Page 67 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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52 Then
The mass ornament as the aesthetic reflex of capitalism is closely
tied to the essentially self-referential nature of the commodity form,
neither have any substantial meaning beyond their own self-
generation: ‘Like the mass ornament, the capitalist production
process is an end in itself. The commodities that it spews forth are
not actually produced to be possessed; rather, they are made for the
sake of a profit that knows no limit’ (Kracauer 1995: 78). Both share
a rationale but they are not truly rational in terms of having an
ultimate justification:
Value is not produced for the sake of value. Though labor may
well have once served to produce and consume values up to a
certain point, these have now become side effects in the service
of the production process. The activities subsumed by that
process have divested themselves of their substantial contents.
The production process runs its secret course in public. Every-
one does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a
partial function without grasping the totality.
(Kracauer 1995: 78)

The only purpose of both capitalist production and its aesthetic
reflection of the mass ornament is self-augmentation. Their overrid-
ing purpose is to generate a surplus but whether one thinks of the
actual contributors to the productive process (the workers on the
assembly line or the Tiller Girls in formation) or consumers who
consume for the sake of consumption – all such groups suffer
alienation because they are participating in a process that is without
an autonomously rational end. To the extent that a rationale exists it
is the externally imposed (above their heads) requirements of
profit-driven Ratio.
The concept of Ratio is an inversion of the false concreteness that
characterizes traditional mythology. It represents a new form of myth
for highly technologized culture – the false abstractness of the
commodity fetish in the form of mediated signs to be circulated. As
previously mentioned, traditional myth is falsely concrete in the sense
that it plays an excessively determinative role within a society in
which people impute unwarranted beliefs into inanimate objects.
From the standard of rational analysis, such mythic thinking prevents
a true relationship with the real. Non-technological societies are
prevented from developing technologically and rationally because
they are bound by their groundedness to their richly symbolic
environments. Rationality involves a departure from this mythic
mode of thought. However, in the capitalist stage of production, a
mode of false abstractness predominates and becomes the new mythic
way of thinking. The mass ornament as an aborted form of reason
‘reveals itself as a mythological cult that is masquerading in the garb of
abstraction’ (Kracauer 1995: 83; emphasis in original). In opposition

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