the herd of independent minds: has the avant-garde its own mass-culture?

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THE HER OF IN EPEN ENT MIN S

Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture?

HAROLD ROSENBERG

HE basis of mass culture in all itsforms is an experience recognized ascommon to many people. It is be-

cause millions are known to react in the sameway to scenes of love or battle-because cer-tain colors or certain kinds of music will callup certain moods-because assent or antagon-

ism will inevitably be evoked by certainmoral or political opinions-that popularnovels, movies, radio programs, magazines,advertisements, ideologies can be contrived.The more exactly he grasps, whether by in-stinct or through study, the existing ele-ment of sameness in people, the more suc-cessful is the mass-culture maker. Indeed,so deeply is he committed to the conceptthat men are alike that he may even fancy

that there exists a kind of human deadcenter in which everyone is identical witheveryone else, and that if he can hit thatpsychic bull's eye he can make all of man-kind twitch at once. (The proposition, "Allmen are alike" replaces the proposition,

IN SHAKEsPEARa's England, a man waiting histurn in a barber shop would take a violin fromthe wall and entertain himself and his neigh-bors; in Louis B. Mayer's America, millions ofmen (and their families) passively see thesame movie or watch the same television pro-gram at the same time. For the intellectualsof our day, this mass culture has been a threat(which some have evaded by self-isolation) anda challenge (which some have answered bystudying the wicked magic that makes massculture so effective). Yet, as HAROLD RosEN-BERG here maintains, it is possible that the zoth-century intellectual, in his relations with theworld of mass culture, has been himself un-knowingly seduced and conquered just when

he thought he was fighting the hardest. Mr.Rosenberg, poet and critic, was born in Brook-lyn in 190o6, and studied at the City Collegeof New York and Brooklyn Law School. Atpresent he is with the Advertising Council.

"All men are equal" in the "democracy"of mass-culture institutions, thus makingit possible for rich or politically powerfulmass-culture leaders to enjoy their advan-tages while still regarding themselves as'men of the people. )

On the other hand, the producer of mass

culture has no use for experience, his ownor another's, which cannot be immedi-ately shared. What is endured by onehuman being alone seems to him unreal,or even an effect of madness. The "aliena-tion" of the artist, his characteristic neuro-sis, which we hear so much about today,is an essential axiom of mass-culture think-ing: every departure from the commonexperience appears to be an abnormality

requiring some form of explanation-medi-cal, sociological, etc. Actually, the conceptthat the artist is "alienated from reality"has little to support it either in the psy-chology of artists or in any metaphysicsof art. As Thomas Mann said recently, itdepends on who gets sick; the sickness ofa Nietszche may bring him much closerto the truth of the situation, and in thatsense be much more "normal," than thehealth of a thousand editorial writers.

The image of the "alienated individualis usually derived by American contem-poraries from Marx. Marx, however, seesalienation as the condition not of the ar-tist but of the common man of industrialsociety; for him it is the factory worker,the business man, the professional, who is"alienated in his work" through being

hurled into the fetish-world of the market.The artist is the only figure in this society

who is able not to be alienated, becausehe works directly with the materials ofhis own experience and transforms them.Marx therefore conceives the artist as the

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model of the man of the future. Butwhen current critics influenced by Marx-ist terminology talk of alienation they meansomething directly contrary to Marx's phil-osophical and revolutionary conception.

They mean not the tragic separation ofthe human individual from himself, butthe failure of certain sensitive spirits (them-selves) to participate emotionally and intel-lectually in the fictions and conventionsof mass culture. And this removal frompopular hallucination and inertia theyconceive as a form of pathos

Nothing could be more vulgar, in theliteral meaning of the term, than whin-ing about separation from the mass. Thatbeing oneself and not others should be de-plored as a condition of misery is themost unambiguous sign of the triumph inthe individual of the ideology of massculture over spiritual independence. It isa renunciation of everything that has beengained during the past centuries throughthe liberation of mankind from the au-thoritarian community.

HE opposition of mass-culture makingto anything individual goes far beyond

mere rejection or even social condemna-tion. It claims to assert a truth regardingthe very nature of human reality: that thereal situation of the individual is that inwhich he is aware of himself in massterms. The most explicit and aggressiveformulation of this metaphysical bias isto be found in the Soviet Union, where

the mass-culture principle has been carriedto its logical conclusion. There individualexperience is denounced officially as anaberration from real life.

