Page 76 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament 61
Benjamin placed his hope in distraction because it bypassed the
cognitive process of the individual, operating directly upon the body,
in contrast, Kracauer placed his faith in reason. His account of the
early mediascape of his time differed from those of his peers
because it offers ‘the possibility of the recuperation of reason by way
of the vilification of Ratio … His faith in the power of reason is
striking’ (Koss 1997: 31). This faith in reason and its centrality in the
emergence of capitalism and its media technologies brings us now to
a consideration of Adorno, who, like Kracauer, placed reason’s
dialectical destruction of myth as the precondition for both capital-
ism and its possible alternatives. However, Adorno was more sceptical
about the innate value of reason. It is not simply that reason’s
distortion in the form of Ratio produces the worst cultural aspects of
modernity but, rather, that there is a fundamental ambivalence in
rationality itself. As a result, we shall now see how Adorno was even
less hopeful than Kracauer that reason in the form of a liberated
consciousness would be able to break the spell of the culture
industry.

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