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Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education Hardcover – October 9, 2018

by Camille Paglia (Author)

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One of the Best Books of the Year: Kirkus Reviews

A timely and lavishly comprehensive collection from the inimitable critical firebrand—hailed as "a fearless public intellectual and more necessary than ever” (The New York Times)—tackling sex, art, feminism, politics, and education, and covering the full span of her wide-ranging and important career.

Much has changed since Camille Paglia first burst onto the scene with her groundbreaking Sexual Personae, but the laser-sharp insights of this major American thinker continue to be ahead of the curve—not only capturing the tone of the moment but also often anticipating it. Opening with a blazing manifesto of an introduction in which Paglia outlines the bedrock beliefs that inform her writing—freedom of speech, the necessity of fearless inquiry, and a deep respect for all art, both erudite and popular—Provocations gathers together a rich, varied body of work that illuminates everything from the Odyssey to the Oscars, from punk rock to presidents past and present.

Whatever your political inclination or literary and artistic touchstones, Paglia’s takes are compulsively readable, thought provoking, galvanizing, and an essential part of our cultural dialogue, invariably giving voice to what most needs to be said.

Print length

736 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pantheon
Publication date

October 9, 2018
Dimensions

6.38 x 1.51 x 9.54 inches
ISBN-10

1524746894
ISBN-13

978-1524746896
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“I loved Camille Paglia’s new collection of essays, Provocations. With her signature acerbic wit, Paglia offers astute and humorous cultural commentary across pop culture, art, feminism, and politics.”
—Lily Kupets, Visual Editor, Vogue

“Brilliant. . . . The scholar and culture warrior comes out swinging. . . . Paglia covers a vast swath of society and culture at large, including sections on popular culture, literature, education, art, politics, and more. She is still at her fiery intellectual best as a teacher, whether she's throwing out odd but intriguing comparisons—Captain Ahab and Ziggy Stardust are both ‘scarred by lightning,’ each ‘a voyager who has defied ordinary human limits and paid the price’—or deciphering poetry, happily butchering sacred cows along the way. . . . This career retrospective is both maddening and essential.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Outrageous, just as we expected and hoped! Not a neutral observer, Paglia has an eye. She can see movement, see fissures developing, hear the winds shift. Here, in her collection of essays, we are doing time travel, but with destinations set. The author is showing us what she sees ahead.”
—Patricia E. Moody, Blue Heron Journal

About the Author

CAMILLE PAGLIA is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is the author of Free Women, Free Men; Glittering Images; Break, Blow, Burn; The Birds; Vamps & Tramps; Sex, Art, and American Culture; and Sexual Personae.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

This book is not for everyone.

It is not for those who believe that they and their friends, allies, political parties, or churches have found the absolute truth about mankind, present or future.

It is not for those who believe that language must be policed to serve what they view as a higher social good, nor is it for those who grant to government and its proxies on college campuses the right to require and enforce “correct” thinking.

It is not for those who believe that art is a servant of political agendas or philanthropic goals or that it contains hidden coercive messages that must be exposed and destroyed.

It is not for those who see women as victims and men as the enemy or who think that women are incapable of asserting their rights and human dignity everywhere, including the workplace, without the intervention and protection of authority figures deputized by the power of the state.

It is not for those who see human behavior as wholly formed by oppressive social forces and who deny the shadowy influence of evolution and biology on desire, fantasy, and anarchic impulse, from love to crime.

This book is instead for those who elevate free thought and free speech over all other values, including material considerations of wealth, status, or physical well-being.

It is for those who see art and the contemplation of art as a medium of intuition and revelation, a web work of meaning that should be enhanced and celebrated and not demeaned by teachers who cynically deny the possibility of meaning.

It is for those who see women as men’s equals who, in their just and necessary demand for equality before the law, do not plead for special protections for women as a weaker sex.

It is for those who see nature as a vast and sublime force which mankind is too puny to control or alter and which fatefully shapes us as individuals and as a species.

It is for those who see life in spiritual terms as a quest for enlightenment, a dynamic process of ceaseless observation, reflection, and self-education.

