Susan Sotang Art Today Is a New Kind of Instrument

Deep Thinking: 45 Quotes past Susan Sontag

By | On | Comments (0)

From the fourth dimension of her archetype essay, " Notes on Army camp " (1963), Susan Sontag was launched into the position of one of America's premier public intellectuals. Nearly every line she wrote or spoke was quotable, so it's a great challenge to choose a selection of quotes past Susan Sontag for a post that'south reasonable in length; here, we've attempted such a feat.

Achieving fame (and sometimes notoriety) in multiple forms of media — essays, fiction, picture show, and more — Sontag seemed to encompass her part as provocateur. Susan Sontag pastel portrait at right by Juan Bastos.

In her biography of Susan Sontag on this site, Nancy Snyder writes that she "accomplished what was believed to be impossible for any American writer: she could easily pontificate on structuralist philosophy and on the history of estimation — subjects not widely embraced in American culture — yet Sontag hands made the crossover from the inaccessible intellectual into the realm of established literary star."

. . . . . . . . . .

Acquire more well-nigh Susan Sontag

. . . . . . . . . .

Notes on Campsite (1964)

"What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most cute in feminine women is something masculine."

. . . . . . . . . .

"The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a apparel made of three meg feathers."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Gustatory modality has no system and no proofs. Just at that place is something like a logic of taste: the consequent sensibility which underlies and gives ascent to a sure taste."

. . . . . . . . . .

"The discovery of the proficient sense of taste of bad gustatory modality can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can relish; in the constant practise of his skilful taste he will eventually toll himself out of the market, and then to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good sense of taste equally a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp. For Military camp fine art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and fashion at the expense of content."

. . . . . . . . . .

"The whole indicate of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more circuitous relation to 'the serious'. Ane tin be serious most the frivolous, frivolous about the serious."

. . . . . . . . . .

On Photography (1977)

"The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once institute their place, the collector may at present in proficient conscience get about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments."

. . . . . . . . . .

"The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed upward in the generalized desolation of fourth dimension past."

. . . . . . . . . .

"The camera makes anybody a tourist in other people'south reality, and eventually in ane's own."

. . . . . . . . . .

"And then successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the earth that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Photography has become almost as widely skillful an amusement equally sexual activity and dancing."

. . . . . . . . . .

"The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed upwardly in the generalized pathos of time past."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Whitman thought he was non abolishing beauty but generalizing it. So, for generations, did the most gifted American photographers, in their polemical pursuit of the picayune and the vulgar. Just amid American photographers who have matured since Earth War II, the Whitmanesque mandate to record in its entirety the extravagant candors of actual American experience has gone sour."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Nobody demands that photography exist literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent."

. . . . . . . . . .

"So successful has been the camera'due south role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the earth, have go the standard of the beautiful."

. . . . . . . . . .

"The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the function to which information technology was originally idea to exist limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is oftentimes experienced as a letdown."

. . . . . . . . . .

Illness as Metaphor (1978)

"Illness is the dark-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to utilize only the good passport, sooner or after each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other identify."

. . . . . . . . . .

"There is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, every bit of everything else. Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events (similar grave illnesses) over which people have in fact little or no control. Psychological understanding undermines the 'reality' of a disease. That reality has to be explained.

. . . . . . . . . .

For those who alive neither with religious consolations virtually decease nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) equally natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can just be denied.

. . . . . . . . . .

"A large office of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its beingness a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific fashion of affirming the primacy of 'spirit' over matter."

. . . . . . . . . .

AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)

"The AIDS crunch is show of a earth in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to go, worldwide."

. . . . . . . . . .

"It is not suffering every bit such that is most deeply feared simply suffering that degrades."

. . . . . . . . .

"Etymologically, patient means sufferer. Information technology is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared merely suffering that degrades. That illness tin can be non an epic of suffering but the occasion of some kind of self-transcendence is affirmed by sentimental literature and, more assuredly, by case histories offered by doctor-writers. Some illnesses seem more apt than others for this kind of meditation."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Epidemic diseases unremarkably elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of affliction (in the late nineteenth century: cholera, yellowish fever, typhoid fever, tuberculosis). … Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the plague metaphor: information technology allows a affliction to be regarded both every bit something incurred by vulnerable 'others' and equally (potentially) everyone'south disease."

