Sontag Against Interpretation ==-==-==-==

Against
Interpretation The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, LaPasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality. It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.

Indeed, and this challenge has been perpetually reissued ever since in terms of the theory du jour. Ergo, what is ultimately important about the mimesis theory is not the mimesis part but the theory part. Music Theory, French Theory, Color Theory, Psychoanalytic Theory, String Theory...do all of these theories not challenge art to justify itself in more or less the same vein? Is this not what happens even with the latter two, otherwise having nothing necessarily to do with art, as soon as they are brought to bear on the latest weblog polemic, re: modernists ruining everything? By its very terms in fact what the mimesis theory does is to grab art by the scruff of the neck and hold it up against the backdrop of an a priori, given, or a necessity: reality in this case, or perhaps some particular relationship-to-reality which remains to be defined. The other theories perform the same maneuver, albeit placing different unmarked objects at their centers: beauty, education, activism, sanity, equilibrium... But then, a meta-theory: How valid is each ideal vis-a-vis art? Need the ideal du jour actually be achieved? Need artists be the ones to achieve it? Is it still an ideal if everyone has to observe it all times, or else? Doesn't much beloved art fail to justify itself in any such terms? And then, infinite regress, French jargon, Italian insults, turf wars, minoritarian rule, natural allies driven apart by animistic tribal law... The questioning of art's right (or need) to exist waxes and wanes in tandem with such fixed ideals. This waxing and waning itself indicates that it is art writ large and not the ideals which are universal. The perception that art has ceased to inhabit the realm of the necessary or the given and instead been demoted (or has it actually graduated?) to the realm of the elective is an old trope given always a somewheat different flavor by the particular ideal of the moment. What once was unquestioned, because taken for granted, eventually becomes noticeable, and subsequently, questioned. Its justification having become unclear to *some people*, it is thereby challenged to justify itself. In this cycle there is a reason (that is, a theory) for every season. In various species of dime-store pan-theoretical neo-primitivist theorymaking, it is said that art formerly was subsumed in everyday life. Debord and the Situationists especially seized on the class aspect of recent art, seeing it as so classbound in fact that it would be "superseded" once class alienation was overcome. Their theory and their tactics were radical but the basic idea of an art-life duality is jarringly pedestrian. Here is a more capital-friendly urbanist describing positively what the Situationists described skeptically:

Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist. To be sure, the artist has a sense that the demands of the work (i.e. of the selections of material he has made) control him. The rather miraculous result of this process—if the selectivity, the organization and the control are consistent within themselves—can be art. But the essence of this process is disciplined, highly discriminatory selectivity from life. In relation to the inclusiveness and the literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. (Jacobs, Death and Life, 372-3)

Debord et al can be granted one small point here: that art was once an instrument of ritual is so only in our own blinkered contemporary sense of instrumentality fragmented along class lines. The details of this fragmentation are hazy and the consequences disputed, but suffice it to say that art of the diverged variety didn't just make itself. Somebody made it, and made it diverge. Somebody gots lotta justifyin' to do, not for their art, as it is so often put indirectly, but in fact for themselves. Individual responsibility, that old conservative huff, is very much still a thing for the Marxist Debord: he literally wanted the artists executed right along with the kulaki who hang their paintings in the living room. Artists themselves, in our own blinkered contemporary sense of instrumentality fragmented along class lines, themselves evince a terrible imitation of reality, the contemporary "reality" as such being ever more a populist, personal, subjective one. Never mind that the divergence did not *actually*, in any substantive or material way, deprive any non-artists of their subjectivity. The whole point of the divergence, if that's what it was, was to create, within strict personal boundaries a new reality. But, well...*some people* weren't having it. They were fine for a while, but then they started having a lot of theories. Their subjectivity is not just populist but downright animistic. Suddenly inanimate objects like paintings and sculptures were making like river spirits and snatching The People's subjectivity from them in the night. Something had to be done. Posing this division between "art" and "life" is something of the same fallacy as the old division between "man" and "nature." In the same sense that man is part of nature, so art is part of life and cannot actually be divorced from it in any material sense. Jacobs' account above, though one can imagine she did believe it, was more than anything an opportunistic weaponization of the art-life trope as proxy for a much grander theory of top-down versus bottom-up governance. No doubt there is also plenty of phenomenological resonance with what goes on inside of many artists' heads as they are making their work; but for these same artists I must think there is also, concurrently, a certain absurdity in such rhetorical uses of the art-life division as would render the results of said process a part of some artificial or alien realm which can only be felt as uncanny by "real" people. In short, the art-life duality is more useful rhetorically than it is useful practically. The meaningful practical distinction, rather, is the one Sontag points to here, between art before and after theory challenged it to justify itself. The importance of this observation is that it points to a rare case where ontogeny indeed recapitulates phylogeny: there is perhaps no singular moment in our development when we realize in a flash the need to justify our actions, but there is a developmental process roughly along Erikson's lines, beginning at birth with a substantial (usually happy) freedom from the need to justify, which later on, normatively at least, is overtaken by a much longer (and usually quite unhappy) epoch of holding one's actual thoughts and actions up against abstract ideals. Here is one of many developmental arcs which have led to facile comparisons of the artist to, variously, the infant, the child, or the adolescent. Beyond the shallowest innuendo (which is of course perfectly apt in special cases and small doses) many deeper realities give the lie to this charade, none more poignantly than the observations, per Erikson and others, that these seemingly interchangable preadult phases in fact represent three quite discrete phases of moral development. And, to complete the circle, it would seem that artists as a group are profligate theory generators, which is an indication of an extremely strong (and distinctly adult) moral orientation. The challenge of theory condemns art to the margins of pluralistic society, but it is also a necessary moral reckoning which, unlike art itself, and unlike the maelstrom of shifting priorities in a pluralistic society, knows no season. This really hinges not on the isolated actions of eggheads but on the presence and the absence of introspection in a society. I wish that did not sound so judgmental. Certainly judgment is not sustainable here: think of all the terrible mistakes introspective societies have made in seeking to "justify" their fixed ideals.

Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious.

So, in other words, this original sin of theory really was a sin. Specifically, a lie. More specifically, an innuendo. There was no moral ideal at the center of it, or if there was then this was not the ideal which was actually put forth, which in any case itself now, in our age of ultimate theory, seems quite arbitrary indeed. Is that what she means? Or was it just an honest mistake? Do ancient philosophers make honest mistakes?

Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an "imitation of an imitation." For Plato, art is neither particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense, true. And Aristotle's arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato's view that all art is an elaborate trompe l'oeil, and therefore a lie.

Takes one to know one.

But he does dispute Plato's idea that art is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.

So, already, confronted with a mere theory of imitation, and without anything nearly as formidable as Lacanian Feminism or the Masters of Business Administration degree in Music Business to contend with, an Extrinsic Benenfits defense was still the best we could do? If the Greek cats indeed placed music among various educational gymnastics much as its place in today's educational schemata is secured for gainful rather than intrinsic reasons, then this points in both cases to the presence of something, some ideal, that is thought to be bigger, more necessary, than music is itself; a hint that perhaps both milieus carved out a semi-sacred place for education (which, setting aside the inevitable slippage between word and deed, indeed seems a safe assumption). Conversely, only one (the West of today) has elevated, say, commerce to the same level of near-sacredness, to the extent that any not-quite-sacred occupational group might periodically find themselves issued a challenge, this by the very terms of commerce. There are a few remote corners of society where art itself has been so enshrined, but mainstream culture's sacred cows trample and graze on them easily. One instance that has stuck with me: the AFM's International Musician magazine used to, ca. 2008-10, allot a small amount of space each month to the very explicit, seemingly personal issuing of such challenges by a stringently commerce-oriented member-columnist. To resort to the word which won't die, I would say that music lacks autonomy in such a milieu, starting on even the rhetorical level, to say nothing of the material or practical level. What else to say when organizations founded to defend the commercial interests of musicians have become moralizers for commercialism itself? If Arthur Danto is within his rights to call Plato a "philistine," does that mean I can call this guy a shill without jeopardizing my future employment prospects? Paging through the various competing theories of art, we find this same dynamic just about everywhere else too; most obviously in political-activist theories of art, where pretty much everything is open to question except for The Cause itself. If we are being honest we find it also in the most apolitical aesthetic and formalist theories, like mine, which appeal to psychological needs that ultimately are more fundamental and wide-reaching in their implications even than the whole of "art" can provide for. The case can be made for granular targeting of art to psychology here, but it still is not an airtight case; and further, psychology is certainly not a good proxy for everything I am concerned with in taking this direction. Whatever art is to us, everywhere we look we find it only partially adequate to its own purpose, a purpose which, as in both the mimetic and the therapetuic theories, has previously been defined as external to itself. And while we may wish not to inherit such prior definitions, at that point we find ourselves cut off at the knees by art's diversity of forms, which do not all seem equally self-justifying even to us. Guy Debord railed against this partial quality of art, finding in it the reflection in negative of all extant human oppression and alienation at the hands of entrenched power. This is, to be polite about it, not the most parsimonious explanation. Appearances to the contrary, I assume that even the politician who makes Education a Kitchen Table campaign issue, even the artist-businessperson who rails against self-actualization as a decadence, even they are not claiming totality for their Theories. Priority and totality are not the same thing. Even the pure formalist who seems to be living out a near-total art-life division has brought their life with them into the gallery; lives cannot be checked along with the coats, no matter how rich everybody is who is waiting in line. Everything is political, but politics is not everything. Each one of these rhetorical constructions is indeed of a partial rather than total quality. The only path I can see towards an ecstatic unity a la the Situs leads back to prehistory, and I am not quite hardheaded enough to want to make that journey for myself (though to be sure there are days out here in the year 2021 when that indeed seems like not the worst alternative).

