Interpreting Susan Sontag’s Essays

Radical Contemplative

Mark Fulk, Mark K. Fulk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367757144
• eBook ISBN: 9781000375428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Literature

Interpreting Susan Sontag's Essays: Radical Contemplative offers its readers a scholarly examination of her essays within the context of philosophy and aesthetic theory. This study sets up a dialogue between her works and their philosophical counterparts in France and Germany, including the works of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin. Artists and concepts discussed in relation to Sontag's essays include the works of Andy Warhol, Pop Art, French New Wave Cinema, the music of John Cage, and the cinematic art of Robert Bresson, Leni Riefenstahl, Ingmar Bergman, and Jean-Luc Godard. Her aesthetic formalism is compared with Harold Bloom, and this is the first volume to examine her late works and their position within the American events of 9/11/01 and the War on Terror(ism).

1 The Genesis of “Against Interpretation”

1 Introduction

Peter Gay in Freud: A Life for Our Times (2006) attests to the ease with which everyone, including those with no formal training in Freudian psychoanalysis, applies Freudian terminology and ideas to their lives: “It is commonplace that we all speak Freud whether we recognize it or not. We casually refer to repression and projection, neurosis and ambivalence and sibling rivalry. A historian called our time an age of narcissism and everyone professes to understand what he means” (xvii). Sontag was troubled early by this appropriation and simplification of Freudian ideas and practices, which she traces back to Freud’s American practitioners and professional explicators. Sontag tells Edwin Newman in a 1969 interview that Americans’ weak sense of history has led to the triumph of a truncated version of Freudian psychology. “Freud was a great pessimist,” Sontag suggests, “but psychoanalysis has become on the whole an instrument of optimism in this country, a myth that through psychological understanding you can get rid of the past” (14); “I think that Americans have a rather weak connection with the past. That’s one of the peculiarities of this country….Psychoanalysis…has succeeded in this country in a way that it hasn’t anywhere else because it’s experienced by people as an instrument for breaking with their past” (14). Sontag worries that Freudian psychoanalysis has been reduced from a potentially culturally transformative practice to a preset story that Americans tell themselves to maintain the bourgeois status quo. In an interview with Amy Lippman of The Harvard Advocate, Sontag develops her insights into the popularization of Freud and its effects on American culture, telling Lippman that

The only institution in modern urban culture that invites storytelling is psychotherapy. But the story told to a therapist or a therapy group is a function of a complaint. … The story is already thematic, illustrative. People treat their experience as alienated from themselves. Experience, thus depreciated in value, is viewed as observing the laws of fashion—such as built-in obsolescence; the self is regarded as a commodity, its decisions as sociological predictable behavior. (200)

We have seen Sontag opine before about capitalist commodification when, in her 1996 postscript to the reissue of her volume Against Interpretation and Other Essays, she laments that those essays have been read to support the facile commodification of anti-intellectualism and pop culture apart from high culture in American arts and letters; here, we see that the simplification of Freudian ideas has likewise done something similar. Sontag worries that the story told by weakened psychoanalytical models is pre-scripted and, as such, becomes a pre-defined product that can be summarily categorized, consumed, and dismissed—made, in her words, immediately obsolete. The self is thus not truly actualized (or radicalized), truly opened, through the psychoanalytical process, but rather analyzed, detached, and rendered conformable to some normative model; as Sontag herself illustrates later in the same interview, people via psychoanalysis have learned to say “my lifestyle” (as in a commodity that can be bought and used, put on and taken off at will) instead of “my life” (Lippman 200) (an organic whole that is more than the sum of its parts) when describing their various choices. As Sontag makes clear, consciousness has become an eminently marketable commodity rather than a radical, unique mode of being in our contemporary world.

The question of who has authority to interpret and thus circumscribe these narratives into a “proper,” normative product becomes the key question for Sontag when she writes Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966) and its important lead essay, “Against Interpretation.” This authority seemingly rests with the analyst (frequently posited as male, often seen as patriarchal), not the analysand, who is once again made into a passive recipient of a pre-packaged truth. Sontag sees this same authoritarian and limiting tendency in art criticism in the 1960s, which inspires the conclusions she draws in “Against Interpretation.”

In that pivotal essay, Sontag indicates her dislike of what pre-fashioned Freudian hermeneutics has done to the experience of art. Noting that all modes of interpretive practice need to be assessed through a “historical” context (AI 7), Sontag reflects that the style of semiotics in practice before the heyday of Freudian and Marxist criticism “erected another meaning on top of the literal one” of the work of art. This erected meaning was equal to the art itself but did not insist on supplanting the artwork it sought to analyze. However, this respectful style of exegesis was replaced by hermeneutics enacted through the theories of Freud and Marx; and, when this practice enters art analysis, it seemingly undermines what the work can do in the experience of its pure form. Sontag writes that this mode “excavates” and “destroys” the artwork by going “‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text” that it then posits as the only “true” reading. The analysis itself (and the (male) analyst who produces it) consequently marks itself as superior to the work of art being considered. Sontag sees this authority coming from Freudian and Marxist theory being (mis)appropriated by the art critics of her age, often to unintentionally bourgeois and capitalist ends. As Sontag notes, these analysts mount what becomes in its own right a religious interpretation, or “hermeneutics,” through a reading that both attacks and misinterprets the work(s) analyzed (AI 6–7); respect for the work is replaced by respect for the theory.

