Ep. 246: Susan Sontag on Interpreting Art (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 246 is something like how can we best engage art? And we read three essays by Susan Sontag against interpretation from 1964, on style from 1965, and the death of tragedy from 1963. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer whose mask is my Face in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:29 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, stylized but without style in Austin, Texas.

0:34 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:36 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, incanting my mimetic self in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:42 Mark: Has anybody read any Sontag, like any of her famous novels, award winning novels?

0:46 Seth: I can't say that I have.

0:48 Dylan: Me neither.

0:49 Seth: I always thought of her as like an activist.

0:52 Mark: Yes, but you were not aware of her as a public figure.

0:54 Dylan: I was not.

0:55 Mark: Yeah, because she only died. When did she die?

0:57 Dylan: Early 2000s.

0:59 Seth: She was one of those national intellectuals who was like on Charlie Rose and those kinds of television shows back in the 80s. I remember. I always thought of her as an activist. I didn't think of her as a writer.

1:10 Mark: And I certainly didn't know about. Even if I knew that she was a trendy in the 70s writer, critic, I did not know about her philosophical training, philosophical work, that she kind of has the equivalent of our education, that she did some graduate level work, hung around with Marcuse, seems extremely well read in the continental tradition at least so. Right. We're only doing this because we had this On Style essay recommended by our previous guests. And we enjoyed that so much that we wanted to make sure that we could discuss that in detail. And the collection that we were reading that in was Against Interpretation and Other Essays.

So Against Interpretation, the first essay On Style being the second scene, an obvious addition. Again, interpretation didn't end up being as meaty. It's a little more sloganistic and covers similar ground to On Style. So I looked for something else and she happened to have this one On Tragedy, which I think we should probably save until last because people are probably sick of us talking about it. But it was nice to have her engaging fairly directly with what we've been doing. The one comment I would make from On Tragedy, just to start off is she characterizes the beginning of that essay.

Why literary criticism is important philosophically is that it's kind of where people did the hard work of thinking about human nature after the empiricists pushed everybody out of Actual philosophy is the way she put it. So thinking about Bertrand Russell and the analytic philosophers like this is, at least in America, kind of where stuff was going on. You know, until recently, no one had any. Wants to dispute that or had any thoughts about that.

2:44 Dylan: And I'm just holding myself back from just griping about your framing of, I guess, interpretation as a sloganistic, thin version of on style, when I thought, on the contrary, they both together actually formed a nice whole. So I just said that, but did not resist my temptation to be irritated by your framing of that.

3:04 Mark: But what other initial reactions.

3:07 Dylan: I really liked it. I think you'll. If you have read Nietzsche, you will find something really familiar with at least the point of view. I like the way in which she structures it in terms of art. And I thought a little bit of the history part of it and the interpretation of how we got where we're at was interesting and satisfying enough. I think there's a lot to sort of dig into.

3:30 Seth: I would agree there's a lot to dig into. There's an interesting thesis that's put forth. I think when you combine the two essays together, you actually get kind of a rounder, thematic picture of interpretation versus criticism, you know, and tie it back to the mimetic origins and so forth. But we'll talk about that. I just found her super entertaining as a writer. She has brilliant style, no pun intended, and can be nasty but funny at the same time. That I read the essay Sartre Saint Genet, and I mean, it's hilarious. I'll have to read at least one of the opening.

4:07 Dylan: Yeah, just the first sentence.

4:09 Seth: The first sentence is awesome. And also, clearly she's like, super well read. It was very fruitful. I really enjoyed it.

4:16 Mark: You're really going to say the first sentence is awesome and not read the first sentence?

4:20 Seth: No, I said we will.

4:21 Mark: Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Just to give a sense of her style. Even though this was not part of our reading.

4:26 Seth: Saint Genet is a cancer of a book grotesquely verbose, its cargo of brilliant ideas borne aloft by a tone of vicious solemnity and by ghastly repetitiveness.

4:38 Mark: And it's a positive review overall.

4:40 Seth: And it's a positive review. Yes.

4:44 Mark: I was just impressed in this one. And she wrote one on Camus as well, but especially this one, that she just, in a few pages, is able to at least fake, if not demonstrate a thorough knowledge of Hegel, of Being and Nothingness.

