Political art is not political (Sontag)

March 19 2026

The easiest and the laziest approach to art is to interpret its content psychologically or politically. "This is a symbol for this person's mental state," or, "this is a symbol for this real-world event." Maybe it is (as in, the author intended it), but I think it's boring; this is the level of analysis you find in online fandom. Susan Sontag says that interpretation happens when were dissatisfied with a work and we want to make it something else: "[interpretation] is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world--in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)"

Psychology

Sontag suggests in her essay, "the artist as exemplary sufferer," that psychology is a sort of secular manifestation of "the Christian tradition of introspection." The discovery of the self in Christianity is an ascetic one, as the discovery of the psychological self is one of suffering. Both disregard a superficial or illusive surface for the search of a deeper truth. This truth-seeking remains through the development of art, too, beginning from the Aristotelian artist-as-imitator who looks for a truth outside of themselves, to the modern artist-of-expression who looks for truth within themselves. Importantly, psychology interprets; unsettled by a dream, you can rely on the comforts of dream interpretation to make what's unfamiliar and scary into something understandable, digestible to the intellect. A thing that's hard to understand secretly hides something nicer, neater, truthier behind it.

In her essay "The death of tragedy," Sontag reiterates the ideas of Lionel Abel on metatheater. Tragedy -- like the oedipus rex that is greatly owed by psychoanalysis and so is greatly owed by psychology -- has gained too much credit for its origins in the ancient Greeks. It is rather the metaplay that has marked the development of western theater, that of self-conscious characters and of "leading metaphors stat[ing] that life is a dream and the world a stage." metatheater is found at the level of the surface, as opposed to the depths behind an un-self-aware Oedipus; Hamlet is self-conscious, he plays his roles, even a role in a play-in-a-play. "Achilles and Oedipus do not see themselves as, but are, hero and king."

The lead of a metaplay doesn't suffer for an ascetic's eventual heaven or for the relief of the therapy-subject that conquers their pain with reason. It's the suffering of a nightmare in which self-consciousness doesn't tend towards truth but a slipping further and further away from reality.

"the concern with insanity in art today usually reflects the desire to go beyond psychology. by representing characters with deranged behavior or deranged styles of speech, such dramatists as Pirandello, Genet, Beckett, and Ionesco make it unnecessary for their characters to embody in their acts or voice in their speech sequential and credible accounts of their motives." ("Marat/Sade/Artaud")

"[Robert Bresson] does not intend his characters to be implausible, I'm sure; but he does, I think, intend them to be opaque. Bresson is interested in the forms of spiritual action--in the physics, as it were, rather than in the psychology of souls. Why persons behave as they do is, ultimately, not to be understood. (Psychology, precisely, does claim to understand.)" ("Spiritual style in the films of Robert Bresson")

"all art tends toward the formal, toward a completeness that must be formal rather than substantive--endings that exhibit grace and design, and only secondarily convince in terms of psychological motives or social forces." ("godard's vivre sa vie")

Politics

A genre considered to be very much politically-charged is science fiction. It's easy for anyone to draw parallels between a work of science fiction and the real world; the wars are metaphors for real wars, the technology is metaphor for real technology, and the political leaders are metaphors for real political leaders. Sontag rather argues that it's all apolitical fantasy.

The essay "the imagination of disaster" argues that science fiction is a fantasy of moral simplicity. War can be fought heroically, nobly without moral problems because the enemy is entirely emotionless. Not only that, but, war is good, actually, because it fulfills the "UN fantasy" of a united world against a common enemy, an enemy that perfectly transcends the social order and reveals no contradictions within it. The technology used in this warfare will eliminate social conflict as well: "in these societies reasonableness has achieved an unbreakable supremacy over emotions. Since no disagreement or social conflict was intellectually plausible, none was possible."

Yet, at the same time, science threatens social unity. The mad scientist with a passion exceeding any utilitarian purpose demonstrates an anti-intellectual suspicion in the genre; the invading aliens are enemies because of the emotionless and strictly scientific order they want to impose on Earth. When science fiction recognizes the anxieties over science and technology, it only serves to neutralize them. The scientist-that-went-too-far isn't a product of their social conditions but an anti-social individual that will lose to the utilitarian collective. The too-emotionless aliens don't come from anything even close to us, anti-social behavior again is the cause of all conflict. The conventions of science fiction fail their apparent social criticism.

"Lukacs is committed to a version of the mimetic theory of art which is simply far too crude. A book is a "portrayal"; it "depicts," it "paints a picture"; The artist is a "spokesman." The great realist tradition of the novel does not need to be defended in these terms." ("the literary criticism of georg lukacs")

Besides for the reason of psychological comfort, interpretation allows art to be justified: beneath a work's apparently useless surface is the important function of revealing what it means to be human or a greater involvement in social progress. I already talked about this utilitarian insistence in art in this blog and how miserable I think it all is. The first time I read "against interpretation" a couple years ago, it was scandalizing to me that art might not be an ultimate means of self-expression or social commentary. now, after watching the humanities' pathetic scrambles to prove itself useful to our miserable social order, a social order that absorbs any effort of change into the ultimate cycle of capital accumulation, Sontag's essay reads as common sense.