Susan Sontag
Against Interpretation and Other Essays
(1966)
On Style
(pp. 15-36)
[Orig. 1965]
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[22]
mitment, judgment in a state of thralldom or captivation. Which is to say that the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgment) in itself.
This explains the preeminence of the value of expressiveness in works of art; and how the value of expressiveness--that is, of style - -rightly takes precedence over content (when content is, falsely, isolated from style). The satisfactions of Paradise Lost for us do not lie in its views on God and man, but in the superior kinds of energy, vitality, expressiveness which are incarnated in the poem.
Hence, too, the peculiar dependence of a work of art, however expressive, upon the cooperation of the person having the experi- ence, for one may see what is "said" but remain unmoved, either through dullness or distraction. Art is seduction, not rape. A work of art proposes a type of experience designed to manifest the quality of imperiousness. But art cannot seduce without the complicity of the experiencing subject.
• • Inevitably, critics who regard works of art as statements will be wary of "style, 79 even as they pay lip service to "'imagination." All that imagination really means for them, anyway, is the supersensi- tive rendering of "reality." It is this "reality snared by the work of art that they continue to focus on, rather than on the extent to which a work of art engages the mind in certain transformations.
But when the metaphor of the work of art as a statement loses its authority, the ambivalence toward "style" should dissolve; for this ambivalence mirrors the presumed tension between the state- ment and the manner in which it is stated.
• • In the end, however, attitudes toward style cannot be reformed merely by appealing to the "appropriate" (as opposed to utilitarian) way of looking at works of art. The ambivalence toward style is not rooted in simple error_-it would then be quite easy to uproot--but in a passion, the passion of an entire culture. This passion is to pro- tect and defend values traditionally conceived of as lying "'outside" art, namely truth and morality, but which remain in perpetual dan- ger of being compromised by art. Behind the ambivalence toward
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[32] tecture. Starobinski examines the art of this period in terms of the new ideas of self-mastery and of mastery of the world, as embody- ing new relations between the self and the world. Art is seen as the naming of emotions. Emotions, longings, aspirations, by thus being named, are virtually invented and certainly promulgated by art: for example, the "sentimental solitude" provoked by the gardens that were laid out in the 18th century and by much-admired ruins.
Thus, it should be clear that the account of the autonomy of art I have been outlining, in which I have characterized art as an imagi nary landscape or décor of the will, not only does not preclude but rather invites the examination of works of art as historically specifi- able phenomena.
The intricate stylistic convolutions of modern art, for example, are clearly a function of the unprecedented technical extension of the human will by technology, and the devastating commitment of human will to a novel form of social and psychological order, one based on incessant change. But it also remains to be said that the very possibility of the explosion of technology, of the contemporary disruptions of self and society, depends on the attitudes toward the will which are partly invented and disseminated by works of art at a certain historical moment, and then come to appear as a "realistic" reading of a perennial human nature.
• • Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist's will. And as the human will is capable of an indefinite number of stances, there are an indefinite number of possible styles for works of art.
Seen from the outside, that is, historically, stylistic decisions can always be correlated with some historical development-_-like the in- vention of writing or of movable type, the invention or transforma- tion of musical instruments, the availability of new materials to the sculptor or architect. But this approach, however sound and valu- able, of necessity sees matters grossly; it treats of periods" and "traditions" and "schools. 27
Seen from the inside, that is, when one examines an individual work of art and tries to account for its value and effect, every styl- istic decision contains an element of arbitrariness, however much it
[33]
may seem justifiable propter hoc. If art is the supreme game which the will plays with itself, "style" consists of the set of rules by which this game is played. And the rules are always, finally, an artificial and arbitrary limit, whether they are rules of form (like terza rima or the twelve-tone row or frontality) or the presence of a certain "content." The role of the arbitrary and unjustifiable in art has never been sufficiently acknowledged. Ever since the enterprise of criticism began with Aristotle's Poetics, critics have been beguiled into emphasizing the necessary in art. (When Aristotle said that poetry was more philosophical than history, he was justified insofar as he wanted to rescue poetry, that is, the arts, from being conceived as a type of factual, particular, descriptive statement. But what he said was misleading insofar as it suggests that art supplies something like what philosophy gives us: an argument. The metaphor of the work of art as an "argument, with premises and entailments, has in- formed most criticism since.) Usually critics who want to praise a work of art feel compelled to demonstrate that each part is justined, that it could not be other than it is. And every artist, when it comes to his own work, remembering the role of chance, fatigue, external distractions, knows what the critic says to be a lie, knows that it could well have been otherwise. The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole.
• • In other words, what is inevitable in a work of art is the style. To the extent that a work seems right, just, unimaginable otherwise (without loss or damage), what we are responding to is a quality of its style. The most attractive works of art are those which give us the illusion that the artist had no alternatives, so wholly centered is he in his style. Compare that which is forced, labored, synthetic in the construction of Madame Bovary and of Ulysses with the ease and harmony of such equally ambitious works as Les Liaisons Dan- gereuses and Kafka's Metamorphosis. The first two books I have mentioned are great indeed. But the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.
For an artist's style to have this quality of authority, assurance, seamlessness, inevitability does not, of course, alone put his work at
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The artist as exemplary sufferer
(pp. 39-48)
[Orig. 1962]
...
[41]
ary," and "too subjective.") Like Antonioni's films, Pavese's novels are refined, elliptical (though never obscure), quiet, anti-dramatic, self-contained. Pavese is not a major writer, as Antonioni is a major film-maker. But he does deserve a good deal more attention in Eng. land and America than he has gotten thus far.*
Recently Pavese's diaries from the years 1935 to 1950, when he committed suicide at the age of forty-two, have been issued in Eng. lish. They can be read without any acquaintance with Pavese's novels, as an example of a peculiarly modern literary genre--the writer's "diary" Or "notebooks" Or "journal."
Why do we read a writer's journal? Because it illuminates his books? Often it does not. More likely, simply because of the rawness of the journal form, even when it is written with an eye to future publication. Here we read the writer in the first person; we encounter the ego behind the masks of ego in an author's works. No degree of intimacy in a novel can supply this, even when the au- thor writes in the first person or uses a third person which transpar-
* The same is true of another Italian, Tommaso Landolf, with a large body of stories and novels, bor the same year as Pavese (1908) but still living and writ. ing. Landolfi, who is thus far represented in English by only one volume, a selection of nine of his short stories, entitled Gogol's Wife and Other Sto- ries, is a very different and, at his best, more forceful writer than Pavese. His morbid wit, austere intellectuality, and rather surrealistic notions of disaster put him closer to writers like Borges and Isak Dinesen. But he and Pavese have something in common which makes the work of both unlike the fiction mainly being written today in England and America, and apparently un. interesting to the audience for that fiction. What they share is the project of a basically neutral, reserved kind of writing. In such writing, the act of relating a story is seen primarily as an act of intelligence. To narrate is palpably to employ one's intelligence; the unity of the narration characteristic of European and Latin American fiction is the unity of the narrator's intelligence. But the writing of fiction common in America today has little use for this patient, dogged, unshowy use of intelligence. American writers mostly want the facts to declare, to interpret themselves. If there is a narrative voice, it is likely to be immaculately mindless_-or else strainingly clever and bouncy. Thus, most American writing is grossly rhetorical (that is, there is an overproduction of means in relation to ends), in contrast to the classical mode of European writ- ing, which achieves its effects with an anti-rhetorical style--a style that holds back, that aims ultimately at neutral transparency. Both Pavese and Landolf belong squarely in this anti-rhetorical tradition.
