The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels … The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposite streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes even more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city (Friedrich Engels in Harrison, Wood and Gainger (eds) 1998: 295).
Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) is best known for his writings on the cinema. And the moot question asked about the ‘arts of the camera’ initially comprising photography and the moving image, invented during the nineteenth century was in which category were they to be included? Were they ‘mechanical device’ or were they ‘art’? The argument in favour of the latter found a formidable supporter in André Malraux, who described the cinema as ‘the furthermost evolution to-date of plastic realism, the beginnings of which were first manifest at the Renaissance and which found its completest experience in baroque painting’ (Bazin in Alperson 1992: 277).
Kracauer’s reputation continues to rest on his contribution to the philosophy and aesthetics of film. In his seminal book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, first published in 1960, he argued in favour of a realist theory of film, whose roots he located in philosophy, exemplified by the documentary approach to filmmaking pioneered by the Lumière Brothers, which constituted one of the two main directions cinema followed, the other being George Méliès’s phantasmagoric productions, firmly rooted in the theatrical tradition.
The reason why Kracauer regarded the realist approach exemplified by the Lumiére brothers by now iconic first reels, such as Sortie des usines Lumière (Lunch hour at the Lumière Factory) or L’Arrivée d’un train (Arrival of the Train), where they captured everyday folk going about their business, unaware of being observed and recorded by the lens of the camera, was their ‘cinematic’ quality. Thus Kracauer contributed a new aesthetic category to film studies, by which he meant the distinct characteristic which separated cinema from other forms of art or mechanical reproduction: ‘In strict analogy to the term “photographic approach”, the filmmaker’s approach is called “cinematic”, it acknowledges the basic aesthetic principle’ (Kracauer in Alperson 1992: 311). This particular aesthetic category is not compatible with the concept of art Kracauer argues, which ‘cannot cover truly “cinematic” films – films that is, which incorporate aspects of physical reality with a view to making us experience them’ (Kracauer in Alperson 1992: 312).
What is less well known is that Siegfried Kracauer was a prolific writer, long before he turned his attention to the cinema with his psychological study: German Cinema: From Caligari to Hitler first published by Princeton in 1947 which brought him for the first time recognition in the English speaking academic world and it may well be that one of the reasons has something to do with his biography which split his life and therefore his literary, journalistic and academic input into two halves, in two languages, published in two continents.
Siegfried Kracauer was born to a Jewish family in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1889 and after studying architecture and obtaining a doctorate in engineering in 1914 he began to practice as an architect, first in Munich and then Berlin. Between 1922–1933 he worked as a film and literature editor for Frankfurter Zeitung where he met – among others – Walter Benjamin and Ernest Bloch.
His interest in the everyday; mass media, popular culture; advertising – everything that came to be associated with capitalist consumerism emerged at this point in his career with the publication of an analysis of the detective novel Der Detektiv Roman (The Detective Novel) written between 1923–1925. But the two works which comprise his seminal contribution to the, everyday, are Ornament der Masse (The Mass Ornament) and Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses) published in 1927 and 1930 respectively.
With the rise of the National Socialist Party to power, which culminated with Adolf Hitler’s election in 1933 to the chancellorship of Germany, its intelligentsia were forced to rethink their future and many decided to flee Nazi Germany. The situation was even more acute in the case of the Jews, because it was not only their ideological position but their very lives they had to protect and thus a veritable exodus began which including – among others – the entire School of Frankfurt which relocated lock, stock and barrel to the US. Neither Siegfried Kracauer nor Walter Benjamin were considered members; rather they were regarded as associates, both decided to head for Paris, the latter also attracted by his research interests focusing on his hero Charles Baudelaire. Their French sejour however was short lived, because in June 1940 the Nazis occupied Paris. In August 1940 ‘two German Jewish cultural critics: Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer gathered in Marseilles in the hope to cross to the US by boat. Their friends Theodor Adorno, Meyer Schapiro, Max Horkheimer, Richard Krautheimer had arranged for them visas and employment in the US’. At this point however, their paths separated with tragic consequences for Walter Benjamin who fearing for his life committed suicide. Less well known, also fortunately less tragic, was the story of Kracauer and his wife Lili, who managed in the end to cross Spain and reach Lisbon from where they embarked on a boat for the US (Levin 1995: 1–32).
Walter Benjamin in fact left us a perceptive if rather misanthropic portrait of his fellow traveller:
A loner. A discontent, not a leader … A rag-picker early in the dawn, who with his stick spikes the snatches of speeches and scraps of conversation in order to throw them into his cart, sullenly and obstinately, a little tipsy, but not without now and then scornfully letting one or other of these discarded cotton rags – ‘humanity’, ‘inwardness’, ‘depth’ – flutter in the morning breeze. A rag-picker, early in the dawn of the day of the revolution (Quoted in Frisby 1988: 109).
The ‘rag-picker’ and the ‘flâneur’: both Kracauer and Benjamin wrote about the big city, emphasizing the solitary existence of the life of the modern city dweller but they were both preceded by Friedrich Engels, who was quick to notice this situation as early as the 1840s and whose pessimistic comments perceptively underlined the painful isolation of the city dweller. Baudelaire’s flâneur is melancholic and solitary wrote Benjamin:
Baudelaire’s genius, which is nourished on melancholy, is an allegorical genius. For the first time, with Baudelaire, Paris becomes the subject of lyric poetry. This poetry is no hymn to the homeland; rather the gaze of our allegorist, as it falls on the city, the gaze of the alienated man. It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of life still conceals behind a mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city dweller (Benjamin 1999: 10).
