Siegfried Kracauer

The three structuring topics of this chapter
will be the relationship between art and technology
in the work of the Frankfurt School,
including the notion of art as itself a type
of technology; repetition as a dynamic in
the field of art, and as a cultural logic more
broadly, with reference to associated notions
such as aura, singularity, and reproduction;
and the currency of central categories of the
critique of political economy, such as use
value and exchange value, for the field of
artistic production in capitalist society.

On the value of recycling old film theory and films for thinking a longue durée conceptualization of the anthropocene. Considers "natural history" as a genre of the anthropocene (in which genre is understood as a mode of historical interpretation and perception), and then reflects on the historiographical implications of Siegfried Kracauer's 1927 essay on photography as exemplary of this approach, developing a natural-historical media theory through ghosts, garbage, and uncanny creatures.

This essay, originally published in ON FILM magazine in 1983 and reprinted in this form in 2009, details how the classic German Expressionist film THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Robert Wiene, 1920) manages to convey sociopolitical themes and ideas about Caligari-as-Hitler, Caligari-as-Freud, and Caligari-as-Filmmaker,

Readers might want to access the URL below for the anthologized version, which includes a few images.

Oxford University Press, 2018
In recent years, environmental and human rights advocates have suggested that we have entered the first new geological epoch since the end of the ice age: the Anthropocene. In this new epoch, humans have come to reshape unwittingly both the climate and natural world; humankind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted the oceans, and irreversibly altered the atmosphere. Ironically, our efforts to make the planet more hospitable to ourselves seem to be driving us toward our inevitable extinction. A force of nature, humanity is now decentered as the agent of history. As Jennifer Fay argues, this new situation is to geological science what cinema has always been to human culture.

Film, like the Anthropocene, is a product of the industrial revolution, but arises out of a desire to preserve life and master time and space. It also calls for the creation of artificial worlds, unnatural weather, and deadly environments for entertainment, scientific study, and devising military strategy. Filmmaking stages, quite literally, the process by which worlds and weather come into being and meaning, and it mimics the forces that are driving this new planetary inhospitality. Cinema, in other words, provides an image of "nature" in the age of its mechanical reproducability. Fay argues that cinema exemplifies the philosophical, political, and perhaps even logistical processes by which we can adapt to these forces and also imagine a world without humans in it. Whereas standard ecological criticism attends to the environmental crisis as an unraveling of our natural state, this book looks to film (from Buster Keaton, to Jia Zhangke, to films of atomic testing and early polar exploration) to consider how it reflects upon the creation and destruction of human environments. What are the implications of ecological inhospitality? What role might cinema and media theory play in challenging our presumed right to occupy and populate the world? As an art form, film enjoys a unique relationship to the material, elemental world it captures and produces. Through it, we may appreciate the ambitions to design an unhomely planet that may no longer accommodate us.

BLURBS FROM THE BACK-COVER
"Compelling and brilliant on every page, Inhospitable Worlds shows where film figures in the slow burn of the Anthropocene. In five clearly drawn and meticulously documented studies running from Keaton to noir, from China's three gorges to atomic testing sites in Nevada, and from the South Pole to the Yukon, Fay draws attention to contradictions and dilemmas at the core of cinema. Crafting a strategy of melancholy to rethink its condition past and present, Fay turns criticism in new and definitive directions. Anyone having concern about the condition of our planet must read Inhospitable World."-- Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

"At a time when much of the world is consumed with anxiety about the fate of the planet, Jennifer Fay shows us a way forward by traveling backward ironically and locating our future in the present. Inhospitable World reveals a history of cinema mobilized, as it were, for the purposes of rendering and conveying a world crisis as it unfolds. Cinema, in Fay's hands, is not only a vehicle, nor merely a medium, but a technology designed in part to capture this crisis invisible elsewhere. Not only a breath-taking feat of film scholarship, Inhospitable World is also a genuine contribution to the task of critical thought in a time of despair. It serves as an exhortation."-- Akira Mizuta Lippit, T. C. Wang Family Endowed Chair in Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

"Inhospitable World teems with cinematic lessons in survival, from the 'survival burlesques' of Buster Keaton to Bill Morrison's chronicle of the Dawson City Film Find. But there's a catch: the survivors of the Anthropocene may not be human. In Fay's arresting account, cinema's profuse world-making hastens, even as it broods on, the unmaking of human futurity. The history of film is retold in these pages as a rehearsal for a world without us."-- Paul K. Saint-Amour, author of Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form

