On Sontag

Writer Susan Sontag has died at age 71. She was a towering public intellectual who had the courage to consistently test the limits of coventional thought and strictures and to equally enrage the Right and the Left.

After the 911 attacks she was unfairly demonized by Sunshine Patriots as un-American, as a soft-headed leftist who had a weakness for terrorists. This because of her temerity in stating the obvious i.e. that the attacks on the WTC didn't just materialize out of the blue. She wrote in The New Yorker:

"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?...In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

Sullying Sontag for this postulation was, in itself, an act of cowardice. Sontag was hardly  a patsy for knee-jerk leftism. Indeed, she was among the first on the American Left --back in 1970-- to lambast fidel Castro for his persecution of writers.

In 1982, Sontag raised a storm at a New York Town Hall rally for the Polish Solidarnosc movement. Saying that Communism was but Fascism with a human face, Sontag angered the liberal audience by arguing that if anyone had read only The Nation or only the Readers Digest over the previous 20 years, the one who read the Digest would be be better prepared to understand the revolt in Poland.

During the 1990's Sontag made the Balkans and opposition to Milosevic's form of facsism her personal crusade, making serveral perilous visits to Sarajevo and -- somtimes alone among American intellectuals- calling for armed Western intervention.

The L.A. Times Sunday Book Review editor, Steve Wasserman writes a moving and comprehensive obituary of Sontag. Some of the key graphs:

Sontag wrote about subjects as diverse as pornography and photography, the aesthetics of silence and the aesthetics of fascism, Bunraku puppet theater and the choreography of Balanchine, as well as portraits of such writers and intellectuals as Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti.

Sontag was a fervent believer in the capacity of art to delight, to inform, to transform.

"We live in a culture," she said, "in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying."

In a Rolling Stone article in 1979, Jonathan Cott called Sontag a writer who was "continually examining and testing out her notion that supposed oppositions like thinking and feeling, consciousness and sensuousness, morality and aesthetics can in fact simply be looked at as aspects of each other — much like the pile on the velvet that, upon reversing one's touch, provides two textures and two ways of feeling, two shades and two ways of perceiving."

A self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist," Sontag sought to challenge conventional thinking.

Comments

[Susan]

From one Susan to another --

I will miss her dearly and was greatly saddened to hear of her death today. Thanks Marc, for the posting about her...

Mark, no. You quote too selectively, and the point is misdirected.

My (least) favorite passage from that Sontag piece:

- Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a "cowardly"
- attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free
- world" but an attack on the world's self proclaimed super-power,
- undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and
- actions?

Well Suzie, it was "cowardly" because it involved no challenge more masculine than slitting the throat of an unsuspecting stewardess.

There's nothing "self-proclaimed" about America's super-power status, which is universally acknowledged.

Also, I'd like to know WHICH "specific" alliances and actions she deems (would have deemed) responsible for this horrendous massacre?

And that's ONE SENTENCE. The rest of the piece collapses as readily.

It was in reading that letter from Sontag that I came to understand that New York intellectualism was frogwash, useless as a beacon for the challenges facing cilivilazation in the rest of my life.

[Cridland]

Sorry, that was me.

[Cridland]

Also, sorry for mispelling civi-millivanilli-zation. It's because of the rain.

[John Moore (Useful Fools)]

I have to agree with Cridland. Sontag was wrong to say that. Part of it was tautological (whatever we do has consequences...duh). But it failed to understand the critical issue: free and innocent human beings were attacked in a vicious and cruel manner, and that innocent humans - Americans and others - died not as a result of American policies, but because vicious cowards sent others to commit a vile act. Those others hardly needed much courage when they deeply believed that crashing those aircraft into towers full of people would instantly transport them to paradise.

They were attacking us because we were seen as evil in their twisted version of Islam, and because we were blocking their political ambitions to spread that version, by bloodshed, throughout the middle east and ultimately the world. And yes, they did attack because we are free, as liberty is against their values; they did attack our humanity, because it conflicts with their inhumane values; they did attack the free world and civilization because they wanted to create an unfree world without real civilization.

Sontag could not have been more wrong.

There were many things that could be said at the time. It is not as if Sontag said anything insightful or original or even non-obvious. She just had the bad taste to say it at a time that was inappropriate, and to include the standard left wing blame shifting to the United States.

But I guess only the right can be excoriated for being insensitive.

It reminds me of one of the big league civil libertarians whose first comment was "Oh no, what will this do to our liberties."

What a lousy perspective - just like Sontag's.

That she said a few other things against the leftist orthodoxy doesn't make her so great either. Whoopie. This person commented once in a while that the emperor had no clothes. I am not impressed.

The loss of Susan Sontag doesn't make my world any worse, except in the sense that the loss of almost any human life is sad.