In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand with the assumption that art is always figurative. But advocates of the mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art is necessarily a "realism" can be modified or scrapped without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic theory.

Damn.

The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such—above and beyond given works of art—becomes problematic, in need of defense.

I have tried to expand on this observation above. Expansion can be tricky. The important point is stated simply enough here.

And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call "form" is separated off from something we have learned to call "content," and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.

Now THAT is some shit.

Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it's usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (What X is saying is . . . ," "What X is trying to say is . . . ," "What X said is . . ." etc., etc.)

Eventually the effort would be made to justify art as necessary in and of itself, as Core Subject rather than mere Elective; but the moment this defense became imaginable was the same moment that the very concept of art had become too broad to be litigated as a class. (In another sense, this broadness of "art" is precisely what validates the claim that "art" is valuable for its own sake. In yet a third sense, this broadness simulataneously renders such an observation meaningless, throwing us back upon a more granular view.) Increasingly, a new, postmodern dynamic governs theories as well as art forms themselves: no longer do they merely come and go; rather, they show up late to an already-crowded party and won't leave. Today even the mimesis theory lacks for neither apostles nor for dupes, and a tuba player can find more gainful employment playing polka and dixieland music than he can in any contemporary musical style. Among this panoply of art-theories, some issue the ultimate "challenge" more or less forcibly than others; ditto various arts' answers. I would propose, then, that the current (meta-)theory of art is the sum of this process, lived out under modern social conditions. That is, the current valuation hierarchy mirrors the various arts' fitness for rhetorical defense and pretty much ignores their intrinsic, material qualities and their documented histories. In place of moral reckoning there is the merely rhetocial struggle for valuation. This is the original sin of theory, condeming art to be made not just after the fact but after the fall as well. Theory is what contemporary basketball fans call lawyer-ball. This makes speaking broadly of "art" or "The Arts" in the year 2021 quite specious, actually, though I cannot seem to think my way out of that trap just yet. The arts nowadays are united or divided not by technique nor by history nor by tribe, but by their defensibility in a winner-take-all society short on trust and hungry for accountability. All of that said, the "interpretation" issue seems almost broad enough to permit the blanket logic to continue for at least one more series of posts. Susan will now show us just how broad it is. ==-==-==-==

2 None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.

Or, perhaps the work was seemed to be saying nothing of particular importance, or not in comparison to the fact that we simply could not take our eyes or ears off of it. To be utterly untroubled by this, or to be deeply troubled by it, that is one particularly guilt-ridden theoretical question which has been with us for too long. I do think this question permits some atomized consideration of psychology and environment. The global account of an "innocence before [and a loss after] theory is an account of how we justify our actions to each other, not of how we justify them to ourselves. Art is, one way or another, a social phenomenon, but it is built up out of many non-transferable, private art worlds. These private worlds are oblique to both theory and to the social qualities of art. They drive the generative side of art even as they make the social side quite difficult to navigate. Those who would sacrifice something on the generative side for a more graceful social existence should be careful what they wish for. Certainly we have not stopped thinking we know what art is saying, not even after theory began to tell us we do not, not even with full knowledge that innocence has in fact been lost, and not even in absence of a single other person to agree with us. I have always maintained that the fact we cannot agree is an artifact of what is nowadays called "diversity," also "freedom" if we can momentarily reclaim that word from the denialists. I do subscribe to the diversity stuff and to the freedom stuff provided that we trade in deep rather than superifical qualities. The full scope of the case in favor of diversity is what is at stake when what art is saying is taken to be or is engineered to be a socially static quality rather than a socially dynamic one. If art no longer inhabits a properly subjective space, if any consensus as to what art is saying actually emerges, then something quite radical has happened, something far more radical than a new theory or a loss of innocence. For this to be possible, those private art worlds of the mind would have to be made uniform, either by reprogramming or by suppression. This has not actually happened, still, and it may well be impossible in such stark terms. But it has been attempted and will be attempted again, and so for me there is a very political edge to this essay, even though I do not make or believe in political art. Perhaps I give the royal us too much credit this way; but if not, then there is some serious self-delusion going on, of precisely the kind that psychoanalysis was intended to set straight. (More on that inconvenient diversion later.) By the same token, the lost innocence of meaning can't help but get tangled up with the lost innocence of justification; and so increasingly what we think we know about what art is saying has lots (often enough everything) to do precisely with justifying it, preemptively as it were, knowing that the "challenge" has been issued open-endedly; and increasingly this is equally true of the artists themselves as of all manner of interpreters. But there is no responsible argument in favor of acceping this at face value, because have been veritably prompted to think this way; and here the royal us, including even the highest representative of the Lowest Common Denominator, cannot be exempted, since even mass culture has its origin myths and guiding fictions which function as vehicles of interpretation exactly as does High Theory for the guilty intellectual.

From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense. Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice.

This has been my abiding project here over the years, or at least the one I most aspire to, and I couldn't ever put it any better than this. Seeing your own purpose stated so directly by a representative of your parents' generation has a double edge to it. Failing much of any common ground with any peer, it is at least nice to be able to crack open a book and commune with the ancestors. But besides serving as a vivid reminder of this alienation from my own cohort, it is not exactly encouraging to know that this alienation was still unavoidable decades after the forceful distillation and wide circulation of a way out. If every generation has its absolutists and its interpreters, then we really have been wasting a lot of time and resources quarrel[ing] with one or another means of defense There is more: my mother gave me my copy of this book for my birthday sometime in my early twenties, accompanied by a remark something to the effect of: "This is what you're always saying. I give up." I think this was the first moment she truly (if grudgingly) accepted that I am not just like her, that I was never going to warm up to Shakespeare or Jane Austen or 19th-century opera the way she had been hoping I would, and that my first chilly declarations to this effect were not (or not merely) artefacts of immaturity. The book was simultaneously an olive branch between combatants and a recognition of the child's full exit from the parental orbit. I read those chapters which based on the titles seemed applicable to my interests and I skipped the ones which seemed too far afield to matter much. Returning now its clear that the intervening time spent clarifying my positions and broadening my horizons was a prerequisite toward grasping all the implications here. This essay now seems even more important than it did then. Moms just know, even if they'd rather not. There is yet more: sometime after receiving the book, making this limited survey of it, and abandoning it to the then-modest stacks, it performed before my very eyes a rather remarkable moth-to-flame demonstration to which many works of art have aspired and very few achieved. A roommate had struck up a relationship of growing seriousness and I was at one point given notice that the inamorata was on her way over, this time accompanied by a friend. I was given this notice, and also a warning that this friend was...different. I now recognize her behavior as Aspergers-like, though at the time I had no inkling that such a condition existed and I can't know for sure if that is actually what was going on. In any case, as the two guests entered the apartment, this rather attractive young woman trudged straight to my bookshelf, paused, grabbed the Sontag, and demanded that its owner identify himself. Thinking this unusual in a good way, I piped up, only to be engulfed by a tidal wave of aspie rage: "TELL ME YOU JUST BOUGHT THIS FOR A CLASS." Well...besides still being alone, where were we?

