Page 60 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament 45
of images. Kracauer thus identified at an early historical stage the
negative aspects of a trend whose true significance is more fully
apparent today.
Benjamin was able to conceptualize the way in which traditional
aura is replaced by a new realm more accessible to manipulation by
the masses but, constrained by his particular historical perspective,
he could not trace the process far enough to realize the extent of its
negative implications. In the mass-media capitalism of the contem-
porary mediascape, our conception of an underlying reality behind
media representations has become increasingly distorted by the
exponential circulation of signs. This has created a semi-autonomous
realm of pseudo-events and the hyperreal (see Chapter 5 and 8’s
treatment of Debord/Boorstin and Baudrillard respectively). With
great foresight, Kracauer identified the combined social and techno-
logical origins of this simulated environment – a culture in which
the notion of the original is consistently and profoundly under-
mined by the rise of mediated copies and representations. For
Kracauer, these reproductions which appear to place the world in
front of the reader/viewer, are nothing more than ‘signs … of the
original object’, as such they neither inform nor represent. The
word signs is crucial here because it marks the technologically
sponsored move away from the location-dependent symbols based
upon aura’s previously discussed dependency upon location and
physical grounding. Signs are decontextualized and freed from the
otherwise unbreakable bonds of reciprocity that Baudrillard claims are a
basic property of symbols and their innate dependence upon a
physical context – aura as a unique point in space and time. Thus,
the qualitative effect of ‘the flood of photos’ is so great that it
threatens to destroy the original object.
Prefiguring Benjamin’s description of aura’s decline and Baudril-
lard’s much later theorizing of the simulacral/hyperreal, Kracauer
observes that ‘the resemblance between the image and the object
effaces the contours of the object’s “history” ’ (1995: 58). Photogra-
phy creates an explosion in the amount of visual information that
can be circulated independently of any physical origins. This causes
social experience to become increasingly fragmentary because such
ungrounded image-signs create a knowledge of the world that is
increasingly disembedded. Taken out of its original auratic context a
new mode of sensory experience is indeed created as Benjamin
argued, but for Kracauer: ‘the contiguity of these images systemati-
cally excludes their contextual framework available to consciousness.
The “image idea” drives away the idea’ (Kracauer 1995: 58; emphasis
added). Rather than empowering the masses, Kracauer describes
how the magazines and techniques they employed provided a new
means of control so that: ‘In the hands of the ruling society, the

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