Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation

Abstract

In his genealogical tree of the New York Jewish Intellectuals c. 1935–c. 1965, Daniel Bell places Susan Sontag in the generation that comes ‘of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s’.¹ Though clearly affiliated to this group and sharing many of their assumptions about culture and politics, Susan Sontag questioned a number of the group’s shibboleths. She does not concur with their outright rejection of an aesthetically degraded and potentially totalitarian mass culture, nor does she believe that the arts have a sacred mission to provide models of ethical and spiritual behaviour. For critics and social theorists of Hannah Arendt’s and Lionel Trilling’s generation, the arts had responsibilities to deal with a set of moral and social themes that Daniel Bell has summarised as follows:

How one meets death, the meaning of tragedy, the nature of obligation, the character of love — these recurrent questions which are, I believe cultural universals, to be found in all societies where men have become conscious of the finiteness of existence.²

In her famous essay, ‘Against Interpretation’, in the book to which it gives its name, Sontag argued that the arts had other less transcendental responsibilities than those enunciated by Daniel Bell. Sontag calls for an ‘erotics of art’, which will enable people ‘to see more, to hear more, to feel more’.³