Aesthetic experience

The new role for the critic beyond solitary exegesis implies a transition from criticism to the notion of critical theory: ‘The great task which remains to critical theory is to examine in detail the formal function of subject-matter’ (‘On Style’ 20). As we have seen, one of the reasons why Sontag took her stand ‘against interpretation’ was its standard treatment of the works of art as ‘statements’ (21). Against this long-established trend, she contends: ‘A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or a commentary on the world’ (21). In emphasising the idea of art as an encounter, she places herself in the tradition of Adorno while making the effort to revisit his notion of aesthetic experience to overcome the limits of the contemplative state it implies. While Adorno did not exclude the production of reflection from this contemplative state, he discouraged the passage to discursive meaning when he predicted that meaning drawn from the aesthetic encounter would be an ‘abomination of the useful’ (qtd. in Jauss 19).

Hans Robert Jauss's critique of Adorno, with specific reference to his posthumously published Ästhetische Theorie (1970), is particularly useful for understanding better what lies behind Sontag's position against interpretation. Adorno assumes an initial distance between subject and object. Aesthetic experience first of all creates distance between the observer and the object. The distance makes possible a state of absorption in which the recipient ‘forgets himself and disappears in the work’ (qtd. in Jauss 20), but this experience (also called perplexity or shock), as Jauss points out, does not lead to discursive production. The recipient is ‘incapable of crossing the line from contemplative acceptance to dialogic interaction’ (Jauss 20). The solitary subject in Adorno remains trapped in a state of ‘disinterested contemplation’ (qtd. in Jauss 18). While, as a thinking subject, he or she rises to the purity of reflection, he or she, and this is the core of Jauss's critique, does not cross to the communicative efficacy of the aesthetic experience because of Adorno's ‘therapy of negativity against the seductions of the culture industry’ (21).