This is the case, today, with the very idea of content itself. Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content today is mainly a hinderance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism. Though the actual developments in many arts may seem to be leading us away from the idea that a work of art is primarily its content, the idea still exerts an extraordinary hegemony. I want to suggest that this is because the idea is now perpetuated in the guise of a certain way of encountering works of art thoroughly ingrained among most people who take any of the arts seriously. What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.

I can't overstate how mystified I was as an adolescent when I first began to encounter the form-content distinction. Even now I sense that I have my own, personal concept of what this means which may or may not have anything to do with its widest usage, a usage which still tends to mystify me. Trite as it is, I would ask: is it not in the nature of distanced scholarship to veer toward this way of understanding things, and similarly in the nature of grounded practitioners to resist it as, literally, a matter of self-preservation? Is it not in the nature of generative practice to be so far from making such a distinction that this is actually a mystifying distinction to even consider? Is that old spat between the academics and the practitioners, between book cred and street cred, in spite of its triteness nonetheless still the source of this basic friction? And does this not threaten the very existence of private worlds? Diversity? Freedom?

3
Of course, I don't mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, "There are no facts, only interpretations." By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustates a certain code, certain "rules" of interpretation.

Hmm...how meaningful is this distinction? Is the area of semantic overlap between the broad and the narrow senses of interpretation" larger than it is here given credit for? "There are no facts..." The parallactic view of epistemic claims is not merely destructive of certainty but also constitutive of a certain kind of agency: we can only interpret. Or, we cannot not interpret. Much interpretation is unwitting and unobtrusive, but we cannot imagine that it is of no consequence at all, not unless the agent in question were to effect a conscious withdrawal from this kind of social intercourse. Such withdrawal is difficult but it is conceivable, more conceivable at least than perfect objectivity. Withdrawal does not positively achieve anything, rather it closes feedback channels by which one's imperfect ("biased" or "slanted") view of things might be fed back into the social world. It would be fair to call this an extreme course of action. It could solve a lot of problems, though. Short of this extreme, one might simply be a bit more careful with certain interpretations" and a bit more brash about others, based on their differing potentials to do social harm. If only we could tell which were which. "...only interpretations." Much of this is social Dark Matter, invisible yet also endemic, sprawling, extending beyond the horizon. It is unopposed because there is nothing else to oppose it on its own terms. Still, this unseen mass generates a visible world of parallax, borne of voluntary social intercourse, a world which (a) is very much of conscious origin, and (b) indeed illustrates a certain code. This fleshes out, via triangulation, a mind's-eye view of the epistemic shadow world as un-/semi-conscious and proceeding according to myriad individual codes which are not monolithic, not institutional in nature, but which nonetheless do, with time, inevitably evince certain "rules" of interpretation in an order-from-chaos manner, at which point the time is ripe for institution-builders, populist politicians, art critics, etc.

Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don't you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?

To me this is not a caricature. Actually, it is almost identical to my earliest naive thoughts about program notes and stuffed shirts. (As an adolescent I unwittingly placed myself in the path of many program notes and stuffed shirts.) Sontag here describes well the type of thinking which seemingly still prevailed in the classical music ensembles, non-profit organizations, and academic programs where I, beginning in the mid 1990s, was to chance upon it as a proto-Sontaggian adolescent. Yet it seems not to describe (or not anymore, or not where I live now) the wider state of interpretation across all of the arts. By the time I graduated from adolescence to young adulthood, and from a narrow focus on tuba technique to a wider platter of aesthetic and intellectual hors d'oeuvres, it suddenly seemed that many would-be interpreters had dispensed even with the "really means" in favor of a more passive-aggressive, postmodern rhetoric of innuendo, name-dropping, wordplay, and of course the granddaddy of them all, the "personal perspective." "Really means" was too absolute and un-parallactic to get away with calling itself interpretation any longer. (One might as well say, it is far too Pre-Postmodern.) It became too transparent to too many people that this actually was mere translation of one mostly arbitrary thought into a totally arbitrary one. Most of all the interpreter thus inserts themselves into the discourse, for what necessity or greater purpose has never been clear to me. This is of course a profoundly un-parallactic manner of discourse. Once it is truly accepted that

"all vantage points yield a real knowledge, partial and different from that offered by any other vantage point, but in which no point yields insight more privileged than that gained from any other"

(Gary Tomlinson)

then there can be no more art criticism. Today there can be no doubt that quite a few captial-I Interpreters, the professionals, the ones who believe most vehemently and authentically in criticism as a crucial link in the overall arts ecology, actually were not engaging in it at all, and that at a certain point this became obvious to them as well as to most people who take any of the arts seriously So, if Sontag's ABC-XYZ rhetoric is heavy-handed, that is because she is handling an obelisk studded with razor blades. I think that the wide abandonment of "really means" criticism in favor of the squishier, equivocating, variety proves that she was correct about what prior self-styled interpreters had actually been doing. Within the context of a practice (Criticism) which I still don't endorse, I very much endorse this change as it at least imparts some much-needed honesty to the critical transaction, i.e. by qualifying from the outset that each interpretation issues from an imperfect, less-than-all-knowing social agent. Of course we should not need the reminder, not after Sontag has graciously spared us the trouble of tracing it all the way back to Nietzsche, but in reality we very much need it, as each and every absolutist howler lurking in the archives (mine too) may serve to remind us. The enduring problem here even so is that honesty in and of itself fails to enable this panoply of interpretations to coalesce, as the parallactic ideal would have it, into something like a greater truth. The result, quite to the contrary, is just that much more noise, dark matter made visible and material, but with no obvious use and the very obvious drawbacks of taking up a lot of space, diverting a lot of attention, tipping over a lot of shelving as it expands. Per McLuhan, the new information technologies hurtle toward pre-literate thought, yet in doing so they also ramify the several centuries of literate thought which immediately preceded them. Whereas opinions were already a dime a dozen, now interpretations, even the faux-sophisticated kind, are also cheap-to-free. A very intelligent relative of mine is fond of pointing out that any single guess about the number of gumballs in a jar is likely to be quite far off the mark, whereas the average of many such guesses uncannily approaches the correct answer as the sample size grows. This is the undeniably happy side of parallax, of interpretation with a lower-case i, and of what has come to be known as diversity. It is the side which contemporary artists and economists alike are deathly intent on marshalling towards gainful ends as each metier respectively defines them. But consider the difference between the task of counting gumballs in a jar and the task of confronting an artwork issuing from a distant subculture, and there you will have isolated the problem, a problem which the more "honest" version of interpretation has, whatever its other virtues, exploded into a full blown existential threat. This is why I still think that the only way to redeem the interpretative project is to abandon it. (An aside: in my part of the world a live translator of live speech is known as an "interpreter" whereas a translator who acts deliberately upon an inanimate text is called a "translator." This would seem to indicate a distrust of live speech, perhaps also an undue respect for print. Professor McLuhan would be proud of us.) [POSSIBLY BREAK HERE??]

What situation could prompt this curious project for transforming a text? History gives us the materials for an answer. Interpretation first appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the "realistic" view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment.

That's really interesting, because the power and credibility of myth is totally still a thing, not just for whole cultures but for institutions, families, and individuals within those cultures. It's almost like scientific enlightenment never reached them, or like they took proactive steps to ensure that it didn't reach their children, or like they decided that science is just one of many subjectively constituted epistemological strategies for the arrogated construction of truth claims.

Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness—that of the seemliness of religious symbols—had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to "modern" demands.

Because making a new text would have been too much trouble. And because "modern" demands are further beyond question even than religious symbols.

Thus the stoics, to accord with their view that the gods had to be moral, allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer's epics. What Homer really designated by the adultery of Zeus with Leto, they explained, was the union between power and wisdom. In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty years, and the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an allegory of the individual soul's emancipation, tribulations, and final deliverance.

This is so awesome, because *some people* are still way more into the adultery side of things. Remember when we had a chance to make a new text, back when the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness was all up in everyone's shit? Well, instead we split the old text in two, then we split it like five hundred more times, and now everyone has plenty of options depending on how modern their "modern" demands are.

Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable, yet it cannot be discarded.

