Once upon a time, her crazy had more bite.

As I'm catching flack from, among others, two of the three co-panelists from my MLA panel on academic blogging concerning the title to my Camille Paglia post, I feel the need to have Molly Ivins clarify it for me (courtesy of Ahistoricality) :

You think perhaps this is a cheap shot, that I have searched her work and caught Ms. Paglia in a rare moment of sweeping generalization, easy to make fun of? Au contraire, as we always say in Amarillo; the sweeping generalization is her signature. In fact, her work consists of damn little else. She is the queen of the categorical statement.

There was a period in which Paglia could be counted on to be write with force and clarity, i.e. before she began writing disorganized columns brimming over with self-aggrandizing allusions and mindless repetitions of right-wing talking-points. In 1991, she even possessed prescience enough to predict her own rightward drift:

[I]f people are trying to critique from within the academic establishment, and they're getting tarred with the word "neoconservative," you keep on doing that long enough, people will get used to hearing it about themselves, and they will become conservative.

Case in point: Camille Paglia. Did her ready-made anti-feminist statements predispose her to drifting so? Without a doubt. Were her arguments about the inability of woman to create truly great art always as absurd as they seem now? Absolutely. However, she would not have become the media sensation she was in the early '90s had she not packaged her faux-feminist critiques in a language understandable to the general intellectual culture. There were (and are) many anti-feminst thinkers who rivaled Paglia in virulence but not prominence, and the point of my title was that she now resembles those muted, vainglorious misogynists more than the contrarian firebrand she once was.

Comments

[tomemos]

Scott, pardon me, but: that's your argument? That Paglia must have written clearly and forcefully at some point, because otherwise she never would have been a media sensation? Scads of people have become media sensations without being clear and forceful writers, particularly "contrarian firebrands," since whenever you're contrarian you're bound to fool some people into thinking you're speaking truth to power, even if your arguments are objectively incoherent or self-sabotaging. (Figure 1.) I'll grant that maybe her writing was a little less coked-out at one point than it is now, but that's a far cry from clear and forceful, and in the face of Ivins's points I'd want to see an example of impressive (even if disagreeable) writing from 90's Paglia to be convinced that the empress ever had any clothes.

And no, the "prescient" statement you quote doesn't count as impressive writing, because there's nothing prescient about it. She's not saying something perceptive, like, "If I'm not careful, I could become a right-wing caricature of myself"—she's threatening her critics that if they make her mad she'll turn into their worst nightmare. It's a "look what you made me do!" for a persona that she's already looking forward to adopting. That just emphasizes her cynicism and intellectual bankruptcy.

[tomemos]

Now that I've gotten that out of my system, have you seen this?

[SEK]

that's your argument?

That last sentence, yes, it is.

Scads of people have become media sensations without being clear and forceful writers, particularly "contrarian firebrands," since whenever you're contrarian you're bound to fool some people into thinking you're speaking truth to power, even if your arguments are objectively incoherent or self-sabotaging.

Part of the problem here is that I was taking a lighthearted swipe at Bérubé there, because he also rose to prominence on the back on a forceful and argumentative writing style in the early '90s. Michael had the obvious advantage of being correct more often than not, and, it goes without saying, mention being a far superior stylist.* But he became an academic with a popular audience not because (as mentioned in the footnote below) he was a towering giant in the field, but be because he stepped off-campus and wrote in a voice (and for a venue, The Village Voice) that rewarded force and clarity of prose. (It was founded by Norman Mailer, after all.) At the same time, Paglia was being profiled in New York on the strength of Sexual Personae. (The profile's worth your time, if only to catch a glimpse of the state of the profession [albeit in profile] at the end of the '80s.) In other words, as the culture wars heated up, the writers who came to represent factions therein were valued, in part, on the clarity of the communiques. Despite being wrong 99 percent of the time, Paglia's mistakes were at least identifiable; now, it's a meaning battle muddle in a murky battle puddle with a paddle etc.

And no, the "prescient" statement you quote doesn't count as impressive writing

As it came from a speech, I wouldn't claim otherwise. I was simply pointing out that she was formerly able to recognize that people sometimes became what other people perceived them to be ... but now that she's done that, she insists that she's as she always was because she can't recognize that the process she once described worked upon her. Again, I think you're getting the mistaken impression that I'm defending her former self. I'm really not. The title was really just meant to accentuate the incoherence I documented in the post.

*For example:

Readers who've followed the tortuous course of political correctness (p.c.) in the national press now know that there is no American intellectual community so benighted and blinkered as that of young faculty members in the humanities. If deconstruction is nihilism, if multiculturalism is barbarism, and if feminism is the annihilation of all we hold dear, well, then, you can just imagine what happens when today's newly-tenured and untenured professors put all these things in their big iron cauldrons, together with liberal doses of Foucault Helper. Let's just say that if we young whelps aren't quite the Great Satan, we're what one pundit calls "the new fundamentalists"—or worse yet, in Dinesh D'Souza's catchy phrase, "Visigoths in Tweed." But strange to say, though we're always mocked, derided, and reviled, we untenured radical Gothic fundamentalists are never quoted directly, in speech or in print, in any of the articles we "appear" in. It is as if, as Marx said (in another context, I think), the fundamentalist Visigoths cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.

