Postmodern Anxieties in an Age of Confidence

“In asmuch as the soul is present there is power not confident but agent.”

         —R.W. Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

Sometimes characters from fiction can get such a grip on your imagination that their fate beyond the fictional circumstance of their origin continues to occupy your thinking long after you’ve finished the book. They become bearers of significance, archetypal actors in your imagination. I have been fascinated for a long time, for instance, with the fate of the sole survivor of the apocalyptic end of the whale ship, Pequod. Destroyed by the white whale that its captain and crew sought to destroy, the Pequod sank into the sea with its entire company, save one—Ishmael. Through fate or fluke, or some combination of both, he was thrown from his boat, a boat he wasn’t supposed to be in, outside the field of the whale’s destruction, and was last seen floating on Queequeg’s coffin which popped up in the centre of the Dark Omphalos, the button-like black bubble at the axis of the slowly wheeling circle that was the last sign of the Pequod. As it swallowed the lives of the crew, it ejected a coffin that saved Ishmael’s life. Arguably, that uncanny marriage of death and life is a sign of the reason he survived when everyone else perished. It embodies the knowledge he gained in his quest to understand the whale, a quest that led him through multiple modes of measure, from rulers to tastebuds, from squeezing sperm to writing, from science to poetry, past the notion of the exclusivity of truth and into a vision of the endless accretion and transformation of knowledge that can never be “complete.” In the process he acquired a mode of being, an identifying stance that is fluid, porous, inclusive, and fundamentally erotic in that it merges with the objects of its attention rather than trying to isolate, enclose, and dominate them, as Ahab does. What’s at stake are modes of knowing the world that are inextricably implicated in modes being in the world.

Reporting from an unspecified future, Ishmael describes how he was saved by the wandering Rachel, looking, as he puts it, for her lost children. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. There is no further history. At least no explicit history, though surely Melville thought about it. You have to wonder at the workings of his mind after he returned from his naval adventures to prim, proper Beacon Hill in Boston. He married into upper class Boston Brahmin propriety, wedding the daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, an old family friend. He settled into a literary life that began with a flurry of fame and notoriety and ended in ignominious rejection and critical disdain. Beacon Hill was the penultimate stop in a process of the radical transformation of identity. From the Marquesas where he hints he partook in the sexual openness of the Island culture, and possibly ate human flesh (my bet is he did), to Tahiti where he was criminally convicted and locked up in the public stocks, to the hold of a US Navy frigate where he witnessed the brutality of the officers above deck and the amorous encounters among the sailors in the bunks below deck, he entered the Calvinist redoubt of Boston in 1850.

His adventures and ordeals transformed Melville and his understanding of the nature of identity and the moral and philosophical structures of belief that flow from it. Ishmael’s protean, fluid self and its erotic relation to knowledge and the world became a consistent concern in his novels from Mardi to The Confidence Man. The narrator of Melville’s White-Jacket may throw off his white jacket in order to make the return to Boston, but I’ll bet Melville never threw his off. Nor, I’d like to suggest, did Ishmael, and further, that he made a stunning return to Melville’s imagination in the fluid multiple identities of the Confidence Man, now seasoned, cynical, and out to reveal the deep hypocrisy and metaphysical stupidity of USAmerican culture.

The Confidence Man was Melville’s last novel, written after the crushing disappointment of the critical and commercial failure of Moby-Dick. There’s no other novel like it in 19th century USAmerican writing. A dark farewell to the literary life, a brilliant, devastating dissection of 19th century American confidence, it is an anti-novel that consists of a series of conversations on philosophical. moral, ethical, and practical issues that take place on a paddle wheeler sailing on the Mississippi River. One half of the conversation is always carried on by some manifestation of the Confidence Man who appears in multiple forms including the gentleman with the weed in his hat, the Charity Agent, the Black Rapids Coal Company agent, the herb doctor, the agent of the Philosophical Intelligence Office, Black Guinea, Charlie Noble, Frank Goodman, and the Cosmopolitan, who appears in one scene simultaneously with another avatar, a child beggar. There are also suggestions that he may be a manifestation of Satan, the Prince of Lies. But then again, maybe not. The physics of his transformations and his metaphysical status are irrelevant. Even in his resemblance to Ishmael, the Confidence Man is an archetypal figure—a shapeshifter and a Trickster—in an archetypal setting—a Mississippi paddle wheeler. The laws of the physical universe are irrelevant, especially as Melville uses his character to undermine the rules of modern, realist fiction with their central emphasis on representing the social individual.

Melville learned some crucial lessons in his 5 years at sea. Most importantly, he came to understand that the world of Calvinist certainty in a morally ordered world decreed by divine sanction had no more validity than the Marquesan islander’s certainty that he gained his enemy’s strength by eating his dead body. Jehovah, it turned out, was neither more nor less real than Queequeg’s Yojo. The confidence their followers placed in them and the worlds they defined and ordered was the antithesis of thinking. It was not only delusional, in the case of the U.S. it hypocritically masked an actual world untouched by any moral considerations at all, a world of greed, mistrust, stupidity, gullibility, poisonous racism, and insane violence which Melville captures in the chapter ironically titled, “Containing the metaphysics of Indian hating, according to the views of one not evidently prepossessed as Rousseau in favor of savages..”

The Confidence Man is an assault on USAmerican modernity that takes on a whole constituting array of epistemological certainties. These include, but are not limited to, the integrity of individual identity, realism as the representation of truth, history as progress, the beneficence of philanthropy, and the biggest whopper of all, reason as the defining quality of the human. Peeling back the confident, hypocritical layers of Christian ideology that mask USAmerican cupidity and violence The Confidence Man in both form and content locates itself outside the ethos and authorized structures of meaning of 19th century U.S. modernity. That ethos had everything to do with confidence in American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. Emerson’s sense of confidence as stasis figures here. And the question becomes what exactly is the Confidence Man after? Money, of course, is always at stake since an obsession with money defines the soul of USAmerica, notwithstanding occasional formal nods to “liberty” and “freedom.” Sometimes the stakes are only two bits, but it’s the principle that matters. The Confidence Man is just as happy to con a mark out of a volume of Tacitus or a distrustful attitude.

