Weekly Readings #102 (01/15/24-01/21/24)

no law in the arena

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week saw the beginning of the fourth and final part of Major Arcana, my serialized novel for paid subscribers: “Counter, Original, Spare, Strange.” There we rejoined a 50-year-old Ellen Chandler at the grave of Marco Cohen. This Wednesday, we will find Simon Magnus in renewed colloquy with certain powers and principalities, both earthly and non-. Please subscribe today, as the novel hurtles toward its conclusion.

I also began The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, with an almost two-and-a-half-hour discussion of the visionary William Blake, free to all: “The Poetic Genius Is the True Man.” This Friday, we will move on to Romanticism proper for a study of William Wordsworth, the poet whose marriage to nature and whose expression of self did more than anything else to invent what we now think of as lyric poetry. Was this innovation, on balance, a good thing or a bad for the modern fate of literature? This episode will be paywalled, so please subscribe today so you don’t miss the answer!

In today’s post I take on the public intellectuals. First, I defend Camille Paglia from her detractors and provide instead the right way to criticize her project. Then I memorialize the late Michael Sugrue. Please enjoy!

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Resemblance and Resentment: How (Not) to Criticize Camille Paglia

Aubrey Beardsley, Salomé (1894), detail

If I have any qualm at all about Substack as a milieu—every platform has its own milieu—it’s that it’s a bit too chummy and supportive, as if overcorrecting from the bloodsport of Twitter. I worry that the back-patting and log-rolling of the aboveground is being replicated in the underground. It reminds me of the debates about “literary community” that were happening a decade ago. This sentimental commitment to “community”—a word one tends to mistrust these days, in the same way that one has unfortunately been forced to mistrust “kindness” or “empathy”—was what made literary institutions so vulnerable in the first place to the quasi-Maoist takeover of the 2010s, when Red Guard assaults on the autonomy of literature were met with across-the-board capitulation. Nevertheless, I too find myself trying to stay on the collegial side of disagreement on this platform, give or taking calling the writing of someone beloved on here “obscurely evil” after being invited by one of my readers to comment on his latest missive, which, in fairness to myself, I would not otherwise have read beyond the first paragraph.

So it was with some amusement that I watched another social-media meltdown over Camille Paglia just a week after I was calmly discussing her actual literary criticism (something neither her admirers nor her detractors ever do). No one better took to heart Blake’s urging us to “mental fight” than La Paglia. The most recent trouble started when right-wingers circulated a clip of her telling Charlie Rose how out-of-control the leftism was on campus back in the mid-1990s.¹ Like Rose himself—and where is Rose today?—her critics argued that she was exaggerating and that her animadversions only prove that the “conservative grift” has been going for 40 years, this even though they can’t keep the lights on in the English department. Then the ad hominem insults, usually projective, begin.

“A dumb person’s idea of a smart person” was the cliché² a writer beloved on here (I mention no names) for his “craft”³ advice decided to deploy, an amusing betrayal of the fact that “gifted-kid” liberals aren’t any less invested than is the psychometric Sailer/Hanania right in the idea that intelligence is the measure of every other worth. (As I’ve argued already, excessive intelligence can be a positive hindrance to the writer or artist.) It’s not only a cliché but also an inaccuracy. Paglia—in this like Žižek, her successor-counterpart on the left—represents the intellectual as Socratic clown and jester, valued for a witty, epigrammatic transvaluations of all values performed both on the page and in public. The demotic version of this archetype goes back to the turn of the last century in figures like Wilde, Shaw, and Chesterton, who refashioned the Victorian Sage for public consumption in a mass-media age.

People who resent this archetype—in which Sontag no less than Paglia partook—resent high culture’s being made publicly charismatic at all. They want to relegate literature and art to the realm of the merely bookish when it should be a more visceral and all-encompassing force than that, if one less amenable to the scholar’s sole dominance. I’ve always thought Paglia’s most direct hit on Sontag was when she mocked her for her love of late-modernist Continental literature, a literature suffocated and imprisoned in words, veritably martyred to words in the Beckettian style, and therefore beloved mostly of the cloistered and the scholastic.

Next we hear from another popular writer on here that “she’s never actually thinking about anything, she’s just rapidly positioning herself in the field of discourse for effect,” which contradicts the idea of her consistent conservatism even as it’s ironic coming from someone whose fashionable analyses of our cultural fascism derive from Pierre Bourdieu. In Bourdieu’s sociology, culture has neither autonomy nor disinterest, since there is little to culture beyond its “positioning in the field of discourse.”

