Camille Paglia: A Jungian Cognitive Profile

Challenging Consensus: A TeNi type (ENTJ) frequently misidentified as an NeTi type (ENTP).

Paglia in 2015.

Preface
Camille Paglia is a humanities professor at the University of the Arts known for her provocative cultural criticism. She has been widely reviled for her academic dissidence and unorthodox, unpalatable ideas.
The subject of discussion within this essay is an esoteric consequence of Paglia’s unorthodox nature within Jungian typology circles. In such circles, Paglia’s dissidence, coupled with her eclecticism, have caused her to be typed by many as an Extraverted Intuitive (Ne) and Introverted Thinker (Ti), or an ‘ENTP’, using a personality model derived from Jung’s ‘Psychological Types’. I assert that this is a misidentification of Paglia’s personality shakily undergirded by a misapprehension of her work and a maleducated perception of Jung’s typology. This essay intends to dispel this misidentification by attentively sourcing evidence against it from across her career, and will definitively establish why Paglia is a TeNi type, or ‘ENTJ’.

- Make sure to check out CognitiveType. They specialise in vultology, which is a concept I use in Paglia’s typing. CognitiveType has deeply influenced how I perceive Jung’s theory. I reference their methods for typing in one section here, specifically on Paglia’s Introverted Feeling. I have included footnotes linking to the website within the Fi section, but I will link it here too: https://cognitivetype.com
- I have decided to cover Paglia’s intuitive function first as I believe it is the most deeply misunderstood.

Contents
I. Introverted Intuition’s Sky-Cult: Paglia’s Ordered Dream-Life
II. Extraverted Thinking: Amoral, Formalist Standards
III. Extraverted Sensing’s Earth-Cult: Connection to the Material World
IV. Dissidence and Non-Conformism: Paglia’s Introverted Feeling

I. Introverted Intuition’s Sky-Cult: Paglia’s Ordered Dream-Life
Sexual Personae, Paglia's magnum opus, is a cataloguing of archetypes throughout culture. It makes disparate links between many different phases of culture and draws parallels between figures - both real and fictitious- from across history, boiling each one down to an archetype of sorts, or titular ‘Personae’. This is my primary evidence for Introverted Intuition. Introverted Intuition (Ni) is a style of cognition characterisied by a stripping back of superficial contexts and particular instantiations in an effort to find a core, eternal pattern or universal beneath. It carries archaeological undertones, cartographising these patterns across time.

I assert that Paglia’s eclectic descriptions are a manifestation of her fixation upon universal trends. She may use disparate sources, but they are ultimately to point to a convergency upon an eternal trend or pattern despite their surface differences. Because Paglia’s intuitive connections seem tangential and sometimes even bizarre on a superficial level - and subversive Extraverted Intuitive connections often are - her disparate links (e.g. writing about Star Wars and ancient Egypt in the same book) have been provided as evidence for Extraverted Intuition among some typologists. Reading any of Paglia’s work, however, quickly reveals a shining exemplar of Introverted Intuition.

"These youths have a distinctly ancient Greek face: high brow, strong straight nose, girlishly fleshy cheeks, full petulant mouth, and short upper lip. It is the face of Elvis Presley, Lord Byron, and Bronzino’s glossy Mannerist blue boy. " - Excerpt from Sexual Personae.

Antinous Farnese, sculpted between 130 and 137 CE.

Her association of Byron with Presley seems arbitrary and indiscriminate on a very surface level, but it is based on an androgynous personae that dates back to ancient Greece, pointing to an eternality of the archetype and a universalism. It is Ni’s syncretic quality, perceiving unity across cultures, traditions and belief systems, not too dissimilar from identifying Apollo and Mars as the same god among the Greco-Roman pantheon.

Ne types (Ne leads in particular) are cognitively repulsed by this style of thought. Not in the sense of ‘disgust’. Rather, as a kind of attentional magnetism, their ideation wanders away from viewing patterns eternally in this manner because Ne values novelty (i.e. subversion). Ancient trendlines and universal patterns constrain subversion. Subversive ideation can be understood as pattern-recognition formed upon fluid, arbitrary connections that are disconnected in a broader or deeper sense. The dual-meaning of a pun is one example. Ne’s abstract connections do not meaningfully ‘belong’ together, they cannot, because if a structure is meaningful - or even really structured - then it is no longer subversive, there is no new information for it to refresh itself with. This results in Ne presenting the sort of 'radical relativism' and infinite modes of interpretation that Paglia derides.¹ Paglia is a defender of canonicity and the permanence and aliveness of long-term trends, which Ne needs to discard to function. Ne is eternally sceptical, it is the postmodern attitude towards the legitimacy of patterns.