Baudelaire himself talks about this observer of human life from whom ‘the crowd is his domain’ and for whom ‘his passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd’. This observer depicted in the seminal essay entitled The Painter of Modern Life, happened to be Constantin Guys, whom Baudelaire transforms into the paradigm of the flâneur ‘this solitary mortal endowed with an active imagination, always roaming the great desert of man’ but his seemingly aimless wanderings in fact have a telos; a final cause which is ‘that indefinable something we may be allowed to call “modernity” for want of a better term to express the idea in question’ (Baudelaire 1972: 390–431).
Thus Baudelaire invented ‘modernity’, which he goes on to define as ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half art, the other being the eternal and the immovable’ (Baudelaire 1972: 403). The true impact of Baudelaire’s definition of ‘modernity’ will only become apparent during the twentieth century when it will be placed centre stage both by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer in their own writings.
Kracauer’s early journalistic and essayistic career started in 1921 when he was employed by Frankfurter Zeitung as a journalist and where he worked until 1929 when he moved to Berlin but continued to work for them as their cultural correspondent. This was however a short lived period and by 1931, as a consequence of a law-suit to do with severance pay, he lost his job and this event marked ‘the beginning of his life-long exile’ (Levin 1995: 1–32).
Kracauer’s prolific journalistic career started with reportage but after being appointed as editor, he was able to choose his own topics, mostly informed by his personal interests in philosophy and sociology. Between 1921–1931 he wrote the majority of the articles and essays later published in two volumes: Das Ornament der Masse: Weimar Essays (The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays), already referred to and a second: Strassen in Berlin und anderswo (Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere), already referred to, both edited by Kracauer himself and first published in 1963.
The subject of this essay will be to provide a critical analysis of these writings, concentrating on the ones incorporated in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, which today remains less well known, a fact which has not passed unnoticed and to that effect we find comments in almost everyone of the few existing contribution to the sparse existing Kracauer bibliographical list. This is less than helpful to the readers who wish to acquaint themselves with Kracauer’s Frankfurt and Berlin years, before he embarked on the second half of his writing career when he switched to the English language and proceeded to write about the cinema. Thus David Frisby (1988) comments: ‘If Simmel’s contribution to a theory of modernity has until recently, largely been neglected, then that of Kracauer has along with his other contributions to social theory been almost totally ignored’ (Frisby 1988: 5). More recently, Paul A. Taylor and Jan Ll. Harris comment:
Although less well known than Benjamin in media and cultural studies, Kracauer played a formative role (he had been Adorno’s tutor and regularly corresponded with Benjamin) in the analysis of culture and media carried out by various members of the Frankfurt School to the extent that Benjamin and Adorno’s accounts of the mass media can be seen as direct response to Kracauer’s path (Taylor and Harris 2008: 39).
If we accept Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as the major premise in the subsequent debate, Kracauer’s contribution has been aptly summed up as concentrating: ‘Upon the media of popular culture: the cinema, streets, advertisements and the circus. The unifying feature from the early to the late works is the intention of deciphering social tendencies immediately out of ephemeral cultural phenomena’ (Karl Witte in Frisby 1985: 110).
Growing interest in the everyday and the understanding of how it continues to inform our understanding of the twin contributions of the nineteenth century, of inventing the concept of ‘modernity’ and creating ‘urbanity’ are at the forefront of what came to be defined as ‘the post-modern condition’, and this is confirmed by a recent addition to an already impressive bibliographical list such as Michael Sheringham’s book entitled Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (2006). Focus is specifically on four French writers: Henri Lefevre, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau and Georges Perec and the period between 1960 and 1980 characterized – the author argues – by ‘an explosion of interest in the everyday’ whose origins however are traced back to the Surrealist movement (Sheringham 2006: 14). Moreover, he argues that Lefevre’s book Critique de la vie quotidienne, written in 1945 draws on wider sources about ‘the everyday at large’ such as ‘Marx, Freud, Lukács, Heidegger, Surrealism, Bataille, Leiris, Queneau and Benjamin’ (Sheringham 2006: 4). A cursory glance through Kracauer’s own writings reveals not only his formidable erudition but, more importantly, a commonality of inspiration, although he seems to display, not surprisingly, a noticeable preference for German, rather than French bibliographical sources.
Kracauer amassed 24 of his articles and essays contributed for Frankfurter Zeitung in the volume entitled: The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Hitherto focus has been on the sociological, and to a lesser extent philosophical aspects of his writings, exemplified in the scholarly contributions of Thomas Y. Levin, David Frisby and more recently Paul A. Taylor and Jan Ll. Harris, and for that reason I would attempt a different angle of approach that will link him to modern art, more specifically to the European artistic avant-garde which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as to popular culture, whilst exploring the recent new interest about its contribution to the development of ‘high’ art.
As already mentioned, both Kracauer and Benjamin were affiliated but never belonged to the elite Frankfurt School, although they both had close links with its members, and in the case of the former, especially with Theodor Adorno to whom he dedicated the volume under discussion.