The absurdity being of course that any text is quite easily discarded on any number of strictly rational grounds. There are plenty of fish in the sea. But some fish have posses of bottom feeders who ingest their waste products in order to live, and who are not quite so strictly rational.

Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too perilous to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can't admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the Rabbinic and Christian "spiritual" interpretation of the clearly erotic Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there.

So, interpretation does its erasing in the abstract realm rather than in the material realm. Interpreters hope we won't notice all the erasure if it is done abstractly rather than materially (though the latter certainly has also been tried).

Interpretation in our own time, however, is even more complex. For the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs "behind" the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation.

Well...the conceit of these excavations (or one of their conceits) is indeed that surfaces can be deceptive. This is often true, so it's a bit hasty to call these two heavy cats aggressive and impious. Rather, it is the application of their celebrated and influential modern doctrines directly to artworks (rather than to, say, governments, economies, psyches, families) which is most questionable. And this has been the work of their respective bottom-feeding posses more so than it has been their own.

All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud's phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning—the latent content—beneath. For Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual lives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a dream or a work of art)—all are treated as occasions for interpretation.

Again, Freud himself did hardly any interpretation of artworks, rather only occasionally of artists. This is, to my knowledge, overwhelmingly true of most of his immediate followers also. A slip of the tongue is not a dream, neither of which is an artwork. Eventually things did indeed become more muddled by varying degrees of irreverence for these boundaries, boundaries which are nonetheless rather clearly laid out by the OGs themselves. If I might dare interpret this irreverence, which seems inevitable the further any given OG recedes back into intellectual history, I would say that it is clearly a motivated irreverence serving otherwise unmet psychological needs (here a Rage To Interpret, if you will, the kind of social phenomenon which simply must be In The Air, rather than merely imposed by a few towering minds, in order to manifest quite as broadly as this openly aggressive mode of interpretation has). In other words, this is a betrayal of the scientific conceit by the darker corners of the human mind as they have been conditioned by dynamic interaction with the social environment. C'est vraiment Too bad! But I think that the spirit of this scientific conceit harmonizes quite well with the broader outlook evidenced in this essay, even if the conceit itself is (too often) just a conceit.

According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation.

Sure. Literally, I think this is a pretty awful mischaracterization. But sure, I can follow the bouncing ball.

To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.

This is indeed what interpreters of artworks do, and I agree that it is...problematic.

Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

The key point, and beautifully said. Marshalling what knowledge of my own milieu I am able ascertain from a position within it, I would start by asserting that interpretation must itself be evaluated even once we have each become our own culture-of-one, even after every artwork is in this sense an individualistic artwork. When every artwork is unfamiliar, unfamiliarity is itself the most familiar experience in this realm. At that point, most of us will do a lot of interpreting for our own purposes of survival. The question is: Why project these interpretations into social space when that is not the reason we created them? There is no sense in denying that interpretation is an act through which a certain irreducible segment of art-consuming humanity has always and will always experience art. The proposition that this is a function of psychology/personality seems to me acceptable even without full scientific understanding of everything that goes into personality formation. Under present conditions, this is the cultural context where interpretation belongs: as a personal matter. The thick encrustations of interpretation which pile up in the public, social world seem to me quite difficult to justify on a mere utilitarian level, to say nothing of the epistemological, ethical or spiritual levels. Even if they are harmless (and I think not), they are not necessary. What is felt necessary about them, I suspect, is that they are vehicles for projecting the self into social space in a particularly gratifying way, a need which really has nothing to do with making, experiencing, or studying art, and indeed, seems too often to be standing in for these things when they are unavailable to people.

4 Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capacity, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings." It is to turn the world into this world. ("This world!" As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience immediately what we have.

Section 4 is one of my favorite pieces of writing ever. The abstract argumentation here I have never doubted. Where I am brought up short is in recognizing that human beings, in the terms given above, are prolific and profligate constructors of shadow worlds of all shapes and sizes. Mumford uses similar imagery in describing both medieval Christianity,

nothing was itself or existed in its own right, it was always a point of reference for something else whose ultimate habitat was another world

and the industrial-age proliferation of images.

we cease to live in the multidimensional world of reality, the world that brings into play every aspect of the human personality... We have substituted for this, largely through the mass production of graphic symbols...a secondhand world, a ghost-world, in which everyone lives a second-hand and derivative life

With or without an institutionalized art world, and with or without industrial technology, collectively we seem apt to create these shadow worlds faster than we can take stock of them. This appears endemic to human civilization. "Endemic" cannot simply mean good or bad; but it is fair to wonder if the shadow world meets (or seems to) an unmet need rather than simply arising hapahazardly out of a chaotic system. In the case of all which can be subsumed under the heading of interpretation as Sontag has thus far theorized it here, the glaring distinction of the resulting shadow world is that the interpretors, the people who do the interpreting, the people who formerly were quite discrete entities vis-a-vis the artwork and the artist, have inserted themselves into this new world on the level of content. From the world and all its big scary vastness against which each of can look and feel quite tiny, the interpretors make like artists and concoct this world of shadow-content, a world governed by certain "rules" of interpretation, evincing a conscious act of the mind which illustates a certain code. Interpretors

