Attention Please

Notwithstanding this rather hysterical response to it, the Camille Paglia essay recently featured at Arts & Letters Daily is really very good. It's in the more scholarly mode of Sexual Personae, and is well worth reading. Here are her main points:

Decade by decade since the 1960s, popular culture, with its stunning commercial success, has gained strength until it now no longer is the brash alternative to organized religion or an effete literary establishment: it is the culture for American students, who outside urban centers have little exposure to the fine arts...

Interest in and patience with long, complex books and poems have alarmingly diminished not only among college students but college faculty in the U.S. It is difficult to imagine American students today, even at elite universities, gathering impromptu at midnight for a passionate discussion of big, challenging literary works like Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. . .

Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space. The new generation, raised on TV and the personal computer but deprived of a solid primary education, has become unmoored from the mother ship of culture. . . The ironically self-referential or overtly politicized and jargon-ridden paradigms of higher education, far from helping the young to cope or develop, have worsened their vertigo and free fall. Today's students require not subversion of rationalist assumptions—the childhood legacy of intellectuals born in Europe between the two World Wars—but the most basic introduction to structure and chronology. Without that, they are riding the tail of a comet in a media starscape of explosive but evanescent images. . . .

Since Paglia herself has been among the most vocal champions of "popular culture" among academics and intellectuals, the essay can almost be read as a kind of apology for her own excesses in encouraging us to "become unmoored from the mother ship of culture," or at least as an expression of second thoughts about her own possible collusion with the powers that be in the academy in "subverting" literature and the fine arts.

Anyone who has tried to teach literature to either high school or college students over the past 15 years knows, however, that she is correct in her description of these students' capacity to read not just long books but any works of literature that require careful attention. It is also true that the prevailing models of literary study actively encourage this corruption of reading by dismissing, both implicitly and explicitly, what gets called "elite" culture as the encoded propaganda of the Oppressor. Students are assured that they don't need to take art and literature seriously because it will only hurt their feelings, or worse. (This is itself an inherently patronizing approach, since it assumes that only the tenured among us need to consider such works in the first place in order to determine they are indeed bad for us.)

I don't think computers have much to do with this state of affairs, although television certainly does. Computers--the internet more generally--requires the active agency of its users, and there's nothing wrong with sampling some of what art and literature have to offer for the first time in cyberspace rather than in a museum or classroom. Television, on the other hand, is entirely passive and does promote the kind of impatience with anything that can't be reduced to its demands that Paglia discusses.

Paglia then goes on to describe the way she tries to introduce her own students to visual art, and although her approach seems reasonable enough, others more competent to assess it would have to do so. I'm also not sure that this kind of remedial, catch-up work will in the long run be very effective. It may be too late. My impression of much of the current discourse on art, music, and literature, even among professed enthusiasts, is that all of these arts have gotten too "difficult," too "cerebral," too far away from what "common people" like. In discussions of literature, much of this criticism seems to take writers to task for not writing books that could easily be made into movies and tv shows. If the experience of reading a novel is ultimately judged by whether it seems like watching television sitcoms, then there's no reason to read (or write) novels at all.

In the response to which I linked above, Paglia's analysis is labeled "cultural conservatism." It is only conservative if we stick to the core meaning of the term--to "conserve." Given that presently in American culture there's not much left of either the ability or the desire to experience any works of art in a substantive way, conserving it is now probably beside the point. Bringing art and literature back into the lives of people of any age--or at least the knowledge of how to do that for themselves--would actually be a fairly radical act. It's the partisans of the current media culture and the mavens of academic criticism who have become the "cultural conservatives."

Comments

[Jeff]

One person's conservation is another person's ossification.

As both an artist and a literary scholar, I was appalled by the essay. I mean appalled with all the nuances complete-- it made me turn white, and left me chilled to the bone.

I attended a lecture a few weeks ago by Cynthia Selfe of Michigan Tech who argued that the ability of children to follow complex textual instructions on how to "cheat" at their favorite games sort of shoots the whole "the kids today have no attention span" argument in the ass.

I agree with Selfe, not Paglia. This sort of "the sky is falling" argument from cultural conservatives, the argument for the reinstatement of traditions (whose traditions?) is self defeating and ludicrous. Chicken little has laid an egg, in my opinion. I admire Paglia's writing on many issues-- just not this one.

If the arts and literature are in trouble, it is only because we have insisted that they be treated as "separate" from life, rather than a part of it. It is indeed a "radical act" to insist that there is a fine art tradition that is more valuable to them that they lack adequate tools to cope with, when the young people of today, in my opinion are genuinely engaged with producing vital art all their own.

They aren't on their own. There is a rich tradition of artists who wait to be studied that are relevant to them, from the Stone Age forward, just as Paglia suggests-- People who didn't surrender to the hatred of their own cultural conditions, but rather worked with and against them to create great art and literature. It is by making connections with that, rather than freezing past moments as touchstones, that the best work will be done. Cultural loathing, which amounts to a thinly veiled self-hatred, gets us nowhere.

[Jeff]

Oh, I did forget to mention that I do teach, and have been teaching literature in my composition classes for the last 2 1/2 years. I do not share your underestimation of my students. If the teacher is engaging, the students will become engaged. All of my literature teachers were, and that is why I ended up in the field. Most of them did stress the role of literature in society, rather than literature's role in the museum.

