"The French constrain their Language all the time by Bureaucracy. "
Peterson: You touched on this idea of the destruction of the work of art. And one of things I really like about reading Nietzsche was his discussion of ressentiment, of resentment.
And it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the motive power that drives the postmodernist. . . Let’s call it - it’s not a revolution - transformation seems to me to be driven by resentment about virtually anything, that has any - well, what would you say - any merit of competence or aesthetic quality.
And I don’t know if that’s. . . It seems to me that that’s partly rooted in The Academic’s disdain for The Business-world, which I think is driven by their relative economic inequality. Because most people who are as intelligent as academics are, from a pure IQ point of view, make more money in the private sphere, and so I think that drives some of it. But there also seems to be this - there’s a destruction, an aim for destruction, of the aesthetic quality of the literary or artistic work, its reduction to some kind of power game, and, surrounding that, the reduction of everything to something that approximates A Power Game. Which I can’t help but identifying with jealousy and resentment as a fundamental motivator. Does that seem reasonable to you?
Paglia : These professors who allege that Art is nothing but an ideological movement by one elite against another group - these people are Philistines. They’re Philistines. They’re middlebrow, hopelessly middlebrow. They have no sense of beauty, they no sense of the aesthetic.
Now Marxism does indeed assert this.
Marxism tries to reconfigure The Universe in terms of Materialism. It does not recognise any kind of spiritual dimension. Now, I’m an atheist, but I see the great world religions, as enormous works of art, as the best way to understand the universe and man’s place in it. I find them enormously moving. They’re like enormous poems. And what I have called for - the true revolution would have been to make the core curriculum of world education - the world, okay - the great religions of the world. I feel that is the only way to achieve an understanding, and it’s also a way to present the aesthetic. I feel that the real 60s vision was about exultation, elevation, cosmic consciousness. All of these things were rejected by these midgets, intellectual midgets, who seized onto Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. My career has been in the art schools. My entire career, beginning at Bennington College.
So I represent a challenge to this from the perspective of Art. It is absolute nonsense, as post-structuralism maintains, that reality is mediated by Language, by words. Everything we can know, including Gender. It is absolutely madness. Because I’m teaching students whose majors are ceramics or dance, who are jazz musicians, who understand reality in terms of the body and sensory activation. See what happened was, something was going on in the art world as well. I identify with Andy Warhol and pop art. That was what was going on during my years in college. Everything about Andy Warhol was like “Wow!” Admiration. Wow. What happened immediately after that in the arts, 1970s, was this collapse into a snide sort of postmodernism also. This happened in the art world. It was an utter misunderstanding of culture, it seems to me, by that movement in the art world. That is, oppositional art, in my view, is dead. What postmodernism is is a pathetic attempt to continue the old heroism of the avant-garde. The avant-garde was genuinely heroic from the early 19th century. We’re talking about Courbet, the realists. We’re talking about Monet and the impressionists. People who have genuinely suffered for their radical ideas and their innovations. Going right down to Picasso and down to Jackson Pollock, who truly suffered for his art. It was only after his death that suddenly the market was created for abstract art. Pop art killed the avant-garde. The idea that the avant-garde continues is an absolute delusion of the contemporary art world, which feels that they must attack, attack, attack. Challenge the simplistic beliefs of the hoi polloi. Excuse me. From the moment Andy Warhol and embraced the popular media instead of having the opposition to it that serious artists had had, that was the end of oppositional art. So we have been going on now for fifty years. The postmodernism in academe is hand-in-hand with the stupidity and infantilism that masquerades as important art at galleries everywhere. This incredible, incredible mechanism of contemporary art pushing things that are so hopelessly derivative, with this idea once again that the art world has a superior view of reality. Authentic leftism is populist. It is based in working class style, working class language, working class direct emotion, in an openness and [inaudible] of speech. Not this fancy, contorted jargon of the pseudo-leftists of academe, who are frauds. These people who managed to rise to the top at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton - how many of these people are radical? They are career people. They’re corporate types. They love the institutional context. They know how to manipulate the bureaucracy, which has totally invaded and usurped academe everywhere. These people are company players. They could have done well in any field. They love to sit in endless committees. They love bureaucratic regulation and so on. Not one ‘leftist’ in American academe raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs, which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people - not one voice to challenge that invasion by the bureaucrats, absolute fascists bureaucrats. They’re cancerous. There are so many of them. The faculty have completely lost any power in American academe. It’s a scandal what has happened. And they deserve the present servitude that they’re in right now, because they never protested. My first job at Bennington College, 1976. I was there when there was an uprising by the faculty, against the encroachment by the board of trustees and the president. It was a huge thing. It was reported on the New York Times. And we pushed that president out. And there’s not been a single uprising of that kind against encroachment by the trustees and by the administrations. All these decades. Passive. Slaves, slaves, they deserve their slavery. Peterson: Yep. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve thought the same thing about university professors for a long time. They get exactly what they deserve because they never stand up and say no. And the fact that in the United States - it’s not quite as bad in Canada, I wouldn’t say. . . But the fact that the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for their student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension. It seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students’ future earnings. And they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control. Something like that. So it’s a real bargain with the devil. Paglia: And a total abandonment of any kind of education, actually, in history and culture that has come along with it. The transformation into a cafeteria kind of a menu where you can pick this course or that course or this course without any kind of guidance from the university about a central core curriculum that teaches you history and chronology, and introduces you to the basics. Because our professors are such prima donnas, they can only teach in their little areas. So we have this total fragmentation. The great art history survey courses are being abandoned steadily. Why? Because graduate students are not trained to see the great narratives, because we are taught now that narratives are false.
