Splinters in Your Eye by Martin Jay;

Author:Martin Jay;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

9

The Little Shopgirls Enter the Public Sphere: Miriam Hansen on Kracauer

Among the most vexed legacies of Critical Theory was its characterization—and denunciation—of what Horkheimer and Adorno called “the culture industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment.1 Central to their analysis was the role cinema played in the modern world as both ideological mass entertainment and a potential medium of emancipation. No one probed the implications of their complicated reactions to film more trenchantly than German-American film theorist and historian Miriam Bratu Hansen, whose long-awaited masterwork, Cinema and Experience, appeared shortly after her premature death at the age of 61 in 2011.2 Hansen insisted on including Siegfried Kracauer along with Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno in her expanded definition of Critical Theory, and the payoff was a richer appreciation of the full range of ways cinematic experience might be understood.

A conference of international scholars in film studies was held at Columbia University in 2012 to commemorate Hansen’s life and work, resulting in a special issue of the journal New German Critique, on whose editorial board she served for many years.3 My own contribution probed the implications of her attempt to mobilize the concept of an oppositional public sphere, developed by sociologist Oskar Negt and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, to rescue cinema from the sour analysis of it in Dialectic of Enlightenment. While acknowledging the power of her arguments on its behalf, I was skeptical of the ways in which Negt and Kluge replaced Habermas’s notion of the public sphere as a locus of communicative rationality and discursive validity testing with one that saw it as a space for shared sensually mediated experiences. Although such experiences might well stimulate discussion and awaken critical impulses, they were not sufficient by themselves to foster the problem-solving, value-testing culture of egalitarian argumentation that the classic public sphere, at least as an ideal telos, can provide.

In a series of eight short articles that ran in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1927, collectively entitled “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” Siegfried Kracauer fleshed out his claim that “stupid and unreal film fantasies are the daydreams of society, in which its actual reality comes to the fore and its otherwise repressed wishes take on form.”4 Each of the film vignettes he examined exemplified how those wishes were discharged harmlessly through ideological consolations for the real injustices of class and gender that the films only appear to address. Kracauer’s scorn for such films’ function is matched only by his condescension toward their victims—why are they “little” and why “girls”?—who are unable to generate any critical distance from the spectacles that lull them into complacency. It was thus far from a compliment when, many years later, Adorno, in the barbed tribute that so infuriated his friend, wrote that Kracauer “himself had something of the moviegoer’s naive delight in viewing; he found an aspect of his own mode of response even in the little shopgirls who amused him. For this reason, if no other, his relationship to the mass media was never as harsh as his reflections on their effects would have led one to expect.

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