The Counterrevolution of Susan Sontag

...a doomed country...

...for then she would seem merely a curiosity...

...But if the new radicalism is indeed emphasizing more and more variety and possibilities, even to the point of anarchic excess, Miss Sontag can hardly be said to advocate that...

...It is much more usual for her to sound like one of the last world-historical professors standing at the last brink of the world-process...

...Miss Sontag disdains this many-headed monster of politics and culture...

...This very versatility, far from diluting her impact, has made her a kind of high arbiter of the new taste as it spreads boldly in all directions...

...She perpetrates again a familiar nineteenth-century effort and style...

...they too usually assume that if Miss Sontag spreads a modish irresponsibility and nihilistic attitude, it is because she gets carried away by enthusiasm for everything new, adventuresome, and liberating...

...One would have thought that the difference between socialism and fascism, or liberalism and conservatism, went beyond sensibility into the particular "repertoire of choices" one made or chose not to make...

...Is it utterly malicious and dense to wonder if precisely the least liberal governments in modern times have not indeed been most impatient with that nuisance "content," and most in favor of a transcending "form...

...Her writing is a marvel of a position pre-fortified against critical attack by its use of so many cherished "modern" hopes and positions...

...There Miss Sontag is in full voice, provoked to a nihilistic mood by the sheer complexity of our lives and traditions, our cultural and political difficulties...

...It is plain that most of the famous modern intellects have sought to bring to intellectual dignity the whole range of whatever is everyday, or low, or banal, or buried, or inarticulate —Hegel, or Marx, or Nietzsche, or Freud...

...it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions" that have poisoned life...

...Aesthetic matters are one thing, content and morality are another, she cries out...

...This can be seen most easily in her refusal to treat the complicated American political scene as it it were complicated at all...

...Miss Sontag repeats this effort in our time quite as if it had never happened before...

...Or, it is "increasingly the terrain of specialists" and is "not open to the generally educated...

...But Miss Sontag again wants politics and morality to adjust themselves to her aesthetics...

...She bubbles into denunciation of our "national psychosis" and paints horror cartoons about sparerib chawing John Wayne in the White House...

...This is of course silly, melodramatic, and intellectually disgraceful but it isn't what distinguishes Miss Sontag from many spokesmen for apocalypse around her...

...Only the scale has changed...

...Just as her aestheticism is elevated and uncontaminated, so the new radicalism is similarly untroublesome...

...looks a good deal less pleasing and self-evidently worthy of perpetuation...

...Despite her claim to be on the Left and her urgent calls for a new cultural sensibility, she seeks neither political results nor cultural reinvigoration of any sizable part of society, as did Yeats's literary societies or the modern Hebrew language movement...

...Marx admired that royalist and Catholic novelist Balzac, because of Balzac's devotion to his lumpy, bumpy world...

...America is a "doomed country," founded on a "genocide," and it has the "most brutal system of slavery in modern times...

...Her real thrust is not toward the radicalism slowly evolving among the young, but rather against the radicalism already evolved among the "older" generation...

...What is intriguing about her violently stated views is that she does not even think in terms of putsches or exile...

...Quoting McLuhan approvingly, she affirms that for most of the "creative artists of our time"—but not for novelists, those clods who cling outrageously to outmoded content—the "old ethical order" is not a genuine order...

...Novels which still disgracefully stress character and content in an old-fashioned way, or politics, with its ward-heelers, dumb congressmen, sly Presidents, and infuriating backing and filling— all this violates and resists what should be...

...She tells us, for example, that the threatening "Mongol hordes" frighten her much less than the damage done by the "idealism," the "magnificent art," and the "sense of intellectual adventure" of Western man...

...But it is consistent of Miss Sontag to applaud the young who see "beyond Freud and Marx," not because Freud and Marx might be wrong but because these two "finks" remained `old-fashioned" about how fast mankind could change...

...And the difficulties begin precisely here...

...But along these lines, a whole series of uncomfortable questions suggest themselves: isn't it legitimate to ask about the possibly horrifying political use of "programming sensations," or of that morally immune elite of "specialists" from which the generally educated man is excluded...

...But the more one reads her, the more one sees that she has indeed only a few interests with a single but hot focus that lends an energy to everything she writes about...