[GMRoper]

Marc writes, "Sullying Sontag for this postulation was, in itself, an act of cowardice."

I respectfully disagree Marc. While I always enjoyed Sontag's writing, she was way off base with that paragraph. It was indeed "cowardly" to attack a non-military target full of totally innocent civilians going about their business. It was cowardly to plan the attack over "infidels" desecrating "holy" soil by the US being in Saudi Arabia. Such wanton slaughter of people for religions sake (bin Laden's self admitted reason) has no place in "protest." Besides my friend, what we have to deal with is not always reality, but our perception of reality and my perception of this bit by Susan Sontag was that she was way off base.

[reg]

I can't imagine that anyone would have suspected that Susan Sontag's death would make your world any worse, John M. Thanks for the confirmation, though.

Marc - good call on Sontag and her critics. The thing about Susan Sontag was that she wasn't particularly likeable. But I like her word, "desimplyfing". That she was...and whether her aim was always true, she always took her best shot as a "public intellectual", the likes of which we rarely see anymore.

I found her post-9/11 commentary jarring until I witnessed the rather hysterical reactions from, you know, ordinary Americans - like Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens. At that point I knew we needed some voices like hers that would risk cutting through the escalating orgy of self-congratulation on having endured a violent attack on our cities. The assault on Sontag was a mere harbinger of the deadening cynicism of a Beltway-centric conservative elite that saw 9/11 as the opportunity of a lifetime, grabbed the ball and ran with it. (Of course, as is now obvious, they took it upon themselves to mostly run in the wrong direction.)

[rosedog]

To me reading Sontag was like watching a great athlete. You don't have to like the person---or even their sport of choice---to appreciate the talent. Her intellect was muscular and daring.

By the same token, I admit never liked the New Yorker piece when I read it at the time. (Although I essentially agreed with the sentence you quoted that caused all the hubbub: "Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." Violent, sociopathic, morally reprehensible, fundamentalist sickos. Okay, I’m pretty down with that description. But, cowardly? No. Wrong use of the word.)

But I enjoyed the challenge posed by her thinking. And the vilification she received as a result of the piece was, as you said, cowardly. (By this I don't mean criticisms like those posed by Cridland, John M., and GM---all of which are merely honest and honorable disagreements---as opposed to the threats and abuse that were heaped on Sontag, and people like Barbara Kingsolver who wrote a similar---albeit much more humanistic Op Ed.)

Glad you wrote some about her, Marc.

[Mark Schubb]

The attacks on 9/11 were an abomination, indefensible by any human measure, and the only people to blame are those who funded it, plotted it, and did it. But Sontag was right to rattle cages in the rhetorical aftermath.

The "unsimplified" truth: the trade center and the pentagon were not random locations but highly symbolic targets. The murderers no doubt overcame fear to martyr themselves. And most sadly of all, their act of terrorism has proven to be wholly successful. They created terror in America. They changed the course of our democracy and radically redirected our attention and resources. And the righteous blowhards -- who leaped forward to advance that process for them -- have remade our way of life. They did with their fear mongering; ill-advised, ill-planned war; and by downgrading freedom in the name of security. They deserved to be challenged for their simplifications.

Sontag didn't expect it to be popular, or to be liked, or thanked. And certainly didn't expect most to agree. It was like the rest of her work. Courageous, dense, complicated, big thoughts, often before people are ready to think them.

Marc, Reg & Rosedog are right: the denunciations were cowardly and intended to help people not to think. While Sontag, first and foremost, always meant to make people think. Thanks for honoring her here.

[Ahmed]

The death of Susan Sontag reminds me of the eloquant tribute she paid to, among others, Rachel Corrie and all Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories. She did this in a speech delivered to the Yesh Gvul organisation, a group of Israeli officers and soldiers refusing to fight in the occupied torritories. Here an excerpt, its titled "Of Corage and Resistance" and was printed in the Nation. Her willingness to speak out agianst the Israeli military occupation ( a taboo in American political and social life) after witnessing first hand its brutality, encapsulates the vision and courage of Susan's life.Susan will be missed. I leave you here with her words.

"We are all conscripts in one sense or another. For all of us, it is hard to break ranks; to incur the disapproval, the censure, the violence of an offended majority with a different idea of loyaltyHere is what I believe to be a truthful description of a state of affairs that has taken me many years of uncertainty, ignorance and anguish, to acknowledge.

"A wounded and fearful country, Israel is going through the greatest crisis of its turbulent history, brought about by the policy of steadily increasing and reinforcing settlements on the territories won after its victory in the Arab war on Israel in 1967. The decision of successive Israeli governments to retain control over the West Bank and Gaza, thereby denying their Palestinian neighbors a state of their own, is a catastrophe - moral, human, and political - for both peoples. The Palestinians need a sovereign state. Israel needs a sovereign Palestinian state. Those of us abroad who wish for Israel to survive, cannot, should not, wish it to survive no matter what, no matter how."

