It Doesn't Have to Be Stupid

On Sontag vs. Paglia and Fan Club Activism

“Did you really say what Entertainment Weekly quotes you as saying—in effect, ‘Who is Camille Paglia?’”

 – Christopher Lydon

Activism isn’t a fan club. It’s tempting to say this is a contemporary misunderstanding, a consequence of a generation’s confusion of participation with friendship, but old beefs tell us otherwise. One such feather-ruffling, following a Susan Sontag essay published in the New York Review of Books in 1974, has been recently republished in On Women, a small volume of Sontag’s essays from the ’70s—most of them previously uncollected—edited by David Rieff and introduced by Merve Emre.

The essay in question, “Fascinating Fascism” (also republished in On Women), was a departure for Sontag. With the exception of some theater reviews and an early-career evisceration of Sartre’s Saint Genet, most of Sontag’s criticism was laudatory, introductory; she had found something and she wanted you, too, to pay attention to it. But her essay on Leni Riefenstahl, which appeared during a rehabilitation of Riefenstahl’s talents as a filmmaker despite her close collaboration and friendship with Adolf Hitler, is perhaps the bitterest thing she wrote.

What begins as a review of a new volume of Riefenstahl’s photographs quickly becomes an occasion to explore the director’s relationship to propaganda throughout her entire career, as well as how so much of the mythos surrounding Riefenstahl at the time had been built on demonstrable lies, which Sontag picks apart one by one—not least in the most devastating footnote of all time.¹ Riefenstahl’s new photographs are no different from her Nazi films, Sontag suggests, because there is still no hiding her “contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.” Riefenstahl cares only for “myth not history”—perhaps the crux of fascist ideology (which is also built on demonstrable lies). Dense, re-readable, sharp, and wide-ranging, “Fascinating Fascism” is the most articulate and accessible expansion on Benjamin’s notion that fascism “sees its salvation in giving [the masses] not their [political] right, but instead a chance to express themselves”² that I’ve read.

Adrienne Rich disagreed. Sontag’s essay, she wrote in a letter to the Review, is full of “failed connections,” and lacks a through line to her more evidently feminist essays. “Many women,” writes Rich, after reading those other essays, “began to look in Sontag’s new work for a serious reflection of feminist values. But there is an absence of integration or even continuity” between those pieces and other work that Sontag published. “I wish,” Rich concludes,

that Sontag could have carried her exploration of this cult [of sexual/patriarchal violence] beyond its encapsulation in a fad, or even in the phenomenon called fascism, and perceived it in the light of patriarchal history, sexuality, pornography, and power, in which the first people turned into things are always women, and female (negative) qualities are attributed to every dominated group as the excuse for domination. It is frustrating, and suggestive of the way women’s minds, as well as bodies, have been colonized, that this did not happen.

In her response, Sontag focuses on Rich’s “wish” that the essay in question had been more explicitly feminist: “Surely it is not treasonable to think that there are other goals than the depolarization of the two sexes, other wounds than sexual wounds, other identities than sexual identity, other politics than sexual politics—and other ‘anti-human values’ than ‘misogynist’ ones.” Sontag didn’t live up to Rich’s feminist expectations because, she says, her essay had addressed itself “to a different problem, with the intention of making a different point.” She then uses Rich’s response as an example of how feminism, in being so reductive, can place a “limitation” on itself and become “a bit simple-minded.” Rich’s assertion that Sontag has failed “to keep up feminist pressure at the center of [her] writing and filmmaking” is exactly, Sontag says, the kind of propaganda or demand for “a ‘correct’ position” that Rich denies she herself is engaged in. Rich’s “well-intentioned letter” thus displays “a persistent indiscretion of feminist rhetoric: anti-intellectualism.” In responding to a takedown of the most famous female filmmaker of the time period, Rich’s buried and tortured question—Why isn’t this essay, which is about fascism, instead about feminism?—lays bare the facile one-dimensionality of so many dogged and narrow-minded activist movements. It reveals the activist’s surrendering of their own agency.

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During a televised interview in 2003, Sontag called equal pay for women “the bedrock of any movement on behalf of women.” She then goes on, winking at a common misconception of her: “People sometimes ask me almost timidly, ‘Would you call yourself a feminist?’ as if they’re asking me either a delicate question or maybe I’ll be insulted. How could I not be a feminist?… It’s probably the only -ist word I like because I find so many people are afraid of it.” Because Sontag primarily read and revered men; because her friends tended to be men; because she remarked—acknowledging that men have had more time and resources to practice writing novels and poetry and plays—that literature (for which she had uncharacteristically unplural definitions) was not “an equal-opportunity employer”; and because she rejected the idea, throughout her life—including in the ostensibly and candidly feminist essays published in On Women—that literary or intellectual standards should ever be lowered or softened because of one’s gender, the assumption that she wasn’t a feminist, that she wasn’t allied to the cause, followed her around for decades.

