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Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation

Written in 1964, this short and concentrated essay still stands as one of the sharpest texts of meta-criticism. The ten points can be read as a manifesto. Although the original is recommended in its entirety, I will sum it up in an even briefer form.

1.

Art began as ritual and magic, and was mimetic from the start. Mimetic theory challenges art to justify itself. Plato accused of art being an imitation of an imitation. Mimetic theory also applies to abstract art, because, apart from representing outer reality, art can be a subjective expression. In both cases, content takes on primary importance. The defence of art implies that there is "form" and "content," that content is essential whereas form is accessory. It is assumed that a work of art _says_ something.

2.

The overemphasis on content entails the project of interpretation. Conversely, the habit of interpretation sustains the fancy that there is such a thing as the content of the work of art.

3.

Interpretation is like plucking elements from the work and translating them. The interpretation of historical texts such as the Bible presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning and the demands of later readers. The old text has become unacceptable, but can't be discarded. Interpretation conserves an old text by revamping it. The interpreter alters the text but can't admit to doing it. To Marx and Freud, events have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, to find an equivalent for it.

4.

The effusion of interpretations of art poisons our sensibilities. Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. "To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the work in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings'."

5.

Reducing the work of art to its content, and then interpreting that, is to tame the work of art. Literature is worse off than other arts.

6.

Resist the temptation to interpret! What matters is untranslatable, sensuous immediacy. Interpretation indicates a dissatisfaction, a wish to replace the work.

7.

Art may try to escape interpretation by becoming parody, abstract, decorative, or anti-art. This is a feature of modern painting. Abstract painting tries to have no content; without content, there can be no interpretation. Pop Art does the opposite: its content being blatantly obvious, it ends up uninterpretable.

8.

What Sontag desires from criticism or commentary is more attention to form, and sharp, accurate, loving descriptions of the appearance of the work.

9.

Enormous quantities of works of art are available to us. Ours is a culture of excess and overproduction, which leads to a loss of sensory sharpness. We should not squeeze out more content of the work than is already there. Criticism should show _how_ it is what it is, even _that_ it is what it is, rather than what it means.

10.

Instead of hermeneutics: an erotics of art.

Final comment

Sontag writes in the context of modernism. Surrealism definitely invited interpretation, as did abstract expressionism. The rapid succession of short-lived movements needed some kind of explanation of what was going on, why they were painting stripes one year, exhibiting sterile metal boxes the next year, and then silkscreen prints of consumer goods. Several artists were becoming more theoretically aware and presented their own interpretations of their work. That has become the norm in contemporary art: the narrative about the work must be in place, constructed by the artist, and when it is, the demand for further interpretation in the traditional sense has diminished substantially.

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