Under the Sign of Sontag

Susan Sontag was born January 16, 1933. I decided to put together a few words about her work, and why I keep returning to it — which you can read below. But first, I wanted to share this wonderful conversation that

Garth Greenwell

was kind enough to have with me, and which Foglifter published earlier this week:

Art involves a radical prioritization of objects of attention. Most importantly, art fixes our attention. Social media disperses it. You could substitute the word meaning for attention and the same things hold. Social media atomizes and disperses meaning, while art concentrates and fixes meaning. Art seems to me the opposite of social media. One argument Small Rain makes is that art is the remedy for the way that social media, and our online lives more generally, are degrading of our humanness itself.

We talked over the phone about Greenwell’s latest novel, as well as how synesthesia guides each of our writing processes. If you haven’t read Small Rain yet, let me try to convince you with this essay I wrote in September. It’s a book that’ll cast its spell all over you.

Now, speaking of the incantatory:

I realize, rereading that essay, how important Sartre has been for me. He is the model — that abundance, that lucidity, that knowingness. And the bad taste.

~ Susan Sontag

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She could make a theory out of a potato peel.

~ Herbert Marcuse

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Like most people who keep track of what they read, I tend to think of how the books I choose, at particular times, can set a tone. After years of sluggishness, I wanted 2025 to be energetic and sharp, and the first book of the year should rise to that standard. I went with a reliable choice: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, the second volume of Sontag’s journals, as edited by her son, David Rieff. It was my fourth time¹ passing through this period of her life, which includes, among several other titles, the publication of Against Interpretation, On Photography, and Illness As Metaphor — her three most influential and widely read books.

A week ago, after reading

kate wagner

’s incredible, sharp, and clear-eyed assessment of the writing industry, I realized that I tend to fall for the writers who know what they think and why they think it. This seems obvious, even tautological — of course “we” want writers who can articulate their own judgments — but finding one is so rare that it’s hard to believe most readers are looking for this quality, or even recognize it.

I always come back to Sontag, and I think this is why: her faculty of judgment, so crystallinely rendered throughout her work, motivates me to refine my own. Most recently, for

The Hobbyhorse

, I touched on her adversarial stance, how she picked apart weaknesses in ideas she was sympathetic to or causes she supported — a method of working most intellectual circles have never cared for, but which is especially rare in contemporary literary discourse. Most arguments, then as now, tend toward sports: you’re on a team, so be a team player.

Careful (or even casual) attention to honest, flexible criticism betrays this as a problem of agency. From “It Doesn’t Have to Be Stupid”:

This, to me, is Sontag’s importance; this is the kind of intelligence her body of work leaves to contemporary readers nearly two decades after her death. In her drive toward an ever-complicating heterodoxy; in her devotion to “the normative virtues of the intellect,” which includes “its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims” and “the rights it accords, alongside passion, to tentativeness and detachment”; and in her sincere belief that even our most fervent ideas and political projects are forever worthy — and deserving — of exacting criticism, revision, and reevaluation, she reminds readers who feel trapped in a fragmented, stupid, and reductive culture that it’s always possible to act.

Sontag loved an idea. “I rush about the world,” she lamented of her various friendships, “raiding other people’s wells to bring back my buckets + pour all these contributions into my super-well.” Her taste for lists and her “interest in everything” point to an acquisitive, even imperial personality². But all this experience and knowledge would never “add up” the way it does in the work of Marx or Hegel or Freud (or in the op-eds of most NYT columnists, for that matter). Despite the way her books talked among themselves; despite conclusions contradicting, consciously, those she’d made in previous books, Sontag never strove toward a total system. She loved a theory, but loathed an ideology. The former is what the mind wields as a tool; the latter is what wields the mind, what bends it to its will.

When Benjamin Moser’s (flawed) biography came out a few years ago, I took the opportunity to illustrate, as best I could, how so much of Sontag’s work can be “permanently contemporary.” For Longreads, I used On Photography as an example:

Reading On Photography in 2019 is important not merely because humankind will upload nearly two trillion photographs in 2020, but because our primary day-to-day experience with each other as human beings has been shattered into an ongoing incoherence of images. Social media is a surrealistic environment that juxtaposes photographs of dying children against a snarky Wendy’s advertisement, a racist remark from the president against a friend who wants a book recommendation. Individual users curate their personalities into personae, clipping parts of themselves or their lives they’d prefer others not see. In short, we have learned to present ourselves as images, to see one another as images. On social media — the primary method by which most people in capitalist nations experience one another every day — we are discontinuous with ourselves and with others; our “friends” resemble a catalogue of images to consume, reject, or discard […] In this capitalism-of-seeing, we rob ourselves of the consciousness that human beings exist continuously in time, and that our beliefs, opinions, desires, and deeds shift accordingly.