The con works like this: the Confidence Man figures out what his mark most desires. He then uses that against the mark by offering to fulfill that desire if only the mark will trust him. Greed is the usual hook—extravagant profits for minimal investment or a bridge in Brooklyn for sale at an unbelievable price. Mostly Melville’s Confidence Man sells trust, and his pitch is based on his understanding that what his marks want is certainty. Once he gains trust, he takes the very thing he promised. And it’s not necessarily money. As the man with the weed points out to the naive minister, the little money at stake in Black Guinea’s appeal would not be worth the effort of a conman so Black Guinea must be an honest beggar. At that point, a grumpy man with a wooden leg enters the conversation (Ahab, anyone?), having previously denounced Black Guinea as a scam artist. “You two green-horns,” he says. “Money, you think, is the sole motive in pains and hazard, deception and devilry, in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?” He makes a crucial point. Why did the devil con Eve? To introduce knowledge that would negate Paradise, in that case the knowledge of good and evil. Melville’s Confidence Man also introduces knowledge, the knowledge of the end of modernity’s certainties and a vision of USAmerica not as city on a hill but as a boatload of greed, avarice, racism, and violence. It is a world after the modern, the world witnessed from the perspective of postmodernity’s uncertainties.

Postmodern is a troubled word these days. When I first heard it in 1968 no one had yet imagined it with an ism tied to its tail. The meaning was straight forward. It named a moment of emergent historical transformation. I was reading the poet Charles Olson with Robin Blaser at the time. In a letter to Robert Creeley in 1951, Olson famously wrote, “The first half of the twentieth century was the marshaling yard on which the modern was turned to what we have, the post-modern, or post-West.” This was one of, if not the, earliest uses of the word after Alfred Toynbee introduced it in A Study in History. Following Toynbee’s use, Olson proposed “postmodern” as a way of thinking history as epochs characterized by identifiable shifting epistemic fields and the structures of meaning and institutional formations that flow from them. One epoch gives way to another based on what Olson called “hinges” rather than the modern notion of “progress.” As Olson used it, postmodern named a moment in time when the most recent epoch, our epoch, which we call modernity, showed signs of destabilizing and transitioning in the same ways European cultures in the 14th century had destabilized and transitioned over hundreds of years into the formation we call modernity. The West is another way of referring to that formation. Postmodern was the marker of a recognition of the emergence of a transitional historical moment in the West, a hinge.

That understanding changed rapidly in the late 1970s. The Academy got hold of the word and it spread far and wide. Transformed into postmodernism it provided a gold rush of topics for PhD theses, journal publications, and myriad books which sought to define it, pin it down, and explain and develop its significance in relation to multiple fields and disciplines that included the arts and literature, philosophy, architecture, feminism, science, cinema, TV, even postmodernism and lifestyles which identifies certain trends in consumption as evidence of postmodernism. When the ism gets tied to postmodern’s tail considerations of emergent history are replaced with arguments about a loosely defined style and eventually a Program. It’s a significant moment that through linguistic legerdemain turns a provocative, fruitful proposition about Time and history that can help us see, investigate, and navigate historical changes into a commodified aesthetic mode, and binds it to predetermined conventions.

The postmodernism-ists translated historical attention into genre conventions. Ihab Hasan led the charge in categorizing the conventions in a very long list, shared by many others in whole or part, that includes elusive meaning, ironic self-awareness, death of the author, broken narrative frames, rejection of unmediated objectivity, the contingency of knowledge, the collapse of a master narrative, etc. Treated as conventions these radical modal stances can then be dismissed as no longer relevant to a new generation whose sensibilities have been determined by new tech, what one philosophical wag called the shift from watching to clicking. This kind of fashion history ignores or is ignorant of the larger historical view that the address to postmodernity opens. In the thinking of the postmodern, the so-called tropes of postmodernism are abstractions of actual identifiable disturbances in modernity’s epistemic field. They are not conventions. Nor are they a program. They are recognitions opening to investigation.

The forces that drove the postmodernism-ist frenzy fizzled out in the 90s. In 2006, Linda Hutcheon, postmodernism’s front-line defender against the Marxists, announced its demise in “Postmodern Afterthoughts”. As a defender of postmodernism she had insisted on a distinction between a historical discourse and a cultural discourse. In “Postmodern Afterthoughts” she abandoned that distinction and no longer referred to it in historical terms. It became a corpus of dated theoretical concerns and tropes that had been rendered defunct by “new theories [such] as queer, postcolonial, and feminism,” i.e. sociology ejected history from the marketplace. The general consensus of academic voices demoted postmodernism to a period style that, like all period styles, reached the end of its allure and was abandoned by the au courant, dead and buried, at least until a new generational market came along and discovered its nostalgia value.

But no one anticipated a Postmodernism Zombie Apocalypse.

A number of conservative writers either missed the news of postmodernism’s demise or decided to voodoo the thing back to life so they could have a box into which they could dump everything they hated about so-called “woke” culture—which they attribute to postmodernism—and blame it for the end of the world. Ideologues like Jordan Peterson, Lydia Pluckrose and Stephen Hicks have chased it down an alley with the ism clanging behind it. They have turned some Frankenstein’s monster assemblage of ideas they call “postmodernism” into the ultimate anti-American boogeyman, a MARXIST far reaching MARXIST plot by sleazy MARXIST bewildering MARXIST Euro-philosophers to destroy USAmerican confidence in Progress, Truth (singular), and Justice for all (white) people.

About the time the former practitioners and explicators of postmodernism were moving on to new fields of academic endeavour “[such] as queer, postcolonial, and feminism,” conservatives discovered postmodernism as an evil plague destroying America by sowing chaos through moral relativism and weird pronouns, and sneaking in Marxism in what Pluckrose calls bewildering texts. Admitting you find the material you are attempting to explain bewildering is probably not a good way to set out, but nothing that follows has much to do with any actual European thinking it proposes to expose. Rather than engage in a critical examination of actual texts, they come up with a set of misrepresentations and distortions to which they attach the ultimate depraved evil, i.e. Marxism, throw in some unpopular identity politics and threats of “cancellation” by a totalitarian left, and presto chango, you have transformed an esoteric idea about history into the Godzilla of Western cultural destruction, a Viral Idea Plague that perniciously infects people and gives them “bad” ideas, even though they are “not aware of the doctrine that has them in its grip” (Peterson again). Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers but inside the alien pods are little homunculi of bald, bespectacled glaring French intellectuals plotting the destruction not just of USAmerican democracy, but as Pluckrose and Hicks propose, of “modernity” itself. To plot the destruction of modernity is no mean feat given that for about 500 years or more the assembly of ideas and institutions that travel under that name have ruled the roost in the West and are deeply embedded in our fundamental modes of thinking and our habits of being. In fact, that is what “the West” is. So, it seems rather extreme to think that a handful of academics (French ones at that) with bewildering ideas could “bring it down” in a few short years. In fact, these so-called philosophers have turned postmodernism into a villain in a Marvel universe movie in which they are the superheroes fighting to return USAmerican culture to the harmonious state of the 1950s.