An interesting question to be asked however is regarding the nature of Kracauer’s relationship with some of the finest art historians and theoreticians of art such as Meyer Schapiro and Richard Krautheimer, who are listed as being among the friends who had arranged visas and work for him and Benjamin, and were awaiting their arrival in New York in 1940.
Richard Krautheimer (1897–1994) the distinguished Byzantine scholar was born and educated in Germany, but like Kracauer being Jewish had to flee Germany during the Nazi period and in 1935 he left for the US where he lived until 1971 when he settled in Rome, which became his adopted home until his death in 1994. In 1940, he was working as a lecturer at New York University where he taught until 1971 and during this time his seminal work in two volumes on Lorenzo Ghiberti, published in 1956 and 1971 respectively by Princeton University Press was published.
Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996) arrived in the US through a different route and at a different time. He was born in Lithuania and in 1907 his family emigrated to the US where he studied art history and completed a PhD at Columbia University where he began his academic teaching career. By 1952 he became a full professor and well-known writer on modern art. His most enduring contribution however was art theory; specifically he was the first to introduce Marxism as a methodology in art history.
Thomas Crow in a study of the relationship between European avant-garde and consumer culture analyses what he calls ‘this extraordinary theoretical moment of the later 1930s’ (Crow 1998: 16) and he singled out as its main contributors the formidable trio of intellectuals: Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg and Walter Benjamin. But there is a fourth contributor to the debate regarding avant-garde movements and mass culture, he regards the most important among them: Theodor Adorno, whom he regards as ‘the only one able to preserve its original range of reference and intent’ and for that reason Benjamin, Greenberg and Schapiro were used to ‘lend historical and sociological substance to Adorno’s stance as it pertains to the visual arts’ (Crow 1998: 28).
The avant-garde movement was not only informed but directly influenced by consumer society Schapiro himself traced back to the Impressionists and this constitutes the main tenet of the argument put forward by Crow’s ‘trio of intellectuals’, Schapiro, Benjamin and Greenberg. It was however Clement Greenberg’s much quoted essay ‘Avant-garde’ and Kitsch, first published in 1939 in the Partisan Review in which he famously introduced the concept of kitsch (borrowing the word from German) as a new aesthetic category which has since been predicated of all that is bad taste, trash and vulgar. Greenberg’s, somewhat dialectical approach postulates the necessity of a rearguard obviously an analogy with the Hegelian anti-thesis:
Where there is an avant-garde generally we also find a rearguard. True enough – simultaneously with the entrance of the avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial West: that thing to which the Germans give the wonderful name of kitsch: popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tim Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc. For some reason this gigantic apparition has always been taken for granted. It is time we looked into its whys and wherefores. Kitsch is the product of the industrial revolution which urbanised the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy (Clement Greenberg in Francina 1985: 21–33).
Greenberg’s criticism of this new form of ‘low’ culture he labelled with the pejorative term of kitsch has been interpreted to reflect his preoccupation with a ‘material and social crisis which threatened the traditional form of nineteenth century culture with extinction’, whose cause was ‘the economic pressure of an industry devoted to the simulation of art in the form of reproducible cultural commodities, that is to say, the industry of mass culture’ (Crow 1998: 9).
The third contributor of the ‘intellectual trio’ Walter Benjamin and he introduced this link in his study of Charles Baudelaire in which he discusses the privileged bourgeoisie, to which Baudelaire himself belonged, and their mode of finding enjoyment whereby the enjoyment on offer could only be enhanced by empathizing with commodities: ‘The enjoyment promised to be less limited if this class found enjoyment of this society possible. If it wanted to achieve virtuosity in this kind of enjoyment it could not spurn empathizing with commodities’ (Benjamin in Crow 1998: 16). The famous aesthetic category of ‘l’art pour l’art’ championed by Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) and Baudelaire himself who proclaimed the purity of an art that had to detach itself from any additional narratives, such as morality, pedagogic or propagandistic or any other role encumbered upon it in its history, was applied to literature but, Crow argues, this applies even better to the visual arts:
the avant-garde left behind the older concerns of official public art not out of any special rebelliousness on the part of its members, but because their political representatives had jettisoned as dangerous and obstructive the institutions and ideals for which official art was metaphorically to stand (Crow 1998: 16).
And so we return to Baudelaire’s celebrated definition of modernité which for the first time brought together, albeit in a poetic manner, the two sides of the culture: ‘high culture’ and the ‘avant-garde’: the former embodying the stable, ideal, universal values of art, the latter, all that is contingent:
Nineteenth-century high culture was nothing if it did not embody the permanent, Indisputable and idea; the avant-garde appropriated the form of high art in the name of the contingent, unstable, and material …Validated fine art, the art of the museums, is that special preserve where the commodity character of modern cultural production is sealed off from apprehension … Marginal, leisure-time subcultures perform more or less the same denial of the commodity, using the objects at their disposal. Lacking legitimating institutions, their transformation of the commodity must be activist and improvisatory: thus, their continual inventiveness in displacing provided cultural goods into new constellations of meaning. The most powerful moments of modernist negation have occurred when the two aesthetic orders, the high-cultural and sub-cultural, have been forced into scandalous identity, each being continuously dislocated by the other (Crow 1998: 26–7).