Critical Theory is not a fixed set of authors grouped together into a school but rather a style of thought. One of Critical Theory’s particularities is its frequent reference to concepts derived from theology and religious vocabulary, a feature well known to eminent commentators such as Martin Jay, but held in low regard and inadequately expounded. This thesis attempts to map and describe the genealogy of the usage made of these concepts by looking at them from a genetic standpoint in order to elucidate their sources as well as from a structural standpoint in order to explain the functional contribution of Critical Theory to the general economy. Another aspect explored is the necessary confrontation of this meaning inherent to Critical Theory with the quarrel over secularization that has permeated German philosophical life since 1922 and the publication of Schmitt's Political Theology.
To this end we have studied a corpus that spans from the founders of the so-called Frankfurt School to later representatives who have been grouped under the term communicative shifting-point, also covering like-minded authors sharing Bloch or Kracauer's relationship to the secularization of theology. Research here is concerned with concepts as such and is not guided by historical rationale or any author classification scheme. An approach focused on major movements and conceptual changes has been emphasized. I nevertheless included the paradigmatic break, as it intersects a historical, methodological and conceptual turning point. Individual authors' positions have been compared with one another and their meaning placed in relation to underlying theological structures, in particular those dealing with the notion of Jewish messianism, but also with key themes surrounding secularization theory.
This use of secularized theological concepts enables us to view the communicational paradigm as a response to certain difficulties arising from earlier use of secularized theological concepts and as part of the transition from a theory of domination to a theory of democracy. Said transformation entails a shift from secularized theology to a political philosophy of religion. Moreover, we have come to realize that Critical Theory is redefining the epistemic scope of the secularization quarrel by advocating an alternative to the Löwith-Blumenberg debate. Beyond metamorphosizing Critical Theory, this theory constitutes a leaven for unity, heralding a model for the conception of complexified secularization. The latter now requires systematic modelling in order to account for the aporia between the persistence of the power of heteronomic religious thought and the decline of its hold on the political and legal organization of societies that have become self-sufficient.

Written in French exile, this text by Siegfried Kracauer from December 1936 outlines a research project that the German-Jewish intellectual undertook with funding from the Institute for Social Research. The work outlined here would be a study of totalitarian propaganda in Germany and Italy through sustained comparison with communist and democratic countries, especially the Soviet Union and the United States. Appearing in English translation for the first time, this document from Kracauer's estate is crucial for a full understanding of his career as a sociologist, cultural critic, film theorist, and philosopher, demonstrating the global scope of his engagement with cinema, mass culture, and modernity.

Comment la production vidéo de l’organisation « Etat islamique » relance-t-elle les relations entre cinéma et propagande ? Quels sont les traits de mise en scène qui caractérisent cette production ? Quels liens entretient-elle avec les images de fiction ? Et aussi, quel devenir pour le cinéma hollywoodien qui inspire parfois directement certains films de Daech ?

C'est un peu comme si, historiquement parlant, les tranchées ouvertes dans l'Europe de la Grande Guerre avaient suscité, dans le domaine esthétique comme dans celui des sciences humaines […], la décision de montrer par montages, c'est-à-dire par dislocations et recompositions de toute chose. Le montage serait une méthode de connaissance et une procédure formelle nées de la guerre, prenant acte du « désordre du monde ». Il signerait notre perception du temps depuis les conflits du XX e siècle : il serait devenu la méthode moderne par excellence 1. 1. Montage déréalisant vs principe de réalité En tant que témoin et acteur des vifs débats sur le montage qui marquent l'Europe artistique et intellectuelle de l'après-guerre, Kracauer rédige dans les années 1920 une série de « feuilletons » sur la modernité weimarienne repris dans L'Ornement de la masse (1963). Un texte en particulier retiendra ici notre attention qui permet de poser, en dehors des analyses vouées au cinéma, la question du montage. Ce texte, « Le Hall d'hôtel », est extrait d'un ouvrage sur le roman policier non publié à l'époque. Il vise à énoncer le problème du sens dans une société où la religion s'effondre progressivement. Selon Kracauer, la production artistique est toute entière prise dans cette vocation de solutionner la perte de sens consécutive à la modernité. Comme

I contend that the question of what is, and what is not, cinema has always been a question of concrete spatial boundaries. The ontology of film, I would argue, has always had a topological undertow. This becomes evident — and has its consequences— in a moment when film seems to be leaving its assigned territory, the spatial framework of the cinema, which happens to be the territory within which it first became an object of theoretical reflection. In what follows, I will first provide some evidence for the spatial element sustaining some of the established answers to the question “What is cinema?” I will
then turn to the history of film theory in order to address what I just proposed to call its inherent spatiality, but also to such recent concepts in media theory as “convergence,” and explore the dynamics of that spatiality. In particular, I will argue that the spatial metaphors and modes of argument in film and media theory point to what I propose to call the “irony of media,” i.e. the fact that from a theoretical point of view film and media, in a way, are bound to remain indeterminate, or limitless.