Charles Olson wrote in the late 50’s and 60’s, as enormous, roiling, creative energies breached boundaries and birthed new forms. They were fuel for a counterculture that rejected the post- WWII USAmerican regime of complacent consensus and polite culture that barely masked its relentless racist violence and aggressive international commercial/military expansion. For Olson, Toynbee’s insight resonated with his own sense of a postmodern opening evident in the increasing loss of legitimacy of Humanism’s ego-centric legacy and the Enlightenment’s giddy proclamations about universal Reason as the Human dominant. That’s not to say that reason (lower case) isn’t a marvellous human capacity, but it does not define our relationships to each other and the world. Two World Wars—actually one with two chapters—tarnished modernity’s promise, to say the least. The repeated brutal slaughter of various civilized, enlightened nations by various other civilized, enlightened nations using technology developed by science, Reason’s precious child, seemed at odds with the notion of humans as creatures ennobled and governed by that immaculate Reason.

The bureaucratic industrialization of genocide, the systematic mass murder of 6 million Jews and 6 million Others, in the name of “purity” using the science and technology central to modernity’s utopian vision of itself, raised serious questions in some minds about the neutrality and the objectivity of science, the universal value of technology, and the nature of whatever is called the Human. Add in the growth of the surveillance state and its penetration into every aspect of people’s lives. And the environmental crisis bred by modernity’s voracious hungers. And modernity seems to have reached a limit. I doubt it is possible to renew the original spirit of modernity, but if it is, it won’t be through nostalgia for the fictional world of “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver”.

Trump’s con, and the program of the right-wing powers using him, is based on an understanding that these days a lot of people have had their world collapse. They are angry, frightened, and hungry for certainty. The image of that certainty is a nostalgic vision of the pristine modern America of the post-WWII Pax Americana economic boom when a flood of money elevated large numbers of the “proletariat” into something called the “middle-class”, and whiteness ruled the roost almost unchallenged. But the middle-class turned out to be an hallucination that by the late 60s had begun to evaporate. The flood of money dried up as big capital shifted production overseas to less expensive labour markets leaving no middle behind. At the same time, the civil rights movement picked up steam, putting America’s racist history and it’s continuing racist brutalities on the front page of every newspaper in the world. USAmericans yearned for a return to the untroubled wealth and power that they felt was their right, guaranteed by USAmerican exceptionalism.

The bedrock of political modernity is a secular state, the rule of law, and the commitment to majority rule. All of these principles are now under attack not by French intellectuals but by Trump, by large swaths of the USAmerican people who yearn for a “return to greatness”, and by Trump’s puppet-agents, including the same individuals who blame “postmodernism” for “destroying modernity” and liberal values. They are attacking political freedom, a free press dedicated to objectively reporting news, academic freedom and independence, due process, free speech, and even habeas corpus, perhaps the most basic of modern, democratic rights, what William Blackstone called “The Great Writ of Liberty,” enshrined in English Common Law in the Magna Carta. These institutions are the constituents of modernity as we know it. They define it.

Trump offers a return to an earlier simplified “greatness” in exchange for people’s trust that he will use the power they give him to reclaim that historical moment. In fact, he wants to reclaim a different historical moment, one in which political power is concentrated in an authoritarian “MonarchPresident” whose will is law, who doles out pardons in exchange for loyalty, to whom the world pays literal tribute, like 400 million dollar airplanes and million dollar contributions to royal bitcoin scams. In the name of defending a renewed modernism, Trump brings a postmodern feudal revival.

Perhaps the most dismal and symptomatic assault is the systematic undermining of the concept of “truth” by the Narcissist-and-Chief and those who find a sense of meaning in his endless fantasying. While the theorists of the Postmodernism Zombie Apocalypse complain loudly and incessantly about post-modernist “relativism” destroying the civilization of The West by denying there is a Truth (and the West is It), their pre-modern movement and its orange leader have invented something called “alternate facts” which are mythologems of his endless phantasies. It’s not that he lies. That would imply he knows there’s a truth to lie about. He lives within a bubble in which everything he thinks is “true” because he thinks it, just as if he was an absolute monarch. The concept of “truth” (small “t”) has been systematically corrupted to the point it has become meaningless. No fact checking or truth monitoring can dent the “golden dome” of his underdeveloped psyche and the willing submission of his acolyte followers, including the so- called philosophers, who gush confidence at whatever he says, no matter how absurd, outrageous, or patently untrue. In that sense, they and their orange boss are the very demonstration of the undoing of modernity that postmodern thinking anticipates. They are examples of the unraveling of modernity.

Confidence, in multiple senses, plays a role here. For the purveyors of the Postmodernism Zombie Apocalypse, confidence is the name of their game. Their vision of a return to a time of stable past glory reeks of confidence in Emerson’s sense, as does their specious claim to understand and dismiss the complex relational idea of knowledge proposed by those serious thinkers engaged in an address to postmodernity as it manifests in the disruption of the modern epistemic field. They confidently avoid any questioning of the current regime’s dis-order. Melville invokes a further sense of the word where the Confidence Man—indulge me and let’s let’s call him Ishmael returned to land to test his hard-won sense of the fluidity of identity—explores the contradictions in the USAmerica he finds there.

He exposes multiple modes of darkness in the heart of USAmerican confidence including blind, uncritical trust in authority, a delusional belief in certainty, and a willful blindness to the horrendous crimes and cruelties that followed in the wake of USAmerica’s bloody 19th century expansion across the continent and around the world. The final chapter of the novel involves an encounter between Ishmael as the Cosmopolitan, a child beggar, and a “comely man” Ishmael describes as “a well-to-do farmer, happily dismissed, after a thrifty life of activity, from the fields to the fireside” who is reading a Bible. In the archetypal world of the Fidèle, there is no more quintessential image of an ideal Jeffersonian American. Melville goes on, however, to uncover a darker side to fabled American innocence, describing the farmer as “ . . . one of those who, at three score and ten, are as fresh-hearted as at fifteen; one of those to whom seclusion gives a boon more blessed than knowledge, and at last sends them heaven untainted by the world because ignorant of it . . ..” Ignorant of the world and confident in their own exceptional virtue, USAmericans deny their own history, and, as we see now, will even go so far as to criminalize the revelation of the truth.

