NEXT BOOK on the essays shelf:
Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
I should say up front that I have no dog in this race. I am not in academia. I was not a humanities student or an English student. I was an acting student. I was protected from the wild changes in Humanities programs (starting in the 70s, I guess, before my time, but continuing on to now). My Humanities class in 11th grade – which incorporated art history and literature trends – we did Egyptian art, we did Gothic melodrama, we did Beowulf, we did the Harlem Renaissance, we did the Romantics, we did a little Impressionist painting – was one of the best classes I took in high school. It’s the foundation. I grew up with parents who loved books, and who were not academics or theoreticians. My family is a family of artists who love art for art’s sake, and don’t get bogged down in theory. I read academic jargon and I think, “Something has gone very very wrong.”
The way I look at it is: Art represents a chaotic impulse deep in the human soul, something that has to do with beauty and sex and death. We don’t have words for these things, or words don’t suffice. Hence, Art. Religious art counts, secular art counts, movies count, performance art pieces count. Personal preference is irrelevant at that level of the discussion, the What Is Art discussion. You may not LIKE Jackson Pollock (for example), but what he was DOING was part of the ongoing attempt to express things that has been going on since a caveman first painted a bison on a cave-wall. And so I think some of the academic jargon sounds like a timid man trying to wrestle with a giant anaconda. Let’s contain all of these chaotic forces by explaining them (in the most incomprehensible prose ever invented. Its PURPOSE is to be incomprehensible. I do not get it. This happens in film criticism, too. There are the theorists, and if you read one paragraph of their stuff, you feel your own enjoyment of the art form draining out of you as though your neck has been sliced open. WHO are those essays FOR? Is there embarrassment that you spent so much time analyzing what is, essentially, pop culture, no matter which way you slice it? And so you have to JUSTIFY your interest in going to movies by drowning it in prose like that?)
I saw something alarming on Twitter from a guy who makes his living writing film criticism. He said that discussing “aesthetics” was evidence of “privilege.” What a dreadful attitude. That attitude is why so many film reviews read like glorified book reports / sociological commentary. Of COURSE aesthetics matter. And if you came up in a time when “aesthetics” are derided, then your ability to SEE will be impacted. Literally. How does one look at the Sistine Chapel without understanding the importance of aesthetics? What does it look like if you treat aesthetics with suspicion and class-hatred? (It’s all quite middle-class Marxist.) You can have glorious aesthetics put in the service of something dreadful (Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will the purest example), you can have a terrible-LOOKING amateurish movie in the service of a good cause. (That second category is why a lot of movies get a pass. I persist in thinking – and this is my show business background – that things have to WORK. Whatever that means. That doesn’t have to look a certain way. Bela Tarr’s work is not ingratiating or show-bizz-y, to say the least, but it WORKS, as story, as visuals, as themes. I don’t CARE if it’s a movie about a popular cause: if the movie sucks, it DOESN’T work. “Aesthetics” doesn’t mean “prettying” things up – it means the VISUALS, HOW things are put together. To work in the arts in any way, and to treat aesthetics with such derision, is, again, an example of “something is very very wrong here.” Incidentally, it was the suspicion of aesthetics that made critics dismiss By the Sea wrongly.
I guess I do have a dog in this race. But not really the same dog as Paglia’s. “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders” is basically a manifesto, attacking American academia, the Humanities, in particular. It’s both macro and micro. It’s 100 pages long. She diagnoses the problem (French theory, which came into our universities through the backdoor in the 1970s), and then proposes solutions. She is still proposing solutions. I haven’t been in a university setting in decades. My grad school was an acting school. All of this is totally unfamiliar to me, although my friends who teach at universities have told me stories about all of this. According to Paglia, the French theorists plus the Humanities departments fracturing into specialization (women’s studies, LGBT studies, and etc.), was when the decay began. And so now a student can conceivably graduate from college or high school without ever having read Shakespeare. And still be considered educated.
Camille Paglia went to Yale, Harold Bloom was her mentor and icon, but her adult life has not been sent in a university setting. She has been teaching at the same arts school in Philadelphia for 30 years. She’s an outsider. Maybe there is some resentment that she has been side-lined, but she’s not really writing from the stance of “Hey, guys, let me in!!” She’s more like an avenging angel. She thinks academics have fucked it all up. Tenure fucks things up. People become safe and rigid, protecting their tiny little ground of theoretical expertise, and they pass that rigidity onto their students.
Her targets in this gigantic essay are the French theorists – Derrida, Foucault, Lacan. She’s extremely mean about the French (shocker). I have not read their work, so I can’t weigh in, but Jessie just gave me a crash-course in Lacanian theory – as it relates to the function of language and Story – in one of the Supernatural posts, and it was very intriguing. Book recommendations, please? I don’t dismiss something just because Camille tells me to. I also don’t dismiss something if I haven’t read it yet.
Camille’s essay appeared in Arion in the spring of 1991. It is gigantic. A small book, really. It features her pet issues, which she goes after with a battering ram. Issues that will be familiar to anyone who read her gigantic tome Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
She attacks the ivy-draped halls of American universities with a flame-thrower. Burn it all down! She does not play nice with things she holds in contempt. Like the following excerpt, about Foucault.
Haven’t read any of the people she discusses, so posting this is not an implicit endorsement. Because I have no idea what she is talking about, it sometimes comes across to me as “BLAH BLAH BLAH I AM SO MAD GRRRRR BLAH BLAH BLAH.”
In my own small corner of the world, I guess I can understand. The French film critics of the New Wave were so influential to American writers. The auteur theory and all that. Now because I came up as an actress, and a movie-lover, I had no idea about any of those guys outside of the movies they eventually made. Which I loved. Godard and Truffaut and Chabrol and all the rest. Artists don’t care about your theories, critics: it’s very important to remember that. The conversation you are having is not meant to be a two-way street. I have my own thoughts on auteur theory (I think it’s so limiting, and it’s so clear that it’s embraced by people who are not artists – and who LOVE “systems.” GOD, look out for people who love systems!!) Auteur theory is an organizing principle. It definitely has its uses. AND, in its first blossoming, helped resurrent/re-enliven the reputations of the guys who did “our” genre pictures, stuff we considered B-movie trash. Howard Hawks and all the rest. The French LOVED Howard Hawks (way more than he was loved here, especially at the time of the French New Wave) – and they were practically single-handedly responsible for putting the gleam on his reputation that exists to this day. As well it should. He’s my #1 favorite director. The French often love most the stuff we are embarrassed about. They loved our gangster movies. They loved our crime thrillers. They loved our whodunit-detective stories. They weren’t in love with our big prestige “message” pictures. They loved our “trash.” And they were RIGHT. (I always pay attention to what the French decide to love and celebrate. Because they have a pretty good track record, in that regard.)
