Page 65 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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50 Then
processes had insinuated themselves into cultural forms. The cultural
and the industrial were now subtly intertwined when once they were
separate areas of human activity. To help highlight this point,
Kracauer attaches great significance to that very apparent superfluity
of the Tiller Girls’ formations. In apparent contradistinction to the
system they reflect, these formations are unproductive and purely
aesthetic. Their geometric formations are merely ornamental both in
terms of form and function – a clear expression of what he calls the
mass ornament. This is a crucial concept and therefore warrants close
attention. Mass ornament describes the manner in which the Tiller
Girls are at once de-individualized, reduced to a common mass, and
then recomposed as components in a larger geometric spectacle,
they are the mass assuming ornamental form. At the same time this
mass ornament acts as a ‘seed’ that draws the much larger audience
viewing the formation of dancers into a formation itself, thus the
regularity of the Tiller Girls’ patterns are ‘cheered by the masses,
themselves arranged by the stands in tier upon ordered tier’
(Kraucer 1995: 76). While Kracauer refers here to the physically
present audience for live performances, in the following chapters we
shall see how this formative, regimented impact upon the audience
also applies to the amorphous mass of the de-auraticized (not
present at the unique point in space and time but distanced by
mechanical reproduction) audience viewing in the comfort of their
own homes.
The pattern that the troupe, and to a lesser degree their
spectators, forms is something they themselves cannot appreciate, it
is an activity whose overriding purpose it is structurally impossible
for the individual participant to observe:
although the masses give rise to ornament, they are not
involved in thinking it through. As linear as it may be, there is
no line that extends from the small sections to the entire
figure. The ornament resembles aerial photographs of land-
scapes in that it does not emerge out of the interior of the
given conditions, but rather appears above them.
(Kracauer 1995: 77; emphasis added)
The key point to note here is how the process required to convert a
group of women into a geometrical spectacle involves a degree of
rational abstraction, an abstraction that ‘appears above’ the heads of
the participants, in other words, an alienating intrusion from the
outside rather than ‘the interior of the given conditions’, or what we
have previously repeatedly referred to in terms of Baudrillard’s
phrase ‘the unbreakable bonds of reciprocity’. The ornament, divorced as
it is from its constituent parts, resembles the pure lines of ‘Euclidean
geometry’ or the simple forms of physics. It is an inorganic, abstract
order and as such ‘the structure of the mass ornament reflects that

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