The Critical Realist in Naïve New York

Jeff Menne (bio)
Oklahoma State University

A review of Johannes Von Moltke and Kristy Rawson, editors, Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, Berkeley: U of California P, 2012.

Nothing has marked the maturity of cinema studies as much as its reckoning with Siegfried Kracauer’s writings. The discipline’s nominal adjustment, from “cinema studies” to “cinema and media studies,” signals its expansion; its reckoning with Kracauer, though, marks its increased conceptual and methodological sophistication. This reckoning has largely been carried out in a Germanist strain of media studies, which was first given focus in a 1991 special issue of New German Critique and would then include the efforts of Miriam Bratu Hansen, Thomas Levin, Dagmar Barnouw, Heide Schlüpmann, Gertrud Koch, Gerd Germünden, and Johannes von Moltke, among others.[1] Conceptually, the nascent discipline’s need for a united front (just to situate itself in the academy, where, by virtue of its object’s “mass” appeal, it was always vulnerable) had been satisfied by a reified version of Kracauer as the theorist of “naïve realism,” fixed in place by Dudley Andrew for the sake of distinguishing what he deemed the more salutary achievement of André Bazin and his Cahiers du cinéma cohort (Andrew, Major Film Theories 131-133).[2] The discipline’s unilateralism, in other words, took the form of obeisance to French intellectual culture. For many years Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed was overlooked for the same reason. “The general reason given,” Cavell would report, “was that in 1971 American academic film studies was still in its formative stages, and its founders were preoccupied with the monthly, even weekly, onrush of material originating mostly in France and then in England” (32).[3] But now a consensus holds there to be no more misleading a tag for Kracauer’s work than “naïve realism.” In an afterword to Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson’s new edited collection of Kracauer essays, Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, Martin Jay suggests, in fact, that we call Kracauer a “magical nominalist” (227). Whichever the apposite term—magical nominalist, curious realist, critical realist—the interest in conceptual nuance indexed therein is a product of the greater methodological rigor in cinema studies today.[4] Von Moltke and Rawson’s collection is an instance of this. It brings together Kracauer’s work from the 1940s and 50s, essays from “little magazines” such as Commentary and Public Opinion Quarterly, and film and book reviews from New Republic, Film Culture, and Saturday Review of Literature. The effect is to suggest Kracauer’s influence on the intellectual culture in New York City in the moment it was admitting film into its ambit as an object of study. Researched at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, von Moltke and Rawson’s collection—partnered with Graehme Gilloch and Jaeho Kang’s forthcoming collection—helps, they claim, provide the most “comprehensive picture” to date of Kracauer’s intellectual personality (ix). This picture might give a perspective on Kracauer different from the one that posits an “epistemological shift” between his Weimar writings and his exile writings, between the conceptual aliveness of essays such as “The Mass Ornament” and “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies” (both 1927) and the pedantic closure of Theory of Film (1960) (3).[5] From this perspective, von Moltke and Rawson propose, we can understand Kracauer within “three overlapping contexts”: the institutional enfranchisement of film study, the relations of the New York Intellectuals, and the relations of the exiled Frankfurt School associates (4). Perhaps the most interesting yield of this overlap is the dynamic relation in which it lets us place modernism and cinema, as the two became co-articulated in the institutions of culture by way of appeals cast in traditional aesthetic terms. Reading by Kracauer’s light, however, we glimpse an alternative history in which the unruly works of modernism might not have been domesticated along Lionel Trilling’s lines (or Clement Greenberg’s or even Irving Howe’s), but would have been reinserted in the media ecologies of early-century modernity, a moment in which the new media, as Kracauer narrates them, reflected back on aesthetic form as traditionally construed.

