Kracauer tied lost cosmic meaning to a subject confronting stripped matter.

Evidence

When meaning is lost (in the West, since the demise of Catholicism), when clearly formed faith is perceived more and more as a constricting dogma, as an aggravating fetter on reason, the cosmos which was held together by meaning falls apart, and the world divides itself into the multiplicity of existing things and the subject which confronts this multiplicity. This subject, which was previously contained within the dance of the structures which filled the world, now descends out of chaos as the sole bearer of spirit, and before its gaze there open the measureless realms of reality. Catapulted out into the cold endlessness of empty space and empty time, the subject finds itself faced with matter which has been stripped of all significance. The subject must process and form this matter in accordance with the ideas it possesses within itself (and which it has rescued from the epoch of meaning). — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 269

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense phenomenological account linking secularization, the rise of the Cartesian subject, and the re-formation of matter by pre-rescued ideas — a compressed genealogy of modernity’s disenchantment.
• XREF: Foreshadows Adorno and Horkheimer’s later critique of the disenchanted instrumental subject in Dialectic of Enlightenment; this is the intellectual seed Kracauer passed to Adorno. — connects to: Kracauer dated the loss of cosmic meaning in the West to Catholicism’s demise — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 269; Kracauer held that after meaning’s collapse, subjects form matter using rescued ideas — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 270
• DEFINE: Defines Kracauer’s early account of the modern predicament: loss of the meaning-filled cosmos, rise of the solitary subject, deadened matter.