Just started Sontag "Against Interpretation" essay, and thinking about how it connects to our cultural fixation on process. It's
funny how hard we try to understand things that are alchemical. Like the way we make bestsellers out of books on the
Habits of Successful People, and how we demand interviews with CEOs and celebrities that reveal the secrets of
becoming
rich, famous, productive.
When you do the things you do best, though, don't they defy intellectualization? They probably "come naturally"... you
get "in the zone" or "flow state" or whatever. If you can sense the poverty of vocabulary in describing these states you are
sensing, on even a linguistic level, how indefinable creation is.
Still, I can't imagine a world without hermeneutics. Art would be ritualistic (again) and as ritual it wouldn't have to justify
itself. The means would be the end. We could do what we do without furiously seeking to define how we did it. Life would
be an exercise in happy mystification, but possibly more intelligible than a constant scrabbling for explanations.
Sontag's indictment of interpretation hit a lot of bullseyes all at once. While I ate my cookies I sat in the library and thought
about
specific pieces of art that I've been confused by*. Actually, I mainly considered Sontag's ideas in relation to my Netflix
history,
which started out with a well-intentioned curriculum of Difficult Great Films (aka Bergman) and morphed into a string of
Non-
Difficult Great Fims (DeNiro punching people).
The problem, I'm starting to see, of someone like me understanding the work of someone like Bergman or Godard is that the
interpretation is included in the piece. It makes for a confounding experience-- Godard is so political and Bergman so
philosophical
(/psychoanalytical) that Molly Young, at nineteen years old, lacks the tools for comprehension.
At least Godard throws in diversions like Jean-Paul Belmondo and yeye tunes to make the incomprehension fun. Bergman
just
leaves me meta-depressed: depressed because I don't know why I'm depressed.
Anyhow, I'm not even through the first half of the book but it is already giving me that jittery
sense like when you first hear
Beggars Banquet or read Lolita. I'm glad this feeling doesn't lessen as I age.
*whoa! This is such a weird use of passive voice. I'm leaving it in.