Page 62 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament 47
increasingly independent and abstract realm of thought. Following
Weber’s notion of disenchantment, Kracauer’s history of thought in its
broadest sense thus becomes a kind of escape from mythology, and
in this regard is a direct precursor to Horkheimer and Adorno’s
Dialectic of Enlightenment described in the next chapter. Kracauer
argues that, historically, images have been closely associated with the
physical environments in which they have arisen. This relation to the
physical environment is an essential aspect of what constitutes a
symbol. It is understood as an expression of the human mind but
one that is intimately intertwined with the nature that surrounds it.
By contrast, a technologized, mediated society increasingly liberates
itself from nature and tends to lose more and more of this symbolic
quality. For Kracauer, this results in the growing dominance of
allegorical signs over grounded symbols. Freed from their immediate
grounding in a physical environment, symbols begin to encompass
and articulate a more abstract, wider range of relationships and are
thereby transformed into signs.
This process represents a further development of Marx’s economy-
based conceptualization of the way in which capitalism promotes a
move away from the social importance of use-value of objects to
exchange-value. The physical properties of objects become less
important than their position in relation to the abstraction of
money. Similarly, in a culture dominated by media technologies,
symbols come to circulate more abstractly as signs. On the one hand,
this move away from the symbolic is empowering. It allows culture to
free itself from falsely concrete myths, that is, beliefs it misguidedly
(from the purely rationalist point of view) places in material objects
– for example, the fetishes and totems (as in the totem pole of
Native American culture) of non-technological societies. On the
other hand, the new realm of abstraction opened up by the
mediation of culture (the falsely abstract) can be an even more
alienating environment. It is divorced from the strong links more
traditional and symbolically rich societies have with their immediate
surroundings no matter how irrational or superstitious those links
might appear to the Western mind. In terms of the now, this rather
abstract discussion of abstraction can be understood in terms of the
globalization debate. The whole purpose of a Starbucks coffee shop
(and any other international franchise) is that its product should
appear largely the same no matter what city in the world you are
buying it. In this case, a form of coffee overladen with milk produces
a taste that is as homogenized as possible (both literally and more
figuratively). Specific, grounded taste (the notion that coffee might
taste different in different countries) is replaced by the more
geographically independent and hence more easily circulated con-
cept – internationally standardized coffee.

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