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Appreciating Susan Sontag

Fred Rush

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 33, Number 1, April 2009, pp. 36-49 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/phl.0.0043

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APPRECIATING SUSAN SONTAG

M mid-1960s to the mid-1970s was self-education. Although one might happen to take a university coursethat incorporated contemporary art and criticism, it was a rarity. Moreoften one supplemented university fare with ones own reading, listen-ing, and viewing of cutting-edge art, anthropology, music, philosophy,linguistics, etc. Susan Sontag was for many Americans of that time a

preeminent guide in this process, opening doors to some of the mostinteresting and influential European work in art and criticism. Son-tags essayistic outputand she was one of the supreme writers in thatgenrewas seminal. Any sociologist or intellectual historian of theperiod would have to take her work greatly into account. Her incisivetakes on her subject matter were not for everyone. Although trained asa philosopher at the then epicenter of the Anglophone philosophicalworld, Harvard, she did not tiptoe through academic complexities and

was, therefore, decidedly out of step with the philosophical tempera-ment of that time. She strode in, proselytized for her favorites, excori-ated her enemies, and left no one in the room ignorant of the fact thatshe had been there, dominated the conversation and, on the way out,rearranged the furniture.

Sontags views generally have not received much philosophical atten-tion. Even those who prize her critical work have tended to sell short theearly, programmatic essays like Against Interpretation and On Style.

Perhaps this neglect is self-wrought. Sontag is often at her best whenengaged in what one might call first-order criticism, that is, criticism ofparticular works of art on their own terms. Her work in critical theorytends to be both abstracting and declamatory and, so, operates againsther strong suit. Moreover, Sontags theory of criticism commits her to

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the precedence of critical practice over theorizing. Accordingly, she isled to reduce the importance of those early essays. Yet this is where theinterest of philosopher will fall, if indeed it falls at all.

Sontags main concern relevant to the philosophy of literature andto aesthetic theory more broadly is what she takes to be the coloni-zation of aesthetic and critical response by what she terms theory.Critical response is always, to some degree theoretical of course, so herpoint cannot be one that is ascribed sometimes to her, i.e., that criti-cal response is supposed to be non-theoretical tout court. An eroticsof art, the famous formula contained in the last sentence of AgainstInterpretation, is after all an erotics, which was in the ancient world agenre of theoretical investigation, not erotic experience or even erotica.Criticism can be theoretical in many senses as well. By itself the termtheory does not rule out much unless one appends to it constraintshaving to do with the internal structure of bodies of knowledge thateither qualify or disqualify them as theories correctly so-called. Sontagseems most concerned about two aspects of theoretical accounts of art:(A) their systematicity and (B) their use of modes of interpretation thatundercut the aesthetic nature of works. With regard to (B), she is wary

particularly of accounts of literary value that appeal to unconscious orsubterranean social forces as determinative of meanings of works. Theproblem with (A) is that systematicity, she claims, tends toward exclusionand reduction, destroying the particularity of individual works.

These two contentions comprise the diagnostic and negative sideof Sontags programmatic work in literary theory, i.e., what is to beavoided in ones experience and judgment of art. What is to be avoidedis interpretation, but what is interpretation exactly? What is the scope

of Sontags claim against it? Do her early essays provide a stable, con-vincing account of the relation between theory, on the one hand, andexperience and criticism, on the other? Is she caught between formal-ism and a more politically engaged kind of criticism? On the positiveside, what kind of critical response to literature is appropriate to itsaesthetic nature? Is Sontags replacement for interpretation viable?Sontag presents her answers to the first set of questions in an unstruc-tured way that requires conceptual reconstruction in order to avoid an

overwhelming impression that there is a central incoherency at the heartof her aesthetic theory. Matters are slightly better on the positive front,but reconstruction is still required, this time to allay concerns that sheholds inconsistent views.

