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Susan Sontag occupies a special place in Modern American letters. She has become our most important critic, while her brilliant novels and short fiction are, at long last, getting the recognition they deserve. Sontag is above all a writer, which is only to say that, though the form may differ, there is an essential unity in all her work. The truth of this is perhaps more evident inA Susan Sontag Readerthan in any of Sontag's individual books. The writer selected a sampling of her work, meaning the choice both to reflect accurately a career and also to guide the reader toward those qualities and concerns which she prizes in her own writing. A Susan Sontag Readeris arranged chronologically and draws on most of Sontag's books. There are selections from her two novels,The Benefactor andDeath Kit, and from her collections of short stories,I, etcetera.The famous essays from the 1960s--"Against Interpretation," "Notes on Camp," and "On Style"--which established Sontag's reputation and can be fairly said to have shaped the cultural views of a generation are included, as are selctions from her two subsequent volumes of essays,Styles of Radical WillandUnder the Sign of Satury.A part of Sontag's best-sellingOn Photography is also included. It is astonishing to read these works when they are detached from the books they appeared in and offered instead in the order in which Sontag wrote them. The connections between various literary forms, the progression of themes, are revealed in often startling ways. Moreover, Sontag has included a long interview in which she moves mroe informally over the whole range of her concerns and of her work. The volume ends with "Writing Itself," a previously uncollected essay on Roland Barthes which,in the eyes of many, is one of Sontag's finest achievements. This collection is, in a sense, both a self-potrait and a key for a reader to understand the work of one of the most imporant writers of our time.… (más)
On Style: Since Diderot art criticism treats art as a statement made in the form of a work of art. Art is not about something, it is something, a thing in the world not a commentary on the world. True: art refers to the world (knowledge, experience, values) it presents information/evaluation, but does not give rise to conceptual knowledge but to an excitation, a phenomenon of commitment. Knowledge gained through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than knowledge of something (a fact, moral judgement) in itself. Behind the ambivalence toward style is the historic Western confusion about the relation between art and morality, the aesthetic and the ethical. Morality is a code of acts, and of judgments and sentiments by which we reinforce our habits of acting in a certain way, prescribing a standard for behaving toward other human beings generally as if we were inspired by love. Morality is one of the achievements of human will, dictating to itself a mode of acting and being in the world, so that no generic antagonism exists between the form of consciousness aimed at action = morality and the nourishment of consciousness = aesthetic experience. Our response to art is moral insofar as it is the enlivening of our sensibility and consciousness. For sensibility nourishes our capacity for moral choice. Art performs this moral task because the intrinsic qualities of aesthetic experience (disinterestedness, contemplativeness, attentiveness, awakening of the feelings) and to the aesthetic object (grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, sensuousness) are also fundamental constituents of a moral response to life. In art content is the pretext, goal, lure which engages consciousness in essentially formal processes of transformation. If art is the supreme game which the will plays with itself, style is the set of rules by which this game is played. These rules are finally an artificial and arbitrary limit, whether rules of form or the presence of content. Critics praising a work of art say each part is justified, it could not be different. The artist knows this is not true, the sense of the inevitability of great art is not the inevitablity or necessity of its parts, but of the whole. What is inevitable is the style. Form, style is a plan of sensory imprinting, the vehicle for the transaction between immediate sensuous impression and memory. This mnemonic function explains why every style depends on repetition and redundancy. The perception of repititions make a work of art intelligible. Not the content but the principles of (and balance between) variety and redundancy make it intelligible. One is always aware of things that cannot be said, of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance,the most potent elements in art are often its silences. Godard's Vivre Sa Vie G's films (A Bout de Souffle, Le Petit Soldat, Une Femme est Une Femme) are directed toward proof, not analysis. VSV is an exhibit, a demonstration, showing that something happened, not why it happened. 12 episodes, serially rather than causally related. No explanation why Nana became a prostitute, nor why her pimp Raoul sells her, or what is behind the gun battle in which she is killed. He does not analyse, he proves. 2 means of proof: a collection of images, and a series of texts. Keeps the 2 elements separate. The rhythm of the film is stopping and starting cf. repeated halting and resuming of music in the credit sequence. G. restores the dissociation of word and image (silent film) on new level. Distinguishing between the seen and the heard very ingeniously and playfully. Cf. Epis. VIII, while taken on a car ride through Paris, seeing shots of a dozen clients, one hears a dry flat voice rapidly detailing the routine, hazards etc. of prostitute's vocation. Epis.XI between N. and philosopher Parain, discussing the nature of language. Nana: why words? P. talking = thinking, there is no life without thought. Tells story of Dumas' Porthos, whose first thought killed him. Running away from a dynamite charge he had planted, he suddenly wondered how one could walk. He stopped and was blown up. Like the Poe story and the one about chicken this is about N. and it also prepares us for N's death. Montaigne motto: 'Lend yourself to others; give yourself to yourself.' N's prostitution is the lending, her freedom is not an inner psychological freedom but like a physical grace. She has become what she is. Being free = being responsible One is free and therefore responsible when one realises that things are as they are.'A plate is a plate. Life is life.' The soul is something to be found not upon but after stripping away the 'inside' of a person is Godard's radical spiritual doctrine.
