MASS ORNAMENT is "the aesthtic reflex of the rationailty aspired to by the prevailing economic system"
- quasi-militaristic regimentation coupled with the Taylorization of leisure time industry
- a need to examine the illusive areas of everyday life that escape our notice precisely because they are so familiar to us.
- Like Brecht and Benjamin, Kracauer shifts from a metaphysical to a materialist conception of modernity, and engages in a series of methodological reflections on the theoretical foundations of a materialist cultural analysis
- described as a `materialist phenomenology of daily life'
- it leaves unresolved the potential theoretical conflicts between the biological and the historical, and the metaphysical and the social
- does not simply reduce the mass ornament to a superstructural reflection of the prevailing mode of production, as would a traditional Marxist analysis of ideology'
- adopting a mode of cultural inquiry which is premissed on the notion of deciphering or decoding
- engages in a critique of ideology by exposing the socio-political contradictions of contemporary capitalism in order to facilitate intervention in social reality
- Tiller Girls (American Dance Troup)
- American product/great American production
- illustrated the virtues of the conveyor belt
- as evidence of society's susceptibility to total domination and of the stabilization of relations of production
- the configurations symbolizing the readiness of the masses to be shaped and used at will by their leaders?
- fascism made use of both terror and propaganda as methods for creating the appearance of the reintegration of the masses into the capitalist economic system
1) the masses are forced to see themselves everywhere (always aware of themselves) sometimes in aesthetically seductive form/effective image
2) radio made domestic place public
3) mythical mass power exploited to underscore the masses as a mass!
(Banjamin - asserts that fascism allows tha mass attain self-expression within confines of the regime- an "aestheticization of political life"
- outlines pop culture within the historical process through its surface manifestations
- phenomenology
- "the cinema seems to come into its own when it clings to teh surface of things"
- in favour of the tastes of the mass b/c it contains a greater measure of reality than fine art does
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