4:59 Seth: Oh, yeah.

5:00 Mark: Just to kind of refer to these things in a way that seems summative as well as this 600 page book and the material that Sartre's writing about and boil that all down to such succinct prose, I would not be capable of that, I can safely say.

5:15 Seth: I had to read that sentence to Shannon this morning. And I was like, when you're confronted by somebody who's just so far superior a writer, it's exhilarating and simultaneously depressing. You're like, I could never think this, I could never write this. But at the same time, I'm encouraged, you know, and exhilarated by it.

5:32 Mark: Wes, any initial impressions before we get into it?

5:35 Wes: She's great.

5:37 Mark: Okay, was there a theme? Can we sum up kind of what her point of view is in a couple sentences before we just get into

5:43 Seth: against interpretation, Referring back to the origin in Western intellectual history that art is mimetic meaning, it's a representation of reality. And she talks at different points about Plato and Aristotle, but she traces that through to modern times, to the idea that art is saying something, it should be saying something or showing something. And so that manifests in an engagement with art that requires interpretation. And the idea is that there's something in there that's trying to be shown or said that's distinct from the way in which it is shown or said.

And that it's the task of the critic or the person confronted by the work of art to do an interpretation, to try to get at this meaning, this semi hidden or partially hidden meaning. And she wants to argue that that structure is wrong to the extent that art doesn't just exist to say or to show something, but it actually does something. And that the more interesting question is what is it doing and how well does it do it? Which is a different approach than interpreting the meaning. And it simultaneously breaks down the distinctions between kind of what you might call the content and the style of the piece, the what and the how it dissolves those distinctions.

And she's going to suggest that criticism, modern criticism of art, should be focused on that latter. Does it achieve or does it do what it's supposed to be doing? Well, and that we should just not try to interpret things because there's nothing really there to interpret. It's our obsession with interpretation that creates the illusion that there is something there to actually find and interpret.

7:27 Dylan: I want to point out that she understands that she's taking a particular criticism of the word interpretation. And when she says against interpretation, she means a particular. I'll call it style of interpretation, in fact. And if anything, she is arguing for a way of interpreting that doesn't fall prey to the bad ways of interpreting. So, I mean, at some level the essay should be called against bad interpretation.

7:56 Mark: Or maybe can we be more specific and say, like reductive interpretation?

8:00 Dylan: Sure.

8:00 Wes: So it's in section three that she says what she means in particular. She begins by starting the culture of late classical antiquity, where you go from the credibility and power of myth to a more realistic and scientific view of the world, so that the literal content of ancient texts is no longer acceptable. So, for instance, the Stoics have to, you know, the gods are not actually paragons of virtue and they have to explain away all the bad things that the gods do, turn it into a kind of allegory of some sort, let's say. So you get this idea that there's this manifest content, what's on the surface, and then some sort of underlying subtext.

And that is enhanced by a lot of contemporary or more modern, more recent developments, including especially Marx and Freud. Right, Where Marx was on about ideology, the representation of class interests that actually had a contradictory underlying meaning. And Freud is onto the same sort of thing psychologically. So this is the way she puts it. The modern style of interpretation excavates and as it excavates, destroys it digs behind the text to find a subtext 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.

All observable phenomena are bracketed in Freud's phrase as manifest content. The manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find meaning. The latent content. Beneath this is a famous, of course, broader trend. This isn't just about art. This is about a whole psychology. It's modern consciousness is oriented towards these sorts of ideas. And you could analyze even a lot of popular discourse and the ways in which people speak. You could see how dominated they are by this particular point of view about interpretation. It dominates our political discourse.

For instance, these Marxian and Freudian.

10:06 Dylan: You left out one word in the quote. Sorry, Wes. No, no, I mean, all the reasons I bring it up is not to be pedantic, but because I think it's important because she says to find the true meaning. So one of the things going on with these reductive interpretations is it's freighted with the notion that those are the true way to understand everything. That's sort of the lever. It's not that you're opening it up to understanding by active interpretation in the sort of, I'll call It the bad model or the reductive model. But you are, as you quoted, you're excavating to destroy and replace. So it's an act of translation that is an act of destruction. It's an act of interpretation that is an act of reformulation, with that reformulation being aimed at saying what it truly was saying.

