Kracauer, cultural studies and the Left

Posted on | September 19, 2006 | 7 Comments

Some of you have noticed that I recently had Joe Moran‘s Reading the Everyday in my currently consuming. Can’t remember if I mentioned that I set his chapter on ‘Workspace: Office life and commuting’ for my students in New Media. It’s a lovely reading of The Office, for one thing, but it’s also a nice introduction to the relevance of Siegfried Kracauer for my research. Martin Jay‘s blurb on Kracauer’s The Salaried Masses describes it as an insightful account of the cultural climate which would shortly give rise to the German fascist state. It’s also described as something of a precursor to the disciplinary territory of cultural studies in its focus on ‘the everyday’. The combination of these two observations strikes me as weird, even though it shouldn’t: it just accords with what I wish cultural studies did more. It helps me think through some of the discussions I had on the weekend with Danny and a number of other people subject to my drunken ramblings about Writers Festival panellists and cultural studies academics. What do they have in common? you may well ask. Answer: their great willingness to fixate on particular causes; their comparative lack of interest in the many miniscule fascisms of everyday life, and the system that links them together.

The recurring and very beautiful motif in Kracauer’s book is the light that reveals the emptiness at the heart of middle-class life, from the heavily made-up faces of office girls to the 9 to 5 slavery of weekend bohemians. The ‘merciless’ light reveals ‘not wretched people but conditions that make people wretched. In its austere glow minute details emerge with unwonted clarity, which are anything but minute details: for taken together they characterize the economic life that spawns them. We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is major events which most determine a person. He is more deeply and lastingly influenced by the tiny catastrophes of which everyday existence is made up, and his fate is certainly linked predominantly to the sequence of these miniature occurrences.’ (p. 62)

‘The more monotony holds sway over the working day’, Kracauer continues, ‘the further away you must be transported once work ends – assuming that attention is to be diverted from the process of production in the background. The true counterstroke against the office machine, however, is the world vibrant with colour. The world not as it is, but as it appears in popular hits. A world every last corner of which is cleansed, as though with a vacuum cleaner, of the dust of everyday existence.’ (93)

I couldn’t help but think of the bizarre labour politics of progressive academics in passages like these: ‘They would like to defend differences, the acknowledgment of which obscures their situation; they devote themselves to an individualism that would be justified only if they could still shape their fate as individuals.’ (p. 81)

And in this final excerpt, sure, it’s lazy theorising, but substitute Australia for Germany, Sydney and Melbourne for Berlin, old for young, and Howard for capitalism, and you’ll see why I’m frustrated by what seemed to be the Writers Festival mantra of asylum seekers, ABC funding and indigenous issues.

‘For some time now in Germany, especially in Berlin, a young, radical intelligentsia has developed that in journals and books comes out quite vigorously and uniformly against capitalism. To the superficial glance it seems to be a serious opponent of all powers that do not, like itself, strive directly for a reasonable human order. But even if its protests may be sincere and often fruitful, it makes protesting too easy for itself. For it is usually roused only by extreme cases… without appreciating the imperceptible dreadfulness of normal existence. It is driven to the gesture of revolt not by the construction of this existence itself, but solely by its most visible emissions. Thus it does not really impinge on the core of given conditions, but confines itself to the symptoms; it castigates obvious deformation and forgets about the sequence of small events of which our normal social life consists – events as whose product those deformations can alone be understood. The radicalism of these radicals would have more weight if it really penetrated the structure of reality, instead of issuing its decrees from on high. How is everyday life to change, if even those whose vocation is to stir it up pay it no attention?’ (p. 101)

If you don’t read the whole book (it’s short. Turn off your email for a few hours and you can do it) track down the postscript from Walter Benjamin. The pair shared a close bond as fellow – in Benjamin’s case, would be – exiles. As such, his is a tribute worth aspiring to.