But we’re a couple generations away from that initial auteur theory, and so it’s morphed into something that can be kind of ridiculous. AND, because the THEORY is the most important thing – directors who don’t fit into the theory (the more workmanlike guys who did a lot of different things well) are ignored. Not even studied. (I covered this a little bit in my Criterion essay about Gilda.)
Back to Camille. Here she is, being extremely generous towards Foucault.
Excerpt from Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
Foucault is falsely used by naive American academics as a scholarly source of information, as if he were Fernand Braudel. But you cannot trust a single fact in Foucault. His books should be called Foucault’s Diaries. They have no relationship to historical reality. They are simply devious improvisations in the style of Gide’s The Counterfeiters. They attract game playing minds with unresolved malice toward society, people who gave lip service to rebellion but who lack the guts to actually rebel and pay the price. Derrida is smack for the spirit, but Foucault is the academic cocaine, the yuppie drug of choice of the Seventies and Eighties. In the Sixties, LSD gave vision, while marijuana gave community. But coke, pricey and jealously hoarded, is the power drug, giving a rush of omnipotent self-assurance. Work done under its influence is manic, febrile, choppy, disconnected. Coke was responsible for the plot incoherence of fifteen years of TV sit-coms and glitzy “high-concept” Hollywood films. Foucault is the high-concept pusher and deal-maker of the cocaine dealers. His big squishy pink-marshmallow word is “power,” which neither he nor his followers fully understand. It caroms around picking up lint and dog hair but is no substitute for political analysis. Foucault’s ignorance of prehistory and ancient history, based in the development and articulation of cultures and legal codes, makes his discussion of power otiose. He never asks how power is gained or lost, justly administered or abused. He does not show how efficient procedures get overformalized, entrenched, calcified, then shattered and reformed. He has no familiarity with theories of social or biological hierarchies, such as the “pecking order” universally observed in farmyards and schoolyards. Because, in the faddish French way, he ridiculously denies personality exists, he cannot assess the impact of strong personalities on events nor can he, like Weber, catalog types of authority or prestige. He is inept in comparing different governmental structures. Because he cannot deal with flux or dynamic change, he is hopeless with protracted power struggles. An astute political analyst would have begun his reflections with the long conflict between Pharaoh and priesthood in Egypt or between Emperor and army in late Rome, patterns still observable in our century’s ongoing power struggles between college administrations and faculties or between Hollywood corporations, banks, and studios on the one hand and directors, actors, and screenwriters on the other.
Foucault, like Lacan and Derrida, is forty years out of date. He does not see and cannot deal with the radical transformation of culture by new technology and mass media following World War Two. He overlooks the economic role of entrepreneurship, and he is blind to the dominance of personality in our pagan Age of Hollywood. Liberal academics are stuck in a time warp. Invoking the Foucault buzz words “surveillance” and “the police,” they try to re-create the Fifties world of J. Edgar Hoover and Dragnet, the last, lost moment of liberalism’s political authenticity, before it was destroyed by my generation’s excesses. It is mildly nauseating to see this snide use of “the police” as a literary cliche coming from spoiled, wifty, middle-class academics who would be the first to shriek for the police if a burglar or rapist came through the window. And as for surveillance, Foucault-style language analysis seems lame and monotonous compared to the treatment of the same theme by Sade, Blake, Poe, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Brecht, or even Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone. The cultural mode of the post-Sixties era is not surveillance but voyeurism, ours. Eye-energy, thanks to omnipresent television, is going in the opposite direction. Institutions are the modern reality principle. Current academic liberalism cannot understand the fragility of institutions, or the ease with which order, due process, and civil liberties can be destroyed by assertions of anarchic selfhood. As a battle-scarred Sixties veteran, I learned this the hard way. Humanists like to childishly sneer and snort about the system, but they are quick to hide behind it, to pose from its forum at conferences, and to use it as a lifelong gravy train.
The academic popularity of Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida was produced by the poor educational preparation of American humanists, who appear to have slept through college. In the basic biology class of my first college semester in 1964, we studied the Pre-Socratics, with their competing and contradictory theories of the origins and constituency of matter. Heraclitus, in particular, to whom I had already been introduced by Walter Pater, contains everything that is in Derrida and more. We later studied the Western development of scientific classification schemes and the checkered history of evolutionary and genetic theories from Lamarck through Mendel and Darwin. In basic geology the next year, we learned how to think in huge time-frames and how to analyze multiple layering and inversions in mixed physical evidence. At no time in my education or reading was science ver presented as an absolutist, dogmatic methodology, the way it is constantly maligned these days by French-befuddled humanists. We saw, following Aristotle and his seventeenth-century admirers, that science is a system of provisional hypotheses, open to constant revision and disproof. In classical art and history, we were impressed with modern archaeology’s tender solicitude for the tiniest chips and fragments of vanished cultures, with the excruciatingly slow and heroically self-abnegating excavation, measurement,numbering, photography, extraction, cleaning, cataloging, restoration, and preservation of artifacts. (It was exasperation and impatience with dull potsherds that ended my childhood dream of becoming an archeologist.) In introductory social science, we learned that the nineteenth-century rise of anthropology as a discipline hastened a new cultural relativism that shifted Europe from centrality; we were shown how anthropology is a limited interpretation by aliens who inevitably alter the small societies they enter and observe. As for Saussure, from the moment we began Latin class in junior high school, we were told, in simple, common-sense terms, that language is an arbitrary, self-enclosed system that varies from culture to culture, a point obvious to everyone studying languages for the last 200 years. Even the hot-dog vendor on the street would never mistake the word elephant for a real elephant. The French school, tickling its own buttocks, is in a state of dementia about the actual facts of modern thought. It has nothing whatever new or important to say.
