Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  It’s time for a recovery and systematic reassessment of the North American thinkers whose work, I believe, will endure over time when the French and German schools have been discarded. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman O. Brown are the triad I would substitute for the big three of French theory—Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault—whose work in my view is specific to postwar European culture and whose ideas do not, I maintain, transfer successfully into the Anglo-American tradition.

  McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown were steeped in literature, classical to modern. They understood the way the creative imagination works, and they extended those insights into speculation about history and society. They themselves creatively reshaped traditions and cross-fertilized disciplines, juxtaposing the old and new to make unexpected connections that remain fresh. Most importantly, their influence on others was positive and fruitful. McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown did not impose their system on acolytes but liberated a whole generation of students to think freely and to discover their own voices. Their independence fostered independence in others. Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, in contrast, hang so heavily on their admirers that only strong, already formed figures like the cultivated scholar Edward Said can use them without being strangled by them. French post-structuralism, like the Frankfurt School, whose antiquated pre–World War Two assumptions dictate so much current media study, grinds up texts and subjects and makes them all sound drearily alike. And at this point, as we survey the scholarship of the last three decades, it should be tragically obvious that very few, if any, genuinely major books were produced by the British and American critics who fell under the spell of European theory.

  I feel fortunate indeed that Marshall McLuhan published his central work, Understanding Media, in the very year—1964—that I entered college at the State University of New York at Binghamton. McLuhan’s ideas were to pervade the cultural atmosphere. Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, as well as Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (which McLuhan cites in his bibliography), had appeared just five years before.

  This was a time when “theory” meant Anatomy of Criticism, the magisterial work published in 1957 by McLuhan’s rival at the University of Toronto, Northrop Frye. In chapters subtitled “Theory of Modes,” “Theory of Symbols,” “Theory of Myths,” and “Theory of Genres,” Frye demonstrated what vital theory should look like—hypotheses and conclusions based on hard evidence, on a wealth of scholarly detail presented in a lucid, accessible style. I will not include Frye here because, as a literary critic rather than an intellectual per se, he rarely addressed contemporary social or political issues outside of education—and he also disliked and rejected mass media.

  McLuhan’s pioneering examination of the ongoing revolution wrought by electronic media in Gutenberg’s print culture demonstrated how history could be reinterpreted with terms bridging high and popular culture. There was a breathtaking sweep to his vision and a charming aptitude for the startling example. McLuhan’s irreverent, aphoristic wit was perfectly attuned to the brash spirit of my generation, with its absurdist “happenings” and its taste for zinging one-liners—in both the acerbic satiric style of comedian Lenny Bruce and the gnomic, oracular manner of Zen sages and Hindu gurus.

  Understanding Media, which had a tremendous impact on me at a pivotal moment in my development, is a landmark of cultural analysis. In its invigorating interplay of high art and popular culture, technology, and commerce, we see an epic panorama of Western culture. Greek myth, Shakespeare, William Blake, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Margaret Mead mingle with the Marx Brothers amid an Alice in Wonderland swirl of clocks, comic books, alphabets, telephones, and typewriters. Architecture, Roman roads, automobiles, sports, dance, jazz, movies, radio, TV, paper currency, clothing—all the elements of culture meet, merge, and bounce away again. In its picaresque form and carnivalesque tone, Understanding Media resembles a work like Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon, which gives a vivid picture of first-century Neronian Rome in multifarious language, from elite banter to working-class slang. McLuhan achieves here what semioticians only claim to do. He finds the interpretive key to our supercharged and overloaded cultural environment, and his swift rhythms, playful tone, and deft touch make academic semiotics look ponderous, pretentious, and pointlessly abstract.

  In The Mechanical Bride: Folk Lore of Industrial Man, published in 1951, McLuhan brought his training as a literary critic to bear on the iconography of modern advertisements, reproduced in a graphic style that seems amazingly contemporary. The rest of the world has finally caught up to that book. But McLuhan never displays the condescending irony of postmodernist appropriation, with its fatiguingly arch self-consciousness. Like Andy Warhol, who began his career as a commercial illustrator, I have loved advertisements since childhood, when they conflated in my mind with the Catholic iconography of stained-glass windows and the mythological tableaux of paintings and sculptures in picture books. In 1960, I surprised my ninth-grade teacher with a term project consisting of clipped-out ads and running commentary—exactly the style, little did I know, of McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride. Hence my grateful appreciation of that book when I finally saw it—with its merry profusion of Betty Grable posters, pulp-fiction dust jackets, and magazine ads for lightbulbs, diamonds, whiskey, mouthwash, girdles, soap flakes, cars, Coca-Cola, and cod liver oil.

