Dérive

Siegfried Krakauer's  The Salaried Masses  explores the lives, the hopes, the dreams, and ultimate dissapointments of Berlin's pracarious middle class (named the "salariat" by Walter Benjamin) in the late 1920s. This is a class of people who are alienated from their work but paid just enough to consume a little extra. The salaried masses are immersed in Adorno's culture industry and suffer from Marx's alienated labor. They are unhappy but not desperate. Whereas the unemployed consider killing themselves, the salaried masses have just enough auspicious consumption to keep them thinking too hard about what's going on. In fact, as one interviewee remarks, thinking too hard is a distraction from what would otherwise be more interesting. The salaried masses, young and surrounded by commodities, have absorbed the ideas of the bourgeoisie, much like the characters in Georges Perec's 1965 novel  Things: A Story of the Sixties .  Alas, a mass of things does not