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.
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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…
