Page 73 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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58 Then
become unendurable without the prospect of escape. It is dispersed
in the potential of travel, while the possibility of transcendent Beyond
is reduced to a spatial elsewhere. In effect all that remains is the
novelty of motion – travel offers a ‘substitute’ for a Beyond that can
no longer be accessed. In place of Benjamin’s empowered, wander-
ing masses, the mediated public is:
confined to the spatio-temporal coordinate system and are
unable to extend themselves beyond the forms of perception to
the perception of forms, they are granted access to the Beyond
only through a change in their position in space-time …
Travel … has no particular destinations: its meaning is
exhausted in the mere fact of changing locations.
(Kracauer 1995: 71)
Kracauer notes that this mechanized travel is marked by an affective
novelty: ‘We are like children when we travel, playfully excited about
the new velocity, the relaxed roaming about, the overviews of
geographic regions that previously could not be seen with such
scope … Technology has taken us by surprise, and the regions that it
has opened up are still glaringly empty (1995: 73). He identifies
something of that terrain that Benjamin will later christen the optical
unconscious, here it is invoked as an unprecedented hybridization of
the material world and our own techno-media extensions. However,
the regions that travel and technology introduce to us are ‘glaringly
empty’. While Kracauer recognizes the novelty that they afford,
implicit in his account is a fundamental difference between an
apparently authentic earlier mode of Being (in which Here and Beyond
exist in dynamic tension) and the new tensionless experience of
capitalism’s Ratio in which we consume what has already been
predigested by the system that creates our systemic commodities.
Kracauer’s analysis of the emergence of the travel industry prefig-
ures a number of features that illuminate Banality TV and its pursuit
of novelty. Shows such as Jerry Springer construct the exotic from
‘trailer-trash’, while ‘Fenced-in nature preserves’ and ‘isolated fairy-
tale realms’ (Kracauer 1995: 66) provide good descriptions of the
architecturally circumscribed manufacture of the Big Brother fran-
chise. The term franchise is significant because its quality of geo-
graphical mobility not only points to the process of global
homogenization alluded to in Kracauer’s discussion of travel, but
also implies the commodified need of a franchise to provide endless
variations upon the same basic theme. Kracauer draws attention to
how the activities of travel and dance ‘have the dubious tendency to
become formalized’ (1995: 67). In keeping with both this insight
and Weber’s concept of the rationalization of charisma, Reality TV,
especially in its celebrity-based formats, partakes of Kracauer’s asser-
tion that:

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