Page 57 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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42 Then
description of Parisian nightlife in the relatively early days of
electricity and, 74 years later, Seabrook’s panegyric to a central New
York suffused with the neon glow of the information revolution:

The air was fuzzy with the weird yellow tornado light of Times
Square by day, a blend of sunlight and wattage, the real and the
mediated – the color of Buzz. Buzz is the collective stream of
consciousness. William James’s ‘buzzing confusion,’ objectified,
a shapeless substance into which politics and gossip, art and
pornography, virtue and money, the fame of heroes and the
celebrity of murderers, all bleed. In Times Square you could
see the Buzz that you felt going through your mind. I found it
soothing just to stand there on my way to and from work and
let the yellow light run into my synapses. In that moment the
worlds outside and inside my skull became one.
(Seabrook 2000: 5)
Whereas Benjamin saw the evacuation of traditional auratic meaning
as a good thing which could free the masses from any tendency to
fall into fascism, and Seabrook, similarly praises rather than finds
fault with ‘the buzz’, it is Kracauer’s belief that modernity represents
‘an evacuation of meaning, a bifurcation of being and truth’ (Levin,
in Kracauer 1995: 13).
Unlike Benjamin, Kracauer describes how the rise of the mediated
masses is accompanied by this ‘evacuation’ of meaning – an evacua-
tion that is fostered by capitalist values that compete with and
undermine non-commodified forms of mass empowerment. A major
aspect of this book’s critical interpretations of the now is based upon
updating this central insight from then. Instead of empowering the
masses, media technologies reinforce their subordination to com-
modity forms that are no longer limited to just physical objects that
can be bought and sold, but also a much more intangible (yet
profoundly effective/affective) series of images. Kracauer’s early
analysis of mediated culture, is thus an important precursor of
Debord (Chapter 5) and Baudrillard’s (Chapter 8) later identifica-
tions of the society of the spectacle defined as a cultural environment in
which the spectacle becomes the dominant social category. Baudril-
lard, in particular, argues that traditional symbolic societal processes
increasingly succumb to shallower, mediated forms of cultural inter-
action.

Kracauer’s photography: signs and symbols
In his essay ‘Photography’ (first published in 1927) Kracauer’s
analysis of this medium encapsulates some of the key links to be
made between the growth of capitalist society and the advent of

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