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I've been thinking, obviously, about the politics of response.  The Paglia
thread started with a discussion of her attack on queer studies, and her
charge that we should put and end to it before the Republicans do so.

 Many people argue, of course, that her work is insufficiently interesting
even to warrant a response; as a theoretical sparing partner she is a bit
of a straw dog.  Her attacks, however, came on the heels of a number of
assaults from George Bush himself and his members of his administration
which, as we now, had the amazing effect of giving national visibility to
the MLA and even the titles of paper topics -- like the example of William
F. Buckely going ape over the title of Sedgwick's "Jane Austin and the
Masturbating Girl."  This situation led to a number of now-famous
editorials and condemnation of the tendency of literary studies to focus
"irrelevant" concerns such as queer studies.  (Although I do admit enjoying
the accusation that the MLA was "more dangerous to the nation than Sadam
Hussain.")
 
Paglia preferred genre seems to be that of the personal insult, such as
when she attacks "French philosophy" (whatever that may be) with the claim
that it is the effluvia of a dust-bound pedantic French academic culture,
while her thought offers a hip alternative because she was listening to the
Beetles rather than watching _Waiting for Godot_ (she made this attack on
Foucault in a NY Times editorial about 4 years ago; she boasted of her
superiority to Foucault because he liked Beckett and she did not).

Only a brain-dead argument, right?  It was, however, picked up by the media
and played very well into an easy discourse of national stereotypes.
_Vanity Fair_ and several major newspapers picked this up and all chimed
in, yes, the French are really rude, overly academic, and after all, the
whole philosophy of France is based on the insane presupposition that
"there is nothing outside the text."  This line was picked up and we had a
feast of tautologies in response.  If the French think there is nothing
outside the text, it is because they do in fact spend too much time in the
library and are not concerned with the "real world"!  This recalls the
Althussarian definition of ideology (or was this one of his commentators?),
that ideology is that which makes you scream "yes, the world is the world"
and then present that as if it were the motion and action of thought.
Recall what Deleuze said about thought, that it is a rare event, something
which creates a new logic of image, which in turn intersects, motivates and
deforms other images. A painful, joyous, and rare event.
 
With Paglia, however, we get an impoverished vision of what intellectual
work should do, but one that seems profoundly reassuring to many people --
it avoids the aspect of pain involved in thought, replaces the ecstasy of
thought with the cheap pleasure of a personal snipe.  For example, the work
of displacement and intellectual estrangement done by the work of
"historicist" thinkers becomes, in Paglia, a "historical" argument
motivated by stock stores of knowledge about national type ("the French are
bookish; we are groovy and have rock and roll).
 

Confronting these arguments, however, presents a problem in that she has
inertia and stock knowledge on her side, and we rarely have the time to
give any sense to phrases such as "there is nothing outside the text," or
even commonplaces such as the (mis)statement that sexuality is "nothing
but" discourse.  And, her argument has a built in defense: if you don't
like it, it's because you can't take a joke, and hence you really are
dust-bound like the French (and we saved their butt in the big war,
remember?)

So, I am wondering how other people handle these questions.  How do you
respond to Paglia when literary studies (and especially its queer studies
incarnations) hasn't managed to find a way to translate itself into
journalism? Is it better just to ignore the majority of her arguments,
which are D.O.A anyway, or is that acting like Dukakis?  And in what genre
should we respond?  That of the traditional academic journal article?  Do
we return crass insults from hers with similar ones?  (And I think if we do
come to some sort of answer to these questions, she might in fact have
something to offer queer studies after all).

Harrison Brace
Grad Student
Stanford, Department of Comparative Literature
 
Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's
equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind
which incessantly contradict what they have just established.