Interpreting Susan Sontag
Thinking critically about thinking critically in "Against Interpretation"
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Would Susan Sontag have liked Heartstopper? It’s an admittedly absurd question, but considering such a contemporary show might help us examine how Sontag’s writing about art does or does not resonate today. Indeed, Heartstopper is an interesting example because it is so much about (queer) representation and identity, and Sontag was a (queer) writer who eschewed questions of identity – including her own – in favor of formal analysis.
Sontag is probably best known for her influential essay “Notes on Camp,” first published in 1964, in which she lays out a set of characteristics and examples that make up what she calls a camp sensibility. Sontag was often concerned with style and aesthetics, (she has an essay entitled “On Style” and a book called On Photography), and “Notes on Camp” reflects this fascination, while also coming to represent the radical political potential of art in the late 20th century.
Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation,” published in the 1966 book of the same name alongside “Notes on Camp,” is just as essential of an intellectual building block. In it, Sontag proposes a turn away from the burgeoning field of analytical arts criticism and a turn towards sensuousness.
Sontag begins by imagining the very beginning of art. She hypothesizes that “the earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical,” and “an instrument of ritual.” Engagement with art changed with the emergence of a theory of art, which came to be amongst ancient Greek philosophers. The Greeks thought of art as mimesis, ie. a reflection or imitation of real life. The classic argument came down to whether such imitation was, broadly speaking, good or bad for humanity.
As we’ve discussed in this newsletter before regarding on-screen depictions of tragedy, Plato and Aristotle embodied the two sides of this argument. Plato believed that art was ultimately useless – as well as inherently false – and could even have a negative moral effect on the populace (particularly in the form of tragedy). Aristotle, on the other hand, believed art was useful because it could inspire catharsis in the audience, a process greatly beneficial to the metaphysical health of a society.
This paradigm still defines our engagement with the arts today, especially as we consider the framework of mimesis. But, however fascinating these ancient clapbacks are, what Sontag points out about these debates is that both Plato and Aristotle frame art as something in need of defense. This, Sontag notes, is where art criticism goes wrong. “It is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call “form” is separated off from something we have learned to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory,” she writes.
Sontag pushes back against the assumption that form and content can be separated, or that there is an object we can point to within art that can be accurately called content at all. As Sontag explains, “The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation.”
Interpretation is not all bad. In some contexts, Sontag suggests, “interpretation is a liberating act,” but in others, it is “reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.” Here, one recalls Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid and reparative reading, in which she discusses the differences between criticisms that foreclose possibility and those that welcome it. The viewpoint and the intention of the reader matter.
Sontag believes there is a way art can elude this impulse to interpret. One can do this by “making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be…just what it is.” She suggests this happens most often in film, particularly in the works of Golden Hollywood masters like George Cukor and Howard Hawks, whose films have a “liberating antisymbolic quality.” (One might interject with the films of David Lynch here, as his work is filled with symbolism that nonetheless evades definition or interpretation.) Amusingly, Sontag also suggests that film criticism had not yet been “overrun by interpreters,” which can’t be said today.
Sontag isn’t hopeless about the future (which is now the present) of arts criticism – far from it. She proposes a new kind of criticism that would serve art rather than impoverish it. First off, what we need is a vocabulary for form, as well as a commitment to accurately describing art.
More importantly, Sontag argues, we must return to the sensory experience of art. “Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience,” she writes. Sontag wants us to focus on really seeing the art for what it is rather than mining it for content. In a showstopper of a final line, Sontag writes: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” By turning away from categorical analysis, we can focus more on seeing, hearing, and feeling art.
How does this track today? When it comes to responding to art and pop culture in 2024, feelings, personal experiences, and relatability are paramount. Returning to Heartstopper, representation and emotional resonance are the organizing ethos of the series. This sounds a lot like the Greeks and their mimesis – the project of accurately representing reality, particularly as a corrective or redemptive force.
Much of the critical response to Heartstopper has been primarily sensory, as Sontag argued for. But, at the same time, engaging with media from a purely personal standpoint can be a myopic stance. Prioritizing personal experience and direct representation over form or artistic achievement is the danger of such a lens.
Sontag wrote “Against Interpretation” at the height of the modernist movement, an artistic sensibility that opposed the Enlightenment philosophy of rationalism and the notion of objective truth. In the present day, trends in the arts and popular culture tend to revolve around the idea of expanding our worldview and making room for multiple truths. This is not so much an erotics of art as it is a source of reflection – a mimesis that widens the mirrors we hold up to ourselves and to each other.
Still, there’s plenty to glean from Sontag, even as interpretation, as well as literalism, continue to reign supreme. Sontag reminds us that art should actually be artistic, that the senses are just as important as intellect, and that there’s merit in beauty for beauty’s sake. Hermeneutics, be damned.
