Page 66 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament 51
of the entire capitalist situation’ (Kracauer 1995: 78). As in our
previous discussion of signs and symbols, the mass ornament stems
from capitalism’s destruction of pre-existing forms and their specific
physical groundedness. Component parts are recombined in con-
formity with an alien, abstracted order – in what could be seen as a
motto for the culture industry, ‘community and personality perish
when what is demanded is calculability’ (Kracauer 1995: 78). It is
this process of abstraction that Kracauer calls Ratio. It may be
intangible but its influence is felt deeply within and widely across
commodity culture. It is not just the actual performers who experi-
ence their own performance as something external, imposed upon
them from the outside (what we shall soon see Adorno discuss in
terms of heteronomy); viewers too now consume culture that comes to
them, above their heads, in a pre-packaged non-spontaneously
created form.
Ratio can be seen as further developing the distinction between
signs and symbols. It is part of the capitalist tendency to supplant a
symbolism grounded in spatial proximity to physical objects.
Kracauer thus distinguishes between nature’s symbolic power and the
distortedly allegorical form of reason that flourishes when objects
derive their meaning from their relationship to an overarching,
standardizing frame of reference. According to Kracauer, reason
involves a process of abstraction from the natural world, a retreat
from sensory immediacy in favour of the general concept. A process
that in turn facilitates the exploitation of the natural world – ‘reason
speaks wherever it disintegrates organic unity and rips open the
natural surface’ (Kracauer 1995: 84). When the ‘natural surface’ is
ripped open (in a similar fashion to Benjamin’s notion of the optical
unconscious) there arises the possibility that the masses can see
more clearly than ever before the nature of the reality that sur-
rounds them and hence be empowered with that insight. But
Kracauer sees Ratio as the stalling of reason, a perverted reason
because it serves to obscure such insight: ‘Ratio flees from reason
and takes refuge in the abstract’ (1995: 84). In the next chapter we
explore Adorno’s account of the way in which the culture industry
abolishes the natural tension between the general (in this context,
the abstract) and the particular (in this case the grounded symbolic)
that fuels great art. The removal of this tension and the promotion
of abstraction produces an uncritical friction-free cultural experience
(Seabrook’s buzz). It is this insight that provides the basis for
understanding the banal predictability of a diverse range of culture
industry experiences such as fast food and soap operas – and
demonstrates the roots (the then) of a contemporary society domi-
nated by abstraction (the banal now of Part 2).

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