“That attitude is why so many film reviews read like glorified book reports / sociological commentary.”
The more I read, the more our group review of “The Gates” seems less like giddy satire and more it comes across as documentary.
That group review is one of the high watermarks in the history of this site.
I believe you were the one who contributed the immortal phrase “nekulturny hordes of bourgeois apparatchiks.” I think I remember that when you posted a link to it on your site, Mitch, someone over there thought it was real and got all outraged which was perfect.
“See, THIS is everything that is wrong with today’s world !!!”
“Uhm, it’s a joke.”
“Oh. Well. I don’t get it.”
It’s like when people put up links to The Onion thinking it’s real. That’s when you know you’ve hit paydirt with whatever it is you’re making fun of.
I contributed that one, and I think I may have also been behind “schmatte-clad yentas”, and I think you credited me with “brio-cum-angst”.
And out of curiosity I found the thread on my blog:
http://www.shotinthedark.info/archives/005201.html
Yeah, that was fun!
And I’m still laughing too.
// “brio-cum-angst”. //
hahahahaha
Oh my God, I’m reading that thread now, Mitch !!
I keep saying, “This is a joke.” “But art critics really write that way.” “Yeah. That’s the joke.” “This language has no meaning.” “I know. That’s the joke.”
Sheila, give it up. And stop taking over Mitch’s comment thread.
Mitch – Found it. I just re-read it and I am howling.
http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=2500
“I would equate the experience of walking through the exhibit with passing through the birth canal and suggest that those who hate The Gates do so because they despise their own existence. ”
I can’t stop laughing.
// Christo’s animism is at the heart of his challenge to the verity of truth, insofar as it rectifies the humanism of our spatial modality. ‘Gates’ purports to effect a nouveau realisme in which the actual is unrealized into a cathartic emanence of the whole. //
Mitch, send help. I can’t stop laughing.
You’re on your own. I can’t work now.
hahahaha
It’s even funnier than I remembered it. And it’s so LONG.
Perhaps a little off the main point, but there was, or is, an academic jargon generator out there. Hit a button and it spits out a paragraph of nonsensical academic prose. I was trying to find it again, but unable to dig up a link. I found the thing below, I’m not sure what the deal is, if it’s real or mock academic writing, but it does contain dreadful examples. Who would write like this? Definitely someone with no appreciation of the English language.
Click on the button labeled Postmodernism on the right side of the page and get more examples.
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Patrick –
Ooh, fun! Thank you!! This kind of language BEGS to be punched in the mouth, and I’m happy to oblige.
But why use a “generator” when you can just group-source it – as we did here on my site years ago, to write a group review of Christo’s installation “The Gates.” (I loved Christo’s “The Gates”, by the way. But we just used it as an example to write a mockumentary review of it using that horrible language.)
Everyone contributed phrases, the more ridiculous the better, with random French phrases thrown in, and then I took all those phrases and put them all together – like my very own POMO generator. (Mitch – comment above yours – references it.)
It is still hilarious to me to read this. I should have tried to get it published in an actual art magazine.
http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=2500
Okay, so I clicked on the Postmodernism Generator, and here is the first paragraph I saw:
In the works of Madonna, a predominant concept is the distinction between
within and without. Foucaultist power relations holds that reality comes from
the masses. Therefore, the characteristic theme of the works of Madonna is the
paradigm, and eventually the defining characteristic, of structural sexual
identity.
hahahahahahahaha
Funny – brilliantly hideous.
Oops, that reply was supposed to belong to the first post, your mock Cristo piece.
Hideous is the perfect word for it!
“It is mildly nauseating to see this snide use of “the police” as a literary cliche coming from spoiled, wifty, middle-class academics who would be the first to shriek for the police if a burglar or rapist came through the window.”
Hahaha! Aside from shooting the burglar or rapist how else would one deal with them?
Just the same, it’s true that overemphasis on theory–any theory really–can suck the joy out of almost anything. I was an English major and I was lucky enough to avoid a lot of this because I went to a small, old-fashioned liberal arts school. But I knew I didn’t want to go to graduate school where I figured I would learn to loathe the books that I loved.
Rachel –
A friend of mine just suffered through a Masters Degree writing program because he wants that degree so he can teach. The stories he told … It’s like a lost generation of people who don’t know how to read. Or … don’t know how to feel PLEASURE at what they read. Suspicion of pleasure is something that is so common in critical circles – I see it in the film critic world – and it is just so divorced from anything even APPROACHING reality.
Normal people are not suspicious of pleasure. They see a movie, they love it, they go out for a drink, they go home. Or maybe they think, “Damn, they were really trying to make the waterworks flow, weren’t they, Jeez Louise” but they don’t treat Pleasure in and of itself as the enemy.
It is such a messed up way to approach art. And, the worst part, is that those critics are writing for each other – not for a wide audience.
and yeah, hahaha, Paglia is so mean to middle-class academic types. In her second volume of essays, she appears on the cover in basically a military-type outfit, with a knife at her belt. She cracks me up.
Sheila, I worked out my own brief definition of art a long time ago. For me, art = a conscious effort to communicate beyond words.
… that’s good enough for me, Steve!
I read a ton of theory in college. I think there is a genuine part of philosophy (as it applies to literature or art), where you become very abstract and your language breaks down a little bit because you are trying to explain things that are hard to explain. Or there’s a corollary phenomenon, where you might have some pretty interesting ideas, but you just suck at expressing them. You are a thinker or analyzer, rather than a born writer. Those don’t always go together. I would put someone like Eve Sedgwick in the latter category – great ideas, even a good writer sometimes, but just gets trammeled up in all she’s trying to say. She also could not give a public lecture to save her life.
Then there is a part where you just kind of want to sound smart, and not easily accessible, and you have a tendency to obscure where you should clarify. An awful lot of it is like this. I would put Mr. Pentagonalizes in this group.
I’d say on French theory, particularly, it’s useful to know what Derrida, or Lacan, or Foucault think, because they make some useful points and have sort of categories or topics that are interesting and that a lot of people refer to and use in shorthand. Foucault especially – if you read him it affects how you see government and sort of general civic organization and what it means to be free. But just for the purpose of learning their themes, even one of those comic book versions of their thoughts would be helpful, I think. Wading through the books can be a slog. It’s more rewarding if there’s already a theme you are sort of interested in, which you encountered in a summary or introduction. Foucault was more worthwhile to me than Derrida, but ymmv.
