1 Introduction
Peter Gay in Freud: A Life for Our Times (2006) attests to the ease with which everyone, including those with no formal training in Freudian psychoanalysis, applies Freudian terminology and ideas to their lives: âIt is commonplace that we all speak Freud whether we recognize it or not. We casually refer to repression and projection, neurosis and ambivalence and sibling rivalry. A historian called our time an age of narcissism and everyone professes to understand what he meansâ (xvii). Sontag was troubled early by this appropriation and simplification of Freudian ideas and practices, which she traces back to Freudâs American practitioners and professional explicators. Sontag tells Edwin Newman in a 1969 interview that Americansâ weak sense of history has led to the triumph of a truncated version of Freudian psychology. âFreud was a great pessimist,â Sontag suggests, âbut psychoanalysis has become on the whole an instrument of optimism in this country, a myth that through psychological understanding you can get rid of the pastâ (14); âI think that Americans have a rather weak connection with the past. Thatâs one of the peculiarities of this countryâŠ.PsychoanalysisâŠhas succeeded in this country in a way that it hasnât anywhere else because itâs experienced by people as an instrument for breaking with their pastâ (14). Sontag worries that Freudian psychoanalysis has been reduced from a potentially culturally transformative practice to a preset story that Americans tell themselves to maintain the bourgeois status quo. In an interview with Amy Lippman of The Harvard Advocate, Sontag develops her insights into the popularization of Freud and its effects on American culture, telling Lippman that
The only institution in modern urban culture that invites storytelling is psychotherapy. But the story told to a therapist or a therapy group is a function of a complaint. ⊠The story is already thematic, illustrative. People treat their experience as alienated from themselves. Experience, thus depreciated in value, is viewed as observing the laws of fashionâsuch as built-in obsolescence; the self is regarded as a commodity, its decisions as sociological predictable behavior. (200)
We have seen Sontag opine before about capitalist commodification when, in her 1996 postscript to the reissue of her volume Against Interpretation and Other Essays, she laments that those essays have been read to support the facile commodification of anti-intellectualism and pop culture apart from high culture in American arts and letters; here, we see that the simplification of Freudian ideas has likewise done something similar. Sontag worries that the story told by weakened psychoanalytical models is pre-scripted and, as such, becomes a pre-defined product that can be summarily categorized, consumed, and dismissedâmade, in her words, immediately obsolete. The self is thus not truly actualized (or radicalized), truly opened, through the psychoanalytical process, but rather analyzed, detached, and rendered conformable to some normative model; as Sontag herself illustrates later in the same interview, people via psychoanalysis have learned to say âmy lifestyleâ (as in a commodity that can be bought and used, put on and taken off at will) instead of âmy lifeâ (Lippman 200) (an organic whole that is more than the sum of its parts) when describing their various choices. As Sontag makes clear, consciousness has become an eminently marketable commodity rather than a radical, unique mode of being in our contemporary world.
The question of who has authority to interpret and thus circumscribe these narratives into a âproper,â normative product becomes the key question for Sontag when she writes Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966) and its important lead essay, âAgainst Interpretation.â This authority seemingly rests with the analyst (frequently posited as male, often seen as patriarchal), not the analysand, who is once again made into a passive recipient of a pre-packaged truth. Sontag sees this same authoritarian and limiting tendency in art criticism in the 1960s, which inspires the conclusions she draws in âAgainst Interpretation.â
In that pivotal essay, Sontag indicates her dislike of what pre-fashioned Freudian hermeneutics has done to the experience of art. Noting that all modes of interpretive practice need to be assessed through a âhistoricalâ context (AI 7), Sontag reflects that the style of semiotics in practice before the heyday of Freudian and Marxist criticism âerected another meaning on top of the literal oneâ of the work of art. This erected meaning was equal to the art itself but did not insist on supplanting the artwork it sought to analyze. However, this respectful style of exegesis was replaced by hermeneutics enacted through the theories of Freud and Marx; and, when this practice enters art analysis, it seemingly undermines what the work can do in the experience of its pure form. Sontag writes that this mode âexcavatesâ and âdestroysâ the artwork by going ââbehindâ the text, to find a sub-textâ that it then posits as the only âtrueâ reading. The analysis itself (and the (male) analyst who produces it) consequently marks itself as superior to the work of art being considered. Sontag sees this authority coming from Freudian and Marxist theory being (mis)appropriated by the art critics of her age, often to unintentionally bourgeois and capitalist ends. As Sontag notes, these analysts mount what becomes in its own right a religious interpretation, or âhermeneutics,â through a reading that both attacks and misinterprets the work(s) analyzed (AI 6â7); respect for the work is replaced by respect for the theory.
