Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN

and organization. Yet Kracauer is materialist enough to know that these principles do not miraculously emerge from the rational discourse of inner-directed subjects, let alone from efforts to restore the authority of a literary public sphere. Rather, cognition has to be grounded in the very sphere of experience in which modernization is most palpable and most destructive—in a sensory-perceptual, aesthetic discourse that allows for “a self-representation of the masses subject to the process of mechanization.”

      As I suggested earlier, Kracauer’s concept of the masses developed within a force field defined by, on the on hand, elitist-pessimistic crowd theory (popularized by Le Bon and adapted by thinkers as disparate as Spengler and Freud) and, on the other, socialist and communist conceptions of the masses as traditional or revolutionary heroic working class. If Kracauer shared with crowd theory the assumption that the modern mass blurred traditional boundaries of class, he linked that assumption with the recognition of a new kind of publicness and a passionate inquiry into the conditions of possibility of mass democracy (in that sense pointing forward to Hardt and Negri’s concept of the “multitude”).⁶⁵ Where conservative crowd theory turns on the bourgeois intellectual’s fear of the mass as powerful other, Kracauer displays an amazing lack of fear—fear of touch, violence, contagion—toward a social formation that he knew himself to be part of, whose experience he shared in a number of respects. Like his protagonist Ginster, he felt drawn to transitional, heterotopic spaces—such as train stations, harbors, and movie theaters—that allowed him to disappear in the anonymous, amorphous, circulating crowd, to be “between people” rather than “with them.”⁶⁶ While going some way toward accounting for his cinephilia, Kracauer’s nonphobic relation to the modern mass also made him a kind of seismograph, attuned as much to what was new and promising in this formation as to its political volatility.

      The specifically modern mass that Kracauer was to track began to enter public awareness in Germany with World War I. Industrialized warfare, mass killing and death, mass starvation and epidemics had brought into view the masses as object of violence and disease (rather than, as in crowd theory, their putative subject and source). While social privilege protected to some extent against these ravages, the sheer scale made suffering as much a statistical probability as a matter of class. Following the revolution of 1919, which mobilized the image of the masses as a powerful agent, mass existence continued to be associated with the stigma of misery, culminating in the 1923 hyperinflation, which spread the experience of destitution far beyond the industrial working class. During the short-lived phase of economic recovery, however, the masses began to appear less as a suffering and more as a consuming mass—a mass that became visible as a social formation in collective acts of consumption.⁶⁷ And since consumer goods that might have helped improve living conditions (for instance, refrigerators) were still a lot less affordable than in the United States,⁶⁸ major objects of consumption were the fantasy productions, images of consumer goods, and environments of the new leisure culture. In these phenomena Kracauer discerned the contours of an emerging mass society that, for better or for worse, was productive in its very need and acts of consumption.

      MASS CULTURE, CLASS, SUBJECTIVITY

      The essay on the mass ornament invokes the language of conservative crowd theory while effectively undermining it. Seemingly rehearsing the standard oppositions, Kracauer delineates the mass against the organic community of the people qua Volk; against the higher, “fateful” unity of the nation; and, for that matter, against socialist and communist notions of the collective. While the community had secreted individuals “who believe themselves to be formed from within” (MO 76), the mass consists of anonymous, atomized particles that assume meaning only in other-directed contexts, whether mechanized processes of labor or the abstract compositions of the mass ornament. But for Kracauer the progressive aspect of the mass ornament rests precisely in this transformation of subjectivity—in the erosion of bourgeois notions of personality that posit “a harmonious union of nature and ‘spirit’ ” and in the human figure’s “exodus from lush organic splendor and individual shape toward the realm of anonymity” (MO 83; S 5.2:64). The mass ornament’s critique of outdated concepts of individual personality turns the Medusan sight of the anonymous metropolitan mass into an image of liberating alienation and open-ended possibility, at times even a vision of diasporic solidarity; that is, Kracauer sees possibilities for living where others see only leveling and decline.⁶⁹ Put another way, the democratization of social, economic, and political life, the possibility of the masses’ self-determination, is inseparably linked to the surrender of the self-identical masculine subject and the emergence of a decentered, disarmored and disarming subjectivity exemplified by figures such as Chaplin and Kracauer’s own Ginster.

      This vision, however, as Kracauer knew all too well, had more to do with the happy endings of fairy tales than with ongoing social and political developments. His more empirically oriented work on mass society focused on a group that personified the modern transformation of subjectivity and at the same time engaged in a massive effort of denial: the mushrooming class of white-collar workers or salaried employees to whom he devoted a groundbreaking series of articles in 1929, subsequently published as Die Angestellten.

      Although by the end of the twenties salaried employees still made up only one-fifth of the workforce, Kracauer considered them, more than any other group, the subject of modernization and modern mass culture. Not only did their numbers increase fivefold (to 3.5 million, of which 1.2 million were women) over a period during which the number of blue-collar workers barely doubled, but their class profile was deeply bound up with the impact, actual or perceived, of the rationalization push between 1925 and 1928. The mechanization, fragmentation, and hierarchization of the labor process and the resulting threat of dequalification, disposability, and unemployment made the working and living conditions of the employees effectively proletarian. Yet, while actually a rather heterogeneous group (comprising both upwardly mobile working-class and déclassé members of the bourgeoisie), they fancied themselves as a new Mittelstand, a middle estate rather than class, asserting their distinction from the working class by, among other things, recycling the remnants of bourgeois culture.⁷⁰ Unlike the industrial proletariat, they were “spiritually homeless,” seeking escape from the everyday in the metropolitan picture palaces and entertainment malls like the Haus Vaterland or the Moka-Efti—in the very cult of distraction to which Kracauer, three years earlier, had still ascribed a radical potential. With the impact of the international economic crisis, the employees’ self-delusion and frustrated ambition, as Kracauer was one of the first to warn, made them vulnerable to National Socialist propaganda; it was these “stand-up collar proletarians” who were soon to cast a decisive vote for Hitler.⁷¹ In this sense, then, Kracauer’s report “from the newest Germany” (the book’s subtitle) reads not just as “a description of the modernization of everyday life” but at the same time as “a diagnosis of the beginning of the end of the first German republic.”⁷²

      The salaried employees had been the object of research from unionist and sociological perspectives both before and during the Weimar period.⁷³ As a number of commentators have noted, several features distinguish Kracauer’s study from these publications. Methodologically, while the study is directed toward empirical social reality, Kracauer problematizes the very notion of an empirically given reality: “Reality is a construction” (SM 32). This in turn mandates a method of self-aware critical construction that explores the subject “from its extremes,” that is, through exemplary instances of the reality of salaried employees in Berlin, Germany’s most advanced site of modernization (SM 25). Kracauer pioneers an eclectic mode of writing that combines literary and sociographic methods, though he distances his approach from that of the fashionable Weimar genre of left -wing reportage.⁷⁴ Claiming to reproduce authentic reality, he argues, reportage shares the limitations of photography as defined by its predominant positivist usage (a point Bertolt Brecht was to echo two years later).⁷⁵ “A hundred reports from a factory do not add up to the reality of the factory, but remain for all eternity a hundred views of a factory” (SM 32)—what is missing is a sense of context or relationality. By contrast, Kracauer experiments with a form he likens to a “mosaic,” made up of quotations, conversations, and reflections, scenes and situations, images and metaphors. The fragmentary and citational character