Where is the Future?
I’ve been reading a lot lately about this guy named Siegfried Kracauer. He was a sociologist and cultural analyst in Weimar Germany. He was right about a lot, but was mostly marginalized—and he’s largely been neglected since then. What makes Kracauer special is how he was able to critique the Right but also the Left. Anybody can critique the Right, but so often the critique of the Left gets overlooked (or is done in a cartoonishly stupid way).
Kracauer was, in my view, the most insightful and accurate thinker of the so-called Frankfurt School—but its other members like Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin get all the attention. This is unfortunate for a few reasons—they are vague and abstract, while Kracauer is more grounded and clear. They also don’t critique the Left, and communism, in the way Kracauer does.
Kracauer was not afraid to harshly critique the Left, and it cost him opportunities within the Frankfurt School. Adorno edited some of his articles so much that they ended up barely containing any of Kracauer’s own ideas.
Kracauer’s critique of the Left is crystallized in his review of the 1932 German film Kuhle Wampe. As Kracauer scholar Dagmar Barnouw puts it: “He saw the decisive mistake of the film’s composition in the sharply contrasting visual presentation of the resignation of unemployed middle-aged, petty bourgeois workers and the unalloyed optimism and exuberance of unemployed proletarian youth. This juxtaposition was clearly meant to demonstrate that the old, tired social democracy would be replaced, inevitably and irresistibly, by young, vital communism.”1
It seems to me that Kracauer hit the nail on the head with this. There was this sort of thoughtless hope and trust that the youth would energetically embrace some kind of communist idea that would carry us all into the future. Still today I think there is this same naïve blind faith that the youth with their energy and optimism will naturally achieve some kind of ultraleftism and the future will be utopian. Or rather, there was—maybe that time has already passed. It was sort of the original motor behind Obama 2008—if you remember those days, he used this newfangled thing called “Facebook” a lot, which no politician had ever done before. It made his campaign seem “youthful.” His slogan, of course, was “Hope and Change.” It was all very much about the youth changing things to make the future better in some vague way.
That burnt out almost immediately, of course. Something similar came back years later when Bernie Sanders ran, and that spread to AOC and into a few other places. The Parkland students were kind of part of that same thing. But in 2023, that stuff seems very outdated, which is ironic, since it was all about being this youthful future-oriented thing. Their future ended pretty fast, and suddenly became musty old news. (In retrospect, it was fitting, and telling, that the elderly grandpa Bernie Sanders was the driving force of this “new youthful” future).
But the status quo is as old and crusty as it gets—in both physical appearance and neoliberal ideology, Joe Biden is as outdated as can be. So there’s no future there either.
So where is the future today? There’s as little future today as there was in Kracauer’s Germany of the early 1930s. Yet that was a time of great leaps in technology and science—radio, the automobile, airplanes, movies, and much more, were widely available for the first time. The world had never seemed so open before. The future had arrived, and it was amazing.
Yet there also was no future, in social, political, and cultural terms. The assumption was that “young vital communism” would “inevitably and irresistibly” replace the tired wobbly old democracy. That the futuristic technology which was so inevitable and irresistible would somehow be mirrored in the social, political, and cultural spheres. That’s not what happened.
This is all happening again, of course. We hear more than ever about the miracles of new technology—artificial intelligence, anti-aging bioscience, and on and on. And there was a sense that the wave of young progressivism would inevitably carry society into a shiny future. That progressive cultural values could be put into art and entertainment and it would permeate everything irresistibly.
But none of that happened. We have a technological future but no social/political/cultural future. And we know how that ends.
Dagmar Barnouw, Critical Realism: History, Photography, and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 138.