"Reason speaks wherever it disintegrates the organic unity and rips open the natural surface (no matter how cultivated the latter might be); it dissects the human form here only so that the undistorted truth can fashion man anew. But reason has not penetrated the mass ornament; its patterns are mute. The Ratio that gives rise to the ornament is strong enough to invoke the mass and to expunge all life from the figures constituting it. It is too weak to find the human beings within the mass and to render the figures in the ornament transparent to knowledge. Because this Ratio flees from reason and takes refuge in the abstract, uncontrolled nature proliferates under the guise of rational expression and uses abstract signs to display itself."
Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament", The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 84.
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