Discussing "plays dealing with the situa-tion arising from the return home of Rus-sian soldiers," Drew Middleton reports(New York Times, Feb. 1x 1948) that"the fidelity or infidelity of the soldier'swife, his own amorous affairs at the front,were not considered essential problems ofreal life by the dramatic critics of theKremlin" (my italics). Middleton thencites the list of situations with which So-

viet art is bidden to concern itself: thevictory in World War II, socialist recon-struction, etc. The list comprises only situ-ations common to Soviet citizens, and theartist is directed to create an emotional and

pictorial equivalent of this "real" exper-ience. Needless to add, the recent attack on"formalism" in music means that too muchindividuality must not be allowed to sneakinto even the manner in which the artistdeals with the mass experience.

It may be argued that what is wrongwith Soviet art is not that it restricts it-self to the common experience but thatits version of that experience is false; wereit faithfully to reflect the true experienceof the Soviet masses it might be valid art.But how can one speak of a commonSoviet experience without taking into ac-count that it itself is formed by Sovietmass culture? Mass- cultural statementsare constantly in the process of makingthemselves true by causing people to experi-ence their common lives in those terms. Toillustrate: several years ago the WPA Writers'Program interviewed old Negroes who had

been slaves in the South before Emanci-pation. A large majority had an image oftheir own slavery identical with that of theromantic apologists of plantation life. Onewas left to assume either that the romanticpicture is a true description of slavery, orthat it became true to the ex-slaves by absorb-ing their actual experience into itself.

Thus we may take it for granted thatthe collective experience of the Russians

resembles at any given moment the ver-sion of it presented by Soviet novels andmovies to roughly the same degree thatthe common experience of Americans cor-responds to the Hollywood or slick-maga-zine presentation of it. Each Americanknows that these smooth and understand-able portraits are not faithful to him. Buthe does not know that they do not trulypicture other Americans. In sum, mass-culture-making operates according to cer-tain laws that cause it to be potentially true of the mass but inevitably false toeach individual. It is not just Soviet mass

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COMMENTARYculture that is false. What is "experienti-ally" (moral and political values are some-thing else) 'wrong with Soviet mass cul-ture is simply that it is mass culture-andwhat is wrong with the Soviet Union isthat it checks the creation of any otherkind of culture. But we, too, have less of the other kind than we imagine, as Ishall show later.

T me make it clear that the differencebetween mass culture and authentic art

is not that the first deals with the commu-nity or mass while the second depicts onlythe single individual. There is a massculture of "individuals" too, obviously-as

in the myriad applications of the BoyMeets Girl formula. On the other hand,there is an authentic art, even in moderntimes, of masses and of crowds-e.g., thebattle panoramas of Tolstoy, Zola, or Mal-raux, or the street movements of Romains.

What counts is not the number of peo-ple involved in the situation but the na-ture of the experience that goes into thework. The formulated common experiences

which are the substance of mass culturemust be distinguished from the commonsituations in which human beings findthemselves. The common situation is pre-cisely what the common experience withits mass-culture texture conceals, and isoften intended to conceal But the gen-uine work of art, going past the formu-lated common experience, may succeed incommunicating the common situation-all

too clearly from the point of view of theguardians of stasis. I doubt that those inauthority would be so violently opposedto authentic art if, as they claim, it re-vealed only the private personality of theartist and had no further reference. Onthe contrary, I am inclined to believe thatwhen art is condemned as "lacking broadmeaning" or as unrelated to real life"these accusations often disguise the fearthat the exact opposite is true-that thisdeviation has too much meaning and bearstoo acute a relation to life to be reconciledwith the common myth.