On discard, it’s also worth noting that Paglia dedicated two decades of her life to a thesis which covers a single, core theme that attempts to account for essentially every phenomena; an Apollonian and Dionysian framing of sex tracing every whim and cycle of history back to fundamental forces, with the mythic used as a heuristic for such forces, the brutality of cthonic nature and man’s Apollonian struggle for individuation. Paglia explores many patterns and archetypes but they all trickle down from this fundament. Paglia’s ideas are not discarded the moment they become predictable, she commits to their excavation and they always coalesce upon a meaningful root.

Ni-Se: The Eternal Archetype. Nefertiti and Emily Dickinson are identified as manifestations of the same pattern, a universal. Sexual Personae’s cover is a clear representation of Ni.

What is misconstrued as Extraverted Intuition by those who identify her as an Ne type is in part Paglia’s tertiary Extraverted Sensing (Se), which causes her Introverted Intuition to be just as pop-culture oriented and crude as it is spiritual, as present as it is historical. Paglia is willing to associate even vulgar, crass elements of the zeitgeist today with eternal patterns. Tertiary Se is content with mixing the high and the low, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

II. Extraverted Thinking: Amoral, Formalist Standards
Evidence of Paglia’s Extraverted Thinking can be found within her formalist attitude to the arts, advocating against conflating values with a work's objective merit; "[These feminists said] 'Nothing that demeans women can be art...' Now I'm sorry, that is the Soviet view of art."² Reaffirming an amoral standard to the arts is a consistent theme throughout her work, which contains a Wildean flavour that invokes "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written."³ Paglia views sentiment as a stylistic choice, and her default mode of analysis always buries flowery Fi descriptions for honest Te descriptions, such as when she discusses the orthodox, ‘sentimental’ narratives concerning LGBT rights embedded within progressive movements. She is disgusted by the idea of 'advocacy' becoming a feature of university classes for these reasons, perceiving it to be cause for a distortion of objective standards of quality and a betrayal of academic honesty, which she perceives a non-ideological perception of reality to be prerequisite for. Paglia has always prescribed an appreciation for the arts before one critiques them based on their own political dogma.

‘Under My Thumb’, the allegedly sexist song that Paglia has defended over the years as a “work of great art” based on her objective standards of artistic merit.

A personal, human element is often stripped from Paglia’s perception and she self-identifies as a decadent, a movement which she designates within Sexual Personae as characterised by “sophistication without humaneness”. This impersonal perception is brought to an extreme in her view of nature, becoming incredibly mechanical. While it is in part a product of her Extraverted Sensing to emphasise humanity’s animal fundament, Paglia strips this fundament down mechanistically, conveying humans to be machine-like in their predictable drives. Her exploration of biology invokes cold language that conveys humans as systems defined by circuitry, with deterministic rhetorical flourishes everpresent.

“The gravest challenge to our hopes and dreams is the messy biological business-as-usual that is going on within us and without us at every hour of every day. Consciousness is a pitiful hostage of its flesh-envelope, whose surges, circuits, and secret murmurings it cannot stay or speed.“ - Excerpt from Sexual Personae.

I have far less to say on this than Paglia’s perceiving functions (Ni-Se), as I believe that her perceiving functions are the ones being misjudged most severely by people who identify her as an Ne type, and this essay (in its current form at least) is largely a response to that group.

III. Extraverted Sensing’s Earth-Cult: Connection to the Material World
Extraverted Sensing can be understood through how Paglia idealises the 'real world'. Her core contention with post-structuralism is its fixation upon language (signifiers and constructs) and rejection of a material fundament of 'preverbal' forces and perceptions beneath (i.e. nature, biology, hormones and the senses) that are unyielding towards such constructs. She stresses how humans are not affected by only culture and ideas (i.e. ‘social constructs’), and are under the inescapable thrall of natural drives, puppets to their hormonal impulses, which maintain a canoncial truth firmer than the intellectual game-playing we may test them against. Paglia also presents this appreciation for the material and contempt for post-structuralism’s undermining of it by explaining how vocational types at her university understand an objective, 'real world' through their craft, "[At the University of The Arts] We deal with art. We don't deal with Foucalt... We deal with the real, material world",⁴ and when mentioning Kessler, she affirms a belief they share of art's '[sensory activation]'⁵.

