Page 64 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament 49
in keeping with Benjamin’s previously cited linkage of the simulta-
neous rise of the optical unconscious and the Freudian unconscious,
Kracauer asserts his belief in the above quotation that mundane
cultural phenomena can reveal significant underlying analytical
truths. In this spirit, Kracauer turns his attention to the ‘Tiller Girls’
– an American dance troupe specializing in the kind of choreo-
graphed geometric spectacle that Busby Berkeley was to turn into an
art form in the Hollywood musicals of the 1930s. Kracauer
approaches this seemingly frivolous and ephemeral production of a
nascent culture industry, as emblematic of the entire system of
production:
Not only were they American products: at the same time they
celebrated the greatness of American production … When they
formed an undulating snake, they radiantly illustrated the
virtues of the conveyor belt; when they tapped their feet in fast
tempo, it sounded like business, business; when they kicked
their legs high with mathematical precision, they joyously
affirmed the progress of rationalization; and when they kept
repeating the same movements without interrupting their rou-
tine, one envisioned an uninterrupted chain of autos gliding
from the factories into the world, and believed that the
blessings of prosperity have no end.
(Kracauer, cited in Witte 1975: 64)
This description clearly demonstrates how the quality of simultaneity
– an apparently harmless entertainment – actually replicates and
celebrates the logic of the capitalist production. Kracauer sees the
Tiller Girls as a literal embodiment of the disembedding or
de-territorializing effects of capital: the women who make up the
spectacle are de-individualized. They become interchangeable man-
nequins, doubles of a generic white-toothed, firm-bodied, long-
limbed humanity. This process does not respect the body as an
organic whole, its members are themselves disarticulated and recom-
bined; not ‘fully preserved bodies’ but ‘arms, thighs and other
segments are the smallest component parts of the composition’
(Kracauer 1995: 78). The fate of the individual body serves as a
microcosm of the fate of the body politic. Capitalism disarticulates
the latter’s natural organs (understood as various forms of commu-
nity) and recombines them in accordance with the dictates of
production even when apparently in the service of art or entertain-
ment (hence Adorno’s use of the oxymoronic phrase culture indus-
try).
Although a high-kicking dance troupe of the 1920s might seem
somewhat anachronistic to a modern readership, Kracauer’s analysis
demonstrates how, at the very beginnings of mass-mediated culture,
apparently rational (but ultimately disempowering) systems and

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