The voyeuristic crowd

Sontag's rise as a public intellectual in the 1960s is so legendary that anyone writing about her is compelled to revisit the story. This chapter will consider the consequences of the loss of philosophy, discussed in the previous chapter, on Sontag's performance of the public intellectual. Philosophy's metamorphosis into an incomplete critical discourse that resists the ‘spectral and mortuary cosmos’ of total reproduction both enhanced and questioned her public image. Progressively, she realised that the public intellectual is pinned to a scene of utterance that produces assenting crowds, and therefore is thrown into question. The second part of this chapter concentrates on Sontag's visual iconography, on how it set her at odds with rising feminism and theories of language, and created the popular if limiting image of the melancholy modernist. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ultimate consequences of this popular image, to raise the question of the mutual dependence of Sontag and modernism as objects of study.

The figure of the artist presented in ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ essentially continues to draw on the unassimilated energies of modernism. Sontag's artist believes in the supremacy of form and struggles to free himself or herself from a ‘servile bondage to the world’ (6). We have seen that the ruling concern of ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ is the production of the new. As philosophy dwindles, Sontag turns to contemporary art to muse a ‘thought beyond thought’ (17). But the essay is important for its additional emphasis on the artist's relation with the audience, which is one of open challenge and even hostility.

In ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, Sontag writes that silence is ‘a highly social gesture’ (6) because it manifests itself in hostility towards the audience and the rejection of an assenting crowd:

Her survey of modernism-inspired contemporary art, in fact, takes stock of the impasse of modernism. Despite its prolonged temporality, modernism results in a dulled mode of reception that leaves the audience untouched.