Aesthetic Redemption:Kracauar’s Cultural Criticism And Photography Theory

With the establishment of Weimar Republic and the maturity of capitalist production relations,abstract thinking mode exerts a subtle influence on human beings.Scientific rationality gradually becomes a new myth in the process of disenchantment,and the whole society falls into a dilemma of meaningless and fragmented modernity.Kracauar,in the torrent of the times,did not turn to the secularization of worshipping scientific rationality,nor did he turn to all kinds of religion-oriented thoughts.Instead,he reconciled his lapsarian historical ideas with the historical process of Marx Weber’s "de-mystification".At the same time,he was influenced by Zimmel’s research methods that he regarded "every detail of life" as possibilities of " discovering the totality of its meaning".And he used "The marginal and accustomed surface phenomenon of material reality" as the material to analyze the dilemma of the times,and finally found the consistency in the two different historical processes of "disenchantment" and "redemption".He believes that the abstract thinking mode brought by scientific rationality separates the material nature from matter itself and leads to the emptiness of meaning.Only by re-understanding the fragmental physical reality can we break the closed-loop of abstract thinking.Therefore,through the analysis and utilization of the content and form of popular culture and the photographic media with the fundamental characteristics of materiality,he launched the salvation of material reality in the predicament of Weimar era.The ultimate goal of "rehabilitate material reality" is to redeem the totality of human beings and in a certain level return to "a unified culture" that "saturated with meaning".