Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN

attributes its recognizability to the slippage between the image of the actual person and her representation in another medium—film—just as the suggestion that the star might be “only one-twelft h of a dozen Tiller girls” corrodes the aura of her uniqueness. Yet, lest the object of critique be prematurely demolished, Kracauer restores her image by closing the paragraph with a refrain of the opening lines.

      The photograph of the diva functions as a synecdoche for the emerging mass culture of industrial-capitalist image production that Kracauer saw flourishing in the illustrated journals and weekly newsreels. By 1927, the term illustrated magazine was actually becoming something of a misnomer: the main purpose of the photograph, according to publisher Hermann Ullstein, was “no longer to illustrate a written text but to allow events to be seen directly in pictures, to render the world comprehensible through the photograph.”⁹⁵ In Kracauer’s analysis, such ideological investment in photographic representation corresponds to the false concreteness by which the individual image mimics the logic of the commodity form; it goes hand in hand with the massive increase—not simply mass reproduction—of photographic images on an imperial, global scale. “The aim of the illustrated magazines is the complete reproduction of the world accessible to the photographic apparatus” (MO 57–58).⁹⁶

      Kracauer sees in the relentless “blizzard” of photographic images a form of social blinding and amnesia, a regime of knowledge production that makes for a structural “indifference” toward the meanings and history of the things depicted. “Never before has an age known so much about itself, if knowing means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense. . . . Never before has an age known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful weapons in the strike [Streikmittel] against understanding” (MO 58; S 5.2:93).

      Understanding is prevented above all by the contiguous arrangement of the images—“without any gaps”—thereby systematically occluding reflection on things in their relationality (Zusammenhang) and history, which would require the work of consciousness. The illustrated magazines, like the weekly newsreels, advance a social imaginary of complete coverage (anticipating later media genres such as twenty-four-hour cable news and online news services) that affords an illusory sense of omniscience and control. The surface coherence of the layout glosses over the randomness of the arrangement and, with it, the arbitrariness of the social conditions it assumes and perpetuates; the illustrated magazines offer an image of the world that domesticates otherness, disjunctions, and contradictions. But, Kracauer adds, “it does not have to be this way” (MO 58).

      Kracauer’s critique of these practices should not be mistaken for a lapsarian complaint that the media of technical reproduction are distorting an ostensibly unmediated reality. Rather, “photographability” has become the condition under which social reality constitutes itself: “The world itself has taken on a ‘photographic face’; it can be photographed because it strives to be absorbed into the spatial continuum which yields to snapshots” (MO 59). Here he works toward a medium- and institution-specific account of what Heidegger, a decade later, will call the “age of the world picture”—“world picture” understood not as a picture of the world, “but the world conceived and grasped as picture.”⁹⁷ From this condition, there is no way back, either conceptually or ontologically, to an unmediated state of being that would release us from the obligation to engage contemporary reality precisely where it is most “picture”-driven—which for Kracauer is as much a political as a philosophical and psychotheological concern.⁹⁸

      Let me note parenthetically that Kracauer’s critique of illustrated magazines was not exactly fashionable at the time. Avant-garde artistic and intellectual circles— for example, the Berlin group assembled around the magazine G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung (1923–26), an important platform of German constructivism—valorized mass-marketed journals such as the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung for their innovative layout, the dynamic integration of photographs, text, and typography.⁹⁹ The pedagogic potential of this graphic form inspired not only the layout of G and other avant-garde journals but also László Moholy-Nagy’s famous book Malerei, Fotografie, Film (1925; 1927). And Benjamin, a member of the G group, wrote a defense of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, “Nichts gegen die ‘Illustrirte’ ” (1925), that praised the journal for its contemporaneity, its “aura of actuality,” documentary precision, and conscientious technological reproductions.¹⁰⁰

      If Kracauer remains skeptical toward the illustrated magazines, it is for the same reason that he indicts the vernacular style of New Objectivity in his analysis of the Berlin entertainment malls: “Like the denial of old age, it arises from dread of confronting death” (SM 92). Benjamin, too, comments on the juncture of photography and death, as do later writers such as André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Georges Didi-Huberman. For Kracauer, the fact that the world “devours” this image world is a symptom of the fear and denial of death, inextricably linked to German society’s refusal to confront the experience of mass death in the lost war. (This refusal is not incompatible with the fascination with disasters, crashes, and catastrophe that Kracauer observes in the media’s sensationalist exploitation of violence and death.)¹⁰¹ “What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image.” Yet the more the world seeks to immortalize itself qua “photographable present,” the less it succeeds: “Seemingly ripped from the clutches of death, in reality it has succumbed to it” (MO 59).

      The concept of the “memory image” appears to furnish an epistemological and spiritual counterpoint to photography, especially in its mass proliferation. As an immaterial, unstable, and degenerative image, it belongs to a different order of reality and works on a fundamentally different principle of organization. From the perspective of photographic representation, with its claims to accuracy and fullness, memory is fragmentary, discontinuous, affectively distorted and exaggerating; from the perspective of memory, however, “photography appears as a jumble that partly consists of garbage” (MO 51). The memory image relates to those traits of a person that resist being rendered in the spatiotemporal dimensions of photographic representation, and that in fragmentary form may survive aft er death as the person’s actual or proper “history.” In a photograph, by contrast, “a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of snow” (MO 51).

      The opposition between photography and memory image participates in a broader discourse, associated with Lebensphilosophie, that sought to reconceptualize perception, time, and memory in response to modernity’s alleged reduction of experience to spatiotemporal terms. While Kracauer does not mention Bergson by name, the notion of durée resonates in the essay’s critique of pretensions to chronological and spatial continuity, as manifested, respectively, in historicism and photography.¹⁰² Likewise, he assumes the Proustian distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory, which Benjamin was to mobilize in his work on Baudelaire. Benjamin links the “increasing atrophy of experience” to the fact that devices like photography and film “extend the range of the mémoire volontaire.” But this expansion comes at a cost: “The perpetual readiness of voluntary, discursive memory, encouraged by the technology of reproduction, reduces the imagination’s scope for play [Spielraum].”¹⁰³ Similarly, Kracauer warns that, instead of serving as an aid to memory, “the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. The assault of these collections of images is so powerful that it threatens to destroy the potentially existing awareness of crucial traits” (MO 58).

      The problem with this kind of argument is that it casts memory and technological reproduction as antithetical, exclusive terms, rather than analyzing their complex interactions.¹⁰⁴ What’s more, it assumes an economic logic by which the expansion of the photographic (and, for that matter, phonographic) regime inevitably entails the withering away of human capacities of memory, reflection, and imagination. Given the exponential growth of media technologies, this logic cannot but imply a trajectory of cultural decline. It occludes the possibility that film and photography have also enabled new and qualitatively different types of experience—a possibility in which both Kracauer and