[Cridland]

> the trade center and the pentagon were not
> random locations but highly symbolic targets.

How do you figure?

Let's say I decide to attack your family, and select as first target, um, say... your WIFE. And let's say I strike first to blind her, so that she can't defend herself further, and then go to break her knees, so that she can't go about the business of caring for you and your infant sons. Would there be anything "symbolic" about such assaults? Would the cleverness of wounding her pivotal capacities instruct you about the nuance and purposes of my complaint with you?*

I'd heard Sontag's name my whole life without caring about her any... Same as with Terry Bradshaw. In both cases, there was a body of work, mostly from the 70's, that sat waiting for investigation if I ever found the time, which wasn't likely. But the New Yorker 9/11 letter completely drained that curiousity.

Mostly because it was so STUPID. Consider her use of the word "specific" in the passage above. Could there be any doubt that she was actually speaking GENERALLY? Otherwise, she'd have LISTED some specifics... Which would have been fascinating. But she didn't, did she? Because she couldn't. And there was no ironic intent on her part.

So I think whatcha got here is a rattled old woman, out of her depth in the flow of events, trying to convince people to turn to wisdom of the intellectual in a time of new crisis... And bungling it so badly that the opposite truth is apparent: When the heat is on, this planet is not about brains.

You're right, her thinking was "dense." At least Bradshaw didn't pop up that week to lecture us on the importance of the forward pass.

*PS- This was rhetorical, and I presume you're not married.

[Cridland]

> the trade center and the pentagon were not
> random locations but highly symbolic targets.

How do you figure?

Let's say I decide to attack your family, and select as first target, um, say... your WIFE. And let's say I strike first to blind her, so that she can't defend herself further, and then go to break her knees, so that she can't go about the business of caring for you and your infant sons. Would there be anything "symbolic" about such assaults? Would the cleverness of wounding her pivotal capacities instruct you about the nuance and purposes of my complaint with you?*

I'd heard Sontag's name my whole life without caring about her any... Same as with Terry Bradshaw. In both cases, there was a body of work, mostly from the 70's, that sat waiting for investigation if I ever found the time, which wasn't likely. But the New Yorker 9/11 letter completely drained that curiousity.

Mostly because it was so STUPID. Consider her use of the word "specific" in the passage above. Could there be any doubt that she was actually speaking GENERALLY? Otherwise, she'd have LISTED some specifics... Which would have been fascinating. But she didn't, did she? Because she couldn't. And there was no ironic intent on her part.

So I think whatcha got here is a rattled old woman, out of her depth in the flow of events, trying to convince people to turn to wisdom of the intellectual in a time of new crisis... And bungling it so badly that the opposite truth is apparent: When the heat is on, this planet is not about brains.

You're right, her thinking was "dense." At least Bradshaw didn't pop up that week to lecture us on the importance of the forward pass.

*PS- This was rhetorical, and I presume you're not married.

[reg]

"When the heat is on, this planet is not about brains."

You know, that's one of the best rationales for the BushCo post-911 strategy I've read yet.

[too many steves]

I know little about Sontag but having now read obits, blog praise, and various criticisms it is clear to me that she exemplifies this rule (or is it simply a guideline?):

Loud Contrarian = Intellectual.

How else to explain these:

"The North Vietnamese genuinely care about the welfare of hundreds of captured American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets."

"The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality, and freaking out. … The increase of energy comes because they have found a new focus for it: community."

"To us, it is self-evident that the Readers Digest and Lawrence Welk and Hilton Hotels are organically connected with the Special Forces' napalming villages in Guatemala."

Marc, you do more in a single post to advance how we think about the way the world does and ought to work. My life is none the worse for being ignorant of Ms. Sontag.

[jim hitchcock]

Sorry, Cridland...your argument about symbolism just doesn't work.
An attack on the center of U.S. military isn't symbolic? How do you figure? How about the perceived target of the Pennsylvania plane, the White House? That wouldn't have been symbolic? I would argue that attacks on, say, Yankee Stadium, or perhaps Madison Square Garden, would have been more about random death than symbolism, as opposed to, say, Wall Street, which would indeed be a target with symbolic value, which would be more about economic disruption than random death.

[Cridland]

> ...rationales for the BushCo...

See, it's all about GWB. This is why the left earns no enthusiasm... They're as monomaniacal as the Impeach Clinton people were.

[Cridland]

Jim, EVERY ASSAULT is going to have symbolic value. But when blood actually spills --and we lost buckets on that day-- I'm immediately less concerned with the declamatory intrigues of it all. One doesn't kill thousands of people in a moment of articulation. The point is not whether the terrorists delivered death pointedly (a claim Sontag declines to substantiate) or randomly: The point is, they delivered death. Most Americans figured that out.

