"against interpretation" is an essayessay
The essay is a genre in literature developed by montaigne, himself inspired by seneca and plutarch, as well as francis bacon.
david solway says that writing an essay is a r... by sontagsontag
susan sontag.
about interpretationinterpretation
interpretation is the act of making meaningness of any system that shows emergence. It is related to the concept of explanation.
In Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations, he uses John Sno....
by interpretation, i mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain “rules” of interpretation. directed to artart
all art is quite useless. – wilde
the greeks spoke of art as mimesis, mimicking nature. The German idealists (kant and friedrich schiller) saw art as a form of play.
art is..., interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the x, the y, the z, and so forth) from the whole work. the task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. the interpreter says, look, don’t you see that x is really— or, really means—a? That y is really b? That z is really c?
however, interpretation can also involve a synthetic act of connecting things together. Sontag claims that interpretation begins around the time of the stoicstoic
a stoic practices stoicism, the hellenistic philosophy founded by zeno of citium (c. 335-252 bc) who studied with plato's successors at the academy in athens. zeno taught at the stoa, meani...s.
Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning
The hermeneutics of suspicion (Freud, Marx) tell us to be suspicious of meanings from appearance. So we don't leave art alone, we have to incessantly prod and poke it and think about subterranean (or astrological) meanings, ignoring the earthly ones.
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
Sontag would prefer more attention to form.
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
Ultimately, there is a place for interpretation, I think. David Solway responds to Sontag:
Even at [interpretation's] worse, in its pedagogical or allegorical mode, it involves the presentation of ideas that may not have occurred to one and that – rejected, accepted, or modified – enrich the experience of a work of art. At its best, as it seems to me, its function is anamorphoscopic, disclosing views and perspectives previously unguessed at and lobbying, so to speak, for their integration.