Against Interpretation

Sontag published this in 1966 as a direct attack on the dominant mode of art criticism — the tradition that treats a work of art as a container for hidden meaning to be extracted by an expert who knows better than you what you just experienced. Her argument: interpretation is an act of domestication. It makes art safe by reducing it to content, by rushing past the actual experience of the work to explain what it signifies. What she wanted instead was an erotics of art — a criticism that attended to form, sensation, and surface, that trusted the encounter before reaching for the explanation. This is the most important argument for children making films and stories: your perceptual experience of the work is the primary data, not a puzzle to be decoded by someone with more authority. Sontag was not anti-intellectual — she was the most rigorous intellectual of her generation. She was anti the use of intellect to defuse what art actually does to a body. The third pillar of the DoCR theoretical shelf alongside Brecht and Bazin — Brecht tells you what political performance should do, Bazin tells you what cinema's relationship to reality is, Sontag tells you to trust your own experience before you let anyone explain it away.