556
SUSAN SONTAG
vantage point is that it do justice to the twin aspects of art: as object
and as function, as artifice and as living fonn of consciousness, as the
overcoming or supplementing of reality and as the making explicit of
fonns of encountering reality, as autonomous individual creation and
as dependent historical phenomenon.
Art is the objectifying of the will in a thing or perfonnance, and
the provoking or arousing of the will. From the point of view of the
artist, it is the objectifying of a volition; from the point of view of the
spectator, it is the creation of an imaginary decor for the will.
Indeed, the entire history of the various arts could be rewritten
as the history of different attitudes toward the will. Nietzsche and
Spengler wrote pioneer studies on this theme. A valuable recent
attempt is to be found in a book by Jean Starobinski,
The Invention
of Liberty,
mainly devoted to eighteenth-century painting and archi–
tecture. Starobinski examines the art of this period in terms of the
new ideas of self-mastery and of mastery of the world, as embodying
new relations between the self and the world. Art is seen as the naming
of emotions. Emotions, longings, aspirations, by thus being named,
are virtually invented and certainly promulgated by art: for example,
the "sentimental solitude" provoked by the gardens that were laid out
in the eighteenth century and by much admired ruins.
Thus, it should be clear that the account of the autonomy of art
I have been outlining, in which I have characterized art as an imagi–
nary landscape or decor of the will, not only does not preclude but
rather invites the examination of works of art as historically specifiable
phenomena.
The intricate stylistic convolutions of modern art, for example,
are clearly a function of the unprecedented
technical
extension of the
human will by technology, and the devastating commitment of human
will to a novel fonn of social and psychological order, one based on
incessant change. But it also remains to be said that the very possibility
of the explosion of technology, of the contemporary disruptions of self
and society, depend on the attitudes toward the will which are partly
invented and disseminated by works of art at a certain historical
moment, and then come to appear as a "realistic" reading of a peren–
nial human nature.
