Against Interpretation

Against Interpretation
Jacket design by Ellen Raskin. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. · Public domain · source
Name	Against Interpretation
Author	Susan Sontag
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Art criticism, aesthetics
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub date	1966 (essay collection; title essay 1964)
Media type	Print
Pages	176
Isbn	9780374533401

Against Interpretation

Susan Sontag's essay collection Against Interpretation crystallizes a moment in mid-20th-century intellectual life when debates about form, meaning, and politics converged. The title essay, first published in 1964, challenged prevailing practices in criticism associated with psychoanalysis, New Criticism, and politically inflected readings, proposing a shift toward the sensuous, the formal, and the experiential in encounters with works by figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and Pablo Picasso. The book helped situate Sontag among critics and public intellectuals linked to institutions like The New Yorker and Columbia University, and engaged wider conversations involving contemporaries such as Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, and Harold Bloom.

Background and Context

Sontag wrote in a historical milieu shaped by postwar debates over modernism and postmodernism, where intellectuals associated with New York School circles, the Parisian structuralists, and Anglo-American scholars contested the aims of art and criticism. Influences and interlocutors included writers and thinkers tied to Black Mountain College, the literary scene around Village Voice, and academic departments at Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley. The Cold War cultural politics of the 1950s and 1960s—debates involving institutions like the Ford Foundation and journals such as Partisan Review—provided a backdrop for disputes about aesthetic autonomy and political engagement that inform Sontag’s interventions.

Publication and Composition

Originally delivered as public lectures and essays, the title essay emerged amid Sontag’s contributions to periodicals such as The New York Review of Books and Esquire. Farrar, Straus and Giroux assembled the essays into a 1966 collection that included pieces on practitioners and movements ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to Andy Warhol, and from Brecht-related debates to reflections on camp sensibility. The composition reflects Sontag’s role as a public intellectual active in cultural institutions like The New School and her connections with critics and artists affiliated with galleries such as Tate Modern and museums including the Museum of Modern Art.

Themes and Arguments

Central to Sontag’s argument is a critique of hermeneutic domination: she contends that critics modeled on Sigmund Freud-aligned psychoanalytic readings, or on historicist frameworks practiced at places like Oxford University and Yale University, reduce works of art to meaning alone. Sontag urges a reorientation toward the sensuous surface and an attentiveness to form, championing a mode of reception resonant with artists from Dada and Abstract Expressionism. Drawing on examples from Samuel Beckett to Igor Stravinsky, she argues that interpretation often functions as an act of domestication, while urging an ethic closer to performances at venues such as Carnegie Hall or film screenings at Cannes Film Festival where experience precedes explication.

Sontag also addresses cultural phenomena—film, theater, painting, and literature—tracing how technological changes in media, from projects sponsored by RCA to cinema innovations at studios like MGM, alter perception. Her essays interrelate with contemporary debates led by figures at Columbia University and Princeton University about the role of criticism in public life, and invoke thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre without reducing artworks to authorial intent or political utility.

Reception and Influence

Upon publication, the collection provoked responses across literary, artistic, and academic circles. Reviews appeared in outlets from The New Republic to The New York Times Book Review, prompting exchanges with critics affiliated with The New York Review of Books and intellectuals connected to Cambridge University and La Sorbonne. The essays influenced younger critics and curators operating in galleries like Guggenheim Museum and university art departments at UCLA and University of Chicago, promoting a renewed emphasis on formal analysis and the phenomenology of reception. Sontag’s stance resonated with certain strands of feminist cultural critique and with artists participating in exhibitions at venues such as Documenta.

Critical Responses and Debate

Critics aligned with Marxist traditions—some connected to journals like New Left Review—accused Sontag of aestheticism divorced from social critique, while proponents from formalist camps praised her resistance to reductive readings associated with New Criticism and psychoanalytic schools linked to Freud and Jacques Lacan. Debates involved scholars at King's College London and public intellectuals such as Susan Brownmiller and Daniel Bell, and extended into methodological disputes within departments at institutions like Rutgers University. Subsequent reassessments tracked how Sontag herself revised positions in later works, leading critics at places like Yale and Columbia to consider the evolution of her thought.

Legacy and Cultural Impact

Against Interpretation left a lasting imprint on late 20th-century cultural discourse, shaping practices in art history programs at Princeton University and curatorial strategies at institutions including Whitney Museum of American Art. Its privileging of surface and sensibility influenced debates around postmodernism and informed pedagogy in literature and film studies at universities such as NYU and Stanford University. The essay collection continues to be cited in conversations alongside works by Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, and John Berger, and remains part of syllabi in seminars on criticism, modernism, and cultural theory in departments across the United States and Europe.

Category:1966 books Category:Essay collections