Episode #176 - Transcript

So we can never know WHAT Simone Weil would’ve said about SO MANY things that came to pass after her death at the age of 34 years old. But lucky for us there were plenty of OTHER brilliant people out there that took INSPIRATION from Simone Weil’s work and SOME of them ended up having a PRETTY GIANT impact on the culture that surrounded them. And one of my PERSONAL favorites… is gonna be the woman we’re talking about today: the legendary essayist that went by the name of Susan Sontag.

Susan Sontag…if she was ANYTHING…was TRULY… a cultural critic, of the highest order. She wasn’t one of these FAKE critics. She wasn’t one of these balding dudes on the internet giving HOT TAKES about stuff trying to get clicks…she wasn’t a coward. In fact she spent MOST of her CAREER, standing up to some of the most POWERFUL people in the world never shying away from SAYING the things that REALLY didn’t make these people too happy. She was somebody that, ultimately…REFUSED to BOW to anyone.

And what she RESPECTED MOST, ABOUT someone like Simone Weil in particular was that she was that KIND of person, that WASN’T satisfied being some typical, VOICE OF REASON that sits around trying to be a MODERATING INFLUENCE on the world all the time.

Because THAT’S what SOME of the critics out there DO right? Some of these people do their work from a place…where ANY criticism that somebody comes up with that’s TOO abrasive or TOO far outside the norm…the VOICE OF REASON out there has to bring us all back down to earth right because that’s how you make progress in the world

Well not necessarily to Susan Sontag…SHE CERTAINLY didn’t think that way. In fact, she thought that if you EVER wanted to critique culture in a meaningful way…YOU HAVE, to be the kind of person that stands in OPPOSITION to the status quo…you have to offer up a DIFFERENT VOICE than what’s CURRENTLY being accepted as REASONABLE by the majority. And to her if there was EVER someone in this world who EMBODIED that sort of spirit…Simone Weil did that, every day…unapologetically. She gave her LIFE to do just that.

Sontag would later WRITE about Simone Weil…that she was the type of person who was impolite, repetitive, obsessive, the KIND of person who impresses by FORCE. She SAID all this as a COMPLIMENT to Simone Weil.

Because to Sontag that’s what it TAKES to be a good cultural critic. When you LIVE in what is MOST of the time a pretty polite, moderated society…Simone Weil is the kind of person that HAS to emerge if we EVER want to make things better. And Susan Sontag was going to MAKE SURE she was ALSO one of these people that STOOD UP to the way that things were, and REFUSED to apologize for doing so.

However, it SHOULD be said that throughout this process…just LIKE Simone Weil…sometimes when you LIVE a life COMMITTED to the truth ON this level…what comes along with that… is inevitably…a certain degree of suffering in order for you to get there, and a certain amount of your work being misinterpreted in ways that you never intended.

By the end of the episode here today we’ll understand one of the main entry points into her work…but more IMPORTANTLY we’ll understand WHY Susan Sontag started to SERIOUSLY DOUBT… truths that she was being FED by people who ARRIVED at those truths, after having sacrificed NOTHING in order to get to them…in other words… we’ll understand why SHE thought that in order to ACTUALLY arrive at the truth…that “each of our TRUTHS… must have, a martyr.”

So to get us started moving in that direction…KNOWING that Susan Sontag thinks ANY good cultural criticism is going to start from a place of opposition to the way that things are…let’s start with an interesting PROBLEM she saw in the way that Americans talk about their experience of the world.

Cause how does that typically go? We have… an EXPERIENCE of something. We FEEL a certain way about it. And let’s say that FEELING were having this time is particularly intense. What do we do to MAKE SENSE of this intense feeling that’s overwhelming us?

Well we categorize and interpret the experience using one of ANY NUMBER of different psychological TERMS that have been TAUGHT to us by EXPERTS over the years.

People will say things like oh, I’m feeling ANXIOUS right now. I’m having this INTENSE feeling of anxiety right now about my significant other. What is that, well let me THINK about it…that must be because subconsciously…I have a repressed fear of abandonment from my childhood that’s now manifesting as this ANXIETY that I have in this moment. They’ll USE all the psychological LANGUAGE to describe it.

