Selected Publications
- The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America (Berkeley: U of California Press, 2016).
- Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture [with Kristy Rawson]; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
- Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer [with Gerd Gemünden], Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.
- No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005);
- “Hollywood, Hitler, and Historiography: Film History as Cultural Critique,” in Cultural Critique no. 91 (Fall 2015), 167-89.
FRIAS Project
Critical Theory in “Postcritical” Times
In this project, I pursue a series of linked investigations into the place of Critical Theory in the present. Each inquiry is prompted by a specific constellation in which the work of the Frankfurt School figures either historically or conceptually in relation to the current media, political, and academic landscape. One such constellation arises from the alt-right’s (ab)use of critical theory in its ostensible critique of „cultural Marxism.“ Taking seriously the mediated cultural formation of the alt-right, I first reconstruct the appropriation of critical theory as an internet meme before turning to the historical work of critical theory itself to analyze that meme’s fascist cultural logics. A second constellation derives from current populist and authoritarian trends in Europe and North America, which I read in light of critical theory’s historical analyses of propaganda. Here, the argument is that critical theory harbors tools to decode the political rhetoric of the present. A third constellation concerns the proposed shift, within the humanities, away from the project of critique – a shift that in my view misconstrues the history of that project. Engaging carefully with arguments about the limits of critique, I aim to show that critical theory provides a set of useful caveats against postcritical overreach in the age of “post-truth” and “alternative facts.” The film and media work of Alexander Kluge, finally, provides my fourth constellation, which centers on what Kluge calls the production of „Unterscheidungsvermögen,“ or the ability to make distinctions – a critical faculty par excellence and the condition of possibility for judgment.