The idea of hermeneutics and how it becomes a term of derision for Sontag deserves our consideration. The state of thought on aesthetics in the American academy of the 1950s and 1960s—Sontag’s formative years as a student and instructor—provides some illumination. Lindsay Waters supplies some of the background to what the academy was like and what was at stake for the intellectual interested in art and literature in her elaboration of the early context for Paul de Man’s rejection of the literary critical status quo of that time. Waters writes that what de Man was rejecting in part was the subordination of experience—or, more philosophically, “subjectivism”—to rationality. The New Critics, embodied for de Man in the figures of T. S. Eliot and Irving Babbitt, wanted to “subordinate feeling to reason,” which resulted in too much emphasis on “the person of the poet”; these hegemonic theories allowed Eliot, Babbitt, and others to “write off vast tracts of literary history and such troubling figures as Milton and Shelley.”¹ As Waters points out, what these critics espoused was (with all the religious connotations implied) an “incarnational” mode of “the literary symbol” in which “the metaphor … incarnated an idea” (Man xliii).² As de Man articulates in a review of works by J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Frank written around the time Sontag is penning her first collection of essays, “the newcomer” to literary study “who tries to find stimulation and guidance in the work of his elders may well be overcome by a feeling of weariness that drives him to other shores” than America “or, if he is timid, to an even more remote return to traditional literary history” before these hermeneutic theories became dominant in the academy (107).³

Sontag finds these same kinds of incarnational and pseudo-mystical leanings problematic not only in their articulation by the self-styled New Critics, but also by those critics claiming indebtedness to Freud and Marx. The Freudian analyst of literature and art becomes the subject of Sontag’s discerning and rigorous gaze as embodying these dangerous systematizing and mystifying tendencies. Sontag explains how Freud’s (and his followers’) notion of “manifest” compared to “latent” content undermines the art object from doing its work. All that is on the surface—all which Sontag will put into the area of form itself—is dismissed as “manifest” content that must be cast away in favor of what is seen as underneath, or “latent,” which is given priority. Marxian and Freudian analysis both seek this latent meaning, but directing their determinations in different ways: for Marx, the latent content is class warfare; for Freud, it is neurosis that can be analyzed like “slips of the tongue,” unintended and yet revelatory (AI 6–7). Note that in either case, the analyst becomes superior to the work of art through the latent meaning that (s)he sees. This latent content replaces the work itself and its power, which may be polyvalent and even contradictory.⁴ In her call at the end of “Against Interpretation” for an “erotics of art” (AI 14), she instigates more than defines a move that celebrates surface and ambiguity over prefabricated, determinant meaning imposed from an authority outside the work itself.

To trace the reasons that Sontag rejects Freud when she was once a proponent of his work (and married to one of his major apologists), we must travel back to her college days when she was introduced to Freud’s ideas and, not coincidentally, her husband, sociologist and Freudian explicator Philip Rieff. Rieff in his 1959 book Freud: The Mind of the Moralist—a book he wrote while married to Sontag and in the writing of which she probably played a significant part—explains the Freudian view of the work of the imagination that will shape what Sontag ultimately rejects. Sontag may have contributed to the writing of this book, but whether she did or not, Rieff’s writing of the text was certainly influenced by their marriage and intellectual partnership.⁵

Rieff sees the work of the imagination as representing “a primitive level of truth—which, uninterpreted, is false,” basing his conclusions on a Freudian science of the mind. This science proposes a “double level of truth” about the imagination: “The ‘work of the imagination is to distort, complicate, individualize, and thereby conceal the potent sub-individual wishes and desires.” Therefore, according to Rieff, “[t]he highest task of psychoanalytic interpretation is to work back through expressive statements to the repressed motive thus hidden especially from its carrier” (126). The surface of the artwork under analysis, in this view, becomes tantamount to a deliberate (even though unconscious) obfuscation, hiding the true meaning of the work. The true meaning comes packaged for the viewer as, in Sontag’s word, a “built-in obsolescence” that can and does supersede the necessity of the artwork itself; for the analyst must be able to transcend the surface effects of the art to get to the “truth” that he always already knows exists beneath.⁶

Sontag’s call for an open-ended “erotics of art” at the end of “Against Interpretation” (AI 14) becomes an attempt to undo the damage that Freudian hermeneutics have done to the work of art and its interpreter, characterized implicitly by the conclusions drawn earlier in Freud: The Mind of a Moralist. Throughout Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Sontag celebrates the experiential, the open-ended, and the unfinished as a way of undermining the interpreter’s intention to remain superior to the work under observation.⁷ Sontag replaces the superior interpreter with a viewer that is shocked and then shaped by her reaction to the new in works of art and literature. In this manner, and by tracing these reactions—which she does in many of the earlier essays in the Against Interpretation volume—Sontag describes a way of honoring the work that art or literature does without overcoming it via theory. This new theory (or non-theory, if we prefer) becomes codified through this title essay, but its development needs some tracing in the earlier reviews included. As she wrote in the passage quoted before, the older method (before Freud) was more respectful. Sontag is not nostalgic for an idealized past of, perhaps, Arnoldian or Coleridgean literary interpretation; rather, what she celebrates is the formative and the constructive in art rather than the finished and closed-off product. As she describes it in her essay “Marat/Sade/Artaud,” a review of Peter Weiss’s play The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, the most important version of sensibility may be shaped previous to any articulation of the aesthetics behind it, not predetermined by a set of suppositions brought to the work itself from outside (AI 172). This formative approach to artwork that challenges the viewer to participate in the creation of meaning, and how this aesthetic formulation i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Sontag, the Essay Form, and Modernism
• 1 The Genesis of “Against Interpretation”
• 2 Sontag, Bloom, and the Autonomy of the Aesthetic
• 3 Sontag’s Film Criticism: Bresson, Riefenstahl, Godard
• 4 On the (Violence of the) Photographic Image
• 5 Sontag and Illness Degree Zero
• 6 Crisis in the Polis: Sontag, Arendt, and the Nature of Eulogy
• 7 Sontag and Derrida after 9/11/01: American Democracy (and Beyond)
• Index