It is possible then to construe the entire avant-garde movement as a confirmation of how it continuously intended to incorporate low-brow or mass culture in its morphological vocabulary and Crow provides excellent examples starting with Georges Seurat’s famous Bathers at Asnières, and the Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte painted in 1886 and 1888 respectively, in which the painter transferred the kind of leisure associated with the bourgeoisie, onto ‘an exhausted but uncontrived working-class time off’ (Crow 1996: 26–7).
The final apologia for writing an essay dedicated to modernism and mass culture in the visual arts, is to do with the fact that Crow considered that ‘the founding moments for subsequent discourses on both modernist art and mass culture were one and the same’ and that they always started with the same names ‘Adorno, Benjamin, Greenberg (less often Schapiro…)’ but seldom were these debates developed together as they had been at the beginning and it is important that they should be thus seen: ‘Modernism exists in the tension between these two opposed movements. And the avant-garde, the bearer of modernism, has been successful when it found itself a social location where this tension is visible and can be acted upon’ (Crow 1998: 37).
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s introduction of the concept of the ‘culture industry’ in the seminal book Dialectic of Enlightenment was first published in 1947 when all the members of the Frankfurt School were living in exile in the US. In the chapter entitled ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2008: 120–67) they introduced the concept of culture industry, which they argued, had replaced art with mass culture, which became industrialized e.g., ‘movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2008: 121) and so the culture industry, whose primary function is to reach the many, rather than remain the privilege of the few replaces ‘auratic’ art. Less commented on is Adorno and Horkheimer’s direct parallel with the avant-garde: ‘Like its counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry, determines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary by the use of anathema’ as they both submit to ‘the constant pressure to produce new effects’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2008: 128).
Theodor Adorno, Crow argues, was the only contributor to the theory of modernism and mass culture, that coalesced in the 1930s ‘able to preserve its original range of reference and intent’ and for that reason, ‘the present discussion of the avant-garde as a resistant subculture has been to lend historical and sociological substance to Adorno’s stance as it pertains to the visual arts’ (Crow 1998: 28).
Ultimately, Modernism prospered by riding the culture industry, and incorporating precisely ‘low brow’ popular culture it tried to deride or disqualify and the examples selected which range from Impressionism through to the twentieth century when the avant-garde movement properly emerged in 1905 with Fauvism, through to Surrealism are chosen to support this contention. Among them Crow singles out Surrealism as:
Perhaps the most notorious instance of this process. Breton and his companions had discovered in the sedimentary layers of an earlier, capitalist Paris something like the material unconscious of the city, the residue of forgotten repressions. But in retrieving marginal forms of consumption, in making the latest text, manifest, they provided modern advertising with one of its most powerful visual tools: that now familiar terrain in which commodities behave autonomously and create an alluring dreamscape of their own’ (Crow 1998: 36).
The true extent of Surrealism’s involvement with the commercial world became the subject of an exhibition entitled: Surreal Things (Surrealism and Design) organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (29 March–22 July 2007). Although the idea that artists belonging to an artistic movement could engage in commercial activities appeared treacherous and none was more vociferous than André Breton himself, but his shenanigans were disregarded; suffice to mention Man Ray’s lucrative activities as fashion photographer and his involvement with the couturier Paul Poiret: ‘Man Ray identified the incipient Surrealism of the world of fashion by exploring the imagery of the objectified mannequin in both commercial and “art” photographs’ (Wood 2007: 5).
Central to the notion of ‘surreal things’ was that objects pertaining to the commercial world were being suffused with that special quality which rendered them ‘surreal’ and the ultimate expression of this process of conflating the real with the surreal world can be found in Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (Peasant Paris). In 1924, the same year when Breton launched his Surrealist Manifesto, Aragon wrote The Passage de l’opera, published in four instalments by Philippe Soupault in his Revue Européene (Aragon 1971: Introduction).
His famous stroll becomes the quintessential expression of this process of ‘making the fantastic real’ was immortalized in The passage de l’opera written in 1924 – the year when André Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto – also at the point when the arcade was about to disappear, engulfed by Baron Haussmann’s project of modernization whereby Boulevard Haussmann was spreading to take over ‘the thicket whose twin arcades ran through the Passage de l’opera’ (Aragon 1971: 29).
Aragon enjoyed strolling along the Passage de l’opera with the notorious reputation of a lodging-house where ‘couples book by the hour’ whose transience Aragon regarded as pleasant because ‘an atmosphere of freedom reigns in them’ but one evening his attention is attracted by a banal shop selling canes and walking sticks near the entrance of the lodging-house. After several drinks at the adjacent Café du Petit Grillon, Aragon has a ‘surrealist’ experience whereby the shop window had morphed into something else:
My attention was suddenly attracted by a sort of humming noise which seemed to be coming from the direction of the cane shop, and I was astonished to see that its window was bathed in a greenish almost submarine light, the source of which remained invisible. It was the same kind of phosophorescence that I watched as a child, from the jetty of Port Bail on the Cotentur peninsula … I recognized the sound: it was the same voice of the sea-shells that has never ceased to amaze poets and film-stars. The canes were floated gently like seaweed. I had still not recovered from my enchantment when I noticed that a human form was swimming among the various levels of the window display (Aragon 1971: 36).
