The Actuality of Adorno

This chapter details Alexander Kluge's acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving a prize named for Theodor W. Adorno. Kluge met Adorno when he was twenty-four years old and working as an attorney in Frankfurt. Adorno was a friendly and communicative man of his day. However, when it came to his work, he was a man of extreme incorruptibility and strict earnestness. In order to describe him more accurately, Kluge cites a central point in his thinking. He then mentions Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative: every moral individual should plan his actions such that they could provide maxims for a universal system of laws. Friedrich Nietzsche radicalized this principle: one should always act such that one could live with one's behavior knowing that one would have to repeat one's actions for all eternity. Adorno would presumably find Nietzsche's idea more lively and practical than Kant's formulation, but Nietzsche's phrasing would have been too existential for him, meaning irrelevant compared to the practical experiences of the 1940s. Adorno thus presents a more practical and decisive standard. Public expression, learning and education, in fact every expression of life, he says, exists under the postulate that Auschwitz not repeat itself. One sees in this imperative of Adorno's a sentence that repeats itself: There is no praxis without theory.

Medialization—Musealization

This chapter evaluates Alexander Kluge's discussion of the tension between “medialization” and “musealization.” Kluge thinks that the word “medialization” primarily alludes to “television,” but when all its parts are examined, then the “long-distant vision” that the word “tele-vision” implies has nothing at all to do with any of the television stations he knows. Medialization could be generally translated as mediation, but then there must be immediate experience if there are plenty of mediated experiences on the other side. However, Kluge cannot say that as much immediate experience must be saved, preserved, or organized as possible because the principle of immediate experience is a purely private matter. He then suggests that there is a way of dealing with temporalities and modes of experience that can be quite differentiated. Only when all of these differentiations come together is reality rich, which means they are also all real. The isolation or hegemony of one temporal mode over others, even if it were the polite optative, would essentially be a dictatorship of unreality. This would already be the factual contribution, the machinery, leading to the loss of history. If the concept of “musealization” is taken seriously, understood correctly, and interpreted within this context, then it can only mean labor against the loss of history.

No Farewell to Yesterday

This chapter studies Alexander Kluge's reflections on the organizational politics that gave rise to New German Cinema as seen through the uncertainty of cinema's future in the new millennium. It has been nearly fifty years since a group of young filmmakers, who up until that point had distinguished themselves only with shorts, spoke up at the Short Film Festival in Oberhausen. In their now-famous Oberhausen Manifesto they demanded a renewal of the intellectual attitude in filmmaking in a direction toward authenticity and away from commerce; an intellectual center for German film, meaning film education; and opportunities for young filmmakers to make their first films. The Kuratorium junger deutscher Film (Board for Young German Film) emerged out of the final demand with an endowment of five million marks. North Rhine-Westphalia's funding agency for short film, which formed the foundation of the Oberhausen group, added up to 800,000 marks distributed over six years. A shift in German film occurred right from the start. At that point, the history of film was seventy years old. What later grew out of the Oberhausen movement up until Rainer Werner Fassbinder's death filled a quarter of this history. This included lots of mistakes, a lot of claims to fame, variety, enthusiasm, and many works that have enriched the history of film.

A Plan with the Force of a Battleship

This chapter explores Alexander Kluge's retrospective evaluation of Soviet avant-garde cinema practices. Kluge recounts Sergei Eisenstein's plan in 1927 to film Capital, “based on the scenario by Karl Marx.” During the following two years, Eisenstein pursues his plan, which no one is willing to finance. Kluge sees Eisenstein's grand plan to film Capital as a kind of imaginary quarry. One can find fragments there, but one may also discover that there is nothing to be found. Dealing in a respectful way with the plans of a great master like Eisenstein is similar to excavating an ancient site; one discovers more about oneself than actual shards and treasures. Kluge suggests that “today we experience the proliferation of existent conditions. Objective reality has outstripped us, but we also have reason to fear the mass of subjectivity that eludes our consciousness.” In 2008, it is dangerous to confront this reality with the method and the expectations of Marx: one becomes discouraged. Kluge then provides a definition of images.