A premise of this book, following the great cultural revolution of the 1960s, which was thwarted by the reactionary and elitist forces of academic postmodernism, is that higher consciousness transcends all distinctions of race, class, and gender. Sixties multiculturalism was energized by a convergence of influences from world religions—both Buddhism (a legacy of the Beat writers) and Hinduism, which suffused popular music. Standard interpretation of the radical 1960s in exclusively political terms is a common but major error that I address in detail in an essay collected here, “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s”.

Although I am an atheist, I have immense admiration and respect for religion as a comprehensive symbol-system, far more profound in its poetry, insight, and metaphysical sweep than anything currently offered by secular humanism. In my Cornerstone Arts Lecture at Colorado College, “Religion and the Arts in America” (also collected here), I demonstrate how central religion has been to American culture and how its emotionally expressive and multiracial gospel tradition remains the principal reason for America’s continued world dominance in commercial popular music.

I have argued for decades that true multiculturalism would be achieved in education not by splintering the curriculum into politicized fiefdoms but by making comparative religion the core curriculum of world education. An early piece on this subject (published in my first essay collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture in 1991) was “East and West: An Experiment in Multiculturalism”, a chronicle of an interdisciplinary humanities course that I co-taught with artist and social activist Lily Yeh at the University of the Arts. In the present volume, the same theme is addressed in my opening statement for a 2017 debate at the Yale Political Union, “Resolved: Religion Belongs in the Curriculum”.

Provocations covers the two and a half decades since my last general essay collection, Vamps & Tramps, in 1994. Some of my articles and lectures on sex, gender, and feminism were published separately a year ago in Free Women, Free Men. The latter volume contains my 1991 New York Newsday op-ed on date-rape that caused prolonged controversy as the first public protest against an escalating hysteria around that issue on college campuses and in the media. I continue to espouse my code of “street-smart feminism”, which frankly acknowledges the risks and dangers of life and encourages women to remain eternally vigilant and alert and to accept responsibility for their choices and adventures.

However, as the generations pass since the sexual revolution launched in 1960 by the release of the first birth-control pill, discourse about sex has become progressively more ideological, rigid, and banal. The feminist rejection of Freud as sexist has eliminated basic tools of psychological analysis once standard in cultural criticism. Few young adults with elite school degrees today appear to realize how romantic attractions and interactions often repeat patterns rooted in early family life. Nor do they seem to have heard of the complex principle of ambivalence, which produces mixed messages that can disastrously complicate social encounters.

In my first book, Sexual Personae (1990), I wrote extensively about the tormented fragility of male sexual identity—which most feminist theory, with its bitterly anti-male premises, seems incapable of recognizing. Too often, women fail to realize how much power they have over men, whose ambition and achievement in the public realm are often wedded to remorseless anxiety and insecurity. Canonical feminist theory has also missed the emotional and conceptual symbolism in sexual behavior—as in the infantile penile displays of entertainment industry moguls who appear to have routinely chosen as targets women who would show embarrassment, confusion, or fear and not those who would laugh, scold, or whack that tender member with the nearest shoe, purse, hairbrush, or lamp. Interpreting such pathetically squalid scenes in exclusively political rather than psychological terms does not help women to make their way through the minefield of a professional world that will always be stressful, competitive, and uncertain for aspirants of both sexes.

The masculine dream of sexual freedom is writ large in the drawings of Tom of Finland, who heavily influenced gay male iconography after World War Two and directly inspired photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (whom I defended in Sex, Art, and American Culture). My essay, “Sex Quest in Tom of Finland”, which was written for the massive Taschen edition of Tom’s collected works, stresses the pagan energy, vitality, and humor of Tom’s pornographic all-male world, with its panoply of archetypes borrowed from Hollywood and Nazi-era Finland.