In addition to her late novels and several other collections, On Women provides ample evidence that feminism was never far from Sontag’s mind, even if she did allow herself to think about other things—which is perhaps the greatest “idea” or “lesson” in considering Sontag’s oeuvre: her pluralistic approach to life and to thought. For Sontag, this pluralism was entwined with rigorous literary and intellectual standards, which is another way of saying authority. In the unfortunately titled essay, “The Third World of Women,” she rebuffs the idea, so prominent among leftists of the time (and today), that Marxism will automatically open the door to equality between men and women. Looking at the facts should make it obvious: “No government which claims to operate on part of Marx’s legacy has rethought the condition of women… Marxists have not properly estimated the depth of sexism any more than, in setting out to defeat imperialism, they properly estimated the depths of racism.” However, she adds, “only in a society that one calls, for want of a better name, socialist would it be possible to invent and institutionalize forms of life that would liberate women.” Here is that “and”: the idea that one can believe in a thing and criticize it—often ruthlessly.

Sontag often addressed this directly. Included in her response to Rich is her caveat that, “However opposed I am to authority based on privileges of gender (and of race), I cannot imagine any form of human life or society without some form of authority, of hierarchy… The hope of abolishing authority as such is part of a childish, sentimental fantasy about the human condition. Much of feminist rhetoric not only tends to reduce history to psychology but leaves one with a shallow psychology as well as a thinned-out sense of history.” Substitute “feminist rhetoric” here with the slogans and ideology and memes of almost any other social justice movement in recent days, and Sontag’s critique is, like so much of her work, startlingly contemporary. Dismantle the patriarchy—fuck yeah, right on—but let’s not pretend this kind of thinking doesn’t deserve its own criticism, its own hierarchy, and that the further it hardens into absolutism and simplicity the more harmful it becomes.

Social media, if nothing else, has proved Sontag’s intimation of just how disastrous it is to give everyone a platform from which they can share their opinions and ideas, even if those individuals are “on the right side” of a movement; even if their politics conjugate with yours. Egalitarianism of rights, protections, and access doesn’t mean we should debase ourselves, and ultimately harm ourselves, with more nihilistic egalitarianisms, such as assuming one person’s position on a complex topic is as valid as another’s, or that one work of art is “just as good” as another.

Concluding her thoughts on Riefenstahl, Sontag observes how

Art that seemed eminently worth defending ten years ago, as a minority or adversary taste, no longer seems defensible today, because the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous, in a way they were not then. The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

This, more than anything, underscores the relevance of On Women appearing now, when an awareness that standards have been applied nefariously, that authority has abused its position, has crumbled into a total paranoia that standards are inherently untrustworthy, that authority is de facto harmful. But standards and authority are necessary—for growth, for organization, for pluralization, for tolerance. Social media—which is, in its structure, a fascist aesthetic that rewards reduction, dehumanization, and exclusion, all in service of profit for the actual wealthy elite whose authority is harmful³—is perhaps the most evident and omnipresent arena in which one can see the degrading realities of this paranoia. A recent example—involving, surprisingly, Susan Sontag—reiterated just how stupid and craven our “discourse” has become.

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In October of 1992, following the publication of The Volcano Lover, Sontag sat for an interview on Christopher Lydon and Company. Watching the footage, it’s clear that Lydon isn’t interested in discussing her novel at all, and centers most of his questions around television (which she says she doesn’t watch) and pop culture (which she says she doesn’t delineate from “high” culture). But the most famous question from the interview concerns the writings—mainstream at the time—of Camille Paglia, of whom Sontag says, “until about two weeks ago I’d never heard of her.”⁴ A few months later, when Lydon interviewed Paglia on the same program, he showed her this clip, and Paglia erupts: Sontag is over, she is the new Sontag, Sontag is boring, Sontag’s fiction is awful, Sontag turned her back on her readers. Paglia’s work from this time is also full of jabs at Sontag, as well as—more queasily—comparisons. In the “cancelled preface,” as she calls it (anticipating the right wing and centrist obsession with what they are “not allowed” to say), to Sexual Personae, she notes how Sontag is “tall, thin, and cerebral, in European terms a northerner as I am a southerner. Her gravity and austerity belong to the era of Sartrean nausea, of metaphysical dyspepsia… I, on the other hand, with my Mediterranean mesomorphic bullishness and frenetic Joan Rivers comedy routines, am an overeater and overstater, a gourmandizer of the grand manner.” It’s possibly the most unhinged way anyone has ever said “I don’t think about her.” In a lecture at MIT, she says “I don’t know what the hell [Sontag]’s been doing for twenty years. She thinks she’s a novelist… She has no talent whatever for fiction-writing. It’s just a delusion. This is a woman who should have been a leading intellectual… She should have done that, and I’m going to be trying to bring serious intellectual issues into the public domain and similarly bring public concerns back into academia.” As I’ve noted elsewhere: 30 years later, volume two of Sexual Personae has yet to appear.

