Against Interpretation

[droqen]

Regarding, at last, Susan Sontag's
"Against Interpretation"

[droqen]

Before I even got into the titular essay, I enjoyed the preface of this collection.

I disagree now with a portion of what I wrote, but it is not the sort of disagreement that makes feasible partial changes or revisions. [..] For me, the essays have done their work. I see the world differently, with fresher eyes[.]

[droqen]

Alright, time for the essay proper, "Against Interpretation".

[droqen]

[Interpretation] is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world[..] In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.

[droqen]

[..] interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something

[droqen]

Those who reach for [..interpretation..] are only expressing their lack of response to what is there on the screen.

[droqen]

I was thinking about a thing I wrote a while back, something I have never been able to find again though I wrote it, about how 100%ing a game with branching paths destroys the multifaceted nature of such a thing, turns it again from one of many individual experiences into a singular canonical experience. I was thinking about 'interpretation' as 'completionism'. It's not a 1-to-1 fit at all, perhaps not even close, but this is what I was thinking about when I read the next section.

a great deal of today's art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation. To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become ("merely") decorative. Or it may become non-art. [..] Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation. [..] A great deal of modern poetry as well [has attempted] to put silence into poems and to reinstate the magic of the word

[droqen]

Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way [than experiments with form at the expense of content], by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be . . . just what it is.

[droqen]

I am not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be described or paraphrased. [..] What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?

The wealth of how-to-play guides for games are in some way like interpretations, only drier and less inventive if possible; unlike a work of art which may be interpreted and reinterpreted, a game directly acknowledges its completion and therefore grants canonical and unambiguous feedback that one's actions are 'correct'.

See the walkthroughs, the longplays, the let's plays, that as Sontag says of interpretations usurp the "place" of the work itself... These acts are even more blatant, aren't they?

[droqen]

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art--and in criticism--today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing itself, of things being what they are. [..] Once upon a time [..] it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life.

This is an interesting lens, but I can feel the edge of this line of thinking. It's a momentary reaction, and by momentary I do mean the type of reaction that is momentary only on the scale of an entire life, or more... a 'momentary' reaction that lasts a year or two.

This essay was written in 1964 and Sontag says then, in the pre-internet age, that "Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction", that "All the conditions of modern life--its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness--conjoin to dull our sensory faculties", and it's comforting to look fifty (fifty!!!) years into the past at someone feeling what I've been feeling for years and to think as a result that it's not some insurmountable problem arisen from the systems of today, but rather that it is some human mental problem arisen from the patterns of thought shared by myself and Susan Sontag and likely other artists(?) throughout time... that the feeling itself is something I own, something I possess, something that I can therefore overcome.

It's not all the environment.