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I

Sontag opens Against Interpretation with a speculative claim that willbe familiar to anyone with a passing acquaintance with Walter Benjaminsessay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility, awork that Sontag knew well.1Benjamin identifies a crucial shift from theexperiential significance of art in archaic tribal societies to the theoreticalarticulation of such experience that is first on view in the West in Platoand Aristotle.2The abstracting theoretical impulse in Plato is indulgedat the expense of primary experience of art, with the result that art isevaluated almost exclusively in terms of its ethical and political roles.Although Aristotle labors to resuscitate aesthetic experience, he does soin a way that still makes it answer to the theoretical impulse to understandits value in ulterior terms. Sontags own contribution to the narrative,which is somewhat at odds with Benjamins understanding, is to identifythe primary experience of art with the aesthetic experience of it. In anyevent, this speculative narrative provides the conceptual backdrop to (A)above, i.e., the claim that systematic theories are reductive of the particu-lar things over which they range. This subservience of art to systematic

abstraction is inherently pernicious and its particular manifestation inmodern critical theory is something that should be avoided.

Sontag is less detailed than one might like concerning what is wrongwith systematicity in aesthetic theory. But her main line of thought onthe subject also seems to be lifted virtually intact from early FrankfurtSchool poetics: knowledge is domination. Understanding a thing neces-sarily involves bringing it into connection with what is already known.The connection between understanding a thing and already under-

standing (other) things requires tracking similarities between the tworelevant domains: the understood and the to-be-understood. The ideaseems to be that the past leverages the present in such a way that whatis idiosyncratic about the object as the object it isits singularity oruniquenessis submerged in favor of its belonging to a more or lessundisturbed, presumed sets of concepts, dispositions, or beliefs. At leastsome art of a very high caliber has value, so the argument goes, onlyif it can be experienced without this categorical overlay. At its outer

reaches the early Frankfurt School holds that even predicative judg-ment is domineering in this way, a claim that descends from a long lineof thought in German idealism that treats predicative judgment as aspecies of identity statement (e.g., Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, FriedrichSchlegel, and Hegel). I dont wish to defend this idea of the relation

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of art to cognition or to instrumental behavior, but I take it as a givenin Sontags critical apparatus. The questions become: what implicationsdoes she draw from it for her theory and practice of art criticism? Whatrole can theory play in our experience and criticism of art, given thisgeneral picture? Which sorts of theories are better than others in thisrespect and which ones sabotage aesthetic experience?

The second concern(B) aboveon the face of it, has more to dowith the kind of interpretation a literary theory deploys than with thestructural domination of theory. Sontag addresses the issue of deepinterpretation by historically situating the brand of theoretical under-standing at play in the literary criticism of her day (AI, p. 15). Inter-pretation, as it turns out, is a term of art for her, although she doesnot draw attention to this fact. Much of the conceptual work necessaryto understanding Sontags early programmatic essays involves pinningdown the sense of this term more precisely than she does herself. As theword is often used in literary contexts, interpretation means under-standing an intentional object whose meaning is non-obvious. Ironyis particularly good example, a speech act that requires as one of thecomponents its completion by interpretation. But the phenomenon is

broader, including all manner of artistic utterance that is more sugges-tive than is everyday language. There is a philosophically salient notionof interpretation that is even more general than this use in art criticism.Some views on linguistic meaninge.g., Donald Davidsonsrequireinterpretation even in cases of seemingly overt and univocal meaning.Interpretation applies to all utterances and not merely special kinds.Davidson, in effect, treats everyday linguistic behavior as but a specialcase of its artistic counterpartthey exist on a single continuum that

always implicates interpretation in meaning. Sontag explicitly exemptsinterpretations of this latter sortwhich she associates with Nietzschesviews on interpretationfrom her analysis. She is concerned only withexplicitly hermeneutic interpretation.

Is Sontag suspicious of all explicit hermeneutical interpretation ormerely specific sorts? She singles out for consideration literary criticismin the heroic modes prevalent in the U.S. during the 1930s to 50s, i.e.,Marxist, liberal, or psychoanalytic criticism (AI, pp. 1617). No one in

particular is named, but one might presume Howe, Leavis, Trilling, andWilson. Sontag treats heroic interpretation as a species of translation. Thesense in which this might be true, of course, depends as much on whatone means by translation as it does on what interpretation turns out tobe. After all, translation is a subtle art that had better include amongst