10:55 Wes: And this brings up, as you guys have already kind of hinted at this, but this brings up a real problem because we can all be against reductive interpretation. And there are a lot of like the effect of Marx via critical theory and Freud and psychoanalysis on literary interpretation, in my opinion, have been devastating. They're usually really, really bad and reductive. On the other hand, I happen to be fond of those things in a sense too. And there are really people versed in psychoanalysis, including Sontag and others, who are really good at interpretation and can do it well without being reductive.

So it's unclear to me, and maybe we'll become clearer on it by the end of the podcast, but where you draw the line, she'll give some examples of the kind of interpretation about which she has a positive opinion later. But are we saying that any attempt to get underneath manifest content is, you know, like so for instance, Cavell or any typical piece of literary criticism, and we could take Cavell on King Lear as our example, is just doing this. It's looking at subtext. It's saying, oh, look at King Lear. This is about shame and recognition and the avoidance of love.

For instance, anytime you start doing that about thing, you're doing the thing that she seems to be on the face of it, objecting to here.

12:08 Mark: So I think our guiding principle has to be her overall political point of view here, which is that we are an over intellectualized, innervated, overstimulated society and art is one of those things that allows us to directly have a semi religious experience of. And if we're doing this sort of interpretation, if we're taking apart again, to connect this to her second essay, if we're trying to strip out the style from the content and just get at the content, in other words, that's what the reduction is, is the reduction to what is the statement that is being said, whether that is an explicit political point or whether that's translated through one of these models, to the extent that that is ruining the work of art for people, then that is where we would draw the line.

That's the hermeneutic that I would try to apply. So maybe there are types of uses of Freudianism that don't do that, that actually make it more exciting. That I've experienced the story once immediately, and now I go back and read Lacan talking about the story that I just read, and I get an second wonderful experience. I'm not sure if anybody's had that

13:17 Seth: experience reading Lacan, but I think the subsequent paragraph or two from what Wes read nicely articulates that it can be liberating or, as she calls it, reactionary. She says fairly clearly that it's reactionary in our current historical period. You know, that interpretation is always within a historical context. And right now it's reactionary, but it doesn't need to be. I just would caution listeners not to put too much stock into the word reductive, because I think, as she says, interpretations about restating. It's an attempt to say what the work of art is trying to say, but say it differently, which is not necessarily reductive, but it definitely is. I want to say transfigure. I don't even know if that's a word.

14:01 Mark: Transmogrifying.

14:03 Seth: Yeah. Yeah. Basically that. It's as if you're saying, well, I can say better what the artist was trying to say than the artists themselves. Like that, to me, is the real violation.

14:13 Dylan: Yeah. In section four, she says, 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 capability, 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.

14:48 Wes: What section are you in?

14:50 Dylan: That's Section four of Against Interpretation. I basically read the whole section. I mean, it's a short section, and

14:56 Mark: that's one of the most Nietzsche inciting passages in there. This world. As if there are any other. Yeah, she's been reading a lot of his aphorisms.

15:03 Dylan: Yeah. It's even constructed aphoristically. I think that you get a hint, and she goes into this more at the end of this essay. And then I think you see it reflected in On Style when she says that effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. So the antidote for her is going to be the way in which we Conduct ourselves in interpretation. It's the way in which we use our intellect. It's really a comportment of our intellect. One feature of this comportment that she wants us to have, that you have to cultivate is cultivating our sensibilities.

That basically the problem with these reactionary over interpretations that substitute that interpretation for the world is we're no longer interacting with the world. We're no longer interacting with the art, we're no longer interacting with the work. By doing so we kill it, we remove the life from it. And it's by interacting with it with a kind of open handedness that doesn't mean that you don't come to it with thinking and thought. And this is, I mean, I think Wes is right for pointing out that this is really a challenge, right, because whenever you're going to be trying to talk about something, you're going to bring a frame to it in trying to understand it.

There's a way in which there's an open handed kind of interpretation, interpretive activity you have to be doing. And so the very act of what she's doing, it can't be as simple as there's no interpreting, there's only experiencing. She's not an advocate of being a mystic, of simply saying you have to experience everything and there's no talking or understanding to be involved. But she is an advocate of really bringing that act of intellect closer to something like I'll call an act of maybe not mysticism, but an act of real engagement where you're cultivating those sensibilities in terms of cultivating your awareness regarding the form and the activity of the world.

