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94 THE SALARIED MASSE.
nature. Inherent in them is a secondary significance that often distances
them from their original determination. Under pressure from the
prevailing society they become, in a metaphorical sense, shelters for the
homeless. Apart from their primary purpose, they acquire the further
one of binding employees by enchantment to the place the ruling
stratum desires, and diverting them from critical questions - for which
they anyway feel little inclination. So far as contemporary film production
is concerned, I have demonstrated in two essays published in the
Frankfurter Zeitung - 'The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies' and
'Contemporary Film and its Audience'l7 - that almost all the industry's
products serve to legitimize the existing order, by concealing both its
abuses and its foundations. They, too, drug the populace with the
pseudo-glamour of counterfeit social heights, just as hypnotists use
glittering objects to put their subjects to sleep. The same applies to the
illustrated papers and the majority of magazines. A closer analysis would
presumably show that the image-motifs constantly recurring in them
like magical incantations are intended to cast certain contents once
and for all into the abyss of imageless oblivion: those contents that are
not embraced by the construction of our social existence, but that
bracket this existence itself. The flight of images is a flight from
revolution and from death.
If the magic of images assails the masses from without, then sport -
indeed the whole culture of the body, which has led also to the custom
of the weekend - is a primary form of their existence. The systematic
training of the body no doubt fulfils the mission of producing a vitally
necessary counterweight to the increased demands of the modern economy.
The question, however, is whether the contemporary sports industry
is concerned only with this admittedly indispensable training. Or
whether sport is not ultimately assigned so eminent a place in the
hierarchy of collective values today because it offers the masses a welcome
opportunity for distraction - which they exploit to the full. For
distraction, in the most crucial sense of the word, and also for glamour.
Numerous people who otherwise would remain faceless soldiers in the
employee army can win prestige as sporting celebrities. It is the masses
themselves who throng to the sports grounds. If a number of big firms
did not think they needed their own company sports associations, society
as a whole would hardly still have to whip up enthusiasm for sport in
order to preserve itself. One discerning manufacturer complains in
conversation with me that sport monopolizes the interest of young
17. The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, translated and edited by Thomas Levin,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. and London 1995, pp. 291-304 and
307-20.