Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
at the 1979 Edinburgh film festival and translations of texts by Claire Johnston and Christine Gledhill), and that the paradigmatic impulses of this work, in particular Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” were absorbed, criticized, and pushed further. The point was not just to rehearse the apparatus-based critique of masculinist cinema but also to conceptualize female subjectivity in the cinema in terms other than absence and negativity; to offer accounts of cinematic pleasure that did not simply revolve around classical psychoanalytic categories of voyeurism, fetishism, and castration but that, within the larger framework of Critical Theory, had recourse to anthropology, phenomenology, and other discourses, as well as to early film history.13 These efforts had an enabling influence on my own work, beginning with my essay on Rudolph Valentino and female spectatorship, of which an early version appeared in Frauen und Film.
There was also a more general, if indirect, lineage between Frauen und Film and Critical Theory. The notion of women’s cinema as counter-cinema, and of a journal as a medium of organization, expression, critique, and debate, was part of a discourse—and a vital ensemble of practices—indebted to the idea of the public sphere, in particular alternative and oppositional forms of publicness. If Habermas’s book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) had been the basis for the militant demand for publicness (general access, transparency, discussion) so central to the protest movement around 1968, Negt and Kluge’s response to Habermas, Public Sphere and Experience (1972), became the key text for the new social movements of the 1970s (women’s and gay movements, urban grassroots organization, pedagogic and environmentalist causes, etc.). That book broadened Habermas’s category of the public from the formal conditions under which individuals could speak and act regardless of origin and status to a more comprehensive understanding of the public as a “social horizon of experience,” grounded in the subjects’ “context of living” (Lebenszusammenhang), that is, the lived relationality of social and material, affective and imaginative re/production.14
The concept of experience (Erfahrung) that Negt and Kluge invoked resonates deeply with the tradition of Critical Theory, especially its emphatic elaboration in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno. Even in its ordinary usage, the German term Erfahrung—with its etymological roots of fahren (riding, journeying, cruising) and Gefahr (danger, peril)—does not have as much of an empiricist connotation as its English counterpart, inasmuch as it stresses the subject’s precarious mobility rather than a stable position of perception vis-à-vis an object. Benjamin, theorizing the conditions of possibility of Erfahrung in modernity, had linked its historic decline with the proliferation of Erlebnis (immediate but isolated experience) under the conditions of industrial capitalism; in this context, Erfahrung crucially came to entail the capacity of memory—individual and collective, involuntary as well as cognitive—and the ability to imagine a different future.
For Negt and Kluge, writing at a time when experience had allegedly all but vanished, the fragmentation, alienation, and blockages of experience were themselves already part of experience (persisting despite lamentations of its decline), along with needs and fantasies in response to that condition. Hence they saw the political significance of the public as that of a social horizon or matrix in which individual lived experience could be recognized in its relationality and collective dimension, even as—and not least because—the dynamics of market-driven media worked to appropriate and abstract that experience. In his writings and films, Kluge offered a theory of cinema as a public sphere, with aesthetic devices that encouraged viewers to mobilize their own experience; at the same time, he situated the cinema in relation to a larger, heterogeneous and unstable public sphere in which traditional bourgeois forms of publicness were cohabitating and competing with those spawned and marketed by the new media (then referring to the increasingly privately owned electronic media).
Understanding the public in terms of this conceptualization of experience has been a guiding framework in my thinking about cinema, in particular early cinema and its relations to modernity. It has steered me toward questions concerning the relationship between institutional norms, like those associated with the classical Hollywood paradigm, and the unpredictable dynamics of mass-mediated publicness (as in the case of the Valentino craze). Today, I find Negt and Kluge’s insistence on the mixed, conjunctural, rapidly forming and disintegrating character of contemporary public spheres remarkably prescient as I am trying to understand the transformations of publicness and experience in the digitally based media environment—and the implications of these developments for cinema, film theory, and film history.
Sketching these intersections of Critical Theory and film, ones I consider important to the history of the present book, makes me keenly aware of the distance between American cinema studies circa 1980 and the sets of questions, concerns, and knowledges that had been part of my luggage.15 This was particularly the case with the concept of the public sphere, which I took to offer the possibility of mediating the textual and apparatus-based analysis of film with social, cultural, and political concerns, and of situating the history of formal-stylistic development in relation to the longer-term histories of modernization and modernity, including changes in gender roles and sexuality. But the word publicness was all but impossible to find in the academic’s dictionary, at least until the late 1980s when it burst onto the scene in a wide range of disciplines (e.g., anthropology, philosophy, history, area studies, literary studies) and discourses (e.g., postcolonial, feminist, gay and lesbian). The hesitation, even then, with which the concept entered cinema studies may have been due to the primary reliance of these debates on Habermas’s book, which is not particularly helpful when it comes to technologically mediated forms of publicness (besides, cultural studies seemed to offer a simpler, more easily adaptable alternative).
The broader reception of Critical Theory in English-language contexts, of course, dates back to the 1970s, thanks in large part to the scholarship of Fredric Jameson, Martin Jay, and Susan Buck-Morss. 16 And there was the phenomenal success of Benjamin’s work, beginning with Hannah Arendt’s edition of Benjamin’s Illuminations (1969), followed by Reflections (1978), which was perceived as a novel and different type of writing on literary and cultural objects. Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” eventually entered the canon of classical film theory and, along with his writings on Baudelaire and the Arcades Project, became an important source for the exploration of early cinema’s relationship to modernity, as well as reflections on cinema and the postmodern.17
However, the bulk of commentary—exegesis, critique, transformation—of Critical Theory, including Benjamin, took place in the contexts of German Studies and of critical social and political theory, specifically in such journals as New German Critique and Telos. Founded in 1973, New German Critique (whose editorial board I joined in 1984) sought not only to make key texts available in translation and to situate them historically but also to develop the critical and cross-disciplinary impulses of that tradition for different times and a wider range of topics and fields, including the visual arts, cinema, and the new media. Following a double issue on New German Cinema (1981–82), we published a special issue on Weimar film theory (1987), which included essays by Tom Levin, Thomas Elsaesser, Schlüpmann, Koch, and Richard Allen. (It also included my first article on Benjamin, cinema, and experience, “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,” of which some remnants still haunt the present book.) In later years, there were special issues on Kluge, Kracauer, and Fassbinder; on Edgar Reitz’s Heimat; on Weimar mass culture, Nazi cinema, film and exile; and on postwall cinema and transnational cinemas; among others.
Beginning in the 1990s one could observe a more differentiated reception of Critical Theory in a range of fields, in particular literature, philosophy, and art. While this new wave of discovery owed much to the availability of more and better translations, it also had something to do with a renewed interest in aesthetics, which had been banished first by semiotics, then by new historicism and cultural studies. Benjamin offered a theory of aesthetics qua aisthesis, more comprehensive than a work’s formal and stylistic features, linked to his inquiry into the transformation of sensory perception and experience in modernity. Adorno’s microanalyses of literary and musical works demonstrated a dialectical mode of reading that took seriously these