Introduction to Adorno, "Transparencies on Film" (1966)Author(s): Miriam B. HansenSource: New German Critique, No. 24/25, Special Double Issue on New German Cinema(Autumn, 1981 - Winter, 1982), pp. 186-198Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488049 .Accessed: 08/06/2011 19:05

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Introduction to Adorno, "Transparencies on Film" (1966)

by Miriam B. Hansen

"Technology opens up unlimited opportunities for art in the future, and even in the poorest motion picture there are moments when such opportunities are strikingly apparent. But the same principle that has opened up these opportunities also ties them to big business. A discus- sion of industrialized culture must show the interaction of these two factors: the aesthetic potentialities of mass art in the future, and its ideological character at present." (Adorno/Eisler, Composing for the Films)

If the reader of "Culture Industry Reconsidered" detected a "shift of emphasis," a modification of Adorno's thesis of "universal manipulation and delusion,"' the reader of "Transparencies on Film" may be even more surprised. First published in November 1966 (only three years after the radio lecture just mentioned), this essay seems to suspend some of the major fixations of Adorno's theory on Culture Industry. Moreover, it encourages a reading against the grain of Adorno's writings on film and mass culture which, for the most part, date from the period of his exile.2

1. Andreas Huyssen, "Introduction to Adorno [Culture Industry Reconsidered]," New German Critique, no. 6 (Fall 1975), pp. 3-11.

2. Besides the chapter entitled "Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), most of Adorno's reflections on mass culture focus on developments in the field of music, cf. his writings on jazz. popular music, and the mass reproduction of 'serious' music: "Uber Jazz" (1936), repr. in Moments Musicaux (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1964); "Uber den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hbrens" (1938), trans. in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen Books, 1978); as well as papers written during his tenure with the Princeton Radio Research Project: "A Social Critique of Radio Music," Kenyon Review, 7/2 (1945); "On Popular Music," Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences, 9/1 (1941); "The Radio Symphony," in Radio Research 1941, ed. Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton (New York: Harper, 1941). The theoretical groundwork of Adorno's critique of mass culture already takes shape in his study on Wagner, Versuch iiber Wagner, written in 1937-38 and first published in 1952 (English trans. London: NLB, 1980). Adorno's most detailed, most pragmatic contribution to questions of ideology and aesthetics of film,

Composing.for the Films,

written in 1944 together with Hanns Eisler, is usually omitted from this list because of its tricky publication history (see n. 34, below). Similarly neglected are the scattered but poignant remarks on film and culture industry in Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem

beschddigten Leben (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1951 ), a book of aphorisms and fragments begun in 1944; English translation, subtitled Reflections from Damaged Lift, by E.F.N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974).

186

Introduction to Adorno 187

The cinema, as one recalls from Dialectic of Enlightenment, was seen as an exemplary branch of a system which subordinated all aesthetics to a single ideological purpose: to reproduce the spectator/listener as a consumer. Within the cultural framework of monopoly capitalism any attempt to make a differ- ence was doomed to be assimilated and thus to serve the validation of the system as a whole; no alternative practice of film-making seemed conceiv- able.3 While Adorno basically maintained his and Horkheimer's indictment of Culture Industry for the administrative cultural order of the Federal Republic, the essay reprinted here takes as its point of departure precisely such an attempt to make a difference: the beginnings of an independent West German cinema in the wake of Oberhausen. Exchanging the view on a paralyzing totality for a more particular, even partial angle, Adorno sets out to reflect on problems inevitably confronted by any film-maker who conceives of an alternative practice under the given social and economic conditions. This shift of angle re-opens areas of speculation which seem stereotypically blocked in Adorno's earlier work, for instance the question of an aesthetics specific to film as well as the issue of reception.

In the context of Adorno's writings, film generally does not rate as a subject of aesthetics - however Adorno may transcend the boundaries of the traditional sense of that term - but is rather considered within the field of sociology of culture or criticism of ideology. The exclusion of film from the traditional arts, even their most avant-garde manifestations, hinges on the technological origins of the cinema, specifically the assumption that its aes- thetic techniques are secondary to its technology, the means of reproduction.

Quite apart from the detrimental influence of commercialism, aesthetic analyses of the motion picture easily become inadequate because it is rooted less in artistic wants [in der kiinstlerischen Konzeption] than in the fact that in the twentieth century optical and acoustic technic [sic] reached a definite stage, which is essentially unrelated, or related only very indirectly, to any possible aesthetic idea.4

Unlike music, in whose internal processes of liberation and reification Adorno discerned traces of technification even prior to its technological (re-)produci- bility (cf. his study on Wagner), the cinema does not have a tradition which figures as its original. As Adorno reiterates - with reference to Benjamin - the cinema's techniques of mass reproduction and distribution are the very basis of its artistic processes.

