Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” sets out to propose an ertotics of art in contrast to a hermeneutics of art. Sontag’s essay is divided into ten sections. In the final section, she proposes, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
Sontag begins with, “The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers” who… “proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.” Art was the attempt to imitate the real, such that, critique of mimesis, is that of properly or improperly, representing the real. So she says, “at this point… the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.” The justification, namely, of proper representation or not.
Sontag claims that justification or defense of art leads to something we call “form,” which “is separated off from something we have learned to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.” The “form” is determined by critique of mimesis itself, i.e. the symbolic, while “content” is the real or material.
She states though “modern times” have moved away from “the theory of art as representation of an outer reality” toward “the theory of art as subjective expression,” in practice the “mimetic theory persists.” In the former, “the work of art” is “model of a picture (art as a picture of reality).” In the latter, a “model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist).” The pragmatic signification is the same, namely, “content still comes first,” e.g. as picture of or as statement of the real or imaginary. The picturing or stating is still the symbolic or mimetic act.
Sontag’s use of “interpretation” is not that of Nietzsche’s. Her use of “interpretation” is direct toward art, which means “plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work.” Moreover, the “task of interpretation is virtually one of translation.” For example, “The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really— or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?” She takes issue with interpretation, which neglects the historicity, the concrete. Now this is not a laps back into the “content” of mimesis or expressionism. But against abstraction, separation of “form” and “content.”
For her, a hermeneutics of art amounts to impoverishing and depleting “the world,” such as to, “set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.” There is move from “interpretation” to “experience.” However, experience itself is not that of mimesis or expression. Therefore, “what we have” is emphasis of the erotic.
So what or how does this “erotics of art” work? Hermeneutics of art is, for Sontag, “based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content.” The result is that interpretation “violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.” Erotics then is the opposite.
Erotics is the need for “a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms. The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.” Sontag makes a Wittgensteinian move from “prescriptive philosophizing” to “description,” from “logical form” to “form of life.” Describe language-games (so to art)!
Erotics cuts “back content so that we can see the thing at all.” Experience is to see the thing itself. Thus the goal of “commentary on art” is to make “our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us.” This is not the over-emphasis of the symbolic, but that of an imaginary real. “The function of criticism,” Sontag concludes, “should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” Once more Sontag makes a Wittgensteinian move from “saying” to “showing.” Yet, it is not that art is ineffable, but alive.
An erotics of art is the attempt to describe art in “life.”
fragments of philosophy 