To penetrate through the common ex-perience to the actual common situationrequires a creative act-that is to say, anact that directly grasps the life of peopleduring, say, the War or the Plan, thatgrasps the War from the inside, so tospeak, as a situation with a human beingin it. But the moment an artist, ignor-ing the War as an external fact knownto all, approaches it as a possibility thatmust be endured over again in the ima-gination by anyone who would genuinelyexperience it, he puts the existing massconception of it into question. Conse-quently, the result of such a creative actis to arouse not only hostility on the partof officials who have a stake in the per-petuation of some agreed-upon version ofthe War, but also a general distrust anduneasiness. For the work of art takesaway from its audience its sense of know-ing where it stands in relation to whathas happened to it and suggests to it thatits situation might be quite different thanit has suspected, that it is jammed withelements not yet perceived and lies open

to the unknown....Exactly in so far as he touches the com-

mon situation of man in the zoth century,Kafka goes against the common experi-ence; he undermines its self-confidence,which rests on a whole system of assump-tions as "false to reality" as the formulasof behavior in a best seller; and for thisreassuring common experience he substi-tutes only the tension of an individual

struggling for self-knowledge, a cloudy andpainful seeing and not-seeing. Along thisrocky road to the actual it is only possibleto go Indian file, one at a time. It meansbreaking up the crowd-not "reflecting"its experience.

r THE essential assumption of mass-culture-making is that only the experience recog-

nized as common is real, the failure to beconscious that this assumption is being

made leads only to confusion. In the So-viet Union there is no confusion on thisscore. Non-mass art is outlawed and any

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THE HERD OF INDEPENDENT MINDSexpression of non-mass experience danger-ous. Here in the United States the prin-ciple of the common experience operatesmore or less in disguise to produce differ-ent levels of mass culture, including a

specifically anti-mass-culture mass culture.From "significant" novels, through "high-brow" radio programs, to "little" magazinearticles and stories, a variety of mass-cul-ture forms pits the mass culture of smallgroups against the mass culture of themasses. The result is not the creation ofan artistic culture but of a pyramid of"masses" of different sizes, each with ex-pressions of its own common experience.

Now the interesting thing about thispyramid is that the farther each level getsabove the mass base of the multi-millionsthe closer it is presumed to get to genu-ine art. Thus even radio and Hollywoodhave their Norman Corwin and OrsonWelles, who by the scale of the mass-culture structure are true artists becausethey appeal to "small" audiences. Andmagazines designed for college professorsand writers are assumed to be more cultur-

ally pertinent than those whose audienceare housewives or prurient bon vivants.

Yet a single conviction falls like a plumb-line through all the levels of the pyramid,from its apex to its base: the convictionthat the artist ought to communicate thecommon experience of his level, and thatif he fails to do this it is because he isan egotist and "irresponsible." Each levelof mass culture on the basis of this same

conviction holds the level above it to befilled with "nuts," that is, with artists andan audience "cut off from the people,"snobs who insist on "expressing themselves"and thus shirk the true labors of art andenlightenment. Thus an editor of Lookonce disclosed to me his mingled awe andcontempt for the esoteric highbrows whowrite for the tiny audience of the AtlanticMonthly, and the same feeling prevails inthe advertising agencies toward Corwin asa writer of "sustainers."

The irresponsible-artist, or artist-nut,formula, based on audience scale, works

both ways: on the one hand, anybodywho has a "small" audience (from a mil-lion in radio to five in poetry) is auto-matically suspected of being a genuine ar-tist; on the other, any artist whose experi-

ence seals him off from the mass, big or small,is regarded as a megalo-maniac. A literaryagent said the other day of a writer appearingin little magazines: "Oh, he writes for pos-terity. An even worse egotist than the rest."

It is amusing, however, to trace thissame artist-egotist formula into an anti-mass-culture organ like Partisan Review.In issues closely following one another,Partisan reviewers meted out the follow-ing judgments: that Dostoevsky andKafka were neurotics; that there was littlein Thomas Mann's Essays of Three De-cades that had meaning beyond the au-thor's literary exhibitionism-"In the end,"said the review (entitled "The Sufferingsand Greatness of Self-Love"), "[Mann]continues to love only himself.... ; thatPaul Valery failed "to convey any sub-stantial doctrine beyond the existence ofthe particular man and writer" and there-fore fell down both as artist and thinker;that "in the Journal Gide's self-analysistoo often begins and ends with Gide," sothat Andre Gide too had been destroyedby self-interestedness.

