SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Lee Quinby
On Sontag
Nov 11, 2008
Alice Kaplan points out that Susan Sontag “set out to pair Last of the Nuba (1974) with a book on Nazi regalia, and she needed to make them stick.” Even though the writing along the way provides numerous moments of insight, surprise, and stylistic delight, the combination never quite sticks in the way that Sontag seems to intend. Her claim that “between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural link” insofar as both exhibit “theatricalization” just doesn’t hold up (103-4). Such logic would impugn Halloween, Broadway, and the Colbert Report.
Frankly, I’m not entirely sure what Sontag’s view is on the practice of Sadomasochism, or what today is more often referred to as D/S for Domination/Submission. Her final line, with its zestful roll-out of dramatic descriptors seems rather enticing, yet it comes across as at odds with the preceding lament regarding the decline from Sade’s originality and uniqueness to today’s democratic reach: “Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch. . . . Now there is a master scenario available to everyone” (105). This ambivalence, if that is what it is, may relate to the point she makes, and that Michael Busch quotes in his post, indicating that “what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture.” The danger apparently, is in pervasiveness, since such tastes “become corrupting when they become more established” (98).
John Brenkman provides important cautionary advice when he points out that it is a mistake to “indict the social system as a whole in the name of particular sexual practices.” I am less certain, though, that Sontag is indicting the sexual practice so much as its populist possibilities. A questionable elitism runs through many of her remarks.
At the same time, she does seem to have been on to something in terms of Sadomasochism as a growth industry. As Michael points out, “themes of fascism have simply been gobbled up by the mainstream, the mass culture, and spit back out as a consumable product stripped of any ideological significance.” But is this a function of “an affluent society’s tendency to turn every part of people’s lives into a taste, a choice” as Sontag argues, or more a case of rampant commodification of everyday life through the forces of advanced capitalism?
For me, it is clearly the second. Furthermore,--and perhaps in some disagreement with Michael on it having no ideological significance and in agreement with John’s defense of sexual and other practices of individuality and freedom--commodification tends to thwart choice rather than offer it. It homogenizes and standardizes, and then presents multiple copies bearing different labels. Even more important for those who agree with Foucault’s arguments about aesthetic ethics and the art of the self, commodification is the opposite of an aesthetics of existence; it makes life into fads to purchase rather than practices of freedom worthy of cultivation.
To what extent does the commodification of fascism and sexuality—either linked or not—block practices of freedom?
I want to take up Michael Busch’s remark that “themes of fascism have simply been gobbled up by the mainstream, the mass culture, and spit back out as a consumable product stripped of any ideological significance” and link it to John Brenkman’s insistence that “the political question is to defend and extend individual liberty.”
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