  Leslie Fiedler used his profound knowledge of literature to become the forefather of today’s academic multiculturalism. He presciently dwelled on the outsider—the Native American, the black, the homosexual, and even the maturely sexual woman, whom nineteenth-century American literature caricatured or excluded. Fiedler knew how to apply his liberal progressive ideals without deforming the texts under study. He did not indict literature, whatever its ethically disturbing content, nor did he define art as an oppressive tool of unjust power in the reductive way now so familiar. Fiedler’s opening of the literary canon to science fiction or to sentimental nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, raised hackles in the academic establishment. I was a graduate student at Yale University in 1970 when Fiedler came to speak on the topic “Teaching Literature in the ’70s.” Not a single member of the English department came to hear him. But I admired Fiedler’s combination of Jungian archetypes with dark Freudian insights into personality, and I would borrow from it for my own work.

  Norman O. Brown, with his background in classical studies, moved out of his field to daringly apply Freudian principles to a massive rereading of Western history. Life Against Death is one of the great nonfiction works of the twentieth century. It is what Michel Foucault longed to achieve but never did. The long, sinuous lines of argumentation—paragraph by paragraph and chapter by chapter—make Life Against Death a tour de force of North American thought. Brown weaves material from Greek philosophy and Christian theology with modern psychology and economic theory to show the conflicts and repressions in human life. He stunningly juxtaposes Jonathan Swift’s so-called “excremental vision” with Martin Luther’s devil-haunted Protestantism and the birth of modern capitalism. Brown shows the link between ideas and physiology, projection and body-image. Compared to Life Against Death, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), one of the centerpieces of the Frankfurt School, seemed overschematic yet blobby and imprecise to me in college, and I continue to question the inflated reputation of Marcuse as well as his Frankfurt colleague, Theodor Adorno.

  My argument is that the North American intellectuals, typified by McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown, achieved a new fusion of ideas—a sensory pragmatism or engagement with concrete experience, rooted in the body, and at the same time a visionary celebration of what might be called artistic meta-space—that is, the fictive realm of art, fantasy, and belief portrayed by William Blake in his hallucinatory epic poems that oddly prefigure our own cyberspace.

  North American ph
ilosophers from the late nineteenth century on turned away from the metaphysical preoccupations and increasingly dour world-view of European thinkers. The term “pragmatism” was first used by Charles Peirce in 1878 but was developed by William James, who significantly began his career as a lecturer in anatomy and physiology and only later entered psychology and philosophy. In other words, James’ foundation as a thinker was in the human body. In James’ later portrait of consciousness as an active agent and in his method of testing an idea by defining its “sensations” and asking about its “reactions” or practical effects, we see anticipated Marshall McLuhan’s identification of modern media as “extensions” of the human senses and, second, McLuhan’s practice of analyzing technology by focusing on its “effects” in the individual or group. In Understanding Media, for example, McLuhan says, “Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes.”1

  John Dewey, whose critique of authority has had immense influence on modern education, also never lost sight of the biological element in human behavior. Dewey’s theories are grounded in the senses through consideration of “motor-activity” or physical energy. In his philosophy of “instrumentalism,” related to pragmatism, change is a constant in life, but our response should not be doubt or despair, the radical subjectivity of European thought. Dewey is committed to social improvement and experiment, active strategies always subject to review and revision. This resembles McLuhan’s view of the whirlwind of modern society, where each invention or solution makes another obsolete. The entire cultural system is in a state of dynamic transformation.

  Dewey’s focus on educational reform also prefigures McLuhan’s attentiveness to how the young struggle to process information in a media-saturated age. The French post-structuralists, in contrast, deconstruct and expose the institutions and organization of modern knowledge without thinking about how they would improve matters outside their already highly educated coterie. In fact, they would reject the idea of improvement or reform as bourgeois.

  Dewey’s faith in democracy is another departure from French and German theory, with its Marxist premises. McLuhan was implacably opposed to Marxism because he clearly saw how capitalism has enhanced modern individualism, unleashed creativity, and promoted social mobility. Dewey’s democratic ideals also connect to Leslie Fiedler, who published in the Old Left Partisan Review but whose vision of a pluralist, populist America descends more directly from Walt Whitman’s dream of all-embracing inclusiveness in the wake of the Civil War. McLuhan’s interests overlapped with Marxism in the area of institutional analysis: he hated bureaucracy and was one of the first, for example, to condemn the centralization and over-specialization of the contemporary university.

  The final late-nineteenth-century American thinker who prefigured our triad is the economist Thorstein Veblen, who is explicitly cited as an influence by Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death. In his 1899 classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen speculated about the psychological forces at work in the formation and activity of social institutions in a way that, in Brown’s view, anticipated Freud. This American line of thought, which extrapolates from observation of actual human behavior rather than, in the French way, the dissection of verbal formulas, can be seen passing from Veblen to the eminent Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1956 work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (cited in a later book by Brown), examines the creation and daily operation of social roles. Goffman’s book, a primary text for my 1960s generation, was extensively borrowed from without due acknowledgment by Foucault, and it is Goffman’s theories that one often hears flowing from the mouths of credulous Foucauldians.

