Against Interpretation

Sontag’s essay finds her arguing for a reevaluation of a content-based approach to art and criticism and putting forth a potential method of replacing hermeneutical interpretation with another form of engagement with art. She argues her points through a rhetorical method of appealing to her audience with a use of logos and contrast.

She writes about the Experience of Art and its Theorization in order to use it as a foundation for her own critical perspective on the act of interpretation. By citing the Greek philosophers mentioned earlier, Sontag illustrates the richness of interpretation’s textual and philosophical history. However, she also points out that this theorization of art is to blame for the modern predicament people face: the limits imposed on viewers as they experience art. She uses a rhetorical appeal to logic, or logos, to establish the validity of her analytical commentary on past philosophers and interpreters, allowing her to pursue her goal of supplanting interpretation with an entirely new model. Sontag also employs an explicit sense of contrast throughout the essay for the same purpose. By contrasting experience and theory, Plato and Aristotle (95), form and content, etc., Sontag marks the acute differences between the entities in each pairing. In doing so, she also appeals to her audience by making a distinct choice about which element is to be preferred over the other. In this case, the experience of art is considered more important than the theory of art.

Sontag writes about the Dangers of Interpretation, listing numerous reasons why we should refrain from interpreting works of art and literature. She also praises modern forms of art that generally have a predisposition toward evading the possibility of interpretation on their own (101). This contrast pointedly gestures toward the imperative nature of avoiding hermeneutics altogether because it juxtaposes warnings against interpretation with a positive acknowledgment of the successful evasion of interpretation. Similarly, Sontag employs a logical outlook on this topic, citing various critics and readings of well-known works of art and literature in order to point out the fallacies that were hidden in their allegorical interpretations. Her approach is logical because it employs a critical lens informed by scholarly interventions that Sontag herself engages with as well, contributing her own point of view to the general discourse on interpretation as an approach to art and literature. Therefore, through both a sense of logic and the tool of contrast, Sontag endeavors to present The Dangers of Interpretation and caution critics and viewers from falling prey to a natural conformity to it.

She writes about Form and Content in Artistic Criticism in a similar fashion to the aforementioned thematic frameworks, mirroring her earlier methods with the same sense of logic and tool of contrast. Through this parallel construction, Sontag’s argument moves forward in a predictable fashion: She praises form and condemns content in artistic criticism because she believes that the former can make a meaningful contribution to our ability to experience art while the latter is more destructive than helpful. She cares about how a piece of art communicates its contents, and feels that there is a lack of language to analyze form in and of itself due to its separation from and devaluation in comparison to content and interpretation. One of Sontag’s core concepts in this essay states that when one engages in the act of “reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art,” making it “manageable” and “comfortable” (99). In contrast, form does not perform this function. Instead, it lets art be, and focusing on form allows us to experience art as it truly is in reality rather than imposing a self-driven meaning upon it.

Sontag’s logical appeal comes into play as she underlines the need for form to supersede content in artistic criticism. This involves logic because it addresses a well-detailed concern that is based on a thorough consideration of the consequences of content-based interpretation. In this fashion, Sontag aims to discuss Form and Content in Artistic Criticism in terms of what we may learn from the first but be disadvantaged by the second. This additionally parallels the other themes by demonstrating the author’s distinct favor toward the first and criticism of the second.

In addition to her general discussion of these thematic frameworks, Sontag conveys her argument through her careful citations of philosophers, writers, and scholarly critics. Her pursuit of the problem leads her to Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, who serve as immensely influential individuals in the development of artistic and literary criticism. Indeed, Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis are profoundly prominent in contemporary literary criticism, for instance. She discusses the ideas of manifest and latent content proposed by Freud, as well as Marxist ideological views of societal crisis (98). In this portion of the essay, Sontag critically echoes the meaning of the word “content” with the common Freudian use of it. She also notes that, according to these two individuals, one’s sense of understanding is predicated on one’s ability to interpret. However, Sontag observes a problem with this argument: Interpretation is merely a repeated articulation of a phenomenon, in a similar vein as the Greek mimetic theory of art, as the viewer only seeks something else to stand in art’s place. It’s a form of imitation. Sontag very clearly differentiates the concept of a work’s meaning from the work itself throughout the essay.

Lastly, Sontag ends her essay by urging for an “erotics of art” to replace its pre-existing hermeneutics (104). When she refers to “erotics,” she emphasizes the differences between her definition of it with her definition of hermeneutical interpretation. Because “erotics” would semantically involve desire, pleasure, and satisfaction in some form or another, it serves as an antithetical term to hermeneutics, which Sontag decries as being inherently unhelpful and even hurtful. Instead, an “erotics of art” would seek to uphold works of art and make them more real for us instead of reducing them through content-based interpretation. Sontag stresses that it is necessary for such an erotics to exist because it would perhaps allow viewers to experience art the way it was originally experienced prior to the advent of interpretation, which would have been similar to the “instrument of ritual” mentioned at the beginning (95). Experiencing art in such a physical way is of paramount concern to Sontag’s conceptual framework, as evidenced by her persistent resistance to interpretation as a critical approach to works of art and literature.