Page 69 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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54 Then
mass cultural products. What it does indicate is that the truth of an
era can be uncovered from the particular cultural forms to which it
gives birth. Thus, in a similar fashion to our focus in Part 2 on
Banality TV, Kracauer reads the rise of the detective novel around
the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of the growing
hegemony of Ratio. This is reflected not in the explicit themes or
characterization of individual texts, but rather in the genre’s narra-
tive structure in which a fragmented world (made up of disparate
clues) is deciphered. A society that exists ‘only as a concept … is
fully realized in actions and figures’. In exploring such a society by
constructing ‘a whole out of the blindly scattered elements of a
disintegrated world’ the crime novel ‘transforms an ungraspable life
into a translatable analogue of actual reality’ (Kracauer 1995: 174).
Noting that hotel lobbies frequently appear in detective fiction,
Kracauer examines them in terms of their illustration of some of the
spatial experiences of a society ruled by Ratio. In order to accentuate
their particular features and the distance of these from earlier spatial
forms he uses the comparison of a church and its congregation.
Both are indexes of particular forms of community, and the contrast
they provide serves to illuminate the stakes involved in the transition
from one to the other. Kracauer sees a church as a spatial expression
of a certain form of community, whose members are present to
themselves and others in their gathering in the presence of God.
The hotel lobby represents a kind of ‘negative church’; like the
church it is a place of waiting, like a church it is a site preserved
from the currents of everyday life, and into both one enters as a
guest. However, unlike a church whose ‘gathering is a collectedness
and a unification of this directed life of the community’ (Kracauer
1995: 176; emphasis in original) in the lobby people gather alone, its
‘detachment does not lead the community to assure itself of its
existence as a congregation … people find themselves vis-à-vis de rien’
(Kracauer 1995: 176). The hotel lobby thus embodies for Kracauer
the essential emptiness of what we begin to explore in the next
chapter as the culture industry and then in later chapters as the
society of the spectacle/simulation. In the lobby the social is encoun-
tered as a spectacle so that ‘the person sitting is … overcome by a
disinterested satisfaction in the contemplation of a world creating
itself, whose purposiveness is felt without being associated with any
representation of a purpose’ (Kracauer 1995: 177; emphasis added). This
notion of purposiveness without purpose is borrowed by both
Kracauer and Adorno from the German philosopher Immanuel
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Here, Kant famously defined beauty as
‘purposiveness without any representation of a purpose’ (Critique of
Judgment 1.18) or as the German mystic-poet Angelus Silesius (1624–

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