It’s funny, Derrida came to speak at my high school, and I did not understand a word he said. I don’t think there was one sentence that made sense to me. And that seems telling – you’d think you’d try to dumb it down a little bit for a high school audience. Make it *slightly* accessible. But he didn’t deign to make himself understood to us at all. He talked at us like we were some graduate seminar at the ENS, rather than a bunch of 16 year olds.
The French theorist that I love is Rene Girard. His book Deceit, Desire, & the Novel is GREAT – so interesting, explains so much about literary themes and patterns, and it’s relatively clear. You may not agree with him, but he does make an interesting case. I’d say he’s someone who had some great ideas and actually wanted to explain them.
I could also relate a bit better to some of the women theorists, mainly Julia Kristeva, because she talks a lot about motherhood, and spends a lot of her time wondering how it affects us all moving from the world of home & the feminine to the outer masculine world. But she could probably have used a clarity filter as well.
Your Derrida anecdote is amazing, Anne! I would say I can’t believe it, but I very much can.
Anne –
// Then there is a part where you just kind of want to sound smart, and not easily accessible, and you have a tendency to obscure where you should clarify. //
That definitely applies to a lot of film criticism. I think a lot of that in film (considered a “low” art) comes from some vague vestige of embarrassment that you take pop culture so seriously, and so you have to drone on and on about the mise en scene in order to justify how much time you spend watching B-Westerns, or whatever. Do people feel the same sort of embarrassment if they devote their lives to analyzing Russian literature or 19th century novelists? I don’t know – I don’t read a lot of academic film writing – I find it unbearable.
// because they make some useful points and have sort of categories or topics that are interesting and that a lot of people refer to and use in shorthand. //
Yes, I can totally see that. The shorthand is omnipresent – and sort of “leaves you out” of the conversation if you haven’t actually engaged with the work. That’s why I finally bit the bullet last year and read William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience.” It’s referenced so much that I practically felt like I had read the book without having read it – but that was a cheat, so I decided to catch myself up. I am very glad I did! Now I understand!
That Derrida story is so funny, Anne!!
I’m not familiar with the other theorists you mention – but they sound intriguing. Since I never took literature classes in college – and came to books on my own – I just haven’t encountered any of that stuff.
But in film criticism there are definite corollaries. I’m in the process of reading the entire work of Pauline Kael (what’s available anyway) and she did all these broadsides against “auteur theory” – which, weirdly, I had come to on my own, and – like you say – she clarified some of my feelings about it. (She’s also more knowledgeable about the landscape of film criticism, as well as those influential French critics who totally changed the American landscape of criticism, to this day.)
I find the auteur theory limiting. I also find it to be a very “boy” thing. Wanting to categorize and systemitize. It’s also clearly written by people who literally do not understand how Hollywood works, or how artistic collaboration works. Have they never heard of the “front office”? Or the executive producers? Or test screenings? Every day compromises are made. And the actors have just as much to do with the film as a whole as the director. Oh, these director-focused critics … I get it, I love directors too … but not at the expense of every other person involved in the collaboration. It’s a very weird “way in” to the movies – and the Americans are much weirder about it than the French. The French critics (Bazin, Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol) loved our gangster movies and action movies and loved the movies that Americans were embarrassed by, or saw as “guilty pleasures”. Movies directed by John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks. To Americans in the 50s, they seemed like dinosaurs working in old “sentimental” forms and were embarrassingly crowd-pleasing. Americans feel inferior to Europeans and so our culture and our critics tended to over-praise our “serious” films that took on important “issues.” But then the French critics came along in the 50s and 60s and were like, “We love your so-called Trash. Your Trash is the best thing about you.” (I tend to agree, although there’s no need to be prescriptive about it.) The French helped prop up the Americans’ pride in their own culture (interestingly enough) – and the French have often done that for us. (Jerry Lewis, anyone?)
But then the Americans took on the French view and turned it into an absolute System. I still struggle with fellow film critics about this. They are only interested in one thing: The Director. That would be like being a fan of baseball and ONLY being interested in the Batting Coach. Or the general manager. But … what about everyone on the team? What about the strategies of the game? The collaborative aspect of it? The compromises made …
I don’t mean to be sexist, but the American version of the French theory is boy-centric and they over-value so-called boy movies (adventure movies, gangster movies, Westerns) and sniff at one of the most enduring genres in film – the FIRST genre – which is melodrama. Melodrama will always be with us. Some of our greatest films are melodramas, including the “women’s pictures” of the 40s. But the “boys” don’t really “count” those – and have a hard time dealing with King of the Melodramas, Douglas Sirk. He’s seen as too “commercial,” too “slick” – but all of that is shorthand for “He is interested in women and what life is like for women and it’s all a bit snively and over-emotional.”
We STILL have to deal with attitudes like that.
And hey, I love “boy” movies. I don’t agree with that gender-split in the first place and never have – but the dialogue is so set in stone you’re forced to play along with it to make your point.
Anyway … this is my dispatch from my small corner of the Theory Wars.
Auteur theory did a LOT for criticism of film – especially in that it embraced the B-pictures – which SHOULD be embraced. But when taken too far, it becomes absolutely absurd and incomprehensible.
Thank you for weighing in, Anne, and I am still laughing at the image of baffled 16 year olds listening to Derrida be incomprehensible.
Oh, the sacred cows being slaughtered! I know what I’m having for dinner tonight.
Easily the best courses I did as an undergraduate were about relating texts to time and place. Those two teachers brought theory into the discussion of culture, context and a continuum of art history that gave the art priority, made it alive. Reading Ubu Roi and The Dispossessed next to each other with a picture of Portrait of Pope Innocent After Velasquez up on the powerpoint and talking about Kropotkin. The most interesting thing for me about art is relationships and connections — meaning-making (I include feelings in “meaning”). And meaning is an unstable bitch. What’s the point of trying to lock something down and drain it?