make selections from the abounding materials

of their host discipline,
and organize these selections into works that are under the control
of the interpretor, and not the artist. Unlike that "ultimate habitat" described by Mumford above, interpretation's shadow world always has a slightly larger human population than its referrent. That is one thing, at least, which distinguishes it from so much other endemic activity.
5 In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone.
Them's fightin' words! Perhaps to a fault, i.e. ad hominem; UNLESS, that is, the word philistine is not merely left to dangle there in colloquial purgatory. Instead I propose we explicate (don't say interpret) this sentence in all its richness until we hit upon the basis for an ethical or moral claim rather than a mere value-laden hurling of insult. For Google, the noun "philistine" signifies a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them. Similar: lowbrow anti-intellectual materialist bourgeois boor ignoramus lout oaf barbarian primitive savage brute yahoo vulgarian Or, it can be an adjective in pretty much the same vein, hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts. Similar: crass tasteless uncultured uncultivated uneducated untutored Now, this might help a high school student survive the SAT but it is not too helpful to us here, since obviously some pretty particular worldviews have penetrated this particular nook of the Googlesphere. Let's seek another angle of attack. Transparently, an evinced refusal to leave the work of art alone does not exactly indicate a position of being indifferent vis-a-vis culture and the arts broadly. Quite the reverse, actually. Within which there may indeed be a hostile streak, but there may just as easily be nothing of the sort, at least consciously. In these respects, the contemporary gist of the P-word is quite inessential to the specific problem Susan has placed in front of us. Perhaps a better semantic guide would be this pesky and meddlesome refusal to leave the work of art alone since that notion, although literally it is much vaguer than the P-word, may actually be firmer anchor. Specifically, an artwork presenting in some state of being alone (define this any way you wish), subsequently *some people* betray a certain refusal to leave the work be in said condition of aloneness. It matters not, then, which ancient Levantines most closely resemble these modern-day meddlers. Rather, the point is that the work of art which once was alone in relation to...anything, I don't care, literally pick whatever tf you want this to be in relation to; it will not change the bottom line, is no longer quite so alone; and among that which now accompanies it is a person, Levantine or otherwise. A person who has exercised their agency proactively on a former condition of stasis. The ethical or moral angles then are quite specifically matters of evaluating the objective state of things (a) before, and (b) after said intervention, this quite independent of who the meddler is, what their conscious intentions were, which independent journalism outlet employs them, the overall wholesomeness of said journalism outlet as evinced in their prior publications, or to which ancient Levantine tribe they or their forebears belong. The task of such an ethical or moral evaluation of course ultimately tempts infinite regress in the marshalling of evidence from virtually every sphere of human knowledge and experience. At that point it does matter what alone means. In other words, we may have to agree to disagree. But we may not disagree that there was a former state of aloneness which was proactively transformed into a current state of accompanied-ness. At least that is the scenario Susan has placed in front of us here. We may proceed now. The peculiar transformation effected by the institution of interpretation involves the piling up of thick encrustations which, if they are hardly necessary and possibly damaging, nonetheless may issue from sources of great social authority and great erudition. Even to me it seems, on the surface, a bit harsh to heap the word "philistine" on, say, the person responsible for a well-researched and well-written program note. Rather, it is the conceit underlying the institution of the program note which is philistine, even if it seems too harsh to apply this epithet to the most erudite, authoritative program note-ers. It is the action and not the actor that is philistine. It is, in the case of the program note, also likely that the conceit belongs to the person writing the check, or, in the case of academic, to the instituion writing the check to the person who writes the email to the student that says they must, as a condition for receiving an accredited degree, write and supply program notes for a given performance. But also, it is the actor, the interpretor, who has placed themselves in the line of fire here. And for that there eventually comes a reckoning, erudition be damned. So, what of this collective refusal to leave the work of art alone? Perhaps there are as many answers as there are philistines. Already Sontag has invited us to consider the contemporary practice of interpretation in light of its ancient origins, in light of the need to reestablish the currency of a "text" which has somehow lost currency, become unacceptable. The reasons for this loss (or absence) are, however, not usually quite as transparent in the case of contemporary artworks as they are in the quite concrete literary-religious examples she has provided. I would conjecture that the closest such parallel is to rear-guard art subcultures/subgenres struggling to sustain their position in the vanguard against all evidence to the contrary: "Bebop is the music of the future!" But this is hardly adequate to account for the bulk of what passes for interpretation, not in the 1960s, and not in the 2020s. Newness and unfamiliarity also attract interpreters like leeches, but for different reasons. Where the philistinism lies, then, is in imagining that there is a monolithic correct response to any given work, a singular target which we are more likely to miss the less familiar we are with the work, but which we might have a better chance at hitting if someone of great erudition and authority (someone who knows stuff) would just TELL US WHERETF to find the sweet spot. From here there follow all kinds of divergences, even among true believers in this paradigm as a paradigm, regarding what sorts of context must be considered here: biography, psychology, aesthetics, politics, etc. The "text" was in this case quite unacceptable from the start, because its mere right to exist (to say nothing of its right to command human attention) is, let's say, untransparent to a great number of observers, given present material and social conditions. Too cynical? But then, what is today more thoroughly ingrained among most people who take any of the arts seriously than exhaustion?
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Indeed, the capacity, but not (quite) the mandate. That's because such a mandate is absurd given how different (and differently-nervous) we all are. "...to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." Even here we are left, ultimately, trying to reconstruct Taleb's ice cube from a puddle of water. Incidentally, the few direct compliments I've received about this blog arise from some of the most petulant things I've written.
By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
Indeed. But again, the mandate to untameness is also stifling and absurd, on the same basis as above. What Art Can Do > What Art Does.
This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art.
God I love this part. Novelists eating their own! Don't just wallow in that art-epistemological privilege, get out there and earn that shit!
For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself—albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony—the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an uncooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.
I haven't touched a novel since the last time I was required to do so by an academic authority (i.e. high school), so naturally all such appeals to examples, welcome and necessary as they are (there could be more of them here, honestly, and in my own writing too), are appeals which I cannot evaluate or learn from. How do I end up reading so much literary theory and criticism? Because I want to stop them from turning my music into a novel! Make it stop! I don't want to go to high school today...
The work of Kafka, for example, has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory
Is that a real thing? Let's assume she means, "Those who interpret Kafka psychoanalytically."
see desperate revelations of Kafka's fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God. ... Another oeuvre that has attracted interpreters like leeches
YESSSS
is that of Samuel Beckett. Beckett's delicate dramas of the withdrawn consciousness—pared down to essentials, cut off, often represented as physically immobilized—are read as a statement about modern man's alienation from meaning or from God, or as an allegory of psychopathology. Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Rilke, Lawrence, Gide ... one could go on citing author after author;
So, I admit that there are moments, like this one here, when it seems like its time for me to finally jump into actual literature with two feet. Perhaps in clinging to a high-school level (literally) of perspective here, I let the interpreter-terrorists win. But then I remember that it is only the interpreter-terrorists, so-called, who moralize for literature's importance based on their own interpretations of it. If that maneuver is rejected, there is then no reason for me to take time away from, say, listening, which is an already-ongoing art-consumptive project of greater priority and importance which no one nowadays can ever do justice to in just one lifetime. These lists are tantalizing, and I have reason to think based on a few high school experiences that the modernist writers would speak to me in a way the Victorians cannot. But with all the other lists already exploding (not just listening but non-fiction reading, and god forbid music-making too), zero-sum thinking is, for me at least, unavoidable, a mere fact of postmodern life. So, already feeling spread way to thin, ignoring literature is the way I comfort myself. I am actively ignoring it, so that I feel better. Among all the other things I might ignore, ignoring literature is by far the easiest and most pleasant. Where does militant ignorance end and discipline begin?
the list is endless around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold.
At 20 years old I landed on the word sedimented for this metaphor, and it became an anti-credo for a brief time thereafter. "Thick encrustations" is one of the few things I underlined the first time I read this essay.
But it should be noted that interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality. Thus, in the notes that Elia Kazan published on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear that, in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilization, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little the worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams' forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be mamageable.

