Only Disconnect

Posted by jesuslewis on August 8th, 2017

On November 16, 1924, Siegfried Kracauer, a luminary in the literary world of the Weimar Republic, published a feisty essay in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Trained as an architect, Kracauer was an acute observer of modernity and its impact on life in the city. He followed in the footsteps of his onetime teacher Georg Simmel, the sociologist whose 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” argued that overstimulated urban dwellers were prone to develop a “blasé attitude,” a coping mechanism that blunted their ability to react to new sensations. Kracauer’s concerns went beyond that. “People today who still have time for boredom and yet are not bored are certainly just as boring as those who never get around to being bored,” he wrote in the Zeitung. The bourgeoisie “are pushed deeper and deeper into the hustle and bustle until eventually they no longer know where their head is.”
Life in the modern city, with its cheap and ubiquitous entertainment, was partly to blame. The glow of street advertising hijacked people’s spirits with the promise of cheap liquor and cigarettes, while movie theatres created the illusion of “a life that belongs to no one and exhausts everyone.” Radio listeners were in a state of “permanent receptivity, constantly pregnant with London, the Eiffel Tower, and Berlin,” their souls “badgered by the news hounds” so that “soon no one can tell anymore who is the hunter and who is the hunted.” The disorienting experience, Kracauer complained, is like “one of those dreams provoked by an empty stomach”:

A tiny ball rolls toward you from very far away, expands into a close-up, and finally roars right over you. You can neither stop it nor escape it, but lie there chained, a helpless little doll swept away by the giant colossus in whose ambit it expires. Flight is impossible. Should the Chinese imbroglio be tactfully disembroiled, one is sure to be harried by an American boxing match. . . . All the world-historical events on this planet—not only the current ones but also past events, whose love of life knows no shame—have only one desire: to set up a rendezvous wherever they suppose us to be present. But the masters are not to be found in their quarters. They’ve gone on a trip and cannot be located, having long since ceded the empty chambers to the “surprise party” that occupies the rooms, pretending to be the masters.

For More Details Recycling Service Video