16:56 Wes: Well, the way she puts it in nine is that. And we can back up and get some of the things in between. But just to get more at her positive view, 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 or Ozu or Renoir's The Rules of the Game. So some of this sounds a little bit Heideggerian. Am I right about that?

17:24 Dylan: Yeah, I think there's that there too for sure.

17:27 Wes: So you see a lot of different influences in her writing. But you know, you could read some of this as a there been recent wars over theory. Right. So the way in which literature and film and other cultural artifacts are treated in the academy, where generally what's in vogue is to bring all these Theoretical frameworks, including Freud and critical theory, cultural studies. The thing that's obviously very popular right now is to read things in terms of gender and various sorts of oppression. And you've always had a segment of intellectuals who.

And I'm sympathetic to them, who argue that those approaches. It's like taking a very cookie cutter approach and coming with a bunch of preconceived opinions and milking the text for whatever one's philosophical or political preoccupations have to be. And I agree, that really kills the joy of reading, and it kills any sensitivity. So, like I'm reminded, a friend of mine dragged me to a reading not too long ago, before the whole pandemic thing started and someone had published a novel. And all the audience wanted to talk about was capitalism and race and gender.

There was nothing in the book to them that counted as an individual, luminous thing. The concept of transparency was completely gone. There was no aesthetic experience there for them. There was simply political experiences and theoretical experiences. So that side I'm sympathetic to. On the other hand, I'm not sure that any act of interpretation can avoid unearthing a subtext. But I'll leave it at that for now.

19:05 Seth: So, Wes, you touch on another point that she raises. Might be in the style essay, but that art is an invitation. It's a dialogue. It requires an interlocutor. I think it's that she's trying to talk about the way in which the relationship between the observer or the experiencer and the work of art is framed. And, you know, she says at one point that there's something that art does in us, it stimulates in us. That is not knowledge, but has the form of knowledge. So what you were pointing at or what I just heard and what you were saying was that really the audience that you were with wasn't really engaging with the art. They weren't even interpreting, by reading into the work whatever it is that they wanted to do. They just were not even having a relationship with it. Much less an interpretive relationship, as opposed to a critical relationship.

19:59 Wes: Well, they might have, but I think that they have the impression that what it means to reflect or think about a work of art, inevitably that must mean the type of activity that they're engaged in which is very moralized and very oriented towards what's ethical and what's just. And it's not something, I think, that Sontag goes into. But that's one aspect of this kind of interpretation which I think makes it impossible to really understand or be engaged with the text.

20:29 Dylan: And in Fact is patently not engaged with the text. You know, the text is in those cases, merely an occasion to talk about those other things.

20:39 Mark: Yeah, I guess it depends whether we're talking about interpretation as an act of translation or an act of checking the content against a code that you already have in mind. And her definition doesn't totally make this clear. It's in section three, she calls interpretation in the sense that she's objecting to a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain rules of interpretation. In other words, I have the Marxist book by my side of literary analysis, but it seems like even then you're not taking every sentence just like west is describing.

You're looking at the point of view of either the characters, maybe the structure of the plot, more likely the author and saying, oh, he only wrote that because he's a bourgeois and these are bourgeois ideas. Like, you're just like Wes is talking about basically throwing away 90% of the text. Like, you run it through your bourgeois detector, and it comes up with bourgeois as the result. So that's not a translation at all. As opposed to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams kind of thing where you really could get. You're looking for a point by point symbolic hookup of every single thing in the plot with The Old Man and the Sea or something.

A very straightforwardly written book and looking to make the whole thing an allegory. That seems like a different activity. I think she's rejecting both. But it would be nice if she were clearer, like giving more examples of the bad kind.

21:57 Wes: Right. Because I think, you know what we're getting into. There are a lot of subtleties to this. Once you start delving into this in detail, it becomes confusing about where you actually ought to draw the line. She does give examples, right? She does give a bunch of examples of what she thinks counts as good criticism, including Northrop Frye.

22:17 Mark: Were you familiar with any of these, Wes? These examples?

