Episode #177 ... Susan Sontag - Do you speak the language of pictures and videos?
33:05 Share

Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon shoutouts this week, Carlo Fazzioli, Matthew Morrison, MJ Mazun, Michael McAuliffe, and Derek Purdy. Thank you for all that you do. PhilosophizeThis.org is the website for more information. Instagram, Philosophize This Podcast. Twitter is IamStephenWest. Also, been posting three-minute clips of the podcast on YouTube at PhilosophizeThisClips.

The thinking is maybe somebody doesn't have 30 minutes to invest in a podcast episode, but maybe they have three to see whether they like it or not. Anyway, it's something I'm going to be working on for the foreseeable future. So if you want to help your friend Steven out and support that process, again, Philosophize This clips on YouTube. Today's episode is part two on Susan Sontag. I hope you love the show today. So in one of her earlier essays, Susan Sontag talks about a life-changing moment she experienced when she was just 12 years old.

Now, she described this moment when she wrote about it as a kind of revelation. In fact, she called it a type of epiphany that would go on to affect the direction of her thinking and her work for decades moving into the future.

It was July of 1945. She was browsing through a random bookstore in Santa Monica, California. And what she came across was something that she would later call, quote, a photographic inventory of ultimate horror, end quote. What she came across for the first time were pictures of the horrible things that were done to people in two of the concentration camps during the Holocaust of the Second World War.

And you can just imagine her standing there, 12 years old, in the middle of this bookstore, looking at these pictures of mangled human bodies, taking in as a young person for the very first time the darkness that people are capable of when their minds dip into this place, this passive state of compliance, what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. This is the first time in her life that she encounters this. And Sondheim later writes about how she felt in that exact moment.

She says, quote,

Some limit had been reached. And not only that of horror. I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded. But a part of my feelings started to tighten. Something went dead. Something is still crying, end quote. Sontag didn't know it at the time, but this type of experience that she had in the bookstore, she would later think of it as a classic experience that every person living in the modern world eventually has to have.

We all eventually have to come face to face with images of horrible things that are going on in some distant part of the world. And then we got to figure out what the best way is to deal with whatever feelings come up as a result of seeing those images. This is a uniquely modern experience to Susan Sontag. In fact, the image itself is a uniquely modern thing that we all have to deal with. To put it as simply as possible, we have a complicated relationship with images as modern people.

And it's born out of a complicated past, and if we're being honest, looking into the future with AI-created images on the horizon and among us, things aren't looking like they're getting any easier anytime soon. So maybe it's time on this podcast we go on a little journey, and do a philosophical evaluation of the image, more specifically of pictures and videos, as things that are by this point deeply normalized pieces of technology that we use every day as we go about our life.

And I can think of nobody better to guide us along this journey than Susan Sontag. See, she was a huge fan of the work of Roland Barthes, who we did two episodes of this podcast on a few years ago. And if you remember from those episodes, one of the things he was most interested in analyzing in his work was what he thought of as a sort of modern mythology that we have today, or the accepted metaphors that we attach to seemingly everyday things that help us give them meaning, metaphors that help our societies function at the end of the day.

And he did this with everything. He even looks at the mythology surrounding something like soap and how we always seem to be waging a war against this thing called uncleanliness in our homes and our lives.

and how great soap is as the sort of nuclear weapon in that war. He talks about the mythology of pro wrestling at one point, and how the messages that are being sent by these people that are pretending to fight each other on stage may actually help to maintain societal order at some distant level. Point was, to Barthes, it was important to look critically at these metaphors that we often take for granted,

because in ways that aren't always entirely obvious to us, these metaphors actually have a huge impact on the way that people see the things that make up the culture they're a part of. Sontag takes inspiration from this line of thinking and then makes it her own. All throughout her career, she does something very similar to this. She takes things that to us as modern people are so normalized that we may never even really think about them.

And then she reexamines them. She reinterprets them from a different perspective, and then brutally illustrates in her writing the social cost of having a lazy relationship with the mythology of everyday things. What I'm saying is that by the end of the episode here today, we will understand exactly what Susan Sontag thinks about someone who just passively consumes pictures and videos all day, putting in very little effort, not even recognizing how complicated their relationship to the image really is.

So to get us started on that, Susan Sondhag might want to start by saying here that pictures and videos are obviously the primary method of communication in our modern world. But how many of us really speak the language of pictures and videos?

And she's not asking, you know, can you look at pictures and understand what they're about? I mean, obviously, people are saturated by them. What Sontag's talking about is how many of us have really taken the time to break down what these kinds of images are and all the functions they serve in culture? Might be helpful to try to think about what we call an image, like you come from an alien civilization that had just never used images to send information to each other before. Maybe the civilization evolved with really big ears or something. How do you think an alien species would see pictures and videos?