The initial theme of my work, however, was not masculinity but androgyny, the subject of my doctoral dissertation at Yale. (Its title was Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art.) When the prospectus for my thesis was accepted in 1971, it was the only dissertation on sex at the Yale Graduate School. While completing its writing at my first teaching job at Bennington College, I was electrified by David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust phase, which seemed to encapsulate everything that I had been thinking about gender. Forty years later, Bowie would put Sexual Personae on a list of his 100 favorite books. It did not surprise me: that great artist was sensing himself mirrored back from my pages. It was a tremendous honor to be invited by London’s Victoria & Albert Museum to write the article on gender for the catalog of its mammoth 2013 exhibition of Bowie costumes, which then toured the world. That essay, “Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution”, is reprinted here.

As I have often said, my own protest against gender norms began in childhood with my flagrantly dissident Halloween costumes: Robin Hood at age five; a toreador at six; a Roman soldier at seven; Napoleon at eight; Hamlet at nine. (A photo of me as Napoleon appears elsewhere in this book.) From college on, I adopted the gender-bending styles of Mod London, which were effectively transvestite. However, despite my lifelong transgender identification, I do not accept most of the current transgender agenda, which denies biological sex differences, dictates pronouns, and recklessly promotes medical and surgical interventions. An excerpt from an interview with the Weekly Standard, where I condemn the use of puberty blockers on children as a violation of human rights, is collected here. When Sexual Personae was released, I called it “the biggest sex change in history”. Gore Vidal rightly said that the voice of Sexual Personae was the voice of his transsexual heroine, Myra Breckinridge. Aggressive, implacable, and scathingly satirical, that voice is a transgender construction, using the materials of language and mind. To questioning young people drawn to the siren song of hormones and surgery, I say: stay fluid! Stay free!

It is surely my sexually dual perspective that has allowed me to understand and sympathize with Alfred Hitchcock’s awed and quasi-mystical view of women, which so many other feminists have reductively condemned as “misogynous”. I defended Hitchcock in my British Film Institute book on The Birds (1998), as well as in essays such as “Women and Magic in Alfred Hitchcock”, written for the BFI’s 2012 Hitchcock retrospective and collected here. Other pieces on film in this book celebrate movie music and lament the waning of European art film as well as the decline of film criticism.

One of my principal ambitions since my student days has been to develop an interpretative style that could integrate high and popular culture, which had exploded during the 1960s. I call myself a Warholite: Andy Warhol’s improvisational, avant-garde short films (starring gay hustlers and drag queens) and his conversion of publicity photos of Hollywood stars into radiant Byzantine icons provided an inspiring template for my work. In contrast, I detest and oppose academic media studies that monotonously recycle judgmental, politicized terminology from the passé Frankfurt School, which has no feeling whatever for popular culture.

Provocations, I submit, demonstrates the range and flexibility of my system of interpretation, which fiercely attacks when necessary but which respectfully illuminates both the artist and the artwork, from Old Masters like Shakespeare and Leonardo to modern music stars like Prince and Rihanna. In college, I was impatient with the New Criticism, which I felt was too narrow and genteel and had to be urgently expanded with history and psychology. But I have continued to apply the New Critical technique of close textual analysis to everything I write about, as in my pieces here on Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror” or on what I call the “psychotic mysticism” of poet Theodore Roethke. One of my long-range goals in college was to break down the barriers between genres, and I believe that my interdisciplinary method has in fact done that—extending the same minute focus and dramatic commentary to all of the arts but also to contemporary politics.

My columns and op-eds on politics over the past quarter century are too numerous to reprint or even catalog. I think I showed special facility for analyzing the horse race of presidential primaries, when my reviews of televised debates, for example, were usually far more attuned than those of the major media to how the candidates were actually being perceived by mainstream voters. I consider the cover-story Salon.com interview (collected here) that I did with editor-in-chief David Talbot in February 2003 to be a supreme highlight of my career: I was virtually alone among political commentators in condemning the imminent invasion of Iraq. Other leading media, including the New York Times and the New Yorker, had shockingly surrendered to tissue-thin government propaganda.