. . . . . . . . . .

Against Estimation and Other Essays (1966)

"From now to the stop of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art."

. . . . . . . . . .

"The discovery of the skilful taste of bad gustatory modality tin be very liberating."

. . . . . . . . . .

"None of the states tin ever remember that innocence before all theory when fine art knew no demand to justify itself, when 1 did not ask of a work of art what information technology said considering i knew (or thought one knew) what information technology did. From now to the finish of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending fine art. We tin can only quarrel with one or another means of defense. Indeed, we take an obligation to overthrow whatsoever means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practices."

. . . . . . . . . .

"What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of budgeted works of art in club to translate them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear significant of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; notwithstanding it cannot exist discarded."

. . . . . . . . . .

Estimation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought as well precious to repudiate, by revamping information technology. The interpreter, without really erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. Simply he can't admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning."

. . . . . . . . . .

"The old mode of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern mode of estimation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs 'behind' the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Interpretation is non (every bit most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of listen situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon fine art … To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in gild to set upwards a shadow earth of 'meanings.'"

. . . . . . . . . .

"Real art has the chapters to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, ane tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Science fiction films are not about scientific discipline. They are most disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of fine art."

. . . . . . . . . .

Miscellaneous writings and essays

"Compassion is an unstable emotion. Information technology needs to be translated into activeness, or it withers. The question is what to exercise with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — considering of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling."  (Regarding the Hurting of Others, 2003)

. . . . . . . . . .

"Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the style of gruesome, easily-on cruelties upon other humans, has non reached moral or psychological machismo."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Ours is an age which consciously pursues wellness, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of disease. Nosotros mensurate truth in terms of the cost to the author in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer'due south words stand for. Each of our truths must have a martyr."   (from a review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books, February i, 1963)

. . . . . . . . . .

"The need for truth is not abiding; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a baloney may take a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, merely the reverse of truth, which is unbalance, may not exist a lie."   (from a review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963)

. . . . . . . . . .

"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth most anything. There would just be what is."(The Benefactor, 1963)

. . . . . . . . . .

"The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary authorities, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilisation has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human being history."(Partisan Review, Wintertime 1967)

. . . . . . . . . .

"I don't want to express breach. Information technology isn't what I feel. I'm interested in diverse kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake upwardly."  ("Susan Sontag Finds Romance," interview with by Leslie Garis, The New York Times, August 2, 1992)

. . . . . . . . . .

"To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What practice we take from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That'southward what continues to feed people and give them an thought of something amend. A ameliorate state of ane's feelings or simply the thought of a silence in one's cocky that allows one to think or to experience. Which to me is the same." ("Susan Sontag Finds Romance," interview with by Leslie Garis, The New York Times, August two, 1992)

. . . . . . . . . .

"One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling … which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the centre and the caput, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. We have more or less the same bodies, but very unlike kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of idea in the world. Thinking is a grade of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking." (from "Susan Sontag: The Rolling Rock Interview" with Jonathan Cott, October 1979)

. . . . . . . . . .

"The tide of undecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has washed over and bitten into the facades of monuments and the surface of public vehicles in the city where I live: graffiti equally an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion … the powerless saying: I'm hither, too."  ("The Pleasure of the Image," from Writers on Artists, ed. by Daniel Halpern, 1988)

. . . . . . . . . .

"I guess I think I'yard writing for people who are smarter than I am, because so I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very agape to write from a position where I consciously idea I was smarter than about of my readers."   (From "The Chance Taker," profile by Gary Younge, The Guardian, January 19, 2002)

. . . . . . . . . .

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an musical instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing fine art have been radically extended. … Painters no longer feel themselves bars to sail and paint, only apply hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians take reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on record) constructed sounds and industrial noises.  ("I Culture and the New Sensibility," Styles of Radical Volition, 1966)

. . . . . . . . . .

Susan Sontag page on Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . . .

*This is an Amazon Chapter link. If a production is purchased past linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

Categories: Writer Quotes

dickeywhoes1961.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-quotes/deep-thinking-quotes-by-susan-sontag/

Share this post