⁰Susan Sontag sits in a position of one of the more influential tastemakers of the last century. A collection of essays ‘’Against Interpretation’’ plays host to some of her most well known work. The first entry, bearing the same title, is geared towards the goal of among other things abolishing the distinction between form and content, thereby liberating the sensuous nature of art from the grasp of stifling influences which seek to tame it by splitting it in two. For Sontag art is entirely inseparable from our sensory experience of it. ‘’Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.’’¹ Inspired by this end a stand is taken against interpretation. Spearing it as ‘’...the revenge of the intellect upon art’’.²
In the essay Sontag finds art on the run. A flight from the utilitarian demands of justification placed upon it by Plato’s theory of mimesis into an era of modern and intentional obscurity, parody, and pop apparantism.³ ‘’From now until the end of consciousness we are stuck with the task of defending art’’.⁴ Dancing across examples from multiple pieces⁵ she criticizes the formulaic approach which digs through and designates elements with drab and recognizable movements, the theories of Marx and Freud; everything a metaphor for class struggle or a cock. All of it reinforcing familiar truths at the expense of actively distancing the audience from what it is they are encountering. Reducing a work to analysable containers of content places the witness in a safety blanket, domesticating art and protecting from what we might otherwise feel. In place of this hermeneutics she desires to erect an erotics. ‘’We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.’’⁶
The artist's job then is to be a mixer of new sensations⁷, a summoner of phenomenology (the phenomenological?). Sensibilities of course extend beyond mere sensory input, there is a history to them which informs their manifestation, and thus, what is apprehendable through them.⁸ Art itself being part of forming, or informing, said sensibility which is, ofcourse, inspired by however many other pieces which it is perceived to be in orientation to.
The most interesting works of contemporary art are full of references to the history of the medium; so far as they comment on past art, they demand knowledge of at least the recent past. As Harold Rosenberg has pointed out, contemporary paintings are themselves acts of criticism as much as creation.⁹
A post Industrial Revolution trend identifies two cultures in opposition. As defined by Sontag: The fist a literary and artistic culture centered around cultivation, and the other a scientific culture dedicated to comprehension. A commonly commented on conflict which places art and artists, once lauded for their role as creators of unique objects that provide pleasure while conditioning conscience and sensibility, as boarding on uselessness in an automated society. A perception due in large part to the ease of mass reproduction of objects.¹⁰ Though Sontag sees the situation less as a conflict and more as the creation of a new culture, a new sensibility. One in which art has fallen away from its magical-religious origins, crossed through a period of perceived utility as depiction or commentary on secular reality and into a new era of modifying consciousness by creating and organising new sensibilities. Exemplified, for example, in that of speed. A sensation facilitated by means of the mass reproduction of art objects.¹¹ ‘’Such art is also notably apolitical and undidactic, or, rather infra-didactic.’’¹²
It does not mean the renunciation of standards… there are new standards … of beauty and style and taste. … defiantly pluralistic … dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and fun and nostalgia. … very high-speed and hectic. From the vantage point of this new sensibility, the beauty of a machine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a painting by Jasper Johns, of a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the personalities and music of the Beatles is [are] equally accessible.¹³
A dissolving of the distinction between high and low cultures feared by those invested in art as a defense for an ever receding humanism. A fear born through then propagated by a general ignorance in literary culture and of those inhabiting the scientific with no interest in art. Matthew Arnold illustrates this when he advances the idea that the highest purpose of culture is creation of a critique of that culture through the vehicle of literature.¹⁴ Sontag proceeds alternatively, offering us Marshall McLuhans definition of human history. Which can summarily be presented as the extension of human technological capacity which works radical change on their surrounding environment, ways of thinking, feeling, and valuing. Going on to say that while the ”More timid people prefer to accept the … previous environment's values as the continuing reality of their time…” … Only in terms of … the old ethical order does the problem of ‘two cultures’ appear.¹⁵ Remarking that “... music, films, dance, architecture, painting, and sculpture….all… draw, profusely, naturally, and without embarrassment, upon science and technology-’’¹⁶ while only literature has stayed behind in a refusal to adapt adequately to the technologic age.
So if this dissolution of boundaries between scientific and the literary-artistic, high and low cultures, art and non art, form and content¹⁷ had taken hold and people have come around to the idea that ‘’works of art, psychological forms, and social forms all reflect each other.’’¹⁸ On what grounds, in her 1996 afterword, is Sontag to find this cultural product botched?