[Mark Schubb]

I do have a family. And if you did any of those things to the mother of my child I would do my enraged best to kill you. I am not Michael Dukakis.

Since when are acts of terror -- or acts of war --ever intended to "instruct about the nuance and purposes" of the complaint? That was never my point and your analogy is bogus.

[Cridland]

The point is Sontag's, and you're right, it's bogus.

Nice to have gotten on the record about the "specific" thing before Htichens did this morning:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2111506

[reg]

Actually,Cridland, it's all about the direction of the country. BushCo (the brand), if you hadn't noticed, has had a significant impact on the country I do indeed care about "monomaniacally" - virtually all of it has been negative unless one savors death and deficits. Prior to 9/11, GWB was a virtual nonentity - an opportunist with a lucky streak, a pedigree of sorts, a fairly mindless pre-fab agenda and ruthless handlers. BushCo benefited from 9/11 to a remarkable degree and they're the only Americans who were, I have absolutely no doubt, happy to have an historic opportunity handed to them. One might say they were "immediately concerned with the declamatory intriques of it all" - like how an attack by Islamists based in Afghanistan with cells reaching into Europe and America could be used to justify an old obsession, taking out Saddam. The current imbroglio was, quite clearly, totally unanticipated by Bush's Brain Trust. Given the speculative fiction that "justified" the invasion in the first place, the turn of events really should come as no surprise. (For an example of the utter cluelessnes that still drives the conduct of this war, read Col David Hackworth's column on the Mosul mess hall bombing. Herding troops into a high-school cafeteria environment in the midst of a guerrilla war runs counter to the most elemental rules of force protection. I've heard that point made twice now from guys with military experience, and it signifies that whoever is in charge in Iraq can't comprehend where they are and what they're up against. There's no excuse for degree of ignorance at this point, except that the alternative doesn't fit into the consistent and mostly wrong scenario that's been painted for the past two years by the politicians and ideologues in charge of the war. Disgusting, dangerous, deadly.)

The meme that "the left's" concern with George Bush is essentially personal, like Clintonmania, is a convenient device to assist the several layers of denial and dishonesty that has characterized the descent of contemporary conservatism into routine BushCo apologia. Of course a guy who didn't know who Mushareff was when he was seeking the presidency a year before 9/11 does make an awfully sweet, inviting target.

On Topic - I had no idea until reading an obit that referenced her "longtime companion" that Susan Sontag and Rolling Stone photog Annie Liebovitz were an item. The thought of those two together certainly adds another dimension to the concept of "gay".

[John Moore (Useful Fools)]

It is unfortunate this discussion takes place immediately on her death. I was angry at those who criticized Reagan during the mourning period, and here I attacked Sontag just after her death.

My comments above represent my views (and the Vietnam quote by "too many Steve's" reinforces them), but the timing is inappropriate.

[reg]

So the reasons al Qaeda attacked us weren't specific. Nor - Hitchens would have it in the Slate column referenced - were they general. I'm at a loss. Oh yeah...they were EXISTENTIAL. Bin Laden attacked us because of who we ARE.

Who are we ? Well, to get on the wrong side of the Islamofascists, we must be people who've consistently and historically put democratic values first in our dealings throughout the Muslim world.

Well, no, that's not really true.

Must be because we're the pro-homo, pro-feminist, hedonistic, baby-killing, secular infidels reviled by religious fanatics everywhere. Could it be that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were the only Americans who really GOT 9/11.

[Mavis Beacon]

Cridland – by ‘specific’ Sontag clearly means 9//11 was a response to policies not values. Perhaps in a longer piece she might have suggested some – though other authors have pointed to Israel-Palestine, economic & cultural imperialism (including feminism), and support for mideast dictators and war. An accounting of each policy would be a major undertaking, don’t take her unwillingness to do so as evidence that she condemns every mullah-offending policy. Sontag’s piece contests the notion, and more pointedly the purveyors of the notion, that our enemy’s grievances are simple and a-historical. If she isn’t clear enough in her denunciation of the terrorists themselves (Marc would have been more careful), that’s a failure I’ll attribute to her frustration with commentators who only talked about the evil killers and never tried to understand the context.

I was lucky enough to hear Susan Sontag speak at my college graduation two years ago. Her work merits disagreement but not dismissal. She always approached her own work with that same ethic.

[Mavis Beacon]

100,000 gone. Sobering.

http://www.thisislondon.com/news/articles/15630695?source=Evening%20Standard&ct=5

[Josh Legere]

Sontag showed courageous solidarity with the people of Sarajevo. She stayed in the city while it endured horrific shelling. She supported an intervention when most of the Left was caught in a knee-jerk anti-war position (I was at the time).

She may have lost her bearings from time to time, but she always got back on track. I will miss her work.