They’ll say I’m really SAD right now, but maybe this SADNESS is REALLY, just a different type of OVERWHELM I’m feeling at the moment because things have been really rough at work lately and I don’t really know where I’m GOING in my life. They’ll DIG into their PAST to EXPLAIN the present.

They’ll be sitting in traffic getting mad at the car in front of them… and they’ll say no no no…my anger here is NOT directed at this person in FRONT of me…I’m REALLY angry… because my goldfish died when I was seven…and this car in front of me REMINDS me of his FISH bowl and this is part of some HIGHER LEVEL fixation on SHELLFISH that I’ve developed over the years.

There’s NO LIMIT to the amount of ANALYSIS and CATEGORIZATION that we do to the experiences that we have of reality, THROUGH THE FILTER of these psychological terms. And while there’s nothing INTRINSICALLY wrong with ANY of this across the board…Susan Sontag would really want us to take a closer look at how we’re TREATING our experiences when we ENGAGE in this sort of analysis.

Because this is a pretty MODERN invention…this LEVEL, of ANALYSIS of our experience. In fact Modernity itself is often CHARACTERIZED by treating things in the world this way. It’s all about DOMINATION through ANALYSIS she would say. We come up with THEORIES about how things all fit together…we PROJECT these theories out onto the world in an attempt to understand it…and then WHEN one of these THEORIES helps us make sense of something…we draw conclusions and then stand alongside them with a feeling of SUPERIORITY over the thing we USED to not understand.

Is this NOT what a Psychoanalyst is doing when they interact with a patient, she would ask?

See in HER time it was FREUDIAN analysis that was dominating people’s thinking. Somebody would come into a psychoanalysts office and they’d SAY that they’re having a hard time…The analyst would LISTEN to the them about the experiences they’re having…and then they’d GIVE the patient some language and concepts that allow them to categorize their experience in a way that demystifies it a bit to them.

And on one level…this is GREAT. We want to DEMYSTIFY these some of these INTENSE experiences that we’re having…that’s one of the reasons you’d want to go to a psychoanalyst in the FIRST place. But on ANOTHER level to Susan Sontag WHAT the psychoanalyst is DOING there when they GIVE the patient the LANGUAGE they use to make SENSE of their reality…another way to PUT that would be to say, that the psychoanalyst is giving them a set of normative, theoretical terms…that allow them to take their own unique, INDIVIDUAL experience…and FRAME it in a way that corresponds with some STANDARD of human experience. As though there’s such a thing as a STANDARD EXPERIENCE for ALL people to have. As though there’s a UNIVERSAL set of TERMS to be able to DESCRIBE people’s experiences.

You know, you have an intense experience as a person…and, every human being that ever lived… BEFORE Sigmund Freud's mom and dad met at a Baskin Robbins a hundred and fifty years ago…ALL THOSE people just had to FEEL their individual experiences in the moment…but now that we’re in MODERNITY…the NORMAL thing to do is to ANALYZE your experiences and filter them through a theoretical model. And again, WHY DO WE DO THIS? Well to DEMYSTIFY them. To UNDERSTAND THEM FULLY we say. Which is ALSO to say to Susan Sontag to DOMINATE our experience and feel SUPERIOR to it. The end RESULT being that by analyzing our experience we create some distance between ourselves…and IT.

We’re always LOOKING OUT at our EXPERIENCE of the world as though it’s something OUTSIDE of ourselves.

There’s this concept of the latent and the manifest in Freudian psychology but the SAME type of thinking ABSOLUTELY persists to this day in OTHER theoretical models. We’ve all HEARD of this idea before the idea is that there’s the MANIFEST part of your psychology…that’s your immediate BEHAVIOR that you’re ACTING OUT in the world…but what YOU need… is a PROFESSIONAL psychoanalyst to look at your BEHAVIOR, and get to the bottom of something LATENT within you that explains the REAL reason why you’re acting the way you’re acting.