Firstly under the impression that the creature was a siren, Aragon then identified her ‘emaciated features and distraught appearance’ as those of Lisel, a German prostitute he first met by the banks of the river Saar. Aragon cried, ‘The Ideal’, whereby: ‘The siren turned a scared face towards me and stretched out her arms in my direction. Immediately the window display was seized by a general convulsion … By the next morning everything was back to normal’ (Aragon 1971: 36–7).
Walter Benjamin was influenced by Aragon and he must have been familiar with The Passage de l’Opera which was published in four instalments in Philippe Soupalult’s Revue Européene between June and September of that year (Aragon 1971: Introduction) and in 1927 he wrote an essay entitled Arcades, which was in fact one of the earliest completed contributions for Das Passagen Werk – volume five of Benjamin’s Gessamalte Schriften translated into English as ‘The Arcades Project’ – first published in 1982. It is important to note that whilst Aragon was still able to wander through the Passage de l’Opera in 1924, by 1927 Benjamin wrote: ‘While here a new thoroughfare was being prepared for the most fashionable Paris, one of the oldest arcades in the city has disappeared – the Passage de l’Opera swallowed up by the opening of the Boulevard Haussmann’ (Benjamin 1999: 871). And he comments: ‘In the crowded arcades of the boulevards, as in the semi-deserted arcades of the old Rue Saint Denis umbrellas and canes are displayed in serried Ranks: a phalanx of colourful crooks’ (Benjamin 1999: 872).
A distinction however could be made regarding Surrealism and the way its artists chose to incorporate the everyday in their art and in this respect Aragon’s example becomes paradigmatic of the ability to suffuse it with the fantastic, the marvellous, the oneiric … in other words what lifts an experience from real to the realms of the surreal. Not so in the case of Benjamin and Kracauer however, who although ultimately indebted not only to Surrealism but the whole avant-garde art movement, they remained firmly entrenched in reality, albeit the beauty of their writing adds a poetic dimension even to the most prosaic observation, such as Benjamin’s description of the umbrellas and canes on display in the arcades of Faubourg Saint Denis, which he compared with a ‘phalanx of colourful crooks’.
In The Mass Ornament (Weimar Essays) dedicated to Theodor Adorno, Kracauer amassed 24 essays in turn divided into seven uneven thematic chapters with titles such as: ‘Lead-In: Natural Geometry; External and Internal Objects …’. One of the longest chapters, entitled ‘Perspectives’, incorporates essays on Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka. The last and the shortest chapter, entitled ‘Fadeway: Toward the Vanishing Point’, also constitutes as the epilogue. The two essays Kracauer selected for this chapter are entitled ‘Boredom’ and ‘Farewell to the Linden Arcade’, Kracauer’s response to Aragon and Benjamin and it might be of interest to provide a paragone between the Berlin arcade and its Parisian counterparts.
A photograph of the Linden Arcade reproduced in the book is dated 1930 – the year when Kracauer arrived in Berlin sent by his newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung as their correspondent where he remained until 1933 when political events forced him to flee Nazi Germany. The result of these two prolific years was the volume entitled: Strassen in Berlin und anderswo (Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere), already mentioned, published in 1964. The dramatic opening line informs the reader that Lindenpassage ‘has ceased to exist’, but in 1930 that was not entirely accurate.
The arcade came into existence in 1873 when it had the honour of becoming ‘the first independent, so-called, purely commercial building’ as a playground for the fashionable and the aristocracy. By 1888 it started to change and its elegant cafés and concert halls were replaced with shops of the kind that attracted the seedy underbelly of a society which the bourgeois classes avoided whereby dioramas, prostitution, cheap souvenir shops replaced the elegant atmosphere which dominated it at the point of inception. In 1928 however, the now shabby ‘Linden Arcade’ underwent a second volte face, this time a process of modernization, which included an important architectural intervention: the three-story interior was lowered by a vaulted glass roof to on storey. Its real demise came in 1944, when it was destroyed by Allied bombing (Kracauer 1995: 388, note nr. 1).
Kracauer becomes the Baudelarian melancholic flâneur comparing his experience of the arcade in the wake of its restoration in 1928 with the one he had experienced as a student before World War I. His shared experience is a combination of his personal ruminations and the now-time account, whereby he introduces us to the dark, mysterious and frightening world that he worded passageway – in German Durchgang – which might have been evoked in him by l’époque de Fantômas; Kracauer would certainly have been familiar with the notorious anti-hero beloved by the Surrealists, given that between 1922–1925 he wrote his own study, The Detective Novel. Characterized by ‘the synthetic horror and a brazen black humour, partly attributable to the influence of silent films and detective novels’ (Gablik 1970: 44) it influenced the Surrealists to the extent that they adopted him as a kind of anti-hero, René Magritte in particular. Fantômas was the evil genius of crime, the Surrealists adopted as their hero. They admired him because he could ‘outwit the forces of the law’ and Magritte wrote his own rendition of Juve (the inspector of the Sûreté) in pursuit of Fantômas: ‘A THEATRICAL EVENT: Juve has been on the trail of fantômas for quite some time. He crawls along the broken cobblestones of a mysterious passage’ (Gablik 1970: 44). The passageway can also be regarded as a passage through bourgeois life, which resides around but not in it: ‘Everything excluded from their bourgeois life because it was not presentable or it run counter to the official world settled in the arcades’ (Kracauer 1995: 338).