This bridge, from photography to social media (by way, crucially, of television), is what makes Sontag — and specifically On Photography but also her earlier comments on Surrealism — indispensable to any critique against the forms of social media that influence the content, the substance, of our lives (not to mention our politics). Many academics have touched on this phenomenon, but so few writers have approached with such clarity, such style, how nefariously and pervasively we are invited to participate in our own diminishment.

my Sontag collection

While that rare creature, a famous intellectual, Sontag abhorred the reductions that come with celebrity. One of the most photographed authors in history, she refused to let anyone turn her into an image. Notoriously, this led to dismissive, if not vicious, responses whenever a fan asked her about “Notes on Camp” or other “sixties essays” from Against Interpretation — essays she began to distrust once other people adopted her arguments and began taking them “too far.” Strangely, it’s Sontag’s celebrity that makes it easy for me to overindulge in her mind. Had she been lesser known in her lifetime, which ended in a digital-but-still-very-analog 2004, the availability of interviews — including radio and TV appearances — as well as speeches, readings, and lectures, would be scant. Her only peer, in several respects, with a similar media afterlife is Edward Said. This fame makes it easy for me to listen and re-listen³ to certain lectures and conversations (the 1964 lecture on classical pornography is my favorite) while I’m doing the mundane work of living — cooking, lifting weights, driving out of town, tidying the house. She (along with Said, Baldwin, and, despite his lack of style, Chomsky) gives me a familiar intelligence that helps me remember what I’m after, in my work — as well as helps me learn, I hope, from her mistakes, her misjudgments.

This aversion to celebrity also helps explain her preference, later in life, for fiction. When The Volcano Lover appeared in 1992, she told an interviewer that, “I identify with everybody in the novel. I think that’s what a novelist does. You have to identify with everybody because you have to see the humanity of everybody.”⁴ Fiction — a narrative art — worked against the confines the image sensibility by unfolding or unspooling a life, a consciousness, in a way that a picture cannot.

These distinctions — theory and ideology; agency and passivity; narrative and image; art and entertainment; time and space — are the strangely dichotomous tributaries feeding the river of Sontag’s pluralistic judgment. But as I’ve said elsewhere, the word “and” (as opposed to “versus”) is key to each of them; it keeps their value sets attenuated, nimble — available for any application or revision. Morals, to use a rather weighted example, are a form of ideology from which many can and do benefit. This doesn’t mean that morals are rigid or closed to theories, to challenge; it simply acknowledges the created-ness of morality — its social and contractual nature, as I wrote last week. A writer who knows what they think and why can bring their judgment against certain forms of morality, be it in defense or condemnation, just as they can bring that judgment against any other aspect of the world. Writing, for these writers, is the translation of judgment into rhetoric, and sometimes into literature — each a social act which proposes a public. Conversely, a writer who relies on the thoughts of others — on clichés, on slogans, on “common sense,” or perhaps most insidiously on attention or validation, on allowing a form of discourse to shape the content of their thoughts — has no judgment to bring, nothing to say, and no public to believe in.

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1. When Image Control came out in 2021 — marketed as “Susan Sontag meets Hanif Abdurraqib” — an astute interviewer noticed her presence throughout the book, and wondered about her overall influence upon the project. I replied that, “for a few years now, Sontag has been my little bump of coke. When my attention flags or I get tired or feel stupid, I turn to one of her books — the second volume of her journals is particularly ‘pure’ in this regard — and I feel reinvigorated, reenergized.”

2. “Trip to Hanoi” and various notes on traveling in China indicate the extent to which Sontag was sympathetic but not sensitive to non-European cultures.

3. Even to this one, which I feel like I’ve almost understood — probably because Sontag speaks French like it hurts.

4. “Everybody” of course, doesn’t seem to include fans who’ve come to see you read your work.