Each of these artists, according to Par-tisan Review s intellectual captains ofthousands, is an egotist lost in himself,"alienated" from others, incapable of avalid formulation of the common experi-

ence of the modern intellectual and of a"substantial doctrine" for him, and to thatextent a failure as an artist. In the phraseonce popular in radical circles, it is "noaccident" that these estimates of Dostoev-sky, Kafka, Mann, Gide, and Valery areshared with Partisan Review by Sovietcriticism. Mass culture, whether of theflat plain of the One Big Mass or of thepyramid of the Many Small Masses, mustdeny the validity of the single human be-ing's effort to arrive at a consciousness ofhimself and of his situation, and must beblind to his practice of a distinctive meth-

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od of giving form to his experience. Theinsight of the particular man" must becrushed by the "substantial doctrine," evenwhen, unhappily, one happens to be with-'ut such a doctrine.

Thus the reduced audience scope of amass-culture undertaking, be it a radioprogram or a publisher's book list, doesnot alter its mass-culture character; justas the popularity of a Durante or Chaplindoes not prevent them from being genuineartists, regardless of the indifference ofthe little mass. True, the masses do notread Kafka or Henry James. But a liter-ary magazine, no matter how "little," doesnot escape being a mass-culture organsimply by interesting itself in these writers,when in discussing them it reduces theirwork to formulas of common experience.This reduction is the very method bywhich Hollywood or the Church or theCommunist party appropriates the artistand his creation to its own uses wheneverit can-e.g., the capture of Dostoevsky byHollywood, Rimbaud by the Church, VanGogh by the CP-under the pretext of

bringing culture to the people." Thepeak of the mass-culture pyramid and itsbase are made of the same material.

NTELLECTUALS who set themselves againstmass culture become contributors to it by

shifting small-mass perspectives to previ-ously neglected fields, as in the "noveliza-tion" of the Okies by Steinbeck or of theChicago Irish by Farrell. This activitymight

be understood as part of the gen-eral expansion of mass culture, its imperi-alist dynamic, so to speak, by which hu-manity is increasingly converted into thecommon man through the discovery andpenetration of new areas of experience inorder to derive from them the raw materialsof new cultural commodities.

The area which intellectuals have mostrecently staked out for themselves as be-longing to culture par excellence is the

common historical experience. While downbelow one still hears about love, crime,ambition, the top of the pyramid is reserved

exclusively for the history-conscious smallmass. There the talk is of the experienceof the 2o's or of the 30's," the experi-ence of the younger generation" or of thedepression generation," the epoch of theconcentration camp," etc. To

be acceptedby the intellectual mass, experience mustcome wrapped in a time package.

It is to the credit of a writer like Jean-Paul Sartre that when he makes contem-porary historical experience his point ofdeparture for literature he does so with fullconsciousness of what this means. Sartreknows that beginning with the commonexperience implies mass culture. HenceSartre is in favor of reaching a big audi-ence, of writing for the movies and forradio in order to inform and convert thepopular mind. He rejects the individualas an object of literary interest and attacksVal6ry and Gide on principled grounds.He insists on the "engagement" or partici-pation of the artist in the social problemsof his time and place and in political activ-ity. In this respect his view correspondsto that of the Communists and the Gaul-

lists against whom he is struggling.American intellectuals are, however, re-

luctant to face the mass-culture conse-quences of their historical self-definitions.They retain a nostalgia for the personaland unique, for esoteric art, for small-group attitudes, even while they deplorethe inadequacy of these standpoints. Asindividuals they see themselves in termsof what they have in common with others;in the mass they sense themselves

despond-ently as individuals. Thus they cannotact creatively either for the individual orfor the mass.

This spirit of mass-individual evasionis expressed poetically in the verse ofAuden and Spender, which has had thewidest and to my mind the most stupe-fying dead-end influence upon the so-called younger generation. Here is anexcellent example of the voice of thisspirit, picked at random out of a reviewof Spender's poems in the New YorkTimes:

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The shame of what I never was live-was a standing threat to one's person-That when I lived my life among these ality, was in a sense a deep personal hu-

dead miliation." Warshow correctly notes theI did not live enough-that when I loved presence of a "mass culture of the edu-Among these dead I did not love enough- cated classes" and recognizes in its surface

That when I looked the murderers in seriousness a further obstacle to individ-their eyes ual experience.