Full columns have been reproduced here on three political figures: Bill Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump. I have written so voluminously and variously about Hillary Clinton since the Clintons’ arrival on the national scene in 1992 that there was no one piece that could be considered representative. Hence I have interwoven excerpts about her from numerous articles in the Media Chronicle at the back of the book. (It lists articles in English only. My extensive articles and interviews on politics, art, and other subjects in the foreign press, particularly in Italy and Brazil, have been omitted.) The reader should be forewarned that I began as a Hillary fan but became steadily disillusioned over the years.

I was speaking, writing, and crusading about the first woman president throughout the 1990s, when most other feminists were absorbed with policy issues. Reproduced in this book is a poster advertising my appearance at a 1996 debate at the Yale Political Union (“Resolved: America Needs a Female President”), which was recorded for national TV broadcast by C-SPAN. The Media Chronicle also contains excerpts of then-controversial columns or articles where I was notably prescient, as a registered Democrat, about developing problems and evasions in my own party that would eventually lead, many years later, to its stunning surprise defeat in the 2016 presidential election.

Education is a major theme in this book. As a career teacher of nearly half a century, I have watched American universities miss their epochal opportunity for radical curricular reform in the 1970s and descend decade by decade into the balkanized, bureaucratic, therapeutic customer-service operations that they are today. High scholarly standards and deep erudition (as admirably exemplified by the stiff, stuffy, old-guard professors at Yale when I arrived as a graduate student) have so vanished that their value and indeed their very existence is denied by today’s bright, shiny, and shallow academic theorists. The real revolution would have been to smash the departmental structure of the humanities, reunite the fragmented fields of literature and art, and create an authentically multicultural global curriculum.

A principal piece in this volume is “The North American Intellectual Tradition”, which was given as the Second Annual Marshall McLuhan Lecture at Fordham University. There as in my long exposé, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders” (published by Arion in 1991 and reprinted in Sex, Art, and American Culture), I reject European post-structuralism and call for a reorientation toward North American pragmatism, grounded in nature. The academic stampede toward pretentious, abstruse French theorists in the 1970s was a grotesque betrayal of the American 1960s, which was animated by a Romantic return to nature and a reconnection of art with the sensory—the dynamic life of the body. Michel Foucault’s primary influence, by his own admission, was playwright Samuel Beckett--whose depressive postwar nihilism was swept away by the communal music and dance of the 1960s. Today’s jargon-spouting academic postmodernists with their snidely debunking style are not the heirs of Sixties leftism but retrograde bourgeois elitists, still picking through the shards of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land.

This book contains multiple examples of my early involvement with the Web. “Dispatches from the New Frontier: Writing for the Internet” documents the process by which I developed the unique format of my long-running Salon.com column. Because articles written for the Web are viewed on a screen rather than a page, adjustments must be made in syntax, diction, and visual design. A continuing failure to recognize this has produced the rafts of slack, verbose, meandering prose that currently clogs the Web on both news sites and blogs. Historically, it will eventually be recognized that my lengthy, multi-part Salon column, with its variety of tone and topics, was the first blog, a new literary genre of the digital age. When I began writing it, only Mickey Kaus was doing anything comparable, but his Slate.com column was wholly focused on politics. My autobiographical diary approach was so new that Salon’s editor-in-chief relayed complaints from other staffers that there was too much of me in my columns. In retrospect, it is clear that my work for Salon prefigured today’s universal social media.

“Dispatches from the New Frontier” also describes how the geographically scattered, maverick founders of the Web instantly understood and supported my libertarian and multi-media ideas. In the early 1990s, while my work was being ostracized by the academic establishment, the dissidents on The Well were discussing it from coast to coast. Stewart Brand, a co-founder of The Well, interviewed me in 1993 for the premiere issue of Wired, which called me “possibly the next Marshall McLuhan”. I co-hosted early online chats, an innovative interactive genre whose format was, by today’s standards, strikingly primitive.

