Camille Paglia Speaks; Stewart Brand mostly listens

(Editor's note - Paglia's faxed corrections of this article became a critical part of the design and layout. Hence, it has lost much that cannot be conveyed in ASCII over the electronic BBS's or the Internet. We strongly suggest you refer to the original in the magazine itself for the complete context).

Camille Paglia, bad girl of feminism, has a knack for outraging listeners one moment, and then having them nod their heads in agreement the next. In rapid-fire broadcast mode, Paglia jumps from Aristotle to Madonna, soap opera to cathedral, all in one sentence. A tape recorder has trouble picking out her cascading words (Paglia faxed the accompanying text corrections to Wired's offices late one Saturday night) and makes absolutely no progress in capturing her total body animation as she acts out each phrase. A media creature through and through, Paglia has been cavorting in the limelight of network TV and sold-out lectures ever since her 1991 book, Sexual Personae (the first of two volumes), poked the eye of both conservatives and liberals. Intrigued by Paglia's intellectual resemblance to Marshall McLuhan - patron saint of Wired magazine - Stewart Brand, the author of the Media Lab, caught up with Paglia in the court of a San Francisco hotel.

Brand:

Have you mapped your success against Marshall McLuhan's? Remember how that happened? Here was a guy, like you he was on the fringe of academia, Catholic oriented, basically a literary creature. He starts holding forth in a epigrammatic way about culture and media, and suddenly AT&T and everybody else wants to talk to him. Paglia comes along, does what you've done...

Paglia:

...Influenced by McLuhan. Neil Postman, who I had the Harper's magazine discussion with, said something that was very moving to me. He said at the end of that evening, "I was a student of Marshall McLuhan and I have never been with someone who reminded me more of McLuhan. When you were sitting with McLuhan in the middle of the night, all you would see was the tip of his cigar glowing, and you would hear him making these huge juxtapositions. Even his writing never captured the way McLuhan's mind worked. Your mind works exactly the same, the way you bring things together and they ssssizzle when you bring them together."

Brand:

So you read McLuhan in college.

Paglia:

McLuhan was assigned in my classes. Everyone had a copy of his books. There were so many things that were happening at that moment - McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Leslie Fiedler, Allen Ginsberg. There was enormous promise of something that was going to just blast everything open in cultural criticism. What the heck happened? It wasn't just a conservative administration in the '70s and '80s. That's not it. It was a failure on the part of the '60s generation itself. You feel it a little bit in "Blow Up," or just like reading about Jimi Hendrix and the way the women looked, the way the groupies looked - how fabulous the groupies were. They were so sexy and so ballsy! It was amazing how those '60s chicks talked. This was the real feminism. Even women got less powerful. We have had a general cultural collapse.

Brand:

What did you make of McLuhan?

Paglia:

We all thought, "This is one of the great prophets of our time." What's happened to him? Why are these people reading Lacan or Foucault who have no awareness at all of mass media? Why would anyone go on about the school of Saussure? In none of that French crap is there any reference to media. Our culture is a pop culture. Americans are the ones who have to be interpreting the pop culture reality.

When I was in England earlier this summer for the release of the Penguin paperback of Sexual Personae, I was having fits because of no TV there. I felt like I was in prison. Then I got to Amsterdam, and Amsterdam was better because they had everything on satellite. That was interesting in a kind of sociological way. They have German TV and Italian TV and French TV, but it is still not equivalent to what we have. What we have is total domination by the pop culture matrix, by the mass media matrix. That's the future of the world.

Brand:

Is pop culture and mass media the same thing?

Paglia:

For me, yes. I teach a course called "Mass Media." I think that it should be required for every liberal arts graduate - the whole history of mass media, traced from the 1830s newspapers all the way to today.

Brand:

Between Volume 1 and the forthcoming Volume 2 of Sexual Personae is the arrival of mass media. When you have mass media, is art different?

Paglia:

I call the 20th century "The Age of Hollywood." I believe that mass media and pop culture is the culture of the 20th century. There's a big break at World War II. The last great works of high art are with World War I. You have Picasso and T. S. Eliot, and I feel that modernism in literature exhausted itself in its first generation - Proust, Joyce, Wolff; that was it. What else? That's why I have my provocative statements, such as for me the best novel after World War II is Auntie Mame. I mean that literally. The only writers of fiction interesting to me at all after World War II are decadent or comedic. These are to me the only modes that work literarily after World War II. So Genet and Tennessee Williams are major figures for me.

My publisher is always trying to get me to read novels - Saul Bellow, A.S. Byatt. I say, "Why would I want to read a serious novel?" Because a serious novel today is already too reactionary, by trying to reinterpret contemporary reality in verbal terms, making a verbal structure - no, no, no. To me, the rhythms of our thinking in the pop culture world, the domination by image, the whole way the images are put together, and so on are way beyond the novel at this point. If a novelist does emerge now who is a product of pop culture and mass media, it's going to look quite different on the page. It won't necessarily look fragmented. I don't believe in that post-modernist thing of cutting things up. But the rhythms of it are going to be fast rhythms, and it's going to be surreal, flashing.

