Steven Lai

Enzo Traverso

December 14th, 2017

Kracauer and Adorno: Mass Culture as Art

1. The Curious Realist

In the “Curious Realist,” Adorno’s account of Kracauer’s lifetime of writings, Adorno

pictures his colleague as a man captivated by film, with “the primacy of the optical in him.”1

Adorno praises Kracauer’s writing ability and engagement with nontraditional subjects, but

undercuts his uniquely intense predilection with movies. Adorno never fails to paint Kracauer as

an emotionally guided obsessive, as he challenges Kracauer’s implication of Weimar-era social

factors as a singular reason toward’s Hitler’s eventual rise: “a general social factor is readily

mistaken for the sole responsible factor when one has experienced it,”2 Adorno haughtily puts.

Moreover, he expresses concern over Kracauer’s alleged downplaying of capitalism’s role in

film narratives, as “One looks in vain in the storehouse of Kracauer’s intellectual motifs for

indignation about reification.”3 We therefore see in Adorno an ideological impasse with

Kracauer’s mode of inquiry, in an essay thinly veiled as a celebration of Kracauer’s legacy. To

understand Adorno’s distaste, and the chasms in thought between the two thinkers, we look to

each man’s thesis on mass culture, then compare the frameworks by which they pursue their

respective inquiries.

1 Theodor W. Adorno, “A Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer,” New German Critique, no 54 (1991): 166.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
 2. Capitalism and mass culture

Despite their opposite conclusions on what constitutes art, both Kracauer and Adorno begin

from the same socioeconomic framework: mass culture as inextricably linked to capitalism. In

“Mass Ornament”, Kracauer states that the characteristics of mass ornament, given rise by mass

culture, “reflects that of the entire contemporary situation,” a situation wholly permeated by the

“capitalist production process.”4

This process’s influence results in the destruction of “the natural organisms that it regards

either as means or as resistance.”5 Kracauer illustrates this dismantling in an example of the

Tiller Girls line dancers, where they are “no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters

whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics.”6 Individuals become “fractions of a

figure,” merely “products of American distraction factories.”7 The Tiller Girls echo the great

pillars of capitalistic production- replaceable parts, efficiency, and so forth.

Transitioning to Adorno, we see similar claims: that capitalism has given rise to a

commodified mass culture. However, Adorno backs his reputation as the most pessimistic of the

Frankfurt school by further magnifying the link. Mass culture is not only a reflection of

capitalism, but is in fact wholly controlled by the system- in a positive feedback loop capitalism

dictates the existence of mass culture, and mass culture perpetuates the further existence of

capitalism.8 This is made possible the complete reification of mass culture, where artistic

mediums have become synonymous with other productive units of the system: work and

consumer. In “Enlightenment as Mass Culture,” Adorno claims that the existence of cheap mass

culture represents a triumph of reification. Film, radio, and television are all one in the same,

4 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995): 78.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, (1947): 98.
representing a “genuine commodity character.”9 The specific elements of media, such as plot and

style choices, also reflect reification; Plot devices and film decisions are “completely defined by

the purpose they serve within the schema,”10 i.e. the schema of the surrounding capitalist

structure. Society’s irrational intertia, passing through business, thus takes on the”shrew

intentionality peculiar to [business]” in mass culture.11

In other words, where Kracauer saw media generated by capitalism, Adorno implicates

capitalism with a further ulterior motive: capitalism not only produces media characteristic of

capitalism, but its produced mediums function to further propagate capitalism.

3. Indictment of Abstraction

In both Kracauer and Adorno’s works, we also see similar indictments of capitalism’s

‘Abstractness’- its purposeful vagueness to which it utilizes towards its own ends.

Kracauer argues that capitalistic mass culture exists between Nature and Reason. It moves

away from the directly ideological symbols of the past, thereby lacking “mythology’s

resplendence of nature.”12 Yet this is only a partial move towards Reason, as mass culture adopts

the mathematical and organizational surface-level principles of capitalism (in what he calls

‘Ratio’), but fails to adhere to an ideology centered on human interests. The result is “a

mythological cult that is masquerading in the garb of abstraction, ”13 where “the Ratio of the

capitalist economic system is not reason itself but a murky reason. Once past a certain point, it

abandons the truth in which it participates. It does not encompass man.”14 Kracauer himself

9 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, (1947): 98.

