In his unpublished work The New American Vortex, Marshall McLuhan included in the first book a piece entitled The Case of the Missing Anecdote. The first three pages of its ten-page typescript are crossed out in pencil, and scribbled across the top are instructions to “Skip to the top of page 4.”
It’s funny to think that, were Vortex ever published, the reader thus might not learn that this chapter began as a response to a very-famous column in the September 1948 issue of Commentary Magazine. It will be our first retrieval in this New Explorations Weblog feature series: McLuhan’s Milieu. This series will link to full, archived copies of literary articles cited by Marshall McLuhan in his published and unpublished work, as well as articles which illuminate art criticism and historical commentary of the modernist age.
New York art critic Harold Rosenberg will feature heavily in McLuhan’s Milieu. Our first look at his extensive career will be a piece whose title has become an oft-used cliché in discussion of mass media:
The “mass” experience and recording of an historical event necessarily differs from each individual’s own private experience and recollection. Rosenberg cites a contemporary who writes, “For most American intellectuals, the Communist movement of the 1930’s was a crucial experience,” and responds:
Warshow is able to state flatly that this was “crucial” only because he is discussing “the” Communist experience as a mass event. Yet from this point of view, it seems that Marxism in the United States became a renunciation or negation of experience, a plunging of the individual into mass inertia, precisely because he yielded himself up to the general intellectual “climate.” There wasn’t any significant group experience of Communism in America except in the negative sense, and this is one of the main reasons why people ran away from it. Then why talk about it as “crucial”? Or, better still, why not talk about some other kind of experience? Because since it happened to an historical “us” it seems to Warshow most significant: “It is for us what the First World War and the experience of expatriation were for an earlier generation. If our intellectual life is stunted and full of frustration,1 this is in large part because we have refused to assimilate that experience . . . never trying to understand what it means as part of our lives.” ([Rosenberg’s] italics.)
Harold Rosenberg, The Herd of Independent Minds, Commentary Magazine Sept. 1948
In turn, McLuhan zeroes in upon Rosenberg’s identification of the “renunciation or negation of experience, a plunging of the individual into mass inertia” and elaborates:
Mr. Rosenberg made no guesses about the source of such mental compulsion. I would personally suggest that it rises from the Kantian and Hegelian notion of the world as Idea and of the ‘manifold of experience’ as a blind chaos which we know and order only by our concepts. If things are inaccessible to reason, if they are not themselves radiant with intelligible forms which nourish the mind (as they are for example in the hylomorphic philosophy) then intellectual abstractions manufactured by the mind itself are the only things we know and offer the sole basis for social and artistic communication.
Marshall McLuhan, The Case of the Missing Anecdote, The New American Vortex Book I
And in Rosenberg’s quite off-hand, passing reference to Finnegans Wake as a more relateable rendition of his own individual anachronistic and fragmented memories of the 1930s than recorded, popularized “mass” experiences, McLuhan finds the opportunity to explain the origins of Joyce’s technique in his kinship to the French Symbolist poets.
Certainly Joyce (also Flaubert and Baudelaire) never made any concessions to the debased existence which surrounded him. But never for a moment did he entertain the attitude of Mr. Warshow that debased or mass culture “was a standing threat to one’s personality, was in a sense a deep humiliation”. Such an attitude is only possible to the prisoners of the concept for whom a conflicting set of concepts is a threat to the integrity of their own.
Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Joyce were often nauseated by but never alienated from the mass culture of their time. And the patient contemplation which they directed towards its every form and facet was rooted in the awareness that it was deeply related both to themselves and the nature of the real. Ulysses was already a work in which the alienation of the “artist” showed the illusions which Stephen had to banish before he could be either a man or an artist. So far as that book goes Joyce exhibits the prisoners of the concept as prisoners only of illusion, since they are all alike, seen to be embedded in a reality which unites them in spite of themselves. And it is a reality of the manifold of ordinary experience which is available as nutriment for everybody in any time or place.
Marshall McLuhan, The Case of the Missing Anecdote, The New American Vortex Book I
McLuhan’s typescript goes on, in its unredacted portion, to explain how the recording of “ordinary experience”—that is, experience of what he eventually comes to term “the human scale”—had been overlooked by American writers in the 1920s and 30s. Private notes, observations, and anecdotes were not being meticulously kept and filed by artists whose responsibility it was to record their every fleeting perception of the mundane objective scene in analogical just-proportion to both themselves and the whole.
Baudelaire knew that the “significance of an experience”, and this is the whole of the matter, does not reside in the poet, the thing, or the larger reality but in the ratio between the three. And there I think we should find the solution to the Case of the Missing Anecdote.
Marshall McLuhan, The Case of the Missing Anecdote, The New American Vortex Book I
The result was a paucity of raw materials from which to construct believable private experiences of historical events in novels and histories of those eras, increasing mass-susceptibility to retro-active possession by a retconned memory of “shared” experience.
Today, do we not let raw recordings stand-in for our own private experiences and impressions in our lives which, should we take the time to record them freshly in words, might serve as necessary material for the human-scale anti-environment necessary to oppose personality-obliterating mass dreams and media-rewritten memories?
