Kracauer, Bachofen, and the “bedeutungsleere Naturfundament”

Abstract

In his 1927 essay “Die Photographie,” Siegfried Kracauer attributes to photography the ability to intervene in the dialectic, as old as history itself, between nature and thought. Paradoxically, precisely because photography can only reproduce meaningless fragments of the visible world in its attempt to offer a total, gapless coverage of reality, its failure can render the process of signification visible. This wager might suggest a course out of the perpetual relapse into myth that has attended human thought since it first began to free itself from nature. Yet what image of nature allows Kracauer to make such a claim for photography in the first place? To answer this question, this article turns to Kracauer’s often-overlooked citation of Bachofen, in order to identify an uneasy co-presence in Kracauer’s essay of two entwined historical narratives concerning the relationship between freedom and necessity: one is a universalizing, civilizational narrative about humankind’s development from mythic ensnarement in blind nature towards rationality; the other is more specific to capitalism as a particular social arrangement. Thinking about the coincidence of these two narratives can reveal the generative tensions within Kracauer’s essay, tensions that themselves index an important moment in the development of Critical Theory in the 1920s.