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McLuhan’s Milieu: Hannah Arendt on Existenz

July 15, 2020 / Clinton Ignatov

In a May 1946 letter to Felix Giovanelli, McLuhan points out the poetry in the placement of an experimental atomic reactor pile mentioned in a scientific report.

That it should be situated symbolically in a football stadium is too perfect. American sport, the artistic imitation of American business. Our great emotional educator and indicator.
You see, American business, excluded form the lib. arts curriculum conquered the college for all that. The dialectically organized curriculum omits all emotional education. That is entirely in the hands of the symbolic stadium. You see how perfectly this ties up with the “real life” of the outside world—the alumni. Lethal nostalgia and revenge on the pedagogues. From outside the school the business man conquers the curriculum. What need to fool with actual courses?
I have all this stuff on slides. Show the entire interaction of all levels of our wake-a-day and dream lives. The areas of consciousness, though, are now pin points. Just a mind here and there struggling against freeze-sleep. Sent it as a book to Reynall Hitchcock but haven’t heard from them. Embraces the entire business of Existenz by anticipation.
As I move through these correlations you can see why I crave the materials provided by [Cyril] Connolly and Existenz. I begin to see deeper into the consciousness of Poe and Faulkner. Their rage is relatively noble. Rooted in a community born in the decadence of the Greek revival they were peculiarly alive to the impact of technology. Invalid or Dying from their inception, they had the hyper-awareness of the sick-man for his enemies. Disgust with themselves was mounted on disgust with their external foes. Inner exhaustion was called on to fight an empty robot. A nightmare of nullity. And yet symbolically in such as [Allen] Tate and [Cleanth] Brooks, a note of modest confidence in renewal of the human condition. Not the abstract assertion of such a possibility as in [Lewis] Mumford the urbanite, but the quiet cultivation of a positive grammatica. Stirrings, however dim, of a genuine culture. Knowledge and supply of a real pabulum. That’s where, I too, take my stand. The view is horrible, but the garden is there too.
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, pg. 184

A week later he gives some constructive criticism to Walter Ong regarding a published piece in which Ong compare Reader’s Digest to a circus run by P.T. Barnum.

Now a word about your essays. The America papers were good but your analysis would have been better for a closer view of the typical items. In fact, you yourself would have been shocked had you taken even the very best items and considered them closely. I mean with regard not only to their structure and texture but with a view to their assumptions about audience. The whole function of thought and entertainment embedded in that mag. can be a parabola of the most profound contemplation. (Have you seen the last 2 issues of Partisan Review?) But I am being though with you were Walter only because its the only point at which I can be of help to you.
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, pg. 186

The McLuhan’s Milieu feature will take a deep dive into the archives of Partisan Review, which is available online for free thanks to the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. To start that journey, let’s consider a possible origin or catalyst for McLuhan’s 1946 craving for material on Existenz. Looking at the two issues mentioned to Ong, we find that it could very well be creditable to an essay appearing in the first, written by one of the magazine’s many prolific contributors: What is Existenz Philosophy? by Hannah Arendt. (PDF)

As distinct from existentialism, a French literary movement of the last decade, Existenz philosophy has at least a century-old history. It began with Shelling in his late period and with Kierkegaard, developed in Nietzsche along a great number of as yet unexhausted possibilities, determined the essential part of Bergson’s thought and of the so-called life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), until finally in postwar Germany, with Scheler, Heidegger, and Jaspers, it reached a consciousness, as yet unsurpassed, of what really is at stake in modern philosophy.
Hannah Arendt, ‘What Is Existenz Philosophy?’, Partisan Review 1946 No. 1

Arendt provides a broad overview of philosophical history following the destruction of the unity of Being by Immanual Kant, “the true, if also clandestine, founder of the new philosophy: who has likewise remained till the present time its secret king.”

More depends than is commonly supposed in the history of secularization on Kant’s destruction of the ancient unity of thought and Being. Kant’s refutation of the ontological proof of God destroyed that rational belief in God which rested on the notion that what I can rationally conceive must also be; a notion which is not only older than Christianity, but probably also much more strongly rooted in European man since the Renaissance. This so-called atheising of the world—the knoweldge, namely, that we cannot prove God through reason—touches the ancient philosophical concepts at least as much as the Christian religion. In this atheised world man can be interpreted in his “abandonment” or in his “individual autonomy.” For every modern philosopher—and not only for Nietzsche—this interpretation becomes a touchstone of philosophy.
Hannah Arendt, ‘What Is Existenz Philosophy?’, Partisan Review 1946 No. 1

Arendt dedicates a particularly long section of the essay to explaining the major points of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, such as Existenz/Dasein, and throwness/Geworfenheit. To this, she contrasts the work of Karl Jaspers:

From an historical point of view, it would have been more correct to have begun the discussion of contemporary Existenz philosophy with Jaspers. The Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, first printed in 1919, is undoubtedly the first book of the new “school.” On the other hand, there was not only the external circumstances that Jasper’s big Philosophie (in three volumes) appeared some five years after [Heidegger’s] Sein und Zeit, but also, more significantly, the fact that Jaspers’ philosophy is not really closed and is at the same time more modern. By modern we mean no more than that it immediately yields more clues for contemporary philosophical thinking. There are such clues, naturally, also in Heidegger, but they have the peculiarity that they can lead either only to clues for polemic or to the occasion of a radicalization of Heidegger’s project—as in contemporary French philosophy. In other words, either Heidegger has said his last word on the condition of contemporary philosophy or he will have to break with his own philosophy. While Jaspers belongs without any such break to contemporary philosophy, and will develop and decisively intervene in its discussion.
Hannah Arendt, ‘What Is Existenz Philosophy?’, Partisan Review 1946 No. 1

Arandt’s essay is worth reading in full, so I’ll close with a question which you might find the answer to while reading it.

