The hand is the great symbol of man the tool-maker as well as man the writer. But in our super-mechanized era, many young people have lost a sense of the tangible and of the power of the hand. A flick of the finger changes TV channels, surfs the web, or alters and deletes text files. Middle-class students raised in a high-tech, service-sector economy are several generations removed from the manual labor of factories or farms.
The saga of the discovery of the cave paintings can also show students how history is written and revised. The first cave found, at Altamira in northern Spain, was stumbled on by a hunter and his dog in 1868. The aristocratic estate owner, an amateur archaeologist, surveyed the cave but did not see the animals painted on the ceiling until, on a visit in 1879, his five-year-old daughter looked up and exclaimed at them. Controversy over dating of the paintings was prolonged: critics furiously rejected the hypothesis of their prehistoric origin and attributed them to forgers or Roman-era Celts. The discoveries of other cave paintings in Spain and the Dordogne from the 1890s on were also met with skepticism by the academic establishment. Funding for the early expeditions had to come from Prince Albert of Monaco. The most famous cave of them all, Lascaux, was found in 1940 by four adventurous schoolboys who tipped off their schoolmaster. Thus children, with their curiosity and freedom from preconception, have been instrumental in the revelation of man’s primeval past. —Camille Paglia —Magic of Images (Arion)
When Paglia writes and talks, she jumps from one thought to another, sometimes making tiny hops, often making grand and heroic leaps. If she were in my freshman composition class, I’d tell her to drop some of her supporting points in order to explore the others in more depth; I’m not trained in the visual image, so I’d appreciate a little more explication.
This particular text, with the words separated spatially from images they describe, disturbs me — I have to scroll back and forth between the words and the images. What kind of a web desiner would separate the images and lump together at the end? I’m sure they weren’t separated during the original talk that this printed document was based on. A baffling design choice.
Anyway, this is more than the usual “what’s the matter with kids today” article that older academics can’t resist writing from time to time.
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Paglia's article is one of her poorest but still it reflects something of value. Think of her beginning statements, "But in our super-mechanized era, many young people have lost a sense of the tangible and of the power of the hand. A flick of the finger changes TV channels, surfs the web, or alters and deletes text files." The leaps and bounds relate to the way we, as a techno-culture, are pressed with different images that present a vacancy in argument and focus. She, maybe due to intention, culture or watching too much tube, does the exact same thing she mentions in the beginning: flipping through arguments.
We live in a time of vacancy or at most a time that allows for knowledge to be incomplete. Many authors feel that we suffer from a factoid culture which entails quick bites of knowledge without further elaborating on substance. It's not that we cannot fill in this vacancy rather we allow for vacancy to exist, a spatial void that permeates itself without imagination. Harken back to the orators of old who implicently worked out their speeches point by point and tried to address everything they could imagine. Such a vantage point is lost sense we reduce ourselves to picture then story formats that come as quickly as they leave. Details are lost or not projected, breaking news overrides actual research and analytical reasoning, and information is quickly projected then forgotten until the next go through. It's what we see that is dominant regardless of whether we wish to put on those nifty x-ray specs and search for the unseen.
At first I was going to refer to "attempting grand and heroic leaps," but in this case I thought it was the presentation of the article, rather than Paglia's thinking itself, that left me unsatisfied. She's very rooted in her baby-boomer time-frame, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
I suppose it's a matter of perspective whether those leaps are "heroic" or luddite. Personally, I favor the latter explanation.