, Jenneman is able to show that ‘Adorno’s relationship with Hollywood and the filmmaking community was much closer and more complicated than has previously been acknowledged’ (xxxiii).
Amy Villarejo, in turn, has followed through on this observation with a detailed re-reading of one of Adorno’s other texts on mass media, the 1954 essay ‘How to Look at Television’, first published in the Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television (today Film Quarterly; Adorno, 1954). Turning to Adorno with the intention of ‘thinking about what critical theory and queer theory have to say to one another on the terrain of culture’ (Villarejo, 2013: 49), she discovers a surprisingly careful reader of mass cultural texts –one who ‘acknowledge[s] the gendered nature of the programming that he analyzes’, who tends to perform ‘extremely careful textual analyses’, and who reads television with a ‘very accurate sense of audience’ (36). Attributing to some of Adorno’s observations a ‘proto-feminist inclination’ (51), Villarejo is able to tease out a differentiated reading of television and its ‘pseudorealist’ bent. This is particularly evident in Adorno’s treatment of identification not simply as a question of positive or negative representations of identity, but as a matter of programming, seriality, and ultimately the apparatus of television itself, which facilitates a form of ‘psychoanalysis in reverse’. Villarejo finds the essay’s analysis of stereotyping to be similarly nuanced. Where ‘Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ had hammered home the role of stereotyping in spreading the culture industry’s pervasive ooze of sameness and standardization (see e.g. Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 119), Villarejo shows Adorno here to be arguing that stereotypes can also ‘become vehicles for social participation, exchange, and recognition, even if they retreat into the abstractions he criticizes’ (63). A TV show from the 1950s such as Our Miss Brooks can activate those stereotypes and put them into circulation in a chain of queer significations and mechanisms that includes not only stereotypes, but also banter, innuendo, double entendre, and slang (64). This is a deliberately revisionist account of the mandarin critical theorist who ostensibly dismisses television, mass media, and the culture industry from his perch atop modernist high culture. Instead, Villarejo finds in ‘How to Look at Television’ a complex model of the medium that ‘refutes a commonly held sense of Adorno’s writings as presuming a monolithic mass duped by a centralized, rationalized culture industry’ (64).
Perhaps the most sustained and thought-provoking re-reading of Adorno’s media theory, however, comes from Miriam Hansen. In her posthumously published work on the place of cinema and experience in the works of Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer, Hansen joins the emerging argument that Adorno’s ‘engagement with film … was more comprehensive and complex than commonly assumed’ (Hansen, 2012: 208). In order to trace that engagement, Hansen turns not only to the canonical texts on film, the culture industry, and television, but also to Adorno’s life-long concern with other technologically based media such as radio and the gramophone, and to his treatise on film music, co-authored with Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films, which was published in the same year as Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (Adorno and Eisler, 1947). In addition, she usefully notes that a text such as ‘Transparencies on Film’, which she considers Adorno’s ‘most extensive statement on the question of film aesthetics’ (1981/82: 210; see also Hansen 1981/82), must itself be read in the context of the aesthetic theory Adorno was elaborating at the same time (though it would only be published posthumously in 1970; see Adorno, 1997). In rereading these different aspects of Adorno’s work together as part of an avowedly ‘recuperative project’ (Hansen, 2012: 250), Hansen concludes that Adorno ‘could have thought – and occasionally did think – that film had a privileged role to play in discussions on modern art’ (211).
A central insight to emerge from Hansen’s new constellation of Adorno’s texts concerns the relation between technique and technology in technological media. By their very definition, the latter would appear to prioritize the technology at the expense of inner-aesthetic technique, whose autonomy from extrinsic forces (such as technological reproduction, indexicality, or the demands of ‘pseudorealism’) Adorno considered a prerequisite for authentic art. In the normative terms of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, technique – the ‘conscious free control over the aesthetic means’ (Adorno, 1997: 213) – trumps technology. Now, although the yoke of the culture industry would appear to offer dim prospects for the ‘conscious free control’ of anything other than profit, Hansen is able to show that Adorno’s writings do allow for various degrees of autonomy and for the assertion of ‘the aesthetic means’ even under conditions of technological reproducibility. Examples include the treatment of film music as a counterpoint to cinematic narrative (Composing for the Films), the ‘radical naturalism’ of cinema (Minima Moralia), and the ‘associative stream of images’ favored by the Young German Filmmakers and various New Waves in the 1960s (‘Transparencies on Film’). In working out the apparent contradiction between a technological a priori and the assertion of autonomous technique, Adorno thus moves the discussion of film out of the confines of the culture industry and its ideology critique, and – like Benjamin and Kracauer before him – into the realm of aesthetics. He now allows for the possibility that ‘while film, by its immanent logic, tries to rid itself of its artistic character – almost as if the latter violated its aesthetic principle – in this rebellion it is still art and expands the notion of art’ (Adorno, ‘Die Kunst und die Künste’, cited in Hansen, 2012: 221).