The MODERN assumption is that the REAL meaning of your experience is HIDDEN from you…and that the ANALYST is the ONLY one who can tell you who you truly are and why you’re ACTING that way. And don’t worry…just keep coming back for the next 12 years paying $100 a week… and after a few years of DIGGING maybe we’ll get around to explaining the REAL reason why you’re feeling the way you are. She says:

“People treat their experience as alienated from themselves. Experience, thus depreciated in value, is viewed as observing the laws of fashion— such as built in obsolescence; the self is regarded as a commodity, its decisions as sociological predictable behavior.”

What she’s getting at is: WHEN you’re constantly ANALYZING your experience…you’re constantly ALIENATING yourself from it. And people often LIVE THEIR LIVES…IN this place of alienation, CONSTANTLY KEEPING the experience at arms LENGTH and never really FEELING it with any sort of IMMEDIACY.

Do this LONG enough…eventually you start TALKING about yourself…almost like its in the THIRD PERSON…you FEEL a certain way and you’re like oh well OF COURSE I would FEEL anxious in the MILK Department of the grocery store…after all I DID grow up on a farm…and my grandfather WAS a little DISTANT in my formative years.

In other words, you start to DESCRIBE your experience as though its sociologically predictable, rather than…you know, just YOU. And when you’re IN THIS PLACE…your ENTIRE SURFACE level experience and behavior… becomes DEPRECIATED in VALUE she says…it becomes a BUILT IN OBSOLESCENCE. And what she MEANS by that… is that you start to see YOUR EXPERIENCE of the WORLD…as just some lower level, chaotic thing that’s in the WAY...and IT needs to be SIFTED through and ANALYZED for you to be able to get to the bottom of the REAL meaning behind your experience.

Psychoanalysis was supposed to LEAD people, in theory, to greater and greater levels of self actualization. But in REALITY she says it’s moving us further AWAY from our experiences. Now we just want a sense of SUPERIORITY over them. And she says people start TALKING this way they’ll talk about their LIFESTYLE… as opposed to their LIFE, as though there’s any DIFFERENCE at all between those two terms.

And it would be BAD ENOUGH to Susan Sontag if we were ONLY, creating distance between ourselves and our experiences. But the fact is: when we focus TOO MUCH on ANALYZING everything in relation to some THEORY…when your experience of the world is this thing that’s ALWAYS at arms length from you…your experience becomes something that’s MUCH EASIER for you to DISMISS. It becomes easier for OTHER people to dismiss as well.

It’s much easier for you to HAVE one of these visceral experiences, and then to INSTANTLY go into ANALYSIS and DEFUSAL mode. Like your experience is a bomb and you got these tools to go in and cut the blue wire so it’s just something inert, sitting on the table somewhere. Then the DREAM is that I have hereby analyzed and understood that experience…that experience is NO LONGER a problem, sir. Don’t worry about it. But should we be DISMISSING our experiences?

And by the way this MODERATION of your experiences by describing them through normative, standardizing language…it’s NOT LIKE that’s ONLY HAPPENING when it comes to your BAD experiences. You can spend your ENTIRE LIFE… analyzing away transcendent, POSITIVE, LIFE ALTERING MOMENTS, DEEP FEELINGS of CLOSENESS with other people, BUT I just need to bring myself back down to EARTH here…because OF COURSE I’d be feeling this way given all the events in my PAST that explain why I’m feeling so strongly.

I mean imagine if somebody DID that with every experience they had with other people. Where NO interaction with another person is EVER the way that it seems on the surface. EVERYBODY has an angle, EVERYBODY has an ulterior motive. Even your own MOTHER…is only PRETENDING to love you so that she can steal the COOKIES out of your lunchbox when you’re not looking.

What if we’re missing out on some of the most important experiences of our lives… because we’re so OBSESSED with filtering everything through these terms PRESCRIBED to you by a so called expert in HUMAN EXPERIENCE?