The idea of hermeneutics and how it becomes a term of derision for Sontag deserves our consideration. The state of thought on aesthetics in the American academy of the 1950s and 1960sâSontagâs formative years as a student and instructorâprovides some illumination. Lindsay Waters supplies some of the background to what the academy was like and what was at stake for the intellectual interested in art and literature in her elaboration of the early context for Paul de Manâs rejection of the literary critical status quo of that time. Waters writes that what de Man was rejecting in part was the subordination of experienceâor, more philosophically, âsubjectivismââto rationality. The New Critics, embodied for de Man in the figures of T. S. Eliot and Irving Babbitt, wanted to âsubordinate feeling to reason,â which resulted in too much emphasis on âthe person of the poetâ; these hegemonic theories allowed Eliot, Babbitt, and others to âwrite off vast tracts of literary history and such troubling figures as Milton and Shelley.â1 As Waters points out, what these critics espoused was (with all the religious connotations implied) an âincarnationalâ mode of âthe literary symbolâ in which âthe metaphor ⊠incarnated an ideaâ (Man xliii).2 As de Man articulates in a review of works by J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Frank written around the time Sontag is penning her first collection of essays, âthe newcomerâ to literary study âwho tries to find stimulation and guidance in the work of his elders may well be overcome by a feeling of weariness that drives him to other shoresâ than America âor, if he is timid, to an even more remote return to traditional literary historyâ before these hermeneutic theories became dominant in the academy (107).3
Sontag finds these same kinds of incarnational and pseudo-mystical leanings problematic not only in their articulation by the self-styled New Critics, but also by those critics claiming indebtedness to Freud and Marx. The Freudian analyst of literature and art becomes the subject of Sontagâs discerning and rigorous gaze as embodying these dangerous systematizing and mystifying tendencies. Sontag explains how Freudâs (and his followersâ) notion of âmanifestâ compared to âlatentâ content undermines the art object from doing its work. All that is on the surfaceâall which Sontag will put into the area of form itselfâis dismissed as âmanifestâ content that must be cast away in favor of what is seen as underneath, or âlatent,â which is given priority. Marxian and Freudian analysis both seek this latent meaning, but directing their determinations in different ways: for Marx, the latent content is class warfare; for Freud, it is neurosis that can be analyzed like âslips of the tongue,â unintended and yet revelatory (AI 6â7). Note that in either case, the analyst becomes superior to the work of art through the latent meaning that (s)he sees. This latent content replaces the work itself and its power, which may be polyvalent and even contradictory.4 In her call at the end of âAgainst Interpretationâ for an âerotics of artâ (AI 14), she instigates more than defines a move that celebrates surface and ambiguity over prefabricated, determinant meaning imposed from an authority outside the work itself.
To trace the reasons that Sontag rejects Freud when she was once a proponent of his work (and married to one of his major apologists), we must travel back to her college days when she was introduced to Freudâs ideas and, not coincidentally, her husband, sociologist and Freudian explicator Philip Rieff. Rieff in his 1959 book Freud: The Mind of the Moralistâa book he wrote while married to Sontag and in the writing of which she probably played a significant partâexplains the Freudian view of the work of the imagination that will shape what Sontag ultimately rejects. Sontag may have contributed to the writing of this book, but whether she did or not, Rieffâs writing of the text was certainly influenced by their marriage and intellectual partnership.5
Rieff sees the work of the imagination as representing âa primitive level of truthâwhich, uninterpreted, is false,â basing his conclusions on a Freudian science of the mind. This science proposes a âdouble level of truthâ about the imagination: âThe âwork of the imagination is to distort, complicate, individualize, and thereby conceal the potent sub-individual wishes and desires.â Therefore, according to Rieff, â[t]he highest task of psychoanalytic interpretation is to work back through expressive statements to the repressed motive thus hidden especially from its carrierâ (126). The surface of the artwork under analysis, in this view, becomes tantamount to a deliberate (even though unconscious) obfuscation, hiding the true meaning of the work. The true meaning comes packaged for the viewer as, in Sontagâs word, a âbuilt-in obsolescenceâ that can and does supersede the necessity of the artwork itself; for the analyst must be able to transcend the surface effects of the art to get to the âtruthâ that he always already knows exists beneath.6
Sontagâs call for an open-ended âerotics of artâ at the end of âAgainst Interpretationâ (AI 14) becomes an attempt to undo the damage that Freudian hermeneutics have done to the work of art and its interpreter, characterized implicitly by the conclusions drawn earlier in Freud: The Mind of a Moralist. Throughout Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Sontag celebrates the experiential, the open-ended, and the unfinished as a way of undermining the interpreterâs intention to remain superior to the work under observation.7 Sontag replaces the superior interpreter with a viewer that is shocked and then shaped by her reaction to the new in works of art and literature. In this manner, and by tracing these reactionsâwhich she does in many of the earlier essays in the Against Interpretation volumeâSontag describes a way of honoring the work that art or literature does without overcoming it via theory. This new theory (or non-theory, if we prefer) becomes codified through this title essay, but its development needs some tracing in the earlier reviews included. As she wrote in the passage quoted before, the older method (before Freud) was more respectful. Sontag is not nostalgic for an idealized past of, perhaps, Arnoldian or Coleridgean literary interpretation; rather, what she celebrates is the formative and the constructive in art rather than the finished and closed-off product. As she describes it in her essay âMarat/Sade/Artaud,â a review of Peter Weissâs play The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, the most important version of sensibility may be shaped previous to any articulation of the aesthetics behind it, not predetermined by a set of suppositions brought to the work itself from outside (AI 172). This formative approach to artwork that challenges the viewer to participate in the creation of meaning, and how this aesthetic formulation i...