Page 72 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

JOBNAME: McGraw−TaylorHarris PAGE: 19 SESS: 12 OUTPUT: Wed Oct 10 13:18:15 2007 SUM: 5488BDDD
/production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/tayharris/chap02

Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament 57
how formerly socialized people are reduced to undifferentiated
atoms predates some of Baudrillard’s last writings in which he
defines this invalidation of togetherness as a process of telemorphosis.
Kracauer’s insightful account of the spatially limited hotel lobby,
becomes for Baudrillard a society-wide phenomenon. Reality TV
formats that tend to be situated in ‘any enclosed space where an
experimental niche or zone of privilege is re-created – the equivalent
of an initiatory space where the laws of open society are abolished’
(Baudrillard 2005: 191). The enclosed space of the hotel lobby is
now replaced by the invalidly together space of the Big Brother
compound.

Kracauer, travel and Reality TV

In the essay ‘Travel and dance’ (first published in 1925), Kracauer
turns his attention to the emergence of the modern travel industry.
He uses it to illustrate the concealment of non-mediated reality by
technologically driven capitalism. As with his concept of the hotel
lobby, travel becomes an example of the way in which mass culture
only apparently appears to empower when in fact it merely provides
experiences to consume in an ultimately empty fashion. Kracauer is
much more critical here than Benjamin. He describes how the travel
enabled by mass culture is not to be understood in terms of
broadening horizons, the experience of other cultures. Instead, it is
simply an extension of the same pseudo-novelty that characterizes
the commodity form. He establishes this by erecting a distinction
between the symbolic experience of the Here and the Beyond of a
pre-technological society, and the purely spatial understanding of
such a distinction that predominates under capitalism. Kracauer
argues that while earlier cultures recognized and cultivated an
awareness and a space for an experience of a Beyond (a powerful
aesthetic and emotional realm to be found in such spheres as
religion and art), in technological society this Beyond is tamed,
controlled and enframed: ‘technology becomes an end in itself …
space and time must be conquered by the power of the intellect …
Radio, telephotography, and so forth – each and every one … serves
one single aim: the constitution of a depraved omnipresence within
calculable dimensions’ (Kracauer 1995: 70). Once again, the abstrac-
tion of the general dominates the physicality of the particular.
Under capitalism the potential of the Beyond is replaced by what is
merely elsewhere, an elsewhere whose dominant feature is its
accessibility: in contrast to the Ineinander (defined as the condition
of a reciprocal inter-penetration of the Here and the Beyond)of
earlier cultures, modernity posits a Nacheinander an ‘after-each-other’.
As a result both the Here and the Beyond are lost. The Here has

Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: chap02 F Sequential 19

www.kerrypress.co.uk - 01582 451331 - www.xpp-web-services.co.uk
McGraw Hill - 152mm x 229mm - Fonts: New Baskerville