Susan Sontag says there’s of course MANY OTHER huge problems with putting this much emphasis on theoretical analysis. One OBVIOUS one you probably all see coming here… is: WHO DECIDES…WHAT the normative theory is that we should be FILTERING everyone’s experiences through?

This WHOLE strategy we’re using Sontag writes puts a WHOLE LOT OF POWER in the hands of the psychoanalysts. A SCARY amount of power. I mean think about it…you go into a therapists office, you check in at the front desk, they bring you into their office they got their little PLANT on the table to LIVEN UP THE ROOM a bit…and you essentially GO to this person DESPERATE. Oh please, wise king of the therapy realm…bestow upon me your WISDOM for why I’m F ELING all these things that I’m FEELING. Whole thing starts OUT with a pretty big disparity of POWER.

And LEAVING ASIDE the possibility that a therapist would EVER USE that power to take advantage of somebody in a desperate situation, cause NOBODY ever does that right…but EVEN the most well intentioned, good-hearted therapist can REALLY mess a person UP from this position of power…simply by being BAD at their job.

I mean, you ever had a BAD therapist before? Those people can set you back 20 years of your life. I had a therapist one time I was having a problem sleeping…and they told me that the NAVAJO would say that the reason I can’t sleep is because my soul is linked with the wrong SPIRIT animal. I was like oh wow that’s super interesting about the Navajo…uh, what would your college education have to say about it though? Like can your professor from COLLEGE be my spirit animal now I’m looking for some guidance. It’s shocking how much trust we sometimes put into someone with a four year degree, just TOTALLY vulnerable. Can you help me?

And just to be clear Susan Sontag is not AGAINST psychoanalysis…she thought parts of it were great…but what SHE’S concerned about is the ability for someone to STEER so much in that DIRECTION when it comes to their experience that they don’t even know that it’s POSSIBLE to have an INITIAL EXPERIENCE of something and just BE with it without having to ANALYZE it.

Another SUPER INTERESTING problem with this whole strategy Sontag would say that EXTENDS into more of a CULTURAL criticism of Americans…is that, if the GOAL of psychoanalysis for people is to ultimately achieve a certain level of PEACE about their past because now they RATIONALLY understand the ORIGINS of their behavior…for a citizen of the United States in particular…is this just giving Americans a set of tools to not be affected by the things in their COUNTRY’S past? Are we SETTING up people with the TOOLs to be able to say: Look I KNOW my history guys…I know, Iknow SLAVERY, women’s RIGHTS, treatment of minorities, war, destruction, the way we treat workers…but you know what? I’ve been working through it lately and I really do think I’m ready. I think I’m past ALL THAT. It’s time to forget about it and move FORWARD with my life. It’s like NO she would say…sometimes there’s certain uncomfortable feelings that we NEED to feel for the sake of IMPROVING ourselves AND our Societies.

Now QUICK RECAP so far for the sake of organization here. Susan Sontag is saying that it’s not that theoretical analysis of our experience is a BAD THING across the board…but that IF we over emphasize too much in this direction there are a FEW bad things that we're gonna have to watch out for. One… it creates a NORMATIVE model for what a human experience is that everything has to conform to…Two, It puts a SCARY level of power in the hands of the EXPERTS that get to PRESCRIBE this normative terminology. And three, it alienates people from their experience, which then makes it easier to DISMISS experience, and along WITH that it allows people to dismiss experiences that maybe they have a lot of good reasons that they SHOULD be paying attention to them.

Now what Sontag is going to do from here is in MY opinion a stroke of genius. She’s going to take this modern OVER EMPHASIS on theory in the realm of psychoanalysis and she’s going to APPLY the critique to the world of aesthetics. Just as the overemphasis on analysis prevents us from seeing our experience in its true form…so TOO an over emphasis on interpretation and art THEORY, is going to prevent us from experiencing a work of ART in its true form.