10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 83.
13Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995): 81.

14Ibid.
advocates for a greater transition towards reason- mass culture, in leaving the mythology of the

past behind, must make the leap towards a culture centered on human interests, or risk self-

deception. The Tiller Girls, Kracauer points out, exemplify this Abstractness. Their geometry

gives the illusion of sophistication and reason, and their dramatic movements tease meaning, yet

the culmination is nothing more than an ambivalent expression- empty ideology wrapped in

surface-level rationality.15

Adorno highlights capitalism’s ideological masquerade along similar lines to Kracauer,

noting that mass culture’s “ideology is split between the photographing of brute existence and

the blatant lie about its meaning, a lie which is not articulated directly but drummed in by

suggestion.”16 But in typical Adorno fashion, he implicates mass culture’s ambivalent pseudo-

ideology with extra authoritarian ulterior motives: “its very vagueness, the quasi-scientific

reluctance to be pinned down to anything which cannot be verified, functions as an instrument of

control.”17

Adorno points out that the medium of film serves to reiterate capitalist society’s own

values through Abstractness. Mass culture maintains its noncommittal relationship to “suggestive

ideology, or concrete promises” by hinting at them without explicitly endorsing them18, so that

the ideas of capitalism are broadcasted through palatable means. The delicate process of

maintaining Abstractness thus leads capitalism to carefully appropriate from all levels of culture:

“It is causing meaninglessness to disappear at the lowest level of art just as radically as meaning

is disappearing at the highest,”19 lending unwarranted meaning to the fairgrounds while unfairly

dismantling traditional pomp and circumstance. Through this calculated appropriation,

15 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995): 81.
16 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, (1947): 111.
17 Ibid., 118.
18 Ibid., 114.
19 Ibid.
capitalism espouses its own values and omnipresence: “Ideology [of mass culture] becomes the

emphatic and systematic proclamation of what is. Through its inherent tendency to adopt the

tone of the factual report, the culture industry makes itself the irrefutable prophet of the existing

order.”20 In summary, mass culture functions as a controlling factor for capitalism by

systematically transfiguring all mediums of culture to deliver pro-capitalist narratives- and

especially in film, by warping the depiction of reality, the culture industry causes consumers to

believe in a state of the world where capitalistic society exists as an omnipresent state of the

world.

Where Kracauer sees mass culture and capitalism as in a reciprocal bind, Adorno sees a

totalitarian relation. Culture, transfigured from a separate ideological transmitter to a totally

reified and controlled unit, exists only to propagate capitalism further.

4. Discerning reality through culture

Kracauer and Adorno’s differences on capitalism and mass culture’s relation, though

seemingly subtle, lead to opposite implications regarding the proper way to discern ‘truth’: the

reality of the surrounding environment.

To Kracauer, mass culture is not only a reflection of society but a lens towards its true

nature. His writings on media, from works such as “Mass Ornament” to “Theory of Film” and

“Caligari to Hitler,” rest on this foundational belief: by analyzing cultural output, one can

decipher the particular essence of a time and place.21 As he stated in “Mass Ornament”: “The

surface-level expressions, however, by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated

access to the fundamental substance of the state of things.” Indeed, the characteristics of mass

20 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, (1947): 114.

21 Siegfried Kracauer, Caligari to Hitler, 5.
culture, no matter how banal in appearance, must be analyzed, as “the fundamental substance of

an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally.” 22

Adorno rejects Kracauer’s view. To Adorno, the culture industry is so totally reified that any

analyses into its particularities are redundant; Kracauer’s observations are reduced to the

reflections of a House of Mirrors- observations of capitalism, by capitalism, for capitalism.