In my famous encounter with Susan Sontag in 1973, I had a bitter disappointment when I invited her to Bennington and we tried to talk, and I couldn't talk to her. I had felt like "Finally, a woman on my level," and her mind seemed so sloooow. It took me ten years before I realized what it was. She was born before World War II. There's no way her brain is like my brain. I suddenly realized, half my brain is different. I mean, half my brain is the traditional Apollonian logo- centric side which was trained by the rigorous public schools of that period, but the other half is completely an electrified brain. Essentially, what I'm doing is what all the '60s was doing, which was exploring the way that brain works. I have been exploring both sides of the brain in my work. But we need both. Not having both I think is a disaster for the young today because I have them in my classes.

Brand:

You agree with Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death on this?

Paglia:

I agree with Neil Postman that we need both. We cannot have one, or one over the other. These young kids, they're lost.

Brand:

If somebody's got both sides of their brain electric, what happens?

Paglia:

I think that they become hysterical. They become very susceptible to someone's ideology. The longing for something structured, something that gives them a world view, is so intense that whatever comes along, whether it's fascism or feminist ideology (which to me are inseparable), they'll glom onto it and they can't critique it. You see the inability of the young to critique this can of worms that feminism gives them - "patriarchy" and all this stuff - the inability to think through issues like date rape. I was screamed at by girls at Brown about date rape. Later I encountered them by chance on the streets of Philadelphia - they happened to be touring the country registering voters this summer - and I said ask me some questions. These girls were juniors at Brown and their minds couldn't even focus long enough for a reply. (Paglia mimics fluttering inarticulate interruptions.)

They didn't have the base of education that I did, the rigorous public school education. The consequence is my mind can play in the realm of the mass media and that's my creativity as a person, the solid, rigorous building of the Apollonian skills on one side of the brain, and then the free play. To me, this is the great model of the human mind. It's incredible to go back and forth between those two things. This is why I don't need anybody in my life, because I have so much in my brain playing with each other. It's fantastic.

When I was in England early in the summer, I was interviewed by some Cambridge women and had an incredible intellectual conversation. They were full of knowledge and insight. There's no TV whatever in Cambridge.

Brand:

So all they do is Neil Postman's long cool argument.

Paglia:

Well, no. Actually, drinking a lot is what they seem to be doing. I think it must be that their extreme, extreme development of words is so exhausting. The amount that the educated class is drinking there, I couldn't believe it. I saw the public drunkenness in Cambridge of university men, staggering drunkenness, and I thought, that's what they have instead of pop culture: alcohol.

The minute I hit London I realized no one looks at each other. I asked people there, "How does anyone pick up anyone, how do you ever meet anyone?" I was told, "The men never look at you. They respect your privacy." Well, OK. I was near the British Museum and we were going to a lecture; I needed something to eat, and walked into a pub at 4 o'clock. It was respectable - intellectuals and so on. The drunkenness! You could feel the sex was in there, in the pubs and the drinking. We've got the sex in our popular culture, and the feminists hate it - "sex and violence!" - but I think ours is far healthier.

This is a very healthy culture as long as we keep up the rigorous training. The kids' true culture is pop culture - they already live in that - so that's why I oppose all this use of TV in school. I want education movie-based, in the way that we had in college. From the moment I arrived in college in 1964 we were immersed in films. I saw something like 800 films. The true multiculturism is foreign films, foreign films with subtitles, so you hear the language. That's the way to teach sex, the way to talk about male/female sex roles: movies. The way to teach what Lacan or Foucault claim to be doing - the relativity of a memory - is "Last Year in Marienbad." Did they meet at Marienbad or not? The inflections of emotion on people's faces, interrelations of subtleties, of non verbal subtleties of interpersonal sexual relations, are shown by cinema. Date-rape feminists want to insist, "No always means no." You'd never believe that if you were seeing cinema.

When I think about it, these were mint-condition films. I realize what an incredible gift I had. It was a magic moment. There had been the art houses in the '50s in the urban centers and suddenly my generation had film on the college campuses in the '60s. We were seeing films - Fellini, Antonioni - that were five years old. We saw prints in mint condition. No one anywhere has that now. The quality of the prints has degenerated, and the films are being shown as videos. The way you develop the eye is to see great photography, the great high-contrast black-and-white in those films.

Here's my proposal. A proper job for funding of the arts is to underwrite a national consortium of archives of all the classic films. They are too expensive to maintain at individual colleges and universities. What I envision is, when you go to any college of four years, by your fourth year, by rotation, a superb print of every classic film will have been shown. We happen to have a very bad print of "Persona" at my school. I have to tell the class, "Remember that scene where Bibi Andersson is standing, wearing a black dress against a white wall? I have to describe to you what Sven Nykvist photography really looked like there. It's a blazing white, very rock textured stucco, deep textured. The glossy sun glints in her blond hair..."

