PERSON
Susan Sontag
The critic who diagnosed the interpretive reflex—the compulsive translation of every encounter into meaning—as the deepest impoverishment of modern culture, and whose demand for an erotics of genuine attention is the sharpest instrument we have for reading AI-generated text honestly.
Susan Sontag is the thinker of attention before interpretation. In
Against Interpretation (1966), she argued that the modern habit of asking “what does it mean?” before attending to what a work
is constitutes a revenge of the intellect upon direct experience—a mechanism that converts every unsettling encounter into a comfortable extraction. Her counter-demand—not a hermeneutics but an
erotics of art—was for perception that sits with form, surface, and texture before reaching for significance. In
On Photography (1977), she extended the argument to the image-saturated culture, diagnosing an
ecology of images that anaesthetizes rather than sharpens perception; in
Illness as Metaphor (1978), she showed how cultural narratives colonize raw experience and assign moral blame to patients before they can confront what is simply happening to their bodies. Each book is the same book: a demand for honest attention before imposed meaning. In the age of
large language models that produce the formal properties of thought without