Camille Paglia Bashes Claude Levi-Strauss

In her Salon column this week Camille Paglia spared a few column inches to consider and then completely trash the entire career of Claude Levi-Strauss:

"Continuing on the theme of overrated male writers, I was appalled at the sentimental rubbish filling the air about Claude Lévi-Strauss after his death was announced last week. The New York Times, for example, first posted an alert calling him "the father of modern anthropology" (a claim demonstrating breathtaking obliviousness to the roots of anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and then published a lengthy, laudatory obituary that was a string of misleading, inaccurate or incomplete statements. It is ludicrous to claim that Lévi-Strauss single-handedly transformed our ideas about the "primitive" or that before him there had been no concern with universals or abstract ideas in anthropology.

Beyond that, Lévi-Strauss' binary formulations (like "the raw and the cooked") were a simplistic cookie-cutter device borrowed from the dated linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the granddaddy of now mercifully moribund post-structuralism, which destroyed American humanities departments in the 1980s. Lévi-Strauss' work was as much a fanciful, showy mishmash as that of Joseph Campbell, who at least had the erudite and intuitive Carl Jung behind him. When as a Yale graduate student I ransacked that great temple, Sterling Library, in search of paradigms for reintegrating literary criticism with history, I found literally nothing in Lévi-Strauss that I felt had scholarly solidity.

In contrast, the 12 volumes of Sir James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" (1890-1915), interweaving European antiquity with tribal societies, was a model of intriguing specificity wed to speculative imagination. Though many details in Frazer have been contradicted or superseded, the work of his Cambridge school of classical anthropology (another of whose ornaments was the great Jane Harrison) will remain inspirational for enterprising students seeking escape from today's sterile academic climate."

Now you know I couldn't let that go unanswered! I posted the following comment:

Bashing Levi-Strauss? Really?

As someone who made your academic bones explicating ad nauseum the opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian, I am surprised that you so blithely dismiss Claude Levi-Strauss. To reduce his massive career to a few-sentence caricature implies that you haven't read him carefully or completely.

Even if its granted that his structural armature was a bit overwrought; even if you discount his visionary explication of Amerindian mythology; even if you deduct from his oeuvre all writings from the 1960’s onwards, at least you can grant him some props for the sense and sensibility of his Tristes Tropiques and let him rest in peace. Just sayin’.

Media Ecology Poet Laureate

I notice that Camille Paglia has returned to blogging on Salon and so I thought I would post a message I sent to the Media Ecology listserve concerning the need for a Media Ecology Poet Laureate, and the greater need that I be that person:


I have received some inquiries as to whether the Media Ecology Association needs a Poet Laureate. More specifically, the messages seems to ask whether the Media Ecology Association needs me as their Poet Laureate. The question has been raised as to whether the publication of only one masterpiece qualifies one for such a position.

I would like to point out that "The Very Model of a Media Ecologist" is not my sole masterpiece. In fact, I understand that Camille Paglia is considering a sequel to her best selling book of poetry criticism, to be titled "Break, Blow, Burn - A New Hope," that would focus exclusively on my unpublished body of work.

Among the unpublished masterpieces to be considered are:

Ode to the Medium of a Grecian Urn

(In which I contemplate the relationship between the figures on the outside of the urn with the ground grain on the inside. This figure/ground dichotomy leads me to conclude that, to the ancient Greek, the content of the urn was of more importance than the urn itself. In fact, all Grecian urns have been shown using x-ray technology to have the words "su ejpaggeliva autou" underneath the erotic or Homeric or homoerotic etchings, which translates roughly as "your ad here.")

Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- Burma Shave.

Lacan and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still,
and all of western literature lies helpless at his feet.

IM to His Coy Mistress

Hd we bt wrld enuff, & IM,
This cynss, ldy, wre n crm.

The Vast Wasteland

May Sweeps are the cruelest month,
breeding Idol clones out of the dead land.
......
I had not thought death had uncouched so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man's eyes fixed on the screen before his feet.

In a more popular vein:

Don't Think Twice, It's Derrida

It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don't matter any how.

Also included will be my continuation and completion of John Milton's planned tetrology, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained with:

Paradise Enhanced

Satan decides that serving in Heaven isn't such a bad deal after all.

Paradise Reversed

Unintended consequences occur when Satan develops time shares in heaven for souls who would not normally be able to get in. Complications ensue when Hitler and Mussolini move in next door.

Media Ecology Shakespearian Series:

Is This a Daguerre I see before me?

To Be or Not to Be: It depends on your abstraction level

It can be seen that I take my role as Media Ecology Poet Laureate seriously, especially considering the rate of pay.