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Cracking the Cultural Code Methodological Reflections on Kracauer’S ‘The Mass Ornament’

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Cracking the Cultural Code Methodological Reflections on Kracauer’S ‘The Mass Ornament’ Cracking the cultural code Methodological reflections on Kracauer’s ‘The Mass Ornament’ Steve Giles Since the mid-1980s there has been a major revival of between the biological and the historical, and the interest in the work of Siegfried Kracauer, focusing on metaphysical and the social. This discussion of ʻThe the essays he wrote during the Weimar Republic for Mass Ornamentʼ is therefore particularly concerned the Frankfurter Zeitung.1 As a result of this renewed to establish the nature of Kracauerʼs materialism. interest in Kracauerʼs early writings, a revisionist Although commentators on Kracauerʼs Weimar essays school of Kracauer criticism has emerged, particularly concede the part played by Marxism in establishing in the USA.2 Where he had once been dismissed as a Kracauerʼs materialist credentials, they also tend to peddler of naively realist or simplistically psychologi- draw attention to the ways in which Kracauer trans- cal film criticism, Kracauer is now accorded a privi- cends the supposed limitations of Marxist cultural leged position in the pantheon of post-structuralism analysis. Levin, for example, observes that Kracauer and post-modernism, as the putative saviour of cultural ʻdoes not simply reduce the mass ornament to a studies from its own tendentious reflexivity.3 superstructural reflection of the prevailing mode of At the epicentre of this reconfiguration of Kracau- production, as would a traditional Marxist analysis of erʼs work lies the essay ʻThe Mass Ornamentʼ, with its ideologyʼ.7 Moreover, Levin argues – again fairly typi- beguilingly lucid opening paragraph.4 ʻThe Mass Orna- cally – that Kracauer escapes the pitfalls of Marxist mentʼ is usually seen as playing a crucial role in the reductionism by adopting a mode of cultural inquiry articulation of the new direction taken by Kracauerʼs which is premissed on the notion of deciphering or writings from the mid-1920s onwards. Like Brecht and decoding. He even suggests that Kracauerʼs method- Benjamin, Kracauer shifts from a metaphysical to a ology is redolent of Freudʼs ʻlogic of the parapraxisʼ.8 materialist conception of modernity, and engages in a The Freudian dimension to Kracauerʼs approach seems series of methodological reflections on the theoretical to be confirmed by Kracauerʼs adherence to a symp- foundations of a materialist cultural analysis.5 The tomatic mode of reading modelled on dream analysis opening sentences of ʻThe Mass Ornamentʼ are often which seeks to access a historical unconscious,9 and construed as a statement of Kracauerʼs new methodo- the stage might appear to be set for Kracauer to logical credo: grounding his interest in phenomena abandon his Marxist predilections entirely. otherwise ignored by sociologists and cultural critics, Yet even when Kracauerʼs writing seems to be at involving a genre of theoretical writing embodied in its most manifestly psychoanalytic, a more activist the essayistic miniature, and establishing a mode of Marxism is also in evidence, as Kracauer engages in cultural inquiry that appears to blend the insights of a critique of ideology by exposing the socio-political Marx, Freud and Weber in such a way as to inaugurate contradictions of contemporary capitalism in order to what Levin refers to as a ʻmaterialist phenomenology facilitate intervention in social reality.10 It is far from of daily lifeʼ.6 clear that Kracauerʼs own practice of dream analysis It may well be that ʻThe Mass Ornamentʼ signifies or symptomatic reading has any firm basis in psycho- a key stage in the articulation of Kracauerʼs material- analytic theory, rather than the allegorizing modes of ism, but it does so in a contradictory manner, in that reading propounded by Simmel and Benjamin.11 Not it leaves unresolved the potential theoretical conflicts only that, it has also been argued that Kracauerʼs idi- Radical Philosophy 99 (January/February 2000) 31 osyncratic analyses of cultural modernity owe at least view of the fact that seemingly neutral methodological as much theoretically to Weber as they do to Freud precepts are grounded in specific epistemological and or Marx; Weber was, after all, the key proponent of ontological assumptions – not least those articulating the view that sociology should involve the systematic the relationship between self and society – it is hardly investigation of culture through the method of inter- surprising that, as Mülder notes, Kracauerʼs own meth- pretative understanding.12 odological practices should be so firmly rooted in his My consideration of these issues will proceed as historical construction of the crisis of modernity.14 follows. Concentrating on ʻThe Mass Ornamentʼ, as an