With the somewhat seamy release of Susan Sontag’s journal and notebook entries, in the collection Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963, comes what may be great relief among the many who cherish her work, and even among those who do not, over their respective – and likely quite similar – fears of inadequacy. She reveals herself therein as an individual of enormous self-consciousness, whose plans for the future seem more prescriptions for a model self than anything else. The entries are filled with lists recounting the works she must read, with demands she puts upon herself so as to be a more formidable thinker. She recounts the often tawdry and just as often tedious accounts of her days, with the abundant dramatization of someone of her age: she began composing her journals at fifteen, and this collection traces her entries for the following sixteen years. It is, as these things often are, entirely invasive; it is voyeuristic in the salacious sense that few legal things ever are.
What may come as a relief to the many self-conscious bloggers of the current generation, however, is the extent to which Sontag’s intellectual and academic self-preening took precedence over the substance of her ostensible desires for knowledge and understanding. Her appetite seems less intellectual than stylistic or affective; she wants to have read many of the works she has mentioned more than she actually wants to read them. With the seemingly limitless access to knowledge that the internet affords its users, many of us feel pointedly and naggingly the little that we actually know as a mark of shame, especially beside all the other blogs, journals, magazines, novels, and various other textual forms that flaunt intellects far more knowledgeable than we feel we will ever be; as a remedy, we attempt to gorge on all the information we can find, often haphazardly and in defiance of any proper order. Sontag seemed to approach knowledge this way, as well. It is a familiar malady.
The collection makes her a far more likeable and respectable personage than many of her essays allowed her to be. A great percentage of her work is written with an engagingly infuriating epistemological approach: it opts for generalizations and prosaic statements over open-ended questioning and the willing and willful acceptance of the skeptical and unanswerable that has defined the work of so many of our most probing public intellects. Her prose is so simple and forceful that it seems to almost demand outraged dissent or dismissive disagreement, if only on the superficial grounds that she seems so unwilling to engage in a less limited discourse than the one her uncomplicated – but not necessarily not complex – sentences imply. Her manner of discourse seemed to be one which would lead inevitably to the impasse of her hardened decision; she seemed less a thinker – someone, in the barest sense, who thinks, absurd as it sounds, for a living – than someone who thought, and then defended her position afterwards. There rarely seems any evidence, any residue, of a process. Her essays, hardened as they are in their statements, are distinctly uninviting; they engage the reader who agrees, but want nothing to do with anyone who doesn’t.
The impasse provided by so much of her work is similar to that provided by so many blogs: the majority are unabashedly – indeed, intentionally – guided by and interested only in the subjectivity of the lives therein addressed. A blog is a presentation of subjective life as fact. Someone’s photographed dinner is a fact. Personal problems become a fact. They become impossible to argue with because argumentation was never the point, or anywhere near the point. Blogging allows people to present their lives as facts, their subjective appeals and complaints as objective, and they allow little room – given their often limited scope – for response. Essentially, Sontag wrote blogs.
She addresses this issue of the personal-as-objective in “Regarding the Torture of Others,” an essay published in the New York Times Magazine shortly after the publication of Regarding the Pain of Others. Both texts, like most of Sontag’s work, are alternately incisive and infuriatingly shortsighted. Many of the claims she makes about those who tortured and took photographs of the torture at Abu Ghraib are grand generalizations, but of which there is more often than not at least a kernel of truth. Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch provide more acute and individual accounts in Standard Operating Procedure – which has been published in paperback with the curious title The Ballad of Abu Ghraib, and which is much better than the film version – but suffers from its own problems, as well: lack of focus, whether moral or “forensic,” being perhaps its most egregious. But Sontag does offer an interesting twist to a familiar argument on what photography has done to “publicize” private life:
To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and therefore to go on with one’s life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera’s nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the community of actions recorded as images. The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the deep satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn’t take a picture of them.
We have adapted, in a sense, to the publication of our lives, and depend upon it. Furthermore, she seems to say, the action of taking a picture is almost a mere formality: we are already posing for the picture, so it might as well be taken. This could lead into dangerously oversimplified, Baudrillardian territory, but there is something beckoning toward a kind of truth beneath those reductions. She continues:
Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to have grown. From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high schools — depicted in Richard Linklater’s 1993 film, ”Dazed and Confused” — to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun.
There does seem to be a greater delight taken in violence these days, at least visibly: in movies, video games, and all of the usual suspects. But, as is usual with Sontag, her problem lies in blaming the zeitgeist as something inextricable from its time; this seems a contradiction in terms, but what Sontag does not question in her assessment is whether the delight has grown or simply the easiness. She frames them together: it is an “easy delight.” But they are separate issues: it is easier than ever to take delight in certain things – owing to the increasingly “global community” and so on – but this does not mean that the delight itself has grown; rather, it is the ease that has grown. That is why it is more visible; that is why it seems to have grown. Who can say, or how could it be said, whether or not it really has?
Delight is taken in violence when it is foreign. And while films display violent acts, and ostensibly inure their audiences to cinematic violence, it is, of course, far from the real thing. This is because violence engages the voyeuristic sense. Violence is private; when made public, it attracts the kind of giddy excitement that occurs when the private is publicized. Violence, then, is somewhat distinct, when shown in movies or video games, from real violence that truly affects, and hurts, real people. Violence, for many people, is just another private thing that is exciting to see publicly. And filmmaking – and any expository branch of an art form – engages in the kind of artificial voyeurism that can make violence seem exciting and sexy to so many. The audience knows that the violence it is watching on screen is composed, that the “events” are “designed to be photographed.” It is similar to taking private photographs and passing them along to friends, although it is of course significantly heightened. Violence in film is just another kind of sex, or cursing, or just watching another person go about his or her day. It provides an affect of realism, but without the same ethical problems that would accompany watching these acts outside of the cinema. The problem with a movie like Funny Games, Michael Haneke’s supposed attack on screen violence, is that it thinks it’s doing one thing, to expose the audience, when in fact it is doing another, which only further excites the audience: when the actors begin playing with the fourth wall, staring out at the audience, or stopping and rewinding the film, they are not – as Haneke desires – subjecting the audience to something they do not want; on the contrary, they are providing the audience with exactly what it wants: participation, further inclusion in this escapist, faux-voyeuristic world. As Haneke has remarked about the film, he is making explicit – namely, the audience’s involvement in film violence – what had previously only been implicit; what he doesn’t realize, however, is that the audience wants to be involved. The audience understands the artificiality of this kind of voyeurism and enjoys when it is pushed. This is why the vast majority of people who like Funny Games also probably like movies by Quentin Tarantino. Haneke isn’t forcing the audience to see what they have done; he is allowing them to do what they want to be doing. He is making this artificial voyeurism, in effect, only more approachable, in heightening the artificiality. Furthermore, the blame he places on the audience for the proliferation of violence is a bit skewed: he forgets entirely about the providers, like himself, who abet the consumers in their consumption.
And so: blogging is merely another trend of artificial voyeurism; it wends in various directions – toward the more intellectual, critical, personal, crafts-oriented – but is essentially bound to a fundamentally exhibitionistic desire. It would have been interesting to read what Sontag would have thought about blogging, although one can likely easily imagine: it seems she would find it just another potential arena, like photography, for posing. It also seems likely that she would have very much liked the whole concept, through the practice of which acts of “posing” can be seen or read. That’s why it’s fun; that’s why it’s infuriating; that’s why it’s gross or boring. “To live is to be photographed” is a dubiously grand statement, and perhaps it applies more to Sontag, to the self-consciousness so evident in Reborn, than contemporary human nature; but if living is posing, then blogs are just another posture.