Rather than begin with Kracauer’s place among the New York Intellectuals—and in turn the subjunctive disciplinary histories of modernism and cinema that might have played out had he enjoyed the same institutional clout as Greenberg and Howe—I prefer to consider first whether, and how much, Kracauer’s subsumption into New York institutional life alienated him from the Frankfurt School methods that he, though not an Institute member, had practiced in his own way as a Weimar journalist. Theodor Adorno faulted Kracauer for not returning to Germany with himself and Max Horkheimer. He would surely bristle at Kracauer’s use of first-person pronouns when describing American habits (“Why France Liked Our Films,” for instance, describes not the reception of German but Hollywood cinema in France), and he felt Kracauer’s quick adoption of the English language curbed his expression. “It is a terrible shame that in his most mature years,” Adorno writes, “under the compulsion to write English but probably also out of revulsion over what had happened, Kracauer became ascetic with regard to his own verbal art, which is inseparable from the German language” (172). Adorno denies Kracauer what seems to me his rightful place in the dialectical tradition. “Dialectical thought never suited his temperament,” he said of Kracauer, whom he believed to be stubbornly ontological, committed to “a moment that always evaporated in the idea stage for the German spirit of almost any orientation” (164). This threw him from the idealist side to the materialist side, as it did his colleague Walter Benjamin, but it threw him too far to this side, so Adorno thought. But no doubt the habit of inquiry which Adorno learned from Kracauer is dialectical. Reading Kant with Kracauer, Adorno says, taught him to see Kant’s critique “as a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read”; Kracauer showed “how the objective-ontological and subjective-idealist moments warred within it” (160). What Adorno and Kracauer’s latter-day dispute might be said to index, finally, is how differently they had negotiated Marxism in their own theoretical projects. In Kracauer’s notes, he complains that by Adorno’s standards no one was sufficiently dialectical “à la Hegel and Teddie himself (who invokes the Hegel of his making as a sort of protective cover & shield)” (American Writings 129). This critique includes “Marx to the extent that his dialectics is controlled by an ontological vision” (132). Pace Adorno, Kracauer claims Marx as an alibi because he shared with Marx a commitment to the indigestible moment—call it the “ontological moment,” the “objective spirit,” or the trace of history—in what Adorno calls “the idea stage” (Adorno 164).

But whether Kracauer was so intransigently opposed to idealism that it rendered him nondialectical, the long and short of Adorno’s critique is an assessment we might put to test in von Moltke and Rawson’s collection. There we find a series of one-off analyses (in the mode of his feuilleton writing in Weimar) that Kracauer wrote while evolving the putatively more systematic ideas of Theory of Film. For present purposes I consider two pieces, one a set of unpublished notes in defense of qualitative analysis, “A Statement on the Humanistic Approach,” and the other a review of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946), a movie perfectly suited to show the affinity of the object world for what Kracauer calls “camera reality” and to reveal how little his film theory is closed or historically invariant. In the former, Kracauer denounces a tendency (endemic, we infer, to the American academy) to apply positivist methods to a range of “phenomena which differ from the subject matter of exact science in that they are historical entities and as such carriers of unique values and qualities” (American Writings 124). What is valid in such analysis, he concedes, is that it wishes to rise above merely subjective evaluation; but its mistaken belief that so-called objective measures will negate subjective influence leaves such analysis blind to the “technical or managerial interest” behind it (124). The question remains, though, whether qualitative analysis can better cope with “plain subjectivism” (126). Kracauer claims that the problem is likely overstated and that distortions coming from “the analyst’s philosophical viewpoints” will be “neutralized” in the very performance of analysis (126). “Whether or not he states them overtly from the outset, they are bound to leak out anyway,” and “can in a measure be controlled and discounted” (126). Kracauer depends, that is, on a dialectical reading process. Perhaps his most compelling maneuver, in this regard, is to have recourse to the shape a medium imposes on an object of analysis. His essay, “Photography” (1927), marks his peculiar orientation on medium-specificity. There he argues that photography is opposed to memory, a telltale of subjectivism, because it works on a different “organizing principle” (Mass Ornament 50). “The fact that the grandmother was at one time involved in a nasty story” that her grandchildren always recount “does not matter much from the photographer’s perspective,” which liquidates memory’s residue and gets to know instead “every little wrinkle on her face” (50). The effect, then, is to dis-embed the object from what Kracauer calls “the demonic nature of the drives,” which thoroughly govern memory (51). This, roughly, is the virtue of photography.