I did not die enough- Yet despite his horror of mass culture,I lacked Warshow's entire approach is an "us" ap-

That which makes cities not to fall proach, that is to say, a mass-cultureThe drop of agonizing sweat which changes approach-though his "us" is not the mass-Into impenetrable crystal- es but the small mass of the intellectuals.And every stone of the stone city "For most American intellectuals," he be-To moments held through time. gins his article, the Communist movement

of the 930's was a crucial experience."According to the Times Spender here He is referring, obviously, to the fact that"rises to magnificence and responsibility American writers, artists, students, had(my italics). To me this poem is pure various relations with Marxist parties andcant. It brings in "these dead" to bestow Marxist ideas. I don't know, and neithersignificance upon the poet's feelings, which does Warshow, what this contact has meanthad nothing to do with them and which to each of these people in terms of theare not described-thus avoiding the in- total structure of his consciousness-thatdividual experience through giving the is, we cannot say whether for any individ-impression of solidarity with mass experi- ual his Communist experience" was cru-ence; and then it claims for this non- cial or not. Perhaps it was crucial forexistent individual a fantastic power over certain men who went to Spain and gotthe destiny of others, by his passion to killed. But even then, in the instances I hap-"make cities not to fall." Such a combina- pen to be familiar with, other experiencestion of avoidance of responsibility for in- played at least as important a part in such de-dividual experience with avoidance of re- cisions as the experience of Communism.sponsibility for social thinking is now known Warshow is able to state flatly that thisas "responsible" poety. And, of course, every was "crucial" only because he is discuss-truly independent mind must believe in "re- ing the Communist experience as asponsible literature, as well as "alienation," mass event. Yet from this point of view,the "failure" of radicalism, the obsolescence it seems that Marxism in the Unitedof the individual, etc. States became a renunciation or negation

of experience, a plunging of the individ-N TH December 1947 issue of COMMEN- ual into mass inertia, precisely because he

TARY, Robert Warshow, writing of yielded himself up to the general intellec- The Legacy of the 30's," expresses an tual "climate." There wasn't any signi-antagonism to mass culture per se. Unlike ficant group experience of Communism inthe French Existentialists, Warshow feels America except in the negative sense,not only hemmed in but internally in- and this is one of the main reasons whyvaded by the intellectual commodities of people ran away from it. Then why talkcontemporary society. Mass culture for about it as "crucial"? Or, better still, whyhim is the alien within the gate, the slot not talk about some other kind of experi-machine on the altar, the Trojan horse ence? Because since it happened to an his-that brings the ready-made into the halls torical "us" it seems to Warshow mostof the original. "Its mere existence- he significant: It is for us what the Firstsays, this climate in which one had to World War and the experience of expatri-

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ation were for an earlier generation. Ifour intellectual life is stunted and full offrustration,* this is in large part becausewe have refused to assimilate that experi-ence . . . never trying to understand what

it means as part of our lives." (My italics.)Warshow then goes on to measure the

success of Edmund Wilson's and LionelTrilling's "assimilation" and expression of that experience" as efforts in an essentialtask that lies before the modern intelligence.

ow I was alive in the 30's too and alsounderwent the intellectual impact of

the Marxist movement, as well as popular-front novels and movies, the New Deal,peculiarities of the erotic in the urban hu-man being, and a good portion of othercontemporaneous phenomena. Yet I findthat there is very little that is of interestto me in my thoughts and my feelingsthat is dealt with by either Edmund Wilsonor Lionel Trilling. Yes, what they de-scribe sounds familiar, one had heard aboutit, even run into it personally.

But somehow the experience of thesemen does not communicate with minenor seem very pertinent to it-to think itimportant I should have to impose uponmy reactions some external literary or his-torical or social "value." Maybe this isbecause Warshow is right, and Wilsonand Trilling are dealing with that experi-ence," that is, with something common inthe 30's, but not with any significant ex-perience or hypothesis of their own. Now

perhaps the faintness of my response tothis historical souvenir only proves thatmy experience lacks universality or is evenout of date. All right, then I confess-thetension of my experience never belongsto the right time or place. Besides myexperience of the 30's," it contains al lsorts of anachronisms and culture frag-ments: the Old Testament and the Gos-pels, Plato, z8th-century music, the no-

* In my opinion, if someone's intellectual life is"stunted and full of frustration" it may be becausehe belongs to a crowd but it is not because of some-thing that happened to a crowd.

tion of freedom as taught in the NewYork City school system, the fantasticemotional residues of the Jewish family.If one extended and deepened this com-pendium, one would get to a kind of tiny

Finnegan s Wake, which, incidentally, incontrast to Memoirs of Hecate County, 1do find very communicative.

