Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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the other, this process ends up reestablishing the natural in ever-new forms. By perpetuating socioeconomic relations “that do not encompass the human being,” capitalist development reproduces these relations as natural— as given and immutable, instead of historical and political—and thus reverts to myth; rationality itself has become the dominant myth of modern society (MO 81; S 5.2:62).
Unlike other Critical Theorists, however, Kracauer does not locate the problem in the concept of Enlightenment as such (which he associates less with German idealism than with the utopian reason—justice and happiness—of fairy tales canonized in the French eighteenth century). Rather, he argues that the permeation of nature by reason has actually not advanced far enough—the problem with capitalism is not that “it rationalizes too much” but that it rationalizes “too little” (MO 81). This hyperbole implies the distinction, key to subsequent debates within the Frankfurt School, between instrumental rationality—the unleashed Ratio “that denies its origins and no longer recognizes any limits”—and reason as Vernunft , which reflects upon its own contingency, goals, and procedures.44 The mass ornament embodies the incomplete advance of rationalization, that is, one without self-critical reason, by stopping halfway in the process of demythologization and thus remaining arrested between the abstractness endemic to capitalist rationality and the false concreteness of myth. Yet, just as he knows that the emergence of humanist reason is inseparable from the development of capitalism, Kracauer rejects any thought that this development could be reversed: “The process leads right through the center of the mass ornament, not back from it” (MO 86; S 5.2:67).
The essay on the mass ornament has been criticized for its reductionist analogy between “the legs of the Tiller Girls” and “the hands in the factory” (MO 79; S 5.2:60), an analogy that allegedly ignores the aesthetic specificity of the revues, their playful negation of the abstract regime they reflect.45 Such criticism fails to see that the relationship Kracauer delineates is neither literal nor obvious but heuristic and symptomatic. Since he first reviewed the Tiller Girls in 1925, the connection between the new dance form and Fordist-Taylorist rationalization, between chorus line and assembly line, had more or less become a topos, notably with Fritz Giese’s illustrated paean to “girl culture” published the same year.46 This topos, however, remained stuck in the binary discourse of Americanism, which either welcomed the revues as a “new culture of training” (Trainingskultur)—that curious americanism is, a means of social discipline—or decried them as a yet another manifestation of mechanization and standardization, the “growing drive toward uniformity” and “complete end of individuality.”47 In contrast with either enthusiastic or lapsarian accounts, Kracauer’s essay assumes a more dialectical stance toward the phenomenon, reading it as an index of an ambivalent historical development. Above all, where the Americanist discourse extols technological rationality or, respectively, laments mechanization, Kracauer develops his argument from within a Marxist critique of capitalism.
If Kracauer at this point shares the Marxist (or more specifically Lukácsian) assumption of the totality of capitalism, this does not mean that he subscribes to a determinist model of base and superstructure. Methodologically, he rather borrows from the language of psychoanalysis, extending it into the political and social realm, in particular the ideological mechanisms of public consciousness. The simultaneous omnipresence and occlusion of capitalism takes the form of a paradox: “The production process runs its secret course in public” (MO 78; S 5.2:60). Yet it remains encrypted, unread, sub- or preconscious. In his 1929 study of employee culture, Kracauer invokes the “purloined letter” in Poe’s well-known story (later famously analyzed by Lacan) to describe a similar paradox—that of the salaried masses who increasingly dominate the appearance of Berlin’s cityscape but whose life eludes consciousness, both their own and that of the bourgeois public.48 Like Poe’s letter, the salaried masses remain unnoticed “because [they are] out on display” (SM 29; emphasis added). The cover of unconsciousness, Kracauer ventures in the already-cited epigraph to “The Mass Ornament,” actually offers a cognitive gain. “The inconspicuous surface-level expressions” of an epoch yield more substantial insights about “the position [this] epoch occupies in the historical process” than the “epoch’s judgments about itself ” (MO 75). Like the image configurations of dreams, they require a conscious work of “deciphering.”49 Echoing Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Kracauer links this work in other texts to the metaphor of hieroglyphics, a figure that, like the mass ornament, combines abstract, graphic lines with visual concreteness and ostensible self-evidence.50
The mass ornament requires critical deciphering for two reasons. First, the educated bourgeois public fails to recognize the significance of these displays, which, Kracauer asserts, capture contemporary reality more aptly than older forms predicated on concepts of community such as folk and nation as well as outdated notions of individual personality. Second, the work of deciphering is needed because the mass ornament itself remains “mute,” unpermeated by reason, and therefore lacks the ability, as it were, to read itself. “The Ratio that gives rise to the ornament is strong enough to mobilize the mass and to expunge [organic] life from the figures constituting it. It is too weak to find the human beings in the mass and to render the figures transparent to cognition” (MO 84; S 5.2:65)—cognition, that is, of the social and economic conditions that they inhabit and unwittingly perpetuate. Instead, the modernizing impulse is deflected into the mere physicality of body culture (gymnastics, eurhythmics, nudism, fresh air), much as that movement may dress itself up in neospiritual ideologies (MO 85, 86).51
Against a bourgeois humanism to which the mass ornament gives the lie Kracauer seeks to delineate the contours of a modernist humanism that would combine the precarious and anonymous subjectivity of mass existence with the principles of equality, justice, and solidarity, a humanism grounded in reason aware of its contingency. It is no coincidence that he invokes the example of Chinese landscape paintings: a representational space from which “the organic center has been removed” (MO 83).52 This comparison, however, begs the question as to who reoccupies the empty space in front of or, in the case of the mass ornament, above the representation—specifically, which invisible hand or eye organizes its patterns, and to which purposes and effects.
Whether the mass ornament is merely an “end in itself ” (a travesty of Kantian aesthetic autonomy) or organized by the “invisible hand” of the capitalist system (which also appears as an “end in itself ”), Kracauer seems to leave the answer deliberately vague. Since his concept of the mass ornament is transnational, if not emphatically internationalist, as well as implicitly opposed to Le Bonian crowd theory, he does not at this point consider the fusion of mass ornament aesthetics with an extreme nationalist ideology focused on a fascist leader. When he resumes the term “mass ornament” in From Caligari to Hitler (1947) with reference to The Triumph of the Will (1935), he does suggest a genealogy linking the Nazi regime’s “ornamental inclinations,” as choreographed and eternalized by Leni Riefenstahl, with Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), though he does not mention his earlier analysis of American-style mass displays (nor, for that matter, the Busby Berkeley musicals which developed that style to exuberant perfection by cinematic means).53
Even in the mass ornament essay, though, one can already discern the contours of Benjamin’s analysis, in the epilogue of his artwork essay, of fascism as a politics that aestheticizes the masses, thus giving them an expression, instead of giving them their right (that is, to change property relations).54 Kracauer’s distress over the “muteness” of the mass ornament relates to a particular structure of miscognition and denial that he would soon focus on in his study on the salaried employees. Benjamin was to observe similar psychosocial mechanisms at work in the success of fascist mass politics, in particular the aesthetic pleasure in spectacles amounting to total destruction and self-destruction. A further trajectory could be drawn from Kracauer’s mass ornament to Adorno’s analysis of mass culture as hieroglyphic writing—as a modern form of pictographic script that facilitates the internalization of domination by keeping its author, namely, monopoly capitalism, invisible: “ ‘no shepherd but a herd.’ ”55
Still,