22:20 Wes: Yeah. So Northrop Frye and also Eric Auerbach's Mimesis. I've read some of Frye's Anatomy of Criticism and then Erich Auerbach's Mimesis. These are classic big guns in the history of literary theory. And she seems to be endorsing them. And they're just good critics. I wouldn't say that they're not doing interpretation. I would say that they're definitely avoiding their reductiveness. You know, there's an attention to the text. There's an attention to close reading, let's put it that way.

22:51 Dylan: This is why I Bristle at the title is just feels a little bit disingenuous from what she says against interpretation because it's impossible to get through it and not understand her as objecting to a way of interpreting. And in fact she's explicit about it that there has to be a new way of interpreting. And I think we quoted part of that. The case where interpretation is a liberating act. And then she definitely has her eye towards that kind of activity and understanding. That's what she means by interpreting. So it comes off a little because the term is overloaded with a good way of doing and a bad way of doing it. But she's constantly using. When she says interpretation, 99% of the time she means the bad way of interpreting.

23:35 Mark: So I think it is ambiguous. So she starts the whole essay. The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory. Magical. Art was an instrument of ritual. Whereas the theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality. So she's contrasting those. Even if you have an experience of art that is magical, you know it's a religious ritual, it has a meaning. You're singing praises to God because it has the meaning of worshiping God. Right. It is at once an aesthetic experience and something that has a definite non aesthetic meaning. Right. A purpose behind it. So even right there it seems obvious that a purely interpretation less experience is not going to be possible. She just wants it to be less intellectualized.

24:20 Seth: Yeah.

24:20 Wes: The way she puts it in section eight, back to that, is that what kind of criticism of commentary in the arts is desirable today? For I'm not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be described or paraphrased. It can be all right, so that's not a promising. It's not what I'm looking for in literary criticism, although some people do it very, very well. But just describing or paraphrasing. But what she gets onto is that you need more thorough descriptions of form. And then the way she puts it is the best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of the sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form. And I think we'll see with that on style essay it'll become more clear what that means. That's when she gives all those examples of different critics that she likes.

25:07 Dylan: At the end of nine, she adds to what the activity would look like of being attentive to form. The examples for me, I haven't gone to read them, so it's less illustrative to Me, what's important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. 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. And so in that activity of showing how it is what it is and even that it is what it is really just puts you smack dab in the conversation of form and of how the text itself or the art itself is doing the work that it's doing.

25:47 Mark: Yeah, it's just whatever will enable readers to better appreciate the work of art. So says we need a descriptive rather than prescriptive vocabulary for forms. You know, in other words, explaining genre. If we're talking about music, for instance, or painting, explaining the history and the genre and the stuff that sort of led this person to be drawing or singing, writing in this way, then can give us an appreciation. Likewise, you might just say, I'm not really a painting person. I really don't get paintings. But then if you read someone, or actually a better example is us, closed blind to greater or lesser extent, dudes. To read Shahida writing in a rapturous way about these different outfits and kind of the way that they make her feel that can be a way into a new form of art that we just were not able to appreciate. I think that's the kind of stuff she would really like.

26:42 Seth: It's not just a way into the art, it's a way into what the art can awaken in you. I think more than anything, it's not about appreciating the art so much as being able to connect with the experience. I think of it this way, like when somebody who's very enthusiastic about something shares that enthusiasm with you, even if you are not as enthusiastic about the subject or know nothing about it, it's changes the way in which you experience it. And I think the best criticism in her mind can generate, you know, and stimulate emotions and feelings and experiences of art that you might not otherwise. It's about awakening something within you, really.

27:21 Wes: Here's an example. Take our reading of Camus the Plague. Suppose someone asked us, what is that about? We can describe the plot to them and we can do that in what's the way she puts it? A loving, attentive. I forget exactly how she puts it, but in a way that's not just a boring summary, but in a way that increases our attention to the work of art and maybe even how it's accomplished and what makes it beautiful. But then if someone said to me, well, what is it really about? And this is really honestly the part that most interests me. What is it really about?

Someone might be tempted to do ham fisted psychoanalysis of Camus, or ham fisted social or political reading. But I think one can avoid. If you're answering the what's it really about? Question is the sort of answer which is that the plague is a metaphor for something larger and it's a metaphor for something that afflicts us psychologically, socially, let's say, just the way in which ordinary routine infects and devitalizes life. You don't have to agree with that, but that's just an example, the type of interpretation that interests me. And in fact it's the thing that most interests me.