...And looking over the list of subjects she writes about, who would dare doubt tnatt l nose who dislike her grant her the pretensions of her stance...

...In that confusing variety of movements and moods lumped together as "the new radicalism," no one is more visible than Susan Sontag...

...It is Miss Sontag's strategy to equate her version of "modernism" with all good things in culture and politics, and also with the radicalism of the young...

...The essence of a number of Miss Sontag's essays re-enact her struggle to bring these two incompatibles together, but when the dust raises, "form" always wins and morality bows its head, submitting to being "redefined" in terms of such aesthetic form...

...This would be reason enough for taking a close look at her...

...It is more accurate to say she preaches the opposite of self-indulgent individualism...

...This is Miss Sontag on solid if entirely conventional ground, fighting off reductionists and dogmatists, urging the view that enriched sensibility can nourish our capacity for moral choice and action by nourishing our disinterestedness, attentiveness, and feelings...

...It is crude, gross, vulgar—intransigently plural...

...Characteristically, Miss Sontag nowhere makes clear what she means by the "old" ethical order...

...In one sense, it is an inversion of the Marxist view in the 30's that art should mount the barricades...

...These two views are not contradictory as Miss Sontag presents them: they support each other since both are in flight from the banality of our everyday problems...

...In part, she is trying to provoke what she calls her timid elders into scolding her for irresponsibility...

...There is the peculiar sight of a "socialist" explaining morality as only a "form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices...

...How sure can Miss Sontag feel—with our century in mind—that her aesthetic purposes can be guarded against political application...

...None of this would be of any importance here if Miss Sontag were indeed mainly an aesthetician...

...It is an aesthetic view of politics, concerned with "consciousness" but avoiding politics itself...

...What that means is filled in by her next sentence: "That being a socialist and taking certain drugs (in a fully serious spirit: as a technique for exploring one's consciousness, not as an anodyne or crutch) are not incompatible, that there is no incompatibility between the exploration of inner space and the rectification of social space...

...The "new sensibility" must reject any notion of being a criticism of life, says she, and instead be thought of as a ". . . creative community of artists and scientists engaged in programming sensations, uninterested in art as a species of moral journalism...

...That focus is a narrow "modernism" aggressively sitting in judgment on culture, aesthetics, morals, and politics...

...Such redehning of morality is typical...

...Miss Sontag never wearies of reminding us how infuriatingly slow people are to embrace the radical changes that would make them better...

...Many of Miss Sontag's admirers take her at her word that she is open and liberal in her views and sympathies...

...Or, "art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility...

...This distinguishes Miss Sontag's brand of radicalism from the various other kinds around...

...Nevertheless, Miss Sontag goes on tirelessly reinventing the same "revolutionary crisis" in art, excitedly informing her readers of the dangers which follow from interpreting art dogmatically or according to irrelevant and external "moral" standards...

...But it happens to be the raw material both of culture and politics...

...Miss Sontag accepts no excuses, compromise or moderation, either culturally or politically...

...What she means perhaps is simply any of the older insistences on a fairly clear morality of any kind...

...But Miss Sontag doesn't have only this in mind...

...What she means by that unworthy "local history" turns out to be "Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government," and the like...

...But, as Miss Sontag rebuts, "Let the professors be the caretakers of this indeed precious legacy, and discharge the obligations of piety...

...and because they have no political consequences, she can inflate them rhetorically without limit or restraint...

...Whatever she says to the contrary, Miss Sontag's quarrel with morality and content is not simply an aesthetic matter, but the highroad to her kind of political and cultural radicalism...

...The "white race" here turns out to mean the West in toto, and Miss Sontag caps her cries by proclaiming America (as the culmination of the West...

...This can seem like a fresh critical position, as long as one does not know or has forgotten that it is a battle long since fought and won in all-bututter triumph: Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Picasso are by now almost household classics...

...For socialism, if it is not to lose meaning entirely, seems rooted in a fairly specific historic "content" and "morality," and these don't easily square with Miss Sontag's "pure" aestheticism...

...But she goes on to try it: "from a world-historical perspective, that local history which some young people are repudiating (with their fondness for dirty words, their peyote, their macrobiotic rice, their Dadaist art, etc...

...She brings to our political and cultural difficulties mainly an older and narrowly aesthetic cure...