The significance Kracauer assigned to the camera’s interest in the meaningless and the marginal in his
"Theory of Film" (1960) goes hand in hand with the way he situates pertinent-feeling fragments of his own
discourse on the margins of the main flow of the argument. They are the most troublesome fragments if
read from the perspective of a unifying, realistic interpretation of "Theory of Film". In many cases, these
offhand digressions have turned out to be the pieces of a primary theoretical concept from the 1940-1941
– as revealed by Kracauer’s notebooks now known to us. Kracauer notes here the relationship between
the extermination as the utter disappearance of people and the erasure of their deaths from the
composition of an image – and claims this connection to be central to the Holocaust. When the film
image reaches a place where all representation must be annihilated, it becomes the last refuge of violated
human dignity. Some of this arguments derivate from the discussion on the allegory of the skull from
Walter Benjamin’s "Ursprung des Trauerspiel". This view can, of course, in no way be reconciled with
Theodor Adorno’s famous, iconoclastic stance. In the light of Kracauer’s discussion with Adorno the
thesis of impossibility of representation of the Shoah should be read in new perspective.

Prenant au sérieux le caractère référentiel et automatique du mode d’objectivation du réel par la caméra, André Bazin a fixé l’idée que le cinéma est un art absolument réaliste qui nous débarrasse de l’expression de l’artiste, des effets de style et de l’ennui d’une histoire à raconter. Mais une telle conception n’allait pas sans ambiguïtés et partis pris embarrassants. D’une part, puisque l’esthétique se déduisait des propriétés techniques, ce n’est qu’en restant fidèle à la spécificité de son medium que le film est capable de laisser venir le monde « tel qu’en lui-même », c’est-à-dire « objectivement ». D’autre part, à considérer l’ensemble de la production, il était nécessaire de créer une opposition artificielle entre les cinéastes formalistes qui manipulent et reconstruisent le réel par un enchaînement d’actions indigne, et les cinéastes de la présence brute chez qui l’inscription sensible du corps filmé révèle une puissance propre indépendante du montage. Comment rendre compte de cette apparente aversion de Bazin à toute marque de style un peu appuyée, voire à ce qui semble constituer les gestes fondamentaux d’un cinéaste : narrer, relier, couper, coller, éditer, se rapprocher ? Contre l’explication répandue qui ne tient naïvement compte que des présupposés modernistes sur l’enregistrement et de l’épiphanie des « faits bruts » que le film est censé procurer, il est soutenu que Bazin n’a pas conçu le réalisme comme la possibilité du cinéma de transmettre la consistance spatio-temporelle du monde. Son problème ne porte que marginalement sur l’ontologie de l’image analogique et concerne davantage l’attitude du cinéaste face à un medium qui a des affinités spécifiques vis-à-vis du réel. Car si l’œil mécanique est capable de tout capturer, cette incorporation du monde par la caméra atteste aussi une forme de violence proprement cinématographique. Quel est le critère possible pour une pertinence politique d’une image cinématographique ? Y a-t-il un standard non-subjectif qui fonde la différence entre les films abjects et les films acceptables ? En dernière instance, puisque la caméra prélève des fragments hors du réel, l’image filmique n’est-elle pas nécessairement réification obscène, extorsion cruelle et arbitraire ? Après une étude préalable des aspects technique, idéologique et artistique de l’esthétique réaliste, il apparaîtra que la théorie de Bazin est plus correctement exprimée en tant qu’une demande pour un positionnement moral du cinéaste qui juge ce qu’il filme et qui devrait être jugé d’après la façon dont il juge. Redoublé avec les arts « mécaniques » qui ont affaire – techniquement – au réel, il y a le sentiment qu’il ne faut pas prendre à la légère la responsabilité d’un homme envers les images qu’il crée. En traitant le problème en termes politiques, plutôt que techniques ou formels, il deviendra possible de révéler en quoi Bazin a établi l’idée qui fait autorité dans l’esthétique filmique, selon laquelle « juste une image » doit aussi être une image de « justice et justesse ». L’exigence du réalisme n’est alors rien d’autre chez lui que l’exigence pour l’artiste de l’ère moderne de ne pas nuire avec ses images, c’est-à-dire de faire l’épreuve du négatif dans laquelle la caméra cogne contre un réel qui résiste, insiste. Ainsi, la tâche du cinéaste est d’être un guetteur, un veilleur sur un monde qu’on doit supposer non-totalisable et irréductible à sa captation.