Finally, we hear of her support for NAMBLA. Now I don’t mean to be unpleasant, but Paglia’s position on this subject is the one shared across the spectrum of the 20th-century gay male literati, from Ginsberg to Burroughs to Vidal to Foucault to Delany, and it’s from the gay male literati that she borrows the opinion. If any of this bothered the likes of Susan Sontag or Patti Smith or Judith Butler any more than it bothered Paglia, they certainly didn’t show it, given how much they hung around with or collaborated with these sometime apologists for pederasty. By all means, then, criticize Paglia for her stance on the subject—I also disagree with her—but spare a criticism, too, for your otherwise admired liberal and left culture-heroes.⁴

The latter topic, however, gives us a clue to the right way to criticize Paglia. Like her own critics, she does a lot of projecting. She hates most in others the way she most resembles them. Take Foucault: she obviously loathes him so much because he is so close to her. The suffocating matriarchy she sees in nature he relocates to modern liberal society, but their diagnoses of modern liberal society (derived in both cases from Nietzsche, of course) aren’t so different, and neither is their shared celebration of transgressive literature.⁵ Aside from the literary theorists she despises, no one loves the Marquis de Sade as much as Paglia does. And is her reading of Sade—as a writer whose cruel porno-geometries expose the Enlightenment as a melioristic scam—that distinct, really, from the Frankfurt School reading of Sade as the salubrious obverse of Kant in Dialectic of Enlightenment?

Like the theorists, she overvalues power and cruelty, undervalues literary expressions of anything else—as in the showy mockery of Chaucer, Wordsworth, Twain, Emerson in Sexual Personae—and accordingly subordinates works of art to a programmatically inhumane theory-of-everything. But to know this—to know that what’s wrong with Paglia is her resemblance to Adorno and Foucault, not her supposedly right-wing departure from their supposedly left-wing thinking—you would, again, have to read her work with some care and attention, apparently too tall an order for the “smart people” today.

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Public Intellectual: RIP Michael Sugrue

Anselm Kiefer, For Paul Celan: Ash Flower (2006)

Speaking of public intellectuals, I would like to talk now about an accidental one. This week came the sad news of the death of Dr. Michael Sugrue, a history professor whose 1990s Teaching Company lectures on the Great Books of the Western Tradition have recently gone viral on YouTube. Sugrue sated just the appetite for high culture that the universities have ceased to even try to satisfy over the last generation, while also providing the ethical critique of this culture they failed to provide except in the form of an answering radicalism no less dehumanizing than what it contested.

I found Sugrue accidentally two years ago, while looking for a lecture on Heidegger. I’ve enjoyed many of Sugrue’s lectures since then, despite my not sharing his general orientation toward thought and culture. I came to enjoy some of his Teaching Company colleagues, too, who formed interesting contrasts with his own attitudes, even if they didn’t quite shine so brightly at the lectern.

In memoriam, then, I repost below three old Tumblr pieces of mine on Sugrue and his colleagues, each couched as a commentary to one of their lectures. I will try in The Invisible College to live up to his—and Paglia’s—example in making our intellectual and literary heritage a living, charismatic tradition, not an inert hoard of “intellect” guarded by jealous pundits.

1. Gnostic Ressentiment: Sugrue Contra Heidegger

[This was my first response to Sugrue, posted almost two and a half years ago.]

Though I don’t really understand him or any other philosopher, I did enjoy writing a little essay on Heidegger after perusing the popular volume of his aesthetics, Poetry, Language, Thought. I took it as an opportunity to watch one of Michael Sugrue’s Great Books lectures since I’ve run across several references to them lately, most recently in David Perrell’s long essay, “Saving the Liberal Arts.” How do we save the liberal arts? Through Heidegger’s own most persuasive recommendation: to slow down and accept the human validity of what is not rationalizably productive. The legendary lecturer Sugrue is more skeptical, from what alternate ideological position I haven’t yet divined. (Does he criticize Heidegger’s crypto-religious discourse from the perspective of a believer or an unbeliever? In preference to Heidegger, he quotes both Eliot and Carnap.) Today I offer you Sugrue’s eloquently prosecutorial lecture—and an extraordinary comment under it. A characteristically self-satisfied viewer accused the professor of mispronouncing Dasein in the French style, and Sugrue’s offspring, who appears to control the account, responded with a transcription of father’s brilliant riposte:

