Page 63 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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48 Then
Kracauer’s argument clearly matches the changing function of the
work of art in Benjamin’s Essay where it emerges from a strictly
ritual function to assume a religious or latter exhibition value, and
then as a result of mechanical reproduction, becomes independent
of any material context/unique point in space and time. Benjamin,
and to a lesser extent, Kracauer, believed that there was a positive
potential to this ability of technology to disembed by removing aura
and promoting processes of increasing abstraction. This is because it
presents opportunities for the newly emerging masses to free them-
selves from the aura of tradition. However, to be upheld, the
optimism of both writers requires that the alienating consequences
of the decline of aura are adequately recognized and then compen-
sated for by providing a convincing account of empowering new
alternatives – but in both writers little direct evidence is in fact given
of likely alternatives. Benjamin assumed as his post-mediated cultural
horizon, a world of fragments, mere detritus left by the dynamite of
one-tenth of a second. With the benefit of historical hindsight it is
still unclear to contemporary eyes whether wandering adventurously
among the rubble can provide meaningful empowerment beyond
the dubious value to be found in Benjamin’s notion of distraction.
Amid his occasional optimism, Kracauer’s analysis tends to provide a
more realistic assessment of the negative consequences of a
de-symbolized culture. He describes how the technologized removal
of symbols is replaced by a systematized, industrialized perversion of
human reason that he calls Ratio and which he discusses in relation
to his mass ornament – a notion that prefigures both Adorno’s culture
industry and Debord’s society of the spectacle.

The mass ornament

The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process
can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its
inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s
judgments about itself … The surface level expressions … by
virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access
to the fundamental substance of the state of the things …
knowledge of this state of things depends on the interpretation
of these surface-level expressions.
(Kracauer 1995: 75)
Among his Weimar essays, Kracauer’s ‘The mass ornament’ (first
published in 1927) is a cogent summary of his guiding analytical
principles and is perhaps the most significant of his early writings. In
it he identified the principle of Gleichzeitigkeit or ‘simultaneity’ – the
idea that the spheres of production and leisure had begun to fuse
under the capitalist phase of production. Faced with this fusion, and

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