>[!note] By [[Susan Sontag]] (1966) A discourse about … [[Realism]]? Duality? Sontag’s terminologies for the duality are *form* and *content*. *Form* refers to the physical manifestation of the art, *content* refers to the latent meaning of the work. # "Interpretations" 1. "seeing things when there is nothing to see, or seeing things with agenda" - this is the great allure of [[Marxism]] because it gives such a compelling interpretation of class struggle for every phenomenon out there. * *Straussian interpretation* - "there are some things that one cannot say outright, therefore authors will hide their meaning, therefore readers must put in effort to read between the lines and discover this hidden meaning" * Strauss-Bush - interpretation of Thucydides where “might makes right, once you have a powerful empire you should exercise your power and impose your rule on others” - and this was popular amongst the Bush administration. * This worldview - that there's *more than meets the eye* - can be applied to the *conspiracy theories* also. > [!quote] [[Popper]] on Marxism > A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation—which revealed the class bias of the paper—and especially of course in what the paper did not say. 2. Sontag in the essay complains a lot about "over-cooperative authors" who love to sprinkle these. - Thomas Mann - In [[#Pilgrimage]] , Sontag describes her experience of meeting Thomas Mann and she was disappointed because the conversation made her feel like she was no talking to the author, but "a book reviewer". 3. Sontag also talks about "form over content"; i.e. it's the form that is important, even though we always try to look for the hidden meaning of things. - Software Engineering Philosophy interpretation - I both love of engineering philosophies but also disdain because it adds so much "interpretation" on why things are done this way, how things should be done, etc... - Runciman's interpretation of [[Trump Presidency|Trump]] as an Avant-Grade politician. # Main points From the beginning, art is perceived as “representing something”. For Plato, ordinary objects are mere mimetic of its ideal, ”even the best painting of a bed would be an *imitation of an imitation*” ## Art and Interpretation > [!quote] > From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. ### Salvaging Myth > [!quote] > Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. ### Shadow World of Meaning > [!quote] > To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of “meaning”. Discussions of Kafka, Mann (Singled out as an *over-cooperative author*) The example of *A Streetcar Named Desire*, where the production *needed* an interpretation in order to stage the play. > [!quote] > … Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible; it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute name Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche du Bois, it would not be manageable. --- # Pilgrimage [The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/12/21/pilgrimage-susan-sontag); [[David Runciman|Runciman]] mentioned this episode in his podcast, so I ended up reading it too. It is “fictionalized account” of her encounter with Thomas Mann; I do not know how fictional it is. Is this all made up? Or did the teenager Sontag actually meet Mann, but the dialogs were not memorable and she spiced it up? I am okay with the latter, but I would be so disappointed if it was the former - I desperately crave for the fiction of reality. > [!quote] > I wouldn’t have minded if he had talked like a book. I wanted him to talk like a book. What I was obscurely starting to mind was that (as I couldn’t have put it then) ==he talked like a book review==. # Other ## Plato on Art > [!quote] [[Plato]]’s view on arts. > Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an “==imitation of an imitation.==” I haven’t read *the republic* or any other work; but his dismissal of arts and fiction seems to be a common thread. *An imitation of an imitation* is a beautiful #phrase.