Page 71 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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56 Then
Banality TV of mass-mediated society. In both cases, existence is
overdetermined in an artificially enclosed and circumscribed space
of reductive self-referentiality: ‘it does not refer beyond itself’. We
can see it in: the tautological self-referentiality of the media’s
pseudo-events (defined as events that only have meaning/significance
within the media – see Chapter 5); the predictability of Banality TV
formats; and their hybridized interbreeding. Kracauer’s analysis
highlights a basic distinction to be made between critical theories
and the competing theories of active audience theorists and cultural
populists who tend to reject the critical theorist’s right to question
the fundamental quality of social activity. The observer within the
hotel lobby is as free to watch the surrounding activity as the
audience is to interpret the content of the mass media. Critical
theory is critical, however, because it does not shy away from making
the judgement that this activity is essentially worthless. The guests in
the hotel lobby enter into an alienated and atomized contemplation
of one another reminiscent of contemporary celebrities and Reality
TV where first-hand knowledge of people is replaced by systematized,
manufactured representations: ‘Remnants of individuals slip into the
nirvana of relaxation, faces disappear behind newspapers, and the
artificial continuous light illuminates nothing but mannequins. It is
the coming and going of unfamiliar people who have become empty
forms’ (Kracauer 1995: 183). Kracauer’s hotel lobbies thus illustrate
how the then of early mass culture speaks directly to critical aspects of
mass media culture now.
We have seen how the hotel lobby acts as a trope for wider
commodity culture’s lack of a symbolic grounding with its environ-
ment. Marx describes how capitalism abstracts out from the use-
values of objects and replaces them with the abstract,
decontextualized notion of exchange value, and in the hotel lobby/
culture industry we similarly find ourselves in an ‘undetermined
void’ in which there are only two modes of operation available. One
can stand ‘superfluously off to the side’ or immerse oneself to the
extent of ‘intoxication’ (Kracauer 1995: 179). The togetherness
implied by social bonds of substance is replaced in this new situation
by an ‘invalidation of togetherness’ (1995: 179). Here we can clearly
see the resonant parallels between Kracauer’s analysis and subse-
quent developments within contemporary media: Reality TV’s Big
Brother celebrity formats are analogous to the hotel lobby both in
terms of a suspension in a generic non-space, and in terms of the
self-referential nature of the celebrity system – ‘unfamiliar people
who have become empty forms’(1995: 183). It is interestingly that
Kracauer discusses this invalidation in terms of the unreal because
this is a notion that prefigures Eco and Baudrillard’s much later
examination of the postmodern hyperreal. Kracauer’s description of

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