W 1:215)
The juxtaposition of these vignettes illustrates the discrepancy between the employees’ consciousness and their material conditions of living and yields a more nuanced account of the ideological tug-of-war that defines the ongoing “process of social mixing.”79 In the first vignette, the discrepancy results from the déclassé employee’s bourgeois set of values, according to which age and gentility still command a certain respect—an expectation thwarted by rationalized business with its fetishization of youth and denigration of experience and the capitalist interest in a mobile labor force. The second vignette inverts the direction of social mobility: for the sales girl, barriers of class and status appear transcended in the medium of romance, antithetical yet not unrelated to the sphere of work (the “Nebenberuf,” or “other job”). Ironically, class transcendence is facilitated, on the part of the entertainment business, by resurrecting the very discourse of genteel femininity that capitalist rationalization had deprived of its social and economic foundations.
As in the essay on the mass ornament, Kracauer does not posit the nexus between rationalized production and mass-cultural consumption as a simple analogy but complicates it through a series of subtle mediations. In the section devoted to the employees’ leisure activities, “Shelter for the Homeless,” he explores the reconfiguration of public and private in employee culture through an extended architectural-geopolitical metaphor that links images of home, homelessness, and a new global space. The discrepancy between the employees’ consciousness and their increasingly precarious socioeconomic status makes them “spiritually homeless,” as Kracauer varies on Lukács’s influential phrase, all the more so since “the house of bourgeois ideas and feelings in which they used to live has collapsed, its foundations eroded by economic development” (SM 88). The literal dwelling or abode (Zuhause rather than Heim) that they inhabit does not afford them any of the traditional, that is, bourgeois-familial, ideals of protection, warmth, and intimacy. Kracauer reenacts this erosion of boundaries by metaphorically extending the space of “home” from a mere lodging to “an everyday existence outlined by the advertisements in the magazines for employees.” These advertisements mainly concern “things”—material objects and tools—as well as the small breakdowns of the human body: “pens; Kohinoor pencils; haemorrhoids; hair loss, beds; crêpe soles; white teeth; rejuvenation elixirs; selling coffee to friends; dictaphones; writer’s cramp; trembling, especially in the presence of others; quality pianos on weekly installments; and so on” (ibid.).
The misery signaled by these public intimations of personal needs and anxieties drives the salaried masses to seek “shelter” (Asyl) at night in the “pleasure barracks” that beckon them with the glamour and light missing from their monotonous working day. Behind the international-modern façade of New Objectivity or Sobriety, the fantasy of a national home, eponymic in the Haus Vaterland, mingles with emblems of an exoticized global space, the Bavarian landscape of the Löwenbräu bar, “ ‘Zugspitze with Eibsee—alpenglow,’ ” with the generic Americana of the Wild West Bar, “ ‘Prairie landscapes near the Great Lakes—Arizona—ranch— dancing . . .—Negro and cowboy jazz band.’ ” From the Bavarian Alps to America, “the Vaterland encompasses the entire globe” (SM 92).80 “The true counterstroke against the office machine . . . is the world vibrant with color. The world not as it is, but as it appears in the popular hits. A world every last corner of which has been cleansed, as though with a vacuum cleaner, of the dust of everyday existence” (SM 93).
The compensatory traffic between an all-too-close physical existence and the glamour of faraway places, like that of work and leisure, ultimately calls the very notion of home into question, as a sentimental residue of failed bourgeois promises propped onto an actual space. Kracauer’s exploration of the entertainment malls’ architectural geopolitics resonates with his evocation of a double exile—from both the stifling dreariness of the petty-bourgeois home and the alienating bustle of the modern city—in his reviews of Karl Grune’s film The Street (discussed in chapter 1). If in the earlier texts he rhetorically identified with the film’s lonesome wanderer, he now observes almost clinically how this mode of being was becoming paradigmatic of a modern, provisional, postconventional identity, a social identity no longer founded on tradition, origin, and class. In the meantime, however, the experience of the exiled individual had taken on mass proportions, with accordingly amplified social and political implications. In the entertainment malls, Kracauer states, “the masses play host to themselves; . . . not just from any consideration of the commercial advantage to the entrepreneur, but also for the sake of their own unavowed powerlessness.” Mass culture furnishes, if not a home, then at least a house of mirrors. “People warm each other; together they console themselves for the fact that they can no longer escape from the herd [Quantität]” (SM 91–92; W 1:292). I read this observation less as a sarcastic commentary than as a trace of Kracauer’s earlier insistence on the ambiguity of mass formations theorized in the essay on the mass ornament. Even in Die Angestellten, the pessimistic tenor of the study is punctured by the possibility, though weak at this point, of self-representation and self-reflection on a mass scale.
Rationalization and distraction dovetail specifically in the emergence of new forms of socialization and identity fashioning. Under the heading “Selection,” Kracauer examines the criteria by which individuals succeed, or fail, in a competitive labor market. In addition to youth, which is paramount to employability and accordingly fetishized in employee culture, a generally “pleasant appearance” is as important as regular physical features and proper dress. The ideal personality is “ ‘not exactly pretty,’ ” Kracauer quotes a staff manager of a Berlin department store as saying; “ ‘what’s far more crucial is . . . oh, you know, a morally pink complexion’ ” (SM 38). Neither too severely moral nor too passionately pink, the proper skin color is supposed to warrant an instantaneous legibility of inner qualities through outwardly visible features. This shift toward the visible exterior in turn encourages the cultivation of a uniform appearance on the part of the subjects under scrutiny. “It is scarcely too hazardous to assert that in Berlin a salaried type is developing, standardized in the direction of the desired complexion. Speech, clothes, gestures, and physiognomies become assimilated and the result of the process is that very same pleasant appearance which can be widely reproduced by means of photographs” (SM 39; W 1:230).
If the employees are taking on “a photographic face,” to invoke Kracauer’s photography essay (MO 59), they are assisted in this effort by the movies. The circularity of mass-cultural identity formation becomes a topos in Kracauer’s writing around this time, as in the notorious statement from the shopgirls essay: “Sensational film drama and life usually correspond to each other because the mademoiselles-typists [Tippmamsells] fashion themselves after the models on screen; it may be, however, that the most spurious models are stolen from life itself ” (MO 292; W 6.1:309). Kracauer’s observation of a loop effect in the way mass culture has come to mediate the social construction of subjectivity anticipates similar observations in postmodern media criticism.
Kracauer’s insights into the workings of mass-cultural subjectivity are thrown into relief by a comparison with Benjamin’s reflections on the masses. As I discuss in more detail in chapter 3, these reflections oscillate between a turn-of-the-century pessimistic view of the mass or crowd, as distinct from the proletariat, and his attempt (famously in the artwork essay) to reclaim a progressive concept of the masses—in the plural—as revolutionary productive force by way of a structural affinity with technological reproduction, in particular film. Indebted to Béla Balázs, the assumption of such an affinity turns on the phenomenological claim that film, in Kracauer’s paraphrase, “by breaking down the distance of the spectator that had hitherto been maintained in all the arts, is an artistic medium turned toward the masses.”81 Benjamin establishes the revolutionary potential of film from the by now familiar argument aligning the fate of art and the aesthetic with the rise of industrial-technological re/production. As a result, the masses figure primarily as the hypothetical subject of a technologically mediated mode of perception rather than an empirical entity defined by the social, psychosexual,