One recognizes here broad compatibility between Kracauer’s argument and the ones Bazin and Roland Barthes make for photographic ontology.[6] In the photograph there is a displacement in the dialectical process, its poles of subject-object now assumed into an operation involving reality and its impress in a medium, carried out in a way that leaves the subject no special privilege. Kracauer’s response to Rossellini’s Paisan, though, shows that affirming these photographic properties is nothing so straightforward as subordinating the subject to the laws of the object world. In his understanding, it’s a “go-for-broke game of history” that might end one of two ways: in the worst outcome, the “nature” that consciousness had “failed to penetrate would sit down at the very table that consciousness had abandoned”; in a more hopeful outcome, the subject, no longer locked in its modernist agon with the object, and “less enmeshed in the natural bonds than ever before,” can find emancipation where “the original order is lost” and “the valid organization of things remains unknown” (61-63). In Paisan, Kracauer finds, “Rossellini’s infatuation with reality” places him at odds with high modernist Sergei Eisenstein because “Rossellini patiently observes where Eisenstein ardently constructs” (American Writings 155).

This does not mean, however, that for Kracauer “reality” is self-identical and available to empirical methods; it only means that its construction is being thematized. Kracauer’s famous statement, after all, is: “Reality is a construction” (Salaried Masses 32).[7] What he finds in Rossellini, rather, is self-exculpation from a relentless, subjectivist will to construct. Rossellini’s movie, anyway, creates the space to roll back fascist ideology, which, in Italy and elsewhere, will constitute the critical project of the postwar era. Paisan seems “now determined to do without any messages and missions—at least for the moment” (American Writings 155). The review turns on this phrase “at least for the moment,” and I believe that this dialectical gesture separates Kracauer’s critical project from the end-of-ideology ballyhoo that would carry away some of the New York Intellectuals. If in Rossellini’s movie “humanity assumes all the traits of self-sufficient reality,” Kracauer says, it “is a mirage” but one “which may appear as more than a mirage only at a very peculiar moment” (156). Paisan is “delusive,” though, to the extent that it “makes the triumph of humanity dependent on a world released from the strain of ideas” (156). The subject, then, does not cede ordering power to the flux of nature alone, but rather lets the denaturing force of the technological media unveil for the subject how susceptible social arrangements are to reordering. This, according to Miriam Bratu Hansen, owes to Kracauer’s grasping in “film and cinema the matrix of a specifically modern episteme” (“Introduction” xi). A site of technological modernity, the cinema, for Kracauer, “also emerged as the single most accessible institution in which the effects of modernization on human experience could be acknowledged, recognized, negotiated, and perhaps reconfigured and transformed” (xi). In the afterword to American Writings, Martin Jay suggests that, though Adorno would never recognize him as such, on these grounds—the grounds of an ontology always open to its conceptual reordering—Kracauer may in fact be one of the “inadvertent exemplars” of Adorno’s negative dialectics (235).

Insofar as von Moltke and Rawson imagine that Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings will fill a hole in Kracauer’s “intellectual biography,” in particular as it relates to the dialectical tradition of the Frankfurt School, this collection does what it intends (3). Kracauer’s writings, in toto, are maybe less tractable than another oeuvre due to the unique conditions of their production. By this, I don’t mean that his flight from Nazi Germany has been too easily read as an epistemological shift. I mean that his journalism, his occasional pieces, and his other freelance writing resulted in a different, more motley body of work than that of someone like Adorno, much of whose work was done in the framework of the university. Because Kracauer composed to the beat of the feuilleton press schedule in Weimar, and to a still more irregular rhythm in New York, he could light on curious and minor practices (as Barthes did in Mythologies) and theorize, as it were, at street level. Benjamin hence called him a “rag-picker,” sifting—as von Moltke and Rawson put it—the objects “of the bourgeois era at the dawn of revolution” (21). Kracauer might describe his job, as movie critic Gene Siskel once did his own, as “covering the national dream beat” (Ebert 148). But his approach to the cinema’s oscillation between “projections” and “portraits,” as he puts it in “National Types as Hollywood Presents Them,” means that Kracauer’s reader follows the to-and-fro analysis of dream production (in Weimar, then in Hollywood) and of the historical process as it shoots through this dream production (American Writings 101). In consequence, Kracauer has been misunderstood. For this Thomas Levin has offered the canny suggestion that we read “Theory of Film and From Caligari to Hitler as a two-volume textual dialectic” (28).

