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From the 1966 volume, a collection of essays, entitled the same. I'm planning to read a couple of the others but I wanted to start with my impressions of this leading essay.
Key quotes
"Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism."
"What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation."
"In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone."
"What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art."
"What is needed is a vocabulary--a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary--for forms."
"Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all."
"The function of criticism should be to show [of the work of art] how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."
"In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art."
[This is the essay's last sentence, paragraph, and section.]
A map
I made a table to map Sontag's associations. Note that Sontag is skeptical that "has content" and "says something" are really things one can say of a work of art--she's simply ventriloquizing the position she's arguing against.
My impressions
Being more a formalist and a style/language nerd than a paraphraser (I know this latter label is simplistic), I love Sontag's push for form over content. But I don't like the term "erotics" because it rings of pleasure and the body. There is nothing wrong with pleasure and the body, heaven forbid I come across as puritanical because I'm not! But my own experience of great art feels neither pleasurable nor bodily. It doesn't feel like a fulfillment but rather a longing? Honestly it feels like obliteration. And it's absolutely not an experience of the senses, it's an experience of the mind. What I feel in the body--the constriction of the breath, the stopping of the heartbeat, and the like--is a consequence of the experience, not the site of the experience. But I'm quite sure this has everything to do with the fact that all I do is read, while Sontag is a cross-medium critic: quite a few essays in this collection are on film, and she has many references to music and painting.
I distinguished form from style and language at the beginning of my paragraph above; I've been finding myself increasingly confused about their interrelationship recently. I do know the opposite of both for me is content, and I do feel that style and language are elements of form, another element is structure, but ... I'm just confused. You can absolutely talk about language and structure separately... I think the key to resolving this confusion might be what Sontag says about vocabulary. You need words and the categories they both create and capture, to be able to describe.
Anyway, Sontag herself separates form from style--"Against Interpretation" is a polemic for form and the next essay is called "On Style." Onward to reading it now!
Key quotes
"Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism."
"What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation."
"In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone."
"What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art."
"What is needed is a vocabulary--a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary--for forms."
"Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all."
"The function of criticism should be to show [of the work of art] how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."
"In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art."
[This is the essay's last sentence, paragraph, and section.]
A map
I made a table to map Sontag's associations. Note that Sontag is skeptical that "has content" and "says something" are really things one can say of a work of art--she's simply ventriloquizing the position she's arguing against.
| the work of art | |
| has content | is form |
| says something | is something |
| the work of the critic | |
| focus on content | aliveness to form |
| interpretation | description |
| intellect | energy |
| what the work of art means | how and/or that the work of art is what it is |
| a hermeneutics of art | an erotics of art |
My impressions
Being more a formalist and a style/language nerd than a paraphraser (I know this latter label is simplistic), I love Sontag's push for form over content. But I don't like the term "erotics" because it rings of pleasure and the body. There is nothing wrong with pleasure and the body, heaven forbid I come across as puritanical because I'm not! But my own experience of great art feels neither pleasurable nor bodily. It doesn't feel like a fulfillment but rather a longing? Honestly it feels like obliteration. And it's absolutely not an experience of the senses, it's an experience of the mind. What I feel in the body--the constriction of the breath, the stopping of the heartbeat, and the like--is a consequence of the experience, not the site of the experience. But I'm quite sure this has everything to do with the fact that all I do is read, while Sontag is a cross-medium critic: quite a few essays in this collection are on film, and she has many references to music and painting.
I distinguished form from style and language at the beginning of my paragraph above; I've been finding myself increasingly confused about their interrelationship recently. I do know the opposite of both for me is content, and I do feel that style and language are elements of form, another element is structure, but ... I'm just confused. You can absolutely talk about language and structure separately... I think the key to resolving this confusion might be what Sontag says about vocabulary. You need words and the categories they both create and capture, to be able to describe.
Anyway, Sontag herself separates form from style--"Against Interpretation" is a polemic for form and the next essay is called "On Style." Onward to reading it now!