I think the last death knell of my interest in staying in the academy came around Christmas time when I read a piece of film criticism on theconversation.com. The Conversation’s tagline is “academic rigour, journalistic flair.” Academics write short essays aimed at mainstream audiences, sometimes (even often) very good and by people I know and respect — but this one piece was a brief survey of Christmas movies. I won’t link to it because that feels mean, you can google it, but it was one of the most disheartening pieces of film criticism I’ve ever read (alongside another online local paper that does great work on every aspect of local news and culture except for film reviews, which are essentially press releases with the word “emotional” or “spectacular” plugged in every other paragraph. They are so bad they make me feel ill).
For one thing, this person dismisses Mixed Nuts entirely which, fuck you. And it doesn’t feature the kind of OTT continental obfuscation that Paglia’s railing against here. But the assumed authority…the disengaged prose…the reached-for links to capitalism…the gallop through a list of titles without actually trying to get at what these movies DO and how they do it… Taking a look at it again now it’s not the worst thing in the world but at the time it was just…is this soulless useless pablum the substance of my peers? My future? Is this what “bringing it to the masses” is supposed to look like?
Having said all that, I have only read this excerpt of this Paglia essay but it makes me very “BLAH BLAH BLAH I AM SO MAD GRRRRR BLAH BLAH BLAH.” ha ha! I did love reading it and being furious. She does not mince words. Foucault is a favourite of mine, I can’t deny it. I would have to read this essay in full (could my blood pressure take it?) but from this excerpt it seems to me that she is wilfully misunderstanding him — she mischaracterises his use of police, power, and surveillance, for a start.
Really, Foucault should be treated much like she argues science is, as an explanation of observable phenomena. Foucauldian theory has the robustness, layers and flexibility that she likes about her high school geology theory. It has the greatest explanatory power for the social organisation I experience at any rate. Because the other thing she seems to miss is that Foucault often works as a meta-theory or methodology and you’ll find him used most usefully in criminology, health, education, social sciences, gender studies, etc — unlike our friends Derrida and Lacan.
What I mean is, she doesn’t (seem to) get that, just like her precious Pre-Socratics, this stuff is still STORIES — stories, yes, with serious, often life-or-death consequences. Would you like to hear a story about we were all once two united beings of same- or opposite-sex who were divided and now have to seek each other out? Would you like to hear a story about Man existing in sin because Eve ate a fruit? Would you like to hear a story about the exploited worker? Would you like to hear a story about how humans are rational and therefore what is not rational is inhuman? Would you like to hear one about how our conscious mind and unconscious desire exists through recognition of the castration of the mother? And what Foucault’s talking about is that it is the way we tell those stories that make us, that allow us to know ourselves and be known, that we live in and through.
But he says it in a very different way to the way I just said it. It seems that what she HATES so virulently (besides the robotic mindlessness she sees in her peers) (and maybe this is bringing it full circle) is the way he and all those hated Frenchies get it out there. I agree, it’s often appalling and bizarre. Foucault I find pretty straightforward but I am acculturated — I am the lobster in the slowly-boiling water — but I can’t get any sense of out of some of them. So what do we do? I agree with you that aesthetics are of paramount importance. But I often love the food even if the meal is ugly. And after a certain point even Cyrano becomes beautiful. It’s a personal thing.
As for Lacan recs, I don’t know if I can recommend him! Ha ha. So often with him you can’t keep track of all the background behind the words he uses and he does insist on algebra. Reading some of these guys is like reading a space opera or A Clockwork Orange. You have to suspend disbelief — you have to buy into the universe and just go with it. For me, the funnest and most interesting stuff is in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, particularly the seminars ‘Anamorphosis,’ ‘The Line and the Light,’ and ‘What is a Picture?’; unsurprisingly perhaps these are about art, vision, and subjectivity and don’t bother too much with preposterous stories about our unconscious.
(I think my favourite passage in Lacan is at the start of FFCOP when he spends a few pages bitching about his “excommunication” by the “Executive Committee” of a psychoanalytic association. It is hilarious.)
This is probably longer than the original Paglia excerpt so it’s prudent to end here I think. Thanks for the thought-provoking essay Sheila!
Jessie – I was hoping you would weigh in! I am way out of my depth with this stuff.
// And meaning is an unstable bitch. What’s the point of trying to lock something down and drain it? //
I like this a lot!
// Taking a look at it again now it’s not the worst thing in the world but at the time it was just…is this soulless useless pablum the substance of my peers? My future? Is this what “bringing it to the masses” is supposed to look like? //
Wow. I know what you mean. So much of film criticism reads like that to me. It feels like
1. these film critics actually don’t enjoy movies at all
2. they are suspicious of pleasure or enthusiasm (this is why I’ve been made fun of for my Elvis essays in certain quarters – wayyyyy too enthusiastic)
3. the writer has never been laid in his life.
Mean, maybe. But they deserve it. They drain the JOY out of the movies – and boy, that’s a hard thing to do with such a primal populist art form.
// For one thing, this person dismisses Mixed Nuts entirely which, fuck you. //
hahahahahaha
// And what Foucault’s talking about is that it is the way we tell those stories that make us, that allow us to know ourselves and be known, that we live in and through. //
Hmmm. That sounds very Joan Didion-ish with her obsession with “narrative.” Didion’s work on narrative (which shows up in practically everything she writes, including her novels) has helped form my own ideas about it – her most famous line, probably is, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Often that quote has been misunderstood – or mis-quoted – the context lost. She’s not talking about it in an inspirational New Age-y way, or in a “we create our own reality” way. She’s talking about the sheer CONFUSION of living in a world with so much stimuli – in a world where the “truth” not only can’t ever be known – but honestly does not exist, at least not in an absolute way – and so we ARE the stories we tell. And sometimes that sucks, but we have to do it, and sometimes we are piecing together fragments because that’s the only way to survive, the only way to make sense of the sheer senselessness that is out there in the world. (Her two novels, “Democracy” and “Book of Common Prayer” are really ABOUT that. And about the hopelessness of ever nailing down a narrative – ever. They deal with Vietnam and Latin American dictatorships – and the baffled Americans who find themselves sucked in … they’re very important novels, even more important than her grief-memoir Year of Magical Thinking – but that, too, is about narrative.)