Dad laughed and said, “Yes, he right, and he doesn’t even mention my other evils. I’ve always had an impulse to feign competence to Americans, despite the fact that their nuanced examination of academic lectures for creeping Frenchification left me open to summary judgement as a poseur. However, since the election of Mr. Trump and Mr Biden, proving competence to Americans seems a rather low bar to set, like jumping out a basement window. An inclination to undertake study with the Jesuits implies a well established cultural constellation prior to matriculation. Not just anybody applies to or gets admitted to a Jesuit school. Read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man if you need to find out how saturating such a Catholic tradition can be. One of the funny ironies of 20th century literature is found in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain with the character Naptha. Naptha was a Jesuit Jewish Communist who battled against Enlightened humanism in the person of Settembrini. Mann noted wryly that his friend, Georg Lukacs, the foremost Marxist cultural critic wrote effusively of Mann’s novel to Mann himself, never raising and apparently never seeing the point Mann thought obvious: that the extravagantly contradictory Jewish Jesuit was a portrait from real life of Lukacs himself. The mad, self destructive casuist for a witches brew of mysticism and nihilism and bloodlust that Naptha turned out to be (in perhaps the greatest single scene in 20th century literature) could just as easily be modeled on Heidegger as Lukacs. Consider that Stalin spent only a year in a Orthodox seminary, but the influence of Orthodox culture is everywhere in his career. His cynical willingness to accept no limits on his pursuit of transhistorical ends situates in the line of pseudo secular political Gnostics: the Puritans, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge. Mythically inflated political fanaticism gave both  Stalin and Heidegger a blank check for eliminative violence, drawn on a depraved indifference to human life.”

“[P]seudo secular political Gnostics”: I’m no philosopher, but this, if I’m not mistaken, is the sign of a conservatism informed by Eric Voeglin (and though I have read Voeglin’s Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, I found it through a work of comic-book criticism by Peter Y. Paik). My own essay, by contrast, leans less on Heidegger’s political misdeeds and more on his failure to generate a properly poetic philosophy; I couldn’t help in the end but link the two faults, however, so tempting, even to me, is the thesis that bad taste is immoral.⁶

2. Marginalized Discourses: Sugrue Contra the Left

[This was my second response to Sugrue, posted about a week after the first.]

We were left in suspense last week as to the worldview informing Michael Sugrue’s now-renowned old lectures on intellectual history. Above, in a concluding lecture that gives a remarkable survey of 20th-century western thought, we find our clue if not our key. Applying a Marxian and Nietzschean critique to the Marxians and Nietzscheans, Sugrue prophetically charges postmodernists and critical theorists with deploying a corrosive critique of modernity not for their asserted purpose—a sentimental appeal to diversity and difference—but rather to delegitimize their rivals in the sciences and politics and march themselves upon governmental power. “May I suggest to you that our concern with marginalized discourses is a means to take control of the state?” he asks. Postmodernism and critical theory, then, mask the intellectual’s will-to-power. These lectures from the mid-1990s see right to the heart of at least one present dilemma.  

3. Hicklib and Metrocon: Roderick Contra Sugrue

[This post, contrasting Sugrue with his teaching company colleagues, especially the stylistically and ideologically very different Rick Roderick, was posted in mid-2023. Paglia epitomizes the “metrocon” as discussed in the post.]

I recently discovered Rick Roderick’s lectures on YouTube. Above is the first in his Self Under Siege course, encompassing Heidegger, Sartre, Marcuse, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard. Being of a certain age, I especially enjoy his frequent recourse for examples to ‘90s popular and political culture.

As with Michael Sugrue and Darren Staloff, whom we’ve already seen on here, Roderick’s lectures were produced in the 1990s for The Teaching Company. Roderick effectively completes a trinity, his plain-spoken and poppy radicalism a counterweight to Sugrue’s eloquent conservative denunciations of “gnostic ressentiment” and to Staloff’s nervous centrist defense of modern liberal civilization.

Superficially, and with the cruelty always involved in typing, he fits a type the Twitter reactionaries have lately named and shamed: the “shitlib yokel” or “hicklib,” as his fans’ application to him of the label “the Bill Hicks of philosophy” might imply. Conversely, Sugrue might fit the hicklib’s antitype: the metrocon.

The hicklib, surrounded in the provinces by complacent conservatives, histrionically over-identifies with left critique, while the metrocon, beset by the “herd of independent minds” known as metropolitan left-liberals, deliberately adopts shocking reactionary rhetoric, each trying to feel free in an ideologically suffocating atmosphere. If the metrocon is too cavalier about what earlier eras of hierarchy and hegemony were actually like, the hicklib is equivalently casual about what toppling every hierarchy might actually cause or whose interests such rhetoric serves.