Raising the cosmological stakes, the final scene unfolds in the light of a solar lamp which projects a shadow image of “a horned altar, from which flames rose, alternate with the figure of a robed man, his head encircled by a halo.” The editors of the Norton edition of The Confidence Man, contextualize the imagery with a quote from Revelations 9.13 where John hears details of the coming of the apocalypse from an angel who speaks in “a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God.” After telling the Cosmopolitan that “to distrust the creature, is a kind of distrusting of the Creator”, the farmer is confronted by a child beggar who reveals his fundamental hypocrisy by convincing him that his money is at risk of being stolen by burglars, pickpockets, and counterfeiters, and in an escalating pitch uses his mark’s distrust to sell him a door lock for his cabin door, a money belt, and a “counterfeit detector”.

Finally, in an ultimate act of humiliation, Ishmael/Cosmopolitan hands the farmer, who is looking for a life preserver to take to his room as security in case the boat sinks, a commode. And so we come around to where we started with Ishmael clinging to Queequeg’s coffin in the middle of the Pacific as the Pequod sinks below the waves. The contrast between Queequeg’s coffin, on whose lid he had carved “all manner of grotesque figures and drawings . . . to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body” and the commode is all you need to know about Melville’s sense of the state of USAmerica’s soul. As the scene closes and the novel comes to an end, Ishmael blows out the last (solar) lamp and leads the old man, this paragon of Jeffersonianism, who holds his money belt in one hand and the commode/life preserver, under his other arm, into the dark, confident of his security. Something more may follow from this masquerade, Melville says prophetically.

Perhaps the historical disruptions we are witness to are temporary and modernity’s institutions will survive this apparent destabilization and outright assault and return to a pre-existing confident order. I wouldn’t take odds on it, but, hey, you never know. The fact is, no system lasts forever. And there is no reason to assume that the forms of life of modernity are any more eternally durable than the forms of life of Imperial Rome or Poverty Point. The value of the thinking of the postmodern has been its opening of the mind to signs of change, transformation, to glimpses of unprecedented developments and options, to acute historical sensitivity to Time’s generative mystery. Whether that’s enough to withstand the hucksters of the age of Confidence remains to be seen. Time, as they say, will tell.

___________________

With gratitude to André Spears for his immaculate critical intelligence and boundless generosity.

Apocalypses Now

The Apocalypse, a long standing event of ongoing fascination, is going through some significant changes. A ubiquitous entertainment presence over the last few years, the Apocalypse has come a long way from the God fueled hallucinatory prose of John of Patmos with its Dragons, Lakes of Fire, Great Harlot and Scarlet Beast. For one thing, at some point in the last 200 years, the End lost its God and had to rely on microbes and/or extra-terrestrials for its eschatological punch. That’s a game changer. God occasionally still makes an appearance as an offstage character intervening in battles between winged super heroes with angels’ names, Paradise Lost retold by Stan Lee, but mostly The End has done away with him. Blame it on secular humanism or science or corrupting consumerism, but the fact is, God just can’t sell corn flakes the way that zombies do.

Zombies have been the #1 agent of Apocalypse for a while now, having displaced vampires who had become far too infected with angsty adolescent sexual fantasy to threaten civilization with more than an aching groin. Young adult fiction undid Bram Stoker’s subversive, erotic critique of Christian moralism, turning it into a prolonged teen romance. Zombies were the cure for that. You couldn’t get much further from well-dressed sexy young bloodsuckers negotiating the subtle complexities of high school social politics than the Undead.

There are plenty of reasons for that. First of all, zombies don’t screw. They are really dead even though they are undead. And even if they did screw, which dead people don’t do, no one, not even other zombies, would want to screw them because they are ugly, rotting, suppurating pieces of stumbling meat. Secondly, they would rather eat your brains than suck your blood, so the whole sublimated sucking thing is out. Thirdly, they don’t dress well, being garbed in the tattered remnant of whatever they died wearing which no doubt smells even worse than it looks.

Read the rest at Dooney's Café

Mythos Americanos: Who Took the Grit out of Integrity?

The invocation of integrity in the mouths of perennially duplicitous officials and politicians has contributed significantly to a general, at best mistrust, at worst downright disbelief, about the continuing relevance of the word in our daily lives. The revelation of outright government duplicity—the Pentagon Papers, or Watergate—has only intensified general mistrust and a deep feeling of the loss of any (perhaps illusory) sense of integrity, other than in reference to marketing communications and brand integrity. As a concept applicable to current USAmerican public life, integrity has become meaningless, a view widely shared, as was evident in the response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) public health crisis. We live in the midst of the disarray, if not breakdown, of modernity’s array of meanings and its components, components that also include democracy and equality, and that extend to the institutions based on them.

I found myself thinking about this in relation to my response to a television show called Yellowstone. I did not begin to watch it until its fourth season when I heard it was the most-watched show on television. Not knowing anything about it (other than it starred Kevin Costner), I was surprised by the intensity of my emotional response. Almost immediately, I was swept up in a roller coaster of feelings that started with excitement at the action. I was stunned by the embrace of deep moral ambiguity. I grew fascinated with the characters and my reaction to them (especially Beth and Rip, and Jimmy). I admired the treatment of animals and the humans’ relation to them. I was impressed by the representation of Indigenous people and their struggles, and I increasingly recognized an intellectual dimension to the narrative that spoke to a long USAmerican conversation about the origin and meaning of the idea of America. Trying to nail down the source of the intensity of my response, I kept coming back to a sense of a deep, existential nostalgia for what I could only think of as integrity.

Read the rest at Merion West

How Does a Poem Mean

A  brief primer for the curious and stumped

—for Frank Aiello

“. . . art [poetry] is always the art of not saying it, of exposing that which is not to be said (not an unsayable, but the not-to-be-said of sense) along the edges of all that is exposed, as the sayable itself, and further, as saying itself, as all of saying in its fragmentation.”

