I pride myself on being an exhibitionist, I talk about it all the time to spot the voyeurs around me. I pity them but I need them. They make me so feeI pride myself on being an exhibitionist, I talk about it all the time to spot the voyeurs around me. I pity them but I need them. They make me so feel so powerful (when it is completely consensual of course.) I make a shrine of my body. So it is with shame and excitement that I read journals. I'm a voyeur of the mind. I let myself into the haphazard and occasionally racist, dirty and shameful thoughts of a much-loved writer, long dead.
A voyeur is a voyeur is a voyeur is a voyeur.
It's a fast-paced page turner for me, the journal. And I force myself to slow down because I don't want to miss out on any insecurities of this person that history has turned into an emblem.
It's the clutter of the mind that's projected onto these pages. I sit at my desk and open the book randomly only to find the entire page adorned with two words: insipid certainties. My own reading is symptomatic of all my longings. It's also fuelled by what Sontag calls 'ontological anxiety.' She writes about being stuck on the "was" of the people. And I think about how curiously peculiar it is, because I'm stuck on the "was" of her.
The doubling of the self in dreams. The doubling of the self in art.
The nightmare is that there are two worlds The nightmare is that there is only one world, this one...more
The camera as a phallus. What an idea! Outrageous, scandalous, sexy and with a great degree of truth. We're all image junkies, living in an age where The camera as a phallus. What an idea! Outrageous, scandalous, sexy and with a great degree of truth. We're all image junkies, living in an age where we try to mark our development through a series of photographs that we hope will speak for us, instead of us. Sontag writes that to photograph is to appropriate the photographed. And it's not just objects that are photographed, we photograph poverty, misery, pain, death - so we appropriate emotions too- to what purpose? To use the photograph as a signifier? What is it in us that makes us covet this sort of obscure, dismal immortality?
The act of photographing demands that the instance being photographed remain static, and therefore, Sontag argues that photography has a vested interest in the status quo remaining unchanged. This is particularly amusing to me because the multitudes of photographs on social media fashioned after a common, 'trendy' theme and marketed using tags which, to me, is very reminiscent of dead butterflies being pinned onto boards, all seem different iterations of the same prototype. We are not just asking for immortality, we are asking that 'this moment' remain immortal (and it's a particularly crappy moment if you ask me.) That it be preserved within the dynamics of time relentlessly moving forward, but to what avail? Who's going to unearth all these images? These digital mass graves?
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
A society that is ruled by class, race and sex based discriminations needs an anaesthetic, and the legion of images provide us with more data than we could consume in ten different lifetimes. The elite keep their control while we keep our illusions and it's a win-win y'all.
Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.
I realise this has been more of a pessimistic rant than a review, but it's sunday and I want to sleep. So meh. ...more
Early in these notebooks, Susan Sontag confesses to having read her lover's journal secretly and feeling extremely agitated, hurt and anxious on discoEarly in these notebooks, Susan Sontag confesses to having read her lover's journal secretly and feeling extremely agitated, hurt and anxious on discovering that her lover didn't really like her. She also confesses that she didn't feel guilty about reading the journal without her lover's consent because she thinks that one of the main social functions of a journal or a diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people. However, I don't think a journal is supposed to have any social function.
In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Sontag writes that we read a writer's journal not because it illuminates their other books, but because we are drawn to the rawness of the journal form and because the first person writing constructs the most intimate portrait of a writer that their novels, however inspired by their own experiences, cannot divulge.
These notebooks do not simply recount events, nor are they just full of personal confessions, fetishes and ideas. They are a mesh composed of the many elements that Sontag encountered and chose arbitrarily to record. Sometimes there are just pages upon pages containing lists of the books she wanted to buy. Sometimes she jots down stray ideas and observations. There is no perceivable order to the writing except a chronological one.
Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it.
It is this assembly of Susan Sontag's selfhood that we have the pleasure of witnessing within these pages. The discontinuity that we encounter while reading a writer's novels one at a time is abolished here. These journals affirm the sequence, the wholeness and cohesion of a life lived. I'm not rating this because how do I quantify a lived experience? What gives me the power? I do not even want that sort of power. I just know that I'll return to this again and again.
In the first volume of her journal Reborn, Susan Sontag wrote that to interpret is to determine, to restrict; or to exfoliate, read meaning into. PerhIn the first volume of her journal Reborn, Susan Sontag wrote that to interpret is to determine, to restrict; or to exfoliate, read meaning into. Perhaps she was deliberate in her focus on form, in her evasions of definitions within this collection of disparate essays that range from critiques of philosophy, art, movies to blatant sixties style fangirling. Perhaps it was her own refusal to be restricted, to be read into, that she transmuted into a writing that has a clear, traceable form and yet is inscrutable. There isn't a unifying theme to these essays, instead it's the contours of the form (that Sontag herself believed was of more merit in art theory than interpretation) that takes the centre stage.
You're not sure what the extensive notes on camp or the barely four-pages long essay on Simone Weil are actually supposed to mean. At least I wasn't. Instead, what resonates here is Sontag's hallmark confidence, and you're convinced that she absolutely believed in everything she wrote, everything she said. And this remarkable confidence helped me read on even when certain parts of this book got surprisingly boring.
Sontag also firmly believed that morality informs experience and that's very evident in her criticisms. She approaches each topic with a predetermined notion of style and form, almost as if the style itself selects the topics she wants to write on. But that would be a wrong interpretation. Her style of writing is so firm, so intelligent that everything else seems secondary....more
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