Crowds and Democracy by Jonsson Stefan;

Author:Jonsson, Stefan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI001000, Philosophy/Aesthetics, POL023000, Political Science/Economic Conditions
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

The people united in a group are no longer full individuals [sind keine Vollindividuen mehr], but only fragments of individuals whose very right to exist is exclusively a function of the group’s goal. The subject as an individual self [Einzel-Ich] linked to other individual selves [Einzel-Ichen]: a being whose resources must be conceived as endless and who, incapable of being completely ruled by the idea, still lives in realms located outside the idea’s sphere of influence. The subject as a group member: a partial self [Teil-Ich] that is cut off from its full being and cannot stray from the path which the idea prescribes for it.85

Outside the collective, Kracauer stated, there exists something called das Vollindividuum; within the collective, this being becomes a partial self, a Teil-Ich.86 The mass was thus defined as a transformation of authentic individuality, or as its deformation.

Compare this analysis to the more canonical one in “The Mass Ornament” of 1927. In the analytic framework that Kracauer employed in this essay, the masses were not measured against an idealized notion of individuality. A notion such as das Vollindividuum has no role to play. As Kracauer made clear, the complete individual is conceivable only in the fully mythologized world, where each being is independently meaningful as a natural sign of the divine creation or the perfected community, or in the fully enlightened world, where each being is independently meaningful by virtue of a reason that has liberated humankind from the constraints of myth and nature. In the historical existence proper to men and women, however, they are always entangled in various kinds of collectives. The real human being is never more than a partial self, a Teil-Ich. Rather than accepting the false alternatives of individual or mass, one should distinguish between various forms of collectives and the degree of freedom or oppression that they entail.

Kracauer’s idea of the mass as an ornament seems to have entered his thinking as he was reviewing performances of touring American dance companies known as Tiller Girls. As one scholar describes these popular revues, they consisted of “kick-lines of ‘girls’ … in various states of undress.”87 The dance companies featured dancers with long legs and shiny costumes whose coordinated steps and gestures formed rhythmic patterns in which the single performer had no meaning except as part of the greater constellation she formed together with her companions. The shows were often large in scale, filling auditoriums and sports arenas, where hundreds of performers would form colorful patterns before excited audiences.

Kracauer realized that the secret behind these spectacles was organization: “Like the pattern in the stadium, the organization stands above the masses, a monstrous figure whose creator withdraws it from the eyes of its bearers, and barely even observes it himself.”88 He went on to suggest that the subjection of the dancer to the mass ornament mirrored the human condition under capitalism. “The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls…. The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires.

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