Notes on Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament (1927)
I
Kracauer begins his essay by justifying the study of seemingly irrelevant, secondary, or marginal cultural phenomena, which he calls “surface-level expressions” Rather than seeking the self-understanding of a particular epoch in its reflexive abstractions - in the way it appears in thought or philosophy—surface-level expressions, Kracauer argues, “provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things.” By looking at seemingly marginal, peripheral expressions of a particular culture, we are able to grasp certain unconscious tendencies of that culture, and thus to grasp the tendencies of an epoch.
He is concerned in this essay with the phenomenon of the Tiller Girls. As the editor writes in an endnote, these groups of militarily trained dance girls first appeared in the late 19th century, and soon became popular in Paris, London, New York, and other major cities in the United States and Europe. These groups performed strictly choreographed numbers, danced in chorus lines, and were known for their synchronized movements.
Kracauer is interested in this phenomenon because in many ways it resembles the state of contemporary mass society. And “mass ornament” is what he calls the reflection of this society in the aesthetic sphere.
II
The mass ornament is the end result of the process of creating an impression. More specifically, it is a reflection of the fundamental forms of mass society. The patterns formed by the dancing girls, for example, are self-referential and out of context. They form mere “building blocks”, as opposed to complete wholes. This feature of the dance numbers would be homologous to mass society itself, in which people are reduced to building blocks of more complex structures, cogs in a capitalist machine.
It’s what remains when an aesthetic phenomenon is emptied of all content - or all “substantial constructs,” as Kracauer puts it. This minimalist result, Kracauer says, must be thought in terms of its “reason.” And he uses the Latin word “ratio” here to make clear that he is speaking of a mathematical and strategic kind of reason, a capitalist reason that is also present more broadly in the organization of social life and in the production of commodities. This reason no longer contains “organic forms” or “emanations of spiritual life.” It is, I think, not “Vernunft” but a kind of corruption of it.
Kracauer distinguishes the Tiller Girls’ numbers from other expressions of precision and choreography, such as a military parade. Unlike the parade, the mass ornament has no further purpose. It does not serve to arouse patriotic feelings in the soldiers and the general population. The star and line formations of the dancing girls have no meaning, nor are they made for any other purpose; they are an “end in itself” (76). According to Kracauer, the show takes place “in a vacuum” (77).
He seems to find a similarity between the mass ornament, represented by the calculability and mathematical organization of the Tiller Girls, and the “contemporary situation”, as he calls it. The capitalist mode of production, which sets the tone in both social organization and cultural production, does away with nature and community. Here I quote from page 78:
“The structure of the mass ornament reflects that of the entire contemporary situation. Since the principle of the capitalist production process does not arise purely out of nature, it must destroy the natural organisms that it regards either as means or as resistance. Community and personality perish when what is demanded is calculability; [then, skipping a line…] A system oblivious to differences in form leads on its own to the blurring of national characteristics and to the production of worker masses that can be employed equally well at any point on the globe.” (78)
The key terms here are “natural organisms,” “community,” and “personality.” These I take to be what the new forms of capitalist reason threaten to eradicate. A little later, on page 83, he says, and I quote again, that
“The human figure enlisted in the mass ornament has begun the exodus from lush organic splendour and the constitution of individuality toward the realm of anonymity to which it relinquishes itself when it stands in truth and when the knowledge radiating from the basis of man dissolves the contours of visible natural form. In the mass ornament nature is deprived of its substance” […and so on.]
Here, too, there is the contrast between organicity, the natural form, individuality, and, on the other hand, anonymity, calculability, and the mass.
III
There are a couple of sections that Kracauer devotes to a critique of capitalist reason as a complicated negotiation with mythological thought. This is particularly interesting because it was written 20 years before Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book that posits that reason or the Enlightenment ends up reverting back to mythological thought. Kracauer argues that the historical process itself is a struggle between ( and I quote from page 79, first paragraph of section 3) “a weak and distant reason and the forces of nature that ruled over heaven and earth in the myths.” (79). Reason comes into the world to introduce truth (80). Once this happens, the historical process becomes one of demythologization, of which the capitalist epoch is a stage. But capitalist reason does not fully rationalize things. It stops halfway on the level of abstract thought. In doing so, capitalist reason - ratio - is not able to grasp the actual and concrete substance of life.
This development seems to suggest that a reaction to the precarious and prejudicial capitalist reason would be either a return to mythological thinking, in which case the struggle would be decided on the side of concreteness, or a defense of reason, in which case the struggle would be decided on the side of abstractness. “Present-day thinking”, he says in the first new paragraph on page 82, “is confronted with the question as to whether it should open itself up to reason or continue to push on against it without opening up at all.” (82). This dichotomy, however, seems to be false. Kracauer argues that while capitalist reason exacerbates abstract thinking, which does away with individuality, personality, and community, a mere return to mythological thinking would not eliminate abstractness, but only reinforce a different kind of domination.
IV
I believe this is what leads Kracauer to take a position that’s is not merely a rejection of the cultural products of capitalist reason. “The mass ornament,” he says, “is ambivalent” (83). Kracauer criticizes other intellectuals who reject the mass ornament outright as a mere distraction of the masses. And I’d like to quote this long-ish passage from page 79:
“Educated people—who are never entirely absent—have taken offense at the emergence of the Tiller Girls and the stadium images. They judge anything that entertains the crowd to be a distraction of that crowd. But despite what they think, the aesthetic pleasure gained from ornamental mass movements is legitimate. Such movements are in fact among the rare creations of the age that bestow form upon a given material. The masses organized in these movements come from offices and factories; the formal principle according to which they are molded determines them in reality as well. When significant components of reality become invisible in our world, art must make do with what is left, for an aesthetic presentation is all the more real the less it dispenses with the reality outside the aesthetic sphere. No matter how low one gauges the value of the mass ornament, its degree of reality is still higher than that of artistic productions which cultivate outdated noble sentiments in obsolete forms—even if it means nothing more than that.” (79)
Kracauer’s way out of the false dichotomy between a return to myth and a defense of capitalist reason is a materialist one: It’s naïve to expect the mass ornament to be anything other than a reflection (albeit reified) of the experience of the masses. To the extent that the experience of abstraction and massification characterizes the daily life of industrial and office workers in a capitalist society, its aesthetic enjoyment by the mass is legitimate. It would be unreasonable that the mass did not take aesthetic pleasure in this kind of cultural product. Rather than rejecting the mass ornament, what’s called for is a change in the economic system that produces it.