To call for an “erotics of art’ did not mean to disparage the role of the critical intellect. To laud work condescended to then as “popular” did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its complexities¹⁹ Though this is exactly what she is demanding when she makes the call to trim back content in her correct appeal to its inseparability from form. The movement away from creating works that were purposefully intricate as both advice and her noted movement of arts retreat. Perhaps something will be revealed if we look at Sontag's opinion on an author of erotica.
“Bataille’s works… indicated the aesthetic possibilities of pornography as an art form: Story of the Eye being the most accomplished artistically of all pornographic prose I’ve read’’ -Susan Sontag²⁰
Bataille is an interesting case because in his philosophy, as well as his erotica, he combines elements of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche²¹. The Story Eye itself, as testified to by the psychoanalytic afterword of its author, is engorged with the complexities of the latent content which Sontag finger wags. None of which could be seen to distance the reader from their visceral connection to the protagonists’ colourful string of murders and rapes which joyously decorate its pages. In fact²² these elements serve as a piece of the works form, seducing the reader to sink further down into the dark sea of unacceptable and inhuman urges that comprise each of us. For Bataille ‘’Erotism … is the assenting to life up to death… a formula which gives the meaning of erotism better than any other.’’²³ A whole business devoted to the excesses of violence and violation directed at the annihilation of the self contained within its participants as they are in their daily lives.²⁴ A religious sensibility which ...always links desire closely with terror, intense pleasure, and anguish.²⁵
This religious sensibility, all hope of the mythic, is something Sontag has abandoned only to her detriment. When analyzing the movement of the two cultures she completely ignores the driving action of culture. Something Shulamith firestone captures exquisitely with her definition of “Culture is the attempt by man to realize the conceivable in the possible’’²⁶. Noting in her own two modes the religious, feminine, and unrelenting destructive nature of the artistic mode. Even identifying its affinity with madness and suicide.²⁷ By removal of this essential piece Sontag mires herself in a utilitarian system of evaluation and justification. One which she cannot even fathom any form of liberation from. A fate which she hand delivers to art in a bizarrely facile capitulation to a challenge Plato issued thousands of years prior. All on the heels of her opening sentence “The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual.’’²⁸
“The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed. The values underlying those judgments did not.”²⁹
Urging readers not to lose sight of the larger contexts in which she had penned, we are reminded The World in which these essays were written no longer exists. Instead of a utopian moment, we live in a time which is experienced as the end – more exactly, just past the end- of every ideal.³⁰ In a somewhat sarcastic call to ... that now mythic era known as the Sixties.’’³¹she summons her recollection of that time to the pages. An era where old hierarchies were toppled, new masterpieces were produced every month, and new art experiences such as happenings were conceived. The constructors of this new sensibility, art as an extension of life, were notably drawing on texts by Nietzche, Antonin Artaud, and Andre Breton.³² Artists were insolent again as they were after WWI until the rise of fascism.''³³ Both Breton and Artuad were involved in the movement of surrealism that existed between the two world wars. A movement of which Bataille was seen both to be a part and an outside agitator. Some placing him in a position of rivalry with Breton, who seemed to be at the fore. The two of them came together briefly to form the group Contre-Attaque in 1935. Of Course it managed to do little more than display the left's ineptitude at both opposing fascism and cooperating amongst themselves.³⁴
A discouraged Bataille found fault in Breton’s prudishness; a man who frowned at sexual depictions, both drinking and the smoking of opium, never allowing his delirium to get the better of his reason.³⁵ Bataille found fascism, with its appeal to the mythic, to be an overwhelmingly seductive force, shipping his self inset Tropman with its clad in swastika red embodyment Dirty in his fiction ‘’Blue of Noon’’.³⁶ Smelling of wet earth with breasts of lunar whiteness and the beauty of a ghost, she leaves him yearning in the pouring rain. They copulate in a cemetery where the earth falls away beneath them becoming countless graves in the sky. Try as he might to resist her, the death and violence she embodies, the awesome and terrifying military might – backed by a call to destiny as absolute devotion, all leave him helplessly possessed with desire. Upon departing from Dirty and exiting the train, Tropman encounters a mild mannered worker whom he finds wholly unattractive.³⁷ Why ought this be the case he wonders³⁸, the man also has an ass to grab and a mouth to kiss, but it's one one he’d rather enjoy hitting.
