(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contemporary reality more aptly than older forms predicated on concepts of community such as folk and nation as well as outdated notions of individual personality.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, Kracauer is reluctant to name the transcendental subject of the mass ornament in an unequivocally pessimistic way. Despite his growing ambivalence, I would argue that he still wants to leave the space of the author and ideal beholder open for the empirical subjects who are present at these displays and to whom they are addressed. For the mass in the “ornament of the mass” (as the essay’s German title translates literally) refers not only to the abstract patterns of moving bodies qua spectacle but also to the spectating masses “who have an aesthetic relation to the ornament and who do not represent anyone”—that is, nobody other than themselves, a heterogeneous crowd drawn “from offices and factories” (MO 77, 79). While the mass ornament itself remains “mute,” it acquires meaning under the gaze of the masses that have adopted it “spontaneously” (MO 85). Against its detractors among the “educated” (who have themselves unwittingly become an appendix of the dominant economic system while pretending to stand above it), Kracauer maintains that the audience’s “aesthetic pleasure” in the “ornamental mass movements is legitimate” (MO 79); it is superior to an anachronistic assertion of high-cultural values because at the very least it acknowledges “the facts” of contemporary reality. And even though the spectating masses are, in tendency, just as unaware of their situation and similarly stuck in mindless physicality, there is no question for Kracauer that the subject of critical self-encounter has to be, can only be, the masses themselves.56 Whether or not such collective self-representation will have a chance to prevail is a matter of the “go-for-broke game” of history by which the technological media could either advance or defeat the liberatory impulses of modernity (MO 61).
Already in his 1926 essay on the Berlin picture palaces, “Cult of Distraction,” Kracauer’s argument revolves around the possibility that in these metropolitan temples of distraction something like a self-articulation of the masses might be taking place—the possibility of a “self-representation of the masses subject to the process of mechanization.” Bracketing both cultural disdain and critique of ideology (though not without deadpan irony), he observes that in Berlin, as opposed to his native Frankfurt and other provincial cities, “the more people perceive themselves as a mass, the sooner the masses will also develop creative powers in the spiritual and cultural domain that are worth financing.” As a result, the so-called educated classes are losing their provincial elite status and cultural monopoly. “This gives rise to the homogeneous cosmopolitan audience in which everyone is of one mind, from the bank director to the sales clerk, from the diva to the stenographer” (MO 325; W 6.1:210). That they are “of one mind” (eines Sinnes) means no more and no less than that they have the same taste for sensual attractions, diversions, or distractions.
The concept of Zerstreuung, diversion or distraction, in the radical twist that Kracauer gives the originally cultural-conservative term, combines the mirage of social homogeneity with an aesthetics of decentering and diverse surface effects, at least as long as it prevails against industrial strategies of high-art aspirations and gentrification. In “the discontinuous sequence of splendid sense impressions” (which likely refers to an elevated version of the variety format that early cinema had adapted from live popular entertainment), the audience encounters “its own reality,” that is, a social process marked by an increased heterogeneity and instability. Here Kracauer locates the political significance of distraction as a structurally distinct mode of perception: “The fact that these shows convey precisely and openly to thousands of eyes and ears the disorder of society—this is precisely what would enable them to evoke and keep awake that tension that must precede the inevitable radical change [Umschlag]” (MO 327; S 6.1:211).
It should be noted that Kracauer does not (at least not yet) assume an analogical relation between the industrial standardization
