Sontag Against Interpretation Quotes

The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.

We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.

For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer.

A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing _in_ the world, not just a text or commentary _on_ the world.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

It was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to strut, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive (...). But whatever you took home from the movies was only part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours - which is the more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. The strongest experience was simply to surrender to, to be transported by, what was on the screen

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE, in a letter

To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.

Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.

Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character.

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force - not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self - these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. Mostly it is a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity.

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. (...) And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities, that the task of the critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to See more, to Hear more, to Feel more.

Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

En lugar de una hermenéutica, necesitamos una erótica del arte.

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

نویسندگان بزرگ یا شوهرند یا معشوق. برخی نویسندگان فضایل استوار یک شوهر را به ما عرضه می‌کنند: قابل اتکا، فهیم، سخی، برازنده. در سوی دیگر نویسندگانی قرار دارند که در آن‌ها قابلیت‌های یک معشوق را ستایش می‌کنیم، قابلیت‌هایی که از طبیعت و مزاج برمی‌آیند تا فضیلت اخلاقی. زن‌ها به شکلی عجیب ویژگی‌هایی چون بی‌ثباتی، خودخواهی، غیرقابل‌اتکا بودن، و خشونت را که در مورد شوهر هرگز با آن‌ها کنار نمی‌آیند در معشوق خود می‌پذیرند، به شرط آن‌که در عوض نوعی هیجان و فوران احساسی شدید را تجربه کنند. به همین سیاق، خوانندگان نیز با فهم‌ناپذیری، وسواسی بودن، حقایق دردناک، دروغ، یا دستور زبان بد کنار می‌آیند-اگر در عوض نویسنده امکان چشیدن عواطفی کمیاب و احساساتی خطرناک را در اختیارشان قرار دهد. و همان‌طور که در زندگی وجود شوهر و معشوق هر دو ضروری است، در هنر نیز چنین است. باعث تاسف است که ناگزیر باشیم میان آن‌ها دست به انتخاب بزنیم .

And suicide is the third, ultimate use of suffering—conceived of not as an end to suffering, but as the ultimate way of acting on suffering.

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art.

The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art.

Insanity becomes the privileged, most authentic metaphor for passion.

A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind.

Man is a creature who is designed to live on the surface; he lives in the depths- whether terrestrial, oceanic, or psychological- at his peril.

Consciousness seeks its meaning in unconsciousness.

It has become spiritually fashionable to be in pain.

Love- any love- reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

And the world is, ultimately, an aesthetic phenomenon.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art—like physical beauty in a person—is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

The dark secret behind human nature used to be the upsurge of the animal––as in King Kong. The threat to man, his availability to dehumanization, lay in his own animality. Now the danger is understood as residing in a man's ability to be turned into a machine.

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.

Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover — moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality — that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar — if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations.

The Happenings thereby register (in a real, not simply an ideological way) a protest against the museum conception of art––the idea that the job of the artist is to make things to be preserved and cherished. One cannot hold on to a Happening, and one can only cherish it as one cherishes a firecracker going off dangerously close to one's face.

Interpretation first appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the “realistic” view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment. Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness—that of the seemliness of religious symbols—had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to “modern” demands. Thus, the Stoics, to accord with their view that the gods had to be moral, allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer’s epics. What Homer really designated by the adultery of Zeus with Leto, they explained, was the union between power and wisdom. In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty years, and the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations, and final deliverance. Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the Rabbinic and Christian “spiritual” interpretations of the clearly erotic Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there.

Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life. Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.

What we are getting is not the demise of art, but a transformation of the function of art. Art, which arose in human society as a magical-religious operation, and passed over into a technique for depicting and commenting on secular reality, has in our own time arrogated to itself a new function—neither religious, nor serving a secularized religious function, nor merely secular or profane (a notion which breaks down when its opposite, the “religious” or “sacred,” becomes obsolescent). Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.

In an essay on the subject some years ago, Paul Goodman wrote: “The question is not whether pornography, but the quality of the pornography.” That’s exactly right. One could extend the thought a good deal further. The question is not whether consciousness or whether knowledge, but the quality of the consciousness and of the knowledge. And that invites consideration of the quality or fineness of the human subject—the most problematic standard of all. It doesn’t seem inaccurate to say most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. But is anyone supposed to act on this knowledge, even genuinely live with it? If so many are teetering on the verge of murder, dehumanization, sexual deformity and despair, and we were to act on that thought, then censorship much more radical than the indignant foes of pornography ever envisage seems in order. For if that’s the case, not only pornography but all forms of serious art and knowledge—in other words, all forms of truth—are suspect and dangerous.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: ‘You can’t deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching your reactions, and steal your secrets by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.’…

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art and in criticism today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

Susan Sontag wrote in her essay “Against Interpretation” that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Meaning: the interpretation of art is a tiresome pseudoscience, and the magnetism of art is what has always saved it from becoming dull, weighted down. It’s something we see and feel first and foremost, before we attempt to understand it. It’s a pretty rich line of thinking for an art critic, no?