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its core admissions that translation is not a univocal enterprisei.e.,one translation does not foreclose others and deciding which is best,at least within a scope of the better ones, may be impossible. But thisis not how Sontag glosses the concept. She seems to associate transla-tion strongly with the kind of interpretation that she thinks Freudianor Marxist theories require between orders of sub- and superstructuremeaning, which she takes as strongly exclusionary. This is true of someMarxist literary theory, for instance, Trotskys Literature and Revolution, butnot for all such. As far as Freudian theory goes, hers is an oddly myopicview. Translation receives its strongest reading here, something like aonce and for all time gerrymandered transfer of a thing into a domainwholly alien to it. She seems to be posturing here. Benjamin and Adornoboth had substantial Marxist and Freudian commitments, yet she esteemstheir work. This shows that she lays more emphasis on the concept ofdetermination, so she is free to allow that not all Marxist or Freudianviews in principle are ones that she would reject. They might not countas determinative for her if they are configured suitably. They mightpreserve, that is, senses in which interpretations are not treated as mereexplanations. On this interpretation of her position, Sontags two main

complaints, although analytically distinct, overlap. The real issue for heris determination. Systematicity determines by exclusion and reduction interms of the system. Hermeneutic interpretation of the subterraneansort achieves determination of the surface aesthetic by explicating it interms of deeper structures that are not aesthetic at all.

This charitable construction of Sontags position, which allows greaterscope for interpretation in aesthetic experience and criticism, cohereswith the tenor of her actual criticism of heroic theories. Sontags general

argument is that theories that deploy interpretations that treat literatureas the phenomenal manifestations of more basic forces determine artis-tic meaning and that is bad for aesthetics. She does not avail herself ofthe characteristic epistemic arguments against such explanation, e.g.,that such theories are self-sealing or that there is something incoher-ent about ascribing causes that are not cognitively accessible, etc. Givenher emphasis on the evils of exogenous determination, one sensiblymight situate her views in the context of American literary criticism,

even though she is associated ordinarily with European literary theory.More specifically, one might view her as a latter day New Critic, whoseaim is to rescue the surface of art from its over-conceptualization, andthis entails a critical practice that can deal in the complexities of formand restrict itself to the internal structure of the work. This need not

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hamstring political analysis. The Society of the Well-Wrought Urn issometimes taken to be strictly formalist, and that is a mistake.3 TheNew Critic can make political statements about a work as a New Critic,so long as those statements are firmly anchored in formal analysis.Her formalist pedigree notwithstanding, Sontag wants to contest anyattempt to short-circuit heroic theory by embracing the other reductiveextreme and eliminating theory by reducing work to text. Indeed, sheis suspicious of the very distinction between form and content, even ifit is drawn merely for analytic purposes. Her concern here seems to bethat the distinction has been a way for content-based theory to margin-alize form. Form comes out of the distinction a mere accessory (AI,p. 14; cf. pp. 2425).

If determination is the root problem, one might expect Sontag toendorse or at least show interest in aesthetic theories that strive toaccommodate the particularity of things by modifying the systematicityof aesthetic theory, the kind of interpretation such a theory employs,or both. There is a literature in nineteenth-century philology in whichinterpretation is a process of understanding that is more open-ended,defeasible, and subjective than the reductive, modern systematic theoriz-

ing of which Sontag is wary. Sontag assesses this literature, not, as onemight expect, by welcoming back to contemporary salience a histori-cal strand of interpretative theory that is less domineering. Rather, sheallows that, historically, interpreting art was oncea liberating experience,but it no longer is:

Interpretation in our own time, however, is even more complex [thanthis historical hermeneutic strandFR]. For the contemporary zeal for

the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward thetroublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an openaggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The old style of inter-pretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on topof a literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as itexcavates, destroys; it digs behind the text, to find a sub-text which isthe true one. (AI, p. 16)

In Against Interpretation Sontag leaves open the question of whether

systematic hermeneutic interpretation of a less determinative sort thatstems from this position is possible nowadays. One example of the pastpractice she finds respectful of aesthetic value is the allegorical treat-ment of literature. This is non-reductive for Sontag for the same reasonit is for Benjamin. Allegory is more paratactic than is, say, symbolism.