And it doesn't have to be ham fisted and reductive. But I don't come away from this essay knowing where she stands on something like that. I just don't. There's not enough detail here for me as sympathetic. I couldn't be more sympathetic to her point of view.

28:46 Dylan: We'd have to read more of her own criticism, right, to see how it plays out for her. Like I read the Saint Genet thing, I mean, not with great attentiveness, but. And I guess the death of tragedy is probably a review of some sort. It seems to me that she comes to conclusions and judgments about things. So it's not that the sort of open handed interpretation is one in which you don't come to conclusions and judgments. And also it's not one in which you abstain from the activity of asking what does it boil down to? I'm brought back to. It's the way in which you approach that question and then also the way in which you hold that question and the way in which you use that answer going forward.

I mean, it might not be the time to bring this up exactly, but eventually I want to talk about the whole question of scientism and the question of the way in which science falls in this way of talking about the world and falls prey to exactly this problem. It's also the case that the answer to that is very much like the answer that she has about the way in which you use the lens and the theory and the understanding of the empirical world that comes through science. And it's certainly true that it can remove the life out of the world, but it's also true that it doesn't have to.

And the difference between those two things isn't in the theory itself.

30:06 Wes: What I'm thinking about in particular is when we Start talking about metaphors, which could be such an important part for literature. We're automatically talking about manifest content and latent content, right? We're talking about some surface level description which stands in for something else and begs to be interpreted.

30:26 Seth: So, Dylan, that's an interesting twist. Maybe I can tie it into what I wanted to refer back to. What Wes was saying was that I think she would be sympathetic, Dylan, to what you're saying, that it's a how as opposed to a what, but with respect to thinking about different ways of framing an interaction with a work of art, as it were. So she's characterizing interpretation as being a way of dealing with art from the framework of meaning that's conditioned by this history of the notion of art as mimesis and so on and so forth. And going into modern rational.

You know, she's got. Call it an intellectual engagement with art. Then she's kind of proposing something that she's calling criticism, which is a different engagement art, where you're not engaging with it from the perspective of trying to reframe it or describe it or explain it, so to speak, but to perhaps explicate or amplify or maybe even translate, so to speak, to your historical context. Like how, as a critic, can I bring this piece of work, this art from a different historical period alive and make it relevant in my contemporary context for the purposes of generating a similar kind of experience in the viewer or the reader or the hearer, as it did in its original historical context?

That might be one way to consider of criticism. But then, Wes, what you mentioned, and what I think is maybe a missing link here, is something we might call a frame of reading. You're taking a work of art as a jumping off point or as an inspiration or as an anchor to have a conversation about something completely different or about something that's only tangentially relevant, or to use it as an example. And in that case, that seems to me to be almost a third way of interacting. We'll call it a reading as opposed to an interpretation or a criticism.

And you know, that's almost like just taking the paint out of the can and you know, the paint is the text. And instead of trying to engage with the redness of the red, you're going to do something with it. And it may not even be recognizable when it's. When it's all over.

32:31 Mark: Well, you might think that that actually does fit her criterion of transparence, which I was trying to figure out why she used that instead of transparency. And she puts it in italics. I can find no explanation other than I'm using this as a technical term. But again, it's. She says transparence means experiencing the luminous of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. So that, you know, in the sort of the ordinary sense, the criticism should be transparent. So it kind of gives you again, a better view of the thing you're critiquing.

But it could just be that it is a statement, a work of art in itself. In fact, for pretty much pop, we interviewed Noah Berlatsky, a critic, and who was just really explicit like that. No, criticism is an art form. Like, I don't care if this article that I wrote does not give you the best window into appreciating that art form. It could be very snarky. It's that he's like, you're describing Seth bouncing off that art form, using it as a spur to basically write a little piece of philosophy, which is what we see Sontag doing here.

33:33 Wes: The way she puts it in 8 is Acts of criticism would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art. So I think that's part of the transparency. Not to introduce a lot of intellectual distance between you and the aesthetic object, but to bring you closer to it. Because a general audience, or any of us who are still in need of an aesthetic education, or any of us, we're not going to notice everything that's in the work. One of the fundamental roles of the critic, I think, that she's getting at with transparence is just to draw our attention to things that we haven't noticed, to make us fully aware of all the aspects of the work.