    —Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World

There was a time, not that long ago, say, a hundred years, when nearly every house in North America contained at least a few volumes of poetry. People read it for refinement and moral edification. Tennyson was a favourite, and a bowdlerized and sweetened Emily Dickinson. Longfellow and Whittier were big. But also moderns like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robert Frost. And Shakespeare, of course. Every home had a collected Shakespeare, a Bible, and a copy of Emerson’s essays. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound with an assist from Gertrude Stein, have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of putting the boots to that fabled moment, crashing the genteel poetry party with their rude and rowdy ways, ruining everything with obscure scholarly allusions and fancy paratactic assemblages. People were stupefied, even outraged. Instead of being left with an elevated moral understanding or a fine sentiment, they were left stuttering, What does that mean? And things have only gotten worse since then.

Poems aren’t the only things whose meaning escapes us. If someone says to me, “to complicate matters further, cotton is a fungible commodity,” I might respond, what does that mean?, in which case, I am asking Mr. Smarty Pants Interrogator to explain his big words so I can understand what he’s saying. Ditto, if you are talking to someone about some stupid thing you did without thinking, and she says, “The development of all natural and spiritual life rests solely on the nature of the pure essentialities which constitute the content of logic,” you might very well reply, “What on earth does that mean? Talk English.” In that case it’s not just a word that’s the problem, it’s an entire idea. Or, even more weird, if a stranger walks up to you on the street and out of the blue says, “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,” you might either slap him or demand that he explain what that means. In this case it’s not a word that’s the problem, or even an idea. It’s language itself which has become a puzzle in need of explication, clarity. What does that mean covers a lot of territory, perhaps more even than we can think of, and getting to know how a poem means requires thinking a bit about meaning first.

One thing for sure—we like to know the meaning of things. It’s satisfying. The meaning of things, the intent that shapes, informs, and directs them, the sense of their significance, relieves us of the anxiety of uncertainty and locates us in and connects us to a world of meaning. It settles the unsettled. Before we faced an aggressive blankness, a kind of implicit chaos, then suddenly . . . Light. We fall into a clear order, the order of the understanding of a word, an idea, a burst of nonsensical language. Suddenly, it makes sense. I carried around a line from a poem by Jack Spicer that stupifued me for 25 years, turning it over and over in my mind, trying to pry some meaning out of it. It was like a Zen koan for me: “Sable arrested a fine comb.” For years it teased me, irritated me, tested me, would suddenly run through my mind as I was cooking or out for a walk. Then one evening as I was about to start a one night workshop for school teachers on “difficult poetry,” it suddenly made sense, the meaning – a meaning – or meaning, anyway, popped into my mind out of the proverbial blue and I felt the world fall into an order. Of which more later.

It gets more difficult when the stake is not just the meaning of a word or an idea, but of, say, life. Does life have meaning? Most of us like to think so. And if it does, how? Does belief in the existence of a Supreme Being give our lives meaning? Does work give our lives meaning? Does family give our lives meaning? Or is meaning an illusion we cleave to in order not to face the fact that we are just random atoms randomly assembled and living in a random world that has no meaning, no intent beyond what we project? Do we just make it up? Without some sense of meaning, how can we know what’s right and what’s wrong? How can we orient ourselves so that our actions are moral?    

This is the point, traditionally, where religion steps in with the idea of God and an order of God’s design, the transcendental ground of existence, the Unmoved Mover, the stability at the centre of the Tumult. God (Whichever One) guarantees meaning, grounds existence in divine Truth and Order beyond the flux of the workaday world, the profane and the mundane. Philosophy does that too, but philosophy always tags along behind religion, even when it pretends not to, because it lacks religion’s access to emotion. Reason will only get you so far over the void before urging caution and sober second thought about the original plan. Think Wiley Coyote here, running off the edge of a cliff and getting half way across a chasm before realizing what he has done and falling. Religion says to Hell with it, throws caution to the (divine) wind and goes for it because God wants you to—means for you to—and may even hold you up—though you can’t count on that second part, which is the point. Do you believe or not? Belief is nothing without a bit of uncertainty.

The trouble is we find ourselves in a modern world in which the authority to say what’s real and what the meaning of that is was passed from Religion to Science a long time ago. Business followed up on that by using Science and its child, Technology, to make a world where everything has been turned into something, at least potentially, for sale and the only value left is exchange value. Religion may claim that water can be turned into wine, and the dead can be raised from the grave, but science knows better, can prove it, and business can use that knowledge to manufacture a cheaper wine than you could make from water if you could make wine from water. This doesn’t mean that people don’t hold to belief in a Divine power. But it does mean that that belief no longer determines the orientation of the culture, which makes some people extremely upset and gives rise to a lot of noise about culture wars. Belief has become individualized. Plus, science deals only with truth and falsity, never with meaning.

In the Medieval world, everyone shared the experience of the sacred which shaped and determined the experience of time itself. Every moment was sacred and informed by divine presence. Each hour had an angel. Each day had a saint. The year circulated around sacred, holy days, days that returned time to the originary energies of Creation. In what was called Christendom, everyone shared in the profound experience of the birth, death, and resurrection of God as those eternal events manifested in the calendar year. Now instead we have “The Christmas Shopping Season” whose profound importance is that something like 80% of retail business takes place during that time, thus maintaining the health of “the economy.” Whereas Christmas once meant that the eruption of the Divine into time disrupted the profane world pulling people out of their workaday lives into the sacred Story, now it means a lot of shopping and the anxiety of massive credit card debt in January. Now, you could say, it means nothing, at least nothing of value.

But of course it means something, just not what it once meant. And that’s the crux. What does it mean to ask what does it mean? This is not just a cute puzzle, but an entrance into the maze where meaning dwells, proliferates, hides, metamorphoses. If Christmas once literally meant that the birth of God was immanent in our lives, now it means that the commercialization of the world has superseded that other sacred reality and replaced it with a shopping season, the ultimate sacred experience of the world transformed into stuff, commodities for sale in a Mall that has swapped out the cathedral as the center of people’s lives. The “meaning of Christmas” shifts from an experience redolent with something called sacred value to an experience of sociological facticity. Both are modes of meaning, but of different orders. So when we ask, what does it mean? we may think the answer is simple, but it is not.