† The Burning Brand; Diaries 1935-1950 by Cesare Pavese. Translated by A. E. Much (with Jeanne Molli). New York, Walker & Co.
[42]
ently points to himself. Most of Pavese's novels, including the four translated into English, are narrated in the first person. Yet we know that the "I in Pavese's novels is not identical with Pavese himself, no more than is the "Marcel" who tells Remembrance of Things Past identical with Proust, nor the "K." of The Trial and The Castle identical with Kafka. We are not satisfied. It is the au- thor naked which the modern audience demands, as ages of religious faith demanded a human sacrifice.
The journal gives us the workshop of the writer's soul. And why are we interested in the soul of the writer? Not because we are so interested in writers as such. But because of the insatiable mod- er preoccuption with psychology, the latest and most powerful legacy of the Christian tradition of introspection, opened up by Paul and Augustine, which equates the discovery of the self with the discovery of the suffering self. For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering.
The writer is the exemplary sufferer because he has found both the deepest level of suffering and also a professional means to subli- mate (in the literal, not the Freudian, sense of sublimate) his suffering. As a man, he suffers; as a writer, he transforms his suffer- ing into art. The writer is the man who discovers the use of suffer- ing in the economy of art--as the saints discovered the utility and necessity of suffering in the economy of salvation.
The unity of Pavese's diaries is to be found in his reflections o; how to use, how to act on, his suffering. Literature is one use. Isola tion is another, both as a technique for the inciting and perfecting of his art, and as a value in itself. And suicide is the third, ultimate use of suffering -conceived of not as an end to suffering, but as the ultimate way of acting on suffering.
Thus we have the following remarkable sequence of thought, in a diary entry of 1938. Pavese writes: "Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: 'You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching your reactions, and steal your secrets by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal How. .. The other defense against things in general
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Simone Weil
(pp. 49-51)
[Orig. 1963]
[50]
writer in suffering-_-rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr. What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who sub mitted his works to the elder statesman of German letters "on the knees of his heart" the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist's plays and tales were mined--is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, most of Goethe is a classroom bore. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet-_and Simone Weil- have their authority with us precisely because of their air of unhealthi- ness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction.
Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is un- balance, may not be a lie.
Thus I do not mean to decry a fashion, but to underscore the motive behind the contemporary taste for the extreme in art and thought. All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I can- not believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas. Nor is it necessary_-necessary to share Simone Weil's anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her vio- lently unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the Jews. Similarly, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; most of their modern admirers could not, and do not embrace their ideas. We read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for the example of
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The Literary Criticism of Georg Lukács
(pp. 82-92)
[Orig. 1965]
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[88]
marred, not by his Marxism but by the coarseness of his argument.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibil- ity. And a writer who--as Lukács does--dismisses Nietzsche as merely a forerunner of Nazism, who criticizes Conrad for not por- traying the totality of life" (Conrad "is really a short-story writer rather than a novelist"), is not just making isolated mistakes of judgment, but proposing standards that ought not to be assented to.
Nor can I agree, as Kazin in his introduction seems to suggest, that, regardless of where Lukács went wrong, where he is right he is sound. Admirable as the 19th century realist tradition in the novel may be, the standards of admiration which Lukács proposes are unnecessarily coarse. For everything depends on Lukács' view that "the business of the critic is the relation between ideology (in the sense of Weltanschauung) and artistic creation." Lukacs is com- mitted to a version of the mimetic theory of art which is simply far too crude. A book is a "portrayal"; it "depicts, 27 it "paints a picture"; the artist is a "spokesman." The great realist tradition of the novel does not need to be defended in these terms.
Both of the present books, "late" writings, lack intellectual subtlety. Of the two, Realism in Our Time is by far the better. The hirst essay in particular, "The Ideology of Modernism, » is a powerful, in many ways brilliant, attack. Lukács' thesis is that mod- ernist literature (he sweeps Kafka, Joyce, Moravia, Benn, Beckett, and a dozen others into this net) is really allegorical in character; he goes on to develop the connection between allegory and the re- fusal of historical consciousness. The next essay, "Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?" " is a cruder, and less interesting, restatement of the same thesis. The final essay, "Critical Realism and Socialist Real- ism. 99 refutes from a Marxist point of view the base doctrines of art which were part of the Stalin era.
But even this book disappoints in many ways. The notion about allegory in the first essay is based on ideas of the late Walter Ben- jamin, and the quotations from Benjamin's essay on allegory leap off the page as examples of a type of writing and reasoning much finer than that of Lukács. Ironically, Benjamin, who died in 1940,
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[91]
The literary, criticism of Georg Lukács 91 which, mutatis mutandis, in the history of music, would have made him in Adorno's terms a "progressive. Kafka is a reactionary be- cause of the allegorical, that is, the dehistoricized, texture of his writings, while Mann is a progressive because of his realism, that is, his sense of history. But I imagine that Mann's writings-_old-fash- ioned in their form, riddled with parody and irony-could, if the discussion were set up differently, be labeled as reactionary. In the one case, "reaction ," is identifed with an inauthentic relation to the past; in the other, with abstractness. Using either standard-_ despite the exceptions allowed by individual taste-_these critics must be generally inhospitable to or obtuse about modern art. Mostly, they don't get any nearer to it than they have to. The only contem- porary novelist the French neo-Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann has written on at any length is André Malraux. Even the extraor- dinary Benjamin, who wrote with equal brilliance on Goethe, Leskov, and Baudelaire, did not deal with any 20th century writ- ers. And the cinema, the only wholly new major art form of our century, to which he did devote the better part of an important essay, was singularly misunderstood and unappreciated by Ben- jamin. (He thought the movies embodied the abolition of tra- dition and historical consciousness, and therefore-_once again!- fascism.)
What all the culture critics who descend from Hegel and Marx have been unwilling to admit is the notion of art as autonomous (not merely historically interpretable) form. And since the pecul- iar spirit which animates the modern movements in the arts is based on, precisely, the rediscovery of the power (including the emotional power) of the formal properties of art, these critics are poorly situated to come to sympathetic terms with modern works of art, except through their "content." Even form is viewed by the historicist critics as a kind of content. This is very clear in The Theory of the Novel, where Lukács analysis of the various liter- ary genres- epic, lyric, novel-proceeds by an explication of the attitude toward social change incarnated in the form. A similar prejudice is less explicit, but equally pervasive, in the writings of many American literary critics--who get their Hegelianism partly from Marx but mainly from sociology.
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Nathalie Sarraute and the novel
(pp. 100-111)
[1963; revised 1965]
...
[101]
less a nude, descending a staircase, as to teach a lesson on how natural forms may be broken into a series of kinetic planes. The point of the prose works of Stein and Beckett is to show how dic- tion, punctuation, syntax, and narrative order can be recast to ex- press continuous impersonal states of consciousness. The point of the music of Webern and Boulez is to show how, for example, the rhythmical function of silence and the structural role of tone colors can be developed.
The victory of the modern didacticism has been most complete in music and painting, where the most respected works are those which give little pleasure on first hearing and seeing (except to a small and highly trained audience) but make important advances in the technical revolutions which have taken place in these arts. Compared with music and painting, the novel, like the cinema, lags well to the rear of the battlefield. A body of "difficult' novels comparable to Abstract Expressionist painting and musique con- crète has not overrun the territory of critically respectable fiction. On the contrary, most of the novel's few brave ventures to the front line of modernism get marooned there. After a few years they seem merely idiosyncratic, for no troops follow the brave CO and back him up. Novels which, in the order of difficulty and of merit, are comparable to the music of Gian-Carlo Menotti and the paint- ing of Bernard Buffet, are garnished with the highest critical ac- claim. The ease of access and lack of rigor that causes embarrass- ment in music and painting are no embarrassment in the novel, which remains intransigently arrière-garde.
