{"id":113510,"date":"2016-02-04T08:26:54","date_gmt":"2016-02-04T13:26:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=113510"},"modified":"2024-10-27T17:27:29","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T21:27:29","slug":"the-books-sex-art-and-american-culture-junk-bonds-and-corporate-raiders-by-camille-paglia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=113510","title":{"rendered":"The Books: Sex, Art, and American Culture<\/i>; \u201cJunk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,\u201d by Camille Paglia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"51iorNOljBL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nNEXT BOOK on the essays shelf<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays<\/a>\"\", by Camille Paglia.<\/i><\/p>\n

\nI 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.”<\/p>\n

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<\/i> (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?)<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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<\/i> wrongly. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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<\/i>. <\/p>\n

Camille’s essay appeared in Arion<\/i> 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<\/a>\"\"<\/i>. Art for art’s sake, is her cry. Understand history, remove specialization, restore the canon. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.” <\/p>\n

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.) <\/p>\n

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<\/i><\/a>.) <\/p>\n

Back to Camille. Here she is, being extremely generous towards Foucault. <\/p>\n

\nExcerpt from Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by Camille Paglia. From “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders.” <\/big><\/p>\n

\nFoucault 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<\/i>. They have no relationship to historical reality. They are simply devious improvisations in the style of Gide’s The Counterfeiters<\/i>. 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/i>, 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<\/i>. The cultural mode of the post-Sixties era is not surveillance but voyeurism, ours<\/i>. 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n

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