Thus the arcade becomes the locus of what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat – the displaced and dispossessed class Clement Greenberg regarded as the reason for the emergence of kitsch. What is unexpected, is that nine years prior to the publication of Greenberg’s celebrated essay ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’ already referred to, in which he proposed kitsch as a new aesthetic category, Kracauer himself uses the concept, which for him was tantamount with the flotsam and jetsam of the bourgeois world: all that was sordid, hidden from sight and ultimately degraded: ‘They were able to congregate in the half-light of the passageway and to organize an effective protest against the façade culture outside. They exposed idealism for what it was and revealed its products to be kitsch’ (Kracauer 1995: 341).
The reason why this twilight world was hidden from bourgeois sight, as David Frisby observed, was to do with its subversivity:
Everything that was cut off from it because it was not worthy of representation or even ran counter to the official world view nestled in the arcade … an anatomical museum exhibiting ‘the excrescences and monstrosities’ of the body, pornography ‘at home in the twilight’ as well as photographers, hairdressers, stamp collectors, cafés and the like.
In short: ‘What linked the objects in the Linden Arcade and caused all to participate in the same function was their withdrawal from the bourgeois front’. In short ‘they laid bare idealism and exposed its products as kitsch (Frisby 1985: 143).
But Kracauer does not finish his essay by succumbing to Baudelarian melancholy; on the contrary, in accordance with Hegelian dialectics, he may well have adopted here in his unique and subtle manner that every thesis (in this example the bourgeois society) contains within its own anti-thesis, the seeds of its destruction (in this example modernity) and so the arcade created its own seeds of destruction: ‘By disavowing a form of existence in which it still belonged, the Linden Arcade gained the power to bear witness to transience. It was the product of an era that, in creating it, simultaneously created a harbinger of its own end’ (Kracauer 1995: 342).
The passageway becomes a sort of morgue for all that it contains ‘exposing its extinguished grimace. In this arcade, we ourselves encountered ourselves as deceased’ (Kracauer 1995: 342). A fitting moratorium for a disappearing world crushed by the necessity of the laws of materialist dialectics, appropriated by Marx from Hegel, replaced by brutal consumerism:
Now under a new glass roof and adorned in marble, the former arcade looks like the vestibule of a department store. The shops are still there, but postcards are mass produced commodities … All the objects have been struck dumb. They huddle timidly behind the empty architecture, which for the time being acts completely neutral but may later spawn who knows what – perhaps fascism, perhaps nothing at all (Kracauer 1995: 342).
A sober warning in 1930, which unfortunately came true, because between Jean-Paul Sartre’s nothingness (le néant) and fascism, Germany chose the latter and in the sanitized world of Nazism, the twilight world of the Baudelarian melancholic flâneur, was crushed forever.
In the section entitled External and Internal Objects, we find the essay which gave the title to the book: ‘The Mass Ornament’ (pp. 75–88). Kracauer must have considered this essay sufficiently important to choose its title for the entire volume of the essay from the Frankfurt period. Regarded as a ‘cogent summary of his guiding analytical principles’ and ‘perhaps the most significant of his early writings’ (Taylor and Harris 2008: 48) it deals with body culture and the choice of examples to illustrate his argument are the ‘Tiller Girls’. Named after the Manchester choreographer John Tiller, these militarily trained dancing girls performed in Germany between 1924–1931 at Berlin’s prestigious Schauspielhaus and they are regarded as forerunners of the modern musicals (Kracauer 1995: 356 note 1). Stripped of their personality, individuality and any other private details, the Tiller Girls performed together and their aesthetic impact was derived precisely from the mass of bodies seen together, trained to create attractive abstract patterns, the ornament which Kracauer argued was ‘an end in itself’. Ballet too yielded ornaments, ‘which arose in kaleidoscopic fashion. But even after discarding their ritual meaning, these remained the plastic expression of erotic life, an erotic life that both gave rise to them and determined their traits’ (Kracauer 1995: 76–7).
Not so with the Tiller Girls which have been transformed into ‘a linear system that no longer has any erotic meaning but at best points to the locus of erotic’. Kracauer compares the abstract pattern of their regimented movements to aerial photographs of landscapes and cities. The Tiller Girls ‘can no longer be reassembled into human beings after the fact. Their mass gymnastics are never performed by the fully preserved bodies, whose contortions defy rational understanding’ (Kracauer 1995: 77–8). And the ‘mass ornament’, which is the final cause (the telos) of their performance, is further compared to capitalist production, similarly regarded as ‘an end in itself’.
Karl Marx introduced in volume I of Das Kapital first published in 1865 the famous notion of the ‘fetishism of commodities’ arguing that the mystical character of the commodity does not arise from its use value which has nothing mysterious about it in so far as the properties of such objects are the product of human labour in order to satisfy human needs but from its exchange value: ‘It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility’ (Karl Marx in Barnard 2007: 349).