3. "Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system." Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cum- ming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), p. 129; German orig., Dialektik der Atufjirung (1944/ 1969), in: Theodor W. Adorno, Gesanmmelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), p. 150.

4. Hanns Eisler (and Theodor W. Adorno), Composing for the Fihnlms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), p. 63; German original (Adorno's version), repr. in Gesamnnelte Schriften, vol. 15 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 64.

188 Miriam Hansen

Apart from the fact that Adorno disregards the complex interaction and transformation of sources (the 19th century novel, painting, theater, the popular arts) that contributed to the shaping of film aesthetics,5 his hypostasi- zation of Benjamin's observation results in precisely that reductive view of which he accuses the latter: the confusion of technique and technology. In his famous response to Benjamin's Work of Art essay in 1936, Adorno re- emphasizes the "primacy of technique (Technologie)" in his own work on music and distinguishes the inner dialectics of that technique from the impact of technology (Technik), i.e. the changes brought about by mechanical repro- duction.6 Benjamin, in Adorno's view, collapses the dialectical relationship between these two with his political investment in technology, thereby surren- dering the concept of aesthetic technique, the internal organization of the object. "You under-estimate the technicality (Techniziteit) of autonomous art and over-estimate that of dependent art."7 Adorno is certainly correct in pointing out how marginal techniques unique to cinema, in particular radical practices of montage, are to commercial film production; mainstream cinema rather thrives on infantile narrative constructions of reality which it pretends simply to render photographically. Beyond this caveat, however, Adomo does not differentiate between levels of cinematic signification such as camera work, composition, lighting, or modes of editing: the logic of mechanical reproduction - inextricably bound up with economic dependency and ideo- logical complicity - so completely controls all processes of film production that any concept of artistic technique appears to be subsumed by it.x

5. Horkheimer and Adorno's linking of the srategies of the culture industry with certain categories of bourgeois aesthetics (e.g. catharsis, purposefulness without purpose. style, Ge- samtkunstwerk) seems to dwell on a level above the more concrete historical one referred to here. Cf. John Fell. Film and the Narrative Tradition (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974); Judith Mayne, "Mediation, the Novelistic, and Film Narrative," in: S.M. Conger & J.R. Welsch, eds., Narrative Strategies (Macomb, Ill.: Western Illinois University Press, 1980); for illuminating remarks on D.W. Griffith's use of 18th and 19th century painting see Russell Merritt, "On First Looking into Griffith's Babylon," Wide Angle. 3/1 (1979). Besides being a process of dilution and bastardization - Adorno and Horkheimer go so far as to call film the "mesalliance of novel and photography" - the formation of the cinema in relation to the other arts involved a good deal of repression, especially with regard to a parent as close as the theater; the repression of theatricality in favor of a novelistic-pictorial illusionism provides a point of return for alternative conceptions of the cinema. Cf. Rick Altman. "Introduction," Yule French Studies, 60 (1980), issue on Ciema/Sound. p. 1 3f.; Roland Barthes. "Diderot. Brecht, Eisen- stein" (1973), in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Heath, "Lessons from Brecht," Screen, 15/2 (Summer 1974), 103-128, and "On Screen, in Frame: Film and Ideology," Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 11, as well as other essays reprinted there.

6. Adorno, letter to Benjamin, March 18, 1936; repr. in Benjamin, Schriften. 1:3 (Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 1001-6; 1001. The issue is further complicated by the confusion, in Harry Zohn's translation, of the German term "Technologie" (which in Adorno's usage means "technique") with the English term "technology" (for which Adorno uses the word "'Tech- nik"); New Left Revieitw.

81 (Sept.-Oct. 1973), repr. in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Fredric Jameson (London: NLB, 1977), p. 121.

7. Ibid., p. 124. 8. Diane Waldman makes this point in "'Critical Theory and Film: Adorno and 'The Culture

Introduction to Adorno 189

The mechanisms that Adorno sees operating in the cinema, especially its techniques of illusionism, enhance the false identification of the particular with the universal which characterizes all products of the culture industry. The deceptive identity of image and referent validates the detail in itself and instantly links it to the cultural system as a whole, thus dispensing with its mediation through the structure of the individual work which, in Adorno's view, still provides an element of negation in autonomous art. The only aesthetic principle imperative to film - as to all consumer-oriented art - is that of effect, the elaborate calculation of the spectator's response down to the last nuance. Under the supremacy of effect, all previous art is disassembled into usable elements which in turn can be amalgamated into an infinite but meaningless variety of dazzling combinations - a tendency which the cine- ma manifests most comprehensively, in particular since the advent of sound. The fictive homogeneity of word, image and music - which Adorno traces back to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk - underlines the claim to veracity of each element and, by their perfect synchronization, ensures an affirmative stance towards the whole system. Such an analysis may be conclusive, but it closes off the possibility of difference within and beyond given techniques as well as the question of the actual efficiency of an aesthetics of effect. Norma- tively derived from an ideal of mediated totality which marks the precarious status of works of autonomous art, Adorno's notion of aesthetic technique cannot but lack a counterpart in works of dependent art. As long as film is simply subsumed under that category, there remains a lacuna in Adorno's speculations, a blind spot: the conceptualization of an aesthetics specific to the medium, however pre-conditioned and limited in scope.