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Allegory places side by side two orders that are isomorphic with oneanother and which maintain their discreteness, whereas symbolic under-standing subsumes one thing under another (more semantically basic)thing. To illustrate the modern use of interpretation, she offers the caseof Kafka. Some will recognize their best efforts in literature class fromhigh school here. One readsDas Schlotheologically, finding religioussymbolism everywhere (see AI, p. 18). Or Freudian interpretation showsthe ultimate scene ofDer Prozeto be about castration, Kafkas torturedpersonal relationships, or both. Sontag allows that some authors invitethis treatment: Thomas Mann, for instance. But the fact that someauthors treat their own work as interpretable in this way does not meanthat critics should indulge (AI, p. 19).

What modern theories do not foul the individuality of the work? Oneobvious candidate class would be theories that emphasize the multipleinterpretability of works across the board. Theory would not be fatedto self-predation so long as interpretation does not close down otheravenues (interpretative or not) to the work. As we saw, Sontag leavesthis precise possibility unaddressed in Against Interpretation. Shedoes mention Benjamin as a critic worth considering in this regard

along with Auerbach, Barthes, Frye, and Panofsky, but all of this is verygeneral, almost at the level of name dropping (AI, p. 22). On the otherhand, the idea that an artist might create a work with the intent thatit be interpreted in multiple ways does not seem to cut that much icewith her. Her example of art that is open to this approach is Renais andRobbe-Grillets film La dernire anne de Marienbad(AI, p. 19), but shemight have chosen any number of artistic testaments from Duchamp toBorges. But Sontag never endorses multiple interpretability as an entirely

general regimen. Her view seems to be that some works flourish undersuch an approach to them and some do not.

When it comes to a more general prescription for how art and its criti-cism are to carry on in the Age of Interpretation, Sontag contemplatestwo proposals, one reactionary, the other proactive. The reactionaryproposal has to do with art that pulls the rug out from under content-based interpretation by taking its own structure to be its subject matter.This is reactive, in Sontags view, because the concept form is tied

dialectically to the concept content in such a way that emphasis onthe former in hopes of undercutting the latter is bound to complicateboth. This revenge of form on content has an air of conciliation to it,but it is a potent avant-garde corrective nonetheless (AI, pp. 2021). Onegets the sense that, like Adorno, Sontag sees but very marginal returns

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in this strategy the farther down the line formal avant-gardism travels,so she favors a second, proactive approach. She writes that ideally itis possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making worksof art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is sorapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be . . . just what itis. Is this possible now? It does happen in films, I believe (AI, p. 21).Her examples here are D. W. Griffith, select 1930s and 40s Hollywoodmovies that have a strong auteurpresence, the films of the nouvelle vague,Antonioni, and some of Bergman. The idea of a unified and cleansurface so seamless that it resists interpretation is, however, somethingof a red herring. The example of Antonionis Lavventura(1959) is welltaken, if it is offered on account of the importance of its highly inte-grated aesthetic surface to the work. And one might easily extend thisobservation to the trilogy (or tetrology, depending on how one counts)of films to which Lavventura is often thought to belong.4True to hercritical scruples, Sontag attempted to cultivate just this property in herfirst two films,Duet for Cannibals(1969) and Brother Carl(1971). But theidea that Lavventuraseals itself off against interpretation borders on ajoke. Her own proscriptions to the contrary, she seems to accord some

of Antonionis own statements about his arts ultimate authority.5What one is left with on the subject of the place of interpretation in

On Interpretation vacillates between broad pronouncements againsttheory and a more careful view that critics must avoid certain interpre-tative practices lest the category of the aesthetic disappear from theexperience and understanding of art. In place of hermeneutics we needan erotics of art is a slogan, not the conclusion of a sustained argument(AI, p. 23). Sontags concerns, however, are clear. The proliferation of

signs and sounds in the modern world makes it especially difficult toexperience works as worksinstead of as bits of an overwhelming stand-ing sensory array. To assume that the question is an in-house concernjustabout art is part of the problem. More precisely, the just is theproblem. What is at stake, according to Sontag, is nothing less than amode of worldly experience. For, awareness of art is as much a primarymode of experience in the world as is anything else.