Instead, one must look into the encapsulating superstructure of capitalism to discern truth. He

justifies this claim by pointing at the common structure of mass culture’s mediums: “If a branch

of art follows the same recipe as one far removed from it in terms of its medium and subject

matter…” he writes, “an explanation in terms of the specific interests of the technical apparatus

and its personnel would be closer to the truth.”23

Adorno explains this ‘recipe’ across film, radio, novels, and novella: capitalism adopts a

medium, then imbues Abstractness onto carefully selected stories through capitalist production

processes, resulting in narratives which manipulate consumers into further demand for capitalist

narrative. The culmination is a present culture “infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio,

and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are

unanimous together.”24

For example, Adorno points out that the film industry has taken on a “shrew

intentionality peculiar to [business],” 25 adopting capitalist procedures within its own production

processes. He notes that Hollywood, in its mandate to generate maximum appeal (no doubt a

requirement established by its covenant with banks), works through a system of imitation and

replaceable parts, not unlike the production processes of the Model T. The stars, chosen to

22 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995): 85.
23 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, (1947): 86.
24 Ibid., 94.
25 Ibid, 98.
adhere to a society’s sense of mass appeal, perform identical functions and are therefore virtually

indistinguishable in any significant sense. They “are absolutely replaceable, pure nothingness,

and are made aware of this as soon as time deprives them of their sameness.”26 Screenplays,

carefully engineered for maximum popularity, strictly obey the conventions and tastes of their

time. The culture industry thus holds “imitation as absolute. Being nothing other than style, it

divulges style’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy.”27 The manuscripts therefore adopt a

guise of relatability- Adorno explains that the plots, speaking to moviegoers on a personal level,

in doing so speak to everyone, resulting in “everyone [amounting] to those qualities by which he

or she can replace everyone else.”28 The replicability and imitation tendencies of capitalism

fully permeate film’s procedures, with Adorno therefore declaring movies the ultimate “triumph

of invested capital.”29 The result is a wholly reified industry.

But what about the element of consumer demand? Defenders of capitalism often note that

suppliers provide a social utility by rising to meet the demand for goods. Can not Kracauer claim

that the same be said of the culture industry- that films, radio programs, and print media are

merely produced to supply the public with what they already wanted? Kracauer himself depends

on roughly this same line of reasoning, especially in his work From Caligari to Hitler, where in

his analyses of Weimar era films he often establishes proportionality between a film’s popularity

and its ability to commiserate on contemporary matters.30 In this sense, Kracauer sees an

opening- doesn’t mass culture, through its reflection of the public’s predilections, partly show us

the nature of reality?

26 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995): 81.
27 Ibid., 117.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Siegfried Kracauer, Caligari to Hitler, 5.
 In “The Culture Industry,” Adorno anticipates this rebuttal and fully rejects it. “The

mentality of the public,” he states, “which allegedly and actually favors the system of the culture

industry, is a part of the system, not an excuse for it.”31 Adorno acknowledges that while

consumer demand does partly account for some of the decision-making of producers and

distributors, public taste is so entirely anticipated by research and tried-and-true methods that

demand hardly becomes the driving force behind their production decisions- producers remain

firmly in control. “Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape,” Adorno

writes.32 The result is that the public does not demand certain forms of entertainment, but merely

accepts what it is given: “Capitalist production hems them in so tightly in body and soul, that

they unresistingly succumb to whatever is proffered to them.”33

To further invalidate the idea that consumers have any control over the mass culture

offered to them, Adorno claims that the problem is even more insidious: the culture industry not

only anticipates demand, but deliberately tricks audiences into further demand through its careful

choice of narrative. For example, Adorno writes that the messages in film foster hopeless feeling,

further driving the demand for escape: “Entertainment fosters the resignation which seeks to

forget itself in entertainment.”34 For example, a multitude of films star “common folk” who are

thrust into fantastical situations and good fortune through sheer luck, thus impressing onto

audiences the omnipotence of Chance while diminishing the sense of one’s own volition in their

destiny.35 Adorno also expounds on Hollywood’s perpetuated “myth of success,” which

reinforces the idea that virtuousness and material well-being are indissolubly linked. These

31 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, (1947): 96.

32 Ibid., 97.
33 Ibid., 106.
34 Ibid., 113.
35 Ibid.
narratives, false by the basic mathematics of a capitalist society where few win and most lose,

further drive hopelessness (and subsequently demand for escape).36

This manipulation results in producers bowing “to the vote it has itself rigged.”37 A

manipulated populace ‘demands’ stories which the industry has manipulated people to demand in

the first place. The result is an intended impairment of their judgment, as “the pernicious love of

the common people for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities.” It is

this “cycle of manipulation and retroactive need” which unifies “the system ever more

tightly,” as movie production and consumption become a positive feedback loop solely

functioning to reify culture, and in the process furthering capitalism’s authoritarian grip.

