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Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament 55
1677) put it ‘Die Rose ist ohne warum; Sie blühet, weil Sie blühet’
(‘The Rose is without an explanation; She blooms, because She
blooms’).
The Kantian perspective that Kracauer draws upon, suggests that
in great art or a religious congregation, the ineffably sublime nature
of the form’s ability to express its content provides its justificatory
purpose. By contrast, in a culture produced in a systematic fashion,
or the emblematic space of the hotel lobby – the externally
generated guarantee of sublime beauty’s ultimate purpose is lacking.
This is because the content is pre-packaged and innately limited
since it is generated from within a self-contained framework. This
has a profound impact upon the aesthetic experience of systematized
culture so that its: ‘aesthetic … is presented without any regard for
these upward-striving intentions and the formula “purposiveness
without purpose” also exhausts its content’ (Kracauer 1995: 177).
The sublime nature of what critical theorists (in opposition to their
less judgemental cultural populist counterparts) stubbornly insist
upon as a truly aesthetic experience resides in its lack of calculable
value–àla Silesius, what is the monetary value of witnessing a
beautiful rose blooming? The sublime is replaced by Ratio and the
culture industry by the previously cited, overwhelming need for
calculability. The result is a self-imposed limitation of outlook.
Kracauer’s example of the hotel lobby highlights this innate bland-
ness. A lobby tends to make minimal reference to the geographical
particularity of the hotel itself, its purpose is purely functional, to
facilitate the circulation of hotel guests and visitors and their
temporary association with that particular physical environment –
the particular is dominated by the general. The lobby is thus a
‘space that does not refer beyond itself’ (Kracauer 1995: 177) a
point which Kracauer then immediately follows up by pointing to
the aesthetic experience that results from inhabiting this self-
enclosed space ‘constitutes itself as its own limit’ (Kracauer 1995:
177). Although there is an irrefutable level of activity it is essentially
pointless in the sense that it does not point beyond itself.
The passive observation of this ultimately pointless activity by the
denizen of the hotel lobby recalls the passage from ‘Analysis of city
map’ with which we began this chapter. There, perambulating
consumers savoured ‘the spectacle of the constant disintegration of
the complexes to which they belong’. But while this pleasure in the
dissolution of complexes harbours at least the possibility of an
eventual revolutionary realization that social structures could be
organized otherwise, in the hotel lobby such a realization is neutral-
ized and undermined by the essential banality of the aesthetic
experience – the physical space of the hotel lobby thus acts as a
trope for Part 2’s analysis of the cultural space created by the

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