Yet, middle-class art form or no, there is no genre in greater need of sustained reexamination and renovation. The novel is (along with opera) the archetypal art form of the 19th century, perfectly expressing that period's wholly mundane conception of reality, its lack of really ambitious spirituality, its discovery of the "'interest- ," (that is, of the commonplace, the inessential, the accidental, the minute, the transient), its affirmation of what E. M. Cioran calls "destiny in lower case. " The novel, as all the critics who praise it never tire of reminding us and upbraiding contemporary writers who deviate, is about man-in-society; it brings alive a chunk of the world and sets its "characters" within that world. Of course, one
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Reflections on
The Deputy
(pp. 125-131)
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[131]
the German government actively. For the scene that depicts this fact, Hochhuth's play has been slandered by many Catholics as an anti-Catholic tract. But either what Hochhuth reports is true or it is not. And, assuming that Hochhuth has his facts and his notion of Christian courage) right, a good Catholic is no more bound to defend all the actions of Pius XII than he is to admire the liber- tine Popes of the Renaissance. Dante, whom no one would accuse of being anti-Catholic, consigned Celestine V to hell. Why may not a modern Christian-_-Hochhuth is a Lutheran-_-hold up as a standard to the then incumbent Deputy or Vicar of Christ the behavior of the Berlin provost, Bernard Lichtenberg (who publicly prayed for the Jews from his pulpit and volunteered to accompany the Jews to Dachau), or the Franciscan monk, Father Maximilian Kolbe (who died hideously in Auschwitz)?
In any case, the attack on the Pope is scarcely the only subject of The Deputy. The Pope appears in only one scene of the play. The action centers on the two heroes- -the Jesuit priest Ricardo Fon- tana (mainly based on Provost Lichtenberg, with something of Father Kolbe) and the remarkable Kurt Gerstein, who joined the SS in order to gather facts to lay before the Papal Nuncio in Berlin. Hochhuth has not placed Gerstein and Fontana (Lichtenberg) in any "grouping, " to be played along with other roles by the same actor. There is nothing interchangeable about these men. Thus, the main point that The Deputy makes is not a recriminatory one. It is not only an attack on the hierarchy of the German Catholic Church and on the Pope and his advisors, but a statement that genuine honor and decency--though these may entail martyrdom- are possible, and mandatory for a Christian. Precisely because there were Germans who did choose , Hochhuth is saying, we have a right to accuse the others who refused to choose , to speak out, of an unforgivable cowardice.
[1964]
The death of tragedy
(pp. 132-139)
[Orig. 1963]
[132]
Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised. The subject of literature has pre-empted much of the energy that formerly went into philosophy, until that subject was purged by the empiricists and logicians. The modern dilemmas of feeling, action, and belief are argued out on the field of literary masterpieces. Art is seen as a mirror of human capacities in a given historical period, as the pre- eminent form by which a culture defines itself, names itself, dram- atizes itself. In particular, questions about the death of literary forms--is the long narrative poem still possible, or is it dead? the novel? verse drama? tragedy?-are of the greatest moment. The burial of a literary form is a moral act, a high achievement of the modern morality of honesty. For, as an act of self-definition, it is also a self-entombment.
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[137]
of the dominant religious traditions of Western culture? Were Paul, Augustine, Dante, Pascal, and Kierkegaard liberal skeptics? Hardly. Therefore one must ask, why was there no Christian trag- edy?-a question Abel does not raise in his book, though Christian tragedy would seem to be inevitable if one stops at the assertion that belief in implacable values is the necessary ingredient for mak- ing tragedies.
As everyone knows, there was no Christian tragedy, strictly speaking, because the content of Christian values-_for it is a ques- tion of what values, however implacably held; not any will do-is inimical to the pessimistic vision of tragedy. Hence, Dante's theo- logical poem is a "comedy, 22 as is Milton's. That is, as Christians, Dante and Milton make sense out of the world. In the world envisaged by Judaism and Christianity, there are no free-standing arbitrary events. All events are part of the plan of a just, good, providential deity; every crucifixion must be topped by a resurrec- tion. Every disaster or calamity must be seen either as leading to a greater good or else as just and adequate punishment fully merited by the sufferer. This moral adequacy of the world asserted by Chris- tianity is precisely what tragedy denies. Tragedy says there are disasters which are not fully merited, that there is ultimate injustice in the world. So one might say that the final optimism of the pre- vailing religious traditions of the West, their will to see meaning in the world, prevented a rebirth of tragedy under Christian aus- pices-as, in Nietzsche's argument, reason, the fundamentally opti- mistic spirit of Socrates, killed tragedy in ancient Greece. The lib eral, skeptical era of metatheater only inherits this will to make sense from Judaism and Christianity. Despite the exhaustion of religious sentiments, the will to make sense and find meaning pre- vails, although contracted to the idea of an action as the projection of one's idea of oneself.
The third caveat I would make is to Abel's treatment of the modern metaplays, those plays which have all too often been thrown together under the patronizing label "theater of the ab- surd." Abel is right to point out that these plays are, formally, in an old tradition. Yet the considerations of form which Abel ad- dresses in his essays must not obscure differences in range and tone, which he slights. Shakespeare and Calderón construct meta-
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Going to theater, etc.
(pp. 140-162)
...
[141]
Everymanish hero (remember Willy Loman) and the timeless, placeless interior setting give the show away: whatever stirring public issues After the Fall may confront, they are treated as the furniture of a mind. That places an awful burden on Miller's "Quentin, a contemporary man, who must literally hold the world in his head. To pull that one off, it has to be a very good head, a very interest- ing and intelligent one. And the head of Miller's hero isn't any of these things. Contemporary man (as Miller represents him) seems stuck in an ungainly project of self-exoneration. Self-exoneration, of course, implies self-exposure; and there is a lot of that in After the Fall. Many people are willing to give Miller a good deal of credit for the daring of his self-exposure-_as husband, lover, political man, and artist. But self exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to leam about themselves from it. In this play, Miller's self-exposure is mere self-indulgence.
After the Fall does not present an action, but ideas about action. Its psychological ideas owe more to Franzblau than to Freud. (Ouen- tin's mother wanted him to have beautiful penmanship, to take revenge through her son upon her successful but virtually illiter- ate businessman husband.) As for its political ideas, where politics has not yet been softened up by psychiatric charity, Miller still writes on the level of a left-wing newspaper cartoon. To pass muster at all, Quentin's young German girl friend-this in the mid- 1950s- has to turn out to have been a courier for the 20th of July officers' plot; "they were all hanged." Quentin's political bravery is demonstrated by his triumphantly interrupting the harangue of the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to ask, "How many Negroes do you allow to vote in your patriotic district?" This intellectual weak-mindedness of After the Fall leads, as it always does, to moral dishonesty. After the Fall claims to be nothing less than modern man taking inventory of his humanity-_asking where he is guilty, where innocent, where re- sponsible. What I find objectionable is not the peculiar conjunc- tion of issues, apparently the exemplary issues of the mid-20th century (Communism, Marilyn Monroe, the Nazi extermination camps), which Quentin, this writer manqué pretending through-
[142]
out the play to be a lawyer, has recapitulated in his own person. I object to the fact that in After the Fall all these issues are on the same level —not unexpectedly, since they are all in the mind of Quentin. The shapely corpse of Maggie-Marilyn Monroe sprawls on the stage throughout long stretches of the play in which she has no part. In the same spirit a raggedy oblong made of plaster and barbed wire-_-it represents the concentration camps, I hasten to explain--remains suspended high at the back of the stage, occa- sionally lit by a spot when Quentin's monologue swings back to Nazis, etc. After the Fall's quasi-psychiatric approach to guilt and responsibility elevates personal tragedies, and demeans public ones -to the same dead level. Somehow- staggering impertinencel-it all seems pretty much the same: whether Quentin is responsible for the deterioration and suicide of Maggie, and whether he (mod- en man) is responsible for the unimaginable atrocities of the con- centration camps.
