Page 189 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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174 Now
example of the continuity in themes between these then and now
theorists compare the following two excerpts. The first is from
Kracauer’s essay ‘Georg Simmel ’ originally published in 1920–21:

The more profound our experience of things is, the less it can
be subsumed to its full extent under abstract concepts. Initially
clothed in the image, it shines forth brightly; we should shroud
it in order to possess it nude. What is most secret needs the veil
of a metaphor so that it can be completely exposed.’
(Kracauer 1995: 236)
The second is from Baudrillard’s 2001 essay, ‘Dust breeding’, in
which he uses the example of Catherine Millet – the author of the
best-selling autobiographical account of a large number of compul-
sively anonymous sexual couplings – The Sexual Life of Catherine M –
as a contemporary example of the culture industry’s inability to
grasp the paradox that the true nature of social reality is to be found
in its shrouding. The more one seeks to reveal it in an excessively
explicit and systematic fashion the further away it becomes:

‘Think like a woman taking off her dress,’ said Bataille. Yes, but
the naiveté of all the Catherine Millets is to think that they are
taking of their dress to get undressed, to be naked and
therefore reach the naked truth, the truth of sex or of the
world. If one does take off one’s dress, it is to appear: not to
appear naked like truth (and who can believe that truth
remains truth when its veil is removed?) but to be born to the
realm of appearances, to seduction which is the contrary.
This modern and disenchanted view is a total misunderstand-
ing if it considers the body to be an object waiting only to be
undressed … Especially since all cultures of the mask, the veil
and ornaments say precisely the contrary: they say that the
body is a metaphor and that the true objects of desire and
pleasure are the signs and marks that tear it from its nudity,
naturalness and ‘truth,’ from the integral reality of its physical
being. In all places, seduction is what tears things from their
truth (including their sexual truth). And if thought takes off its
dress, it is not to reveal itself naked, it is not to unveil the
secret of what had been hidden until then, it is to make the
body appear as definitively enigmatic, definitively secret, as a
pure object whose secret will never be lifted and has no need
to be lifted.
(Baudrillard 2005: 186)
Millet’s quest for sexual fulfilment via mechanistic couplings repre-
sents a physical manifestation of the culture industry’s repetitions (at
a micro-level, the repetitive tracking action of the camera in the Food

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