The commonly conceived consequences of the postmodern are often thought to be a direct result of the rise of fascism and modern atrocities. Any ideal leading to them as an inevitability.
The ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote - indeed, impose - the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons. … Something was operating to make these marginal views more acceptable, something of which if I had an inkling - and, had I understood better … would have made me more cautious. … [a] sea-change in … culture, a transvaluation of values… Let us use Nietzsche’s term: we had entered, really entered, the age of nihilism.³⁹
Basing large portions of his thought on Nietzche, Bataille finds that ... he happened to set forth principles for an aristocracy of “masters of the world”⁴⁰ Denouncing all limits and morality The will to power remains equivocal. In a sense it is the will to Evil, amounting to the will to expenditure or risk.⁴¹ Bataille makes an effort to distinguish risk from the attitude of speculation; which subordinates the present completely to the past; intending to be unchangeable. Where risk maintains an undefined goal in that it brings forth that which does not yet exist.⁴² To will the future is to recognize the known as to be surpassed.⁴³ Risk and the chance it entails are what set life ablaze, they allow us not just to live but to be alive. In Bataille’s eyes this manifests most clearly in the world of lovers. The place in the modern world which most clearly unleashes the image of destiny, the seductive and dangerous myth. A full existence is only one which arouses both hope and terror. The illusory character of the loved one accosts us from the horizon of the sensibilities, pitching us into a feverish disequilibrium which violently snuffs out the light of our reason that would otherwise prevent us from taking the risks involved in pursuit. Their intangible quality places in us an anguish which only the refreshment of their being can quelch. A madness that drives us through a series of chances and expenditures that can produce the random movement which is demanded by obscure passion. An act upon the fortuitous appearance of a series which can approach the impossibility of the luck embodied in their first encounter. The result of the dance cannot be determined by decisions or intentions held in advance. Neither one knowing the cards or hidden motives held by the other; an endless and nuanced flirtation of frauds, which ends only with either a miracle beyond any possibility, or ruin. Any commitment less than this is failed before it begins. ... the world of lovers is still more the realm of trickery than is the world of gambling.⁴⁴ Love, like myth, enters as a force of ascension demanding the submission of any inferior reality, even unto death.
...lovers are temporarily freed from the burden of isolation that every individual bears⁴⁵ – Shulamith Firestone
You that are lonely today, you who live apart, one day you will be a people. From those who have thus chosen themselves there will one day come a chosen people – and it is from this people that the superman will be born. – Nietzche⁴⁶
Deciding to make use of fictions, I dramatize being, I lacerate its solitude, and in this laceration I communicate.⁴⁷ – Bataille
Love, art, and the mythic each offer us seductive pulls, ecstatic drives, and delightful ruptures of self. They make us nervous, agitated, terrified and in so doing ask us, require us, to suspend reason, and walk down closer into the experience of life; conditioning us to want more.
“... purpose of art … to give pleasure-’’⁴⁸
There is another writer, a philosopher, penning books in the mythic era of the 60’s who draws from many the same waters as Bataille, including both Nietzche and a man who based his entire affair on the creativity of nothing, who has something to offer us on the order of why this kind of experience is so infectious.
What fearful power, awesome divinity is repetition! It is the pull of the void that drags us deeper and deeper down like the ever widening gullet of a whirlpool … For we know it well all along: it was none other than the deep and sinful fall into a world where repetition drags one down lower with each step… – Musil, Man Without Qualities⁴⁹
Deleuze offers us the concept of the Tropical Man⁵⁰, the one who frequents tropical zones, places of thought, rather than the temperate zones of the moral, methodical or moderate. Thinking depends on coordinates, where we are carrying our existence to, and the elements we frequent. No thought occurs which is not forced, and so, we do not think unless we are forced to go to places where forces that make thought something active and affirmative are made use of. Culture is both a record, a history, of the series of violence undergone by thought, and a process of the formation of thought through the action of selective forces which draws upon the entire unconscious of the thinker.⁵¹ The continual destruction and reformation of sensibility across time. The Tropical man goes toward danger in order to be and be strongly, because the pull toward annihilation is that which forces adaptation. The creation on the other side of destruction. All action is the result of reaction, but not all reaction seeks active destruction. No, not all reaction is strong enough to see its own undoing, its own overthrow – a production of a new sensibility.