So did my Art teachers twenty years ago. They encouraged me not only to look at it and talk about it, but to make it.

[Daniel Green]

Jeff,

If you think Paglia was calling for a return to "tradition" (clearly a horrible thing, in your estimation), then you didn't read her essay very well.

[Jeff]

I beg to differ. What, for instance, does the passage I quoted say?

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To maintain order, the choice of representative images will need to be stringently narrowed. I envision a syllabus based on key images that would give teachers great latitude to expand the verbal dimension of presentation, including an analysis of style as well as a narrative of personal response.
--

If this isn't canon-formation, in the same sense Mathew Arnold argued for at the end of the 19th century, I have clearly not read what isn't there as explicitly as you have. Just because Paglia has argued in the past for a certain attentiveness to popular culture (admirably, I think) doesn't mean she's arguing for it here. I'm merely basing my comments on what she actually said.

Pagila's argument is "new traditionalism" in the same sense that Arnold's argument was (in its own time). That's why I called it a call for conservatism, rather than tradition. She envisions creating a new tradition, composed of a recast version of the old one (key images), just as Arnold did as he felt the sands of England slipping away beneath his feet amid Victorian decadence. Somehow, I believe that England is still there, and richer for his reaction to it. But this essay isn't Paglia's "Dover Beach"-- it is venomous and ridiculous, as far as her scholarship goes.

"Literature is news that remains news." I think it was Pound that said that. Literature isn't great because it is a part of the "tradition" envisioned by Eliot. In that sense, yes, I do think ossified traditions are horrible. Dynamic ones, however, are a great thing. Even Eliot was forward thinking enough to realize that.

A narrowed "syllabus of key images" does not go anywhere near promoting a vision of art as a vital and important thing.

[Daniel Green]

Paglia has nothing to do with Arnold. In most ways, they couldn't be farther apart.

In the passage you quoted, she's trying to help her students more effectively see what's in front of them. She's trying to help them pay attention.

"Key images" has nothing to do with a "canon." This is a red herring.

[Jeff]

A canon of texts, taught by a university, begins as a list of texts on a syllabus. There isn't time to teach everything, of course, so a teacher picks representative examples. The negotiation of those examples is how canons get formed.

That is precisely what Paglia is promoting. She italicizes key images, as a matter of fact, knowing what she is doing. Of course, compared to Arnold she is not promoting a qualitative choice, merely a narrowing of images from a field dominated by images. When images (like those in Art history books) are chosen as representative of a type of visual expression, they become canonical. It's that simple, and that insidious.

Obviously, that has been done for years, and continues to be done. Her suggestion is neither radical nor new. Nor do I have an alternative proposal, other than cultivating a sensitivity to all texts and images, including the commonplace. Arnold argued for it in this way:

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Indeed, there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and therefore do us the most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. (from The Study of Poetry, 1879)
--

It is the "do us the most good" that I apply Paglia's comments, rather than Arnold's notion of excellence. The root idea is much the same-- to pick out images worthy of contemplation (not necessarily based on their excellence) and to contemplate them and keep them with us. I object to codifying them, not contemplating them. That's where Paglia's use of the word syllabus is telling.

A red herring is a fish. Creating syllabi is the first step to canonization.

But a more serious point of confluence between Arnold and Paglia (in this essay, not as a general rule) is her contention that ordinary students do not have any ability to locate what is "good" or "deep" in imagery. Not to attempt to lecture you on Arnold, but...

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So immersed are they in practical life, so accustomed to take all their notions from this life and its processes, that they are apt to think that truth and culture themselves can be reached by the processes of this life, and that it is an impertinent singularity to think of reaching them in any other. (Arnold, The Function of Literature at the Present Time, 1864)
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In other words, the "context rich" environment they live in makes them unable to sense the greater context of artistic practice and cultural truth. That, in a nutshell, was Paglia's argument. That was also Arnold's argument. If you can't see that, I might suggest that your education in literature was lacking.

[Jeff]

Oh, and I heartily recommend reading some more of Arnold's criticism, because it seems to fit quite well with your point of view in the latest published essay in your repertoire.

Arnold was a smart man, but fearful of change. I enjoyed studying him years ago, and I also enjoyed revisiting these essays. I think we owe him much-- the discipline of English literature as we know it, as a matter of fact.

Regardless of this, though, his cultural panic (and Paglia's, and yours, from what I've read) is overblown and hysterical. The same adjective you applied to me. We'll have to agree to disagree.

[Daniel Green]

Jeff,

In her essay, Paglia writes: "Knowing how to 'read' images is a crucial skill in this media age, but the style of cultural analysis currently prevalent in universities is, in my view, counterproductive in its anti-media bias and intrusive social agenda."

Her goal is thus to help her students more efficaciously interpret all images, maybe especially those they are most familiar with. She thinks she has chosen some vehicles that will get her where she wants to go. (Others may choose different vehicles.) Do you have a problem with the cave painting? Pre-Columbian art? That you keep harping on "key images" and "touchstones" is beyond me.

As to the second quoted passage from Arnold: I don't know whether Paglia would agree with it. I do. It seems to me patently obvious. If the study of literature is not, first of all, a retreat from "practical life" (to be returned to it later), then what is it?