Putting the story inside Quentin's head has, in effect, allowed Miller to short-circuit any serious exploration of his material, though he obviously thought this device would "deepen" ' his story. Real events become the ornaments and intermittent fevers of con- sciousness. The play is peculiarly loose-jointed, repetitive, indirect. The "scenes" 'go on and off- jumping back and forth, to and from Quentin's first marriage, his second marriage (to Maggie), his indecisive courtship of his German wife-to-be, his childhood, the quarrels of his hysterical, oppressive parents, his agonizing decision to defend an ex-Communist law-school teacher and friend against a friend who has "named names." All "scenes" are fragments, pushed out of Quentin's mind when they become too painful. Only deaths, inevitably offstage, seem to move Quentin's life along: the Jews (the word "Tews" is never mentioned) died long ago; his mother dies; Maggie kills herself with an overdose of bar- biturates; the law professor throws himself under a subway train Throughout the play, Quentin seems much more a sufferer than an active agent in his own life--yet this is precisely what Miller never acknowledges, never lets Quentin see as his problem. Instead, he continually exonerates Quentin (and, by implication, the audience) in the most conventional way. For all troubling decisions, and all
...
[150]
commands the plane which drops the H-Bomb that sets off the Russian Doomsday Machine. Without this device of the same actor playing morally opposed roles, and so subliminally undermin- ing the reality of the entire plot, the precarious ascendancy of comic detachment over the morally ugly or the terrifying in both films would be lost.
Doctor Strangelove fails most obviously in scale. Much (though not all) of its comedy seems to me repetitive, juvenile, ham- banded. And when comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in. One begins to ask serious questions about the misanthropy which is the only perspective from which the topic of mass annihilation is comic.... For me, the only successful spectacle shown this win- ter dealing with public issues was a work which was both a pure documentary and a comedy--Daniel Talbot and Emile de An- tonio's editing into a ninety-minute film of the TV kinescopes of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. Viewed in 1964, the hear- ings make a quite different impression. All the good guys come off badly--Army Secretary Stevens, Senator Symington, lawyer Welch, and the rest, looked like dopes, stuffed shirts, ninnies, prigs, or opportunists--while the film irresistibly encourages us to relish the villains aesthetically. Roy Cohen, with his swarthy face, slicked- down hair, and double-breasted, pin-stripe suit, looked like a period punk from a Warner Brothers' crime movie of the early thirties; McCarthy, ushaven, fidgety, giggling, looked and acted like W. C. Fields in his most alcoholic, vicious, and inaudible roles. In that it aestheticized a weighty public event, Point of Order was the real comédie noire of the season, as well as the best political drama.
[Spring 1964]
2 ...
Marat/Sade/Artaud
(pp. 163-174)
[Orig. 1965]
...
[167]
The connection between theater and literature. One ready-made idea: a work of theater is a branch of literature. The truth is, some works of theater may be judged primarily as works of literature, others not .
It is because this is not admitted, or generally understood, that one reads all too frequently the statement that while Marat/Sade is, theatrically, one of the most stunning things anyone has seen on the stage, it's a "director's play; meaning a first-rate production of a second-rate play . A well -known English poet told me he detested the play for this reason: because although he thought it marvelous when he saw it, he knew that if it hadn't had the benefit of Peter Brook's production, he wouldn't have liked it. It's also reported that the play in Konrad Swinarski's production last year in West Berlin made nowhere near the striking impression it does in the current production in London.
Granted, Marat/Sade is not the supreme masterpiece of con- temporary dramatic literature, but it is scarcely a second-rate play. Considered as a text alone, Marat/Sade is both sound and exciting. It is not the play which is at fault, but a narrow vision of theater which insists on one image of the director--as servant to the writer, bringing out meanings already resident in the text.
After all, to the extent that it is true that Weiss' text, in Adrian Mitchell's graceful translation, is enhanced greatly by being joined with Peter Brook's staging, what of it? Apart from a theater of dialogue (of language) in which the text is primary, there is also a theater of the senses. The first might be called "play," the second "theater work." In the case of a pure theater work, the writer who sets down words which are to be spoken by actors and staged by a director loses his primacy. In this case, the "author" "creator" iS to quote Artaud, none other than "the person who controls the direct handling of the stage." The director's art is a material art- an art in which he deals with the bodies of actors, the props, the lights, the music. And what Brook has put together is particularly brilliant and inventive--the rhythm of the staging, the costumes, the ensemble mime scenes. In every detail of the production--one of the most remarkable elements of which is the clangorous tune- ful music (by Richard Peaslee) featuring bells, cymbals, and the
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sequential and credible accounts of their motives. Freed from the limitations of what Artaud calls "psychological and dialogue paint- ing of the individual," the dramatic representation is open to levels of experience which are more heroic, more rich in fantasy, more philosophical. The point applies, of course, not only to the drama. The choice of "insane" behavior as the subject-matter of art is, by now, the virtually classic strategy of modern artists who wish to transcend traditional "realism, " that is, psychology.
Take the scene to which many people particularly objected, in which Sade persuades Charlotte Corday to whip him (Peter Brook has her do it with her hair)-while he, meanwhile, continues to recite, in agonized tones, some point about the Revolution, and the nature of human nature. The purpose of this scene is surely not to inform the audience that, as one critic put it, Sade is "sick, sick, sick"; nor is it fair to reproach Weiss' Sade, as the same critic does, with "using the theater less to advance an argument than to excite himself." (Anyway, why not both?) By combining rational or near-rational argument with irrational behavior, Weiss is not inviting the audience to make a judgment on Sade's character, mental competence, Or state of mind. Rather, he is shifting to a kind of theater focused not on characters, but on intense trans- personal emotions borne by characters. He is providing a kind of vi- carious emotional experience (in this case, frankly erotic) from which the theater has shied away too long.
Language is used in Marat/Sade primarily as a form of incanta- tion, instead of being limited to the revelation of character and the exchange of ideas. This use of language as incantation is the point of another scene which many who saw the play have found objec- tionable, upsetting, and gratuitous-_the bravura soliloquy of Sade, in which he illustrates the cruelty in the heart of man by relating in excruciating detail the public execution by slow dismemberment of Damiens, the would-be assassin of Louis XV.
The connection between theater and ideas. Another ready-made idea: a work of art is to be understood as being "about" Or repre- senting or arguing for an "idea." That being so, an implicit stand ard for a work of art is the value of the ideas it contains, and whether these are clearly and consistently expressed.
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But most of these difficulties, and the objections made to them, are misunderstandings--misunderstandings of the connection between the drama and didacticism. Weiss' play cannot be treated like an argument of Arthur Miller, or even of Brecht. We have to do here with a kind of theater as different from these as Antonioni and Godard are from Eisenstein. Weiss' play contains an argument, or rather it employs the material of intellectual debate and historical reevaluation (the nature of human nature, the betrayal of the Revo- lution, etc.). But Weiss' play is only secondarily an argument. There is another use of ideas to be reckoned with in art: ideas as sensory stimulants . Antonioni has said of his films that he wants them to dispense with "the superannuated casuistry of positives and negatives." The same impulse discloses itself in a complex way in Marat/Sade. Such a position does not mean that these artists wish to dispense with ideas. What it does mean is that ideas, in- cluding moral ideas, are proffered in a new style. Ideas may func- tion as décor, props, sensuous material.