34:14 Seth: Yeah, I think that's right. An example that comes to mind for me. And it's almost as, you know, the critic as educator. But I think about looking at. I used to know all the formal terms for the various artists and periods and whatever, but if I'm looking at a painting and I'm just like, oh, it's a painting of an artist's studio, or there's a famous one where there's like a reflection in the mirror and it's like a kid, you know, the royal child looking in the mirror or something like that, and then somebody says, well, if you notice, like, let's look at the geometric angles that draw your eye to this particular element.

And then that in turn leads to a discussion of understanding how this two dimensional depiction of a three dimensional physical space could not be a real actual reflection of what that space is like. But it's done in order to represent it in a certain way. Or that kind of. It sounds like art education, but that kind of criticism. If you say, like, if it. If you. If by criticism you mean it's highlighting the formal aspects or certain choices that the artist made and then enhancing your experience of. Of the work of art. That's what I feel like good criticism in her mind, would do.

35:33 Wes: Should we move on to On Style?

35:36 Mark: I guess we should read her Last sentence, section 10. In place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.

35:42 Wes: Very suggestive.

35:44 Mark: That's why I was thinking a little sloganistic. I mean, I enjoyed it, I really did. But On Style was much more meaty. Why I was reading Against Interpretation, as maybe sort of a rough draft of this more detailed On Style essay, is because I saw this concern of the relationship between style and content as being very much the same one as the content being the interpretation, the output, and the style being. Well, whatever the thing, you know, the language you have to interpret from, well,

36:15 Wes: interpretations are focused more on content. So when she's against interpretation, she's criticizing that attunement to the aesthetic work. Here it's the same sort of thing. It's a criticism of art as having a conceptual function or a function that centers on content. And she's going to argue that art actually has a different, more formal function that she associates with style. But the way this all begins, she's rejecting. She's arguing against the distinction between style and content. Right. Where style is just treated as a decorative encumbrance.

36:50 Dylan: Well, and that's exactly why it's a great follow up to the previous essay. So, I mean, she starts off saying to talk about style without implying that style is a merely decorative accessory is extremely hard right there, especially if you just read the previous essay. You know what she means by that? Because she's going to want to talk about art and literature and such things and talk about the way in which they're done. Be really attentive to the form of them. That is, in part, being attentive to the style, because style is going to be a way of thinking about form, especially form in historical context.

37:28 Wes: Or she'll call it the idiom in which form is deployed is the style.

37:33 Dylan: Exactly. So the fact that the notion of style would loom very, very large. In some ways, it's getting to the question that the challenge that Wes was bringing up of that there are really important ways of interpreting things that seem to be valuable and worthwhile in the way in which she speaks of them earlier, where you're talking about metaphor or allegory or its style, where the style is idiomatic in some way. And so you're learning something or knowing something about what the art is saying and not saying with capital letters the way it's speaking.

And so there's another analogy to me for the way in which she wants to engage interpretation is basically a conversation rather than a unearthing that results in the destruction. But it's a resonant back and forth where recognizing that part of that is you bringing with you your idioms and your separation of the art into styles, all that you're bringing with you to your activity of engaging with the art or the literature.

38:41 Wes: So the way the argument begins is just to say we need to reject this distinction between style and content in art, because art is essentially formal. And the appeal here is to Kant and the idea that aesthetic judgments are non conceptual. So normal judgments subsume particulars under universals, under concepts. And Kant famously said, no aesthetic judgments. When you think something is beautiful, that's not what you're doing. You're not taking a particular and putting it under a concept. Your understanding is actually in a state of free play. It's free from those sorts of limitations.

So the idea that there's something really essentially formal about art and about aesthetic judgments. So it shouldn't be surprising to us that style, if it is the idiom in which form is deployed, is not simply that something that's separable from the content of art, it becomes, it really is the substance of art. If we accept some of these insights of these, you know, classic aesthetic theories.

39:45 Seth: She's not trying to overturn, you know, to say that style is more important than content. She's not trying to reverse the binary opposition of the two. She's basically trying to destroy it. Right. It's a very deconstructionist kind of move. But she points out that situated where we are in the way that we speak about things in our historical context, that's very hard to do.