(I myself have elements of both sensibilities because I’ve had elements of both experiences—I notice that Roderick’s mother, like my own, was a beautician—but am perhaps more the metrocon by temperament. The hicklib tends to have a Protestant background, the metrocon a Catholic or Jewish one.)

I think here of Roderick’s calm acceptance, at the end of his excellent Derrida lecture, that philosophy is “white mythology,” and that therefore a thousand other (indeed, Other) mythologies deserve to bloom; this may seem naive 30 years later, both about the epistemological chaos such a development occasioned and about anyone’s willingness—white, black, other—not to believe their own myths.

On the other hand, now that it’s happened—I don’t myself believe in any “white mythology,” for example—then we have to get through it with the kind of impassioned good humor Roderick models. That’s what a good teacher is: not a conveyor of information, which is readily available in books, but a model of sensibility.

Roderick’s life ended badly. Duke denied him tenure, and about a decade later, he died in 2002 at age 52. I recommend his son Max’s extraordinary elegy, especially for a glimpse of the early violence and horror with which he purchased his adult convictions, a price too high to be dismissed with the culture-war tropes of the essentially nihilistic online era he both did and not quite foresee in The Self Under Siege.

My generation doesn’t live beneath Rick’s empty, Godless sky. We live beneath a sky so full of Gods that they have become mundane and meaningless. Our heritage collapses by the generation; my grandfather had America, my father had Texas, I have my father – what could my children possibly receive?

1. The best thing about the clip is the angry way she says “Stephen Greenblatt,” he of the “social-energy-writes-poetry” theory, which somehow turned, when he decided to cross over to mainstream writing, into a Shakespeare biography I never finished that read like a YA riff on “Scylla and Charybdis.” To give Greenblatt his due, however, I do like the “Hamlet-in-Purgatory” theory of Shakespeare’s Catholic double-consciousness.

2. Now the real “dumb person’s idea of a smart person”—or, to put that in less elitist terms, the real “popular representation of the genius”—is not a pugilistic persona like Paglia’s. Rather, it’s Hannibal Lecter or Sheldon Cooper, an omniscient polymath who is either effete-perverse or neurotic-autistic, but who is in either case completely remote, whether in a sinister or comic way, from common life. The whole pleasure of Paglia, by contrast, is that she doesn’t conduct herself like an intellectual at all but rather gleefully descends into the muck and the fray.

3. Literature is not a “craft.” A craft is when you gather pinecones and use a hot-glue gun to fashion them into a wreath for your front door around Christmastime. Literature is, as Borges teaches, a vocation and a way of life.

4. I’d get in too much trouble if I actually told you which one of Paglia’s hideous right-wing opinions I do mostly agree with—hint: it’s not one about sex or gender or other identity issues—though anyone who reads some of my old political commentary between the lines can probably tell. Feel free to guess in the comments, though I may decline to confirm.

5. My reference to Foucault as disliking a “matriarchy” may prove puzzling, but I have in mind friend-of-the-blog Nancy Armstrong’s extension of Foucauldian theory to the rise of the English novel in her famous Desire and Domestic Fiction. On her account, the emergence of the sentimental domestic novel in Richardson, Austen, and Charlotte Brontë not only accompanies but actually effects the triumph of feminized middle-class soft power, first over the aristocracy at home, and then over the proletariat at home and colonial subjects abroad. Middle-class womanhood becomes, in Armstrong’s Foucauldian account, the paradigm of modern political power, all the more effective because dissimulated in novels as a sentimental effusion of the deep inner life. I don’t know that Foucault thought about the middle-class soft power of school and clinic in quite those gendered terms, though I do recall his quip when he hired his lover over a better-qualified female scholar for a teaching position: “We don’t like old maids here.”

6. Since I mentioned Heidegger, let me here recommend Wim Wenders’s new 3D documentary on the artist Anselm Kiefer. It’s a superb film, enough to make me drop my exaggerated animus against the American overvaluation of European high culture. Wenders dreamily dramatizes Kiefer’s lifelong examination of the German cultural heritage in the light of Nazism, implicitly defends the artist’s “apolitical” approach to this subject which avoids self-congratulation and the spiral of accusation, and imaginatively recreates such episodes as Paul Celan’s meeting with Heidegger during which the poet vainly awaited a word from the philosopher’s heart. Above all, Wenders shows us in all its beauty and terror the life of an artist, an artist whose life is his art, and what it means to say that art, any art, is not a craft but a vocation and a way of living.