Included in this book is the transcript of a collaboration I did on “Oscar Style” with Glenn Belverio (in his drag persona as Glennda Orgasm) for an America Online “CyberPlex Auditorium” in 1996. The print-out format of our dialogue with real-time questioners, as the Academy Awards unfolded on TV, has been reproduced as exactly as possible. Before the Web, people had to wait more than a full day before there could be newspaper coverage of the Oscars, with their climactic late-night finale. Hence I lobbied David Talbot about the Web’s potential for rapid response to the Oscars broadcast, and the result was a yearly feature on Salon, “Camille Does the Oscars”. I also campaigned in Salon and Interview magazine for comprehensive reporting on Oscars fashions—another of my prophetic themes: the red carpet would eventually win epic coverage by Joan Rivers and become a media staple, currently on the verge of excess.

Finally, two interviews here focus on my philosophy and practice as a writer. My writing has always been motivated by the search for a voice—or rather for many voices, keyed to the moment. There is nothing more important to me than the power of words to describe, recreate, entrance, and provoke.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon; First Edition (October 9, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 736 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1524746894
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1524746896
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.38 x 1.51 x 9.54 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,155,912 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,212 in Feminist Theory (Books)

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Richard B. Schwartz

A Central Cultural Voice

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2018

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CP's new essay collection, PROVOCATIONS, is a welcome addition to my CP shelf. First, some facts: there are 74 pieces, ranging in length from a single page or so to 50 pages or so. The broad subject categories: Popular Culture, Film; Sex, Gender, Women; Literature, Art, Education, Politics and Religion. Some come from the late 90's, some from as recently as 2017. The central text is about 590 pages, with several (but not many) illustrations and a "media chronicle" that runs to about 100 pages. The latter includes details and some commentary. The book's contents include reviews, formal lectures, essays, interviews, debate resolutions, and so on. In short, it contains significant scholarship and what the eighteenth century would have called 'miscellaneous and fugitive pieces'.

While the book is a certifiable doorstop it reads very quickly. There is some repetition in the announcement of her positions and the delineation of her personal experience but it is useful to be reminded of the fact that her 'position' is both non-traditional (in fact, very 'traditional' for these lost times) and yet commonsensical and, ultimately, very broad-based. This is a trans/bi atheist who has voted for the green party who finds common ground with academic traditionalists, conservatives (academic traditionalism is deeply conservative without being right-wing), the pious (she is studiously reverent with regard to religion and would see comparative religions at the heart of the humanities curriculum), et al. She is a vocal feminist who criticizes women's studies, a student of sex and popular culture who criticizes the current English curriculum (if one can actually identify a 'curriculum' there) and a student of politics who votes for Jill Stein but listens to Sean Hannity.

Her work is empirical, historical, studiously non-ideological and massively erudite though it is presented with a clear voice (she quite properly loathes the jargon, and program, of poststructuralism and postmodernism) and a broad spectrum of cultural reference. Several of the pieces here are very, very impressive in their displays of learning and observation, particularly those on Homer on film, the portrayals of middle eastern women in Western culture, the essay on western love poetry and the long essay on religious visions in the 1960's, a kind of William James meets Tom Wolfe piece.

While she is a central voice in our cultural experience she is also a voice crying in the wilderness. She longs for the days of German polymaths exhibiting philological chops that now seem like voices from another galaxy, but she knows only too well that we have given up philology—the scientific arm of literary study—and, with it, the respect of the general public. Her position (like mine) would be caricatured as the 'you have to know everything to know anything' school. She argues for the study of comparative religions as the central, trans-departmental, unifying element in the humanities. I would argue for the history of philosophy and the history of science in this role, but both of us do so in a world where students do not yet perceive the difference between your and you're and are unable to locate the Mediterranean on a map.

Her voice is necessary, irreplaceable and always a source of learning and delight.

Highly recommended.

16 people found this helpful

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Billerica, MA

Brilliant Intellect and writer

Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2019

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For those of you who are already familiar with Camille Paglia, I needn't extol her exquisite intellectual prowess or writing abilities. This is a pretty good collection of some of her past work. You can jump around and read them in any order that suits you. Some you may have already read, but are worth a reread. It is a daunting task to describe her to those who may not be familiar with her. At a glance, Camille Paglia is a cultural maven, who comments widely on a full gamut of social and artistic topics. Politically, she falls on the left or is at least a liberal. She is also a non-feminist, feminist. On the surface, I would expect us not to agree on too many things, but I greatly admire her intellectual clarity and honesty. She has a great depth of knowledge coupled with an ability to focus like a laser on her subject matter. Her writing style is highly refined and entertaining. She has a wonderful ability to choose just the right terminology to communicate precise shades of meaning to the reader. I have a decent vocabulary, but am not above getting help from google in order to fully appreciate her rigorous erudition. You can learn a lot from this collection of essays.