Category: Politics, Reading, Research

Comments

7 Responses to “Kracauer, cultural studies and the Left”

  1. Adam
    September 20th, 2006 @ 1:35 pm

    This is the second time in as many months that I’ve seen contemporary Australia compared thoughtfully with Weimar Germany (the first was something that Meaghan Morris wrote, the source of which eludes me at present). The most disturbing thing about it is that the comparison seems so appropriately made. There is a kind of everyday drift that radicals aren’t able to address adequately. I wonder if some of the more publicly visible issues that they address are anything other than ideological snares (perhaps laid out half-knowingly by the government?). Meanwhile, when I read about ‘conditions that make people wretched’, I think of my old high school friends who are now taking up full-time call centre and data entry jobs, and ‘living’ on the weekends, or nestling into mortgages. I wonder: who are these people going to be after ten or twenty years?

  2. Danny
    September 20th, 2006 @ 4:09 pm

    Hey Melissa. Interesting post and thanks for the lead on Kracauer whose work I’ve never read. I can’t say my rantings were any less drunken lol, but they were enjoyable and our playwright friend’s recipe for Australian theatrical success (“Tits” + “David Williamson” = “Hit”) will unfortunately stay with me for a while to come.

    I am still struggling with the idea that if CS turned their attention to Steve Irwin that somehow fascism might be avoided. It seems to me that material published about “the everyday” in a “cultural studies journal” can only ever be quoted by the culture managers (journos etc.) as an example of how screwed up academics are, unless the academics provide some statistics that can be used by the culture managers to “prove something” or create a new storyline.

    Personally, I find it hard to see how CS’ much-needed scandalising of the ruling class academy has really had much of an impact on the processes that create the average Aussie’s emotional response to Steve Irwin and Peter Brock. If I was going to push the argument a little further, I sort of feel like the desire to connect with the “everyday” of media can also be a disavowal of the everyday structural/cultural reproduction within education and the university, where so many housing this desire reside. I know you aren’t unaware of those tensions, and I’m not accusing you of Buffy Studies-ism, but I do think that dynamic exists in Australia (and NZ) a lot because of the national resistance to a language of class and the desperate desire to fit in. So academia uses “popular culture” to guarantee its political potential or relevance with very little proof of this actually happening.

    So the question for me is “what is the best thing academics could do in this situation?” I don’t think journal articles are ever going to effect popular culture. Increasingly, I think that it’s by trying to think harder about the institutions we’re in, the histories they have, and to understand how they shape our perspectives and the stories we’re able to tell about “life”, or “culture”. An everyday of our own, attached to a not-everyday of some well-tested theoretical frameworks. A bit more rigor about interrogating what we share, or don’t, and how that affects our shared understanding of what we’re doing in our research and in the classroom.

    Unfortunately, despite our different hopes for CS, it seems to me that there is little energy in much of the field toward either. Thankfully, there are blogs!

  3. melgregg
    September 22nd, 2006 @ 8:38 am

    Hi Danny,

    Thanks for sharing this, although I certainly never claimed that ‘if CS turned their attention to Steve Irwin that somehow fascism might be avoided’! I was making a more general statement about what Williams would call a ‘structure of feeling’ that has emerged during Howard’s time in office. And I hardly agree that blogs are going to provide the role that Benjamin ascribed to Kracauer:

    “A ragpicker at daybreak – in the dawn of the day of revolution.”

  4. melgregg
    September 22nd, 2006 @ 10:52 am

    And Adam: I tried to leave a comment on your blog but couldn’t! Make sure you say hi at AoIR, it would be nice to meet you after all this time! M

  5. Adam
    September 23rd, 2006 @ 3:30 pm

    My blog? AoIR? Am I being confused with a different Adam, perhaps?

  6. melgregg
    September 24th, 2006 @ 11:35 am

    Yes sounds like it, eeek

  7. adam m
    October 9th, 2006 @ 12:05 am

    Hi DrMel,

    I think I stumbled onto this thread about two weeks too late. If only I were as articulate as the aforementioned Adam (who doesn’t have a blog). I don’t know what’s wrong with the comments on MY blog, it’s buggered. Bah!

    I’ll look out for you at the next event in Brisbania that I’m at. Something CCCS? Zed Marketday?? (they’re always fun!) Can’t see my calendar from here. *peers*

    I’m not a stalker, I promise. :/

    Anyway, see you around. :)

    - adam m

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