People argue about whether or not language is the source of our experience of meaning which is a pertinent question when thinking about how a poem means since one definition of “poem” is a thing made out of words. Both sides of the argument make reasonable points, but, origins aside, there can’t be much doubt that meaning is always tied up with language to some degree. Our particular sense of meaning is deeply implicated in its rhythms, structures, and references. It may even be that our desire for meaning begins with meaning itself as desire. Robin Blaser, quoting Charles Olson on Alfred North Whitehead points out: “’The condition is hunger,’ ‘mouth,’ and I note that the hunger – the appetition to use Whitehead’s more abstract term – is of both body and mind. Meaning in this sense is an aspect of desire.” Some deep drive in our being propels us beyond ourselves, and a sense of meaning is part of that. Whitehead say, “Appetition is immediate matter of fact including in itself a principle of unrest, involving realization of what is not and may be.” Is meaning, a sense of meaning that must always precede meaning itself, implicit in the dynamic “realization of what is not and may be”? We first form in the rhythms of speech that resonate through our mothers’ bodies, vibrating, calling us. We are conceived, born into, and dwell in language and the meaning that preceded us. And desire forms in the mouthandthumb.

The idea of the meaning of a poem gets mixed up with the fact that meaning is a singular noun, the same as ball or racquet or egg. For most of us, that translates into an object or object-like condition, some thing out there where objects dwell. Asking “What’s the meaning of that poem” implies that there is an answer that begins, “The meaning of the poem is . . .,” in the same way “Where is the ball?” gets answered, “The ball is in the basket.” In that sense meaning is either there or it isn’t, in which case the poem is meaningless. This is frequently a complaint about some poetry written after 1910. People read it and don’t understand it and decide that it is meaningless. Blame Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and especially Gertrude Stein.

In addition to the singular noun problem, we have another—the transformation of human beings from their various roles into a Universal Consumer, Humanity as Bezos’s Gimp. Desire, the great mystery of our lives, desire, desiderare, de sidere, is from the stars. What Whitehead has as that hunger that drives us beyond ourselves, meaning itself, has been disciplined into the bottomless need for a new sweater, a new car, a new blender, a new book. Cigarettes are the perfect commodity in this world. You want it? You need it? Just light up and get 5 minutes of guaranteed satisfaction (addiction is useful that way), something akin, arguably, to meaning. Click on Jeff’s handy link which already holds your name, address, phone number, clothing brand preferences, taste in books, credit card number, facially identified mug shot, and DNA. Click (one click shopping) and it’s yours, just like when you snort that line or hit that needle. Or spark up your next smoke. So why not meaning? What’s so special about meaning it can’t be had like peanut butter or the new, improved iPhone 238?

But that’s an impoverished understanding of meaning’s possibilities. It imagines meaning as something you get, with its implied clutch. What if we think about meaning not so much as a thing that you understand or get, but, say, as a multi-dimensional field you enter into relation with, or just enter, a field of sense alive with interconnected energetic micro-events (rimes) that resonate in the bodymind of the listener with various flashes of coherence? What if differing modalities of language formation (images, similes, metaphors, metonymies, etc.) resonate with the rhymes between sounds and rhythms enlivening measure with multiphasic overlays, vibrating palimpsests? Meaning in this sense in a poem arises out of the interplay of multiple linguistic devices and components which create an event of complex, energetic relations. You could even see the poem as a receiver as Jack Spicer did, or step transformer, an arrangement of words that channels energy from the cosmos into a form of meaning humans can deal with. To experience meaning is to participate in the event as you can, which will never be the same twice. And some events are much richer and more complicated than others. Which means 1) there is no meaning to “get”; there is an experiential event to enter; and 2) meaning comes in quanta, and though each quantum is whole and coherent, it is never the Whole; and 3) you can never get all the meaning, so savour the meaning you’re with.

Poetry, good poetry, is an Opening, and it has no specified form or formal commitment. It is not a feature of this poetry or that poetry. Dividing poetry into binaries made up of antithetical components such as mainstream and avant-garde, aesthetic justice and aesthetic illiberalism, meaningful and meaningless is a favourite pastime of academics staking out claims for their authority over poetry but will not yield any useful meaning. The language event called poetry opens new realms of sense rather than narrowing them down to a choice between two. Binaries will never yield a sense of poetry’s Opening into a further world, a wilderness of sense where elements of wild meaning circulate in a fecund turmoil—phonemes, syllables, individual words, phrases, concepts, rhetorical devices (rhyme, metaphor, metonymy, etc.), feeling tones, sonal oscillations, rhythmic patterns, all resonate in relation to each other at and across various frequencies and scales. Resonance beats at the heart of this experience, the vibrations of rhythm and rhyme (both rooted in measure and number)—creating the spontaneous synchronization of oscillating systems to neuronally entrained rhythmic stimuli, also known as grooving. That’s one way of thinking how a poem means.

Jan Zwicky, who wrote a good book called The Experience of Meaning, approaches the question phenomenologically—she investigates the experience of meaning rather than meaning. That is, she only finds meaning in human experience as if it did not exist otherwise. She says, “This is what the experience of meaning is: the perception, in challenging circumstances, of a gestalt.” That certainly seems reasonable—up to a point. In that sense, wanting certainty is tied up with the desire, the hunger, to feel the revelation of wholeness, completion, the satisfaction of seeing the pattern emerge. Why the hunger? She calls it an “evolutionary pleasure” and says “it’s what the mind is for.” It’s a habit that we picked up a few eons ago while adapting to the often hostile, changing world. It may be, as Zwicky argues, inherent in the ordering of the creature, the physical structure of our brain. It may also be, as Blaser proposed, an aspect of desire, where desire is understood to be a divine manifestation. It may also be an adaptation of the creature not just to the threats from the world, but also to the world of meaning it finds itself in.

Perhaps because of this, Zwicky embraces the possibility of a poem being meaningless. A friend of hers leveled this criticism at a poem, and Zwicky was concerned to address it in her thinking of the experience of meaning. As it turns out, she kind of wants to have her cake and to eat it too when it comes to meaninglessness. On the one hand she equate meaninglessness with bad poetry. The real (good) poem is resonant, and the meaningless poem has no resonant relation to a resonant world. On the other hand, she finds the beginning of meaningless poetry in the work of Dada early in the 20th century, and sees it expand from there. I may not fully understand Zwicky here, but I would argue that even the work of Dada was not meaningless. Kurt Schwitters, one of its founders, described himself as someone who “cultivates nonsense.” Nonsense is a very different kettle of bicycles than meaninglessness. Nonsense operates in relation to sense, and that relation is meaningful. No one, I think, would accuse Lewis Carroll’s Alice books of being meaningless. Their nonsense roils with meaning. Talking about Merz, his own post-Dada practice, Schwitters wrote:

The word ‘Merz’ had no meaning when I gave it form. Now it has meaning I attached to it. The meaning of the concept ‘Merz” changes with the changing understanding of those who continue to work in the spirit of the concept.

