Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN

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      2

      Curious Americanism

      As we saw in the preceding chapter, Kracauer’s early reflections on film and photography suggest a range of specific meanings that the term modernity might have for film theory and film history. These reflections in turn contribute to the archive of modernist aesthetics insofar as they expand the canon of aesthetic modernism to include the technological media, not just with experimental film and photography but also with the vernacular practices of commercial cinema. In this chapter, I reverse emphasis to focus on the significance Kracauer ascribed to cinema and other new entertainment forms as indices of the direction(s) of twentieth-century modernity, which he increasingly saw as defined by mass production, mass consumption, and the emerging contours of mass society.¹ In particular, I trace the ambivalences and revaluations surrounding his utopian proposition that, like their American prototypes, these entertainment forms might provide something like “a self-representation of the masses subject to the process of mechanization,” that is, the conditions of possibility for a democratic culture. ²

      Kracauer’s exploration of modern mass culture was part and parcel of the discourse of Americanism that catalyzed debates on modernity and modernization in Weimar Germany and elsewhere. As has been well documented by historians of Weimar culture, the metaphor of “Amerika” encompassed a wide range of ideas, images, and clichés: Fordist-Taylorist principles of production—standardization, rationalization, calculability, efficiency, and speed, the assembly line—and attendant promises of mass consumption; mass democracy and civil society, that is, freedom from traditional authority and hierarchies, egalitarian forms of interaction, and social as well as sexual and gender mobility (the “new woman” and the alleged threat of a “new matriarchy”); and not least the cultural symbols of the new era—skyscrapers, jazz (“Negermusik”), boxing, revues, radio, cinema. Whatever its particular articulation (to say nothing of its reference to the actual United States), the discourse of Americanism crystallized positions on modernity, from cultural-conservative jeremiads through euphoric hymns to technological progress. Within pro-American discourse, the political fault lines were usually drawn between those who found in the Fordist gospel a solution to the ills of capitalism and a harmonious path to democracy (“white socialism”) and those who believed that modern technology, and technologically based modes of production and consumption, furnished the conditions, but only the conditions, for a truly proletarian revolution (“left Fordism”).³

      As has often been pointed out, the discourse of Americanism should not be conflated with the actual historical process of “Americanization,” that is, the transfer of American-style business practices to Germany (and other parts of Europe).⁴ Still, with the introduction of Fordist-Taylorist principles of production in both industry and the service sector, along with the accompanying spread of cultural forms of mass consumption, the very categories developed to comprehend the logics of capitalist modernity assumed a more concrete, and more complex and contradictory, face. To be sure, Germany had seen experiments in and debates on rationalization earlier, in fact before World War I.⁵ And while there was a distinct push for Fordist-Taylorist methods of production in the mid-twenties, they were not implemented everywhere and at the same pace, and thorough rationalization remained largely an aspiration.⁶ But to the extent that it was becoming a reality, the American system of mass production and consumption signaled a paradigmatically distinct set of values, visions, sensibilities—less a dichotomously understood assault of modern civilization on traditional culture than a specific material, perceptual, and social regime of modernization that competed with European versions of modernity.

      I am less interested here in situating Kracauer within canonical Weimar debates on modernity than in tracing his engagement with American-style mass and media culture as it evolved between 1924 and 1933—not only as a response to the mounting political crisis and bourgeois culture’s failure to address it but also as an elaboration of issues that point beyond both the historical moment and the national frame of reference. During the brief period between the great inflation and the end of the Weimar Republic, Kracauer turned “Amerika” from a metaphysically grounded metaphor of disenchanted modernity into a diagnostic framework for exploring the manifold and contradictory realities of modern life under the conditions of advanced capitalism. As elaborated in chapter 1, the materialist impulse to register, transcribe, and archive the surface manifestations of modernity was initially motivated—as well as licensed—by the eschatologically tinged hope that modernity could and would be overcome: “America will disappear only when it completely discovers itself.”⁷ However, the self-reflexive construction of this phrase also suggests that the object of discovery harbors its own means and media of cognition and self-understanding; by the same logic, it implies that the discovering subject cannot remain outside or above the terrain explored. Accordingly, the more Kracauer immersed himself in the project, the less sanguine he became about the possibility of transcending modernity, and the more passionately he engaged in immanent critique. Thus, in the face of rising National Socialism, he sought to describe the particular ways in which technologically mediated and market-based culture seemed at once to furnish the conditions for self-reflexivity and self-determination on a mass scale and to neutralize and undermine those very principles.

      In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the connection between Americanism qua industrial rationalization and the new mass-mediated culture, in particular cinema, was by no means established—at least not until the implementation of the Dawes Plan in 1924, which ushered in at once a large-scale campaign of rationalization and the consolidation of Hollywood’s hegemony in the German market.⁸ In a report for the Frankfurter Zeitung on a conference of the Deutsche Werkbund in July 1924, Kracauer presents this gathering of designers, industrialists, educators, and politicians as a site of missed connections. The conference was devoted to two main topics, “the fact of Americanism, which seems to advance like a natural force,” and the “artistic significance of the fiction film.”⁹ Kracauer observes a major shortcoming in the speakers’ basic approach to Americanism: they went all out to explore its “total spiritual disposition,” but, true to the Werkbund’s professed status as an “apolitical organization,” they left the “economic and political conditions upon which rationalization . . . is based substantially untouched.” While both proponents and critics of rationalization seemed to articulate their positions with great conviction and ostensible clarity, the second topic of the conference, concerning the fiction film, remained shrouded in confusion. “Curiously, perhaps due to deep-seated prejudices, the problem of film was dealt with in a much more biased and impressionistic way than the fact of mechanization, even though both phenomena, Americanism and film composition, after all belong to the same sphere of surface life.”

      The metaphysically grounded concern over the “disintegration” of the world had prompted Kracauer to turn his attention to that very “sphere of surface life,” to the seemingly inconspicuous phenomena of the modern urban everyday and the culturally despised practices of popular literature and entertainment. This turn entailed an epistemological valorization of the term surface, previously associated with lapsarian laments over mechanization and the hegemony of instrumental reason or rationality (Ratio), the ascendance of Gesellschaft over Gemeinschaft , the crisis of the self-determined individual, and the breakdown of traditional belief and value systems (“transcendental homelessness”). Instead, Kracauer increasingly came to view the surface or Oberfläche as a Denkfläche, or plane for thinking, an as-yet-uncharted map for the exploration of contemporary life.¹⁰