Susan Sontag occupies a special place in Modern American letters. She has become our most important critic, while her brilliant novels and short fiction are, at long last, getting the recognition they deserve. Sontag is above all a writer, which is only to say that, though the form may differ, there is an essential unity in all her work. The truth of this is perhaps more evident inA Susan Sontag Readerthan in any of Sontag's individual books. The writer selected a sampling of her work, meaning the choice both to reflect accurately a career and also to guide the reader toward those qualities and concerns which she prizes in her own writing. A Susan Sontag Readeris arranged chronologically and draws on most of Sontag's books. There are selections from her two novels,The Benefactor andDeath Kit, and from her collections of short stories,I, etcetera.The famous essays from the 1960s--"Against Interpretation," "Notes on Camp," and "On Style"--which established Sontag's reputation and can be fairly said to have shaped the cultural views of a generation are included, as are selctions from her two subsequent volumes of essays,Styles of Radical WillandUnder the Sign of Satury.A part of Sontag's best-sellingOn Photography is also included. It is astonishing to read these works when they are detached from the books they appeared in and offered instead in the order in which Sontag wrote them. The connections between various literary forms, the progression of themes, are revealed in often startling ways. Moreover, Sontag has included a long interview in which she moves mroe informally over the whole range of her concerns and of her work. The volume ends with "Writing Itself," a previously uncollected essay on Roland Barthes which,in the eyes of many, is one of Sontag's finest achievements. This collection is, in a sense, both a self-potrait and a key for a reader to understand the work of one of the most imporant writers of our time.
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Since Diderot art criticism treats art as a statement made in the form of a work of art. Art is not about something, it is something, a thing in the world not a commentary on the world. True: art refers to the world (knowledge, experience, values) it presents information/evaluation, but does not give rise to conceptual knowledge but to an excitation, a phenomenon of commitment. Knowledge gained through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than knowledge of something (a fact, moral judgement) in itself.
Behind the ambivalence toward style is the historic Western confusion about the relation between art and morality, the aesthetic and the ethical.
Morality is a code of acts, and of judgments and sentiments by which we reinforce our habits of acting in a certain way, prescribing a standard for behaving toward other human beings generally as if we were inspired by love. Morality is one of the achievements of human will, dictating to itself a mode of acting and being in the world, so that no generic antagonism exists between the form of consciousness aimed at action = morality and the nourishment of consciousness = aesthetic experience. Our response to art is moral insofar as it is the enlivening of our sensibility and consciousness. For sensibility nourishes our capacity for moral choice. Art performs this moral task because the intrinsic qualities of aesthetic experience (disinterestedness, contemplativeness, attentiveness, awakening of the feelings) and to the aesthetic object (grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, sensuousness) are also fundamental constituents of a moral response to life.
In art content is the pretext, goal, lure which engages consciousness in essentially formal processes of transformation.
If art is the supreme game which the will plays with itself, style is the set of rules by which this game is played. These rules are finally an artificial and arbitrary limit, whether rules of form or the presence of content. Critics praising a work of art say each part is justified, it could not be different. The artist knows this is not true, the sense of the inevitability of great art is not the inevitablity or necessity of its parts, but of the whole. What is inevitable is the style.
Form, style is a plan of sensory imprinting, the vehicle for the transaction between immediate sensuous impression and memory. This mnemonic function explains why every style depends on repetition and redundancy. The perception of repititions make a work of art intelligible. Not the content but the principles of (and balance between) variety and redundancy make it intelligible. One is always aware of things that cannot be said, of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance,the most potent elements in art are often its silences.
Godard's Vivre Sa Vie
G's films (A Bout de Souffle, Le Petit Soldat, Une Femme est Une Femme) are directed toward proof, not analysis. VSV is an exhibit, a demonstration, showing that something happened, not why it happened. 12 episodes, serially rather than causally related. No explanation why Nana became a prostitute, nor why her pimp Raoul sells her, or what is behind the gun battle in which she is killed. He does not analyse, he proves. 2 means of proof: a collection of images, and a series of texts. Keeps the 2 elements separate. The rhythm of the film is stopping and starting cf. repeated halting and resuming of music in the credit sequence.
G. restores the dissociation of word and image (silent film) on new level. Distinguishing between the seen and the heard very ingeniously and playfully. Cf. Epis. VIII, while taken on a car ride through Paris, seeing shots of a dozen clients, one hears a dry flat voice rapidly detailing the routine, hazards etc. of prostitute's vocation. Epis.XI between N. and philosopher Parain, discussing the nature of language. Nana: why words? P. talking = thinking, there is no life without thought. Tells story of Dumas' Porthos, whose first thought killed him. Running away from a dynamite charge he had planted, he suddenly wondered how one could walk. He stopped and was blown up. Like the Poe story and the one about chicken this is about N. and it also prepares us for N's death. Montaigne motto: 'Lend yourself to others; give yourself to yourself.' N's prostitution is the lending, her freedom is not an inner psychological freedom but like a physical grace. She has become what she is. Being free = being responsible
One is free and therefore responsible when one realises that things are as they are.'A plate is a plate. Life is life.'
The soul is something to be found not upon but after stripping away the 'inside' of a person is Godard's radical spiritual doctrine.