6 It doesn't matter whether artists intend, or don't intend, for their works to be interpreted. Perhaps Tennessee Williams thinks Streetcar is about what Kazan thinks it to be about. It may be that Cocteau in The Blood of a Poet and in Orpheus wanted the elaborate readings which have been given these films, in terms of Freudian symbolism and social critique. But the merit of these works certainly lies elsewhere than in their "meanings." Indeed, it is precisely to the extent that Williams' plays and Cocteau's films do suggest these portentous meanings that they are defective, false, contrived, lacking in conviction.
WOW! At the risk of projecting more recent cogition back upon my younger self, I do clearly remember reacting this way in 11th Grade to Ellison's Invisible Man. I thought it was VERY "contrived" and on that basis "defective," though certainly not "false," and anything but "lacking in conviction." I mean, the protagonist literally gets shit on. That is quite heavy-handed by any measure. If memory serves, we read Streetcar the previous year and it made NO impression on me at all. I do wish Sontag (and I) had better accounts to offer of that merit-which-lies-elsewhere-than-in-meanings, but nor do I think that any insufficiency therein necessarily justifies the interpretive mode as merely the lesser evil just because it is more comprehensible and because it is easier to spin superficial justifications in favor of it.
From interviews, it appears that Resnais and Robbe-Grillet consciously designed Last Year at Marienbad to accommodate a multiplicity of equally plausible interpretations. But the temptation to interpret Marienbad should be resisted. What matters in Marienbad is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions to certain problems of cinematic form.
I don't really understand the need for the second part of that last sentence in light of the first part. Once "pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy" has been restored to its rightful place at the center of our concerns, I would think the audience is thereby absolved of any imperative to give a shit about "certain problems of cinematic form." [This might be the place to bring in the Warner and Mayer testimony before HUAC? In O. Friedrich, "City of Nets"] [Bogle happens on a couple of examples of ahistorical representations in films: black FBI agents at a time when the FBI did not take blacks; a black baseballer who claims to have played against Babe Ruth. Bogle's task is merely to point these out, not to dwell on them. But actually there is something really important to be said about this. In a world of informed citizens and historical consensus, portrayals such as these become available as imformed artistic choices, with potentially complex/multiple meanings. There is nothing to fear in that world, for either artist or audience. The ignorance-fear nexus arises when people are poorly educated and mostly get their education from movies. In this latter case, there arises a danger, THE danger on which most of the current chatter seems to fixate, that merely by depicting something not exactly as it actually was whole generations of citizens will be misinformed or propagandized. Where such portrayals rub against existing historical knowlegde, they become generative, perhaps of conflict and discomfort, or perhaps of nuance and thought-provoking reflection. Where they merely rush into a vacuum, they risk becoming replacements (poor ones) for knowledge and reflection.]
Again, Ingmar Bergman may have meant the tank rumbling down the empty night street in The Silence as a phallic symbol. But if he did, it was a foolish thought. ("Never trust the teller, trust the tale," said Lawrence.) Taken as a brute object, as an immediate sensory equivalent for the mysterious abrupt armored happenings going on inside the hotel, that sequence with the tank is the most striking moment in the film. Those who reach for a Freudian interpretation of the tank are only expressing their lack of response to what is there on the screen. It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.
Having previously dispensed with Freud, she dares us to read this sentence as if Freud had never happened. I might not have put it this way. According to my BS detector, Kazan's purported Streetcar notes reeks less of re- or dis-placement of the work than of marketing. The advent of marketing in the contemporary sense is the single most significant difference between ancient and modern interpretive paradigms. Certainly it is stll possible to identify something like marketing underlying the religious examples Sontag has appealed to, but it is also true that economies and technologies have changed drastically since ancient times. Martketing is released into a very different social environment today, one which is already saturated with messaging and where the targets of marketing campaigns have been forced to evolve by the pressures of previous campaigns. A certain turning up of the volume just to be heard is perceptible in the interpretation of artworks as well as it is in their conception.
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
7 Interpretation does not, of course, always prevail. In fact, a great deal of today's art may be understood as a flight from interpretation.
Musicians closed-circuit to these artists: we've been expecting you.
To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become ("merely") decorative. Or it may become non-art.
Here are four very different such avoidances, which are not the only ones available to the avoider, nor are they all equally capable of avoidance, nor are their various implications (ethical and social are the ones I would focus on) the least bit commensurable. As musicians know, abstraction hardly "avoids" interpretation as much as it undercuts any given interpretation's ability to claim correctness or insight. The absence of the kind of clear interpretive guidance which , say, novels seems to provide, is too often mis-experienced by listeners as their own "lack of response to what is there." Owing to (1) unhelpful colloquialisms which privilege reaction over contemplation, and also to (2) the more or less organic human dynamic of anxiety that you might be the only one in the assembled mass who Doesn't Get It, such lack of response is experienced as an anxiety to be allayed, i.e. via a "response," which is already, before it has even been formed into an explicit statement, doomed to miss the mark, much as anxiety in academic testing situations tends to harm cognitive performance. And so abstract artists share a certain bond of shared suffering (though admittedly it is sometimes sheerly entertaining enough to be fun), experienced through their post-performance or gallery-opening social encounters, of being treated successively and in rapid-fire fashion to all manner of contrived statements about their work, the farfetchedness of which is proportional to the level of anxiety they have managed to generate. This where Disturbing The Comfortable is revealed as something art can do but probably should be more careful about doing. But then the conditions for mounting said Disturbance are so minimal, owing to (1) and (2) above, that Art can hardly be held solely responsible (or take all the credit), and certainly this situation, in all its broadness of scope, is also emblematic of Art's limitations in affecting solutions beyond its own confines (within which it of course has less ambitious but nonetheless important things to offer us). As for the other avenues, I find the "decorative" turn a tantalizing theoretical question. It is true that the conversations after a background music gig tend to be a lot less pretentious on the subject of Content, or, if they are pretentious it is usually a matter of vendor-client relationship-tending. But I wonder if "decorative" art is not interpreted simply because people are paying less attention to it? Or is this the right amount of attention to pay to abstract art?
The flight from interpretation seems particularly a feature of modern painting. Abstract painting is the atempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content since there is no content there can be no interpretation. Pop Art works by the opposite means to the same result; using a content so blatant, so "what it is," it, too, ends up by being uninterpretable. A great deal of modern poetry as well, starting from the great experiments of French poetry (including the movement which is misleadingly called Symbolism) to put silence into poems and to reinstate the magic of the word, has escaped from the rough grip of interpretation. The most recent revolution in contemporary taste in poetry—the revolution that has deposed Eliot and elevated Pound—represents a turning away from content in poetry in the old sense, an impatience with what made modern poetry prey to the zeal of interpreters.
Of course this is all wishful thinking. All flights from interpretation can themselves be content-ized and then interpreted all the same as before, as when Mumford says that the modernist painters are saying everything by saying nothing. The revolt against the form-content duality is easily subverted by the interpretati: they simply treat form as content and then interpret that. There is no escape possible here, much as we would like to affect one. The problem remains a "lack of response to what is there," and no essay or blog or artwork or art movement can do any more than bluster in the face of that lack. It is an artifact of the total situation in the world, about which every facet of that world has a small part to play.
I am speaking mainly of the situation in America, of course. Interpretation runs rampant here in those arts with a feeble and negligible avant-garde: fiction and the drama.
Why must the drama and the dance be saddled with articles like they're Los Angeles freeways?
Most American novelists and playwrights are really either journalists or gentlement sociologists and psychologists.
I mean...just...damn.
They are writing the literary equivalent of program music. And so rudimentary, uninspired, and stagnant has been the sense of what might be done with form in fiction and drama that even when the content isn't simply information, news, it is still peculiarly visible, handier, more exposed. To the extent that novels and plays (in America), unlike poetry and painting and music, don't reflect any interesting concern with changes in their form, these arts remain prone to assault by interpretation. But programmatic avant-gardism—which has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content—is not the only defense against the infestation of art by interpretations. At least, I hope not. For this would be to commit art to being perpetually on the run.
Indeed. One of the salutary aspects of it seeming as if everything has already been done is that this on-the-run-ness can be decoupled from the tyranny of popular perception and instead appropriated as a personal choice, taken or deferred. The music that Ornette Coleman, for example, was making around the time this essay was written seems ever more incremental rather than radical, not merely against the backdrop of hindsight but also of the artists concerned, their histories, psychogies, etc. Jazz's deep ties to songforms and songbooks are what made this music seem radical; it pales in comparison to the truly radical musical developments of this time, which, if the standard issue New York exceptionalism is to be accepted, everyone there was more or less equally well-versed in at all times, just by being there, and whether they knew it or not. It now seems obvious that Miles, notably devoted to songform and not amused by any of this, was nonetheless reaching harder and farther relative to his own musico-psychological world than most of his "free" playing contemporaries (Ayler definitely excepted, and perhaps others who I am inadvertently short-changing based on ignorance...) Trite as it is to say, whether you dig the later stuff or not, Miles really stands alone in this regard. Ornette's music, great as I also consider it to be, doesn't show much evolution; and of all the jazz players who plugged in throughout the 1970s, whose music is half as good and individualistic as Miles'? What I'm saying is that Miles' was an aesthetically mainstream musician whose style it was to reach, whereas I would propose that Ornette was not reaching for his music in the same way, no matter what it seemed. This individual typing of artists has, I think, quite a bit more use than does the grand historical narrative which evaluates them against an abstract notion of the mainstream, against which comfortable oddballs become classified against their nature as avant-gardists and restless mainstreamers vice versa.
(It also perpetuates the very distinction between form and contentn which is, ultimately, an illusion.) Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be...just what it is.
Again, ca. 1964, was Miles' or Ornette's music the better (or if you insist, worse) illustration of this ideal? I think it's hard to say, and that this is very informative.
Is this possible now? It does happen in films, I believe. This is why cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms right now.
Fine. "Importance" is what visuals and narrative will get you. But music was pretty sick too!
Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it, and still being good.
Brilliant point. Orchestra managers and jazz professors, she's talking to you.
For example, a few of the films of Bergman—though crammed with lame messages about the modern spirit, thereby inviting interpretations—still triumph over the pretentious intentions of their director. In Winter Light and The Silence,
Is that like the dance and the drama?
the beauty and visual sophistication of the images subvert before our eyes the callow pseudo-intellectuality of the story and some of the dialogue. (The most remarkable instance of this sort of discrepancy is the work of D.W. Griffith.) In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. Many old Hollywood films, like those of Cukor, Walsh, Hawks, and countless other directors, have this liberating anti-symbolic quality, no less than the best work of the new European directors, like Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim, Godard's Breathless and Vivre Sa Vie, Antonioni's L'Avventura, and Olmi's The Fiancés. The fact that films have not yet been overrun by interpreters is in part due simply to the newness of cinema as an art. It also owes to the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds.
Hell hath no fury like an art-form denied its art-status...at least until such status is granted, at which point "people with minds" descend upon it "like leeches," piling on "thick encrustations" of arbitrary interpretations, and thereby eliciting a yet greater fury. Hmm... The "people with minds" don't come out of this scenario looking very good, do they?
Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those people who want to analyze. For the cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms—the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of a film.