40:07 Mark: Yeah. So I think maybe that the steps of the argument is first to get you admit that style is more important than you might have thought. In other words, give up your interpretation game of just completely trying to get right through to the content and saying the clearer style, the better. In other words, realism, a transparent style that is ideal. You know, she just said in the previous essay, transparency is best. You could interpret that as, we want a style that does not seem too cluttered. We want Ernest Hemingway we want Camus in the Stranger.

40:36 Dylan: As you point out, Mark, the beginning of the argument is just raising up style and pointing out that there is a. Is no such thing as a neutral style and there's no such thing as styleless works of art.

40:49 Wes: Yeah. We should point to her distinction between style and stylization. If the style is so self conscious, then that can become an interference, what she calls stylization. But the other thing we should do is we should distinguish what she's recommending for the critic and what she's recommending for the work of art itself. I think they're related.

41:08 Mark: It said in that previous essay, number nine, transparency is the highest, most liberating value in art and in criticism today. So that's, you know, it's confusing.

41:17 Wes: She'll talk a lot about forms of consciousness here. Right. So one of the formal things that the work of art is going to make us attend to is particular forms of consciousness. So I'm not sure how I can directly relate that to transparency. I think of transparency as sort of the ways in which content doesn't overwhelm the formal function of art. So, for instance, to give an example in the beginning here, she's saying works of art should not be treated as statements, but basically as experiences. They're not going to give rise to conceptual knowledge.

So to take the example, my favorite example that I've used in so many previous episodes, if we're looking at a painting of an apple, famously for Kant, right, the aesthetic relationship is not one of appetite. I don't enjoy the painting of the apple because I want to eat the apple. I'm more interested in the enjoyment of the representation and the formal aspects of the representation of the apple. But likewise, I'm not looking at that and thinking, oh yeah, I guess Granny Smiths are green or oh, that's what apples look like. It's not conceptual knowledge which is essential to the aesthetic experience.

It's something about the form of that experience itself. It's almost reflexive or self referential. There's a way in which my normal relationship to an apple in the everyday world, it would probably be utilitarian and conceptual. But in that aesthetic moment, I'm paying attention to the experience itself, which is to say, I'm paying attention to the formal aspects of that.

42:48 Mark: Can I just fill in one historical detail? So this essay is a direct response to José Ortega y Gasset's The Dehumanization of Art. So he just gives a version of the Kantian theory, but about literature in particular. Which he says, the ordinary way that people enjoy literature and think of your own experiences of, you know, enjoying, whether it's film or TV or literature, is by sort of ignoring it as an artwork and just paying attention to the human aspects of the story. So do you sympathize with the protagonist? Are you feeling along with those people that are being written about their ups and downs? So that is the equivalent for Ortega Gasset of Kant being actually brought to hunger or sexual desire by the painting of the pair or the.

43:35 Wes: This is really important because it came up in our. In our talk on tragedy too. I read this Gasset essay as well for this, but I hadn't read it before, but I've read things like it. So there's a great book called the Creative Unconscious by a guy named Hans Sachs, which hopefully one day I'll get you guys to read and discuss. But it's a similar sort of idea in which a lot of the reason people go to the movies, for instance, really is more along the lines. It's for the non aesthetic components of the experience. It's to be excited by the action figure and identify with them and get off on, you know, what's killing people or.

So the content is a lot of the experience that draws people to watch films, for instance, or to engage with other arts. But the more focused on the aesthetic we get, the more that a broader audience tends to just get bored. Beauty is not exciting. Beauty is not interesting in the way that Jason Bourne kicking ass is exciting and interesting. It's inherently boring and maybe even a little scary in too pure form. So Gasset is talking in particular about modern art where you try to get away from that content as much as possible. And we could think about the average person's response to that, which is that it's just, you know, what is this?

I just wanted to say that because our engagement with works of art is really. It's a hybrid experience. Like to the extent that I'm engaged with the plot, for instance, of King Lear, I think, oh, what's going to happen next? That, oh, what's going to happen next is not. I know it's ridiculous, but it's not a aesthetic that's not a component of the aesthetic experience. That's on the other side of things.