II

On Style settles out somewhat the contradictory tendencies in AgainstInterpretation, but only does so if subjected to reconstruction as well.What is needed, she writes, is a new, interpretation-independent concept

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of content. Interpretation-centered modern conceptions of artisticcontent treat content as synonymous with subject matter that can beexhausted.6But what one means when one talks about the content ofa particular novel, say, depends on what Sontag calls a sensibility, inwhich historically specific canons of taste play main roles.7This is theinversion typical of Sontagrather than style being pendant to content,what concept of content one has derives from which general style ofthought is present in a particular historical culture. The idea of contentthat is pertinent to the style of thought of the art being made at thetime, Sontag writes, only becomes visible once the style of thinking ofcontent as subject matter is understood (OS, p. 28). Sontag here moder-ates the anti-content stance of On Interpretation. Treating art works asstatements is not inappropriate in all cases, but even where appropriatesuch treatment is not fundamental (OS, p. 30). Likewise the idea thatart is a form of knowledge that is closely connected to practices of deepinterpretation, or simply viewing art as something like an answer to aquestion, must be reappraised (OS, p. 30). Art of course can contain allsorts of information, propositional and otherwise, but knowledge of thissort is not for Sontag knowledge proper to art as such. Art-knowledge is

the experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather thana knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgment) in itself(OS, p. 30). In other words, the kind of knowledge specific to art is theknowledge of what it is like to have a certain experience. This KantiancumRomantic thought, which situates the cognitive importance of aes-thetic experience in an awareness of aesthetic response, reinforces theimportance of style and form. This may seem to some a Pickwickeanidea of knowledge, but Sontag would likely reply that it only seems so

if one wrongly takes propositional knowledge to be archetypical.Sontag pivots on this consideration of the roles of content and style

in art to address the question that many take to be the proving groundfor any treatment of the relation of those two concepts: the relation ofmorality to art. Sontag can appear to be overly impressed by the lartpour lartaesthetic in a way that Henry James would have been fond toportray: an American provincial soaking in European ideas that are, inEurope, already slightly out of fashion. For all of her openness to Lvi-

Strauss, Barthes and other structuralists, she reads them through Sartreanlenses that filter out social aspects of literature, leaving the after-imageof sacrosanct poetic subjectivity. Because of this, perhaps, Sontag believesshe can re-admit morality into the aesthetic sphere formally. Her pointhere is not, however, Kantian. Morality should not be confused with moral

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judgment, and certainly not with a set of moral prescriptions. Moralityis, rather, aformof acting and not a particular repertoire of choices(OS, p. 33 (emphasis in original)).8This talitrumis extremely close toidentifying morality with style, and that suits Sontag. Of course, she doesnot intend the idea of mere stylethe style of the Paris fashion runway,for instance. That would be a content-biased notion of style. Nor doesshe restrict the idea of style to art and even less to self-consciously styl-ized work (OS, pp. 2829). Nietzsche is again in the wings, but in pointof fact Sontags account of the proper relation of aesthetic objects andmorality is closer to Schillers.9Art expresses morality by enlivening oursensibility and understanding (OS, p. 34), promoting moral agency byrefining the capacity to descry subtle differences in concrete cases tobe submitted for ethical appraisal. Her famous defense of the aestheticmerit of Riefenstahls Nazi films depends on this understanding.10It isopen for one to deplore the Nuremberg rallies and the Berlin stagingof the Olympics, nevertheless, one should appreciate the formal rigorof the films. This is not because, as many readers of Sontag believe, sheviews the moral posture of the works as irrelevant. She does not evenview moral qualities of such works as being cleanly divisible from their

formal structure. It is rather that the moral quality is activated throughstyle, intensifying ones adverse reaction to the work. The formal proper-ties, so to speak, undercut any potential positive role the Fascist contentmight have by making the content ardently present in the work. This,of course, presupposes that the audience is in possession of the relevantstyle to put itself on a collision course with the Fascism of the work. NoNazi will be morally aided by the works in the least.

Style is Sontags way to broker the difference between form and

content, readjusting the latter concept in terms of the former. Herconception of style is designed to steer clear of psychologism; style isnot the authors personality as expressed in the work. This would beto let the heroic Marxists and Freudians in the back door. All work hasstyle of some sort, so the analysis of style does not provide a way to esti-mate works in terms of their own positions on the aesthetic question.While style is what many would call a formal concept, the reflexivebearing of a work on its own style, which is by extension a meditation

on its role in preserving its own particularity over and against rampanttheory, is not guaranteed by a works merely having style. On Styledoes not supply this last component of Sontags overall early views. Thatis, the essay does not answer the question: how does art itselfresist theinterpretative impulse?