Well, aside from noticing that this is how a lot of people get their entire understanding of what's going on outside their immediate surroundings, the other thing an alien might notice is that what a picture or video is at the most fundamental level is something that's designed to be a simplification of more complex modes of human experience. Now, what would the alien with big ears be talking about when they say that?

Well, take a photograph for example. The thinking here applies even at just a mathematical level. Just from a raw mathematical perspective, whenever you're going from an in-dimensional representation of something to a lower dimensional representation of something, you are losing a lot of information about it.

So in the case of a photograph, when you go from a human experience that's otherwise in three dimensions across a landscape of five different senses, various mental faculties are filtering it all through, and you reduce that experience into a two-dimensional photograph, to a purely visual single sensory form, again, we have to start by acknowledging that you are simplifying that moment and losing a ton of information about it in the process. What an alien might say about the concept of a picture is that it's a pretty interesting thing.

It is fundamentally something that takes complex situations and simplifies them into something that can be consumed visually in an instant. And on one level we all know this. I mean, a picture's worth a thousand words, people say, right? That's what they do.

But another thing an alien might want to point out is that given the fact that a picture or video has to simplify reality, and given our tendency to use these images as the primary way that we connect with things that are happening in the world, isn't it a bit problematic that the image is also something that is so easily manipulated by people?

Now, before Susan Sontag launches into her full-blown critique of the image and its role in society, the first thing she might want to start by saying is that she's always looking at the image from a perspective of ambiguity. She fully acknowledges that images can be used for good as well as evil. Which is also to say that depending on who's giving you the images that you're looking at, images can be used to inform the population as well as to deceive the population. And some of this is beyond obvious to us living in 2023.

Which I think speaks to how dead on accurate Susan Sontag was about this in her analysis. I don't think I gotta tell anyone listening to this about how many cool things you've been able to see because of pictures and videos.

That in most other generations of being alive, you just never have the opportunity to see. I mean, the Super Bowl for us used to be that, you know, you grab a stick and chase a raccoon around in your backyard. That was the cool stuff you got to see. And this obviously extends from cool things that you see to things that are less fun. You also see pictures of distant political realities now. Natural disasters, war, famine. Susan Sondheim would want to say that the connection to events that pictures and videos can provide is

is on one level truly inspirational. I mean, imagine the kind of awareness a person could have about what's going on in the world they live in if they were able to get access to images about what's going on in a way that they could trust. But that trust thing, you see, that's where it starts to get a little complicated to Susan Sondag.

Because something else we all know in 2023 is that pictures and videos are never presented to you in a totally unbiased way. Images are always given to you in a way that tries to drum up a particular emotional response to them. And Sontag would say this is part of the relationship you have with pictures and videos that you can never take for granted. Now in certain cases, this can seem pretty harmless. It's not something we doubt or really put too much thought into. Think of an online dating profile. We all know the person sending you their picture wants you to think about them in a particular way.

They got the lighting just right. They take a picture from a very specific angle. Maybe they're one of those people that have the exact same creepy smile in every picture. Looks like they photoshopped their smiling head into different settings. Now I'm smiling in the mountains. Now I'm smiling while holding a puppy. It's all very calculated by the person giving you the images. And we all accept this person's trying to get people to feel a certain way about them. All this seems fine.

but how about when that exact same thing goes on when you're watching the news? The front that news stations put on is that the pictures they're showing you are an accurate representation of what's going on in the world. But almost like someone with an online dating profile, Susan Sontag would want us to recognize that those pictures the news is giving you are hand-selected to produce a certain emotional response as well.

And by the way, the people that took the pictures you're seeing, it's not like they don't have agendas too. If the person making the online dating profile wants their pictures to look a certain way, a photographer also wants their pictures to look a certain way. They're always going for the big news story or sensationalism. They're always taking pictures in the style of the photography that they take. They're often considering what the next chapter is and the narrative they've been producing about whatever they're taking pictures of.

Point is, it's not like these photographers are Buddhist monks out there in the field. They have agendas as well. And even the very presence of the camera itself in reality changes what reality looks like to Sontag. But knowing all that, even if that weren't enough, then once the pictures get in the hands of the news station, depending on the news station that you're watching, again, try looking at this like you're coming from another planet where they don't have images.

Consider just how much our go-to method for representing reality can be manipulated to justify completely opposite outcomes. Images can reveal reality to people, yes. But images can also be staged to put out a false depiction of reality. Images can be used to make people aware of new political voices, yes. But images can also be used to slander dissenting political voices so they never get off the ground.