Adorno drives the point even further in claiming that through this cycle of manipulation,

entertainment has in fact become synonymous with work, a presentation of “automated sequence

of standardized tasks” against a “faded foreground.”38 Adorno points out that movie sequences

are predictable and replicated again again; even today the vast majority of Hollywood films

follow the identical Joseph Campbell-esque Hero’s Journey superstructure, with the exact same

15 story beats following roughly the exact same timing (some exceptions exist, with famous

examples such as Christopher Nolan’s Momento, but the box office does not smile upon them).

These plot’s sequences “emerge from the directly preceding situation, not from the idea as a

whole,” Adorno writes, “an automaton that gives off signals”. Entertainment adopts the same

characteristics of work: mindless repetition and obedience to orders. 39

Thus through a cycle of manipulation, culture becomes work, and the reification of

culture is complete. The culture industry, a seemingly impregnable fortress serving capitalism,

36 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, (1947): 106.

37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 109.
39 Ibid.
offers no truth value to Adorno. Its produced works are commodities, and nothing more; any

peculiarities that seem to explain the contemporary are merely conscious or unconsciously

implemented manipulations. The only way to discern the reality of the situation would be an

analysis of the superstructure itself, which Adorno himself has attempted in his essay.

5. What constitutes ‘art?’

Given the dire situation at hand, how does an artist then transcend the bounds of his era?

What constitutes a great work- and is goal this even achievable?

Adorno writes that this goal is “not possible in transmitted form.”40 That is, an artist cannot

achieve transcendence through the culture industry. There was a time where art, surviving on

patronage through the past centuries, expressed some form of truth. Patronage, distinct from

reifying capitalism, served as a bulwark until late stage capitalism, until when “only the sire and

incessant threat of incorporation into commercial life as aesthetic experts finally brought the

artists to heel.”41 Thus the current day artist is stuck with an all-encompassing industry’s cycle of

manipulation. To escape, they must therefore make works beyond the norms- they must

represent the avant-garde. Adorno describes the traits of art which transcend reality: “traits in

which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity.”42

This failure marks a key differentiation from systematic influences. For Adorno, it is truth’s

stamp of approval. Only outside of the system can the artist preserve their personal subjectivity,

and thus produce works imbued with an element of truth.

40 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, (1947): 109.

41 Ibid., 105.
42 Ibid., 109.
 Kracauer’s opinion is exactly opposite. In his various movie and book reviews written during

the Weimar years, he endorses media which embraces the contours of their indexical- the

profane, the common. To sway too far to a top-down ideological implementation would be

reactionary, which jeopardizes a work’s ability to shed light. For example, in an earlier book

review he scathingly characterized the newly released Buber/Rozenweig Bible translation as a

‘set-piece’ ill-suited for a modern audience. “It could be that they believe they are serving the

truth,” Kracauer writes, “whereas in fact they have no idea how to find truth in all its actuality.

For today access to truth is by way of the profane.”43 On avant-garde works Kracauer would

characterize as them as too steadfastly ideological, which in the process of retaining their

subjectivity lose their ability to speak on the contemporary to which they have alienated

themselves from.

So how does art persist in mass culture? Kracauer, himself a critic of capitalism’s bond with

the culture industry (with his essays “Mass Ornament” and “Boredom,” which touches on radio’s

vegetative effects), nevertheless affords the forerunner of mass culture, film, a certain

‘redemptive potentiality.’ In the epilogue of his ‘Theory of Film,’ Kracauer details this unique

quality of cinema. Given the camera’s unprecedented capability to reproduce reality, truth has

the potential to unveil itself through film, especially through genres such as neorealism. The

“suggestive power of the raw material” shows us sides of physical reality we may have not

previously considered, interpretations of the world that reveal unbeknownst revelations. 44

The ideal film-artist, whose works possess transcendent qualities, is a ‘sojourner’ deep into

this physical reality. Kracauer describes a man “who sets out to tell a story but, in shooting it, is

43 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995): 201.
44 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960): 301
so overwhelmed by his innate desire to cover all of physical reality – and also by a feeling that

he must cover it in order to tell the story, any story, in cinematic terms- that he ventures ever

deeper into the jungle of material phenomena…”45 Kracauer’s film-artist is thus the opposite of

Adorno’s avant-garde ideal: the story guides them towards the jungles of reality, not away from

it.