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III

Sontags attempt to glean ways in which literature itself can embodyformally a resistance to theory and an insistence on its own aestheticautonomy is best on display in The Aesthetics of Silence, an essay thatis undervalued rather substantially relative to her other early work.11Here Sontag returns to the home soil of metaphysical conceptions ofthe value of art, specifically to the idea that arts primary significanceis not the pleasure one takes in it but rather a species of truth. Suchclaims, Sontag notes, historically come attached to teleological viewsabout how art develops historically to more fully function as a vehiclefor such value. Teleological narratives are not limited to the nineteenthand twentieth centuries of course, but they proliferated in the past twocenturies. And much of the proliferation is due to the introduction,through philosophy and the nascent social sciences, of complex notionsof historical time and the relation of that time to human cognitive andevaluative processes that once were considered to be radically ahistori-cal. These views of arts vocation seem to run contrary to the lart pourlart aesthetic emerging during this same historical period. Careful

consideration reveals, however, that the teleological story sustains theart for arts sake movement as well, since autonomy of art fromothersources of value is possible in this period because of an elevated senseof the autonomy ofartthe idea that art is about its own kind of truth.Purveyors of the metaphysical approach effectively reverse the order ofpriority between art and cognitive or spiritual function.

Sontag argues that the way in which this modern idea of the truth ofart persists despite skepticism about the metaphysical underpinnings of

art in truth is to take silence as a highly important formal component.She details various uses of silence in modern art, as well as several con-cepts of silence that are operative in these uses, in order to illustratehow art is both complicit with this metaphysical tradition and yet is onthe verge of rejecting it.

Sontag writes during a period when aesthetic theory is respondingto literature, many of the most interesting instances of which take astheir theme the absence, rather than the presence, of meaning.12One

main way in which absence is made present in works thematically isthrough silence. Being silent is a way to renounce a thought by refus-ing to engage in the conditions for its possibility, speech. In literatureBeckett is exemplary, but one might deploy silence in other arts, forinstance, music. Here John Cage is Sontags prime example. One might

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argue that silence relative to language and relative to music sounds thesamesilence issilent, after all. But that would miss the point. It wouldnot be sufficient to treat silence here as having a surface grammarthat parses as logical negation. Silence is not just the absence of sound(in fact, if Sontag is right, the absence of sound is not even a neces-sary condition on silence). Sontag views silence as relational. Silenceis a single circuit involving both what is silenced and the withholding,silencing act. Silence can be as specific as thought because it is a formof thought. Can the concept be extended to arts that involve sensorymodalities other than sound? What would visual, olfactory, tactile, orgustatory silence be: catachreseis? Sontag does not investigate the limitsof the concept of aesthetic silence.

There are two responses open to the advocate of silence based on thebifurcated nature of the case that we lack words, and that we have toomany of them (AS, p. 22). On the one hand, there is what one mightcall silent silence, where one honors the aesthetic surface of works bynot saying anything. On the other hand, there is stuttering silence,where one displays the limitation of generic meaning by producing somany pertinent meanings that one shows these meanings to be at best

partial renderings of the text. Sontag mentions two strategies relevantto the first approach. The first she associates with Cage, where silenceis sheer withholding, although she allows, as did Cage, that what resultsfrom this is not silence at all, but rather a foregrounding of backgroundsound left by the withdrawal of concert conventions. Sontag refersto the composition 4 33here. It is worth noting that Cage preservescertain concert conventions as well in order to pitch the found soundagainst audience expectations operative in that context. For instance,

the performerin the original performance, David Tudorsits at thepiano bench in front of a piano that is placed in standard position onthe stage. The sense in which Cage controlssuch effects is sometimes lostin the glib application to his music of the label aleatory.13A secondroute to silent silence is through the materialization of the object. ThisSontag attributes to the nouveau romanof Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute.The idea here is to distance the object severely from standard modesof literary address. This is accomplished by exact objective description,

which causes the appropriate response to the objects to shift from look-ing at them, where one sees them as passive reservoirs of potentialarticulation, to staring at them (AS, pp. 1516; see also AI, p. 22).The idea of staring is supposed to capture the obduracy of the object.The objects, as Sontag puts it, rightly perceived, are already full (AS,