The banal commodity is then fetishized by the mysterious forces which establish its exchange value, regarded by Marx as a ‘social hieroglyphic’ which transforms the objects of utility into ‘social products’ rather like ‘their language’ (Marx in Barnard 2007: 349). In presenting the argument that commodities created by the capitalist production system, are not meant for private gain but for the sake of unlimited profit, Kracauer makes good use of Marx’s distinction between ‘use’ and ‘exchange value’ which transforms an ordinary object into a fetishized commodity, only he puts it more poetically:
Everyone does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality. Like the pattern in the stadium, the organization stands above the masses, a monstrous figure whose creator withdraws it from the eyes of its bearers, and barely even observes it himself (Kracauer 1995: 78).
Thus the Tiller Girls become a mass ornament in the same way in which the workers become the organization – philosophically speaking Kracauer argues here from the particular to the universal – like the mass ornament produced by the dehumanized bodies of the dancers, so too the organization becomes ‘a monstrous figure’: the creation of Capitalism.
The rather difficult concept of ratio is also introduced, Kracauer specifically describes as ‘a murky reason’ because ‘it does not encompass man’ so that the problem lies with the fact that ‘it rationalizes not too much but too little’ (Kracauer 1995: 81). Capitalist thinking then deals with ‘abstractedness’, concepts devoid of human content and mass ornament itself, like the process of production with which it is compared here belongs to this ideology, so to speak, of abstractness. Elsewhere we find ratio explained as:
An inversion of the false concreteness that characterizes traditional mythology. It represents a new form of myth for highly technologized culture – the false abstractedness of the commodity fetish in the form of mediated signs to be circulated (Taylor and Harris 2008: 52).
The only redemption as Kracauer suggests comes when a new type of man ‘constituted by reason’ will replace the status quo, whereby true reason (Vernuft) is regarded as oppositional to ratio: ‘In opposition to Ratio, Kracauer privileges Vernuft (true reason) as an oppositional factor to the forces of nature in a similar manner to the way Benjamin seeks the socialist power of the masses to be a corrective to the aura of tradition’ (Taylor and Harris 2008: 52–3). Only when such a man ‘constituted by reason’ will again appear: ‘Then society will change; then too, the mass ornament will fade away and human life itself will adopt the traits of that ornament into which it develops through its confrontation with truth, in fairy tales’ (Kracauer 1995: 86).
Another seminal essay to be considered is ‘Photography’, which it is suggested, should be read as a counterpart to The Mass Ornament; published only a few months prior to it (Levin: Introduction in Kracauer 1995: 21). In this essay, apart from the interesting argument Kracauer puts forward regarding the ontological status of the photographic image, he reveals also an impressive erudition in the field of the fine arts and literature, by making use of a number of references to Goethe, Rubens, portrait painting, the Renaissance, Impressionism and the paintings of Claude Monet whom he calls ‘the godfather of photographic landscape impressions’ (Kracauer 1995: 53).
This is important because from the moment of its invention during the nineteenth century, when photography established itself as a new and cheaper means of having the family portrait taken than employing the services of an Pierre-Auguste Renoir or Claude Monet, it was photography that emulated painting to the extent that the photographic ateliers which were fast emerging during the 1850s both in Paris and in London, not only reproduced the painter’s atelier but also their technique by using the versatility of the camera lens to produce the soft effect of the paint brush. Perhaps it is no coincidence either that Nadar’s photographic atelier became the locus where Impressionism was launched in 1874 with an exhibition which included Monet’s ‘Sunrise’ (better known as Impression) in which he captured the fleeting moment of a sunrise. In these photographic ateliers the sitters were embellished with the same kinds of ‘props’ used by painters and made to pose, the only difference being that they posed to the camera lens rather than the painter’s eye.
One such is the example with which Kracauer starts this fascinating essay: a sixty year old photograph dated 1864 representing a girl of twenty four ‘carefully produced in the studio of a court photographer’ (Kracauer 1995: 48). The image has no history but the young lady captured by the anonymous photographer has a history, a history known to her grandchildren:
The grandchildren know that in her later years she lived in a narrow little room with a view onto the old part of town and that, to amuse the children she would make toy soldiers on a glass plate; they also know a nasty story about her life, and two confirmed utterances which change a bit from generation to generation (Kracauer 1995: 48).
This knowledge however is not contained in the photograph but it is part of the family ‘oral tradition’ without which the image alone would be devoid of content. The photograph does however convey other information about the historical period it belongs to and Kracauer compares the ‘grandmother’ in the photograph to mannequins in a museum used to present to the public historic dress, so that:
The grandmother in the photograph too is an archaeological mannequin which serves to illustrate the costumes of the period. So that’s how women dressed back then: chignons, cinched waists, crinolines, and zouave jackets. The grandmother dissolves its fashionably old-fashioned details before the very eyes of the grandchildren. They are amused by the traditional costume, which, following the disappearance of its bearer, remains alone on the battlefield – an external decoration that has become autonomous (Kracauer 1995: 48–9).
Can we not then compare the outer shell of the grandmother with the mass ornament; the abstract patterns created by the bodies of the Tiller Girls, as a signifier of nineteenth century fashion, devoid of the person that inhabits it. An additional dimension to the photograph is its realism which exceeds even the most realistically rendered painting, as André Bazin argued – to do with arresting in time the likeness of a person, no longer alive:
Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer. The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the imager may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model. Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia shadows, phantom like and almost indecipherable, are no longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art but by the power of an impassive mechanical process; for photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption (Bazin in Alperson 1992: 279).