In a 1978 letter to the Editor of the Toronto Star, McLuhan proffered his own definition of the philosophic tradition of Husserl and Heidegger—what Arendt is calling Existenz—in regards to classifying Roland Barthes:

As for Barthes, he is a “phenomenologist”—that is, one who tries to see the patterns in things while also playing along with the dominant theory of his world.
Personally, I prefer to study the pattern minus the theory.
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, pg. 549-540

How did McLuhan come to that definition? That is, what is he communicating by defining Phenomenology/Existenz in those terms?

McLuhan’s Milieu: The Herd of Independent Minds (1948)

July 5, 2020 / Clinton Ignatov

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 Herd of Independent Minds:Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture?

Read the original 1948 article on CommentaryMagazine.com

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?

Painter and Model, 1928 by Pablo Picasso

The Corporate Mob

June 23, 2020 / Clinton / 0 Comments

The simultaneity of electric communication creates an environment of togetherness for users. By using these media, individuals are irresistibly collectivized through its content. Individuals whose bodies are scattered across the habitable face of the planet get the uncanny sense of being in the same place, creating shared memories in common and, thus, share in common identity. Having traveled together, the result is a tribalism which is called—quite pointedly—mass. Communing in the same shared electric body, mass audiences are the dominant subject of 20th century history: it is the mediums of press, radio, and television which unite the developed world.

The innate sense of belonging, or co-involvement in a group is palpable. And yet today we find that sense of electric interrelation artificially mis-interpreted, pigeonholing our modern tribal identity into statistically-quantifiable, superficial signifiers. The source of our feeling of belonging to …

A Portrait of the Media Theorists as a Young Man—My MEA2020 Presentation

June 18, 2020 / Clinton / 0 Comments

Very glad to present to the Media Ecology Association yesterday. 🙂…

Bless French Canadian Hockey Players

May 21, 2020 / Clinton Ignatov

From Counterblast 1970.

Episode 013 – Tobey Senderovich

Join York University graduate Tobey Senderovich and I for a sprawling conversation about thought, cognition, psychology, behaviorism, wisdom, Heidegger, James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, John Vervaeke’s machinery of knowing, Friedrich Kittler, social lock-down, media effects, and anything else we can throw in! Tobey’s degrees in Neuroscience and Psychology make him the perfect friend to paint a big picture of the world’s new common ground.

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Episode 013 - Tobey Senderovich

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1995 – Neil Postman on Marshall McLuhan

January 20, 2020 / Clinton / 4 Comments

After Marshall McLuhan’s passing in 1980, educator and lifetime New Yorker Neil Postman became the central figure in the field which has come to be known as Media Ecology.

Through his work both in founding Media Ecology as a graduate program and in authoring many of its key texts, such as Amusing Ourselves to Death, Technopoly, and Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century Postman taught generations growing up late in the age of television—during the early rise of microcomputers—to use enlightenment values in carefully and consciously assessing the potentials and morality of modern technology through consideration of his six questions, which are:

1. What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?

2. Whose problem is it?

3. Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?

4. What new

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Mission Statement

December 6, 2019 / Clinton / 0 Comments

Human being can be considered from two inextricably interwoven perspectives: Human nature and the human condition. Think of it as nature vs. nurture, except what is nurturing our being is the total physical environment all together.

Since post-modern theories of Social Constructionism focuses only on the content of media as environmentally-constitutive, it fails to present a relatable account of the contemporary human condition for a growing number of people. That is where Media Ecology comes in.

Creating and internalizing a fuller view of our material, technological world allows all human being—human beings—to become clearer and more relatable by relief. People as products of their environment become distinct and empathetic as we internalize the total environment as backdrop and see how it differently shapes all of us.

Only once we see the physical world for what it is can we put …

1995 – Bob Logan on Marshall McLuhan

November 21, 2019 / Clinton / 0 Comments

Continuing my extraction of interviews from the 1995 Understand McLuhan interactive CD-ROM, I’m very happy to share an interview with Robert K. Logan, former University of Toronto physics professor, communications theorist, author and collaborator with Marshall McLuhan. His defense of his colleague and friend, McLuhan Misunderstood: Setting the Record Straight, is an invaluable essay providing essential context for reading and empathizing with the “guru of the electronic age”. Nobody can better provide a “hard science”-informed bridge to the enigmatic, artistic McLuhan than Bob Logan.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with Marshall McLuhan?

A: Well, I would like to talk about my relationship with Marshall McLuhan, because it was a great privilege to have known this man and to have been able to have collaborated with him. I was first introduced to him by …

Episode 012 – Howard Rheingold

Beneath the well-popularized myths of giants like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, computing has fast-moving, highly-technical story involving very many people and places. And in 1984, Howard Rheingold—who had been the embedded writer documenting and communicating the work of the Xerox PARC team as they developed the GUI, Ethernet, and Object Oriented Programming paradigms—saw the very-real possibility of that story going unrecorded, and lost to history. His book Tools for Thought became the definitive work documenting the history of computer development, and was a key resource of mine for creative Silicon and Charybdis. His later books, like The Virtual Community and Virtual Reality, further cemented Howard Rheingold status as the key writer and test-subject for the largest technological shift in history. He was editor of The Whole Earth Catalogue, testified for the ACLU against the 1996 Communications Decency Act, …

Concerned Netizen