Watching Pots and Kettles

Watching Pots and Kettles

America in the 1960s: things have never been better. World War II is over and the GIs have returned. The economy is booming, suburbs are being torn out of the countryside overnight, and the baby boomers have graduated from college. In this era, Americans turned to the clarion call of the day: social issues such as universal suffrage, feminism, and war's place in society stood at the forefront of the era's discourse. Susan Sontag stood at the crest of the intellectual wave that washed over these questions, writing poignantly and intelligently about war, sexuality, and the ever-present need to be self-knowing, critical agents. Sontag's work rests upon the shoulder of giants; she brought her impressive intellect to the most divisive social arenas of the day. She shrugged off her numerous critics, confident that history would prove her right. In her writings, we see certain recurring emotions --ardor, melancholy, and an overwhelming concern with the relationship between experience and reality. Sontag manages the herculean feat of covering the entirety of our memetic landscape: she writes about the nature of reality (e.g does an objective reality exist & is it knowable?) and our attempts at understanding it (through art, photography, and our ontological parsing of metaphysical questions). A central idea elies these considerations - why, after all, have our thinkers grappled with them for centuries? Susan Sontag's answer is: by considering these questions and their implications we are gazing into a mirror and looking at our selves.

In "Against Interpretation and Other Essays" (1968), Sontag tackles a wide variety of considerations. Stylistically, many of the essays are written in reaction to other intellectual works, which serve as vehicles for Sontag to explore her own ideas. In the collection's titular essay, "Against Interpretation", Sontag asserts that "A work of art is a thing in the world, not just text or commentary on the world" ("Against Interpretation" 7). Sontag's understanding of art, then, is not just a subjective pursuit whose metaphysical significance is imbued by the artist; art can and does, she believes, have a self-contained significance and place in the world. From the idea, as the essay's title suggests, Sontag begins her assault on interpretation. She says, "interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art... It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish... the world- in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings'. "("Against Interpretation" 11). Sontag believes that any interpretive foray immediately and inexorably diminishes the subject being considered. For her, "meaning" is akin to the flickering shadows on the walls of Plato's Cave, in which "humankind lingers unregenerately" ("In Plato's Cave" 23). Rejecting interpretation, Sontag advocates for "transparency", specifically "experiencing the luminousness of thing in itself, of things being what they are"("Against Interpretation" 13). Sontag's fiery compellation to view things objectively, without the trappings of interpretation, serves as the font of her intellectual impetus.

The essays in "On Photography" (1976) were first published in The New York Review of Books. This book, which took five years to finish, was a study of the force of photographic images, which attempt to bridge the divide between experience and reality. Sontag says of photography, "Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood" ("In Plato's Cave" 23).

Sontag notes that the ubiquity of modern photography has served to blur the boundary between art and its original function of simply recreating a scene. Though photography would presumably be Sontag's art idéal, she resignedly suggests that, even though a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means, photographs themselves are interpretative undertakings. In "Melancholy Objects", Sontag distinguishes photographs from paintings, saying that the latter are "narrowly selective interpretation" while the former are "narrowly selective transparencies", but admits in the next sentence that "the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth" ("Melancholy Objects" 52). Where, then, does Sontag believe the merit of photography lies? She reveals this in a straight-forward manner, saying "A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture" ("In Plato's Cave" 24). Again, Sontag's preoccupation with reality is apparent; for her, the utility of photography ultimately rests in its virtue as a documentary enterprise. For Sontag, it is lamentable but expected that photographers are "haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience." ("In Plato's Cave" 26) It is the photographer's humanity itself that, when coupled with the medium, reduces it to an interpretive enterprise; Susan Sontag doesn't believe there is any way to circumvent this occurrence.

Sontag elaborates on this idea in "The Image-World", the last essay from On Photography, which serves as both a water-shed and summary work. She begins by saying, "In spite of the claims of science and humanism that an objective non-image based understanding of reality is now possible, our culture has become more and more dependent on images, rather than less, and this can be attributed to the influence of photography"("The Image-World"247). Sontag argues that people are becoming more dependent on photographs as proof of a given experience, which in turn deprives them of the ability to truly experience what is real without a representational façade. In other words, she believes that photographs (and their artistic analogs) are supplanting our relationship with reality. As she insightfully points out in her essay "On Style":