Page 68 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament 53
to Ratio, Kracauer privileges Vernunft (true reason) as an oppositional
factor to the forces of nature in a similar manner to the way
Benjamin seeks the socialist power of the masses to be a corrective
to the aura of tradition. But like Benjamin, he provides little detail
as to how Vernunft will overcome Ratio beyond wishing it so.
Kracauer sees cinema as a possible solution to the alienating
warehousing of the world that photography has brought about. In
particular, the cinematic technique of montage provides opportuni-
ties by which the fragments of modernity can be recomposed in
pursuit of a new and truly rational and humane order. However, just
as from a critical perspective Benjamin’s notion of empowering
distraction provides an apparently weak basis from which to oppose
the alienating cultural features of media, Kracauer explicitly acknowl-
edges the difficulty of the path he espouses. The Ratio of mass
ornament is powerful in its role as a new mediated form of myth. He
speaks of it as a ‘mythology of an order so great that one can hardly
imagine its being exceeded’ (1995: 84) and suggests that: ‘Reason
can gain entrance only with difficulty’ (1995: 85). Ratio’s social
purpose is likened to the circus games of the Roman Empire and in
Part 2 we see how much more sophisticated and insidiously pervasive
this new mythical cult of Ratio has become with the spread of
Banality TV into realms previously protected by ‘discourses of sobri-
ety’. Kracauer’s invocation of a mythological cult brings to mind
Benjamin’s characterization of fascism as the aesthecization of politics.
The more critical import of Kracauer’s analysis, however, stems from
the way in which his notions of Ratio and mass ornament demonstrate
the manner in which Benjamin’s corresponding desire to see the
politicization of aesthetics has been frustrated by the temptations of false
abstraction. In his essay ‘The hotel lobby’ (first published 1922–25) to
which we now turn, Kracauer argues it is false because it does not
attain the full abstraction of genuine reason, rather: ‘The desolation
of Ratio is complete only when it removes its mask and hurls itself
into the void of random abstractions that no longer mimic higher
determinations, and when it renounces seductive consonances and
desires itself even as a concept’ (Kracauer 1995: 180).

The hotel lobby
Kracauer believed that the apparently insignificant, if not tawdry,
products of the mass media are, if carefully examined, capable of
yielding up the secrets of the whole. Unlike many cultural populists,
this does not mean that he is some sort of cultural relativist, who
believes that all culture is of equal value and that any attempt to
erect hierarchies of taste are necessarily spurious. Neither does this
imply some faith in a consciously subversive or critical dimension to

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