Page 56 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament 41
Kracauer is thus a key critical thinker of the then for the way in
which he draws out the more negative implications of the destruc-
tion of aura and provides insights into the way in which new media
technologies have fostered the development of negative social con-
sequences. Such negativity is partially acknowledged by Benjamin
himself in the concluding lines of his Essay to which this book
repeatedly returns, where he describes how: ‘Mankind, which in
Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian
gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a
degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure of the first order’ (Essay: Epilogue). Implicit in Benjamin’s
Essay, but more explicitly developed by Kracauer and authors in
subsequent chapters of this book, is a particularly disturbing feature
of the alienation created by the media. In an iterative fashion,
alienation itself risks becoming fodder for the yet further alienating
processes of a society for which disintegration and destruction are
reduced to the status of aesthetic pleasure – the content of yet more
media representations. In Kracauer’s description of shoppers, the
analysis is limited to the physical act of consumption in a modern
urban environment but it nevertheless manages to recognize the
seeds of a process that has led to the media-saturated hyperreal of
global capitalism (the focus of Part 2).
Like Benjamin, Kracauer saw a complex interrelationship existing
between the modern urban environment and media technologies.
He saw a symbiosis between the masses as a social concept and the
2
technologies of reproduction that facilitate their existence . But
unlike Benjamin’s image of an adventurous wanderer walking in the
debris of exploded traditional cultural forms, Kracauer also empha-
sizes the potentially negative changes wrought upon the social
landscape by media technologies. Accordingly, his account of the
effects of the newly mediatized urban environment consists of a
significantly more downbeat notion of distraction than that found in
Benjamin’s Essay:
In the centers of night life the illumination is so harsh that one
has to hold one’s hands over one’s ears. Meanwhile the lights
have gathered for their own pleasure, instead of shining for
man. Their glowing traces want to illuminate the night but
succeed only in chasing it away. Their advertisements sink into
the mind without allowing one to decipher them. The reddish
gleam that lingers settles like a cloak over one’s thoughts.
(Kracauer 1995: 43)
Both the prescience of Kracauer’s analysis and an example of the
vastly different conclusions to be drawn from similar descriptions of
mediated culture (the difference between critical theory and cultural
populism) can be judged by the marked similarity between his above

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