Images can be used to promote stereotypes. I mean, take your pick of what group your particular news station wants you to demonize and then hand selects pictures to get you to hate them more. But then again, images can also be used to give people a peek inside another culture they'd never otherwise have. And maybe that fosters more respect between people. Maybe that leads to understanding.

Images are used to get people riled up, wanting to invade another country. Think of the pictures of the giant buildings supposedly containing weapons of mass destruction before the US invaded Iraq in 2003. Then again, images are also used to frame public perception in a way where people don't want to get involved. Think of a news station featuring pictures of a protest where people are burning the American flag. If there's any part of you that doubts whether or not the emotional content of an image is determined by the way that it's presented to people,

Consider the fact that even the exact same image, presented in two different locations, can take on two very different meanings just because of the context that it's connected to. For example, an image of a man kneeling during the national anthem of a football game, in one place that image is presented, with certain captions, music, and commentary behind it, that image is seen as an act of solidarity and protest against police brutality.

Then again in another place, with different captions, music, and commentary, it's seen as an act of disrespect to the flag and the military personnel who fight to protect it. Now again, that's the exact same picture. So Sontag would want us to ask the question, what percentage of a picture's meaning lies in it being a neutral snapshot of something that just occurred? And what percentage of it lies in how the picture is specifically being presented to people?

Pictures are snapshots of an instant that masquerade as a documentation of reality, when in fact they are almost always being used by people as a manipulation of reality. A manipulation of your emotions. Once again, like our alien friend from before said, a picture or a video is fundamentally something that takes a complex situation and simplifies it into something that can be consumed visually in an instant. Now, knowing this, you can spend hours thinking about what people are really up to when they take a picture or a video. What is it that they're really doing?

Susan Sontag says in her book On Photography that pictures are both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. And what she's saying is that whenever you take a picture or a video of something, you are always constructing something in terms of the meaning of the picture, as well as obscuring something about reality that the picture can't possibly include.

She says, quote, End quote.

To Susan Sontag, to take a picture of something or someone is to objectify it in a way. You are taking a moment, freezing it, and then turning it into a thing that you or other people can then appropriate and use in whatever way you want.

Now, we're going to expand on this more, but let's take this point by Sontag, that to photograph something is to objectify it, as the first piece of evidence she's going to present in making her case, that maybe when we're thinking about the problems we have with pictures and videos, maybe the real problem lies in us, as the people that are receiving these images and assuming the pictures and videos have a lot more legitimacy than they actually deserve.

Because she'd probably say, why is this suddenly a problem with pictures and videos, when it wasn't a problem in previous generations with paintings or the written word as a depiction of reality?

Well, the reason it's a problem, she would say, is because most people don't see a picture and think of it as an artist's depiction of reality. They see a picture and they just think of it as the truth. We say things like this. We say, picture it didn't happen. You know, somebody says when you're out sick yesterday, one of your co-workers got up on their desk naked and was screaming at everybody in the office. And you say, come on, I don't believe that happened. But if they show you a video of it, well, I guess that must have happened.

And it's a tough spot to be in as modern people because on one hand, we see a picture someone took, and on one level, this visual moment as it is framed in this camera shot did actually happen. But without critical thinking applied to the picture, on another level, you have no idea what you're even looking at.

Fact is, pictures and videos don't have to come with a disclaimer on them that says everything we've already said on this episode. As Susan Sondheich says, a picture doesn't need to come with a caption on it that says, "This is the truth." The people looking at the picture or the video just assume that it's the truth, on a level they never did with paintings or the written word. And if you say back to this, "Well, not me. Not me. I'm not one of these morons that just accepts things as the truth."

Well, to use one of Sontag's own rebuttals to this kind of person, she'd probably want to say back to them, "Hey, so when you watch a video or see a picture of something that you think is really cool, and then afterwards you find out that it was completely fake or staged,

Are you disappointed when you hear about that? Little bit? Well, why are you disappointed if you're not bringing to the image a stamp of legitimacy that it probably doesn't deserve yet? I mean, knowing as much as we do in 2023 about how images are used to get you to feel a certain way, why would everyone not be taking every image they see with a grain of salt at first?

And that's part of our larger point here. You know, if any portion of this episode so far has come off like it's obvious to you, like of course images always have an agenda behind them, then why do so many intelligent people continue living their lives, consuming content every day, giving images a free pass on any level? When you're shopping for a car and a used car salesman comes up to you and starts telling you about how the car you're looking at is perfect for you, you're thinking, oh really? Really, is that what the car is? The car is perfect for me, huh? Hmm.

