[Marxism] Susan Sontag, the thinking machine

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Lisandro Otero is one of Cuba's best-known writers.
He lived and worked here on the island for many years,
then in Mexico as a columnist for a principal daily
paper. Now he's back in Cuba where he is president of
the Academy of Linguistics. This is his commentary on
Susan Sondag, published a few days ago on LA JIRIBILLA.
Translation for CubaNews by Ana Portala. Mil gracias!)
======================================================

Susan Sontag, the thinking machine
By Lisandro Otero
Havana

http://www.lajiribilla.cu/2005/n194_01/194_33.html

Susan Sontag died a few days ago: a person who, in the
second half of last century, acquired an intellectual
prominence based on her unusual thought that created new
categories of analysis. Her first important essay, on
certain qualities of esthetic appreciation, coined a
neologism called "camp". The word encompassed the
artificial, the anti-natural and the exaggerated, but it
soon became popular to typify the vulgar, the pretentious
and affected frivolity

She died of leukemia but before had suffered breast cancer
which she overcame after a long battle that stimulated her
to write "Illness and its metaphors". However, her great
international reputation rose from her deep studies on
media culture, the universe of the recreational industry
called "pop". She embraced the definition by Ortega y
Gasset that culture is all a person conserves after
forgetting what he or she read. In other words, she based
her concept of culture on the instruments that take in the
environment, the immediate and practical use, of knowledge
and classification rather than an erudite accumulation.
Many consider that the mass reproduction of art objects is
the death of art but Sontag countered with her idea that we
are going through a transformation about the function of
art.

Her essay on photography is a classic. Her studies of
Roland Barthes and Antonin Arthaud contributed to clarifying
the respective work of both. Her first collaborations for
the well known left-wing journal, Partisan Review, sparked her
notoriety. She was always a liberal political militant. She
attacked Bush and Berlusconi, she opposed US intervention
in Sarajevo and traveled to Vietnam; she wrote extensively
against the savage colonial war the US was waging in that
country. She condemned the torture by US soldiers in the
jail of Abu Ghraib and the expansionist policy of Israel,
in spite of being Jewish and of having accepted the highest
award of that country, the Jerusalem Prize for literature.

As President of the US PEN Club she mobilized that group in
defense of the writer, Salman Rushdie when he received
the "fatwa" condemning him to death for his irreverent
anti-Islamic texts. She was genuinely - that is how she was
considered by many - a "thinking machine". She considered
that the job of an intellectual was to privately reflect,
to analyze with discretion, but the 20th century forced them
out into the arena and become public figures, setting aside
their inherent function of retreat. In the style of the
French writers Bourdieu, Foucault or Derrida she was always
newsworthy. She was outrageous, provocative, impetuous and
a rebel.

She tried her hand in to the art of narrative although
with less success. Her novels based on important feminine
personalities such as Lady Hamilton, the lover of Lord
Nelson, Isadora Duncan, the extravagant dancer or the
Polish actress, Helen Modjenska, did not leave the same
penetrating mark of her essays. These were truly original,
incisive and she uncovered unknown facets in each analysis
she undertook.

She was a militant anti-Stalinist and wrote against the
so-called "real socialism" of the Eastern European
countries, a true caricature of true socialism. However,
that view prevented her from finding the differences of the
reach of social battles, of the movements of national
liberation, of anti-imperialism so necessary in certain
Third World countries. She did not grasp the truth of the
Cuban Revolution and the deep historical and national roots
on which the social transformation begun in 1959 were
based.

For her, a work of art was not a vehicle of ideas but an
object that modifies our conscience and sensibility. "A
work of art is nothing but a moment in the conscience of
humanity," she wrote, "while moral conscience is understood
as one of the functions of the conscience". That idea, as a
moral end, that could have come from the pen of Tolstoy is,
perhaps, the best epitaph of her contradictory and dynamic
existence.






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