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 of cultural commodities and the behavior and identity of the mass audience that consumes them—an assumption derived from Lukács’s theory of reification that would become axiomatic both in Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry and, with a more positive slant, in Benjamin’s theses on art and technological reproducibility. For one thing, Kracauer does not condemn commodification, serial production, and standardization as such, as can be seen in his many positive reviews of popular fiction, especially detective and adventure novels, as well as in his repeated, if sometimes grudging, statements of admiration for Hollywood over UfA products.57 For another, Kracauer would not have presumed that people who watched the same thing necessarily were thinking the same way; and if they did pattern their appearance and behavior on the figures and fables of the screen, the problem was primarily with the German film industry’s circulation of escapist ideology on screen and the compensatory gentrification of exhibition. Again and again, in daily reviews as well as the series reprinted under the titles “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies” and “Film 1928,” Kracauer castigated films that advanced their audience’s denial of growing economic uncertainty and social volatility.58 In other words, his critique was directed less against the lure of cinematic identification in general, as an ideological effect of the apparatus, than against the economic and political conditions responsible for the unrealistic tendency of such identification.59
The cinema is a signature of modernity for Kracauer not simply because it attracts and represents the masses but because it is the most advanced cultural institution in which the masses, as a relatively heterogeneous, undefined, and as yet little understood form of collectivity, constitute a new form of public (Öffentlichkeit). Lacking the coherence and familiarity of a traditional community, the metropolitan cinema audience represents a formation of primarily strangers defined by the terms of publicness. As Kracauer writes approvingly of Helmuth Plessner’s Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (Limits of Community, 1924), “The forms and relations in the realm of the public . . . are rules of the game that forgo investing the real ‘I’ and, before anything else, grant respect to all players.”60 Strangers gather at the motion picture shows as spectators; that is, they engage in relatively anonymous yet collective acts of reception and aesthetic judgment in which they may recognize and mobilize their own experience in the mode of play. As Heide Schlüpmann has argued, Kracauer sketches a theory of a specifically modern public sphere that resists thinking of the masses and the idea of the public as an opposition (as still upheld by Jürgen Habermas in his 1962 study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). Kracauer “neither asserts the idea of the public against its [actual or putative] disintegration and decline, nor does he resort to a concept of an oppositional public sphere” (in the sense of Negt and Kluge).61 Rather, Kracauer sees in the cinema a blueprint for an alternative public sphere that can realize itself only through the destruction of the dominant, bourgeois public sphere that draws legitimation from institutions of high art, education, and culture no longer in touch with reality.
Alternative too, I would add, because, unlike the partial publics of the traditional labor movement, the cinema offers a public sphere of a different kind. Epitomizing the multiplication and interpenetration of spaces already advanced by other media of urban commercial culture (shop windows, billboards), the cinema systematically intersects two different types of space, the local space of the theater and the deterritorialized space of the film projected on the screen. It thus represents an instance of what Michel Foucault has dubbed “heterotopias”: places that “are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about.” Sites of transportation like trains and planes, sites of temporary relaxation like cafés, beaches, and movie theaters function, in Foucault’s words, as “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which . . . all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”62 Taking our cue from Foucault, we could read Kracauer’s acknowledgment of the specifically modern type of publicness of cinema not just as sociological observation but also as a theoretical insight into the significance of the cinema’s intersection of an anonymous yet collective theater experience with a product whose simultaneous mass circulation exceeded the local, national, and temporal boundaries of live events.63
As can be expected, Kracauer’s leap of faith into a commercially based collectivity has earned him the charge that he naively tries to resurrect the liberal public sphere, thus unwittingly subscribing to the ideology of the marketplace.64 To be sure, he insists on political principles of general access, equality, and justice and—perhaps more steadfastly than