In "Transparencies on Film," Adorno resumes his imaginary dialogue with Benjamin and, in a less involved, less ritualistic manner, also with Kracauer. At the same time, he seems to be conversing with an earlier self, the author of the position roughly delineated above. He introduces the stereotypi- cal "equation of technique and technology" in film, but recasts it as problem- atic. Referring to the critical debate over Chaplin, Adorno suggests a more complicated relationship between techniques proper to film and the overall artistic achievement of a film - a distinction translated here in Christian Metz's terms as 'cinematic' and 'filmic.'9 Throughout the essay, Adorno's

Industry' Revisited," New German Critique, no. 12 (Fall 1977), p. 57; her listing of "sound" among the shortcomings in Adorno's notion of film technique, however, needs qualification in light of Adorno's contribution to Conmposing for the Films - a text Waldman does not mention in her essay.

9. Metz, Language and Cinema, trans. Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1974), p. 47: "We shall callfilrnic. then, all the traits which appear in films (i.e., in the messages of the cinema), whether they are or are not peculiar to this means of expression, and no matter what idea one has of this specificity or of its absence. We shall call cinematic certain filmic facts which are supposed to play a part (or which one intends to make play a part) in one or the other of the codes specific to the cinema. The cinematic is but a part of the filmic. Certain phenomena are filmic and cinematic, others filmic but not cinematic." Useful as this distinction may be for purposes of translation, Adorno's essay illustrates how he tries to overcome the

190 Miriam Hansen

reasoning strives towards a conception of the filmic yet recognizes it as inseparable from the question of cinematic technique. His reflections actually proceed from various aspects of the latter: the photographic rendering of the object, the role of the camera, montage, conventions such as flashback and superimposition. The greatest stumbling block to a truly artistic use of the medium - as Adorno maintains in opposition to Kracauer - lies in the representational nature of the photographic process; therefore, in order to counterbalance the irreducible semblance of objectivity, an aesthetics of film would have to emphasize its inherent affinity with subjective modes of experi- ence as well as to acknowledge the role of intentionality in both representation and construction. However skeptical Adorno may remain in detail, he none- theless grants cinematic technique the status of aesthetic material - at least in the context of non-commercial film-making. Moreover, he modifies the rigorous standard by which autonomous art has to keep absolutely abreast of its technical development: in the case of the cinema - for which technical brilliance and commodity fetishim have become synonymous - a poverty of means, a self-conscious abstinence from perfection, may be more likely to achieve artistic standards of its own.

Another instance of self-revision may be perceived in Adorno's remarks on reception. The thesis of total manipulation and delusion, as has

been" pointed out often enough, smacks of an elitism similar to brands of cultural conservatism from which Adorno and Horkheimer try to dissociate them- selves. The indictment of the relentless manufacturing of consumers' needs easily blends into an attitude of contempt for those who allow their needs to be thus appropriated, and the critique of the cinema's overwhelming implemen- tation of effects cannot conceal an undertone of condescension for "those who are so absorbed by the world of the movie - by its images, gestures, and words - that they are unable to supply what would really make it a world (Kosmos)."' 0 Such undertones of elitism are refreshingly absent from "Transparencies on Film." What is even more astonishing, in light of Ador- no's well-known reservations against sociological reception studies," is his consideration of a discrepancy between the societally programmed structure

semiotic dichotomy of filmic/cinematic in favor of a more dialectical relationship between the two.

10. Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 127 (translation revised), German edition, p. 148. One of the uglier moments of this attitude (leaving aside the issue of racism implicit in Adorno's writings on jazz) can be found in "The Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (n. 2, above), p. 287: "'The assent to hit songs and debased cultural goods belongs to the same complex of symptoms as do those faces of which one no longer knows whether the film has alienated them from reality or reality has alienated them from the film, as they wrench open a great formless mouth with shining teeth in a voracious smile, while the tired eyes are wretched and lost above."

11. "Thesen zur Kunstsoziologie,0" Ohme Leitbild.: Pariva Aesthetica - the same volume that reprints "Transparencies on Film" - (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. 1967), p. 94-102. Cf. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, "Introduction to Reception Aesthetics," Nei' German Critique. no. 10 (Winter 1977), p. 31-33.