Two more concepts are added by Kracauer in the essay which in a way throw light on the way photography operates as a surface medium, which are historicism and memory. Historicism which emerged about the same time as photography was the revolutionary new methodology (tool) proposed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1760–1831) when he turned the concept of history into a category of thought and proposed it as a new approach to the study of discreet categories of thought, among which he chose to focus on art. Instead of upholding the Kantian view that art is universal he historicized it and to that extent, it was no longer understood sub specie aeternitatis but from an historical perspective. Charles Baudelaire himself made use of this important development in nineteenth century philosophy when he proposed his definition of beauty from which he derived that of modernity (already referred to), as consisting of two separate aspects, the immutable, universal (Kant) and the transitory, fleeting, changeable, historical (Hegel).
Kracauer links historicism specifically to Hegel’s contemporary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) arguing that the principle of his philology ‘is that of historicist thinking, which emerged at about the same time as modern photographic technology’ (Kracauer 1995: 49). Equally important is the concept of memory and the key point made upon introducing it in the discussion is that memory is not coextensive either with space or with time ‘compared to photography, memory is full of gaps’ (Kracauer 1995: 50).
A paragone between painting and photography as methods of recording reality is further introduced, whereby Kracauer comments that from the Renaissance onwards, Western European painting was based on the concept of imitation, the classical Greek mimesis which became also the aesthetic criterion for excellence. However, even this concept of mimesis did not presuppose in art a likeness in the sense of a perfect reproduction of reality which painting, even if it could achieve, never pursued, because, as Kracauer rightly pointed out:
The artwork also negates the likeness achieved by photography. This likeness refers to the look of the object, which does not immediately divulge how it reveals itself to cognition: the artwork, however, conveys nothing but the transparency of the object (Kracauer 1995: 52).
Kracauer does point out that to start with ‘the practice of photography was often in the hands of former painters’, but soon enough photography found its voice, which was different from the way painting dealt with memory by conveying only the transparency of the object, in other words its history, whilst the photograph ‘does not preserve the transparent aspects of an object but instead captures it as a spatial continuum from any one of a number of points’ (Kracauer 1995: 53).
An exciting comparison is proposed whereby photography is seen to convey the passage of time in a way analogous to fashion – thus in the photograph of the grandmother the effect of her 1864 crinoline becomes comical ‘the comic quality of the crinoline results from the powerlessness of its claim’ (Kracauer 1995: 55). Meanwhile contemporary photography which records current events because they provide some sort of access to the life of the original and this enabled Kracauer to introduce into the debate illustrated newspapers whose ever increasing popularity rested precisely on this additional dimension of adding visual images as confirmation of the written word. Their aim, Kracauer argued was ‘to complete reproduction of the world accessible to the photographic apparatus’ (Kracauer 1995: 58).
In an essay entitled ‘In Plato’s Cave’ Susan Sontag analysed the multiple functions of photography distinguishing at least four specific modes of use, starting with one of the oldest, photographs used as legal evidence, already in use in 1871 when the Paris police used them to arrest the Communards. Photographs are also used, she argues, in books, as amusement or to chronicle family life (Sontag in Alperson 1992). But its most important aspect is the knowledge content (its epistemological function) hence the choice of title, whereby the photograph does not provide true knowledge (episteme) but only a semblance of it:
Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks … strictly speaking one never understands anything from a photograph (Sontag in Alperson 1992: 288).
And in a way Sontag’s conclusion concurs with Kracauer, who regards that the kind of knowledge gleaned from photographs specifically those used in newspaper illustrations as surface knowledge, namely mere appearances and not reality: the mass ornament of photography as pointed out above.
In conclusion, in this essay I intended to provide a critical analysis of Siegfried Kracauer’s less well known early writings from the Weimar period (1921–1933) during which, like his colleague Walter Benjamin, he was intellectually affiliated rather than a full member of the elite Frankfurt School. Hitherto the approach to both Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer’s theories tended to lean towards a sociological and to a lesser extent philosophical choice of methodology and for that reason, I decided to propose an alternative approach which links Kracauer with the European artistic avant-garde movement.
The avant-garde movement emerged in Paris in 1905 – the date of a seminal exhibition held at the Salon d’automne – of a group of artists subsequently nicknamed by the critic Louis Vauxcelles ‘the wild beasts’ (les fauves) because of their unprecedented (wild) use of colour. What was also in evidence within the avant-garde, better exemplified in subsequent movements such as Cubism and Surrealism, was the introduction in their work – as yet another mode of subverting the status quo of ‘high brow’ art – of popular ‘low brow’ culture.
I would like to propose that there was a point of conflation between the writings of both Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer which leaned towards popular culture and the everyday. Unlike the elite members of the Frankfurt School who disapproved, both Benjamin and Kracauer expressed their approval regarding the introduction of popular art and mass media into ‘high’ art and in the case of the latter, this is reflected in his collection of essays The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays from which three case studies were chosen for analysis: ‘Farewell to the Linden Arcade’; ‘The Mass Ornament’ and ‘Photography’. A close analysis of these essays uncover new (but not entirely unexpected) links with the literary, philosophical and artistic context of that period, Kracauer made good use of, to argue his case.
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