Kracauer, Hierarchy, and the Educated Masses

Preface

Since it’s been some time since I’ve posted last, and since the time between my initial posts has always been a bit long, I’ll try to start posting a bit more regularly and in shorter bursts.  I’ll attempt to offer a few broad outlines of ideas critical for my dissertation or indicate future projects.

What follows are a few brief notes on Kracauer and the foundations of the kind of labor required for a dissertation, an extension and deepening of some previous comments.

Notes on Kracauer

Kracauer’s The Salaried Masses (1930)—which is fundamental to Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times, the subject of the chapter I’m currently writing—aims to expose the status and nature of the “employee,” the white-collared worker laboring largely to facilitate the massive bureaucracy required by capital’s highly specialized and rationalized processes.  Kracauer claims that such an analysis is necessary not only because the employee has become a central component of the German economy, but also because she has been an almost entirely overlooked element within it.  The employee has so far escaped analysis precisely because of her ordinariness and her pervasiveness in society, particularly in the city. [1]

Charting the centrality of this group of laborers, Kracauer recognizes the fundamental importance of the production of the employee in a certain form—that is, the generation of a certain kind of employee subjectivity.  For instance, hiring and promotion processes, as well as aptitude tests and evaluations,  ensure she is the “model” worker: diligent, efficient, submissive, agreeable, docile, and utterly replaceable. [2]  This standardization is reflected in certain norms of dress and grooming, reinforced by the commodification of the standard.  The employee purchases the look by which she demonstrates her suitability for work to her numerous bosses—the suit, the makeup, the comb….[3]  It seems possible to say the basic characteristic produced in the employee and reinforced by her consumption, is her acceptance of the hierarchies in which she is instilled which dictate how efficient she must be, and the naturalness and necessity of such hierarchy.

I suggest an analogous investigation is required today.  In theoretical labor from undergraduate to graduate work and beyond, the often overlooked element is the production of the student.  The formation of the student is as essential to academic labor as the formation of the employee is to white-collar labor for Kracauer.  I mean that the academic, to serve as one, undergoes a process of subject-formation as student similar to that described by Kracauer: subordination (via various mechanisms like tests and papers) to hierarchies requiring a certain amiability as well as diligence and efficiency.  The acceptance of the hierarchy of the expert thinker over the non-expert thinker seems to largely be the unspoken presupposition for both teacher and students in most university classrooms.  The hierarchical nature of intellectual labor tend to become naturalized and recede into the background as Freire notes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, often left unexamined in the classroom and forming a silent foundation of much academic production.  (Of course, much more has to be said about the distinctions between undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate academic labor, as well as about the labor of the adjunct, non-tenured laborer.)

This situation gives rise to some strange results in recent left revolutionary theory.  As I’ve noted before, a certain (and dominant) strand of recent left movements has been starkly antiauthoritarian and anti-hierarchical, favoring horizontal social and political relationships.  But left theory has tended to generally assume the role of thinker over against such movements, and to offer those movements the theory they “need” to be successful.  They assume, in other words, the hierarchical role of teacher relative to student.  This speech by Zizek and these comments by Agamben may serve as illustrations.  (A lot more needs to be said about the ludicrous nature of Agamben’s approach to recent movements.)  But somehow even avowed anarchists like David Graeber (see this, for example) fall prey to this assumption.  Graeber, too, proclaims with the privileged voice of the university professor (from which the collective voices forming recent movements are excluded) the meaning and necessary course of recent movements.

Analyzing the formation of the academic herself—and more generally the “educated masses”—therefore seems to be an essential task of revolutionary theory in order to avoid uncritically accepting and imposing hierarchical structures upon recent movements.