Introduction to Adorno 191

of the work and the actual spectator response. He distances himself from the proponent of critical thought (der Kritische) who, refraining from empirical analyses, shortcircuits the process of reception with the manipulative inten- tion of the product. Not that Adorno surrenders to the apologists of consumer- oriented art, whose hypocritical bow to the spectator only fixates the latter in a position of masochistic dependency. Rather he accuses them of actively assisting the culture industry in transforming the reified consciousness of the audience for its own purposes, as it were, by preventing that consciousness from changing on its own, "as it secretly and unadmittedly desires."

Moreover, Adorno presents a more dynamic view of the spectator appeal in the product itself, differentiating between official models of behavior and the unofficial ones which provide the attraction. While in Adorno's earlier writings the commercial tapping of repressed libidinal energies is condemned as a mere bait, a tantalizing of desublimated desire,12 "Transparencies on Film" emphasizes a subversive potential in the ambiguous layering of re- sponse patterns. What in another context might have figured as one more instance of standardization and pseudo-individuality - boys and girls osten- tatiously necking on the streets of European cities - now serves, in Adorno's grandfatherly perception, as support for the possibility that "the ideology of the culture industry contains the antidote to its own lie."

What is at stake in any critical analysis of reception is the status of the spectator as subject. As recent French theorists have argued, the major ideo- logical function of the cinematic apparatus is to produce a "subject-effect," to envelop the spectator in a hallucinatory coherence of perceptual identity.'3 Adorno and Horkheimer, in a similar vein, describe the cinema's strategies of illusionism, individualization and re-enchantment as an attempt to efface processes of reification and alienation from the consciousness of those who are themselves the object of such processes. The analysis of these mechanisms in Dialectic of Enlightenment, unlike that of semiotic-psychoanalytic film theory, situates them in a historical context, establishing them, among other things, as continuities of certain tendencies in bourgeois art. The dialectics of this historical perspective, even in the bleakest vision of Culture Industry, allows Adorno and Horkheimer to retain a trace of hope, grounded in the resistance of an albeit contingent subjectivity. In a draft omitted from the chapter on Culture Industry, "Das Schema der Massenkultur," they conclude that "human beings, as they conform to the technological forces of production which are imposed on them in the name of progress, are transformed into objects which willingly allow themselves to be manipulated and thus fall behind the actual potential of these productive forces." Yet in the very

12. Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 139ff.; German edition, pp. 161-64. 13. Cf. Jean Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,"

Film Quarterly, 28/2 (Winter 1974/75), and "The Apparatus," Camera Obscura, no. 1 (1976); Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier," trans. in Screen, 16/2 (1977); also cf. the discus- sion on "suture," summarized and critized by Heath, "On Suture," Questions of Cinema (n. 5, above).

192 Miriam Hansen

repetitiveness of the processes of reification, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, lies the hope that their success be limited: "Because human beings, as subjects, still constitute the limit of reification, mass culture has to renew its hold over them in an endless series of repetitions; the hopeless effort of repetition is the only trace of hope that the repetition may be futile, that human beings cannot be totally controlled."'4 The point of inversion, of a potential antithesis within the system, is not generated - as for Benjamin - by the internal logic of the productive forces, i.e. technology, but rests with the category of the subject, however historically emptied out and ideologically manufactured it may appear.

For Adorno, as for Horkheimer, the adherence to the category of the subject determines its form as one problematically derived from the bourgeois individual; inevitably, Benjamin's positive emphasis on the collective dimen- sions of mass culture became another bone of contention in their debates of the 1930s.'5 Adorno summarizes his defense of the concept of individuality as against the hegemony of a false collectivity - clearly a response to Benja- min - in his essay "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening": "In music, too, collective powers are liquidating an individuality past saving, but against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of collectivity."'6 The cinema, with its inherently collective mode of reception as well as the necessity of cooperation in produc- tion,'7 seems to preclude the aesthetic realization of individual intention as the only remaining act of negativity - both in the structure of the work itself and in the constitution of its subject. When Adorno, three decades later, revises his earlier, monolithic assumptions on reception in "Transparencies on Film," he not only grants the spectators a higher degree of contingency in terms of their status as subjects, but he also acknowledges the intrinsic collectivity of the cinema as a formal quality "in which the aesthetic and the sociological aspects of the medium converge." Abandoning his defensive stance against the cinema as a mass media, Adorno can even conceive of a "liberated" film which would have to "extricate its a priori collectivity from the mechanisms of unconscious and irrational influence" and enlist it "in the service of emancipatory intentions." Benjamin would not have disagreed.

