Page 54 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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2

Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament

Introduction

Using Benjamin’s Essay as a theoretical focal point, in the previous
chapter it was suggested that mass media society involves a process of
cultural fragmentation. This is caused by a decline in traditional
aura and a matching rise in media representations that do not
depend upon aura’s ties to a unique point in space and time. This
decline in aura is fostered by an alignment between capitalist
commodity values and mechanically reproduced images. The social
fabric becomes permeated by this complex mix of the social and the
technological. Although seeking to argue that media technologies
empower the masses, Benjamin’s analysis of aura’s decline is more
insightful about the camera’s profound contribution to a historically
unprecedented way of seeing than it is able to persuade how this
may actually produce empowerment. This chapter addresses more
explicitly the exact nature of this relationship between media
technologies and their wider social environment using as its key text
a collection of Siegfried Kracauer’s essays The Mass Ornament: The
Weimar Essays.
Although less well known than Benjamin in media and cultural
studies, Kracauer (1889–1966) played a formative role (he had been
Adorno’s tutor, and regularly corresponded with Benjamin) in the
analyses of culture and media carried out by various members of the
Frankfurt School, to the extent that Benjamin and Adorno’s
accounts of the mass media can be seen as direct response to
Kracauer’s path-breaking readings. Until fairly recently, Kracauer’s
best-known work in the English-speaking world was From Caligari to
Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Cinema ([1947] 2000),
which presented a history of German cinema in the inter-war years,
arguing that its themes reflected the psycho-social conditions that
led to fascism. His influence on Adorno and Benjamin’s media
theory, however, was the result of a series of articles published in the
1920s (and collected together as The Mass Ornament). Since these
articles were pieces of journalism aimed at a relatively wide

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