Mass Ornament and <i>Ritournelle</i>

This article discusses Kracauer’s analysis of mass ornament in light of Deleuze’s concept of ritournelle. Kracauer was interested in the spectacle of Tiller Girls and found the principle of the capitalist production process in its ornamental formations. Capitalism destroys any natural organisms for its means and excludes any resistance from its effective procedure. This operation necessarily comes along with calculation and mechanisation. All individuals have scaled up statistics charts and scrambled with machines completely. People have turned into masses who are no longer different in form but simple technical objects that can be equally employed at any point of the globe. Kracauer understood mass ornament as the surface-level expression of global capitalism, which revealed its unconscious. He emphasised the ambivalence of mass ornament and a possible line of escape from capitalist rationality through the emptiness of its formal excess. Deleuze’s concept of ritournelle may shed light on a similar question of mass ornament and push its scope beyond Kracauer’s analysis. The two philosophers seem to share the frame of formalism when they deploy their arguments concerning form and depth; however, Deleuze put forward the issue of temporality in his discussion of ritournelle, a crucial question that Kracauer omits.