Sensory activation: Paglia smoking in 1977 while leading a tutorial.

This cognitive interpretation accounts for Paglia’s perception of post-structuralism in relation to poetry and non-narrative arts also; “post-structuralism only works on narrative… it only works on the novel, if it works at all… post-structuralism can do nothing with poetry.” Paglia perceives language as a mechanism to transmit preverbal instinct and sensory shapes rather than as a set of discrete parts denoting ontological differences first. She points to post-structuralism’s detachment from these shapes as a blockade to truly understanding and appreciating art. With her her Te-Se, through its formal quality and Se’s sensory root, language is perceived as a medium pushed to its limit that is merely an extension of a nexus of hidden wordless forms, actions and instincts as opposed to conceptual separations. Language ceases to be an end unto itself. “Yes, at the same time that I seem to be a word fanatic... I still believe that all my deepest ideas, my most original thinking, is coming from a level beneath the level of words. What I'm doing is simply translating into words my actual sensory impressions."⁶ This runs counter to the idea that she uses Extraverted Intuition, which remains suspended from the actual world.

This lends itself over time to a synaesthesic quality, Paglia describing her writing style as 'psychedelic’ (akin to the musical genre) and ‘hallucinatory’. It somewhat accounts for her multi-disciplinary appreciation of the images of film and the visual arts - or her reverence for archaeology with its totems (an extension of Ni-Se’s love of symbology) - despite initially studying literature (a medium built upon language), and perhaps her identification with decadence in its post-romantic, hedonistic worship of nature through the senses.

Paglia stresses how out-of-touch academics are with this ‘real world’ through her populist, pop-culture voice also. This can be discerned from her love of AM radio, respect for pornography and urge to mix high and low culture. Se is the function most attuned to the current zeitgeist because it is the most attached to an unfiltered, indiscriminate perception of the ‘real world’ (or is at least perceived to be by the Se type). "The fiction writers are off in another world... [they don't use the language of the contemporary world]".⁷ Paglia cannot recede into fantasism. She requires a real fundament to be understood by the fiction writers, whereas Extraverted Intuition is comfortable with entertaining ideas that have little to no relation to reality (often driven to the cartoonish, fantastical and surreal).

This isn’t to say that Paglia cannot appreciate any form of ‘fantasy’; she is a great admirer of George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels. Rather, the fantasistical elements must serve as embellishments to a deeper reality. Here we see Se’s coalescence with Ni in the ENTJ. It is very easy to understand how the Star Wars prequels, while futuristic in their aesthetic, may be considered models of our world today, or even models of the ancient past, analogous to Greek epics. They are an authentic model of reality (Se) in their presentation of an eternal mythic narrative (Ni). Star Wars is a contemporary epic. The introduction to each Star Wars film opens with scrolling text that details endless wars and political agitations surrounding legendary, transcendent heroes, features analogous to ancient epics such as the grand stanzas of Homer’s Odyssey. It is also critical to note that much of Paglia’s appreciation for these films stems from a reverence towards their craftsmanship and material artistic mastery, praising Lucas’ ‘visual virtuosity’.

“This episode is a combination of live action, of computer animation, and also of model making. A tremendous model was made, a minature model, of the landscape of this volcano planet… This is a work of installation art… The passionate quality of this finale with its huge musical score… And you’re getting this tremendous duel that’s like dance theatre, the longest duel ever filmed. For months [the actors] learned the sword play, this is dance, this is contemporary dance. You have this huge - it’s like a romantic nature painting - apocalyptic landscape of the lava.“⁸

Tertiary Se's reverence for mixing the lower, animal, sensory, natural world and decadent sensory activation with the higher artifice of the spiritual, constructed, cultural world is easy to mistake for Ne among pop typologists. We could perhaps say that Ni-Se in the middle of her cognitive stack (Te-Ni-Se-Fi) perfectly explains her connection to the duality of Apollo and Dionysus. She experiences a balance within her psyche of an ordered dream-life (Ni) and a chaotic sensory reality (Se); Sky-cult and Earth-cult. She has implied the charismatic androgyne to be capable of balancing Apollo and Dionysus, masculine and feminine characteristics, and my assertion of her ENTJ typology elucidates how the phenomena of androgyny - which Paglia identifies with - expresses itself through her cognition. I have yet to see this duality explored within an Ne-Ti argument for her.