8 What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today? For I am not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be described or paraphrased. They can be. The question is how. What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?
This entire paragraph seems built on the hidden premise that criticism, though we as yet have not said what kind is desirable, is in any case necessary. Apparently it has already been decided that criticism is so necessary that such a question is not even worth asking, never mind that most of the criticism we do have is, apparently, not just in abdication of some other more constructive duty, but downright cooptive, destructive, more interested in usurping art's place than in finding its own. Already we have interpretation surrounded: "commentary," "described," "paraphrased." The last is my personal least favorite of all modes of what might be called, following SS earlier on, "translation." I'm not even entirely sure what it means here: Summarized? Compressed? Referred to in passing? Perhaps "paraphrase" is merely a subspecies of "description," the one which makes no effort to conceal its reductive quality. This is, ironically, a generative strategy which has a long history in the arts even before its postmodern blossoming; but we are concerned here with criticism, and with not usurping the place of the artwork(s) it aims to apply itself to. It seems to me that it would be impossible to practice "criticism" without at some point, in some sense "describing" an artwork, but that the critical conceit, as evidenced by the mere fact that it has attracted attention here, is far broader than mere description, though just how broad it is (or better, should be) is difficult to say. "Commentary" is broader yet, but is crucially different in that it more explicitly denotes a personal perspective, whereas mere "description" permits at least a mild conceit to distanced obectivity. Not all commentary is interpretation, but all interpretation is commentary. Clearly SS holds out faith in the remainder; but if we have accidentally isolated the area of discourse from which our entire problem issues, then perhaps we should tread carefully here. The desire here to dispense with "interpretation" while clinging to "criticism" runs afoul of two considerations: (1) both are species of translation, which above has been quite rightly dispensed with (2) the place which criticism usurps is not that of the artwork, in my opinion, but that of the audience. The intermediary location of the critic deserves nothing less than this label as usurper unless we can somehow reconcile the very notion of intermediaries with various other ways we understand the artistic transaction.
What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If extensive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms.* *One of the difficulties is that our idea of form is spatial (the Greek metaphors for form are all derived from notions of space). This is why we have a more ready vocabulary of forms for the spatial than for the temporal arts. The exception among the temporal arts, of course, is the drama; perhaps this is because the drama is a narrative (i.e. temporal) form that extends itself visually and pictorially, upon a stage ... What we don't have yet is a poetics of the novel, any clear notion of the forms of narration. Perhaps film criticism will be the occasion of a breakthrough here, since films are primarily a visual form, yet they are also a subdivision of literature.
Well...be careful what you wish for! And don't surprised if your expectations are underwhelmed as long as your topic is (like, gee, ALL the other interpreted arts...) "a subdivision" of that towering art-epistemological monolith called literature.
The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.
It is still quite unclear why we really, truly need critics and criticism, but perhaps we are closing in on this much-needed clarity deductively and not inductively. Here we have given a single important characteristic of "the best criticism." Is this dissolution of "considerations of content into those of form" necessary? Is it sufficient? And what else, if anything, can we say about our ideal?
On film, drama, and painting respectively, I can think of Erwin Panofsky's essay, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," Northrop Frye's essay "A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres," Pierre Francastel's essay, "The Destruction of a Plastic Space."
Fun!
Roland Barthes's book On Racine and his two essays on Robbe-Grillet are examples of formal analysis applied to the work of a single author. (The best essays in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis like "The Scar of Odysseus," are also of this type.) An example of formal analysis applied simultaneously to genre and author is Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Story Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov."
*yawn*
Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art. This seems even harder to do than formal analysis. Some of Manny Farber's film criticism, Dorothy Van Ghent's essay "The Dickens World: A View from Todgers," Randall Jarrell's essay on Walt Whitman are among the rare examples of what I mean. These are essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.

9 Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. This is the greatness of, for example, the films of Bresson and Ozu and Renoir's The Rules of the Game.
I have previously stumbled my way to a similar conclusion regarding my own metier, wherein such a notion as "transparence" has a meaning only half in common with narrative and representational arts. That half in common is the technical part, the craft per se, wherein work slowly forms into something that is something in between perfect transparency and perfect opacity. (Intentional opacity is not an exception, but rather reinforces the point. Many such works fail to be opaque enough to bring off the intent behind them, leading to all sorts of Wizard-of-Oz moments of unintented clarity. Here I am thinking primarily of, let's see...all but a handful of every live electronic music performance I've ever witnessed.) I do believe in something like a poetic or synaesthetic Grand Transparency, but I fixate on the concept as a musician for much more earthly reasons which are that much more frustrating for being so earthly. Musicians are only allowed access to a few of the many potential acoustic environments we might work in. We almost never get to know exactly what we're getting, and if we have something in mind that's either too theoretical or too expensive (usually these are related) there is probably no way it will ever happen, thus relegating the work in question to the perfect opacity of the proverbial Drawer.
Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they may be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of reduncancy that is the principal affliction of modern life. Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilar Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture. Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