One might perhaps compare the Weiss play with the long prose narratives of Genet. Genet is not really arguing that "cruelty is good" or "cruelty is holy" (a moral statement, albeit the opposite of traditional morality), but rather shifting the argument to an- other plane, from the moral to the aesthetic. But this is not quite the case with Marat/Sade. While the "cruelty" in Marat/Sade is not, ultimately, a moral issue, it is not an aesthetic one either. It is an ontological issue. While those who propose the aesthetic version of "cruelty interest themselves in the richness of the surface of life, the proponents of the ontological version of "cruelty" want their art to act out the widest possible context for human action, at least a wider context than that provided by realistic art. That wider context is what Sade calls "nature" and what Artaud means when he says that "everything that acts is a cruelty." There is a moral vision in art like Marat/Sade, though clearly it cannot (and this has made its audience uncomfortable) be summed up with the slogans of "humanism. » But "humanism" is not identical with morality. Pre- cisely, art like Marat/Sade entails a rejection of "humanism, 97 of the task of moralizing the world and thereby refusing to acknowl- edge the' "crimes" of which Sade speaks.
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Godard's Vivre Sa Vie
(pp. 196-207)
...
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2 All art may be treated as a mode of proof, an assertion of accu- racy in the spirit of maximum vehemence. Any work of art may be seen as an attempt to be indisputable with respect to the actions it represents.
3 Proof differs from analysis. Proof establishes that something hap pened. Analysis shows why it happened. Proof is a mode of argument that is, by definition, complete; but the price of its com- pleteness is that proof is always formal. Only what is already con- tained in the beginning is proven at the end. In analysis, however, there are always further angles of understanding, new realms of causality. Analysis is substantive. Analysis is a mode of argument that is, by definition, always incomplete; it is, properly speaking, in- terminable.
The extent to which a given work of art is designed as a mode of proof is, of course, a matter of proportion. Surely, some works of art are more directed toward proof, more based on considerations of form, than others. But still, I should argue, all art tends toward the formal, toward a completeness that must be formal rather than substantive- endings that exhibit grace and design, and only sec- ondarily convince in terms of psychological motives or social forces. (Think of the barely credible but immensely satisfying endings of most of Shakespeare's plays, particularly the comedies.) In great art, it is form-Or, as I call it here, the desire to prove rather than the desire to analyze--that is ultimately sovereign. It is form that allows one to terminate.
4 An art concerned with proof is formal in two senses. Its subject is the form (above and beyond the matter) of events, and the forms (above and beyond the matter) of consciousness. Its means are formal; that is, they include a conspicuous element of design (symmetry, repetition, inversion, doubling, etc.). This can be true even when the work is so laden with "content" that it virtually pro- claims itself as didactic-_like Dante's Divine Comedy.
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5 Godard's films are particularly directed toward proof, rather than analysis. Vivre Sa Vie is an exhibit, a demonstration. It shows that something happened, not why it happened. It exposes the inexora- bility of an event.
For this reason, despite appearances, Godard's films are drasti- cally untopical. An art concerned with social, topical issues can never simply show that something is. It must indicate how. It must show why. But the whole point of Vivre Sa Vie is that it does not explain anything. It rejects causality. (Thus, the ordinary causal se- quence of narrative is broken in Godard's film by the extremely arbitrary decomposition of the story into twelve episodes- episodes which are serially, rather than causally, related.) Vivre Sa Vie is certainly not "about" prostitution, any more than Le Petit Soldat is "'about" the Algerian War. Neither does Godard in Vivre Sa Vie give us any explanation, of an ordinary recognizable sort, as to what led the principal character, Nana, ever to become a prostitute. Is it because she couldn't borrow 2,000 francs toward her back rent from her former husband or from one of her fellow clerks at the record store in which she works and was locked out of her apart- ment? Hardly that. At least, not that alone. But we scarcely know any more than this. All Godard shows us is that she did become a prostitute. Again, Godard does not show us why, at the end of the film, Nana's pimp Raoul "sells" 'her, or what has happened between them, or what lies behind the final gun battle in the street in which Nana is killed. He only shows us that she is sold, that she does die. He does not analyze. He proves.
6 Godard uses two means of proof in Vivre Sa Vie. He gives us a collection of images illustrating what he wants to prove, and a series of "texts" explaining it. In keeping the two elements separate, Godard's film employs a genuinely novel means of exposition. 7 Godard's intention is Cocteau's. But Godard discerns difficulties, where Cocteau saw none. What Cocteau wanted to show, to
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Jack Smith's
Flaming Creatures
(pp. 226-231)
[Orig. 1964]
[228]
...
were technically quite studied. Given their very low budgets, the color, camera work, acting, and synchronization of image and sound were as professional as possible. The hallmark of one of the two new avant-garde styles in American cinema (Jack Smith, Ron Rice, et al., but not Gregory Markopolous or Stan Brakhage) is its willful technical crudity. The newer films--both the good ones and the poor, uninspired work--show a maddening indifference to every element of technique, a studied primitiveness. This is a very contemporary style, and very American. Nowhere in the world has the old cliché of European romanticism-_-the assassin mind versus the spontaneous heart--had such a long career as in America. Here, more than anywhere else, the belief lives on that neatness and carefulness of technique interfere with spontaneity, with truth, with immediacy. Most of the prevailing techniques (for even to be against technique demands a technique) of avant-garde art express this conviction. In music, there is aleatory performance noW as well as composition, and new sources of sound and new ways of mutilating the old instruments; in painting and sculpture, there is the favoring of impermanent or found materials, and the transfor. mation of objects into perishable (use-once-and-throw-away) en- vironments or "happenings." In its own way Flaming Creatures illustrates this snobbery about the coherence and technical finish of the work of art. There is, of course, no story in Flaming Creatures, no development, no necessary order of the seven (as I count them) clearly separable sequences of the film. One can easily doubt that a certain piece of footage was indeed intended to be overexposed. Of no sequence is one convinced that it had to last this long, and not longer or shorter. Shots aren't framed in the traditional way; heads are cut off; extraneous figures sometimes appear on the margin of the scene. The camera is hand-held most of the time, and the im- age often quivers (where this is wholly effective, and no doubt de- liberate, is in the orgy sequence).
But in Flaming Creatures, amateurishness of technique is not frustrating, as it is in so many other recent "'underground" " films. For Smith is visually very generous; at practically every moment there is simply a tremendous amount to see on the screen. And then, there is an extraordinary charge and beauty to his images, even
...
Piety without content
(pp. 249-255)
[1961]
...
[254]
may indeed be of unquestionable psychological benefit to the indi vidual and of unquestionable social benefit to a society. But we shall never have the fruit of the tree without nourishing its roots as well; we shall never restore the prestige of the old faiths by demon- strating their psychological and sociological benefits.