There’s this MODERN idea she says when you look at a work of art. A painting, a movie, a song, take your pick whatever kind of art you like…but when you’re standing around with your friends and somebody says what do you think this work of art MEANS? The MOST common RESPONSE you’re gonna get from people are them saying well, let’s really THINK about what the meaning is. Let’s REALLY try to analyze this painting and let’s try to GET to the bottom of what it TRULY MEANS underneath.

In other words… there’s a SURFACE level experience of the art…the paint on the canvas for example…and there’s this IDEA when someone’s critiquing art that the paint on the canvas is REALLY just IN THE WAY of the TRUE meaning that lies underneath.

If we’re talking about a NOVEL, the narrative and the characters are REALLY just things that need to be interpreted and sifted through by a CRITIC… so that we can USE their expertise to get to the bottom of the more IMPORTANT, more TRUE meaning of the artwork that lies underneath the surface somewhere. Now does this remind you AT ALL of the relationship between the patient and the psychoanalyst?

Notice all the parallels here. The professional art critic is ALWAYS seeking SUPERIORITY, OVER the work of art that they’re studying. They ALWAYS seem to be in the business of taking an INDIVIDUAL work of art…and using it to make statements about ALL works of art in general. The art critic operates on the assumption that an individual movie or song, can be understood in terms of how it fits into the greater picture of art theory.

So for example… a song by NWA from the late 1980’s talking about an anger being felt because of daily intense experiences of police brutality…that sentiment can SO EASILY become interpreted by a critic, the meaning of the song supposedly analyzed and understood, and then once that neat little bow is tied around the meaning of the song we can dismiss the song of any FURTHER meaning.

Oh, well of COURSE that song is the way that it IS. After all it DID come from a hip hop group from southern california in 1988! That IS an area and time period KNOWN for over reactions by the police. That IS the inception point of this new form of expression and it IS that frustrated prose that marks a contrast to the overly produced HAIR metal bands of the time that are playing with orchestras on stage. As a critic I’m here to say…this song is sociologically predictable artwork. It FITS within the genre and time period QUITE well actually.

But think of how that OVER EMPHASIS on INTERPRETING the work of art creates distance between the person critiquing it, and what may OTHERWISE have BEEN a visceral, powerful experience with the artwork in its more immediate form. The critic is to the artwork as the psychoanalyst is to the patient. And JUST LIKE it’s possible for us to experience our reality without always relating it to a set of normative psychological terms…Susan Sontag thinks it’s possible to experience works of ART in the same sort of way.

And if you think about it she says this REALLY isn’t that CONTROVERSIAL of a concept. I mean art existed THOUSANDS of years before some old dudes in ancient Greece started talking about art theory. The idea that the MEANING of a work of art lies SOLELY in its interpretation…good luck DEFENDING that point. Sontag talks about the paintings discovered on the cave walls in France in 1940…and how the people that PAINTED these caves were NO DOUBT ENGAGING in something that in MODERN times we would call ART.

But was there anyone standing around in the cave with a corncob pipe a carl sagan turtleneck CRITIQUING…what the painting of the buffalo on the wall REALLY means DEEP DOWN?

No, she says the MEANING of the artwork wasn’t to be INTERPRETED…she says it PROBABLY was more in line with some form of contemplative practice, a form of expression not unlike the purpose meditation serves to some people in TODAY’S world. POINT is…there’s a different way of experiencing works of art that Sontag is going to say we need to reconnect with.

And REAL quick before we talk about how to DO that…there’s a totally fair question som eone might HAVE to Susan Sontag at this point. The thinking is… I know we haven’t ALWAYS been interpreting works of art at the level that we do in modernity, and I SEE how it might create some distance between the observer and the work of art…but WHY is DOING it this way necessarily a BAD thing? What PROBLEMS are we going to potentially run INTO if we STEER to far in this direction?

Well the problems with doing this with ARTWORK are going to MIRROR the problems we saw when talking about psychology. The same way that immediately ANALYZING your experiences creates a DISTANCE between you and them that prevents you from being able to BE in those moments FULLY…by always being in the ROBOT mode of INTERPRETING a work of ART instead of viscerally FEELING it in the moment…you create a similar kind of distance between you and the art that prevents you from being able to be able to feel truly AFFECTED by it.