At any rate, the rhythm of my experi-ence is broken and complicated by allsorts of time-lags, symbolic substitutions,decayed absolutes, experimental hypotheses.Because I am so peculiarly (and also notso peculiarly) mixed up, I confess, too,that it doesn't matter to me much whetherI belong to Wilson's and Trilling's genera-tion or to Warshow's. There was a journal-ism of Americans in the First World Warand an even wider journalism perhaps ofAmerican expatriation. Yet adding up the"assimilations" of all these literary epochsand generations that take me back to thecradle, for some reason they seem to havecommunicated less to me about my situ-ation, to have less deeply penetrated myexperience, and to have contributed less

to my verbal and intellectual resourcesthan, say, Poe, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky,Gide, Mir6, Klee, and a lot of other peoplewho didn't participate in this Americanexperience of "ours," or William CarlosWilliams or Wallace Stevens, whose poetrycontains scarcely a word about their "gen-eration," or E. E. Cummings, who saidsome very private things about his.

What I am getting at is that when some-

one says, as Warshow does, of some onecommon experience that "that experienceis the most important experience of ourtime," such a statement can have only amass-culture meaning. And once you'vetaken this position, to call for a writer tocommunicate that experience "as it reallyis, as it really feels," is simply to ask fora better" mass culture, in the way thatHollywood or some Soviet writers' unionperiodically calls for a more real and morepassionate and even a more original andinspired rendering of The Most EpicEvent Of Our Times. If Warshow, hav-

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THE HERD OF INDEPENDENT MINDSing properly rejected Trilling's novel fordealing with modern life as if it were en-tirely a question of which opinions tohold, is really interested in "making itpossible for the writer himself to have a

meaningful experience in the first place,"he should stop trying to decide in advancewhat is meaningful to everybody and con-centrate on what is meaningful to him.For individual experience it is necessary tobegin with the individual. Maybe there isno individual in the old sense of the term.This cannot be gone into here. But what-ever there is, one will not arrive at it byreflecting oneself in a "we."

No one will deny that common situationsexist. It may be, too, that the most pro-found, or even the most ephemeral, indi-vidual experiences are, or may prove tobe after they have been authentically setdown, in essential respects duplicated inmany men and sometimes perhaps in allmen. In fact "most profound" may ulti-mately turn out to be the same as "mostcommon." The question is not of uni-queness as a goal, of the artist as a lonewolf programmatically dissociating himselffrom society and the pathos of humanlife; it is a question of where to begin andtoward what kind of communication to move.

Acceptance of the mass-culture dogmathat the artist must become the mediumof a common experience will result in thesame contrived and unseeing art, whetherthe assignment is made by a movie pro-ducer, a party cultural official, or by the

artist himself as a theoretician of socialrelevance. That genuine art can be cre-ated to order in modern times has neverbeen demonstrated. Apologists for popularart are fond of referring to Egypt, Greece,medieval or Renaissance Europe, wherethe artist-as-craftsman was the creator ofa high art, officially commissioned, andmore or less immediately accessible to itsintended audience. But these apologists

neglect the fundamental differences be-tween the sources and content of inspira-tion in the authentic communities of thepast, on the one hand, and within the re-

lations that exist in modern industrial so

ciety, on the other.* Under present condi-tions a true work of art may accidentallyattract a large audience, but more and moreelements in it tend to overlap the audi-

ence's responses. Even works once popularbecome increasingly esoteric by comparisonwith, and under the pressure of, the massconsumption of manufactured novels,movies, radio programs, etc. For instance,Somerset Maugham recently argued in theNew York Times in favor of abridging TheBrothers Karamazov, War and Peace, andother world classics, on the ground that no-body read them in their entirety any more

anyway, or had to.