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p. 16). She also enlists Warhol on the side of anti-interpretative stolid-ity of art and, on many accounts of Warhol, this is a surprising move.For Arthur Danto, for instance, Warhols central importance derivesfrom the way he makes the ontology of art thematically present inworks like Brillo Box. Other, more sociologically-oriented art historianssee Warhols work as a celebration of commodity form. Still others willsee in his celebration of Pop culture and celebrity a semantic free-for-all that goes down well with poststructurism. Sontag, in contrast, viewshim as a minimalist, for whom the commodity form is a medium ofsilent critique. The formalist in her should find it very hard to acceptconceptual art, or at least to accept it as being as serious as cutting-edgeformalism. Nonetheless, Sontag holds that Warhol practices silence withan ontological stammer (AS, p. 27). She holds that this more is lessform of silence is not a very promising strategy unless it is harnessedto irony or parody, which is just what Warhol does.

An erotics of art is hardly an ironics of the same of course. They seemto be two completely different things, one requiring immersion in themateriality of the work as much as the other requires distance from it.In the end, Sontags account of arts own role in aesthetic resistance

is not entirely satisfactory. Surely the formalist in her would grant thatworks can promote their aesthetics simply by having aesthetic surfacesthat are commanding in their own right. This does not require, at leastnot in all cases, that such art reflect on its own place in the continuingstruggle of form against content. Yet, the philosopher in her does seem toprize reflexive art. She is skeptical that aesthetic surfaces can commandat all any moreart must assertits aesthetic nature and, in the modernperiod, that implicates artistic reflexivity. This relationship of simplic-

ity and reflexivity, I take it, expresses a constitutive tension in Sontagsearly work between formalism and more engaged criticism. Even underreconstruction her views ultimately may not cohere, if the criterion forcoherence is the removal of the tension. But her treatment of theseissues is a vivid example of an agile literary mind attempting to cometo grips with the marginalization of aesthetic value in modernity.

U N D

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I am grateful to Anthony Cascardi, Richard Eldridge, Gregg Horowitz, and Joshua Landy for their

very helpful comments on a prior version of this essay.

1. Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier-barkeit, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Herbert Schewenhuser(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 43170. For Sontags most extended treat-ment of Benjamin, see Under the Sign of Saturn, in Under the Sign of Saturn(New York:Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), pp. 10936.

2. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, in Against Interpretation (New York: Dell,1966), pp. 1314. Hereafter abbreviated AI.

3. I am grateful to Richard Eldridge for discussion of this issue. A valuable account ofNew Criticism that attends to the differences within its ranks is Ren Wellek, American

Criticism, 19001950, vol. 6 of A History of Modern Criticism: 17501950(New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1986), pp. 144234, 25792.

4. That is, with La notte(1960), Leclisse(1962) and, possibly, Il deserto rosso(1964). Somemight argue for the inclusion of Il grido(1957) as well.

5. See Michelangelo Antonioni,Fare un film per me vivere, ed. Carlo di Carlo and GianniTinazzi (Venice: Marsilio, 1994).

6. Susan Sontag, On Style, in Against Interpretation, p. 28. Hereafter abbreviated OS.

7. Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, in Against Interpretation, pp. 27793; see also OS,

pp. 2728.8. Sontag cites Ortega y Gasset, but it is really Nietzsche who is in view. Reliance onNietzsche in Sontag is pervasive and not always acknowledged, even where there is directparaphrase (see, e.g., AI, p. 17).

9. See Friedrich Schiller, ber Anmut und Wrde, in Schiller Nationalausgabe(Weimar:Bhlaus, 1943 ), vol. 20, p. 289.

10. Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism, in Under the Sign of Saturn, pp. 73108; cf.OS, pp. 3435.

11. Susan Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence, in Styles of Radical Will(New York: Dell,1969), pp. 334. Hereafter abbreviated AS.

12. I have particularly benefited from discussions of this issue with Joshua Landy.

13. I thank Margaret Leng Tan for discussion of Cages various performancepractices.