As Schwitters presents it, meaning is not a Given, a fixed quality. It’s not either/or. meaning or meaninglessness. Meaning is alive. It is created, born, given form, which changes as it becomes part of a conversation and ongoing work. Schwitters’ meaning is a deferred event that displaces meaning as presence, but never becomes meaningless even as it oscillates between sense and nonsense, or takes up residence in nonsense.

Zwicky is critical of what she sees as a tendency or belief among some poets and artists that “art is supposed to be unintelligible.” And while I do not think that art should be anything, much less unintelligible, isn’t a certain unintelligibility a necessary part of the poem’s meaning? If the poem is to be responsive to the world of its address, shouldn’t it harbour some inaccessible secret, some unintelligibility along with its clarities, revelations, and transformations? The world is not transparent. It’s full of confusion, secrets, opaque complexities. If the poem is accurately to reflect or entertain the world, that impenetrability needs to be part of it.  The indigestible serves as essential reminder of our finitude, of our service to language which always is more than we are and always finally escapes our uses into meanings beyond us. Or you could say it serves as an opening within the poem to that which is always beyond it even in the midst of its precisions. The unintelligible is an essential part of intelligible life.

And the poem’s relation to life is always at stake in its articulations. Poems don’t represent life. Nor are they “rent” from it in some act of avant-garde faux heroic violence. Poems teem with life which cannot be encompassed, with language animated by life, with the energetic evidence of compositional choices, and with linguistically coded fragments of that life. Teeming with life means the language of the poem is composed in such a way that the world of its address enters into the field of the poem’s sense and becomes part of the energized meaning, the resonance which dances with coherence.

The poet’s life, the forms of her presence in the world, figure in that activation in multiple ways—sometimes through fragments of re-presentation, but also in modes of selectivity, diction, emotion, and compositional strategies and choices that arise in relation to the event of that life and the determining world of its occasion. The poet’s intent, what she means, reveals itself furtively, appearing and disappearing in the play of language.

No reductive opposition between, as some have proposed, “life experience” and “aesthetic experience” can approach the complexity of the poem’s linguistic entanglement with the stuff of the poet’s life. They are both part of the energetic field of sense that generates a rich meaning. The poem may be a balm or a provocation or a revelation, or all simultaneously. It may be a centre of contemplative attention. It may play with joy, or dwell in anger, locating them in a world of deep form. It may indulge the jouisssance of word play or aim to arouse emotions in the pursuit of the instigation of resistance. Yeats was great at that. One thing for sure—the poem is never Just This or Just That, and anyone who tries to sell you that line is a huckster, no matter how many poetry medals they have pinned to their puffed out chest.

The meaning of a poem, then, is not easy to put your finger on, so don’t despair if you find yourself stumped by a poem. Treat it like the person it deserves to be treated as. When you meet someone, especially someone you anticipate to be interesting, you don’t expect to understand them in 10 minutes. You savour the revelation of the person unfolding over time.

Ditto with the poem. If you don’t immediately “understand” it, carry on the conversation and see what unfolds. It’s not that there is something wrong with the poem. It wants to teach you something and you haven’t learned it yet. You think just because the poem is in English and you speak English, you ought to be able to understand its meaning, and if you can’t, there’s a problem with the poem. Wrong.

The problem is not that the poem is meaningless. The problem is you are approaching it in the wrong mood. Instead of trying to understand the meaning, trying to get it, relax and listen. Then you may hear something, a little thing, and think, wow. That’s an encounter with meaning. You may not feel that you “understand” the poem, but that’s OK. You don’t have to understand it in order to encounter meaning. Do you understand the Grand Canyon? Do you understand the Pacific Ocean, humiliating in its disguises as Spicer has it? You got a flash of meaning and there’s more where that came from. The poem is not going anywhere. It’s not that it’s teasing you, although a good poem is seductive. But the poem doesn’t give it all up just because you want it to. It doesn’t even give it all up to the poet who wrote it. It has integrity. It has secrets. But it does want you to share in its meanings. Maybe it’s a rhyme you hadn’t expected, then, bam, there it is. Or a rhythmic phrase that repeats and varies with a beautiful twist. Maybe it’s an image that stuns you, or a brief flash of insight into a moment of the poem’s thinking. All these are meaningful encounters with meaning. They can never be the Meaning. But there’s plenty of meaning to go around.

Meaning fills the poet’s mouth and the reader’s as well. The sound is tactile. She sounds the energy that fills her and she transforms it into vibrating flesh using words as a medium. Meaning is not an answer. Meaning is an event, and like all events it goes on and can’t be encompassed. As long as the poem exists, the event of its meaning continues and changes. But the way a poem means may ask more of you than you knew you had. It may ask you to rethink your idea of reading for instance. One reading is never enough, which is anathema in today’s culture of tweets and instantaneous connection where speed and more speed has become the Given. The poem stops you in your tracks, refusing to inform and communicate even as it radiates meaning that requires you to engage it. If you want to know what it means, you will have to slow down, look stuff up you are unfamiliar with, and read the poem over and over, say every night for a week, maybe two weeks. It will reward you for that with prodigious gifts of meaning.

Poetry resists the rush to transparency by meaning too much. A poem that means too much requires not just two readings, but many readings. Give it what it asks of you and it will yield to your fidelity. In a world dominated by instant “information” that doesn’t inform and instant “communication” that communicates only instructions, poetry offers a door into another experience of what we call meaning. It offers you a world beyond anything you think you know.

