For Kracauer, Chaplin is both a diasporic figure and “the pariah of the fairy tale,” a genre that makes happy endings imaginable and at the same time puts them under erasure. The vagabond again and again learns “that the fairy tale does not last, that the world is the world, and that home [die Heimat] is not home” (W 6.2:494). If Chaplin has messianic connotations for Kracauer, it is in the sense that he represents at once the appeal of a utopian humanism and its impossibility, the realization that the world “could be different and still continues to exist” (W 6.2:34).40 Chaplin exemplifies this humanism under erasure both in his films and by his worldwide and ostensibly class-transcendent popularity. While Kracauer is skeptical as to the ideological function of reports that, for instance, the film City Lights managed to move both prisoners in a New York penitentiary to laughter and George Bernard Shaw to tears, he nonetheless tackles the question of Chaplin’s “power” to reach human beings across class, nations, and generations (W 6.2:492)41—the possibility, ultimately, of a universal language of mimetic transformation that would make mass culture an imaginative horizon for people trying to live a life in the war zones of modernization.
Compared to Benjamin’s, Kracauer’s interest in Chaplin and slapstick comedy— as in cinema in general—was less focused on the question of technology, either in the Marxist sense as a productive force or as a Heideggerian enframing or Gestell. He was primarily concerned with the ways in which Fordist-Taylorist technology gave rise to a distinct socioeconomic and cultural formation that, more systematically than any previous form of modernization, addressed itself to the masses, thus constituting a specifically modern form of subjectivity. Since I focus on this concern in the following sections, I refrain from offering any general definition of Kracauer’s concept of the mass, or masses, not least because that concept is subject to significant fluctuation and ambiguity. Suffice it to note that, explicitly and implicitly, Kracauer’s exploration of this particular aspect of “Amerika” sets itself off, on the conservative side, against the long-standing lament about mass-marketed culture as well as late-nineteenth-century elitist-pessimistic theories of the crowd (as synthesized by Gustave Le Bon) that essentialized, psychologized, pathologized, and demonized the crowd, or mass in the singular, as an atavistic force that required a leader.42 On the politically progressive side, as we shall see, Kracauer tries to complicate leftist conceptions of the masses predicated on the industrial working class and the idea of a revolutionary proletariat. The metaphor of “discovering America,” after all, refers not simply to an object of exploration but to a heuristic strategy for discovering whatever might be qualitatively and historically distinct, as yet unrecognized and undefined, in a subject so overdetermined by competing discourses. Accordingly, rather than engaging directly with sociological, psychological, or political debates on the nature of the modern masses, Kracauer takes the detour through the ephemeral phenomena of the burgeoning entertainment culture—as configurations that at once spawn and respond to a new type of collective.
THE MASS AS ORNAMENT AND PUBLIC
The locus classicus of Kracauer’s analysis of Fordist mass culture is his 1927 essay “The Mass Ornament.” In this essay, the Tiller Girls have evolved into a historicophilosophical allegory that, as is often noted, anticipates key arguments of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947).43 Once exuberantly portrayed, the dance troupe now figures as a critical emblem of displays that proliferate internationally in cabarets, stadiums, and newsreels, patterns formed by thousands of anonymous, uniform, de-eroticized bodies (“sexless bodies in bathing suits” [MO 76]). The abstraction of the individual body into elements or building blocks for the composition of larger geometrical figures corresponds, as an “aesthetic reflex,” to the Taylorist principle of breaking down human labor into calculable units and refunctioning them in the form of working masses that can be globally deployed (MO 79). As a figure of capitalist rationality, Kracauer argues, the mass ornament is as profoundly ambivalent or ambiguous (zweideutig) as the historical process that brought it forth. On the one hand, it participates in the “process of demythologization” that emancipates humanity from the forces of nature and that, in Kracauer’s words, “effects a radical demolition of the positions of the natural” (in particular the powers of the church, monarchy, and feudalism) (MO 80; S 5.2:61). On 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,