Neither is it worth dallying with the lost religious consciousness because we unreflectively equate religion with seriousness, serious- ness about the important human and moral issues. Most secular Western intellectuals have not really thought through or lived out the atheist option; they are only on the verge of it. Seeking to palli- ate a harsh choice, they often argue that all highmindedness and profundity has religious roots or can be viewed as a "religious" (or crypto-religious) position. The concern with the problems of de spair and self-deception which Kaufmann singles out in Anna Ka- renina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich do not make Tolstoy in these writings a spokesman "for" ' religion, any more than they do Kafka, as Günther Anders has shown. If, finally, what we admire in reli- gion is its "prophetic" Or "critical" stance, as Kaufmann suggests, and we wish to salvage that (cf. also Erich Fromm's Terry lectures, Psychoanalysis and Religion, with its distinction between "human- istic" or good and "authoritarian" or bad religion), then we are deluding ourselves. The critical stance of the Old Testament prophets demands the priesthood, the cult, the specific history of Israel; it is rooted in that matrix. One cannot detach criticism from its roots and, ultimately, from that party to which it sets itself in antagonism. Thus Kierkegaard observed in his Journals that Prot- estantism makes no sense alone, without the dialectical opposition to Catholicism. (When there are no priests it makes no sense to protest that every layman is a priest; when there is no institutional- ized other-worldliness, it makes no religious sense to denounce monasticism and asceticism and recall people to this world and to their mundane vocations.) The voice of the genuine critic always deserves the most specific hearing. It is simply misleading and vulgar to say of Marx, as Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station and many others have done, that he was really a latter- day prophet; no more than it is true of Freud, though here peo ple are following the cue of Freud's own rather ambivalent self-
...
Notes on Camp
(pp. 275-292)
[1964]
Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility -unmistakably modern, variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it- that goes by the cult name of "Camp. 27 A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sen- sibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric-_something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood's novel The World in the Evening (1954), it has hardly broken into print. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edifica-
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tion it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves. For my. self, I plead the goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp conflict in my own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, ex- hibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
Though I am speaking about sensibility only-_and about a sensi- bility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous--these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those myste- rious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free--as opposed to rote--human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion--and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)
Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful,* one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jot- tings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something
* The sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive, but also its most perish- able, aspect. One may capture the ideas (intellectual history) and the behavior (social history) of an epoch without ever touching upon the sensibility or taste which informed those ideas, that behavior. Rare are those historical studies- like Huizinga on the late Middle Ages, Febvre on 16th century France-which do tell us something about the sensibility of the period.
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of this particular fugitive sensibility. It's embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp. One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a very inferior piece of Camp.
These notes are for Oscar Wilde.
"One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art."
—Phrases & Philosophies for the Use of the Young
1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheti- cism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.
2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized--or at least apolitical.
3. Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things. Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are "campy" movies, clothes, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings. . . This distinction is important. True, the Camp eye has the power to transform expe- rience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. It's not all in the eye of the beholder.
4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp:
Zuleika Dobson Tiffany lamps Scopitone films The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunsct Boulcvard in LA The Enquirer, headlines and stories Aubrey Beardsley drawings Swan Lake Bellini's operas Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards Schoedsack's King Kong
...
One culture and the new sensibility
(pp. 293-304)
[293]
In the last few years there has been a good deal of discussion of a purported chasm which opened up some two centuries ago, with the advent of the In- dustrial Revolution, between "two cultures, the literary-artistic and the scientific. According to this diagnosis, any intelligent and articulate modern person is likely to inhabit one culture to the exclusion of the other. He will be concerned with different docu- ments, different techniques, different problems; he will speak a different language. Most important, the type of effort required for the mastery of these two cultures will differ vastly. For the literary- artistic culture is understood as a general culture. It is addressed to man insofar as he is man; it is culture Or, rather, it promotes culture, in the sense of culture defined by Ortega y Gasset: that which a man has in his possession when he has forgotten everything that he has read. The scientific culture, in contrast, is a culture for
[294]
specialists; it is founded on remembering and is set down in ways that require complete dedication of the effort to comprehend. While the literary-artistic culture aims at internalization, ingestion -in other words, cultivation- -the scientific culture aims at accu- mulation and externalization in complex instruments for problem- solving and specific techniques for mastery.
Though T. S. Eliot derived the chasm between the two cultures from a period more remote in modern history, speaking in a famous essay of a "dissociation of sensibility " which opened up in the 17th century, the connection of the problem with the Industrial Revo lution seems well taken. There is a historic antipathy on the part of many literary intellectuals and artists to those changes which characterize modern society. -above all, industrialization and those of its effects which everyone has experienced, such as the prolifera- tion of huge impersonal cities and the predominance of the anony- mous style of urban life. It has mattered little whether industriali- zation, the creature of modern "science," is seen on the 19th and early 20th century model, as noisy smoky artificial processes which defile nature and standardize culture or on the newer model, the clean automated technology that is coming into being in the sec- ond half of the 20th century. The judgment has been mostly the same. Literary men, feeling that the status of humanity itself was being challenged by the new science and the new technology, abhorred and deplored the change. But the literary men, whether one thinks of Emerson and Thoreau and Ruskin in the 19th cen- tury, or of 20th century intellectuals who talk of modern society as being in some new way incomprehensible, *alienated. are in- evitably on the defensive. They know that the scientific culture, the coming of the machine, cannot be stopped.
The standard response to the problem of "the two cultures". and the issue long antedates by many decades the crude and philis- tine statement of the problem by C. P. Snow in a famous lecture some years ago -has been a facile defense of the function of the arts (in terms of an ever vaguer ideology of "humanism") or a prema- ture surrender of the function of the arts to science. By the second response, I am not referring to the philistinism of scientists (and those of their party among artists and philosophers) who dismiss
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the arts as imprecise, untrue, at best mere toys. I am speaking of serious doubts which have arisen among those who are passionately engaged in the arts. The role of the individual artist, in the business of making unique objects for the purpose of giving pleasure and educating conscience and sensibility, has repeatedly been called into question. Some literary intellectuals and artists have gone so far as to prophesy the ultimate demise of the art making activity of man. Art, in an automated scientific society, would be unfunc- tional, useless.
But this conclusion, I should argue, is plainly unwarranted. In- deed, the whole issue seems to me crudely put. For the question of "the two cultures" assumes that science and technology are chang- ing, in motion, while the arts are static, fulfilling some perennial generic human function (consolation? edification? diversion?). Only on the basis of this false assumption would anyone reason that the arts might be in danger of becoming obsolete.
Art does not progress, in the sense that science and technology do. But the arts do develop and change. For instance, in our own time, art is becoming increasingly the terrain of specialists. The most interesting and creative art of our time is not open to the gen- erally educated; it demands special effort; it speaks a specialized language. The music of Milton Babbitt and Morton Feldman, the painting of Mark Rothko and Frank Stella, the dance of Merce Cunningham and James Waring demand an education of sensibility whose difficulties and length of apprenticeship are at least comparble to the difficulties of mastering physics or engineering. (Only the novel, among the arts, at least in America, fails to provide simi- lar examples. The parallel between the abstruseness of contempo- rary art and that of modern science is too obvious to be missed. Another likeness to the scientific culture is the history-mindedness of contemporary art. The most interesting works of contemporary art are full of references to the history of the medium; so far as they comment on past art, they demand a knowledge of at least the re- cent past. As Harold Rosenberg has pointed out, contemporary paintings are themselves acts of criticism as much as of creation. The point could be made as well of much recent work in the films, music, the dance, poetry, and (in Europe) literature. Again, a simi-
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larity with the style of science-_-this time, with the accumulative aspect of science--can be discerned.
The conflict between "the two cultures" is in fact an illusion, a temporary phenomenon born of a period of profound and bewil- dering historical change. What we are witnessing is not so much a conflict of cultures as the creation of a new (potentially unitary) kind of sensibility. This new sensibility is rooted, as it must be, in our experience, experiences which are new in the history of human- ity in extreme social and physical mobility; in the crowdedness of the human scene (both people and material commodities multiply- ing at a dizzying rate); in the availability of new sensations such as speed (physical speed, as in airplane travel; speed of images, as in the cinema); and in the pan-cultural perspective on the arts that is possible through the mass reproduction of art objects.