TH present cultural situation seems topresent to the writer the following

alternative. Either accept the common ex-perience as a point of beginning, embracemass culture, start "enlightening" somepublic about itself, and forget about art andabout experience "as it really is, as it reallyfeels." The writer who makes this choicewill obtain from outside his work-from pol-itics, from sociology, from religion, from"public opinion," from the policy represen-tative of some corporation or group-a set of"values" which he will endeavor, throughsuch feelings, fancies, and "ideas" as he canmuster to his subject, to communicate to aprefabricated audience of experience-com-rades. Here communication means a formu-la, whether in the images of a work of artor in the rhetoric of opinions, by which themember of the audience learns from theauthor what he already knows, or couldhave found out-that together with othershe is an ex-radical, or a Jew, or feels frus-trated, or lives in a postwar world, or pre-fers freedom to tyranny. Repetition of thesemass-cultural themes with all the resourcesof fancy may prove of practical value to hu-manity-as when a group of "bad" fictions,like anti-minority caricatures, are replaced

with "good" fictions, images of men as equal*I have outlined this problem in 'The Pro-

fession of Poetry and M. Maritain," PartisanReview, September-October, 1942.

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Or the writer may choose to breakthrough mass culture itself. In that case hewill reject the time packages and sociology

packages in which experience is deliveredfresh every morning, and begin with thetension of what most agitates, and concealsitself from him. He will voluntarily enterinto a kind of Socratic ignorance. For hewill accept the fact that he cannot know,except through the lengthy unfolding of hisart work itself, what will prove to be centralto his experience. Creating his art is thenpart of his very experiencing; it is his wayof revealing his existence to his conscious-ness and of bringing his consciousness intoplay upon his existence. And this art com-municates itself as an experience to others,not because one man's experience is thesame as other men's, but because each ofthose others, like the author, is unique tohimself and can therefore recognize in hisown experience the matchless experience ofanother human being and even perhaps thepresence of some common situation and theoperation of some hidden human principle.The authentic artist arrives at the commonsituation at the end of his effort-e.g., theemergence of decadent French society inRemembrance of Things Past-or rather hedoes not arrive at it, for no one can arrive atthe whole, but by way of his own humanityhe moves spontaneously towards the hu-manity of others.

N Y the individual can communicate ex-Uperience, and only another individualcan receive such a communication. The in-dividual is in society-that goes without say-ing. He is also isolated and, like Ivan Ilyich,dies alone. I find it no more noble or pic-turesque to stress the isolation at the expenseof involvement than to stress the sentimentfor the social at the expense of isolation.Poses are a matter of taste, sometimes of

achievingspiritual efficiency. I should like

only to make sure that nobody is bullied bythe abstract concept of social responsibilityinto becoming useless to himself and to his

fellow men, or even a menace. Obviously,the isolation of an artist's work, or his per-sonal loneliness, if that happens to be hisfate, does not deprive his accomplishmentof social meaning. Nor in rejecting the "re-

sponsibility" of the representative of mass-thought for the sake of his concrete experi-ence does he make himself an "irresponsi-ble." (It is humiliating to have to repeatthese truisms and to mention such examplesof artistic responsibility by way of concreteexperiencing as Gide's Trip to the Congoor Cummings' The Enormous Room-but Ihere testify to my own social responsibilityby acknowledging the power of vulgar an-titheses and doing my bit about them.)

The mass-culture maker, who takes hisstart from the experience of others, is essen-tially a reflector of myths, and is withoutexperience to communicate. To him man isan object seen from the outside. Indeed itcould be demonstrated that the modernmass-culture lite, even when it trots aroundthe globe in search of historical hotspotswhere every six months the destiny of manis decided, actually has less experience than

the rest of humanity, less even than theconsumers of its products. To the profes-sional of mass culture, knowledge is theknowledge of what is going on in otherpeople; he alone trades his experience forthe experience of experience. Everyone hasmet those culture-conscious "responsibles"who think a book or movie or magazinewonderful not because it illuminates orpleases them but because it tells the peo-

ple" what they ought to know."The makers of mass culture are its first

and most complete victims. The anonymoushuman being to whom they bring their mes-sages has at least the metaphysical advan-tage of being forced to deal daily with ma-terial things and real situations-tools, work-ing conditions, personal passions. The factthat his experience has a body means thatmass culture is to him like a distorting mir-ror in an amusement park; whereas the "en-lighteners," whose world is made up en-tirely of mental constructions, live insidethe mirror.

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the herd of independent minds: has the avant-garde its own mass-culture?

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