Against "Against Interpretation" - Susan Sontag
A seething scathing critique of Susan from a Susan admirooorer
My eyes were glued to the tiny words sprayed across the pdf reader. Susan Sontag, in her book “Against Interpretation”, seemed to be berating every turtleneck-wearing hipster giving their latest “take” on what Goya really meant from his paintings.
She argued that the interpretation of art, involving trying to find the real meaning behind the painting created an abstract world of self-imposed meanings, making the art lose its very real experiential value. To her, this “hermeneutics of art” stemmed from the days when we had to justify the existence of religions in the face of science. Scholars started finding the “hidden meanings” in religious texts in order to maintain their relevance. This hidden world of meanings created around art destroys both the art and our ability to enjoy it
“In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. 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. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
The objective of a critic, according to her, should be to make works of art and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us. To her, the function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
“In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.”
I think she misses a key point - the necessity of communication in art. I think her analysis of how interpretation reduces art is correct, but I think she’s conflating the internal experience of art with the simple form in which we communicate it.
All communication is lossy, we can really mean a million things when we make a statement and the same holds true for art critics. When we try and extract the meaning from a Goya painting we are actually trying to explain why the art makes us feel a certain way and *justifying* it through its origin. This is simply because we don’t yet have a better way of communicating our internal experiences. What Susan says about art comes from the incorrect assumption that “the way people talk about art is indicative of how they feel”
Wrong, counterintuitively so. The meaning is our helpless attempt at trying to communicate our internal experience. I would argue that it’s not just necessary but beneficial to be insistent on getting better at conveying the meaning of the art - it’s just the best way we have right now of explaining the experience.
Susan Sontag has the implicit assumption that people place the analysis of the meaning *first* and the experience second from the meaning. While that may be true in some cases, and I agree it’s a bad thing, more important is recognizing that flipping the order ie. experience first and meaning second is one of the best tools we have for communicating our experience.