To have one of those moments… that you’ve NO DOUBT felt BEFORE when your GUARD was down and you weren’t INTERPRETING things all the time. A moment where a song or a movie HITS you…and it CHANGES something about you.

That’s what great art is SUPPOSED to be doing. To Susan Sontag ART should make people UNCOMFORTABLE, it should be TROUBLING to people at times…art should be a form of NOURISHMENT, but in order for it to ever be able to accomplish any of these THINGS…it has to be able to affect you enough to CHANGE something about you…yet here we are she says in modernity… so caught up in this process of INTERPRETING the art all the time…we’re so caught up that we don’t allow ourselves to HAVE these transcendent moments, as often.

Now think of how that may limit your own PERSONAL growth for sure…but then as Susan Sontag would say: think of how that potentially limits the growth we want within our SOCIETIES.

Because to continue the comparison between the art critic and the psychoanalyst…

If a psychoanalyst is in the business of giving a person a set of NORMATIVE terms to describe their experience with…and PART of that process is that EVERY experience eventually has to correspond with this way of CATEGORIZING what’s going on in your mind…then an ART CRITIC to Susan Sontag…SIMILARLY… IMPOSES a THEORY of ART onto ALL works of art that are out there. And then similarly every individual movie or song or painting or book…no matter HOW extreme or revolutionary they may otherwise BE…they ALL EVENTUALLY have to correspond to this way of categorizing ART within a larger theoretical framework. Works of art are always INTERPRETED…FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of the status quo and how they RELATE to that status quo. Now… what could be wrong with THAT you may ask?

Well imagine an ART critic…and this art critic is NOT an EVIL person…they’re totally well intentioned, good-hearted like our therapist from earlier in the episode…but when DOING their JOB of critiquing ART…where they’re always FINDING these MEANINGS that are HIDDEN somewhere in the art…imagine for example…if they weren’t DISCOVERING meanings…they were CREATING meanings. And then IMAGINE if there were certain POLITICAL realities that art critic wanted to maintain or bring about, even if its just a subconscious bias to SEE certain political messages that MATTER to them.

Imagine how easy it would be when this much POWER is placed in the hands of the ART CRITIC… where they’re essentially a modern day PRIEST thats DELIVERING to people the TRUE MEANING of the art…imagine how easy it is for art to become something that just PERPETUATES the way things are.

Or more ACCURATELY…PERPETUATES the way that a particular ART CRITIC wants to see the world.

Just as we REAFFIRM the SELF through our obsession with analysis of our individual experience…we REAFFIRM the status quo through our obsession with the interpretation of the hidden MEANINGS within art. Susan Sontag says:

“to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world- in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings”.”

She says MEANINGS there in quotation marks. She says a shadow world of meanings, because we’re not actually dealing with the true MEANING of art.

You can see the PARALLELS here to the work of Simone Weil and her concept of attention. The point for Simone Weil was not that you should NEVER HAVE personal biases, privileges, preferences…just as the point to Susan Sontag was NOT that we should never INTERPRET artwork or analyze our experience. The point was that in modernity in particular where we interpret EVERYTHING…we run the risk of LOSING this skill of detachment… we run the risk of never EXPERIENCING things on their own terms with a greater level of immediacy. For Simone Weil this was our experience of people or the universe. For Susan Sontag this was our experience of great works of art.

So, the question becomes: what does Susan Sontag think is a DIFFERENT way of experiencing a work of art that doesn’t UNDERMINE the art the instant that we start looking at it. What we NEED she thinks is something she calls an Erotics of Art.

Now the first thing Sontag would probably want to SAY here is look, I get it. There is NO WAY we CLOSE pandora’s box here…there is obviously no way we’re going to go back to a time PRE-THEORY, BEFORE we were constantly able to understand everything through a theory. But what she WOULD say is possible is for us to be self-aware of this tendency…and then to THROW OUT the theories that are just obscuring a more FULL experience of art for people.