You're always looking for what his angle is, and rightfully so because he's trying to sell you something. When an advertisement comes on, you're thinking "what are they trying to sell me?" and "how are they trying to sell it?" This is a healthy way of thinking about these interactions. Well whenever a picture or a video is presented to you, to Susan Sontag you should be putting those images through a similar type of critical analysis. The default orientation towards anything that's claiming to represent complex reality in two-dimensional image form

should be one where you're asking follow-up questions. You should at least be asking, who is giving me this image? Why are they giving me this image? What do they want me to feel having seen this image? How is this image being presented to me? How is it edited? Knowing that a picture is always obscuring something, what might be obscured about reality if I took this picture to be the gospel truth?

Look, human beings have learned to adapt and survive in a lot of different environments over the course of history. We've learned to survive from the Serengeti all the way to the Arctic tundra. Well, the environment you have to survive in now is one where you are saturated by images that are trying to get you to feel a certain way. And if you don't develop and practice this critical thinking about the images that you're consuming and then bring those skills to every moment, you're always going to be at the mercy of the person that's giving you your images.

Think of what it was like to be a person in most of the Western world before the Protestant Reformation. Where your access to scripture, in other words, your access to what you considered to be the truth about reality around you, that was only available to you through a priest who spoke the language that the Bible was written in. Whether or not what the dude was saying was actually in the Bible or not, you had no way to verify. You would just have to be at the mercy of what he said was written down. We need to start thinking of our ability to read the images around us in a similar way.

We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard, Sontag thinks. And I know, I know, you go to work all day, it's super tiring, you just want to go home and be able to relax. I always want to look at my phone and have a little break, wind down and watch the shows that tell me what's going on in the world. I get it.

But it's not good enough to Susan Sontag. She's calling on us to be better. She's calling on us to put in the effort to speak the language of this new technology we're using every day called pictures and video. To apply the same level of criticism you would to the used car salesman, or else accept your fate as someone that's just getting finessed every day of your life.

Now, if that was something you wanted to do, maintaining this level of awareness is not just knowing the specific tactics people use when giving you images that we talked about earlier. The other half of this to Sontag is to also try to understand your relationship to the images in a social and ethical context as well. See, because something else she'd want us to recognize is that it's not just the way a picture or video is framed and distributed that can affect the way a viewer receives it, but

But part of the context of anything that people consume is the frequency that they're consuming it. So knowing that, in the case of pictures and videos, when it comes to seeing images of things like violence and war and the suffering of other people,

Things we care about that might shock us, like Sontag was shocked in the bookstore when she was 12. It would be one thing to Susan Sontag if we saw a picture or video like that once every year or so. But again, the reality of the world we live in is that we are saturated by images like that. And what happens, Sontag says, is that when other people's pain that's going on somewhere else in the world, when that becomes a routine, normal part of your day, you naturally become desensitized to it. People

People naturally try to find some way to down-regulate their emotional response. She says, quote, End quote. And it becomes next to impossible for these images to affect us emotionally in the same way that they used to. Now they're normal to us. Couple this with the ability we have as members of Western culture in particular, where we have this sort of Hollywood muscle that we've developed since we were kids.

We have this ability to transform anything that we see on one of these screens into something that's purely a spectacle. We have this emotional distance where everything's viewed by us through a screen so it never seems quite real to us.

Another great line Sontag has at one point is that in the Western world, we all have the luxury of patronizing reality. And you can understand where she's coming from with that statement. I mean, we have going on right now the most photographed war in the history of the world. And some people in the Western world wake up every morning, and what their relationship to this conflict has become is that they're excited to turn on the news every day and hear the most recent update on all the horrific tragedies that are going on somewhere else. And

as though this is a TV show or a movie that they're into. That's if, after being a year into it, they're still even into the TV show or if they've moved on to other TV shows. We have the luxury of patronizing reality to Sontag because we're not one of the people that actually has to live in it. This drowning of our emotional response due to oversaturation by violent imagery is something we always need to critically look out for as well. Because another thing an alien from another planet might think is really interesting about this technology of pictures and videos...

is how they can produce in people that are passively consuming them almost completely opposite responses. They can produce mobs of people who are frothing at the mouth to carry out some other person's political ends, running back clamoring to their image dealer like they're a methadone clinic. Sontag says the modern world turns people into image junkies. That's one thing it can do.