In June of this year, this sideshow came back to town. Benjamin Carlson, a former editor at The Atlantic, shared the three-minute clip and called it a “feud” that was “so painfully entertaining” it was “impossible to look away.” In a pair of follow up tweets, Carlson said they were “both good writers worth revisiting,” but it was “Paglia who continues to be a cultural force today.”

Only in the sense that Paglia is alive and Sontag is dead does Paglia’s continuation as “a cultural force” make any sense; and only then because there’s nothing new for Sontag to write, while Paglia is still out there typing. The real rot at the core of the whole ugly apple, however, is Carlson’s both. There is no “both” when considering Susan Sontag and Camille Paglia because the whole equivalence—that they are two intellectuals engaged in a feud—is nonsense. Paglia is a rebuffed protégé too narcissistic to realize the woman she looked up to barely even noticed her, much less took an interest in her, and too obstinate to realize her own lack of talent.⁵ Her work is saturated with gender essentialist binaries, biological determinism, rape apologies, and other fascist storybook drivel. Early in Sexual Personae, she identifies “the male homosexual” as “the most valorous of attempts to evade the femme fatale and to defeat nature,” but concludes that “nature has won, as she always does, by making disease the price of promiscuous sex.” The absence, here, of any mention of the Reagan administration’s silence on AIDS and its cruel withholding of federal resources to control or treat it, is typical of Paglia’s work. Homosexuality is a defiance of nature, which nature answers. None of this has anything to do with life or with human beings—only symbols and archetypes. Her project, like Riefenstahl’s, is to replace history with myth.

In this way, Carlson’s framing of this cultural curiosity is a microcosm not only of social media but of the opinion pages of major newspapers, whose equivocation of genocidal and fascist ideologies with pleas for equality, rights, and protections as “both sides” of a “debate,” is not only reductive but terminal: it doesn’t further the conversation but end it. It doesn’t clarify or elucidate, but obscure. Instead of a way into thought, it’s an escape hatch: a noncommittal egalitarianism that treats ideas—even those tied to the ability of vulnerable people to stay alive—like fashion, mere scarves to try on and discard.

This version of debate is only possible in a society as nihilistically neoliberal as ours, in which all ideas are assumed as currency in a marketplace, and which assumes that genocidal ideas simply won’t sell. In reality, as we’ve seen, they sell quite easily. Their demand, in fact, only goes up. As Sontag wrote of Riefenstahl’s popularity, “It’s not that [her] Nazi past has suddenly become acceptable. It is simply that, with the turn of the cultural wheel, it no longer matters. Instead of dispensing a freeze-dried version of history from above, a liberal society settles such questions by waiting for cycles of taste to distill out the controversy.” Even more troubling than newspapers, which do retain some editorial standards (as well as legal responsibilities), the unregulated and libertarian experiment of social media is “taste” amplified almost incomprehensibly—a radicalized and terminal marketplace that, eventually, subverts all activism into fascism.

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It feels ironic to me—and embarrassing—that in critiquing social media this way I’ve allowed it to guide my own conversation. To set, in some ways, the terms, or to manufacture my consent. Admittedly, it was the virality of Paglia’s coked-out narcissism juxtaposed with Sontag’s dismissive shrug that framed this consideration of activism’s plurality and authority, particularly in a time—fifty years after the pieces that comprise On Women were written—of such crushing helplessness, even futurelessness.

There is nothing “active” in seriously participating in a corporation’s conversation, which is all any post on any social media platform is—especially one engineered to sell adspace to other corporations. To imagine one is engaged in activism in a corporate space without sabotaging or destroying that space is naïve at best, disingenuous at worst. Nor does a one-dimensional (if earnest) response like Adrienne Rich’s—a retro version of the serial “Why are we talking about x when we should be talking about y?”—seem particularly active. Both seem quite the opposite. Neither resist so much as cater to an aesthetic or an ideology (respectively); that is, they reinforce, passively, an aesthetic or ideology without question or reflection.