...it has become less gross, and what it sacrifices in discursive explicitness it gains in accuracy and subliminal power...

...She certainly seems to mean what she says...

...what does suit her is called "form," or the "new sensibility," or the "extension of sensation...

...Both aesthetically and politically, Miss Sontag is counterrevolutionary: she speaks only for form...

...Nor does this kind of ranting portray very well Miss Sontag's typically pedantic manner—and this deserves some attention because she has become accepted by many as a serious intellectual guide...

...The political usefulness of such a view is not an issue, for there is none...

...For her own desire is to bring to us a different kind of Puritanism—one empty of content, pure, severely beautiful, enriched with refined sensibility, but invulnerable and finally indifferent or even hostile to morality with its discomfiting need to choose particularly and tentatively in this sleepy, meaty world...

...It intrudes itself sloppily and demandingly everywhere, insisting on recognition and upsetting many artistic and theoretic applecarts...

...At first signt, Miss Sontag's wide interests make it hard to grasp her political views very cieariy...

...Politics with Miss Sontag isn't anything at all, and the same must be said about culture outside the high, pure confines of her aesthetic "transparency" and programmed sensations...

...With Miss Sontag, it is still this, plus the effort to aestheticize politics...

...True enough, but it doesn't help Miss Sontag's case...

...For she ignores the unmistakable intention and achievement of that revolutionary artistic movement to go beyond "form," to include anything and everything, the crudest content, as if it were worthy of the highest art...

...In some of the fin-de-siècle painters and poets, the effort was to depoliticize aesthetics...

...So far, even Plato wouldn't disagree...

...She can admit therefore that it is hard to "assess life on this planet from the world-historical perspective...

...She does not choose the first, and thus far America affords no possibility of the second...

...What is interesting in her thought is not what she has to say about the groping experiments among the radical young—many others describe that phenomenon with more detail, care, and insight...

...Her model for radicalism of all kinds is taken from only one side of the revolution in art...

...The unconditioned sprawls fieshily and messily all over, prosaic, dull, unattentive, passionately avid —it offends Miss Sontag...

...For the socialist of that era, it was often the case that art was approved if it fit the right political line...

...Yet it ought to be said rignt away that Miss Sontag's irresponsibility springs not from an excess of enthusiasm about new possibilities, but rather from a resistance to so much plurality and untrammeled liberality...

...What then does Miss Sontag suggest as a politically useful course to follow if one does accept her apocalyptic views of America...

...In her view, these two radical approaches naturally go hand in hand...

...There is, she says "a profound concordance between the sexual revolution, redefined, and the political revolution, redefined...

...Maybe not...

...For her, content is "today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism...

...she is also a selfproclaimed socialist, and she is popularly seen as such...

...One wonders, to use Miss Sontag's words cited earlier, what the "profound concordance" could then be between politics and the triumph of aesthetic form...

...If one tries to understand Miss Sontag and her general place in the culture of the moment, such passages should be kept in mind, even if not necessarily emphasized...

...Politics is nonsense, and culture too, when Miss Sontag argues that "the white race is the cancer of human history...

...She is in every symposium on Vietnam or America run by Partisan Review, but also in Mademoiselle on culture in general, and everywhere else on the film or the latest French aesthetic or anthropology...

...Politics must be an art of the possible or it isn't anything, said the Greek...

...of Miss Sontag's methods: mere discursive explicitness is turned into subliminal power . . . and then even gains in accuracy...

...Despite her strongly voiced calls for a very radical politics, her final teaching is indifference or even hostility to both radicalism and politics...

...Wnat does matter is the political danger of such an idea...

...Hasn't Miss Sontag herself protested prophetically against the destructive rationality of Western man...

...Freud and Marx, says Miss Sontag, are "Puritans...

...Having one's sensorium stretched and challenged hurts...

...Two sentences from her "America" statement illustrate the procedure beautifully...

...She has the single-minded stridency of a new puritan whose head is filled with severe, high, clean order...

...She scorns those "tired" radicals over a certain age who still think in terms of strikes and ballots, the UAW or the New Deal or even Lenin...

...But again, Miss Sontag's apparent extremism is really a false scent, diverting attention from her principal views...

...Miss Sontag is—to use the language of the older folks—what used to be called a counterrevolutionary...