Hansen explicitly guards against the idea that this ‘recuperative’ reading of Adorno amounts to a full-fledged theory of film on par with the far more coherent projects of Benjamin and particularly Kracauer. To the degree that Adorno contributes to a critical theory of cinema, he does so on explicitly aesthetic grounds, with a view to ‘expanding the notion of art’. While this is certainly in keeping with the tendency of classical film theory – Benjamin had famously argued that ‘the invention of photography [and consequently of cinema] had … transformed the entire character of art’ (Benjamin, 2008: 28) –the question of film as art also represents a step back from the culture industry chapter, which had opened up perspectives, however bleak, on the cultural and socially embedded study of film and media. As the discipline of film studies leaves behind a prolonged phase of institutionalization, in which it focused primarily on questions of art and the logic of the film ‘text’, critical theory may yet take on renewed relevance – reconceptualized as a contribution not simply to film aesthetics, but to a broader theory of media. As our media landscape undergoes rapid and profound technological shifts and the long century of cinema draws to a close, Walter Benjamin, in particular, has been re-read from this perspective (cf. Kang, 2014; Somaini, 2016); this is also the perspective Dudley Andrew has in mind when, in an authoritative overview of the ‘core and flow of film studies’, he notes that critical theory warrants renewed attention (Andrew, 2009). Pointing out the belated impact of critical theory on (Anglo-American) film studies as a discipline, Andrew suggests that the former may now help to put the latter into perspective. ‘Critical theory put film in its place, so to speak, and interrogated film from that place. Perhaps its impact could only be felt when American film studies began to realize that media was integral to a discipline no longer bounded by dates or by specific technologies’ (909). In their focus on the relation between media and the senses, on the experiential dimension of film, and on the technological a prioris of modernity, Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer were media theorists avant la lettre.
1. On the history of this book and its argument, see Schmidt, 1998, as well as the editorial matter in Horkheimer, 1987, 423–59.
2. Leaving this theoretical shift for readers to trace, Simon During’s influential Cultural Studies Reader gives Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘Culture Industry’ chapter pride of place in introducing the first section of the anthology – which concludes with Stuart Hall’s reflections on ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’. See also Nealon and Irr, 2002: 3.
3. This is to say nothing of other, more recent developments in media theory, where anti-hermeneutic approaches in the wake of Friedrich Kittler have been premised explicitly on a wholesale rejection of the Frankfurt School (cf. Grey Room, 2007; Kittler, 2010; Siegert, 2015).
4. Both have recently been the subject of important and substantial biographies that carefully chart their relations with the Frankfurt School. See Eiland and Jennings, 2014 and Später, 2016.
5. On Benjamin’s idiosyncratic notion of ‘medium’, see Somaini, 2016.
6. ‘If one considers the dangerous tensions which technology and its consequences have engendered in the masses at large – tendencies which at critical stages take on a psychotic character –one also has to recognize that this same technologization has created the possibility of psychic immunization against such mass psychoses’. (2008: 118).
7. Kracauer himself asserts as much in his claim, included in the posthumous History, that he harbored a lifelong interest in minutiae, in ‘the rehabilitation of objectives and modes of being which still lack a name and hence are overlooked or misjudged’ (Kracauer, 1969: 4); for a differently angled assertion about the continuity of Kracauer’s particular commitment to notions of humanism and enlightenment, see von Moltke, 2015.
8. Although the typescript that Kracauer sent to Adorno and Horkheimer in New York is considered lost, the editors of Kracauer’s collected works were able to painstakingly reconstruct a complete version of the text from a surviving manuscript and Kracauer’s systematic bibliographical work. See Kracauer, 2012.
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