In recent years, string figures have gained prominence in cultural theory. Donna Haraway promotes string figures as a method of thinking and collaboration between both disciplines and species. Rather than the technicist and rigid metaphor of the network, Haraway’s string figures provide a playful, process-oriented, embodied, performative (and non-Western) mode of thought in which responsibility and collaboration are foregrounded.
There can be no doubt, however, that in Kracauer’s texts published at the turn of the 1920s and the 1930s from his position as an editor of the cultural pages at the daily newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung, then in the 1950s during his American period, he sketches out a theorisation of photography that can be described as groundbreaking. But it is also true that most of his works overlap, in more than one way, with this medium of reproduction or that...