(Didion’s obsession with narrative, incidentally, has helped me so much once I started the Cognitive Therapy that I’ve been frog-marched into doing. Cognitive Therapy is all about narrative and re-framing narrative – as I know you know – and how our personalities are formed by the stories we tell ourselves ABOUT ourselves … and so if maybe you change the story, and you do so through repetition and breaking habits – so that “I’m a loser” is somehow transformed into “I’m just doing the best I can” … well, that small shift is life-changing, and it’s just about changing those words! I went into it completely cynical, and actually in a rage at those poor doctors who were trying to encourage me – I was like, “Nope. I am actually in touch with REALITY and you all are a bunch of fucking FANTASISTS. I’d RATHER be in touch with reality, even if it sucks.” It was a slow process – and a totally new way of thinking, at least in terms of how to APPLY re-framing and narrative to my own … brain and how it works.)
// he does insist on algebra. //
Okay, I love this, and I’m not even sure what it means. I’d have to read him to really get it, I’m assuming! Thanks for the introduction, anyway! It’s a foreign language to me, honestly.
and yes: Camille haaaaaaates those guys – and also, yes, is – I think, as you picked up on – furious at how she has been rejected by “the academy”, at the same time that she says she despises “the academy.” All of that is pretty transparent in her work. There’s the fury at being rejected, and then the “Oh well, I don’t like you all ANYway” thing going on. She judges people as worthwhile on whether or not they “engage” with her work. Which is pretty narrow. (She has an enormous ego. She wrote a whole essay about some scholar she hates, lambasting him for putting transcripts of interviews done with him in his own books. It was self-serving and egotistical, sneered Camille. And then she turns around and does the same thing! In the same collection where her essay appeared!! I love Camille, but she can be a mess like that.)
Her pop culture stuff and her art stuff – essays on paintings and sculpture and TV and Byron – are my favorite Camille Paglia pieces. Her columns on Anita Hill and date rape and stuff like that get more press attention – because, of course – but her commonsense enthusiastic approach to the art she loves is a lot of fun.
I do wish that her critics would not dismiss her so easily – the way Gloria Steinem does – because I do wish that mainstream feminism was a bit more diverse, flexible, open-minded. I wish it wasn’t so dominated by straight-middle-class-white-woman concerns. I wish it was more of a conversation rather than a dogmatic hammering from above. I resist those Systems, almost in a kneejerk way – which is probably immature. I like to think it’s because of my ancestral background. :) I come from Irish peasant stock, man. My ancestors dug up potatoes and died en masse in the famine. They shot at the British from behind stone walls in the early days of the IRA. My people were not genteel, they did not expect protection from some System, the System was rigged against them from the start. They’re rebels, not joiners.
So deciding who’s “in” and who’s “out,” and who should be listened to and who should be ignored is (in my opinion) the Mean Girls school of mainstream feminism.
All of this French theory stuff is like learning a new language – and honestly I don’t know if I can catch up at this point. You and Anne are two people I trust – whose opinions I always want to hear – and I was hoping I would hear from you on this one!
I think we’re on the same wavelength — it is very much about making sense of chaos — but Foucault operates at a step removed from Didion (and thank you so much for expanding on her, she’s been on my list for ages but I wasn’t sure what underpinned her). Now I am stressing myself out about my own inadequate explanation and so for my own piece of pedantic mind I will now explain at tedious length:
He takes narrative production for granted (to translate into Foucauldian terms, narrative is a field of knowledge, like religious or management or psychiatric knowledges) and he asks, what are the salient ways of organising the chaos at any one time and place? Why are some narratives about what people are and how society should be/is organised dominant, and what does that dominance look like? How does it get embedded in technologies and power structures? Who benefits and how?
So now you’re taught CBT, whereas two hundred years ago you might have had a forced hysterectomy and seventy years ago you would have lain back on a couch and had your dreams analysed. The self-narratives emerging from your CBT therapy (so says Foucauldian theory) are made possible by medical and psychiatric (and other) knowledges that set the field and the terms by which you can produce yourself — it has excluded some terms and made some available to you. And that makes you feel better, which is, obviously, a good thing. (I hope this doesn’t sound insultingly reductive)
Crucially, everybody, in a sense, benefits. For Foucault, power is not necessarily a bad thing (of course it enables the worst kinds of oppression and violence, he is very clear about that). But power is not just repressive and top-down, it is also productive, lateral, and molecular. In tandem with knowledge systems — knowledges that organise the chaos — it produces people, and people produce themselves within those fields of knowledge, consciously and unconsicously and at every level of personhood.
The other classic figure is the homosexual (this might be familiar to you from Sedgewick). At one point he (always “he” with Foucault) would have been a good Greek citizen; at another, a sodomite. And during the nineteenth century social and political and scientific forms of knowledge and structures of power collide and collude to turn homosexual acts (sodomy) into a category of person, the homosexual, about who we can “know” certain things. Without the creation of thiis category, we don’t get the violent state and social oppression of homosexuals — and the corollary, we don’t get people identifying as proud and defiant homosexuals — that category and narrative is ESSENTIAL to them.
Re: Lacan and algebra; Lacan likes to schematise his theories of the unconscious and language with algebraic equations. It obviously makes sense to him but my brain doesn’t work that way at all. One of the drawbacks of secondary texts on Lacan is that they spend paaaaaaaaaaaaages trying to explain the algebra. This is the academy-nerd equivalent of people drawing architectural plans for the Death Star.
Having said that I agree with Anne that a good secondary text like Kaja Silverman’s The Subject of Semiotics can be a helpful place to go for solid understanding of the theory. But of course then you do miss out there on the theorist’s brains — their humour, their asides, their bizarre tangents and analogies and assumptions — and part of the perverse pleasure of these texts is reading every other sentence and saying, okay, you fucking weirdo. I mean, all this stuff emerges from a theorist’s personality, idiosyncrasies and peccadillos, right? If Freud were a different person the things that he thinks “make sense” — the way he organised the chaos — would be different. So my suggestion is generally to go to the source with an assist from google.
thus endeth, we all hope, the lecture. You could definitely catch up — your fearlessness towards the gaps in your knowledge is tbqh inspirational — but you can see that this stuff is an iceberg, or like those snake tongues from Tremors. You can get a small grip on it, but the rest is attached, indivisible, and is ready to explode out of the ground and eat you. You probably have better things to do. Like watch Tremors.
And then she turns around and does the same thing! In the same collection where her essay appeared!!