14. Adorno, Gesammnelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 299-335; 331.

15. Adorno actually mobilizes the classical Marxist-Leninist argument against "spontan- eism" - as Andrew Arato points out (Essential Frankffirt School Reader, p. 216) - when he cautions Benjamin against identifying "the actual consciousness of actual workers" with proletarian consciousness and asks him to fundamentally reconsider the relationship of revolu- tionary intellectuals to the working class; (see letter of March 18, 1936, repr. in Aesthetics and Politics (n. 6, above), pp. 124-25.

16. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, p. 299. 17. The cooperative nature of film production, especially the necessity of "free planning"

which involves the composer from the beginning of a project, is positively emphasized, with reference to Eisenstein, in Composing for the Films (n. 4, above), p. 101; German edition, p. 98 and 133 (omitted from translation).

Introduction to Adorno 193

Remarkable as these speculations may appear when considered against the general tendency of Adorno's writings on mass culture, and film in particular, they do not necessarily convey earthshaking insights. In relation to the major projects of the later Adorno, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, "Transparencies on Film" will hardly assert the same significance as the chapter on Culture Industry in relation to the philosophical-historical enter- prise of Dialectic of Enlightenment or to Adorno's work on modem music. The choice of the essay's rather ambiguous title, "Filmtransparente," de- serves some attention. The trope of "transparencies," a succession of translu- cent images or slides, characterizes the format of the essay as a series of unconnected - though not unrelated - aperpus. As a projectionist of this arrangement, the author himself becomes a viewer, rather than someone more actively involved in the making and criticizing of film; he literally positions himself on the side of the audience. Adorno's observations do not presume the status of great in-sights - they are presented as something 'shining through,' transparent also connoting self-evident, even commonplace. They are 'reflec- tions,' too, not originals: most of the ideas arranged here for a continuous reading can be found - as isolated asides - scattered throughout Adorno's earlier writings. The visual configuration of the title finally points to the elusiveness of the medium itself: present only as a play of light and shadow, the cinema owes its life to the material means of signification - the appara- tus behind the spectators' back, the spectator him/herself - which its tech- niques constantly strive to render absent, invisible.

The other meaning implied in the German word "Transparent" is that of a banner, unfurled at political demonstrations. The cause in this case is that of Young German Cinema, which Adorno refers to as the "Oberhauseners," and the enemy is clearly the moribund West German film industry. 1966, the year in which "Transparencies on Film" was written, saw the production of first feature films by independent directors such as Volker Schldndorff (Der junge T5rless), Edgar Reitz (Mahlzeiten), Vlado Kristl (Der Brief) and Alex- ander Kluge (Abschied von Gestern). This miraculous output was made possible in part by grants from the Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film which had been founded, by decree of the Federal Secretary of the Interior, in February 1965. The relatively unrestrictive subsidizing practice of the Kura- torium was not to reign for long though; the Film Subsidies Bill of 1967 introduced a system which favored previously successful film-makers and subjected non-commercial projects to a screening process likely to encourage political censorship. In the interim year, as commercial lobbyists were active- ly promoting their interests in the wording of the bill, Adorno's publication of this essay in Die Zeit was undoubtedly perceived as an intervention on behalf of the independent film-makers.

It usually takes two people to carry a banner. The person whom Adorno seems to be lending his support for the cause is Alexander Kluge, whose name may be absent from the essay although his influence is certainly not. Kluge's aesthetics and politics of film were themselves significantly formed by his

194 Miriam Hansen

friendship with Adorno. " Through Adorno, Kluge - who got his doctoral degree in Law - was introduced to Fritz Lang, who had returned from the United States to direct Das Indische Grabmal in Berlin. Lang had no particu- lar use for Kluge, nor was Kluge greatly impressed with the production style imposed upon Lang by Artur Brauner & Co.; he spent most of his time sitting in the cafeteria writing stories. These were the beginning of a collection entitled Lebensidufe (Curricula Vitae), published in 1962, of which the story of Anita G. inspired Kluge's first feature film, Abschied von Gestern (Yester- day Girl). As his own literary activities were the mediating element for Kluge's practices in film, so was the paradigm of literary discourse, in particular that of literary modernism, to become a significant aspect of his concept of cinema. It may have been this detour, or rather the appropriation of a traditional art form for an aesthetics of film, in addition to Kluge's ground- ing in Critical Theory, that caused Adorno to drop his defenses against film as a mass media and consider the possibility of an alternative cinematic practice. "If Kluge was influenced by Adorno, then in turn Adorno's later writings on film owed much to his friendship with Kluge without which they might not have been written."'9