Peterson: That’s another issue I want to bring up, because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists. I can’t understand the causal relationship. Tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist. So I’m dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise. And there is some danger in that. But the central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which actually happens to be the case. You can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical. And so, if they’re not canonical, and if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of reality, then it serves some other master. And so the master that it hypothetically serves for the postmodernists is nothing but power, because that seems to be everything they believe in. They don’t believe in competence. They don’t believe in authority. They don’t seem to believe in an objective world, because everything is language-mediated. So it’s an extraordinarily cynical perspective: that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them are canonical. You can attribute everything to power and dominance. Does that seem like a reasonable summary of the postmodern. . .
Paglia: Yes, exactly. It’s a radical relativism.
Peterson: Okay, it’s a radical relativism. Now, but the strange thing is, despite. . . Okay, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of grand narratives. So that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Erich Neumann, because of course they’re foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that there are embodied grand narratives. That’s never touched. But then, despite the fact that the grand narrative is rejected, there’s a neo-Marxism that’s tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade into this strange identity politics. And I don’t. . . Two things. I don’t understand the causal relationship there. The skeptical part of me things that postmodernism was an intellectual. . . It’s intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union, and has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever. But I still can’t understand how the postmodernists can make the “no grand narrative” claim, but then immerse themselves in this grand narrative without anyone pointing out the evident contradictions. I don’t understand that. So what do you think about that? Paglia: Well I can only speak about literary professors, really, and they seem to me, almost universally in the U.S., to be very naive. They seem to know nothing about actual history, political science, or economics. It’s simply an attitude. They have an attitude. Marxism becomes simply a badge by which they telegraph their solidarity with a working class that they have nothing to do with. Peterson: And generally nothing but contempt for. Paglia: Yes, and the thing is that the campus leftists are almost notorious for their rather snobbish treatment of staff. They don’t have any rapport with the actual working class members of the infrastructure: the janitors and even the secretaries. There’s a kind of high and mighty aristocracy. These are people who have wandered into the English departments and are products of a time, during the New Criticism, when history and psychology had been excluded. My ambition was. . . I loved the New Criticism as a style of textual analysis. And the New Criticism had multiple interpretations that were possible and that were encouraged. In fact, one of the great projects was Maynard Mack’s series Twentieth Century Views, where you had these books. . . I adored them in college. It was about Jane Austen or about Emily Brontë or about Wordsworth. And they were collections of alternate views of the same thing. The idea that there were no alternate views, and there was no relativistic, situational kind of an interpretive approach is nonsense. But the point was we needed to restore history to literary study, and we needed to add psychology to it, because there was great animus against Freud. When I arrived in graduate school, in fact, I actually went into the director of graduate studies and protested the way ‘Freud’ and ‘Freudian’ were used as negative terms in a sneering way by the very WASP professors. Actually, it seemed like we were moving there. The early 1970s was a great period of psycho-biography about political figures. So I thought, ‘It’s happening.’ All of a sudden it all got short-circuited by this arrival of post-structuralism and postmodernism in the 1970s. So I feel I am an old historicist, not a new historicist. I think new historicism is an absolute scam. It’s just a way. . . It’s like tweezers. You pick a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. You make a little tiny salad, and somehow this atomized thing is supposed to mean something. It’s all, to me, very superficial, very cynical, very distant. I am the product of old historicism, of German philology. My first choice of a profession when I was a child was Egyptology, archeology. Everything I ever think about or say is related to an enormous time scheme, from antiquity and indeed from the Stone Age. And that is the problem with these people. They’re mal-educated. The postmodernists and academic Marxists are mal-educated, embarrassingly so. They know nothing before the present. Foucault is absolutely a joke before the Enlightenment. Perhaps he might be useful to people to talk about what happened after neoclassicism, which, by the way, he failed to notice. A lot of what he was talking about turns out to be simply the hangover of neoclassicism. This is how ignorant that man was. He was not talented as a researcher. He knew absolutely nothing. He knew nothing about antiquity. How can you make any kind of large structure, large mechanism, to analyze Western culture without knowing about classical antiquity? He did not see anything. This was a person who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything. Peterson: Maybe part of it is that if you generate an intelligible doctrine of radical relativism, then there is no reason to assume that there are distinctions between categories of knowledge, or between different levels of quality of knowledge. I’ve seen the same thing in the psychology departments, although we have the - what would you call it - the luxury of being bounded at least to some degree by the empirical method and by biology. It’s one of the things that keeps most of the branches of psychology relatively sane, because the real world is actually built into it to some degree. But if you accept the postmodernist claim of radical relativism, then you completely demolish the idea that there are quality levels that are associated with education, because everything becomes the same. And that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable justification for maintaining ignorance. You know Foucault, I actually found him the most readable of the Lacan, Derrida, Foucault triad. You can read Foucault. I read Madness and Civilization and a couple of his other books, and I thought that they were painfully obvious. The idea that mental disorder is in part a social construct is self-evident to anybody who has even a smattering of psychiatric training.
