The red badge of authenticity: a review of Regarding the Pain of Others

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Peter Wohlheim

Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan SONTAG. New York., Picador, 2003, 131 pages/$11.00

    "War is the father of all things"--Heraclitus

The era of mass media has allowed certain women to establish unique niches for themselves as arbiters of taste, fashion and morality. Operating outside of, or apart from, the heavy male hitters of academe and other venues of institutionalized aestheticism and comportment, figures such as the still authoritative Martha Stewart, Julia Childs, Dear Abby, Miss Manners and Doctor Joyce Brothers have brought Modernism to the masses by offering advice, solace, and in the case of someone like Oprah, the elevation of a folkish sensibility into what used to be called middle-brow taste. No longer confined to the private salons and drawing rooms of their eighteenth and nineteenth century predecessors, these women have connected especially well with audiences left confused by rapid changes in technology, social and sexual mores, politics and family life--audiences unanchored to either working class traditions or the spiritual stability and inner peace that only old money can buy.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

To be sure, few of these doyennes have set about to position themselves in the upper reaches of the cultural stratosphere quite so self-consciously as Susan Sontag. Essayist, novelist, playwright and short story writer, reviewer, even filmmaker, Sontag has become the closest that the field of American belles-lettres has to what the French used to call a maitre de pensee, someone of the stature of a Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault or Jacques Lacan, someone who must be read less for pleasure than out of sheer obligation. Publishing at a steady if unprolific clip, Sontag now appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, as the cosmopolitan intellectual become accessible, commenting on a range of contemporary concerns that move well beyond the field of high art. She has taken on the persona of what the ancient Roman republic would have recognized as a "censor," a guardian of collective taste and morality, a public intellectual, and as such, the member of an endangered species whose distinguished predecessors have include John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, Christopher Lasch, Robert Jay Lifton and her contemporary Noam Chomsky. Now largely replaced by media pundits or credentialed talking heads on TV news specials, special interest think-tank ideologues and technical specialists, public intellectuals once functioned, if not flourished, under conditions which now seem obsolete, i.e. a literate audience, academic careerism and hyper-specialization, and above all, a contemporary suspicion of all claims to moral certainty. Still, Sontag maintains a remainder of that niche for herself so that reading her almost satisfies on the level of pure nostalgia.

The traditionally tight-knit community of fine art and documentary photography has generally held Sontag at a suspicious arm's length, when it deals with her at all. Sontag is not 'one of us,' not someone who has ever worked as a photographer, ever published or exhibited, someone who certainly knows how to pose for a portrait but has no apparent knowledge of or interest in telling one f/stop from another. Even Beaumont Newhall and John Szarkowski came trailing with clouds of darkroom fumes behind them, A.D. Coleman was semi-hip, and Andy Grunberg impressed one as dour but still sympathique. But Sontag operates out of a decidedly European-inflected literary sensibility, and she has morphed from the free-spirited, liberating aesthete of Against Interpretation (1966) into the perceived slash-and-burn antagonist of On Photography (1977). Nor is she easy to pigeonhole. For example, Sontag has never overtly identified herself with any kind of programmatic feminism, preferring to position herself well above the fray while alluding to decidedly feminist themes in her novel In America (2000). The terms "Modernism" and "Post-Modernism" have apparently never passed her lips. Yet like Martha Rossler, Janet Malcom, and even Laura Mulvey, she remains the elephant in the (dark)room, a kind of eminence grise, difficult to understand or ignore.

Sontag's latest forays into photography are the paperback release of Regarding the Pain of Others and "The Photographs Are Us," an article that appeared in the May 23 (2004) edition of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The former originated as a lecture delivered at Oxford University and, like many works in this genre, conveys the sense of someone of interest being asked to think out loud. It is Sontag at her best and worst, making huge and provocative generalizations, choosing a few ready examples to buttress her points, coining a phrase and using the novelist's prerogative in claiming to speak for everyone in her constructed universe. Here, at least, she makes plain the basis of her hostility towards photography as "both a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality--a feat literature has long aspired to, but could never attain in this literal sense" (p. 26)