exemplary instance of Kracauerʼs analysis of mod- That notorious opening paragraph ernity, I shall seek to establish the precise configuration Let us begin with the text in question, the opening of Kracauerʼs method of cultural inquiry, in both paragraph of ʻThe Mass Ornamentʼ: theory and practice, by addressing a series of ques- The position that an epoch occupies in the historical tions: What does the notorious opening paragraph of process can be determined more strikingly from an ʻThe Mass Ornamentʼ actually mean in the context analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expres- of Kracauerʼs supposed synthesis of Marx, Freud and sions than from that epochʼs judgements about Weber? Is Kracauerʼs approach to the ʻinterpreta- itself. Since the latter are expressions of the tenden- cies of a particular era, they do not offer conclusive tive understandingʼ of social and cultural phenomena testimony about that eraʼs overall constitution. By Freudian, Weberian, or neither? If it is the case that virtue of their unconscious nature, the former grant Kracauer moves towards a Marxist position from unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the mid-1920s onwards, which particular variant of the state of things. Conversely, knowledge of the Marxist theory does he adopt? Is Kracauerʼs model of latter depends on their interpretation. The fundamen- historical development dualistic or dialectical? Does tal substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally. Kracauer provide a coherent theoretical basis for the pursuit of cultural studies today, given the paradox At first sight, these few short sentences could be of the combination of the emergent hegemony of that construed as an indirect response to Marxʼs account of discipline with its own self-confessed methodological social structure and historical change in, for example, fragility? What, ultimately, are the specific terms of the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique reference of Kracauerʼs ostensibly historical and mat- of Political Economy. Like Kracauer, Marx takes the erialist model of modernity? view that when explaining social life, the investigator In engaging with such questions one is inevitably should be somewhat sceptical regarding an epochʼs drawn back to the initial conundrum posed by Krac- judgements about itself. As far as Marx is concerned, auerʼs yoking together of the potentially incompatible an epochʼs self-understanding must itself be accounted theoretical positions of Marx, Freud and Weber, and for as a product of the contradictions of material life, in particular to the issue of the general structure of so that valid explanations of social phenomena can Kracauerʼs method of explanation in the context of his cut through ideological obfuscation and identify the philosophy of history. In this respect, I should perhaps real causes of historical change located at the level note that my own approach to such issues is based on of conditions of production. It is here, though, that the account of explanation and method propounded by Marx and Kracauer part company. Instead of arguing Martin Hollis in Models of Man.13 Hollis argues that that the investigator must don the theoretical garb of all modes of sociological explanation are grounded in the natural scientist and plumb the economic depths an interlinking series of theoretical assumptions that of society, Kracauer proposes that attention should be are not methodologically neutral. Any explanatory focused on inconspicuous surface phenomena.15 paradigm necessarily involves the following distinctive Kracauerʼs advocacy of the superficial here is no features: (i) a method of inquiry that entails specific less striking than his rationale for doing so. He con- criteria of explanation; (ii) a set of sociological con- tends that surface phenomena make it possible to cepts which circumscribe the sorts of explanations reach through to a more fundamental level of social that will satisfy those methodological criteria; (iii) a life – they give direct, unmediated access to the set of ontological propositions specifying the nature of basic content or substance of what exists. Moreover, human beings and society; (iv) a theory of knowledge they do so not by virtue of a dialectic of base and which justifies the method of inquiry; and (v) a set superstructure, but because they are unconscious. It of general ontological or cosmological propositions follows that if the basic content of what exists is to implied or presupposed by that theory of knowledge. In be an object of knowledge, then these inconsequential 32 Radical Philosophy 99 (January/February 2000) surface phenomena must be interpreted. Kracauerʼs siders the status of cultural phenomena, he asserts appropriation of Freudian terminology suggests that initially that forms of consciousness correspond to we have moved from political economy
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