Page 75 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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60 Then
(Levin, in Kracauer 1995: 26)
What makes Kracauer a more pessimistically critical thinker than
Benjamin is his willingness to think through the negative conse-
quences of such training for the ‘sensorial economy of modernity’.
Instead of Benjamin’s rather vague notion of distraction, Kracauer
was more willing to explore the negative implications of such a
mode of mediated experience. For example, he saw the cinematic
spectacle of the Berlin picture house as multi-sensory ‘distraction
factory’:
The stimulations of the senses succeed one another with such
rapidity that there is no room left between them for even the
slightest contemplation. Like life buoys, the refractions of the
spotlight and the musical accompaniment keep the spectator
above water. The penchant for distraction demands and finds
an answer in the display of pure externality … This emphasis
upon the external has the advantage of being sincere.
(Kracauer 1995: 326; original emphases)
Like Benjamin he calls for a heightening of those elements of the
spectacle that challenge or overturn high art and its conservative
dependence upon aura and outmoded cultural values. To the extent
to which Kracauer shares Benjamin’s sense of the empowering
possibilities of the media, it rests in his previously cited concept that
Ratio is a stalled, inhibited form of reason that needs to be pushed
further forwards rather than remaining stuck in abstraction for its
own sake. However, Kracauer’s status as a more overtly critical
thinker than Benjamin and whose mode of analysis leads us directly
to Adorno’s negativity, stems from his recognition that capitalism is
devoted to fostering Ratio at the expense of reason. Unlike Ben-
jamin, and much closer in sentiment to Adorno, Kracauer was
conscious of the extent to which the empowering possibilities of
distraction could easily be betrayed for ideological purposes:
Distraction – which is meaningful only as improvisation, as a
reflection of the uncontrolled anarchy of our world – is
festooned with drapery and forced back into a unity that no
longer exists. Rather than acknowledging the actual state of
disintegration that such shows ought to represent, the movie
theaters glue the pieces back together after the fact and present
them as organic creations.
(Kracauer 1995: 327–8)
Like Benjamin, Kracauer thought that at least in principle the media
could provide the masses with insights with which to confront ‘the
uncontrolled anarchy of our world’, but unlike Benjamin he did not
regard the new media of his time as a ready-made solution to the
problems of capitalism.

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