Big Bitch at the OK Corral

Camille Paglia has long been a self-professed bitch. In a typically over-the-top, in-your-face display of female machismo, she seized a male-centered term of derision and turned it into a post-feminist exercise of female power. The bitch, or more properly, The Bitch, is the nightmare incarnation of the terrors of all moralists. She is nasty, bad tempered, and does not suffer fools at all. Elevating the Bitch to the status of a pagan divinity, Paglia has waged unrelenting war on the proper, the correct (politically and otherwise) and pretenses of all shapes, colours and sexual preferences. At her best, she is capable of genuinely challenging the moralist banalities that pass for politics in too many circles, right and left, today, not to mention the often-preposterous assumptions we all tend to harbour in unexamined corners of our lives. Occasionally, she can even make you laugh at yourself, a genuine political contribution to the health of the polity. On the other hand, more often than not, she’s just what we used to call a shit-kicker.

Not there’s anything wrong with shit-kicking. Having spent a few years in the Teamsters, I’ve been known to kick a bit myself once in a while. But as fun as it is to be a provocateur (and it can be really fun to watch the moralists pop a gasket at your command), it’s a mistake to confuse shit-kicking with thinking, as Paglia’s 1999 talk to the McLuhan Institute demonstrated. Published as “The North American Intellectual Tradition” in Salon in 2000 and in her 2018 book, Provocations: Collected Essays), Paglia’s essay attempted to define some uniquely American mode of thinking stretching from Emerson to her own heroes of the mind, Marshal McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman O. Brown. There’s nothing really new in that aspect of her proposal. It’s the same compulsive influence anxiety that’s been convulsing through American thought for at least 200 years. Paglia’s contribution is to attempt to link it to the energies of American pop culture. And it’s not that she’s wrong, though she isn’t right either. As Stanley Cavell made evident, Emerson, and after him Thoreau, redefined the possibilities of philosophy in a new mode of thinking tied to their understanding of the unique energies of the ordinary world emerging in USAmerica. What she misses or ignores is the interconnectedness of the thinking of that new common world with the thinking of Romanticism, especially as it was being written and practiced in Jena.

Embracing the liberatory energies of pop culture and elevating them to almost philosophical status, Paglia neglects to pay attention to the cosmology it drags along behind it. This is what happens when you take your McLuhan straight with no chaser. The medium (and its admittedly Dionysian energies) so totally overshadows the content that it’s simply forgotten. Paglia’s argument is a case in point. How else explain how she starts off proposing a critique of contemporary continental philosophy and ends up at the OK Corral?

On one side of her archetypal gunfight are the Clantons (the Clintons?) in the guise of three Continental scumbags—“Black Jack” Derrida, “Ladyboy” Foucault, and “Iron Jacques” Lacan­—spiritually sick refugees from a ravaged, post-war Europe, lurking in the shadows of the barn waiting the bushwhack the Earps with a blast of incomprehensible prose. The Earps, marching three abreast down the sunlit streets of Tombstone with their scatterguns nestled lovingly cross their broad, homo-erotic chests, take the form of upright Marshal Marshall McLuhan (or is that Marshall Marshal?), lovable old “Lightning” Les Fiedler with his grizzled beard and his pot belly, (ah! the body, he seems to say with each sure step) and cantankerous “Nobby” Brown wearing a dress shirt, cut-off jeans and black street shoes, and sporting inked knuckles that read “Love” and “Death”.

As Paglia stages the showdown between the slick Euro-trash philosophers reeking of last night’s overindulgence in Heidegger, and the lovable old Yankee cowpoke theorists, their eyes lit up with the immense blue skies of Montana, one thing becomes glaringly obvious. This is not a discussion about ideas. It’s a classic American pop-culture confrontation between the forces of good and evil. We could be in any Arnold Schwarzenegger movie of the last 25 years. Our Bitch, it seems, has something of a moralistic streak to her after all, and ideas are the first thing out the window when moralisms break through the door.

It’s too bad, too, because the territory Paglia stakes out is interesting and full of fascinating complexities waiting to be explored. One by one, though, they fall like innocent bystanders beneath the fullisade of gunfire from the shootout. Paglia states at one point that her good guys derive from “the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive North American English.” She neglects to mention, however, that British Romanticism derives almost wholly from—gasp!—German Romanticism via S.T. Coleridge, and that German Romanticism was one of the great inspirations for Paglia’s arch-villain, Martin Heidegger. Add to that the fact that “pragmatic English” has strong roots in German, and you’re faced with a universe of marvelous, even awe inspiring, connections, relationships, derivations, and cross-pollinations.

Even more confounding to Camille’s vision of philosophical Armageddon is “Black Jack” Derrida’s debt to one of Paglia’s boys in white, R.W. Emerson. Emerson was a chief inspiration for the post-philosophical thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche (you can read Nietzsche’s enthusiastic comments and even cribs in the margins of his copy of Emerson’s essays), and Nietzsche, contrary to Paglia’s apocalyptic vision of philosophical collapse after his work, was a major source for both Heidegger and Husserl (who, incidentally, were far from being “narrow French thinkers”—when did Heidegger and Husserl become French, anyway? Or is it just their “thinking” that’s French?) both of whom were struggling to find a way out of the impasse of European philosophical rationalism. Derrida, who was indebted to them both, can in that light be seen as a kind of Talmudic, post-holocaust oracular Emerson returning in disguise to haunt his own source.

These are fascinating connections, offering a world of fruitful contemplation and scholarly detective work into the intricate intellectual filiations that extend back and forth across the Atlantic, taking on different casts and emphases, but confronting common historical realities. But Henry James Camille ain’t. All these obscure and obscured relationships lead to a sense of complexity, sometimes a source of illumination and clarity, sometimes a sea of confusion. And confusion, we know from all those movie westerns has no place at the OK Corral when the guns are blazing and everything decent and wholesome and American is on the line. The glory of simplicity and certainty light up the purple mountain’s majesty. The Bitch single-handedly clarifies all confusions with a dramatic gesture of unexpected common sense—don’t leave your keys on the car.

It’s interesting that much of the thinking of the bad guys in this staged shootout—the Euro-trash scum bags—has consistently moved to lay bare the structures and dynamics that lead to the kind of knee-jerk dichotomizing that Paglia seems happy to wallow in, drawing out the ways in which that binary thinking upholds certain structures of power. One fact haunts their thinking: the death camps of World War II, and the minds that could conceive, build, and operate them by mobilizing all the institutions of the Enlightenment. This may be what Paglia refers to when she speaks with contempt of war-ravaged Europe. What the scumbags found there was a ubiquitous demonic us against them that eventually permitted any horror. Maybe that’s why Paglia is so upset with them. She doesn’t want to have to think about what she might meet there.