Against Interpretation By Susan Sontag

What happens when you stop translating art into something else

I spent years doing exactly what Susan Sontag argued against. You encounter a painting, a film, a piece of music, and your first instinct is to crack it open like a nut — find the hidden message, the symbolic layer, the real meaning underneath. It's a habit most of us pick up in literature classes and never shake. Sontag wrote Against Interpretation By Susan Sontag as a direct challenge to that reflex. The essay collection came out in 1966, and the title piece is only about twenty pages. But it changed how I approach work in visual media and criticism. The core argument is simple enough to state and hard enough to actually practice. Art doesn't need to be interpreted. It needs to be experienced. The obsession with extracting meaning from artwork — treating the surface as a coded message waiting to be decrypted — is a cultural habit that drains art of its power.

What Sontag Actually Says

She was responding to two dominant schools of mid-century criticism: Freudian interpretation, which treats art as a window into repressed desires, and Marxist interpretation, which treats art as an expression of economic and class conditions. Both approaches share the same move — they insist that the real content of a work lies beneath its form. The form is just packaging for something deeper. Sontag calls this "the hermeneutic program" and she's blunt about it. She writes that interpretation is "the revenge of the intellect upon art." It's a way of taming the unfamiliar, of making art safe and digestible by reducing it to something your mind can already handle. The problem isn't that interpretation is worthless. The problem is that it's become the default mode, crowding out the possibility of actually feeling something when you encounter a work. Her alternative is a phrase she repeats: "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." That doesn't mean sexual. It means a sensory, direct engagement with the work. How does it look? How does it move? What does it do to you in the moment? Not what does it mean, but what does it do.

I hit a wall with this when I was working on a project analyzing a series of 1970s underground films. Every time I watched a scene, my training kicked in and I started reaching for symbolic readings — this shadow represents the protagonist's guilt, this color palette signals class alienation, this recurring object is a metaphor for repression. It was exhausting and it was completely missing the point of what those filmmakers were actually doing. They weren't encoding messages. They were building atmosphere, rhythm, texture. The films worked on a physiological level before they worked on an intellectual one. The workaround was straightforward once I recognized the pattern. I stopped asking "what does this mean?" and started writing down "what is happening to me while I watch this?" I tracked my own reactions — where I felt tense, where I zoned out, where the pacing made me uncomfortable, where the imagery felt electric. That exercise alone took the analysis from about three hours per film down to roughly forty minutes and produced something far more honest.

The Practical Edge Cases

Here's where it gets complicated. Sontag's argument works brilliantly for visual art, film, dance, and music — forms where the sensory experience is primary. It breaks down when you're dealing with literature, particularly dense modernist or postmodernist fiction. A novel is fundamentally structured around language, and language is a system of signs. You can't fully escape interpretation with a novel the way you can with a painting. I learned this the hard way when a colleague asked me to apply Sontag's framework to a close reading of Joyce's Ulysses. I tried to sit with the text purely sensuously — the rhythm of the sentences, the texture of the words — and I got about four pages in before my brain started automatically generating symbolic mappings. It's not a moral failing on your part. Language works that way. The essay does its best work when you're talking about visual media. Another limitation people don't always mention: Sontag's position assumes you have the freedom to engage with art purely aesthetically. That's a privilege. When you're a member of a marginalized group, art about your experience often carries informational weight that can't be set aside. A film about police brutality isn't just a formal experiment. The content matters. Sontag acknowledged this tension but didn't resolve it cleanly.

How to Actually Practice It

You don't need a special method. You just need to interrupt your default response. The next time you encounter an artwork and feel the itch to explain it, sit with that itch for a moment. Write down what you're tempted to interpret, then deliberately describe the work in physical terms instead. What shapes do you see? What colors dominate? How does the pacing work? What's the texture? Who or what is the work addressing directly? For films specifically, I've found that watching without pausing and without taking notes forces you into a different mode of attention. Pause-and-take-notes becomes interpretation-engineering. Keep watching. Let the experience accumulate. Then write about what actually happened to you during the viewing. Soundtracks and music present an interesting case. Sontag herself wrote warmly about rock music and disco, arguing that these forms resist interpretation because they operate so directly on the body. That's still useful advice today. If a song makes you move before it makes you think, that's not a lesser response. That's the point.

What to Do Instead of Interpretation

Sontag doesn't leave you with nothing. She points toward description — careful, detailed, rigorous description of what a work actually contains. Description is the middle ground between blind feeling and reductive interpretation. It asks you to pay attention without immediately converting what you see into abstract concepts. The essay also opens the door to form-focused criticism. You can analyze composition, pacing, sound design, color theory, structure — all of which are legitimate critical activities that don't require treating the artwork as a puzzle to be solved. This is where Sontag's own film criticism, especially her work on Visconti and Pasolini, becomes a model. She writes about how films feel and how they work, not what they secretly mean. If you want a fuller picture, the rest of the 1966 collection is worth reading. "Notes on Camp" remains one of the most useful essays ever written about aesthetic judgment outside the traditional framework. "On Style" treats style as something substantial rather than decorative. But the title essay is the one that changed the trajectory of cultural criticism in a way you can still trace through contemporary writing about art and media.

The uncomfortable truth is that interpretation is harder to give up than Sontag makes it sound. We've been trained to believe that finding meaning is the highest form of engagement with art. Sontag's argument is that this belief is a habit, not a necessity, and habits can be broken. You just have to start by noticing when you're doing it and choosing to stop.