Page 58 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament 43
media technologies. He approaches the photograph as an artificial
form of memory. Like memory, the photograph preserves the past,
but what the photograph preserves is not defined by its meaning in
terms of conceptual significance but solely by the spatial organiza-
tion and contiguity of the photograph’s material content. As its
name implies, the snapshot offers an instant slice of space and time
and according to Kracauer is what makes its meaning contingent
and arbitrary. For example, he distinguishes between human
memory and the quality of a photographic image by considering an
old photograph of a relative. Whereas a family’s memory would have
preserved this person in the context of a range of memories to form
a sense of their unique character over a long period of time – a
collection of impressions that gives their memory human, familial
meaning – the photograph merely preserves the relative in the
representation of an instant. A problem arises when, as this unique
moment in space and time passes, so that the particular features of
the person recorded in that instant are increasingly removed from
the living memory that would animate them. They are represented
in the photograph as discrete, individual features that are technically
very precise but which are taken out of the more general context by
which we normally remember people.
In terms of Benjamin’s notion of aura, what we have in the
photograph are those details that appear at the moment that
preservation and ‘substantive duration ceases to matter’. Thus, in a
process that Part 2’s cultural focus represents on a much larger
scale, in the individual photograph, the most irrelevant and fleeting
details (for Barthes – the punctum) increasingly become the photo-
graph’s substance. They override its larger context (for Barthes – the
studium) so that specific things like the particular clothes worn, the
furnishings that surround the subject, begin to obscure the living
individual. In time, the photograph becomes a mere index of the
particular cultural moment in which it was taken. This occurs in
spite of other attempts to control and determine the meaning of the
image, to manage its contents and thus its semiotic value. This attests
to the power of the media’s form over its content (the import of
McLuhan’s aphorism – the medium is the message).
Kracauer makes an explicit distinction between human and pho-
tographic memory. He argues that when meaning is presented to us
in a technological medium it assumes a markedly different quality to
non-mediated experience:

Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal)
continuum; memory images retain what is given only in so far
as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible
to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory

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