Sontag sez a few things on the idea of postmodernism

[Paul Mackin]

(from    Against Postmodernism, etcetera--A Conversation
    with Susan Sontag  by Evans Chan) 2001?

. . . .


 4. C: In the '60s, you were among the first to try to bridge the
    gap between high and low cultures. Now, after three decades,
    we've seen high culture, or the so-called canon, besieged by
    popular culture and multiculturalism. We have today a new
    sensibility that, depending on one's perspective, either
    surpasses or parodies the kind of sensibility that you heralded
    in the last essay of Against Interpretation (1966). We now live
    in an age of total eclecticism and global interpenetration,
    which many people, including myself, call the postmodern. So
    far, your reaction to postmodernism seems largely inimical. And
    you refused to allow the Camp sensibility that you helped make
    famous to be co-opted by the postmodernists because "Camp
    taste... still presupposes the older, high standards of
    discrimination" ("Writing Itself" 439).

 5. S: I never thought I was bridging the gap between high and low
    cultures. I am unquestioningly, without any ambiguity or irony,
    loyal to the canon of high culture in literature, music, and the
    visual and performing arts. But I've also enjoyed a lot of
    popular music, for example. It seemed we were trying to
    understand why that was perfectly possible and why that wasn't
    paradoxical... and what diversity or plurality of standards
    might be. However, it didn't mean abolishing hierarchy, it
    didn't mean equating everything. In some sense I was as much a
    partisan or supporter of traditional cultural hierarchy as any
    cultural conservative, but I didn't draw the hierarchy in the
    same way.... Take an example: just because I loved Dostoevsky
    didn't mean that I couldn't love Bruce Springsteen. Now, if
    somebody says you have to choose between Russian literature or
    rock 'n roll, of course I'd choose Russian literature. But I
    don't have to choose. That being said, I would never argue that
    they're equally valuable. But I was very struck by how rich and
    diverse one's experiences are. Consequently, it seems to me a
    lot of cultural commentators were lying about the diversity of
    their experiences. On the other hand, there are a lot of things
    in mass culture that didn't appeal to me, notably what's on
    television. It seems very non-nourishing, conventional, bland,
    trivial. So it wasn't a question of bridging the gap. It's
    simply that I saw a lot of simultaneity in my experiences of
    pleasure, and felt that most discourse about culture was either
    philistine or shallowly snobbish. So it wasn't this is "here,"
    and that's "there," and I can make a bridge. It was that I
    understood myself to have many kinds of experiences and
    pleasures, and I was trying to understand why that was possible,
    and how you could still maintain a hierarchical sense of values.

 6. This is not the sensibility that's called the postmodern--by the
    way, that's not the word I use or find useful to use. I
    associate postmodernism with leveling and with recycling. The
    word modernism arose in architecture. It has a very specific
    meaning. It meant the Bauhaus School, Corbusier, the box
    skyscraper, the rejection of ornament. Form is function. There
    are all sorts of modernist dogmas in architecture, which came to
    prevail not only because of their aesthetic values. There was a
    material support for these ideas: it's cheaper to build
    buildings this way. Anyway, when the term postmodernism began to
    be used across the field for all the arts it became inflated.
    Indeed, many writers who used to be called modern or modernist
    are now called postmodern because they recycle, use
    quotations--I'm thinking of Donald Barthelme, for instance--or
    practice what's called intertextuality.

 7. C: Yes, the way writers are being relabelled as postmodern is at
    times baffling. For example, I was startled when Fredric
    Jameson, whose work I greatly admire, cited Beckett--who for me
    is a terminal product of high modernism--as a postmodern author.

 8. S: Jameson is the leading scholar who has tried to make more
    sense of the category of postmodernism. One of the reasons I
    remain unconvinced by his use of the term is that I don't think
    he's interested in the arts. Not really. Not even in literature.
    He's interested in ideas. If he cared about literature he
    wouldn't have quoted--at great length--Norman Mailer. While you
    illustrate your ideas with quotations from novels, you're also
    implicitly suggesting to people that they read these books. I
    think that either Jameson doesn't know that Mailer isn't a very
    good writer, or that he doesn't care. Another example is when
    Van Gogh and Warhol are treated as equivalent by Jameson for the
    sake of theory-building, for fitting examples into his theory.
    That's when I get off the bus. In my view, what's called
    postmodernism--that is, the making everything equivalent--is the
    perfect ideology for consumerist capitalism. It is an idea of
    accumulation, of preparing people for their shopping
    expeditions. These are not critical ideas....



 9. C: However, in your long essay AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989),
    you characterized the current moment as "a... grateful return to
    what is perceived as 'conventions,' like the return to figure
    and landscape... plot and character, and other much vaunted
    repudiations of difficult modernism in the arts... the new
    sexual realism goes with the rediscovery of the joys of tonal
    music, Bouguereau, a career in investment banking, and church
    weddings" (166-67). I, for one, almost felt you were singing the
    praises of postmodernism.

10. S: Did you? That was certainly not my point. I thought I was
    being sarcastic.

. . . .


33. C: Yet, in retrospect, your book On Photography (1977) can be
    considered a pioneering work on postmodernity. For example, you
    said that the photographic taste is inherently democratizing and
    leveling--capable of abolishing the difference between good and
    bad taste. Photography, or the culture of images, has
    aestheticized tragedies and disasters, fragmented our world,
    replaced (virtualized?) reality, and instilled a sense of
    fatalism: "In the real world, something is happening and no one
    knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has
    happened, and it will forever happen in that way" (168). (That
    comment presaged Virilio's observation that our Past, Present
    and Future has been replaced by Fast Forward, Play and
    Rewind--the image of modern/postmodern man being that of a
    sitter with a remote.) For you, photography is the culmination
    of modernism and its undoing.

34. S: Yes, I suppose so. But again I don't think I need to use that
    term "postmodern." But I do think seeing the world
    photographically is the great leveler. And yet I'm puzzling a
    lot over the consequences of viewing disasters and the horrors
    of the world through photographic images. Does it anaesthetize
    us? Does it make us used to things? Does the shock value wear
    off? I don't know. Then there's a big difference between the
    still and the moving images. The moving image is very powerful
    because you don't know where it's going to go. In the last essay
    in On Photography, I talked about the experience I had in China
    watching an operation under acupuncture anaesthesia. I saw
    someone have most of his stomach removed because of a
    catastrophic ulcer. Clearly it worked. His eyes were open and he
    was talking and sipping some liquid through a straw. There was
    no way of faking that; it did work. The doctor said it tends to
    work well for the torso but not so well for the limbs, and
    doesn't work for some patients at all. But it worked for this
    one. I watched the operation without flinching, the cutting open
    of the abdomen, the huge ulcerous part of the patient's stomach,
    which looked gray as a tire. This was the first operation I had
    seen, I thought maybe I'd find it hard to watch, but I didn't.
    Then, six months later, I was in a movie theater in Paris
    watching Chung Kuo, Antonioni's China film, which has a scene
    showing a Caesarian delivery with acupuncture anaesthesia. The
    moment the abdomen of the pregnant woman was cut, I couldn't
    watch it. How strange! I couldn't watch the image, but I could
    watch the real thing. That is very interesting. There are all
    sorts of puzzles about what the culture of image is.


http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.901/12.1chan.txt