What we are getting is not the demise of art, but a transforma- tion of the function of art. Art, which arose in human society as a magical-religious operation, and passed over into a technique for depicting and commenting on secular reality, has in our own time arrogated to itself a new function--neither religious, nor serving a secularized religious function, nor merely secular or profane (a no tion which breaks down when its opposite, the "religious" Or "'ga- cred," becomes obsolescent). Art today is a new kind of instru- ment, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended. Indeed, in response to this new function (more felt than clearly articulated), artists have had to become self- conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods. Often, the conquest and exploitation of new materials and methods drawn from the world of "non-art". for example, from industrial technology, from commercial proc- esses and imagery, from purely private and subjective fantasies and dreams- seems to be the principal effort of many artists. Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the tradi- tional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.
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All kinds of conventionally accepted boundaries have thereby been challenged: not just the one between the "scientific" and the "literary-artistic" cultures, or the one between "art" and "non-art"; but also many established distinctions within the world of culture itself-that between form and content, the frivolous and the seri ous, and (a favorite of literary intellectuals) "high" and "low" cul- ture.
The distinction between "high" and "low" (or "mass" Or "pop ular") culture is based partly on an evaluation of the difference between unique and mass-produced objects. In an era of mass tech- nological reproduction, the work of the serious artist had a spe- cial value simply because it was unique, because it bore his per- sonal, individual signature. The works of popular culture (and even films were for a long time included in this category) were seen as having little value because they were manufactured objects, bear- ing no individual stamp -group concoctions made for an undiffer- entiated audience. But in the light of contemporary practice in the arts, this distinction appears extremely shallow. Many of the serious works of art of recent decades have a decidedly impersonal charac- ter. The work of art is reasserting its existence as "'object" (even as manufactured or mass-produced object, drawing on the popular arts rather than as "individual personal expression 9?
The exploration of the impersonal (and trans-personal) in con- temporary art is the new classicism; at least, a reaction against what is understood as the romantic spirit dominates most of the interest ing art of today. Today's art, with its insistence on coolness, its refusal of what it considers to be sentimentality, its spirit of exact- ness, its sense of "research" and "problems, " is closer to the spirit of science than of art in the old-fashioned sense. Often, the artist's work is only his idea, his concept. This is a familiar practice in architecture, of course. And one remembers that painters in the Renaissance often left parts of their canvases to be worked out by students, and that in the flourishing period of the concerto the ca- denza at the end of the first movement was left to the inventive- ness and discretion of the performing soloist. But similar practices have a different, more polemical meaning today, in the present post-romantic era of the arts. When painters such as Joseph Albers,
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Ellsworth Kelly, and Andy Warhol assign portions of the work, say, the painting in of the colors themselves, to a friend or the local gardener; when musicians such as Stockhausen, John Cage, and Luigi Nono invite collaboration from performers by leaving oppor- tunities for random effects, switching around the order of the score, and improvisations--they are changing the ground rules which most of us employ to recognize a work of art. They are say- ing what art need not be. At least, not necessarily.
The primary feature of the new sensibility is that its model prod- uct is not the literary work, above all, the novel. A new non-literary culture exists today, of whose very existence, not to mention sig- nificance, most literary intellectuals are entirely unaware. This new establishment includes certain painters, sculptors, architects, social planners, film-makers, TV technicians, neurologists, musicians, elec- tronics engineers, dancers, philosophers, and sociologists. (A few poets and prose writers can be included.) Some of the basic texts for this new cultural alignment are to be found in the writings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Antonin Artaud, C. S. Sherrington, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, John Cage, André Breton, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Siegfried Cidieon, Norman O. Brown, and Gyorgy Kepes.
Those who worry about the gap between "the two cultures," and this means virtually all literary intellectuals in England and Amer- ica, take for granted a notion of culture which decidedly needs reex- amining. It is the notion perhaps best expressed by Matthew Ar- nold (in which the central cultural act is the making of literature, which is itself understood as the criticism of culture). Simply igno- rant of the vital and enthralling (so called "'avant-garde") devel- opments in the other arts, and blinded by their personal invest- ment in the perpetuation of the older notion of cuiture, they continue to cling to literature as the model for creative statement.
What gives literature its preeminence is its heavy burden of "content, )) both reportage and moral judgment. (This makes it possible for most English and American literary critics to use liter- ary works mainly as texts, or even pretexts, for social and cultural diagnosis-_-rather than concentrating on the properties of, say, a given novel or a play, as an art work.) But the model arts of our time are actually those with much less content, and a much cooler
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mode of moral judgment~-like music, films, dance, architecture, painting, sculpture. The practice of these arts-all of which draw profusely, naturally, and without embarrassment, upon science and technology--are the locus of the new sensibility.
The problem of "the two cultures, " in short, rests upon an un- educated, uncontemporary grasp of our present cultural situation. It arises from the ignorance of literary intellectuals and of scien- tists with a shallow knowledge of the arts, like the scientist-novelist C. P. Snow himself) of a new culture, and its emerging sensibility. In fact, there can be no divorce between science and technology, on the one hand, and art, on the other, any more than there can be a divorce between art and the forms of social life. Works of art, psychological forms, and social forms all reflect each other, and change with each other. But, of course, most people are slow to come to terms with such changes- especially today, when the changes are occurring with an unprecedented rapidity. Marshall McLuhan has described human history as a succession of acts of technological extension of human capacity, each of which works a radical change upon our environment and our ways of thinking, feeling, and valuing. The tendency, he remarks, is to upgrade the old environment into art form (thus Nature became a vessel of aes- thetic and spiritual values in the new industrial environment) "while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading Typically, it is only certain artists in any given era who "have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the en vironment of their age That is why they may seem to be 'ahead of their time' . More timid people prefer to accept the • previous environment's values as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (auto- mation, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethi cal order." Only in the terms of what McLuhan calls the old ethical order does the problem of "the two cultures" appear to be a genu- ine problem. It is not a problem for most of the creative artists of our time (among whom one could include very few novelists) be- cause most of these artists have broken, whether they know it or not, with the Matthew Arnold notion of culture, finding it histori- cally and humanly obsolescent.
The Matthew Arnold notion of culture defines art as the criti-
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cism of life-this being understood as the propounding of moral, social, and political ideas. The new sensibility understands art as the extension of life--this being understood as the representation of (new) modes of vivacity. There is no necessary denial of the role of moral evaluation here. Only the scale has changed; it has become less gross, and what it sacrifices in discursive explicitness it gains in accuracy and subliminal power. For we are what we are able to see (hear, taste, smell, feel) even more powerfully and profoundly than we are what furniture of ideas we have stocked in our heads. Of course, the proponents of "the two cultures" crisis continue to ob- serve a desperate contrast between unintelligible, morally neutral science and technology, on the one hand, and morally committed, human-scale art on the other. But matters are not that simple, and never were. A great work of art is never simply (or even mainly) a vehicle of ideas or of moral sentiments. It is, first of all, an object modifying our consciousness and sensibility, changing the composi tion, however slightly, of the humus that nourishes all specific ideas and sentiments. Outraged humanists, please note. There is no need for alarm. A work of art does not cease being a moment in the conscience of mankind, when moral conscience is understood as only one of the functions of consciousness.