The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole.

...interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it,

Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it and still being good.

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art-and in criticism today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

(The Camp insistence on not being “serious,” on playing, also connects with the homosexual’s desire to remain youthful.)

This happens with special frequency to the writer, like Camus, who appeals directly to a generation’s image of what is exemplary in a man in a given historical situation. Unless he possesses extraordinary reserves of artistic originality, his work is likely to seem suddenly denuded after his death.

But also, as with Baldwin, that passion seemed to transmute itself too readily into stately language, into an inexhaustible self-perpetuating oratory. The moral imperatives—love, moderation—offered to palliate intolerable historical or metaphysical dilemmas were too general, too abstract, too rhetorical.

A writer who acts as public conscience needs extraordinary nerve and fine instincts, like a boxer. After a time, these instincts inevitably falter. He also needs to be emotionally tough. Camus was not that tough, not tough in the way that Sartre is.

If civilization may be defined as that stage of human life at which, objectively, the body becomes a problem, then our moment of civilization may be described as that stage at which we are subjectively aware of, and feel trapped by, this problem. Now we aspire to the life of the body and we reject the ascetic traditions of Judaism and Christianity, but we are still confined in the generalized sensibility which that religious tradition bequeathed us.

Pavese’s continual prayers for the strength to lead a life of rigorous seclusion and solitude (“The only heroic rule is to be alone, alone, alone”) are entirely of a piece with his repeated complaints about his inability to feel.

Everyone knows that we have a different, much more emphatic view of love between the sexes than the ancient Greeks and the Orientals, and that the modern view of love is an extension of the spirit of Christianity, in however attenuated and secularized a form. But the cult of love is not, as Rougemont claims, a Christian heresy. Christianity is, from its inception (Paul), the romantic religion. The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering—suffering as the supreme token of seriousness (the paradigm of the Cross).

Suffering was not the hallmark of seriousness; rather, seriousness was measured by one’s ability to evade or transcend the penalty of suffering, by one’s ability to achieve tranquillity and equilibrium.

For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain.

it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.

Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense).

What are the implacable values of Homer? Honor, status, personal courage—the values of an aristocratic military class? But this is not what the Iliad is about. It would be more correct to say, as Simone Weil does, that the Iliad—as pure an example of the tragic vision as one can find—is about the emptiness and arbitrariness of the world, the ultimate meaninglessness of all moral values, and the terrifying rule of death and inhuman force. If the fate of Oedipus was represented and experienced as tragic, it is not because he, or his audience, believed in “implacable values,” but precisely because a crisis had overtaken those values. It is not the implacability of “values” which is demonstrated by tragedy, but the implacability of the world. The story of Oedipus is tragic insofar as it exhibits the brute opaqueness of the world, the collision of subjective intention with objective fate. After all, in the deepest sense, Oedipus is innocent; he is wronged by the gods, as he himself says in Oedipus at Colonus. Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

Inevitably, this drives the artist to ever greater and more intense attempts to arouse a reaction from his audience. The question is only whether a reaction need always be provoked by terrorization. It seems to be the implicit consensus of those who do Happenings that other kinds of arousal (for example, sexual arousal) are in fact less effective, and that the last bastion of the emotional life is fear.

He has not been converted from human amiability to monstrous "animal" bloodlust (a metaphoric exaggeration of sexual desire), as in the old vampire fantasy. No, he has simply become far more efficient––the very model of technocratic man, purged of emotions, volitionless, tranquil, obedient to all orders.

Consciousness of self is the "gravity" that burdens the spirit; the surpassing of the consciousness of self is "grace," or spiritual lightness.

These recent plays–and some others, like Dylan, which it would be a mercy to pass over in silence–illustrate once again that the American theater is ruled by an extraordinary, irrepressible zest for intellectual simplification. Every idea is reducible to a cliché, and the function of a cliché is to castrate an idea.

Man is a creature who is designed to live on the surface; he lives in the depths–whether terrestrial, oceanic, or psychological–at his peril.

The writer is the exemplary sufferer because he has found both the deepest level of suffering and also a professional means to sublimate (in the literal, not the Freudian, sense of sublimate) his suffering. As a man, he suffers; as a writer, he transforms his suffering in the economy of art–as the saints discovered the utility and necessity of suffering in the economy of salvation.

The first two books I have mentioned are great indeed. But the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.

What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life- its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.

Art is connected with morality

If morality is so understood- as one of the achievements of human will, dictating to itself a mode of acting and being in the world- it becomes clear that no generic antagonism exists between the form of consciousness, aimed at action, which is morality, and the nourishment of consciousness, which is aesthetic experience.

Elaborate on what Susan Sontag meant with “To call Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumpth of the Will and The Olympiad masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too.

To call Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumpth of the Will and The Olympiad masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too.

To become involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

Love is an essential fiction

Love, like art, becomes a medium of self-expression.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anaesthetic.

Each of our truths must have a martyr.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

Danger is only a means to success.

All “modern” artists are aestheticians