The real narrow medical types tend to think of a mental disorder, let’s say, as something that might be purely biological. They have a pure disease model. But nobody who’s a sophisticated thinker ever thinks that. Partly because medicine is a brand of engineering, not a brand of science, because it’s associated with health, and the diagnostic categories are hybrids between physiological observation and socio- cultural condition. Everyone knows that. So when I read Madness and Civilization I thought, well that’s not radical, that’s just bloody self-evident. Paglia: Well, you know Foucault’s admirers actually think that he began the entire turn toward a sociological grounding of modern psychology. Social psychology was well launched in the 1920s. The levels of ignorance that this people who think Foucault is so original have not read Durkheim, they’ve not read Max Weber, they’ve never read Erving Goffman. So in other words, to me everything in Foucault seemed obvious, because I had read the sources from which he was borrowing without attribution. Again, I know these people. I, in some cases, knew them in graduate school - people who went on to become these admirers of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida. And I know what their training was. Their training was purely within the English department. That’s all they ever knew. They never made any research outside of that. Foucault is simply this mechanism. It’s like a little tiny kit by which they can approach everything in culture. But the contortions of language, the deliberate labyrinth of elitist language, at the same time as pretending to be a leftist? This is one of the biggest frauds ever practiced.
Peterson: So I got a story to tell you that you might like because I’ve thought a lot about that use of language. Because language can be used as camouflage, and so here’s the story. I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky. So he was talking about zebras, and zebras of course have stripes. And hypothetically that’s associated with camouflage. But it’s not a straightforward association because zebras are black and white, and they’re on the veldt along with the lions. The lions are camouflaged because they’re grass colored, but the bloody zebras are black and white. You can see them like 15 miles away. So biologists go out to study zebras, and they’re making notes on a zebra. And they watch it, then they look down at their notes, and then they look up. But they think, ‘Uh oh, I don’t know which zebra I was looking at.’ The camouflage is actually against the herd because a zebra is a herd animal, not an individual. So the black and white stripes break up the animal against the herd, so you can’t identify it. So this was a quandary for the biologists, so they did one of two things. One was drive a jeep up to the zebra herd, and use a dab of red paint and dab the haunch of the zebra, or tag it with an ear tag like you use for cattle. The lions would kill it. So as soon as it became identifiable the predators could organise their hunt around that identifiable animal. That’s why there’s the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals, but they don’t. They take down the identifiable animals. So that’s the thing: if you stick your damn head up, you get picked off by the predators. One of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd-like entities, and then they share a language. And the language unites them. As long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn’t anybody in the coterie that’s going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd. And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language. It’s group protection strategy. It has absolutely nothing to do with the search for. . . It’s the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand the system.
Paglia: So true. To me it’s blatantly careerist because it was about advancement, and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise. This is a special technical language. No one else can understand it. Only we can.
But what’s absurd about it, absolutely ludicrous, is that these people, these American academics, are imitating the contorted language of translations from the French.
When Lacan is translated into English, there’s a contortion there. What he was trying to do in French was to break up the neoclassical formulations that descended from [Jean] Racine. There was something that was going on - there was a sabotage of the French language that was going on - that was necessary in France, not necessary in English. We have this long tradition of poetry going back to Shakespeare and Chaucer. We have our own language, far more vital than the French.
Peterson : Oh yeah, The French constrain their language all the time by bureaucracy.
Paglia: That’s right.
So the amateurism of American academics trying to imitate a translation of Lacan when Lacan is doing something in France - that is absolutely not necessary, and indeed WRONG to be doing in English.
The utter cynical abandonment of the great tradition of the English department. I felt that the true radicalism was not about adding on other departments, so we have African American studies and Women’s Studies and so on. The true radicalism would have been to shatter the departmental structure. That’s what I wanted. I feel that was the authentic revolutionary 1960s thing to do: to blend all the literature studies together,
