Page 61 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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46 Then
invention of the illustrated magazines, is one of the most powerful
means of organizing a strike against reality’ (Kracauer 1995: 58).
Paradoxically, explicit images prevent true observation and under-
standing. The net result of photography’s qualitatively new impact is
thus a profound transition in our experience of the world around us
– a transition, both Benjamin and, in parts of his work, Kracauer
attempted to be optimistic about, but which provides much food for
critical thought. A highly useful summary of the negative implica-
tions of Kracauer’s analysis can be found by forming an aphoristic
contradiction by joining two phrases from his ‘Photography’ essay,
otherwise separated by half a page, ‘Never before has an age been so
informed about itself … Never before has a period known so little
about itself’ (Kracauer 1995: 58).
Kracauer’s analysis directly rejects the temptation to see photogra-
phy as a technical but ultimately neutral, scientifically accurate
representation of the world. He argues that photography re-presents
the world. The new technological medium brings the world into
conformity with its mediated image rather than the other way
around: ‘the world itself has taken on a “photographic” face; it can
be photographed because it strives to be absorbed into the spatial
continuum that yields to snapshots’ (Kracauer 1995: 59). This is very
close to Sontag’s later assertion that: ‘There is an aggression implicit
in every use of the camera … technology made possible an ever-
increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set
3
of potential photographs’ (Sontag 1979: 7). Cinema, too, contrib-
utes to this process:
Film patches together shot after shot and from these succes-
sively unfurling images mechanically recomposes the world – a
mute world … in which the incomplete speech of optical
impressions is the only language. The more the represented
object can be rendered in the succession of mere images, the
more it corresponds to the filmic technique of association.
(Kracauer, in Hansen 1991: 50)
Part 2 explores the development of these trends in the now and the
full extent to which the succession of mere images and the
technique of association have created a strike against understanding
to such an extent that, although working on the right theoretical
lines, even Kracauer’s critical perspective could not adequately
account for its harmful cultural effects.
The question of the status of the photograph as a unit of
representation is a crucial one for Kracauer. He defines the photo-
graph as the ‘last stage of the symbol’ (Kracauer 1995: 59). This
statement must be understood within its wider theoretical context:
Kracauer conceived history in terms of human consciousness’s
progress from an immediate sensory immersion in nature to an

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