Camille Paglia, who proudly wears the fact that she has gotten into fist fights for her principles⁹ as a badge of honour, is not an Extraverted Intuitive. She is a relentless advocate for the real world and her speech and actions (or ‘word and deed’, in her own terms) have paralleled this consistently throughout her career.

“At the University of The Arts we deal with art. We don't deal with Foucalt... we deal with the real, material world.“

IV. Dissidence and Non-Conformism: Paglia’s Introverted Feeling
Though she leads with Te, Her Fi can still be found through her offbeat expressions and consistent dissident position, placing herself as an outsider. Moving into vultology, CognitiveType has keenly identified Paglia's micro-snarling - uneven, snarly expressions that are asynchronous, tilting on the Fi user’s face - as part of the Te-Fi vultological code, and have also identified Paglia as a Te-Ni type.¹⁰ ENTPs are not connected to their emotional register due to a blindspot of Introverted Feeling, an irrecognition and compartmentalisation of what they internally feel, moulding themselves instead to a group identity, i.e. external reactions and feelings (Fe). Fi is concerned with a hierarchy of internal emotional valuing and a visceral connection to taste and distaste, resulting in an absence of co-ordinated reactions, with the Fi user's most authentic personal sentiment being communicated instead. Paglia is vultologically entangled with her emotional register, displaying frequent micro-snarls that intimate judgements formed by her own inner palate.

Three examples of Fi’s micro-snarling, an expression Paglia has displayed throughout her entire life. The third image is a more subtle represenation, however, I wanted to include it to demonstrate a continuity in how her face moves, as it rests in an asynchronous position often too. It is incredibly obvious in her interviews as this is a consistent expression that she makes, so if you are interested in seeing this displayed further, I would check the footnotes I have added which include videos.

Paglia has also held an ideal of dissident eccentricity in high regard throughout her entire life, such as describing eccentric transgender costumes she wore as a child, asserting that she made 'radical gestures of nonconformism' in her youth.¹¹ Fi is known for its assertion of a dissident, unique inner identity. Paglia's dissidence is perhaps being mistaken as Ne's ideal of reinvention, as reinvention is naturally dissident towards convention. Paglia’s dissent in her assertion of an unconventional identity is, however, only socially subversive, not subversive towards ideas, as she maintains a strict defence of canonical structures of meaning.

[Article pending future revision given the change in my concept of functions. TeNi is still the appropriate type, however.]

Last edit: 05/10/2022

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Disclaimer: I do want to reiterate here that I make no claim to be the first to have identified Paglia as Te-Ni. I was aware of CognitiveType’s typing of Paglia as Te-Ni before I wrote this essay. However, I do not think that justifications have been comprehensively provided in relation to things that Paglia has said and done, or relating to the deeper psychology behind her work. CT mainly covered her vultology (i.e. body language, facial expressions and so on), and I could find little reference to why she is an ENTJ beyond this.* Paglia is not yet accepted more broadly as an ENTJ in circles I have seen discussing Jung and MBTI. As of first publishing this essay (02/10/2022), she maintains ENTP consensus on the website PersonalityDatabase, and offhand comments on websites discussing her MBTI either posit ENTP or INTJ. So the argument still needs to be reiterated, and I feel that I have provided a unique perspective on both her typology and Jung’s ideas.

FOOTNOTES

1. 'Modern Times: Camille Paglia & Jordan B Peterson'

2. 'Camille Paglia on '60 Minutes' 1992'

3. Preface to 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', Oscar Wilde

4. 'Camille Paglia on Post-Structualism: Debunking the Deconstructionists'

5. Wikipedia (Under 'Education') https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia

6. 'Camille Paglia Speaks About 'Sex, Art & American Culture' (1992)‘

7. 'Camille Paglia (full) | Conversations with Tyler'

8. ‘Camille Paglia: Cultural Critic, Provocateur‘

9. 'Glennda and Camille Do Downtown'

10. CognitiveType - https://cognitivetype.com/fi-vultology/ & https://cognitivetype.com/forums/topic/teni-the-definitive-vultology/ by Auburn / J E Sandoval

11. 'Camille Paglia 1992 interview'