10 In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. [1964]

=-=-=-=-=-= comment to http://theintellectualamerican.blogspot.com/2015/12/in-praise-of-being-against.html Very nice excursus. I share your enthusiasm for this essay. Some thoughts I've been developing which your piece also touches on: I'm not a card-carrying "Marxist" or "Freudian" but nonetheless it seems to me that the application of those theories to works of art (as opposed to, say, therapy patients or social movements) is, without even considering the consequences for artists and artworks, something between a spurious distaction from and an outright abuse of the theories themselves. In other words, there is a double betrayal here, a betrayal on both sides of the interpretive act, and this suggests that more is at play than just theory running amok in the academy. I'm not equipped to tackle that thesis in its full implications, but drawing on the research I have done (about the advent of program notes for musical performances early in the 19th century), I'd say there is definitely a more holistic picture to be painted wherein "certain rules of interpretation" emerge from wider social conditions more so than from the influence of ivory tower theorists. e.g. By the latter 19th c. in many parts of Europe there was actually more demand than supply for live symphonic music, and people relied on written descriptions of the music, whether in program books or periodicals, both to whet their appetites and to relive a performance they would never hear again. Somehow, still today, liner notes and program books and textbooks use a shocking amount of space to describe in words what the music sounds like. For that I have no firm explanation, and certainly no defense; it seems indefensible (and, frankly, idiotic). But it's curious to think that maybe it wasn't quite as idiotic 150 years ago, and it is possible to argue that since program notes became truly conventionalized for the first time in precisely this era that much which has followed is at root merely an unthinking acceptance of received convention. (In my experience the program books, being so convention-bound and anachronous, have remained virtually untouched by Marx and Freud; liner notes are of course a different story.) Even in light of the 1970s and 80s and all of that gobbledy-gook, it's rare for theory per se, even prevailing theory, to drive behavior in a top-down fashion. Rather, there are myriad larger-scale social trends/forces which could channel people towards "allegorical interpretation." i.e. When Sontag writes, "for some reason a text has become unacceptable, yet it cannot be discarded," this covers much more ground than just the ancients, Marx, Freud.... In full cynic mode, I would say that right now the most common reason "a text has become unacceptable" is that the reader does not see themselves or their group in it, and the most common reason "it cannot be discarded" even so is that it is easier to plunder the currency of an established brand than it is to launch and build your own. There are as many "reasons" as there are people, but I wonder if "certain "rules" of interpretation" are not best understood as part of big-picture trends as opposed to more parochial concerns. (Apologies for my verbosity...) Your penultimate paragraph made me think of Richard Maltby's Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus, which in many ways is a polite but firm rejoiner to the Lacanian turn in film theory. I recommend it wholeheartedly, if you're not already familiar. As for "intrinsic meanings in works of art," I'm an instrumental musician so I struggle with that part even when there is nothing "allegorical" at stake. When you write, "The true meaning is there, in the words, for all to see, and the job of formal analysis is to identify a meaning as accurately as possible that is valid both textually and contextually in order to better understand the literal work itself" it seems there are still two levels on which the work operates, only one of which (the "literal") is there "for all to see." At that point I don't follow how there can be an "intrinsic" meaning that is not the "literal" one. Once we depart from the literal, even tentatively, aren't people bound to diverge? =-=-=-=-=-=-=-= comment to http://wwwcriticalvision.blogspot.com/2006/05/susan-sontags-against-interpretation.html This is really fantastic and insightful. I cannot be sure that I've fully grasped everything, but I do have some thoughts about the "hermeneutic circle" as you lay it out here. I completely agree with what you say in section II, ¶1-2. But I never read Sontag as implying that we might "approach [an artwork] in a pure or pristine condition" or that "prejudices can [ever] be entirely excluded." (Although I see now that the word "pristine" does appear early in the essay...hmm.) Her ancient archetype of interpretation arises directly from a change in what you here call the "form of life": i.e. "when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the "realistic" view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment." In this archetype at least, "interpretation is a denial of the new "form of life," not an affirmation of it. i.e. Someone (ruler, scholar, pastor, critic) is dictating a "form of life" to someone else. Within an already "bounded freedom" someone is drawing boundaries around someone else, boundaries that are a little bit tighter than they otherwise would be. Ditto with the XYZ-ABC stuff: someone is arrogating to speak to someone else in a persuasive or polemic manner about what is "really" there. I could not agree more that "preconceptions or prejudices are what [make] understanding possible in the first place." What Sontag calls "interpretation", though, is very much a projection of preconceptions and prejudices into the social sphere, often (if not always) from some position of power. (Critics still had quite a lot of power at this time.) I am of course very much reading my own purposes into all of this, exactly as you say we all do. But I do wonder if ultimately it is the project/arrogation which is at issue here, especially at the institutional level, and less so the level of individual engagement. You write that "interpretation is conceptualized much more broadly by hermeneutic thinkers than Ms. Sontag would like." Again, I'm not sure she would "like" it to be so "narrow" as much as she is taking aim at a relatively "narrow" subset of interpretive practices. e.g. "for some reason a text has become unacceptable, yet it cannot be discarded" (you mention the constitution...) or oeuvres which "[attract] interpreters like leeches" (Little to no "interpretation" required there! If the artists have the power, then the critics/academics/fanboys often become the parasites...) comment to http://jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.com/2010/04/critical-reading-and-interpretation.html Interesting discussion. In making a tour of the blogspot I previously came across a very erudite post about Sontag's essay which nonetheless completely missed/misread the "power" issue that you correctly identify here. I actually do think that "the primacy of power in the equation" is very much accounted for in Against Interpretation, albeit we must (quite ironically) interpret just a wee bit to get there. When you consider the archetype she constructs from ancient conditions, "for some reason a text has become unacceptable, yet it cannot be discarded" the bit about translation, "Look, don't you see that X is really—or, really means—A?" which is rendered in a persuasive/polemic tone, the stuff about oeuvres which "[attract] interpreters like leeches" it doesn't take much "interpretation" to detect that power dynamics are afoot. comment to http://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2020/09/non-fiction-reads-and-discovery-of.html I never got the impression that Sontag "likes" Marx and Freud. There are essays in this collection about Lukacs and Norman O. Brown...hence Marx and Freud are bound to get some play. But she is openly critical of both in the title essay. Perhaps to a fault, actually, by which I mean not that I necessarily want to defend either of them but because neither theory was hatched as a theory for the interpretation of artworks. That part came later and was seen by some true believers as an idle distraction. In other words, the application of Marx's and Freud's theories to the interpetation of artworks was a betrayal not just of the artworks but also of the theories themselves. It could be argued, then, that the rage to interpretation must run deeper than theory. Similarly, when you say that you "blame her for promoting Camp," I think something of the same restraint is necessary. She was describing things that were already happening. We can safely assume that had there been no Sontag there would still be plenty of "bad taste." There's certainly room for personal judgment here, but causation is trickier. =-=-=-= Ah yes, Hamlet. I'm also an IB kid, which is where my knowledge of Shakespeare begins and ends. I'm the wrong person to discuss Hamlet with: the first time we had to read it was way too soon for me; by the second time it came around I was already plotting my escape into the non-literary world of symphonies and bebop. It was demoralizing to find all of the Freudian and Marxist literary stuff running amok in musicology and music criticism too. That's the life context in which Sontag first really grabbed me. Reading "Against Interpretation" (the essay) after finishing music school was like reading a diary of my own angry thoughts during all the ridiculous lectures I had just sat through. I found many of my own thoughts staring back at me, nearly verbatim in a few cases. But of course she was not terribly concerned with music, at least not in this early compilation. And, for literary people, even I can see, from a distance as it were, that some of her statments here could indeed be shocking. I have no aptitude for literature, so I'll defer to others there. A novel is not a symphony is not a dance, and sometimes I feel like we are all trapped together against our wills in this unwieldy thing called The Arts, like a country with artificial borders drawn around it encompassing mutually hostile ethnic groups. But here we are! Lit critters and beboppers living side by side, occasionally warring, and inevitably borrowing each other's ideas from time to time, whether or not we should. When Sontag writes, "Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are." certainly this sits more easily within some Arts than others. Perhaps ultimately it is an empty rhetorical statement. But as for Freud and Hamlet, I do think it hits the mark. (Fortunately my copy of The Interpretation of Dreams, unlike my copy of Against Interpretation, has an index.) Freud writes, "The play is built up on Hamlet's hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations and an immense variety of attempts at interpreting them have failed to produce a result." Now, who knows what exactly he means by "failed to produce a result." He was a terrible self-aggrandizer. I would guess that a "result" for him here means conclusiveness, a settled matter. Which is perhaps contrary to the very spirit of literature, theater, The Arts, etc. in some cosmic sense of everyone being entitled to experience things their own way. But that aside, what I think Sontag took aim at, specifically, is the fact that he (or whoever else) finds it simply intolerable that the "text offers no reasons or motives" for Hamlet's behavior. It is the desire to settle the matter conclusively, to win the argument, and to elevate oneself in the process; that, I think, is a big part of what she is taking aim at. "Things being what they are," in this case, means that Hamlet hesitates, and that the reasons for this are unclear. Many people have read Sontag to be saying that the reader should not be curious about things like Hamlet's motives, that we should not wonder to ourselves. I don't think that's what she's saying at all. Rather, she writes against the notion that there is, somewhere out there, a "result" waiting to be "produced" by someone, which tells us what a play is "about," according to "certain rules of interpretation" which may well, as in the case of psychoanalytic theory, be quite arbitrary or tenuous. Though she does not say so explicitly, it's easy enough to notice that "interpretation" in her account tends to issue from places of power or authority. And, once all of this has been going on for a while, it starts to feed back on itself. Much of that "postmodern" work you dismiss (and I suspect we are on the same page there) is precisely this kind of feedback loop. e.g. Chris Burden's "Through the Night Softly." Many "interpretations" are available there! But if you're into "things being what they are" then it's just a guy crawling naked over a bunch of broken glass, which in the actual world (as opposed to the "shadow world of "meanings"" Sontag warns against) is totally pointless. I read your Hamlet post quickly, since, again, this is not my bag. "Tennessee Williams' forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable." "Perhaps Tennessee Williams thinks Streetcar is about what Kazan thinks it to be about. It may be that Cocteau in The Blood of a Poet and in Orpheus wanted the elaborate readings which have been given these films, in terms of Freudian symbolism and social critique. But the merit of these works certainly lies elsewhere than in their "meanings." Indeed, it is precisely to the extent that Williams' plays and Cocteau's films do suggest these portentous meanings that they are defective, false, contrived, lacking in conviction. http://anotherreadersreview.blogspot.com/2006/04/against-interpretation-a-hermeneutics.html THIS explains the form/content thing really well: "The result of the separation and hierarchical arrangement of form and content is, at least in part, what calls forth the necessity and universality of interpretation because form, as an accessory, or better put, a covering of content, obscures the essential beneath its latent appearance and effect. Intetpretation, for Sontag, is what creates the assumption that art has content, that it is meaning something rather than doing something (5)." GR comment to Zanna @Zanna Your contention that "it's ableist and elitist and ethnocentric to insist that the objects should 'speak for themselves' is quite interesting. I get it regarding certain artifacts of "heritage," of "the Ice Age," etc., but those examples seem quite far from Sontag's purview, far enough that I'm having trouble seeing the connection. Certainly natural history is not merely in the eye of the beholder. But when it comes to, say, a film, a symphony, a painting, etc., it seems to me that the truly "ableist" view is the view that there is some monolithic archetype of ability against which audiences either succeed or fail. (e.g. This is pretty much exactly the attitude that prevailed for the entire twentieth century re: what came to be called "music appreciation.") To be "against interpretation" in Sontag's terms is to be for a pluralism of reception; pluralism of course being more or less appropriate depending on the medium in question. "WE LACK THE ABILITY TO DECODE in terms of what they 'really' meant to the people who made and used them." When Sontag opposes "interpretation" to, say, "pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy," or some such thing, Invoking "ableism", e.g. is a bit of a double-edged sword here, since it implies that there is some archetype of ability to which all audiences for a given work can/should aspire.