Sensations, feelings, the abstract forms and styles of sensibility count. It is to these that contemporary art addresses itself. The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. (Or if it is an "idea," it is about the form of sensibility.) Rilke described the artist as someone who works '"toward an extension of the regions of the individual senses"; McLuhan calls artists "experts in sensory awareness. " And the most interesting works of contemporary art (one can begin at least as far back as French symbolist poetry) are adventures in sensation, new "sensory mixes." Such art is, in principle, experimental--not out of an elitist disdain for what is accessible to the majority, but pre- cisely in the sense that science is experimental. Such an art is also notably apolitical and undidactic, or, rather, infra-didactic.
When Ortega y Gasset wrote his famous essay The Dehumaniza- tion of Art in the early 1920s, he ascribed the qualities of modern art (such as impersonality, the ban on pathos, hostility to the past,
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playfulness, willful stylization, absence of ethical and political com- mitment) to the spirit of youth which he thought dominated our age.* In retrospect, it seems this "dehumanization" did not signify the recovery of childlike innocence, but was rather a very adult, knowing response. What other response than anguish, followed by anesthesia and then by wit and the elevating of intelligence over sentiment, is possible as a response to the social disorder and mass atrocities of our time, and--equally important for our sensibilities, but less often remarked onto the unprecedented change in what rules our environment from the intelligible and visible to that which is only with difficulty intelligible, and is invisible? Art, which I have characterized as an instrument for modifying and educating sensibility and consciousness, now operates in an environment which cannot be grasped by the senses.
Buckminister Fuller has written:
In World War I industry suddenly went from the visible to the invisible base, from the track to the trackless, from the wire to the wireless, from visible structuring to invisible structuring in alloys. The big thing about World War I is that man went off the senso- rial spectrum forever as the prime criterion of accrediting innova- tions . All major advances since World War I have been in the infra and the ultrasensorial frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. All the important technical aftairs of men today are in- visible The old masters, who were sensorialists, have unleased a Pandora's box of non-sensorially controllable phenomena, which they had avoided accrediting up to that time Suddenly they lost their true mastery, because from then on they didn't personally understand what was going on. If you don't understand you cannot master .. Since World War I, the old masters have been ex- tinct . . .
But, of course, art remains permanently tied to the senses. Just as one cannot float colors in space (a painter needs some sort of
* Ortega remarks, in this essay: "Were art to redeem man, it could do so only boyishness. by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected
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surface, like a canvas, however neutral and textureless), one can- not have a work of art that does not impinge upon the human sen- sorium. But it is important to realize that human sensory aware- ness has not merely a biology but a specific history, each culture placing a premium on certain senses and inhibiting others. (The same is true for the range of primary human emotions.) Here is where art (among other things) enters, and why the interesting art of our time has such a feeling of anguish and crisis about it, however playful and abstract and ostensibly neutral morally it may appear. Western man may be said to have been undergoing a mas- sive sensory anesthesia (a concomitant of the process that Max Weber calls "'bureaucratic rationalization") at least since the In- dustrial Revolution, with modern art functioning as a kind of shock therapy for both confounding and unclosing our senses.
One important consequence of the new sensibility (with its abandonment of the Matthew Arnold idea of culture) has already been alluded to-_namely, that the distinction between "high" and "low" culture seems less and less meaningful. For such a distinc- tion-inseparable from the Matthew Arnold apparatus- simply does not make sense for a creative community of artists and scien- tists engaged in programming sensations, uninterested in art as a species of moral journalism. Art has always been more than that, anyway.
Another way of characterizing the present cultural situation, in its most creative aspects, would be to speak of a new attitude to- ward pleasure. In one sense, the new art and the new sensibility take a rather dim view of pleasure. (The great contemporary French composer, Pierre Boulez, entitled an important essay of his twelve years ago, "Against Hedonism in Music.") The seriousness of modern art precludes pleasure in the familiar sense--the pleas- ure of a melody that one can hum after leaving the concert hall, of characters in a novel or play whom one can recognize, identify with, and dissect in terms of realistic psychological motives, of a beautiful landscape or a dramatic moment represented on a canvas. If hedonism means sustaining the old ways in which we have found pleasure in art (the old sensory and psychic modalities), then
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the new art is anti-hedonistic. Having one's sensorium challenged or stretched hurts. The new serious music hurts one's ears, the new painting does not graciously reward one's sight, the new films and the few interesting new prose works do not go down easily. The commonest complaint about the films of Antonioni or the narratives of Beckett or Burroughs is that they are hard to look at or to read, that they are "boring. But the charge of boredom is really hypocritical. There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration. And the new languages which the interesting art of our time speaks are frustrating to the sensibilities of most educated people.
But the purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure- though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer. And, one can also say that, balancing the ostensible anti-hedonism of serious contempo rary art, the modern sensibility is more involved with pleasure in the familiar sense than ever. Because the new sensibility demands less "content" in art, and is more open to the pleasures of "form" and style, it is also less snobbish, less moralistic-_-in that it does not demand that pleasure in art necessarily be associated with edi fication. If art is understood as a form of discipline of the feel- ings and a programming of sensations, then the feeling (or sensa- tion) given off by a Rauschenberg painting might be like that of a song by the Supremes. The brio and elegance of Budd Boetticher's The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond or the singing style of Dionne Warwick can be appreciated as a complex and pleasurable event. They are experienced without condescension.
This last point seems to me worth underscoring. For it is impor- tant to understand that the affection which many younger artists and intellectuals feel for the popular arts is not a new philistinism (as has so often been charged) or a species of anti-intellectualism or some kind of abdication from culture. The fact that many of the most serious American painters, for example, are also fans of new sound" "the ' in popular music is not the result of the search for mere diversion or relaxation; it is not, say, like Schoenberg also playing tennis. It reflects a new, more open way of looking at the world and at things in the world, our world. It does not mean the
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renunciation of all standards: there is plenty of stupid popular mu- sic, as well as inferior and pretentious "avant-garde" paintings, films, and music. The point is that there are new standards, new standards of beauty and style and taste. The new sensibility is de- fiantly pluralistic; it is dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia. It is also extremely history-con- scious; and the voracity of its enthusiasms (and of the supercession of these enthusiasms) is very high-speed and hectic. From the van- tage point of this new sensibility, the beauty of a machine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a painting by Jasper Johns, of a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the personalities and music of the Beatles is equally accessible.
[1965]
...
Afterword: Thirty Years Later
(pp. 307-312)
...
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at all; two theater chronicles, the brief result of a commission from a literary magazine with which I was allied, that I had accepted against my better judgment.) Who would not be pleased that a collection of contentious writings from more than three decades ago continues to matter to new generations of readers in English and in many foreign languages? Still, I urge the reader not to lose sight of —it may take some effort of imagination— the larger context of admirations in which these essays were written. To call for an "erotics of art" did not mean to disparage the role of the critical intellect. To laud work condescended to then as "popular" culture did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its complexities. When I denounced (for instance, in the essays on science fiction films and on Lukacs) certain kinds of facile mor- alism, it was in the name of a more alert, less complacent seri- ousness. What I didn't understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this) was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions, Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, "unreal- istic, " to most people, and when allowed -as an arbitrary decision of temperament - probably unhealthy, too.
I suppose it's not wrong that Against Interpretation is read now, or reread, as an influential, pioneering document from a bygone age. But that is not how I read it, or--lurching from nostalgia to utopia - wish it to be read. My hope is that its republication now, and the acquisition of, new readers, could contribute to the quixotic task of shoring up the values out of which these essays and reviews were written . The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed . The values underlying those judgments did not .
[1996]