According to Kluge, Adorno's attitude towards film was based on the apothegm: "I love to go to the movies; the only thing that bothers me is the image on the screen.'"20 Beyond the hyperbolic simplicity of the quotation, Kluge refers to Adorno's fundamental mistrust of the visual immediacy of film which he and Horkheimer had diagnosed as one of the culture industry's most effective ideological mechanisms. Kluge himself endorses that position (but only to a certain degree) when he stresses the function of the cuts, the "empty spaces between shots (Leerstellen)," in counteracting the obtrusive referentiality of the image flow; it is in these ruptures that the spectator's own imagination can insert itself.2' The obvious answer for Kluge - as for Adorno and Eisler forty years ago - is a radical practice of montage. Juxta- posing the heterogeneous elements of the cinematic material, translating their inherently antithetical character into expression, montage "raises them to the level of consciousness," in Adorno/Eisler's words, "and takes over the function of theory.'"22 Only through montage which negates the affirmative

18. For Kluge's relationship to Adorno as well as Kluge's strategies of a "literarization" of the cinema, see present author's "Alexander Kluge: Crossings between Film, Literature, Critical Theory," Filmn und Literatur, The Thirteenth Amherst Colloquium on German Litera- ture, forthcoming (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1982).

19. Heide SchlUipmann, letter to author, November 28, 1981. 20 Klaus Eder/Alexander Kluge, Uhner Dramnaturgien: Reibungsverluste (Munich: Hanser,

1981), p. 48. 21, In interviews as early as that with Enno Patalas and Frieda Grafe in Filnkritik, 10/9

(1966), 490, and as recent as the one in Pflasterstrand, no. 69-70 (Dec.-Jan. 1979-80), p. 17, Kluge cites Adorno's apothegm in support of his own concept of montage.

22. Composing for the Films, p. 73; German ed., p. 73. Despite their pervasive critique of Eisenstein's notions of synaesthesia - in particular as realized in his cooperation with Prokof- iev on Alexander Nevskv - Eisler and Adorno explicitly resort to his concept of montage but more radically extend it to the antithetical relationship of sound and image track.

Introduction to Adorno 195

appeal of the image and interrupts the chains of associative automatism can film become a medium of cognition. Adorno's plea for montage, however, is not made without reservations. In "Transparencies on Film" - as in his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory2 - he cautions against the aes- thetic viability of the principle of "shock" (in the Benjaminian sense of the term) and also problematizes the role of subjectivity in the juxtaposition of intentionally unmediated elements. The latter part of the argument seems to be an ad hominem critique of Kluge whose concept of montage tends to occlude the participation of the constructing subject in its very refusal to posit mean- ing - not unlike certain 'impersonal' directions of modernist poetry.

Another trace of Adorno's dialogue with Kluge can be seen in the attempt to base an aesthetics of film on its structural affinity with the stream of associations in the human mind. The raw material of film, as Adorno sug- gests, should be defined - regardless of the cinema's technological ori- gins - by the movement with which involuntary images succeed each other before the inner eye. This somewhat unexpected turn of argument serves to recuperate the much misused mimetic impulse of film, resuming Adorno's remarks - in Minima Moralia - about the "radical naturalism" which film could oppose to a superficial familiar realism, but also reminiscent of Benja- min's assertion that the artistic function of film is to make visible the "equip- ment-free aspect of reality"; Adorno's linking of "the technological medium par excellence" with the concept of beauty of nature (dem Naturschiinen) seems to echo Benjamin's ironic vision of film as "the blue flower in the land of technology.'"24 For Kluge, the structural affinity between film and the stream of associations establishes a utopian tradition of cinema in people's minds to which technological inventions like camera, projector and screen only responded on an industrial scale; the trope of "the film in the head of the spectator" provides a link between Kluge's concept of montage and his program of the cinema as an oppositional public sphere (Gegen6ffentlich- keit).25 For Adorno, who categorically refrained from putting theoretical

23. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 90, 231-34. 24. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations,

trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 233 (translation revised); German version, Illuminationen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 157. For Adorno's earlier projec- tion of a "radical naturalism" based on the stream of associations see Minima Moralia (Berlin, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1951), p. 266: "The radical naturalism to which the technology of film lends itself would dissolve all surface coherence of meaning and thus present an antithesis to any familiar realism. Film would blend into the associative stream of images, deriving its form from the pure, immanent construction of such images." (Engl. transl.-revised-p. 142)

25. See excerpts from Kluge's writings below, and in Wide Angle, 3/4 (1980), 26-33. The concept of an oppositional or counter public sphere is developed in Oskar Negt/Alexander Kluge, Offentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von biirgerlicher und proletar- ischer Offentlichkeit (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1972), a study dedicated to Adorno and in fact more intimately related - in scope, rhetoric, and impact - to a work like Dialectic of Enlight- enment than to Habermas's Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (1962) from which it borrows the title term. For Kluge's concept of the cinema as an oppositional public sphere see: Michael Dost/ Florian Hopf/Alexander Kluge, Filmwirtschaft in der BRD und in Europa: Gitterdlimmnerung in

196 Miriam Hansen

discourse into political practice,26 the grounding of film aesthetics in an associational mode of experience has implications in epistemological terms rather than terms of practical applicability.

