Touchstones

Camille Paglia’s latest article on visual rhetoric really made me laugh. It’s as if the ghost of Mathew Arnold constantly mocks us from beyond the grave. Besides being downright uninformed, it outlines a sort of cultural conservatism that really deserves to die. Just a few snips to fisk out briefly:

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.

Surely Ms. Paglia has read Roland Barthes or Baudrillard. This is beyond absurd. One could more easily argue that Clement Greenberg and high modernism “killed” the notion of a culturally effective art, and that post-modernism was only dancing on its grave. This ignorance is minor, however, compared to her horrible grasp of physiology:

The eyes are neurologically tied to the entire vestibular system: the conch-like inner ear facilitates hand-eye coordination and gives us direction and balance in the physical world. By processing depth cues, our eyes orient us in space and create and confirm our sense of individual agency. Those in whom eye movements and vestibular equilibrium are disrupted, I contend, cannot sense context and thus become passive to the world, which they do not see as an arena for action. Hence this perceptual problem may well have unwelcome political consequences.

Are blind people (who have no sense of visual equilibrium) somehow more passive and unable to discern context? Do they lack a sense of individual agency? This is beyond ludicrous, but not nearly so laughable as Paglia’s “cure”:

To maintain order, the choice of representative images will need to be stringently narrowed. I envision a syllabus based on key images that would give teachers great latitude to expand the verbal dimension of presentation, including an analysis of style as well as a narrative of personal response.

So, the key to dealing with media overload is to act like it doesn’t exist and dredge up some canonical moments of peace and serenity? The students gather around in togas while the teacher pontificates on the nature of classical beauty? I can’t picture a quicker way to send them off in a dead run looking for the nearest TV or Internet connection. This article goes immediately to the top of my list of worst essays ever written on visual rhetoric.

As I was tempted to say when I first read Mathew Arnold, “I got your touchstones hangin!”