Ha haaa! That is amazing!!!! The hatred definitely comes through. As confrontational as it is it is kind of endearing, which I feel like she would probably shoot me for saying. I picture her writing process as just repeatedly refining this draft.
“Nope. I am actually in touch with REALITY and you all are a bunch of fucking FANTASISTS. I’d RATHER be in touch with reality, even if it sucks.”
I have been there. Isn’t it insane (pun unintended) how the worst feels like the only truth? How it’s just so OBVIOUS?
I see a lot of young people on the dreaded tumblr talking about intersectional feminism and privilege in ways that make me excited and optimistic. Sometimes there is a contradictory (like, intellectually incoherent) rigidity to these discussions but it has always been difficult to welcome contingency and multiplicity and to open up. I think your ancestry is standing you in very, very good stead!
Jessie – fascinating!!
I very much get and understand your connections between, say, the history of psychiatry (especially when it comes to analyzing the “problems” of women) – as well as the “definition” of homosexuality and how that has changed. And how language in many ways CREATES reality. You can certainly see that in economics – and how people have understood/described the class struggle through the ages. Dickens is not John Steinbeck. Nor should he be. He was a man of his era, not the 30s.
I wish there was more flexibility in this arena – in understanding that times change, that how human beings understood, say, science in the 18th century may look ridiculous now – but they were also curious intelligent men trying to understand their own universe – the same way we are doing now. Medicine, too, although you hear the stories of laxatives and leeches and “bleeding” people from the 1700s and you thank GOD for things like germ theory and antibiotics and all the rest.
But back to the matter at hand:
// that set the field and the terms by which you can produce yourself — it has excluded some terms and made some available to you. //
Yes, this makes total sense.
My friend Alex says that when she was a kid she felt like a girl in a boy’s body. Or, no: she didn’t even have those words available to her. She just felt WRONG and her world – her parents, bullies at school – treated her like she was wrong. She tells this story often but she walked around with sleeping pills in her pocket when she was 14, thoughts of suicide so loud she couldn’t hear anything else – when she happened to watch Phil Donahue – and he had on a bunch of men who had become women. (In the terminology of the day). And Alex sat watching, and her mind literally exploded. There she was on the TV screen- there were others like her – and they were fabulous and funny and competent and all the rest – this was not some weird thing only SHE had. (This is why she has always said that Phil Donahue saved her life. She means it literally.)
So that moment of awareness – where she could actually name herself to herself – “I am transgender” – transformed her actual experience. In a lot of respects – although I’m not sure, I’d have to ask Alex – the word ITSELF helped set her free. She could organize herself, she could understand herself – it was a “thing”, it wasn’t some weird anomaly – it existed, it had a name.
(This could be seen as dangerous, in other contexts – or who knows, maybe even in the same context but with a different person. Impressionable people who “glom on” to definitions can be very vulnerable.)
// Without the creation of thiis category, we don’t get the violent state and social oppression of homosexuals — and the corollary, we don’t get people identifying as proud and defiant homosexuals — that category and narrative is ESSENTIAL to them. //
Makes perfect sense.
// and part of the perverse pleasure of these texts is reading every other sentence and saying, okay, you fucking weirdo. //
hahahaha Have you seen David Cronenberg’s movie about Freud and Jung? It also tackles the “hysteria” thing – I’m in the midst of writing another one of these Paglia essays – and “hysteria” comes up, so it’s on my mind. Anyway, it’s a really interesting movie about these two eccentric weirdo-men – coming up with different theories about the human mind – both insisting they are right – which is ridiculous in and of itself – but on a higher level: they both were interested in helping people. They were not trying to hurt anyone – they were trying to help people (and especially women, ironically. Both of them sensed the crux of the problem – that women were cut off from their sex drives, and so that sex drive had to go SOMEwhere, didn’t it. Hence: hysteria and depression and no orgasms and all the rest.) So it’s a mixed bag – but reaching for a definition, or even coming up with a “theory” – that’s what they were trying to do. I’m not sure even Freud had any sense of just how popular his ideas would become. If you watch Hollywood movies, you can TELL when Freudian ideas start to dominate. (Late 40s.) Suddenly everyone has a psychological explanation, suddenly everything is about repression, and even villains make long monologues about their crappy childhoods. (The final scene of Psycho – where a psychiatrist stands there and diagnoses Norman Bates’ personality – is one of the most bizarre examples, and a lot of people seem to have blocked out that that scene even exists in the movie.)
Freud helped create giants like James Joyce and Proust – even though James Joyce was not a Freudian person at all. But the interest and understanding in the subconscious, in hidden drives, in the importance of sex, in how memory operates … along with WWI – these were the most important influences on those Modernists.
I’m glad you feel optimistic about the Tumblr feminists. Maybe I’m reading the wrong ones. I agree that intersectionality has been the Great Missing in feminism (at least in the American brand of it) – where white middle-class women have set the terms of discussion, not even realizing that they were excluding women of color or women of working-class backgrounds. (In my opinion, Gloria Steinem still doesn’t get it.) So that awareness – even the concept of intersectionality – which black feminists have been demanding for 40 years now – going mainstream – if you call Tumblr and Twitter mainstream, which I guess it is – well, that is a very very good thing.
In her own “weirdo” way, Paglia has also been calling for intersectionality in feminism. The working-class non-white women who have been left out of the conversation, and left out of the power structures of American mainstream feminism.
So I’m glad Paglia has been out there – screaming from the sidelines. Like I said, I prefer her pop culture stuff and her books on art and painting and sculpture to her larger political/social commentary – I think that’s where her true gift lies – her obsessions with Madonna and Melville and Egyptian art – these are wonderful additions to our cultural landscape, especially since she writes about it in her own distinct non-academic way. Her ranting and raving about American academia as well as what she sees as prissy mainstream feminists … I can’t help it, I find it entertaining. Just not as illuminating as the other. (It also dates pretty badly.)
It does sometimes feel like a dream that Derrida came to my school!
My sense is that most Anglo-American philosophers think he’s full of shit. And they are people who deal with abstract, hard ideas all the time, so would not be put off by the difficulty itself. But then again, it may be a pose or in-group thing to dislike him, as well. Who knows? For myself, I did get a bit of an Emperor’s New Clothes feeling about him.