The images of the interior monologue, Adorno observes, are set off against each other in their very movement and thereby resemble the flow of writing under our eyes which is similarly fixed in its discrete signs; a little later in the essay, Adorno refers to the practice of montage as arranging things "in a constellation akin to that of writing." The analogy of film to written language, however, is more ambiguous than the neutral tone of these remarks may suggest. The exact same observation appears in the draft omitted from the chapter on Culture Industry (1942) - but is cited as a further instance of the cinema's inherent totalitarian bias. In the "rulers' dream of the mummifica- tion of the world," mass culture serves as the "priestly hieroglyphics" which speaks to its patrons in images congealed into allegories. This kind of writing, in Adorno and Horkheimer's indictment, functions as a script, in the sense of Vor-schrift, spelling out orders of false identity. Its secret code - that of monopoly capitalism - is all the more insidious in that its author remains invisible ("no shepherd but a herd"' ).27 The transition from image to writing, which for Dialectic of Enlightenment culminates in the techniques of mass culture, characterizes the absorption of all art under the laws of commodity fetishism: accordingly, for instance, Adorno analyzes Wagner's "Leitmotiv" as an allegorization of expressive gesture which has reached the stage of complete reification in commercial film music.21

Yet only as figurations of writing can elements of the phenomenal world be "deciphered." As Adorno and Horkheimer assert in their methodological preface, dialectics reveals every image as writing, makes it readable in a language that is more than "a mere system of signs."'" As critical thought

Raten (Munich: Hanser, 1973), especially pp. 65ff. Also cf. present author's essay on Kluge's contribution to Gernmany in Autumn, in this issue of New GerLman Critique.

26. Kluge paraphrases - and to some degree defends - Adorno's refusal to let pragmatic political concerns interfere with the serious work of theory which is in itself a mode of praxis (Ulmer Dranaturgien [n. 20, above], p. 47f.). Kluge also talks about Adorno's ambivalent relationship to the practices of the Ulm Institute (which Kluge and others had founded in 1962 as the first academy for young film-makers): Adorno, who was regularly informed about the Institute's projects, called one morning in 1968 to suggest, in a rather agitated manner, that they were to make a film about Franz Josef Strauss - with Alfred Edel as the protagonist. Both these suggestions were rejected as unrealistic at the time (and Strauss did not come to power that year, as Adorno had feared); yet in 1980, when Strauss was contending for the chancellorship, Kluge, Schl6ndorff and two other film-makers collaborated on a film about Strauss (though certainly not played by Edel), The Candidate. which was released a few months before the federal elections and thus presented an attempt to create a public sphere for an oppositional political discourse.

27. "Das Schema dcr Massenkultur" (n. 14, above), pp. 332-35. 28. Versuch iber Wagner (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 40-42. 29. Dialektik cder Aufk.lcirung, p. 41; last part of sentence omitted in translation, p. 24. The

dialectical ambiguity of "writing" in Adorno's philosophy is obviously indebted to Benjamin's

Introduction to Adorno 197

arranges phenomena in "constellations" in which certain qualities may be judged positively while having a negative connotation in others,30 Adorno's reference to film as a form of writing cannot be classified either way. In his treatment of film as mass culture, the condemnatory tone seems unequivocal; in "Transparencies on Film," by contrast, the notion of film as writing is reframed in the context of an alternative practice. If an aesthetics of film is advised to reconstruct an associational mode of experience in constellations akin to writing, this means nothing less than that it should aspire to the level of self-conscious construction by which - in Adorno's view - all truly mod- ern art assumes the function of dialectical theory.3' Only then would film cease to be a script, which imposes a literal reading on the spectator, and become dcriture - which requires a critical deciphering. Here again Ador- no's speculations can be seen as crossing with Kluge's endeavors, in particu- lar his concept of montage as an interference of discourses which attempts to provoke a more active participation on the part of the spectator.

The dynamics of influence between Adorno and Kluge suggest a more complex re-reading of Adorno's writings on film and mass culture than the distinction between early and late can grasp. The handy formula "shortly before his death. . ."32 - evoking the narrative convention of death-bed conversion scenes - neglects the elements of alterity already implicit in the writings of the die-hard critic of Culture Industry. Adorno and Horkheimer's emphasis on the illegitimate and anarchic beginnings of the cinema, its affinity with the circus and the roadshow, their preference for marginal genres like the grotesque and the funnies or even some varieties of the musical, their repeated contrasting of the sound film with the less stream-lined products of the silent era - all these swervings from the main thesis point to a subversive potential which one day - on a self-conscious level of construction - could provide the negativity essential to a different kind of cinema. In this spirit,

concept of allegory, from The Origin of the Germant Tragic Drama to the comprehensive fragments on Baudelaire and Paris.