Kracauer lists the fruits of the film-artist’s labor as many. These redemptive qualities include

its ability to reanimate the worn-out observations of monotonous daily routine, where films, in

their tendency to “explore this texture of everyday life… help us not only to appreciate our given

material environment but to extend it in all directions,”46 thus lending previously unknown colors

onto the worn-out visions of daily habit. Film also allows us to redeem the horrors of the past- by

reflecting historical transgressions into cinematic form, then observing them straight-on, we

become Perseus confronting Medusa’s gaze through his shield. Through this function, film

redeems “horror from its invisibility behind the veils of panic and imagination.”47 Film is also

unique as the only medium with a true bottom-up effect; that is, while other artistic forms start

from the ideology of the artist’s mind and end at the tip of the brush, film begins with reality as

the starting point.48 Kracauer includes a fitting quote by Edwin Panofsky: “it is the movies, and

only the movies, that do justice to that materialistic interpretation of the universe which, whether

we like it or not, pervades contemporary civilization.”49 Finally, film could even potentially

advance the evolution of mankind, perhaps towards Kracauer’s aforementioned vision of a

45 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960): 303.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 306.
48 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960): 309.
49 Ibid.
culture guided by reason. In reference to the expressions of the universal human condition of

Aparajito, Kracauer notes the potential of films to bridge gaps of perspective between cultures. 50

Kracauer concludes that he believes in cinema’s ability to “penetrate ephemeral reality

and burn through it.”51 Reality, when confronted incessantly by the camera, can perhaps divulge

its secrets, and in doing so reveal to us a truthful account of the human condition.

Concluding thoughts

Both thinkers agree on the basic premises of the preexisting economic condition, as well

as the vagueness of the narratives which have sprung forth. Yet their differences in assessing the

degree of capitalism’s domination led to opposite assessments on how to interpret reality, and

what constitutes art. Kracauer, despite his criticisms of capitalism, never establishes the

manipulative cycle of complete reification that Adorno does. In overlooking reification, he

leaves an opening for the individual film-artist to redeem physical reality. Adorno, ever

pessimistic, gives no leeway, even suggesting that destroying all of mass culture would not

deprive people of any real substance: “Shutting [the culture industry] down in this way would

not be reactionary machine-wrecking, ”52 he writes.

One wonders how Kracauer and Adorno would react to today’s culture industry. On one

hand, mass culture has permeated daily life to an unprecedented degree; it is doubtful the

thinkers could have anticipated the number of forms of transmission entertainment now adopts.

On the other hand, the advent of crowd-funded ventures and independent Youtube studios

challenges preconceived notions of film studio totalitarianism. One would imagine Kracauer

50 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960): 309.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 111.
seeing these increased technological capabilities and distribution opportunities as empowering to

the film-artist, and beneficial to their quest to capture reality: 4K video and HD broadcasting, in

their more accurate reproduction capabilities, could bolster film’s redemptive potentiality. But

Adorno, who half-jokingly noted that movie-houses’ only useful function was providing

temporary shelter to housewives and vagrants,53 would reel in shock at the scale of the

entertainment industry today. Indeed, he expressed the entertainment apparatus as “bloated” in

the 1940s, before the advent of IMAX, iTunes, and iPhones; today he would probably continue

to advocate for the total destruction of the culture industry. And as for excitement surrounding

the advent of CGI and the quantum leaps of special effects, with benchmark movies such as

James Cameron’s Avatar and the newly released Star Wars: The Last Jedi reflecting a populace

receptive to dazzling visuals, Adorno reveals a prophetic voice: “The idea of “exploiting” the

given technical possibilities, of fully utilizing the capacities for aesthetic mass consumption, is

part of an economic system which refuses to utilize capacities when it is a question of abolishing

hunger.”54 One can imagine the scenario of Kracauer and Adorno, the curious realist and the

angry realist, in the audience of a modern sci-fi film: Kracauer captivated and taking notes, and

Adorno in deep disgust, wondering the local Cinemark has not been renovated into a food bank.

53 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, (1947): 106.

54 Ibid., 111.
 Bibliography

Adorno, Theore W., “A Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer.” New German Critique, no 54

(1991).

Adorno, Theodor W., The Culture Industry. 1947.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film.

USA: Princeton University Press, 1947.

Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1960,