En la primera mitad del siglo XX, los filósofos de la Escuela de Frankfurt desarrollaron una teoría estética para comprender el cine y su relación con el contexto social del capitalismo tardío. De manera fragmentaria, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer y Theodor W. Adorno aportaron elementos fundamentales para esta teoría, produciendo un acervo conceptual de gran riqueza, y muy consecuente con una postura epistemológica y ética que es general a este grupo de pensadores. Este ensayo propone una lectura que relaciona a los tres autores, para una consideración, más ambiciosa, de una teoría del cine desde la perspectiva de la Teoría Crítica.

In this paper, I tried to present in a brief way the cyberpunk cinematographic sub-genre by connecting it a little to the literature. After this, I selected some movies for a brief analysis. I tried to find common characteristics for this sub-genre and, of course, to popularize it.

Review:
"Because of its inspiring move to bring together the theoretical projects of phenomenological,
aesthetic, and poststructuralist philosophy with the urgency of sociocultural and
historical reality, Conscientious Viscerality should be widely read. It will be of interest
not only to German and film studies scholars but for all of those who work on identity,
subjectivity, and the body across the humanities and social sciences. In a time when racist
polemics like German politician Thilo Sarrazin’s recent publication “Germany does away
with itself”—where the strength of the German nation is portrayed to be undermined by
immigration—seem to do and sell so well, we need more books like this." 
Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Review:
"What Curtis points out in her study using an impressive and versatile corpus of films and videos is the role of the recipient for filmic autobiography as a genre that tells the story of a life in images. For their truth claim and effect these images are dependent on the viewer who is asked to "take a particularly empathetic and corporeal stance to the particular kind of intersubjective experience filmic autobiography offers" (41). Thus, the study is not only a contribution to research on filmic autobiography in Germany but moreover a book on reception theory that offers a new and promising view on autobiography in general. Writing as well as filming or telling life stories become both the experience of a different subjectivity and a culturally contingent, narratively transported and changeable construct that must first and foremost be produced in an interchange between producer and recipient."
Scope

this paper deals with one of the main issue i wish to treat in my project. The thinkers of the frankfurt school and the others heterodox marxist thinkers used to express concepts and words from a theological origin. Our main question here, is to read their attenpt under the prism of the theories of secularization.

in: Thomas Brandstetter, Karin Harrasser, Günther Friesinger (Hg.): Ambiente. Das Leben und seine Räume. Wien, Berlin: turia + kant 2010, S. 131-153 ///
Sub-Headlines: Vermessene Massen – Ein Loch – Dem Vernehmen nach: Kino, Lager, Fabrik und ein Murmeln – Dem Unvernehmen nach – Durch die Dinge denken – Side-by-side im Vorraum

This essay explores the ways in which the notion of “everyday life” helps us stage a theoretically productive encounter between modernism/modernity and utopia within the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary history. Taking Virginia Woolf's critique of Edwardian writers as its starting point, it examines the hidden historical dimensions of the very idea of the everyday, its connection to modernity and, at the same time, to boredom as a specific symptom of that modernity. To illustrate the implications of this theoretical framework for literary study, I turn to two of the most emblematic texts of modernist and utopian aesthetics: James Joyce's Ulysses and William Morris's News from Nowhere. Whereas in Joyce, technical and formal experimentation becomes a means of capturing daily life (including utopian daydreaming) in terms of an oscillation between capitalist commodification and the restlessness of bored distraction, Morris grasps everyday life as both steeped in boredom and removed from the suffering and restlessness associated with it. Thus, utopia reverses the modernist logic of innovation, making “novelty” not a formal dimension of the literary text but one that pertains to its projected, anticipated content: life beyond the determinations of capitalist modernity.