This is surely a vast, vast oversimplification (and possibly something more off-base than that) but I feel like the basic idea of deconstruction is that the reader sort of constructs the text as she goes along – that meaning is so slippery as to be almost infinite, when you look at it in a very fine-grained sort of way, so every act of reading is its own separate thing. And I think the counterargument (more typical of Anglo-American philosophers) is that meaning is variable but finite. There may be multiple possible readings, but that number is limited. Rather than there being this sort of endless cacophony of readings, there are a group that we can determine and have arguments about. So we can basically understand each other.
Somebody who paid more attention in Derrida class could correct me here.
I think my ideas about this are related to truth as it comes up in a courtroom. Like, there is this thing that happened – somebody murdered x – but can we determine and reconstruct what actually took place? And in one sense, yeah, you despair of ever getting to the truth, especially if you’re mostly relying on people’s testimonies and memories. The story that emerges can be hugely different than what actually happened. But at the same time, the truth sounds a bit different than a lie, some witnesses have more credibility than others, timelines are hard to fake, sometimes corroborating testimony comes forward, &c. &c. There are multiple stories, but you can make sense of them, and rule some out, and so on.
Sorry – getting my Derridas out there. It’s a view, it can be considered, for myself I probably have a more Anglo-Am take on it. It would probably have helped if he explained it better, then one could take it on or argue it out more easily. And it might not have taken on such a cult status. But you can also sort of see why – given the argument he’s making and how he thinks about language – why he isn’t clearer.
Fascinating. This also inadvertently loops into the review I just wrote for a movie called Tumbledown – the movie is ostensibly a rom-com, but it’s actually about two people battling over a Narrative – who gets to own it, speak it – who gets to “set the tone” for the narrative. Is there Truth? But what does Truth mean when the record is incomplete? I wrote the review before we had these discussions but it all seems to connect.
I’ve been interested in this because of Sylvia Plath – and how difficult it has been to even come close to a satisfying narrative of her – mainly because she – and her work – have been co-opted by different groups. Exacerbated by the fact that the Plath estate was run by Ted Hughes’ sister, Olwyn, who didn’t like Sylvia – personally – and thought she was not a good match for her precious brother. Olwyn was the WORST person to be “in charge” of the Plath narrative. (Olwyn Hughes just died – so hopefully there may be some light allowed in now. Like: why hasn’t there been a satisfactorily edited volume of Sylvia Plath’s voluminous correspondence? It’s absurd – she was a major figure and how we “get” to talk about her is still so controlled.)
And so scholars and Ted Hughes and Olwyn Hughes and those who knew Plath – plus her mother – and on and on – have been engaged in a 40+ year battle over her work and her life. What did it mean, what did the poems mean … and honestly, who GETS to own “meaning”? Isn’t “meaning” multiple? I’m not going to let Olwyn Hughes or Ted Hughes or anyone else tell me the correct meaning of Plath’s poems. Once they’re out there in the world, they’re yours, they’re mine.
There is serious evidence in some of the poems that Sylvia Plath was drawn to – repulsed by – curious about – lesbianism. Conflicting feelings. Some of the images are labile, and sexual … I mean, who knows. This kind of thing can be annoying in certain hands. But Janet Malcolm – who wrote an entire book about how difficult it is to write a book about Sylvia Plath – Ha!! – tells a story in that same book of one literary scholar who was working on a book about Plath’s themes. This scholar did a whole chapter on Plath’s sexuality and possible bisexuality – at least curiosity about being with a woman. Scholar used certain poems as “evidence.” The book may have sucked, and she may be wrong, and maybe it’s annoying to speculate on an author based on the poems – but whatever, it was her study and as I see it, it’s her right to speculate as much as she wanted to. Scholar’s book was then submitted to “the Estate” for Olwyn to sign off on (outrageous) – and Olwyn Nixed that chapter. “Publish the book but take out the speculation about her gay-curiosity.” Like, this is the kind of shit that has been going on.
It’s a petty war, in many ways – but it really has to do with narrative, story, and meaning – and a bunch of people with vested interests in protecting their OWN reputations (I’m sure Sylvia was BRUTAL about Ted in some of her letters) – control the narrative for the rest of us.
Not knowing anything about Derrida, Foucault or deconstructionism beyond bare bones … I may be getting all this wrong and what I’m talking about has nothing to do with it.
I like your example of courtroom testimonies. My cop friend said that anytime there are 10 eyewitnesses to something, even a car crash, he gears up for 10 different stories. And who can say which one is 100% true? You have to piece it all together, and HOW you piece it together is totally dependent on you, and your individual outlook, your tendencies, how you analyze things, etc.
I can see how all of this can become a swirling black-hole – where meaning itself is lost – and something like, say, “Groundhog Day” is over-analyzed to the point where you forget that it’s a comedy, and that it works as entertainment, and all the rest. I’ve seen film criticism that reads like that.
It’s interesting: I saw Jacques Tati’s Playtime, a real favorite. I showed it to my friend Jen and she literally – literally – had to fall off the couch because she was laughing so hard. I wrote up this whole review of it. I linked to it on Twitter.
another critic – whom I admire, who has an illustrious career, counts it as one of his favorite movies – and Retweeted my review, but took issue with some of my opinions, and then linked to his own review.
So far so good. These are the kinds of discussions that make Art worth talking about.
I read his review – and it’s beautifully written and filled with historical detail about the shoot itself, about Tati, and etc. etc. – but honestly: if you read his piece, you would never ever know that it was a comedy. He made it sound like the dullest social commentary about the mechanization of man, industrialization and all the rest. Playtime IS about that, for sure. But … I don’t know … he did not (to my taste) express that it was a comedy at all … it seemed like he didn’t even perceive how hilarious it was. Maybe he did, but he didn’t choose to focus on that in his review. I have no idea.
It was gorgeously written – I’m slightly intimidated by this man (he can be extremely patriarchal – especially to women) – but I said, politely something along the lines of: “I loved your piece!” (and for the most part I did) – and then “For me, the way into the film was how funny it was.”
All of this is probably a matter of taste. And, in general, this guy’s “voice” is an essential one – he loves things in a very specific way, he does his homework, he provides great context, and his taste is bizarre, eclectic and personal (my favorite things – I never know what he’s going to like.)
Anyway, it’s all extremely interesting – and thanks for the discussion!!