30. On the function of "constellations" in Adorno's methodology see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Franl/flrt Institute (1977; New York: The Free Press, 1979), ch. 6.

31. Situating film in the context of modernism in the traditional arts, Adorno arrives at an almost Benjaminian conclusion when he grants a paradigmatic revolt against Art as specific to the aesthetics of film: "While by its immanent logic film tries to rid itself of any resemblance to art - as if that contradicted its own aesthetics - by this very rebellion it remains and expands art. Such a contradiction, which the cinema is prevented from really acting out by its commercial ties, is the vital condition of all truly modern art." ("Dic Kunst und die Kinste," Ohne Leitbild [n. 11, above], p. 191.)

32. Following the rather pertinent use of that phrase in Huysscn's introduction to "Culture Industry Reconsidered" (n. 1, above), p. 10, the formula, combined with a single evidence of Adorno's alleged 'retraction' (of his "theory of the total commercialization and manipulation of culture"), has made its way into American writings on Adorno and mass culture; cf. Thomas Andrae, "Adorno on Film and Mass Culture," Jump Cut, no. 20 (May 1979), p. 36, and - in a slightly subtler tone - Waldman (n. 8, above), p. 60.

198 Miriam Hansen

Kluge appropriated certain positions - even the more irredeemable ones - as well as certain of Adorno's tropes, images and examples for his own work,

re-writing them in his own film practice and theorizing. The active re-writing of Adorno's discourse (and the interweaving of it with, for example, that of Benjamin, Brecht, and forms of literary modernism) by another person, a younger friend whom he respected as a creative artist, might have prompted Adorno to reconsider those very positions and arrange them in a different constellation. The most notable result of this short-lived period of reconsider- ation was the re-publication, in 1969, of Composing for the Films, a study that belies any sterotypical view of Adorno as a merely elitist, merely theoretical critic of mass culture.33 Written together with composer Hanns Eisler in the early forties, the book was first published - in an English translation - in 1947 under Eisler's name alone because Adorno did not wish to be drawn into the McCarthyist attacks waged against Eisler's brother Gerhart at the time. Twenty years after its East German publication in 1949, Adorno authorized a reconstituted German version with a new preface, expressing his hope to continue the study and theory of film music - in cooperation with Alexander Kluge. The Brechtian bias of Composing for the Films - its emphasis on interruption, quotation, gesture - is generally attributed to Eisler, whose friend and collaborator is acknowledged by the authors in their joint foreword. Leaving aside Adorno's precarious relationship with Brecht (an understate- ment) as well as the question of authorship34, the Brechtian bias appears to characterize the enterprise as a whole: the attempt to conceive of a functional transformation of the institution of cinema with given materials and in opposi- tion to actual social and political conditions. Adorno's assuming authorship of Composing for the Films towards the end of his life perhaps indicates that he more than ever granted such transformation as not only necessary but even already under way and needing support - in the efforts and intentions of independent German film-makers after Oberhausen. For any continuation of Critical Theory committed to alternative practices in mass culture, this strong- ly suggests following Kluge's example and embarking on a more imaginative, more pragmatic re-reading of Adorno's writings than academic Marxism and Film Theory in this country have attempted so far.

33. For a helpful exception to that tendency see Philip Rosen, "Adorno and Film Music: Theoretical Notes on Composing for the Films," Yale French Studies. 60 (1980), 157-82.

34. Adorno gives his version of the book's publication history in the 1969 preface (now included in the English reprint), and the editorial postscript to vol. 15 of Adorno's Gesaimmelte Schriften more or less supports this version. It adds that Adorno - in private correspon- dence --claimed to have written at least nine tenths of the book. This claim can be substantiated by stylistic analysis - at least, that is, with regard to Adorno's edition of the text. Eisler's edition (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1949) straightens out some of Adorno's mannerisms, gives a stronger political emphasis to certain aesthetic observations, and plays down the criticism of Eisenstein and Prokofiev. One might agree with Hartmut LUck that there exists no original text, to be privileged by interpretation, though not accept the reductive bent of his polemical charges: "Anmerkungen zu Theodor W. Adornos Zusammenarbeit mit Hanns Eisler," in Die neue Linke nachI Adorno, ed. W.F. Schoeller (Munich: Kindler, 1969), pp. 141-57.