  The primacy of the body in the North American intellectual tradition is one of our great distinctions. McLuhan’s classification of different eras as “acoustic” or “visual” as well as his emphasis on the “haptic”—that is, the sense of touch—meshes beautifully with the actual practice of the arts. Exploration of the body as a vehicle of thought and emotion is everywhere in the American arts, from the late nineteenth century on. It’s in Isadora Duncan’s freeing of the body through flowing drapery and lyrical, improvisatory dance. It’s in Martha Graham’s creation of the vocabulary of modern dance through study of muscle contractions and visceral spasms and in the orientation of her movement by gravity toward the earth. It’s in the ferociously concentrated rehearsal technique of Lee Strasberg’s interpretation of the Stanislavsky “Method” in the Actors Studio. It’s in the Black Mountain school of poetry’s search for a new kind of rhythm and declamation following the organic pulses and respirations of the body. And it’s in the percussiveness of our glorious popular music, from ragtime and Dixieland jazz through rhythm and blues to rock ’n’ roll—the master art form of the 1960s that united us all.

  It is a scandal that American humanities professors are still forcing unprepared undergraduates to read turgid French and German theorists rather than the linked triad of McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown as interpreters of postwar reality. The philosophic tradition behind the post-structuralists was bankrupt even before their books arrived on these shores. European philosophy collapsed after Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In their pessimism about objective reality as well as in their nihilistic politics, Husserl and Heidegger, Foucault’s precursors, were responding to specifically European problems, which would end in the disaster of two world wars.

  From our distant view at the dawn of a new millennium, surely it should be apparent that the despairing introversion of European philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries happened precisely as mass media were rising to power in the wake of the industrial revolution. Mass communication, the gift of technology, was giving the people their voice and a public forum for their tastes, which always offend the educated elite. Marxist theory has never been able to adjust to the astounding success of the capitalist mass media, but snobbish, censorious, and now hackneyed Marxist formulations like “commodification” are still being drilled into students by followers of the Frankfurt School.

  A fundamental problem with the post-structuralists is that they were narrowly French thinkers who were struggling with the limitations of French discourse as, significantly, French political power was waning around the world. Americans who had absorbed McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown had no need of post-structuralism, which is monotonously based on Saussurean linguistics, with its view of reality as mediated through language. Continental French speakers, with their rationalist Cartesian heritage, may have needed a Saussurean critique, but English speakers do not. That critique is already contained in English literature itself, as it developed from the Middle English of Chaucer down to the avant-garde verbal experiments of James Joyce—whom both McLuhan and Brown studied and wrote about. The encyclopedic episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) contain the whole history of language and rhetoric and make Saussure both unnecessary and irrelevant.

  English is one of the richest and most complex languages in the world. It is a living art form down to its tiniest parts, which McLuhan recognized in his lifelong devotion to word lists and etymology. There are multiple layers in English—the foundation of concrete Anglo-Saxon monosyllables with the Greco-Roman overlay of abstract polysyllables brought by the Norman invasion, with its own lingering bequest of aristocratic household terms. In his plays, written at the birth of modern English, Shakespeare was the first to exploit those levels for serious and comic effects. Immersion in English literature, as it cascaded down the centuries, gives one a philosophic range because of the profusion of English word choices. Two, three, or four words might be possible, emerging from different roots and periods: diction is determined by context. Hence English speakers develop a sense of social context—a hyperawareness of the dramatic situation to which words must be fit.

  The North American intellectual tradition began in my view in the mid-nineteenth century with the encounter of Romanticism, coming from British poetry, with the assertive, pragmatic Engl
ish spoken by North Americans—the plain style, originally Protestant, in the United States as well as Canada, with its strong, no-nonsense Scottish immigrants. It’s Romanticism, incidentally, that Michel Foucault somehow completely missed in his bizarrely incomplete picture of modern intellectual history after the Enlightenment, which he was by no means the first to critique. McLuhan from his schooldays was steeped in the history of English poetry, and it remained his first love. Moreover, he heard his mother, a professional performer, recite poetry at home, so he had a keen sense of oratory and the folkloric oral tradition. At Cambridge University, he studied with the founders of the New Criticism, I. A. Richards and William Empson, and he adapted the technique of textual explication for his media work: McLuhan modernized the New Criticism by showing how close reading transfers to fields other than literature.

  The writer who did most to unite Romanticism with the North American plain style was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poet and public lecturer who drew on the sermon genre but altered its climactic structure for aphorism, which often dissolves his essays into fragments. It is partly to Emerson that I trace McLuhan’s intellectual lineage: McLuhan’s aphorisms, or as we now say, “sound bites,” were his public signature and may have interfered, to his dismay, with his production of conventional books and essays.

  It is to Emerson that Norman O. Brown’s strange 1966 book, Love’s Body, should be traced. Brown’s thematic chapter titles (“Liberty,” “Trinity,” “Unity,” “Boundary”) sound like Emerson’s titles in Nature, and Brown’s disconnected passages of packed, vatic utterances and quotations are like Emersonian prose-poems. There are precedents in Emerson to McLuhan’s concern with the “extension of consciousness,” with circuits, “integral patterns,” and the “total inclusive field” of experience and perception. For example, Emerson says in “Circles,” “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second.” Or notoriously in Nature in 1836, “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.”