Another consequence for Kracauer, one that gives his writing its vitality, is that he never had to specialize. The to-and-fro of his analyses becomes, in effect, their ethical imperative. This is what I take to be most helpfully illuminating in Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, the way it places Kracauer on the scene, albeit its margins, of New York’s postwar “expert-culture.” In hitherto unpublished reflections entitled “About the State of the Humanities,” Kracauer warns against the structure of the university and the symptomatic developments of MIT’s “Young Professors Growth Fund” and the Princeton Council of the Humanities’ sponsorship of “group studies” (118). Efforts to buy time for their faculty’s broad learning (what we would recognize today as interdisciplinary initiatives), both programs are symptoms, Kracauer claims, of the strict “compartmentalization of knowledge,” and a corollary separation that C.P. Snow would identify as the “two cultures” (the humanities and the natural sciences), as well as a similar separation “between the academic world and the world at large” (119). This was the twilight of the public intellectual, and though the “little magazines” such as Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent allowed many writers a conduit to a non-specialized reading public, many, such as Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, were being absorbed into the universities at the same time. As they were absorbed, so too were modernism and cinema. Modernism, in particular, suffered in this process, being made a byword for hyper-specialization. The autonomizing effect of Clement Greenberg’s medium-specificity lent the modernist idiom to the university’s “expert-culture” writ large. The artwork, for Greenberg, found purpose in discovering its support, its peculiar integrity, in relation to nothing beyond it; humanistic inquiry, following the same logic, cordoned itself off and engaged in narcissistic self-definition. Cinema, on the other hand, was made assimilable in the university through those ongoing arguments that it could be construed on the model of the traditional arts. Kracauer’s finely dialectical observation, here, is that art was being instrumentalized to fend off the very situation, i.e. uncontrolled specialization, that gave rise to its instrumentality. “Nearly every university,” he reports, “now aspires to do something about Art in grand style. MIT’s Humanities Department is all set to expand its facilities for extra-curricular work in this vast and lofty area; and Columbia dreams of an $8,000,000 building wholly dedicated to art education. A campus without an Art Center of its own will soon be a remote memory” (120).

Nothing could be more inimical to Kracauer than art passed off as ideology, and the modernist moment was defined for him, in fact, by the way that photography, and by extension cinema, had destabilized the aesthetic tradition in general and had thrown into doubt the prerogative of intentional order. Rather than bring this version of modernism into the academy, though, founded as it was on medium-specificity of a sort quite different from Greenberg’s—the frame of the photograph, for Kracauer, is but “a provisional limit” and “its structure denotes something that cannot be encompassed” because, as a medium, it “transmits material without defining it”—the New York Intellectuals helped install modernism in the university as a study of media that stake themselves off from each other, their purity being a displaced version of the individual’s freedom from society (211).[8]

What is so tantalizing about von Moltke and Rawson’s collection, then, is that it inserts Kracauer into this historical moment, as a contributor to Commentary and to Jonas Mekas’s Film Culture and as a member of Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16; and yet the institutional path taken by modernism would make a hard turn away from Kracauer.  Cinema studies would consolidate itself by means of a simplified Kracauer that only in recent decades, thanks to collections such as this one, has been complicated. 

Footnotes

[1] What this issue coordinated was the ongoing work of a handful of scholars to expand access to Kracauer’s corpus beyond the two postwar studies by which he had been known. In this regard, Miriam Bratu Hansen’s scholarship has been absolutely crucial, including her essay “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940”; her introduction to the new edition of Kracauer’s Theory of Film; and most substantial of all, her Cinema and Experience, which D.N. Rodowick has described as “our most critically and historically important investigations of Kracauer’s work in English” (Aesthetics and Philosophy of Film). Thomas Levin’s introduction to Kracauer’s anthologized Weimar essays, The Mass Ornament, has been equally crucial. See also Barnouw; Schlüpmann; Koch; and Gemünden and von Moltke. One might add to this bibliography recent reassessments of Kracauer issuing more from the middle of cinema studies such as Mary Ann Doane’s uptake of “Photography” in The Emergence of Cinematic Time; Rodowick’s correction of the “scandalous” “general misunderstanding” of Kracauer’s English-language work in Reading the Figural; Malcolm Turvey’s leaguing of Kracauer with “revelationist” film theorists in his study Doubting Vision; and Jennifer Fay’s highly persuasive interleaving of Kracauer’s Weimar and exile methodologies in her recent essay, “Antarctica and Siegfried Kracauer’s Cold Love.”