2 people found this helpful

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Bobby K

Good read

Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2018

So far, so good

Logic to back up that rhetoric...

Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2021

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This is a woman with class. She excels at applying logic to many facets of life and does so with incredible flare. Her grasp of Greek and Roman antiquity is mind blowing and her she sites many great sources along the way - while I read her I keep a pen and paper handy for notes (to research what flew over my head and to write down authors and books she recommends). I don't agree with her on every point but, that's what so fantastic about reading her - you have to think, you're challenged to dig deeper and most importantly, to recognize the West is the safest place you can be when you like to disagree.

4 people found this helpful

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Benjamin H. Tobias

A valuable book in today's world.

Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2022

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I love this book. The kids of today want to cancel the author. I think this last generation of kids remind me of "leprechauns on acid." I don't care what they think.

3 people found this helpful

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M. L. Casey

A Great Voice for My Generation

Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2020

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I had never heard of Camille Paglia until she intrigued me as a guest on a radio program. Where have I been all these years? This collection of essays throughout her career seems tilted toward faded entertainment and celebrity figures, but I enjoy Ms. Paglia's point of view which cannot be pegged as Liberal or Conservative but I would say "common sense" and original.

2 people found this helpful

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Les Barrett

Maybe you will like it

Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2021

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It was a bit pretentious. Well, probably more than a bit.

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DS

Things that need to be said out loud!

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2019

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Paglia is always smart and provocative. Her views have become less radical and more sensible over time. This is because the culture has caught up with much of her thinking! This does not make her less of a leading voice on important social issues but, rather, is 'vindication" for her prescience. The essays here are insightful, well reasoned, sometimes amusing but always clear and meaningful. Highly recommended.

5 people found this helpful

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Nicki-Nacki-Nanu

Eine intellektuelle Pflichtlektüre...

Reviewed in Germany on February 10, 2021

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...die wirklich jedes Genre von Politik über "die Gesellschaft" bis hin zu Kunst und Kultur abdeckt. Ein seitenstarkes Werk, das volle Aufmerksamkeit fordert, einen aber wirklich stimuliert und geradezu zu Gedankenflügen zwingt. Paglia dürfte eine der wenigen verbliebenen Intellektuellen der westlichen Welt sein.

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Bebéto

Decepción.

Reviewed in Mexico on December 15, 2018

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El contenido muy bueno. Sin embargo, si compran desde México, háganlo en formato libro-electrónico. Es la segunda vez que compro el libro físico y la primera vez me ha llegado sucio y con errores de imprenta. Esta vez llegó sin un correcto embalaje y roto/abollado enla parte superior del lomo. Al parecer, legista y ventas son incompetentes.

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Rand

Andrea M

un mattone di diecimila pagine

Reviewed in Italy on February 27, 2019

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MI aspettavo un saggio interessante sul genere, sulla sessualità a carattere antropologico, culturale, storico e sociale e invece mi arriva un mattone con mille capitoli assolutamente non interessanti che parlano di RIHANNA, Bowie e mille altre cose, la copertina poi è orrida

One person found this helpful

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JHS

Paglia at her best.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 13, 2018

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This corpus of essays, bringing together twenty-five years of writing, show Paglia working at the very height of her powers. Paglia has a way with the written word, a profound understanding of the plosive potential and syntax of the English language, and never has it been crisper than in this essay collection. Like any comprehensive volume of writing there is something here for everyone, from iconoclasm to conservatism, atheism to Hindu spiritualism, reading Paglia is a joy for anyone with a passion for learning and true erudition.

7 people found this helpful

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Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education Hardcover – October 9, 2018

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