ABSTRACT
The chapter analyzes Kracauer’s life-long critical use of topographical metaphors of high and low culture, elite and popular, art and mass culture as constitutive for his sociological, cinematic, literary, and philosophical thought about twentieth-century metropolitan life. An older hierarchy is dismantled and vertical distinctions are put into a horizontal dimension. Kracauer thus laid the groundwork for post-Cold War understandings of modernism, media culture, and metropolitan experience.