Well, ich bin ein young faculty member. And what's more, I know a lot of young faculty members. We've been talking a great deal lately, trying to figure out what we think about this p.c. flap. If you've been hearing about us, though, you already know what we talk about: we "reduce" knowledge to power, we read "narrowly" for the ideological ramifications of literary texts. Yes, we plot no less than the destruction of the West. Just the other day a friend and I came up with the most pernicious academic scheme to date for toppling the West: he will kneel behind the West on all fours. I will push it backwards over him.

[SEK]

Also, I hadn't actually seen that, but it's not the least bit surprising. For someone who's attacked identity politics in no uncertain terms, her politics have always been predicated on her Italian identity, Catholic heritage, etc.

[JPool]

Scott, your argument here would be a lot easier to take seriously if you could link to a piece of writing by Paglia that you find to be clear and forceful. Forceful sure, that's a given, but she was never clear.

Against your argument that she wouldn't have risen to prominence if she hadn't been a clear and forceful writer, let me offer an explanatory counter-narrative. Paglia rose to prominence because she offered a couple things to the media and something else to academic and intellectual critics. To the media Paglia seemed a synecdoche for things that they knew were important in the academic world, but didn't really understand or know how to package for a general audience: post-modernism and "post-feminism". Paglia was a tireless self-promoter and put herself forward as the embodiment of a new style of consciousness that could role with the contradictions in the ways those old fuddy-duddies couldn't. Within feminism, third-wave hadn't really coalesced yet and it was still mainly working through critiques of second wave by women of color (bell hooks, This Bridge Called My Back). To a media that was still trying to figure out Ally McBeal and stuff, Paglia seemed to offer a critical engagement with feminism, at least for those who didn't read her too deeply or weren't aware of the fuller range of feminist writing coming out. There were folks saying that the Empress had no clothes almost from the beginning, but in interviews, even where she made no sense Paglia could be entertaining to watch. The fact that she didn't write or speak clearly worked for her in this regard, because it kept alive a sense of intrigue — that maybe she had really clever ideas if only we could figure out what she was saying. Still, this sense of excitement based purely on style could only be kept up for so long before it was pretty universally agreed that she was a hack (if she had tacked more thoroughly right she could have been a kept hack for a lot longer). She enjoyed something of a second life in academia as a foil, particularly for those wanting to demonstrate the foolishness of her post-feminism (I remember reading her "I'm not saying women deserve to be raped, I'm just saying that rape victims are stupid and deserve what they get" essay a couple of times in college as an excercize in "let's tear this to pieces"), but even this yielded diminishing returns. A lot of people bought Sexual Personae (it was mass-marketed like crazy), but hardly anyone read it and its ideas made no real impact. When was the last time you heard someone try and distinguish between Apollonian and Dionysian culture?

Shorter: Paglia did not rise to prominance because of clear and forceful writing, but because of ambiguous and seemingly provactive writing and a personal demeanor that made for good television before everyone got sick of it.

[Flavia]

I agree with you, SEK, if only because I wish to think well of my younger self: I was 16 or 17 when I came across one of Paglia's columns on the Op-Ed page of my hometown newspaper, and I found it electrifying. I bought Sex, Art, and American Culture as soon as it came out, and Sexual Persona early in college; I also went to hear her speak when she came to my campus around 1994 or 1995.

I found her totally compelling and totally provocative, even when (as often, since I wasn't totally clear what these "culture wars" involved) I didn't entirely understand what she was talking about.

I outgrew her (boy, did I outgrow her), but I still retain some affection for her early style, if not the politics behind it. I teach "Rape and Modern Sex War" in my composition class in part because I think it illustrates perfectly how powerful (and how problematic) a strong authorial voice can be. My students love how no-nonsense it seems, and how it seems to be all about telling hard truths, and empowering women not to be victims. . . and yet once you subject it to the least scrutiny, its arguments collapse, and it winds up being even more appalling in its assumptions about men than in its critique of feminism.

(I feel like I just confessed to something horribly shameful here. But she influenced me hugely in ways that I refuse to believe were wholly bad.)

[Flavia]

Oh, and JPool, re: influence of Sexual Personae:

I was assigned Paglia's chapter on Spenser's Faerie Queene in a senior seminar on Spenser when I was in college. But I suspect that may have had more to do with the poverty of good Spenser criticism than anything else; I recall the professor beginning discussion by saying, "Okay, she's crazy, but she kinda has a point here. . ." (That point being that the best moments in Spenser are pornographic, and specifically voyeuristic.)

[The Necromancer]

I'm not sure her crazy ever had much bite. Well, maybe rabid dog bite. But not Michel de Montaigne bite. It's heartbreaking to discover that not every human is a humanist...