So in order to flee from complexity, such absolute critics of postmodern philosophers cram the world into their simple black and white theories. Let's take an example from a recent exchange. I asked Charles Brown "which" Marxists he was referring to in a given context. His reply was something like "the ones that really understand Marx". As if there could be no valid interpretation of Marx other than that of orthodox pro-soviet marxists. Of course, we shouldn't use the word "interpretation" because this smacks of the "bourgeois" relativism of Derrida...Right Charles? Only one way to interpret Marx and it's black and white. Or as another vulgariser, Ross Perot, would put it, "It's just that simple".
Paglia, too, panders to the understandable desire for simplicity. She does this by pandering to sensationalism. And in so much as what is important in Paglia is not the content but the controversial, vitriolic, shit-talking form of her writings, she is indeed a post-modern phenomenon herself. Her readers get so caught up in her rage that it is easy to forget about the content.
This essay that Hakki included is a testimony to this. I mean, despite it being a pretty good survey of art, Hauser's Social History of art (which Paglia touts in the below writing) is a paradigm of orthodox marxist reductionism applied to art history. It was very satisfying as a young student to read this book because it provided me with a simple and sweeping analysis of art history. Basically all you had to do was applaud and call "progressive" any art that was "realist" or striving for that (Giotto, Courbet Millet) and denounce as "bourgeios decadence" anything that did not follow that formula. Hence Mannerism, Malevich and, in brief, just about anything that was done after the discovery of the camera were "OUT". He does applaud, to his credit, Picasso and Aragon. However, one suspects that it might be because the two were Communists.
And it is telling that Paglia's cultural heroine is Madonna, who is a genius at making use of the postmodern and whose artistic content is as non-existent as a Barbie Doll's vagina. It would be interesting to read Paglia's reviews of movies like "Diva" or more recently "Amelie"...like them, she is pure veneer. Of course, even though she is a kindred spirit, I am sure that she would take a nasty swipe at the movies, since they are french and a person of her ilk can always score points at french-bashing.
Thomas
> - - - - - - - - - -
>
> Yes, I have indeed written at length about my
> objections to the grossly
> overpraised Foucault, in a 78-page review-essay,
> "Junk Bonds and Corporate
> Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf," published
> in 1991 by the classics
> journal Arion and reprinted in my first essay
> collection, "Sex, Art, and
> American Culture." One of my observations was that
> Foucault's works are
> oddly devoid of women. Shouldn't that concern you as
> a feminist? It is
> simply untrue that Foucault was learned: He was at a
> loss with any period or
> culture outside of post-Enlightenment France (his
> later writing on ancient
> sexuality is a garbled mishmash). The supposedly
> innovative ideas for which
> his gullible acolytes feverishly hail him were in
> fact borrowed from a
> variety of familiar sources, from Friedrich
> Nietzsche, Emile Durkheim and
> Martin Heidegger to Americans such as sociologist
> Erving Goffman.
>
===== "The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
-Karl Marx
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