This is ridiculous. Classic films are major works of art, and this is where the funding should go.

Brand:

Film had that depth and that quality. Would you also have a television course offered?

Paglia:

Well, a course in mass media to introduce the student to a history of the technologies, the way network news is put together, how different our advertisements are from those in Europe, and so on.

Brand:

What about content? You watch soap operas, right? Which ones?

Paglia:

"The Young and the Restless" is my favorite. For 17 years I've been watching that. "As the World Turns" is my second favorite. I have the TV on with the sound off most of the day. Not early in the morning because at that point I'm still dreaming. I'm waking up and I want to remember my dreams, so I don't want too many images at that point. By mid-morning it is on, on for the rest of the day until 1. I've been poor up to now, and my dream is to have someday a bank of TVs, where all the different channels could be on and I could be monitoring them. I would love that. The more the better. I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it's TV.

Brand:

Why?

Paglia:

Because that's TV's mode. That's the Age of Hollywood. The idea of PBS - heavy-duty "Masterpiece Theater," Bill Moyers - I hate all that.

Brand:

How about the ads?

Paglia:

I love ads. There's a section on ads in Volume 2 of Sexual Personae. Like Andy Warhol, I have been in love with ads since my earliest childhood. That is the way I think. One of the reasons that I probably got this famous is because I think and talk in ad terms, in sound-bite terms. People say, "She promotes herself." When I was young, I thought in newspaper headline terms: "Paglia Falls Off Chair." I feel totally a part of mass media. Everyone knows ads are the best part of television, but the way the ads work - it's also the way MTV videos work - it's just flash flash flash images, symbol symbol symbol. You know, the way that ads are structured is not unlike the way the Catholic Church was plastered with ads, essentially, for saint this, saint that. To me there was an absolute continuity between the Catholic Church and ads.

See, this is where I drew up my theory that popular culture is the eruption of the varied pagan elements in Western culture - that Judeo- Christianity never did defeat paganism as history books claim, but rather it was driven underground. We've had three major eruptions of paganism. One at the Renaissance, and most people would accept that. Another was Romanticism, when the chthonic or daemonic element came up with all those vampires and the nature cult. And now the third great eruption is the 20th century Age of Hollywood. Gore Vidal agrees. Hollywood is the great thing that America has done and given to the world.

Brand:

What happens to those eruptions after a while? Do they eventually self-defeat?

Paglia:

Well, no, because each one of the eruptions became part of the fabric of the future. The eruption of paganism at the Renaissance led eventually to the recovery of science, and science has been the greatest challenge to Judeo-Christianity. Many want to get rid of the church and say it is the biggest source of evil. I hate that talk. A proper society will strengthen all its institutions. I want to strengthen the church and to strengthen the sex industry. I think they play off each other. Both should fight with each other and be strengthened. There will always be a craving for religion, and if we don't get it from Catholicism, which is a very profound system, you're going to get it from feminist ideology.

Brand:

Are you glad of the Latin Mass coming back?

Paglia:

Where is it coming back?

Brand:

A few Catholic churches apparently are bringing back the Latin Mass, and the hierarchy stopped forbidding it. People like it; they like the mysticism.

Paglia:

I thought that was a tremendous loss when the church dispensed with all that ceremony and imagery and beauty...

Brand:

...Priests turning their backs on the congregation...

Paglia:

...Turning their backs. The hierarchy of it, the hieraticism of it, that sense of the holy, the mystical, the awesome. What they've got now is more authentically like early Christianity. You have a bunch of peasants sitting together and holding hands. But what I love is what Martin Luther saw was bad, which was the whole pagan element of the Italian Catholic Church, the heir of the Roman Empire.

Brand:

You say pop culture is the third wave of pagan and chthonic stuff. You say chthonic stuff is dangerous, and you ride on its danger. Is pop culture dangerous?

Paglia:

Well, if the culture becomes only that, I think it is, because it's filled with hallucinations. Of course that's what I love about it. It's surreal. But there are practical realities in everyday life that have to be solved - the procedures of corporate life, of academic life, all of the boring things that have to be done in a systematic manner, and we have be taught those systems. The Apollonian systems also are a heritage of the Greco-Roman period. The Apollonian part of the brain is absolutely necessary for us to exist as rational citizens. The problem with the New Age stuff is it's like all up here, you know (gesturing vaguely aloft). As for the channelers, my acting students could do better accents. Credulity is a product of lack of rigorous education.

Here's what I'm saying in my work. You need to pay homage to both Apollo and Dionysus. Both are great gods. Both must be honored. We need a balance between the two. That's all.