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January 6, 2010
What is the role of the (photographic) critic and their task in late modernity? We can find some suggestions in G.F. Mitrano's The photographic imagination: Sontag and Benjamin in Post Script, Wntr-Spring, 2007 I am interested in this because photographic criticism is devalued in Australia and there is little reflection about this kind of activity or what role it plays vi-a-vis art.
Though Mitrano explores Sontag's debt to Walter Benjamin in understanding the role of the critic, my interest in this post is with Sontag's early formalist understanding of criticism. Mitrano says:
Before encountering Benjamin, Sontag conceived of criticism as a secondary kind of writing associated with rumination and opposed to the 'first idea' of literary productivity, synonymous with freshness, youthfulness, novelty. In his approach to photography Benjamin passed on to Sontag a viable and explanatory narrative of the critical act, which freed her from her formalist confinement. This narrative, which I will call the narrative of the gaze, equates interpretation with the anticipation of an answering gaze; it joins visual questions to hermeneutical problems.
Mitrano adds tthat while Sontag borrowed from Benjamin's conception of the critical act as inserted into a narrative of the gaze, she became increasingly concerned with notions of the gaze that are excessively rigid. In her later work, she became worried that meaning--photographic meaning--would congeal into theatrical externalization, that being would be reduced to posing. In Regarding the Pain of Others, she outlines a desolate landscape where photography rather than suggesting a vista of meanings--Benjamin's dream collective--risks becoming a form of collective instruction.
Early Sontag--pre the encounter with Benjamin--envisioned criticism on formalist grounds and was concerned with the persistence of the form/content split, despite the New Critical dogma proclaiming their unity. In "Against Interpretation," she questioned the use of literature as cultural documentary evidence in the service of conceptual systems and ideological causes, a use that showed no regard for literature's aesthetic knowledge Why do we keep distinguishing between form and content? Why are we afraid of the aesthetic element in literature?
Mitrano says that Sontag was still working with a rather traditional notion of interpretation. She thought that: "great art induces contemplation" and that "the reader or listener or spectator ... must be detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation and approval" ... For the most part, she echoes Rene Wellek's view of aesthetic experience. Summing up the dominant position of the 1940s in Theory of Literature, Wellek (and co-author Austin Warren) define the aesthetic object as that which the reader does not attempt to reform, possess, or consume, but as something that induces contemplation or amorous attention ... While Sontag transforms Wellek's amorous contemplation into "dynamic contemplation" .... she basically agrees at this stage with the traditional notion of interpretation as individual or comparative commentary aimed at evaluating bad and good literature.
This traditional view suggests the idea of the critic as the solitary hermeneute in their study. This model defended the singularity and originality of the critic as reader and suited modernism in the earlier struggle against mass culture.
What is rejected is interpretation of the text or the image within the semiotic world with interpretation seen as the intellect's revenge upon art. It is an anti-theory position in that interpreters -- people who "translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else" -- are philistines.The true task is not to ask what the work means but to appreciate what it is.Sontag says:
Of course, I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain “rules” of interpretation. Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. 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?
The modem style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. Sontag see herself as defending art against interpretation.
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