ABSTRACT

The genealogy of Kracauer’s theory ranges from German idealism to Husserl’s phenomenology, from Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism to Bergson’s metaphysics, from Marx, Simmel and Lukács to the Frankfurt School, from Freud to Surrealism. Kracauer’s analysis of modernity is often derived from Weber’s critique of the instrumentalization of reason under capitalism and from his concept of the historical process as demythologization, although Kracauer eventually distanced himself from Weber by emphasizing the dialectics of enlightenment and the relapse of capitalist Ratio into mythological thought.1 Although Kracauer’s work, particularly The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, foreshadowed Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment thesis, it was also “infl ected in a way that leads to a refreshing rehabilitation of popular culture and ‘distraction’ in defi ance of polemically dismissive accounts of mass culture.”2 In contrast to Adorno and Horkheimer’s bleak vision of historical regression and their view of autonomous art as the last safe home for the enlightenment project, Kracauer still believed in the possibility of Ratio’s selftranscendence, insisting that the path of demythologization “leads directly through the center of the mass ornament, not away from it.”3