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Originally Posted by blp
Um...dunno - generalisation in general? And aren't you generalising a bit yourself? You could equally say, 'What is more particular than sex?' I'm not convinced either statement would be terribly to the point, generalisations that they are.
Generalizing!! You bet I was. Communication, of any sort, is generalizing so that others will understand a person experience.
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In her opposition to the hermeneutic filters of Freudianism and Marxism, Sontag seems to be taking umbrage at generalisation in particular and to be arguing for critique based less on meaning than matter, if such an opposition can be said to be valid. To whit, she's interested in talking about why, or, probably more to the point, how a work of art matters to us experientially without the distantiating and generalising filter of ananlysis.
It was my impression that she was more opposed to the filters than to interpretation. Understanding a work of art is a matter of particularizing a generalization that was produced by another. Applying a filter created by another does not help in that process.
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Your point, that every act of reading involves interpretation, pedantic as it is, does seem to present the biggest problem in understanding Sontag's essay as it would apply to literature. She begins by talking about Platonic and Aristotelian theorisations of art as mimetic, i.e. simulations of things they are not, and suggests that she's trying to move the debate away from this. But how can she when she's dealing with representational media such as literature or film? The word 'hand', is not a hand, just a representation of one - an arbitrary one at that, that not everyone would be able to read. Even a picture of a hand might not be immediately readable by someone from a culture that doesn't have a pictorial tradition .
It was my impression that she didn't like the Platonic and Aristotelian theorisations of art as mimetic, but she recognised that they were reasonable. Any semiotic system is built from signs that have been assigned meanings that are generally agreed upon. That is what any representation is. Without the agreement that a sign is a representation understanding can't exist, except with telepathy, in which case there is no repesentation.
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It might be a thread that pulls the whole jumper apart, but if so, let's leave it for the moment and stick to what she's actually saying, which I think is fairly straightforward. She wants to accept the inherent mimetic qualities of many artforms and concentrate on what they are manifestly representing and not some other thing that they might be said to be representing, which is not present in the artwork. The tank in Bergman's The Silence is a tank, not a symbol of a phallus, in her schema. The material of the tank already matters enough - even as representation - and perhaps it matters too much for some people and that's why they start chattering away, analysing it.
If she did mean that, then there might be a problem, because in much art and literature there are second degree symbols; one sign standing for a different sign. If she wants to ignore those, she would miss a great deal. There are also examples of overinterpretation. If she was railing against interpretations of things that simply aren't there, then that's fine.
