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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Camille Paglia has published a new piece in Arion, on the theme of the increased importance of the image to Western culture:"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... The visual environment for the young, in short, has become confused, fragmented, and unstable. ... the style of cultural analysis currently prevalent in universities is, in my view, counterproductive in its anti-media bias and intrusive social agenda. It teaches students suspicion and paranoia and, with its abstract European terminology, does not offer an authentic anthropology of the North American media environment in which they came to consciousness. Post-structuralism and postmodernism do not understand magic or mystique, which are intrinsic to art and imagination. It is no coincidence that since postmodernist terminology seeped into the art world in the 1980s, the fine arts have receded as a major cultural force. "
It's an interesting thesis, namely that the increased importance of the visual imagination has led to an increased dimunition of the reasoning faculty, something that works through language rather than any visual medium. The particular interest for me is that I have always been most at home with language rather than with music or the visual arts; it took me years before I could appreciate music without lyrics. As always with Paglia, the problem lies with her inconsistency. Her magnum opus, Sexual Personae, suffered considerably from this, in that it suggested two opposed tendencies as dominating Western culture but presented a shifting picture of how each tendency should be considered. Paglia seemed unable to suggest which of the two should be allowed to surmount the other, and seemed equally unable to define any dialectical relation between the two. Accordingly, her tone was alternately moralistic and anarchic. Something of the same problem applies here.
The particular problem is that if Paglia's thesis is correct, then her proposed remedy of 'imagology' (a unified study of art, history and criticism) seems to run the risk of being collaboration rather than resistance (if the only course of action is to dwell on study of the visual imagination, then it may well be that post-structuralism and postmodernism were wise to be suspicious of magic and mystique). Contrast Paglia's argument to that of Neal Stephenson in his essay In the Beginning was the Command Line. Stephenson has a similar argument to Paglia in many respects:"The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the only medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media... A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts."
Stephenson is wary of relying on the visual imagination; he sees it as offering mediated experiences and sees mediated experiences as being unreliable in comparison to the written word. By contrast, Paglia veers between proposing a course of education that simply adapts to this changed world and denouncing it, most obviously with the unintentionally ironic conclusion to her suggested visual studies:"But it is only language that can make sense of the radical extremes in human history, from the ecstatic spirituality of Byzantine icons to the gruesome barbarism of Aztec ritual slaughter. It is language that fleshes out our skeletal outline of images and ideas. In a media age where books are no longer the primary medium for information storage and exchange, language must be reclaimed from the hucksters and the pedants and imaginatively reinforced. To save literature, educators must take command of the pre-rational world of images. The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words."
Update: I've noticed a few other blogs criticising Paglia on a number of grounds. The most obvious is the dated nature of her argument, rehashing Mcluhanite theories at a time when the Internet has arguably restored text to primacy over images. Certainly, the Internet is in many ways a good analogue for the Victorian telegraphy system and by virtue of being initially conceived for military applications evolved through a completely different route to technologies such as television and DVD.
posted by Richard 4:22 pm
