Travel and Dance as Religion in Commercial Culture

In his essay Travel and Dance, Siegfried Kracauer examines the mechanical nature of commercial culture and social abnormalities that result from it. Two examples are travel and dance. In his view, commercial culture has abridged dance to a simple sequence of timed steps and travel to a plain experience of changing place. Both travel and dance are subject to fashion. A new tempo or a new destination is decreed according to the dictates of this peculiar specter and obligingly followed by trend-setting society.

He believes fashion to be the fundamental force powering the commercial machine that is the basis of capitalist culture. Fashion erodes the value of things by subjecting their image to periodic change. Such change is not relative to the efficiency of the things themselves but instead is an impulsive caprice that defaces the world with unnecessary obsolescence. Yet, fashion does show the intimate connectedness that can be established between people and commodities.

Fashion is the agent of the commercial process that now rules us. Kracauer argues that a depraved profit and loss mechanization has prevailed against our humanness. Our cultural processes have been constricted by the assumption that the world can actually be understood according to mechanistic presuppositions. The cultural thought leaders rationalize all aspects of life to accommodate it to technology and mechanization. Mankind must be made malleable enough to fit into this commercial worldview.

By placing such artificial limitations on what is acceptable in society, mechanical men are actually sacrificing intellect, and unnaturally restricting its consideration of anything beyond their carefully restricted models. The more they embed themselves exclusively in these models, the more they disintegrate into a series of formulaic and meaningless activities. They have become henchmen of "intellectual" excess, becoming not masters of the machine but merely machine like.

Travel and dance have an exaggerated purpose in such a culture. Kracauer observes, “[that] the goal of travel is not its destination but rather a new place as such.” There is no longer a search for the soul of another place but just a look at the foreignness of its face. Travel is a pure sensation of space, being somewhere other than where one is now.

Dance has similarly been evacuated of meaning, reduced to the marking of time. The ceremoniousness of old dance had meaning, pleasant flirtation or a tender and sensuous encounter but this has deteriorated in modern dance to a representation of “rhythm as such. Instead of expressing specific ideas in time, its actual content is time itself.” Modern music, no matter its self-promoted vitality, is nothing more than syncopation. Having only rhythm as a goal is inauthentic, and through dance alone one cannot obtain an authentic experience such as Eros. Travel and dance are no longer phenomena that unfold in space and time but instead are associated simply with the transformation of space and time.

Because mechanical men confine themselves to the spatial-temporal view of their restricted world, they are granted access to a “beyond” only through changes in space or time. Dance and travel are a substitute for the sphere they have denied themselves. They must intermittently live in one place and then another. They must move at one pace, then another. Kracauer says that “Travel and Dance have taken on a theological significance” for them.

Still, even mechanical men are aware of the inauthenticity of their mechanical limitedness. The need for redemption is as passionate for them as for real people. Their addiction to change in time or place is their surrogate redemption. Spatially they cannot be here and there but rather they are first here and then somewhere else that is also here. They are only redeemed to that which they vainly try to escape.

Kracauer on Weimar Literature

Siegfried Kracauer used analysis of widely read literature to investigate the structure and dynamics of social strata. He argued that this form of analysis avoided the inevitable pretense aroused by a more direct approach. In his essay On Best Sellers and Their Audience, he reviews the structural transformation of the Weimar economy after World War I that reordered the German middle class, and how that reordering was reflected in the period literature.

The weakening of Weimar Germany effectively turned many in the middle class into the working poor who still carried the middle class label. That middle class lacked the crucial features of the middle class before the war. They no longer had the limited independence enjoyed by the former middle class, through its modest financial security. Because of its size and interests, this middle class had been the financial mainstay for the publishing industry.

Kracauer noted the economic trends leading up to the social quagmire in Weimar: the concentration of capital, impoverishment of small stockholders, and the inflationary crisis that “led to the destruction of essential resources.” The new middle class was dependent. The deterioration of their fortunes slowly dismantled the foundation of their old middle class consciousness. The old tenets could no longer survive, stripped of their economic and social foundations in the new social reality.

Along with the declining fortunes and independence of the middle class, actual individualism declined. Administrative law increasingly invaded individual affairs and governmental planning began to transcend individual interest. Collectivization increased. Kracauer observed that people became less conscious of old social status. These trends in Weimar appeared incognito. The prevailing consciousness was still adjusting to the new realities, still reaching for the old concepts.

In addition to declining individualism in Weimar society, economic authorities lost their ability to cast the previous illusions and spells. In Weimar, strong disenchantment had taken hold. Ideas that used to drive the economy became mere rhetorical bric-a-brac. Kracauer’s brilliant quip was “You can’t live on bread alone, particularly when you don’t have any.” A manifestation of this heightened cynicism was the cinematic unmasking of the rigged game, in Weimar films such as The Joyless Streets with Greta Garbo.

In popular literary works, tragedy walked hand in hand with individualism. The fictional individuals triumph, however, even in the potential catastrophe constructed for them by their author. Kracauer quotes a best selling author in Weimar, “The worried, fearful person of today and particularly the person from the upper classes, almost always has to keep his feelings under wraps in the often futile struggle to maintain his standard of living. Such a person grasps … eagerly for such stories.”

Kracauer believed the middle class in Germany understood that a tragic intermediate fate awaited them. Yet they still attempted to maintain the old and comfortable arrangement. As a result of this tension, they raised “all calamities into tragic events. “

Idealists who tragically sacrifice themselves for an ideal was another popular theme in Weimar. The upper class doggedly struggled to maintain a faded idealism, which gave them style and distance from the mass. Faded idealism, according to Kracauer “resonated among the more cultivated circles, which [were] haunted by taste, culture, and education. “

In contrast, the middle and working class taste in literature had an emphasis on spirit or perseverance, and feeling became a pervasive motif. Feeling provided an optimistic hope to steady oneself during tragedy. It buttressed the outmoded concepts that were a comfortable part of better days. This “touching quality” signified an intermediate position between acceptance and rebellion. This was the middle class stance in the Weimar crisis.

Many story lines preserved the middle class concepts through escape into other worlds. These excursions avoided the challenging issues people would encounter with a reasoned analysis of their situation. A popular such distant world was the sensual, and erotic enchantment increased during the Weimar years. Another world was distant geographies. Nature yet another. Nature proved to be a popular backdrop in bestsellers because of its cathartic expanse. In the silence of nature, complex troubles sink into a mute void.

Kracauer’s conclusion, drawn from his study of popular literature, is that the middle class in Weimar would not acknowledge their change in fortune. They invested their beliefs in the false hopes of maintaining a life style ideal that had already perished. Their literature allowed them to renounce language and reason, and through its feeling to retain hope in the old concepts.

Thomas Y. Levin has translated a series of Kracuaer's essays into English. They originally appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung and are now available in the book The Mass Ornament.