WHAT she’s going to say is that to BE a good critic of art…we need to move AWAY from asking so many Epistemological questions about a work of art…and we need to START asking more ONTOLOGICAL questions about the work of art.

So INSTEAD of asking a question like what is this work of art about? We would ask questions more like: HOW is this work of art what it is? How was this song composed? What techniques and styles are used to MAKE this song whatever it is? In other words INSTEAD of focusing solely on the CONTENT of whatever the work of art is…Sontag thinks we should INSTEAD try to focus on the FORM of the artwork.

The BEST way to clarify what she’s talking about is just to give a hard example:

Imagine…. Vincent Van Gogh’s starry night painting. See that’s what we love to do here at philosophize this co. We cover ALL the demographics. Had a little NWA earlier and now here we are at Van Gogh. It all comes full circle I guess.

Anyway, so you look at the starry night and if you’re caught up in this obsession of looking at the CONTENT of the art…you’ll see a painting, of a night sky. You’ll talk about how the stars are symbols of dreaming, the cypress tree is a symbol of death. You’ll talk about how the yellow he used was a choice because of a condition he had with his eyes. You more or less equate an EXPERIENCE of the artwork with getting to the bottom of the hidden MEANING.

But Sontag would say if you pay attention more to the FORM of the artwork…you’ll see the contrasts he uses between dark and light colors to give the painting its feel. You’ll see the brush strokes and TECHNIQUES he used to SPREAD the paint across the canvas. You may see the type of PAINT he used ON the canvas. You may see the SIZING of the canvas, the SHAPES that are prevalent, POINT is: None of these things have ANYTHING to DO with the specific CONTENT of the painting and what its SAYING…and yet ALL of these are important parts, of a DIFFERENT TYPE of EXPERIENCE that’s possible to HAVE of a work of art. It’s a more IMMEDIATE, surface LEVEL experience of the art she says. It’s a more IMMERSIVE experience.

And you can do this with ANYTHING. Any movie. Any song…or any book. And by the way WHEN you do this ANOTHER thing she says it is interesting to focus on is the STYLE that the work of art was produced in. So FORM and STYLE… become the NEW main point of focus when experiencing art from this different PERSPECTIVE. And, it’s important ask: what exactly does she mean when she says the STYLE of a piece of art? Personally, one of the most INTERESTING parts of her work. She has a whole essay called On Style.

She says consider for a second how much just the STYLE of the art… changes the experience of the person receiving it. For example…art created in the STYLE, of Nazi propaganda…that’s ALWAYS gonna be art that REGARDLESS of the CONTENT is going to PERPETUATE the status quo. Whereas in CONTRAST to that…you know, a live performance at something like a DRAG show…again…REGARDLESS of the content of the SHOW…the very STYLE of the performance ALONE almost INHERENTLY challenges cultural norms and gets people thinking about things differently. I mean it could be somebody dressed in drag SINGING about Nazi propaganda and it would more or less perform the same function just because of the STYLE of the artwork.

Point is again: ALL of these are important parts of a TOTALLY different way of experiencing a work of art…and they have absolutely NOTHING to do with the specific CONTENT of the art. Sontag thought that content and form had become a binary opposition within the world of art criticism…and that just like EVERY OTHER binary opposition culture arrives at…people always tend to favor ONE side of the polarity over the other. And IN our MODERN times to Sontag…critics have OVER INDEXED on content at the expense of form and style. What she’s CALLING for is for a new type of CRITIC to EMERGE…and this new type of critic is going to have a totally different set of GOALS than the way modern critics typically operate.

She says: “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.”

In other words…NOT too different from the way Simone Weil would call for us to develop an ENTIRELY new way of ORIENTING ourselves to reality and to other people that is more open and allows for a richer, less filtered experience…Sontag is going to say that this more IMMEDIATE experience of art, will MAKE people more open to the ART the way that it is… EMBRACING the COMPLEXITY of the art, the possibility for MULTIPLE meanings, embracing the CONFUSION they may feel when listening to it, the INTENSITY of FULLY CONTENDING with the art, they’ll DO ALL this…instead of PROJECTING themselves and theory ONTO the art, in a desperate attempt to have a totalizing understanding of it.

