A L S O_ T O D A Y

Waiting to be unzipped
By Mindy Hung
Zipped: The secrets of a grad student virgin

Comics
Keith Knight: Tk

A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
--- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled ---

Forget Foucault; remember the facts

Filling in the black holes of a liberal arts education means returning to the stacks with an open mind and open notebook.

Dear Camille:

I'm afraid I've become one of those confused modern people who, faced with an onslaught of fragmented, decontextualized information, finds a commentator she respects and quotes her. That's you, by the way, and as much as I respect you and your intellect, I want to do it for myself! How on earth did I get to this point? I've always been an independent thinker, and I even managed to make it through a Seven Sisters education in the mid-1980s without imbibing too much feminist or post-this-or-that intellectual theory. On the other hand, maybe some theoretical training would have done me some good. I find I do good critical thinking on tiny issues but am overwhelmed when it comes to the big picture. Philosophy? Beyond me. Geopolitics? How do I know? So what I'm asking, dear Camille, is how does an intelligent person cultivate her intellect in the (way-) post-college years? I want to be able to figure out how the world should be and then have fun deciding what does and doesn't work. Is there any hope for me to learn to interpret world events and cultural developments according to my own standards? Am I a ninny, and if so, is there a book I can read to learn not to be one?

-- Lorraine Murray

Dear Ms. Murray:

Fragmentation, I often say, is in the eye of the beholder. T. S. Eliot's vision in "The Waste Land" (1922) of the collapse of Western culture into a heap of debris is the result of a provincial, neurotic and now passé mind-set -- endlessly replicated by the epigones of Samuel Beckett (like Michel Foucault) and their irony-poisoned postmodernist heirs.

My idea of fragmentation is history-rich: Archaeology, my childhood passion and scholarly inspiration, gathers up the ruins and makes them into hypothetical new wholes. It's the Western Enlightenment (maligned by Foucault) that invented the painstaking, backbreaking system of excavation, measurement, documentation and cataloguing of ancient fragments that is modern archaeology.

"Decontextualization" these days is mostly a dismal failure of imagination. The great artistic movement of surrealism, animated by Freudian concepts, showed how to make startlingly revelatory juxtapositions of ideas and images from different contexts. Indeed, Marcel Duchamp, the dean of short-lived Dada, virtually invented decontextualization in works like "Fountain," which transferred a urinal from the pissoir to the art gallery.

I fervently welcome your stated ambition to remain "an independent thinker" who gets "the big picture." The problem with poststructuralism and postmodernism is that they lack an overarching sense of chronology, as well as variety of tone. Every period or work they address ends up sounding the same -- flat, nasal and snide. I pity the graduates of the elite schools of the past 20 years, whose fast-track humanities teachers have treated historicity like so much confetti to toss in the air.

My main advice to you, and to all others who feel adrift in today's fast-moving media age, is to think of learning as a lifetime mission. The recent pack of trendy professors seem like such absurdly small potatoes to me because I identify very strongly with the monastic and rabbinical traditions of scholarship, with their devotion to a higher ideal than institutional careerism. I know what erudition looks and acts like -- and it sure isn't to be found on the slick academic circuit with its feeble superstars whose work won't survive their lifetimes.

The four-year, cafeteria-style curriculum of American colleges and universities is barely 50 years old and has yet to prove that it can consistently produce well-rounded, well-trained citizens in any field of the humanities. In feeling something was lacking in your 1980s Seven Sisters education (when political correctness was gelling), you have a lot of company. American students are treated like cattle -- herded into classroom pens and fed formula gruel. Thanks to the aggressive protectionism of college administrators again acting in loco parentis (a policy my 1960s generation rebelled against but which today's latchkey kids seem to covet), college has become a banal extension of high school. Social infantilization inevitably leads to intellectual passivity.

No matter what the gaps of your college experience, you certainly are well-prepared to put the library to maximum use. In my essays and public lectures, I have constantly lauded the reference collection as the great heart of the library, where all those eager for knowledge but disillusioned by bad teaching should concentrate their efforts. The encyclopedias, classical dictionaries and world atlases have everything you need to reorient yourself amid today's "onslaught" of information. There are superb general-interest as well as specialized encyclopedias and handbooks of science, religion, philosophy and art.

Browsing -- following your instinct from shelf to shelf and letting a chain of ideas link to the next -- is the most fruitful way to add to your store of knowledge. As a teacher, I favor old-fashioned time lines, the visual track recording the rough shape of rising and falling cultures and artistic styles. My students find useful, for example, a simple notation of the 1,000-year sequence from 450 B.C. to 450 A.D., which extends from the high point of classical Athens to the approximate fall of Rome. Then another 1,000-year vault takes one to the revival of paganism at the Italian Renaissance (specifically, Donatello's bronze "David," which breaks with medieval conventions).

By setting up a few of these markers (selecting the ones most meaningful to you), you can build your own program for self-education -- the only kind that counts. Biographies of major figures -- from Hatshepsut, Ikhnaton, Aristotle, Alexander, Augustus and Constantine to St. Thomas Aquinas, Galileo, Martin Luther, Louis XIV, Robespierre, Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Nietzsche, Lenin, Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gandhi and Mao Zedong -- can be very helpful in filling in political and intellectual history, with its surge and flux.

I would advise keeping a folder or notebook specifically designated for quotations you find striking or suggestive, leading to future inquiry. Studiousness and curiosity need to be nurtured. In matters of the mind, your highest responsibility is to yourself. Be constantly attentive: Every walk through city or country, every trip here or abroad, should be an opportunity to observe and reflect on both nature and culture. Knowledge is cumulative.

For the short term, however, I recommend that you begin by perusing the cultural atlases in a good reference collection (the reference librarians are there to help). These amazingly informative volumes contain climate and topography charts and maps of the ancient and modern world, showing century by century the migration of populations and the consolidation, expansion and retraction of nations and empires. The atlases for the Middle East, Far East and Africa in particular will give you a very bracing geopolitical tune-up.

When in doubt, take notes. I am a firm believer in the neurological intimacy of muscle and brain. Movement and thought once enjoyed Mediterranean unity in Greek philosophy's walk-and-talk style -- a dynamic fusion I hoped my rock 'n' roll generation would restore. Alas, our bequest to the students who succeeded us seems to have been "19th Nervous Breakdown" rather than "Stairway to Heaven."

Postscript:

On Nov. 17, I will be delivering a lecture called "American Educational Reform" at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. At the invitation of the National Theatre in London, I wrote the program notes for its current production of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," starring Helen Mirren, which opened on Oct. 20.
SALON | Nov. 4, 1998

Got a question on academic or campus life for Camille Paglia? Send it to Camille on Campus.