Abstract
This essay will examine a group of early texts by Siegfried Kracauer that pertain to the cinema and the pleasures it invites. Situating film in relation to other phenomena of modern life, these texts map out a landscape of desire and its modes of production. In doing so, they could contribute to a conceptualization of a history of pleasure, as Thomas Elsaesser has suggested for the study of Weimar cinema in a recent essay.2 Kult der (Cult of Diversion), Die kleinen Ladenmadchen gehen ins Kino (The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies) and Das Ornament der Masse (The Mass Ornament) are central texts which are not only long overdue for critical evaluation of Kracauer's writings in the United States they also invite an examination of the structuring of desire that is highly relevant today. Kracauer's central category in this enterprise is the concept of diversion by which the cinema is thrown into a nexus of discourses that is torn between modern regression and radical change. As a handy attribute, the term Zerstreuung (diversion)3 acquired fashionable status in the 1920s, recurring on the pages of the bourgeois press, and elegantly combining disdain for the new medium and its uncultivated adherents with an obsessive fascination. Kracauer was one of the first to pay serious attention to the mechanisms of diversion which he closely
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