[2] Elsewhere, Andrew offers what has since been roundly dismissed as a myopic, heavily partial assessment: “While Bazin’s notions of standard perception derive from Bergson and Sartre and are substantially more complicated than Kracauer’s naïve realism, both men think of cinema as extending, rather than altering, perception” (Concepts 34).

[3] The discipline’s neglect of his contribution was explained to him, Cavell says in the introduction, by Dudley Andrew.
[4] Martin Jay’s term, “magical nominalist,” indeed comes from a philological attention to wunderlich, the term Theodor Adorno applied to Kracauer.  It has been translated as “curious,” hence the “curious realist.” The other term, “critical realist,” derives from Dagmar Barnouw’s study.

[5] The description of an “epistemological shift” in Kracauer’s thought comes from Patrice Petro’s “Kracauer’s Epistemological Shift” in the above mentioned special issue of New German Critique.

[6] See Bazin’s essays, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” and “The Myth of Total Cinema.” In the former essay Bazin famously and effusively writes, “Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes had covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love” (15); in the latter essay he writes that cinema was fulfilling a myth that had been pursued “from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist” (21). For Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, the work of photography is quite similar, only he calls the “preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime,” or the artist’s freedom to interpret reality, the studium, and that which the “impassive lens” leaves unmanaged, the punctum.

[7] For a discussion of this phrase in relation to the conception of realism in Theory of Film, see Drehli Robnik, “Among Other Things,” in Gemünden and von Moltke.

[8] Cf. Barnett Newman’s remark that his paintings should have, he hoped, “the impact of giving someone as it did me the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality” (xxi).

Works Cited

• Adorno, Theodor W. “The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer.” Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New German Critique 54 (1991): 159-177. Web. 11 Oct. 2015.
• Andrew, Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. Print.
• —.  The Major Film Theories. London: Oxford UP, 1976. Print.
• Barnouw, Dagmar. Critical Realism: History, Photography, and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Print.
• Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Print.
• Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. Print.
• Cavell, Stanley. Contesting Tears. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.
• Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Print.
• Ebert, Roger. Life Itself. New York: Hachette, 2011. Print.
• Fay, Jennifer. “Antarctica and Siegfried Kracauer’s Cold Love.” Discourse 33.3 (2011): 291-321. Web. 11 Oct. 2015.
• Gemünden, Gerd, and Johannes von Moltke, eds. Culture in the Anteroom. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2012. Print.
• Hansen, Miriam Bratu. Cinema and Experience. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Print.
• —. Introduction. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. By Siegfried Kracauer. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.
• —. “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940.” Critical Inquiry 19.3 (1993): 437-469. Web 11 Oct. 2015.
• Jay, Martin. Afterword. “Kracauer, the Magical Nominalist.” Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture. By Siegfried Kracauer. Eds. Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Print.
• Koch, Gertrud. Siegfried Kracauer. Trans. Jeremy Gaines. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print.
• Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament. Ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.
• —. Siegfried Kracauer: Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda and Political Communication. Ed. Graehme Gilloch and Jaeho Kang. Columbia: Columbia UP. Forthcoming. Print.
• —.  Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture. Ed. Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Print.
• —. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.
• Levin, Thomas Y. Introduction. Siegfried Kracauer. The Mass Ornament.  Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.
• Newman, Barnett. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews. Ed. John P. O’Neill. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Print.
• Rodowick, D.N. Aesthetics and Philosophy of Film. “Classical Film Theory: Siegfried Kracauer.” Web. 8 Dec. 2015. http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k27441&pageid=icb.page124045.
• —. Reading the Figural, or Philosophy after the New Media. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print.
• Schlüpmann, Heide. “Phenomenology of Film: On Kracauer’s Writings of the 1920’s.” Trans. Thomas Y. Levin. New German Critique 40 (1987): 97-114. Web. 11 Oct. 2015.
• Special Issue on Siegfried Kracauer.  New German Critique 54 (1991). Web. 11 Oct. 2015.
• Turvey, Malcolm. Doubting Vision. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.