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210 Critical Theories of Mass Media
The particular contribution of Baudrillard’s critical theory is the
way he combines the above points in a sustained demonstration of
how a high level of explicit visual information does not bring us
closer to reality, but in fact carries us further away into a realm of
simulation. Kracauer located the origins of this tendency in the
innate properties of photography and made a distinction between a
true understanding of history and the merely technically correct
visual representation encountered in a photograph: ‘This history
omits all characteristics and determinations that do not relate in a
significant sense to the truth intended by a liberated consciousness
… In a photograph, a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of
snow’ (Kracauer 1995: 51; emphasis added). The direct corollary of
Kracauer’s analysis is that the knowledge we do derive from the
media’s revealing depiction of reality is not a liberated one.
Kracauer’s Ratio described how the culture industry creates a
systemic ersatz replacement for reality in the form of the mass
ornament. His terms prefigure later conceptions of hyperreality and
developments such as Banality TV. For Baudrillard, the hyperreal,
defined as that which is more real than the real itself, is marked by
the absence or increasing irrelevance of an original model upon
which the imitation is based. In the phenomenon of Irish theme
bars, for example, semiotic levels of Irishness exceed that to be
2
found in Ireland . This reduction of the full ambiguity and complex-
ity of reality and a certain quality of excessiveness contained within
media representations is what Kracauer described in pre-
Baudrillardian terms when he suggests that: ‘The desolation of Ratio
is complete only when it removes its mask and hurls itself into the
void of random abstractions that no longer mimic higher determi-
nations, and when it renounces seductive consonances and desires
itself even as a concept’ (Kracauer 1995: 180; emphases added). The
previous imitation of reality is replaced by a realm of ‘random
abstractions’. In this manner, Banality TV programmes suffer from
format inflation. Thus, once talent shows based upon a process of
eviction evolved to include celebrities, the variations upon the theme
being almost endless – celebrities compete in contexts ranging from
a jungle (I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!) to various sorts of
competition, in dance (Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing With the Stars),
ice-skating (Strictly Ice Dancing), circus acts (Cirque de Celebrite, Celebrity
Circus), weight loss (Celebrity Fit Club), and so on). The predictable
format becomes increasingly independent of any ‘higher determina-
tions’. Culturally grounded symbolic values are replaced by the
ready-made commodified categories of the culture industry.
Kracauer’s argument that Ratio renounces ‘seductive consonances’
is a direct forbearer of Adorno’s systemic, operationalized culture
industry and reappears in Baudrillard’s notion of seduction. Prior to

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