Despite her probable hostility to what we might call Parole's 'originary drive,' Camille Paglia made a serious contribution to the American scene in the nineties. I write of her more in form than substance. I liked her brashness and energy. Her critiques of Theory, simultaneously prolix and hyperbolic, were ill-considered -- but they were amusing. Her critiques of academic decadence and the faculty-conference complex even showed a bit of sagacity. Her treatment of camp - her writing revels in allusions to 'The Women' and Joan Crawford and 'Valley of the Dolls' - was exhilarating. She was a flashy presence and very much a guilty pleasure. Besides, does New Criticism not also deserve its flamboyant champions?
So where is she now? Well, she's teaching at Philadelphia's University of the Arts. She's still around, to be sure. Break, Blow, Burn, her close readings of a creatively chosen forty three poems was wonderful. (Less so was the Theory-bashing introduction.) She also writes a monthly column for Salon every second Wednesday. She and Drudge are mutual admirers, and the latter usually posts a link to her columns and occasional newspaper op-eds.
No, the problem is not that Paglia is 'off' the scene, but rather that she has been 'on' it for some time now and has evidently run out of things to say. What she does say, meanwhile, she has said before. Again and again: 'Post-structuralism is a plague.' 'The Ivy league is too cushy.' 'Students need technical training.' 'Madonna is a robot.' Paglia may as well have borrowed Danielle Steel's automatic writing machine. Her Salon columns simply repeat these same points - which were not even particularly numerous to begin with - over and over, as if on cue. Meanwhile, with repetition comes responsibility: You run the risk of running your arguments into the ground. She has done this and then some.
Even taken on their own terms, Paglia's major points of contention are surprisingly anachronistic: No college is, at this point, a stranger to demands for a more 'technical' or 'practical' curriculum (opposition to which accounted for part of the Summers controversy). Her analyses - which almost without exception rely upon (and usually also explicitly call for) - a foundationalist theoretical architecture are not so foreign any longer either. With the rise and increasing ambition of evolutionary biology (and the media's eagerness to publish the news of each 'genetic discovery'), we now have similar ideas bandied about in the garb of 'scientific' authority.
The other Paglia problem is productivity. She is simply not sufficiently prolific. 'But writing requires time, and I do give it time,' Paglia once remarked, in a rare understatement. This is especially damning given her critiques of moribundity in academia. Her only regular output is twelve 2,500-word Salon columns a year. Considering that in at least three of these she is simply responding to readers' letters, these could not possibly amount to a large drain on her energy and 'resources.' Her last significant publication before Break, Blow, Burn in 2005? A slim entry on The Birds for the British Film Institute in 1998.
The long-promised (or, dare I say, threatened) sequel to Sexual Personae has taken on the near-mythic status of Foucault's final volume on 'the history of sexuality.' Whether it was ever really fleshed-out is beside the question: It looks as though it will never see the light of day. The probable reason for this is significant. After an initial Yale Press roll-out with little fanfare in 1990, Sexual Personae became a sort of cult hit, mostly for its thumb-to-the-teeth attitude toward 'political correctness' (my, how banal that kampf seems at present). When journals and the (comp) literati actually got around to publishing reviews of the book, the verdicts were not charitable. Recalls Paglia on that period: 'But when Sexual Personae started to get publicity, which was almost a year later after it was published, it started to get viciously attacked. And I counterattacked!' What happened next is well-known enough at this point.
Paglia is clever enough, then, to realize - particularly in light of the special place she seems to occupy in the hearts of many reporters and editors - that the publishing of the follow-up volume to the book that made her reputation would be accompanied by a good deal of chatter. If the second tome were to follow the foundationalist structure of the first - and we have no reason to doubt that it would - the academic reviews would be scathing. They would, moreover, probably have the unhappy effect of encouraging an unflattering reconsideration of the volume's predecessor. The procateuse, then, has much to lose.
In urging a more engaged and, lacking a better word, fruitful Paglia, one might refer to her 1991 speech at MIT, where Paglia excoriated Susan Sontag for wallowing in 'the novel,' all the while allowing her potential as a nouveau champion of camp to wither away. While Paglia is no doubt a stimulating pedagogue, we might do well to wonder whether her daily energies might be better employed outside of the classroom proper. She is a public intellectual more than she is a serious intellectual - and there's nothing wrong with that. So can't we call for a bit more agitation in the public square?
The academic bookstore: Never to buy—online and used is of course the way to go—but for wandering and wallowing when in need of bibliographic inspiration and a setting less grave but nearly as abundant as the stacks. Unfortunately, these oases must be shared with the people who actually run the places—invariably insane seventh-year graduate students who might pen something like this. The worst offender would have to be Columbia's Book Culture (formerly Labyrinth), where the sneer I received several years ago when buying Writing and Difference from the clerk has left a remarkably vivid psychic etch. True, blank stares from the clerks at popular bookstores are infuriating: I'll admit to a bit of blood boiling when, in Mumbai, I was trying vainly to locate a copy of Écrits, but before I could utter past the 'La' the request had been eagerly filled in by the clerk as '...nce Armstrong!' But at what price must we suffer those who commit what is, of course, the worst sin of all—seriousness?