...She rejects any political cure for political troubles—whether those cures come from the Left, Right, or Middle...

...and neither pity nor fear can halt her, nor frivolous backsliding amuse her: If hedonism means sustaining the old ways in which we have found pleasure in art (the old sensory and psychic modalities) then the new art is anti-hedonistic...

...It is ironic that Miss Sontag should present herself as the champion of the modern in art...

...One might have thought that someone as committed to the Left and so solicitous of the young (whom she praises, for example, for wanting to be "beautiful to look at and touch as well as to be good"), would have more charity toward the sluggish mortal flesh of this world as it possibly moves toward something better—though as reluctantly as possible, to be sure...

...But instead of merely retreating into art-for-art's-sake, she expounds a new political and cultural radicalism based on such an aesthetic...

...It is unprofitable to accuse Miss Sontag of having it both ways again, of finding civilization disgusting while embracing its high artistic visions...

...It is of course clear that with Miss Sontag's views about our present situation, hope for any cooperative political action, moderation, or useful compromise is impossible...

...In one way, "Philistinism" here means what any lover of artistic freedom would say about it—the wish to reduce art to some narrow view...

...For Miss Sontag, "Philistinism" means finally that morality—or culture and politics in its broad scope—has little inherent dignity...

...Needless to say, all varieties of politics are futile now...

...Around the turn of this century aestheticism was often an effort to find some solution to baffling political and cultural frustration by affirming purity of style and form...

...It is a mistake to see her as a spokesman for whatever might really be radical among these "new radicals...

...However much Miss Sontag cloaks herself in everything new and progressive or evokes the sacrosanct immunity of being young and sincere, when one looks twice one sees the odd case of a lady hiding behind someone else's skirts...

...Her inflamed statements, as it turns out, lead to no political action at all, since there is no politics available that might be adequate to them...

...Those who think of Miss Sontag as the champion of a new rampant individualism, of inchoate personal style and excess should ponder her constant enthusiastic praise for the aesthetic-engineer reformers of the culture...

...She first became prominent as a critic and polemicist of a "new" view of art which would be autonomous, "transparent," self-inhered and free from "mucky" content and morality...

...Any critique of her sort of intellectual promiscuousness must seem at the least intolerant, dense, and square—and Miss Sontag does not hesitate to let you know it...

...She wants to stay at this level of contemplativeness, attentiveness, and disinterest, uncommitted to specific moral or political choices...

...and the latter are warned to keep hands off...

...She cures its nuisance and presence by turning to the higher reaches of "form...

...That "otherwise" is fascinating...

...It is here that one can see why Miss Sontag should be called a counterrevolutionary...

...But there is a better reason: no one is more involved than she in what is most troubling and irresponsible in that newsy developing cultural taste and political attitude...

...but Paradise is described here, not the hard political work socialism should undertake on this earth...

...She comes on strong as a champion of experiment, openness, flexibility, and unrealized possibilities— to say nothing of love, youth, the Left—and it is certainly hard to argue with her without sounding a little cranky...

...Instead, she gives us a grossly simplistic account, as in her recent contribution to the Partisan Review symposium "What's Happening in America...

...for Miss Sontag, politics is approved if it fits the right aesthetic approach...

...Anything can be deposited there...

...But she is not only an aesthetic "radical...

...some socialist remodeling of institutions and the ascendence, through electoral means or otherwise, of better leaders won't really change anything...

...For the same reason, the radicalism of the young is a safe bet for Miss Sontag...

...This is in part a tribute to her own variety, for unlike many others, she is not easily blended into any particular wing or tendency...

...A reader's critical sense must be baffled when she starts out ail at once praising Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and bvlcLuhan, or SNCC and the Supremes anti r,merson and Thoreau, or socialism and optimism and pessimism, or programming sensations along with Dionysian depths...

...But though the "propounding of moral, social and political ideas" is not a legitimate part of art, she denies that she is therefore rejecting moral evaluation...

...That tone has become quite common lately (though it might be suggested that its introduction into American leftwing politics is something new...

...Whatever doesn't suit her pro gram is called "old," or worse, "morality," or worst of all, "content...

...Given her outbursts about American national psychosis and our cancerous super-power, Miss Sontag might seem faced with at least two grim but logical prospects: either exile or underground guerrilla action...