Page 55 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

JOBNAME: McGraw−TaylorHarris PAGE: 2 SESS: 12 OUTPUT: Wed Oct 10 13:18:15 2007 SUM: 53904666
/production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/tayharris/chap02

40 Then
audience, their ideas are adumbrated rather than systematically
developed. Nevertheless, Kracauer’s essays are still highly suggestive
for critical theory and manage in a few pages to anticipate a number
of important concepts, for instance, Adorno and Horkheimer’s
dialectic of enlightenment and Benjamin’s notion of distraction. Moreo-
ver, their value is not simply one of anticipation – they offer (albeit
in embryo) a unique, critical perspective upon mass-media culture.

The alienation of the spectacle

The need to lay in supplies for Sunday brings together a crowd
that would appear to astronomers as nebulae. It jams together
into dense clumps in which the tightly packed individuals wait,
until at some point they are again unpacked. Between purchases
they savor the spectacle of the constant disintegration of the complexes to
which they belong, a sight that keeps them at the peripheries of life.
(Kracauer 1995: 41; emphasis added)
The above quotation from Kracauer’s essay, ‘Analysis of a city map’
(first published in 1926), provides a prescient description of the
1
process of cultural disenchantment that forms an important theme of
this book. Kracauer describes here how a new environment is
created by rapid urbanization – an environment that envelops the
masses (in contrast to Benjamin’s previously explored hope that the
masses would actively absorb new cultural content rather than
passively being absorbed by it). This new urban atmosphere seam-
lessly blends widespread commodification with the increasingly pow-
erful social role played by the spectacle (prefiguring Chapter 5’s
analysis of Debord’s society of the spectacle). While Kracauer describes
the physical act of shopping, the self-reflexivity of the consumers as
they watch their own formation – their ‘complexes’ – can be seen as
an early forerunner of the mass-media audience. For example,
watching commercial television now represents a more technologi-
cally mediated and sophisticated example of the experience
Kracauer encountered here in its much earlier and vestigial manifes-
tation as people physically shopping. ‘Between purchases’ (or in
contemporary television terms – advertisements for future pur-
chases), Kracauer provides us with a cogent summary of the current
television viewing experience and its complex imbrication of com-
modity values and Reality formats. ‘[T]hey savor the constant
disintegration of the complexes to which they belong’ becomes an
encapsulation of our contemporary refashioning of communal life
not into the empowered masses Benjamin portrayed but, rather, a
body of consumers kept at the periphery of life and for whom
culture has become merely an alienating spectacle to be viewed
rather than lived.

Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: chap02 F Sequential 2

www.kerrypress.co.uk - 01582 451331 - www.xpp-web-services.co.uk
McGraw Hill - 152mm x 229mm - Fonts: New Baskerville