To be an activist is to exercise power, and without power there is no activism. Sontag frames this neatly in discussing the liberation of women: “Liberation is not just about equality (the ‘liberal’ idea). It is about power… Anything less than a change in who has power and what power is, is not liberation but pacification.” A wonderful contemporary example is the sudden proliferation of corporate DEI initiatives, which “include” those of diverse backgrounds only in the sense that they assimilate and neutralize complaints and absorb these marginalized individuals into the corporate power structure. This enables the corporation to better manipulate, better punish, and better exploit all employees, and without crossing any legal or regulatory boundaries. DEI is like the paradox of empathy: it teaches you how to understand the pain of others, yes, but it also teaches you how to truly hurt someone. Celebrating diversity, like lauding empathy as some innate good, means nothing if it lacks the ethical backbone or moral compass to help truly empower marginalized people as marginalized people (and not as managers).

This, to me, is Sontag’s importance; this is the kind of intelligence her body of work leaves to contemporary readers nearly two decades after her death. Her conclusions are in no way above criticism or reproach; there is something affected throughout much of her work, especially in its commitment to the western ideal. But in her drive toward an ever-complicating heterodoxy; in her devotion to “the normative virtues of the intellect,” which includes “its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims” and “the rights it accords, alongside passion, to tentativeness and detachment”; and in her sincere belief that even our most fervent ideas and political projects are forever worthy—and deserving—of exacting criticism, revision, and reevaluation, she reminds readers who feel trapped in a fragmented, stupid, and reductive culture that it’s always possible to act.

Even ontologically or existentially, she could find agency. As she told the magazine Salmagundi in a 1975 interview that closes out this new book:

That the past necessarily weighs more on the axis of human consciousness is perhaps a greater liability to the individual than to society, but how could it be otherwise?… It is only normal that we are aware of ourselves as persons in an historical continuum, with indefinite thickness of past behind us, the present a razor’s edge, and the future—well, problematic is one damp word for it. Dividing time [this way] suggests that reality is distributed equally among three parts, but in fact the past is the most real of all. The future is, inevitably, an accumulation of loss, and dying is something we do all our lives. If artists are memory specialists, professional curators of consciousness, they are only practicing—willfully, obsessionally—a prototypical devoutness.

That Sontag was so focused, throughout her life, on questions of art, on style and excellence, on the authority of artists, is perhaps because, as she put it, “Art is the most general condition of the past in the present.” It provides the most dynamic, living, malleable, and plural material for making sense of one’s life—one’s continuum—as a human being, and thus informs one’s politics, one’s relationships, and one’s attitude toward being-in-the-world. What she has to show for this is a career that spans four decades and includes two of the most influential books of the latter half of the 20th century: On Photography and Illness as Metaphor. So, if we’re to insist on playing stupid games—a little of this versus that, your team versus mine—let’s play. Pitting one against the other—a writer who created and never stopped revising herself, who knew there was always more to consider, always a way to deepen and complicate every topic as though it was as well-rounded as a human life; and a writer whose fascist theater of briny vaginas and marbled cocks is incompatible with a lived reality where human beings aren’t subject to authorities based on gender and on race—an honest reader, surely, can’t help but ask: Who is Camille Paglia?

1. Regarding Riefenstahl’s denials that Olympia and Triumph of the Will were created as Nazi propaganda, Sontag quotes “an unimpeachable source: Adolf Hitler. In his preface to Hinter den Kulissen, Hitler describes Triumph of the Will as ‘a totally unique and incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement.’ And it is.”

2. From Benjamin’s "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” translated by Harry Zohn.

3. Elon Musk’s purchase and hideous remodel of Twitter hasn’t changed the way social media functions, but it’s certainly made its fascist aesthetic more obvious.

4. In Benjamin Moser’s biography of Sontag, the authority of which is shaky given some questionable sources, unverifiable claims, and whiffs of borrowed sentences, as I’ve previously written about, Moser recounts that Sontag and Paglia met at Dartmouth, and that Paglia “invited [Sontag] to Bennington.” When Sontag arrived in Bennington, according to Paglia, she was “puffy, groggy, and disoriented,” as well as, Moser says, “an hour late.” Elsewhere, Moser says that Sontag told Zoë Heller that she was only “pretending she had never heard of Camille Paglia.”

5. Talent for writing, I should clarify. Paglia has all the formidable talent one needs to spar with our foremost reality TV stars, including the former president.

Patrick Nathan is the author of the novel Some Hell (Graywolf Press) and the book of essays Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist (Counterpoint Press). His new novel, The Future Was Color, will be published by Counterpoint Press in June of 2024.