Focusing on form and style INSTEAD of content allows us to do a FEW different things to Susan Sontag. For one, it allows us to SEE the art CLOSER to how the ARTIST sees the art. And two, it takes the EGO of the critic…and throws it out the window.

As SHE says it gets rid of the ARROGANCE of interpretation. There’s an entire RANGE of aesthetic experiences possible that DON’T REQUIRE some SUPPOSED EXPERT to DELIVER the all the MEANINGS of everything in the world to us. This is why Susan Sontag if she was just going to recommend the types of art that people can GRAVITATE towards that will help DEVELOP this new kind of sensibility… the same way Simone Weil recommends certain experiences to cultivate the skill of attention…Sontag thinks the BEST kind of art sometimes are things that are incomplete. Art that is open ended. Art that can ONLY be properly RECEIVED by being there EXPERIENCING it.

Because think about where she’s COMING from IF you’re an arrogant art critic…and your WHOLE LIFE is to look at stuff and then to TIE A BOW on top of it as a COMPLETED WORK, and then from there to CATEGORIZE it in the grand scheme of art history…you CAN’T really DO that to works of art that are open ended and ONGOING. The FINAL JUDGMENT of the work… isn’t even PART of the aesthetic experience that’s POSSIBLE.

And hopefully to my friends out there who are listening to this philosophical line of thinking, I’m hoping this isn’t too OBVIOUS. But…what Susan Sontag would say at this point…is that in the same way that art doesn’t always need to be a COMPLETED WORK, under MUSEUM GLASS, just waiting to be analyzed and interpreted in its FINAL FORM. YOU…in your EXPERIENCES OF THE WORLD…don’t need to be a COMPLETED WORK, under museum glass. Waiting to be analyzed, waiting to be PRESCRIBED by some EXPERT the PROPER WAY to CATEGORIZE EVERY EXPERIENCE THAT YOU HAVE.

Again, if you’re going through a really rough time NO DOUBT that can be helpful…but if JUST that your DEFAULT is this MODERN strategy to ANALYZE your EXPERIENCES into the GROUND…instead of always trying to DOMINATE your experiences and stand at a distance from them feeling SUPERIOR to them…isn’t it ALSO, a very HUMAN place to be in…to feel SHOCKED by our experience? To have these moments of intense experiences with art OR the events of our lives…and to have them be something that MOLDS us into the person we’re becoming? Maybe sometimes it TAKES FEELING those intense moments to GET us closer to the truth. Maybe sometimes that’s the ONLY way to get closer to the truth.

This is the basis of what made her start to think that every truth needs to have a martyr associated with it. Because in a world where critics are always trying to moderate and understand and LINK everything to some normative THEORY…CRITICS are not people INDULGING in the margins of society. These are people that take the margins of society, and spend their career trying to SILENCE the margins for fear that they might call into question the normative, reasonable middle… of the way things are for MOST people.

These are people…that generally speaking that have never had to sacrifice ANYTHING to be able to get to what they call the truth. But to Susan Sontag…if we’re TRULY committed to PROGRESS as a society…then the voices we need to hear the MOST, are the ones that have been marginalized. She says Simone Weil…to BE one of these VOICES…if you think about it…simply… marginalized HERSELF to try to access these perspectives. She’d say: In a world DOMINATED by people that CLAIM to bring a VOICE OF REASON to public discourse…what WE need, are the voices that AT FIRST might seem, a little UNREASONABLE. Because there’s nothing more BORING to Susan Sontag…nothing more COMMITTED to keeping things EXACTLY how they are…than the type of NON critical critics that hide behind what she calls the impersonal tones of sanity. And to tie this back to her thoughts on art…i’ll leave you with one of my FAVORITE lines from her. She says:

“I never trust novels which fully satisfy my passion to understand.”

Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.