Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-jr42d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T06:40:19.441Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Precocious Archaeology: Susan Sontag and the Criticism of Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Liam Kennedy
Affiliation:
Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Birmingham, P.O. Box 363, Birmingham BI5 2TT, England.

Extract

If Susan Sontag is not a writer behind whom a school or substantial following has gathered, this has much to do with the unsystematic nature of her work. Her studies of thought and culture are not the work of a systematic theorist; they are too much involved with personal taste and response, too free-ranging and open-ended to attract disciplined followers. Sontag's writings receive little direct critical attention at present, though she is often quoted on photography or film, or used to support various theses on post-modernism. Her writings reward more rigorous analysis, especially as the work of this American critic would seem to complement and yet significantly depart from the theorizing of more commonly acknowledged European thinkers – structuralist and post-structuralist – with whom she is contemporary.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 In interview with Alinder, James, “An Interview with Susan Sontag,” Untitled, 15 (1986), 36.Google Scholar

2 Sontag, Susan, “Preface” to Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), xi.Google Scholar

3 Sontag, Susan, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1987), 75.Google Scholar

4 Sontag, Susan, the “The Salmagundi Interview,” A Susan Sontag Reader, ed. Hardwick, Elizabeth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 346.Google Scholar

5 Rosenberg, Harold, The Tradition of the New (London: Paladin, 1970), 10.Google Scholar

6 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 11.Google Scholar

7 Sontag, Susan, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 19.Google Scholar

8 Sontag, Susan, Against Interpretation (New York: Octagon, 1982), viii.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., 171.

10 On Photography, 32.Google Scholar

11 Against Interpretation, 90.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 13.

13 Trilling, Lionel, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 179.Google Scholar

14 See Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilisation (New York: Pantheon, 1965).Google Scholar

15 Derrida, Jacques, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds. Macksey, Richard and Donato, Eugenio (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 252.Google Scholar

16 On Photography, 23.Google Scholar

17 Styles of Radical Will, 91.Google Scholar

18 Burke, Kenneth, “Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education,” Modern Philosophies and Education, ed. Henry, Nelson B. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 271.Google Scholar

19 Against Interpretation, 50.Google Scholar

20 Derrida, Jacques, Positions (London, 1981), 41.Google Scholar

21 Against Interpretation, 275–92.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 290.

23 Ibid., 288.

24 “The Salmagundi Interview,” 340.Google Scholar

20 See Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, eds., The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

26 Styles of Will, Radical, 7071.Google Scholar

27 Foucault, Michel, The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972), 130.Google Scholar

28 Sontag, Susan, “On Art and Consciousness,” Performing Arts Journal, 2 (1976), 32.Google Scholar

29 See Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 327.Google Scholar

30 I follow Catherine Belsey's formulation here in her proposal to study a “politics of meaning.” Belsey has recognized the dangers of relativism and argued the need to “lay claims to specific meanings in the name of politics, not truth.” However, I fail to see how her specific political meanings can be anything other than forms of truth. Belsey, Catherine, “The Politics of Meaning,” in Barker, Francis et al. , eds., Confronting the Crisis (Essex: University of Essex, 1984), 2729.Google Scholar

31 Williams, Raymond, Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books, 1979), 172.Google Scholar

32 Against Interpretation, 6970, 80.Google Scholar

33 Against Interpretation, 80.Google Scholar There is a trace of Sontag's distrust of humanist universalism in her comments on Levi-Strauss, as when she comments that “for Levi-Strauss, the logic of mythic thought is fully as rigorous as that of modern science … [he] argues that the activity of the mind in imposing form on content is fundamentally the same for all minds, archaic and modern” (79). Jean Baudrillard is more direct in his charge against Levi-Strauss's work: “this is the extreme of liberal thought and the most beautiful way of preserving the initiative and priority of Western thought within ‘dialogue’ and under the sign of the universality of the human mind (as always for Enlightenment anthropology). Here is the beautiful soul! Is it possible to be more impartial in the sensitive and intellectual knowledge of the other? This harmonious vision of his thought processes renders their confrontation perfectly inoffensive, by denying the difference of the primitives as an element of rupture with and subversion of [our] ‘objectified thought and its understanding.’” Baudrillard, Jean, Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos, 1975), 90.Google Scholar

34 Styles of Will, Radical, 271.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., 225, 270, 271.

36 Ibid., 263–64; 264.

37 A Susan Sontag Reader, 275, 284, 286.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., 285.

39 Ibid., 268, 282, 284, 286.

40 Ibid., 443.

41 Berman, Art, From the New Critics to Deconstruction: The Reception of Structuralism and Poststructuralism (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 229.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., 5.

43 Against Interpretation, 202.Google Scholar

44 A Susan Sontag Reader, 431.Google Scholar

45 Barthes, Roland, Roland Barthes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 82.Google ScholarBarthes, Roland, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 11.Google Scholar

47 Barthes, Roland, Critical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 386.Google Scholar

48 Brooks, Peter, “Death Of/As Metaphor,” Partisan Review, 46 (1979), 438.Google Scholar

49 Ibid., 439.

50 On Photography, 156.Google Scholar

51 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), 386.Google Scholar

52 Foster, Hal, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconcious,” Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1984)Google Scholar. The notion that all sites of otherness are fully colonized by culture has gained much credence amongst critics of postmodernity. See Jameson's, Fredric influential argument, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, 146 (0708, 1984), 5392.Google Scholar