history

In his    early writings  (that is, his feuilletons written during the 1920’s and 1930s) in Germany, Siegfried Kracauer explored the cultural landscape of industrial capitalism in the early 20th century. The feuilletons, which were  eventually collected into two books—The  Ornament of the Masses and Streets of Berlin and Elsewhere—- decoded the surface phenomena of modernity as complex historical ciphers—surfaces subject to interpretation.  These  were interpreted as symptoms of  larger sociopolitical developments, such as  the evacuation of meaning in the daily life and  the popular culture of  modernity. These writings are a form of cultural criticism in the business of theorizing the present.

Adelaide CBD, 2.20pm

The underlying  argument  in these writings  has its roots in Nietzsche, Weber and Lukas. History in modernity was seen as a process  of disenchantment (demythologising) and a crisis emerged during this process because modern rationality was yoked to capitalist relations of production,  becomes an abstract rationality  that mythologizes the relations of production in industrial capitalism and the conditions of life that result from them as  if they were unchanging nature. Contemporary actuality turns out to be shadowy and insubstantial, a chaos without soul or meaning, whose absurdity can only be represented in a distorted image. We are isolated and homeless, suspended in a void, and stifled by the law-like regularities of a reality we ourselves have created which is fundamentally alien to meaning. Ours is a world fused by the absence of truth, plunged into a state of angst.

The essays or feuilletons map the return of myth across a wide spectrum of high and popular culture in the Weimar Republic. The inconspicuous, quotidian expressions of a culture reveal more about it than its own self-pronouncements. Everyday phenomena such as photos or the nature of popular literature and film are unmediated representations of a culture.  As part of this Kracauer  explored the relationship between visual culture,  art, photography and modernity in the essays such as The Mass Ornament and  On Photography.    The photograph for  Kracauer, as for Georg Simmel, captures a true likeness, a faithful representation, a simple copy of figures, objects and scenes.   Photography’s  strength is that it  captures the actual appearances of people and the surfaces of things  but  its weakness is its failure to penetrate beneath these exterior manifestations.  So the photograph is hollow,  empty and mechanical. Without a supporting history or a memory that is associated with the subject matter photography is  not adequate to recreate an understanding of the event. Continue Reading…