ographyofthe modern massescontinuedto reproduce the conceptual slippage
between“mass”and“class”even in the more methodical studies written after
the war.Laterreadersofmass psychologyfrom SigmundFreud to Theodor Gei-
gerrepeatedlyusedLeBon to make sense of the ruptures caused byWorld WarI
and the German Revolution of 1918/19. Manyusedadecidedlyprewar sense of
fear andaweofmass society in order to work through theirown ambivalences
about social and political change.Yetwhen conceptualizedaspart of the config-
urations of mass cultureand modernity,mass discourse alsofacilitated new
ways of thinking about the disappearance of culturalhierarchies and the process
of democratization spearheaded by the cultureindustry.Siegfried Kracauer’sno-
tion of themass ornamentrepresents but one model forareadingofsurface phe-
nomena that acknowledgesaslegitimate the demands of the modern masses for
representation in the artistic and political sense.
FromaMarxist perspective,itwould be easy to deconstruct nineteenth- and
earlytwentieth-centurydescriptions of the singular mass(die Masse)and the
plural masses (die Massen)byreferringto the antithesis of spirit and mass in ide-
alist philosophy. Marx identified the problem earlyonwhen he called this antith-
esis“nothing but thespeculativeexpression of theChristian-Germanicdogma of
the antithesis betweenSpiritandMatter,between God and the world. This antith-
esis finds expression in history,inthe human world itself in suchaway that a
few chosenindividualsas theactive Spiritare counterposed to the rest of man-
kind, as thespiritless Mass,asMatter.”²¹The semiotic slippagebetween inani-
mate mass in the material sense and animatedmassinthe sense of multitudes
functionsasanimportantgenerative principle in standard mass discourse, with
the marked preference among conservative thinkers for the singular mass (with
its connotations of uniformity and conformity) the clearest example of language
functioningasideology. As evidence of the term’spersuasive powers throughout
theWeimaryears, this juxtaposition of“mass”and“spirit”continues in the
tropes of massification used by Oswald Spengler,PaulTillich, andKarl Jaspers
when diagnosing the tragedyofculture and lamenting the decline of the west.
Likewise, the conservative reactionagainst the so-called revolt of the masses,
to citethe influential 1929 book byJosé OrtegayGasset,confirms to what degree
mass discourse channels the cultural elites’fears of losing influence.Behind the
categories of taste and distinction that equate the masswith mediocrity,there al-
ways lurksadeep distrust or hatred of democracy.The fact that left-wingwriters
sometimesemploy the same tropes to discursively separate organized workers
Marx and Engels,“The HolyFamily,”Marx/EngelsCollectedWorks,trans. RichardDixon et
al. (London: Lawrenceand Wishart,1975–2004),4: 85.Henceforthabbreviated asMECW.
The Threatofthe Proletariat and the Discourse of the Masses 45