But on the other hand, the alien might say, this technology of the image can also be used to turn people apathetic, to make people feel like they have a false sense of familiarity with the suffering of others, and then to feel satisfied with just feeling sympathy for the people we see in pictures rather than actually doing something about it. She says as much in this next quote I'm going to read, but then lays down the Sontag hammer in the next line right after that. She says, "...thinking about images of suffering is not the same as doing anything about suffering."

And it's right here that her critique of the way that we usually interact with images is going to overlap with the critique she has of the way we interact with reality more generally in the modern world.

Remember, if part of our modern mythology is that images legitimize reality for us, we see them as the truth, almost the same way that scripture legitimizes reality for a religious person, then it's not surprising from the perspective of Sontag that this would produce what he's calling here something like a cult of nostalgia. Think about it. How common is it for a modern person to equate having an experience with taking a picture of themselves having an experience?

How common is it for people to look back on what they've done in their lives by referencing a giant collection of pictures that they have on their phone? Life for this kind of person, traveling or doing noteworthy things, becomes more about a process of collecting pictures of the stuff they've done than it does about actually living the moments they're in. The focal point of this person's life then becomes about the past.

the primary concern becomes about commemoration to Sontag. It's about remembering instead of doing. Now, more on that in a second, but I know there's got to be someone out there thinking, well, that sounds like a bit of a cartoonish example. I mean, who really goes around their life and they got a camera with a lanyard around their neck so they don't lose it and they're just snapping pictures of everything? Oh, and they're never living any of the moments that they're in.

But isn't it possible to do what I do, this person may ask, where I try to live the moment first as deeply as I can, and then I snap a picture at the end of it so I got something to browse through later as the geriatric care professional is giving me a sponge bath later in life.

Okay, sure, sure. But another angle that Sondhag might want you to consider here is that when you have this urge as a modern person that you just have to commemorate this moment with a photo or else something's going to be lost about it, recognize that you are also losing something of the moment just by commemorating it. Meaning when you take a picture, again, it's not like you're just taking a neutral snapshot of some events that are occurring around you.

You are losing part of the moment that you are capturing. In fact, to Susan Sontag, in a way, you are killing the moment that you're capturing. You are killing the moment's ability to be anything other than what it currently is that you, for some reason, want to seize control of with a picture. You want to take whatever's going on right now, reduce it down into a picture, and then preserve it in formaldehyde sitting on the shelf in your phone. She says, quote,

And again, if we try to step outside the perspective of the modern person for a second,

Why would the visual, simplified commemoration of the moment ever be more important to you than your full experience of the moment in the present? Well, there's certainly many explanations for this, but one of them is that you are a member of a cult of nostalgia. The focal point of your life is on commemorating the past as opposed to changing the present. Your memories are more important to you than your dreams.

Remakes of the same old shows and movies from the past, rehashing of the same tropes from old songs, events, or games from the past. All of this matters more to someone in a cult of nostalgia than a focus on reimagining or reinterpreting things in a new light. In the most extreme cases, the collection of pictures on someone's phone becomes not a collection of moments that were fully lived,

but a collection of moments that they almost lived, that were tragically cut short by the fixation they had to commemorate it because the picture of the moment is what legitimizes it to them. You could say the technology of the picture or video enables you to have a false sense of familiarity with the past events of your life, to the point where you look back on them and never really feel like you missed out on anything about the experience.

Now you can probably see where this is going. To Susan Sontag, this general attitude then gets applied to the way the modern member of the cult of nostalgia sees the suffering of other people. They equate seeing the images of people suffering with knowing the suffering of other people. Seeing pictures or videos of what's going on allows them to feel a false sense of familiarity with what other people are going through.

Then they think as long as they continue to see images of the suffering that's going on, educating themselves they call it, and as long as they post hashtag never forget, being an activist they call it, as long as they commemorate what went on with these other people that have suffered and share the images with other people, as a deluded cult member, they actually feel through doing this stuff as though they've legitimized the suffering of others. By making a sarcastic post on social media, they actually are able to believe they've done something substantive there.

Sontag would say, "We have fallen into a place as a society where we focus far too much on commemoration and not enough on contemplation. In other words, we focus on remembering things instead of doing things. And passively, uncritically consuming these pictures and videos people give us enables us to do this. And we carry this emotionally disconnected, complicit attitude around with us in a lot of different things. But one maybe unexpected place you can see it," she says, "is in the mythology that surrounds our modern concept of a museum.

Not exactly sure if this is common knowledge that everybody knows about, so I apologize if this is gratuitous, but fun fact, the origins of the modern museum actually come from hundreds of years ago and rich people that were living in Europe at the time that had these things called curiosity cabinets.

The idea is, if you're a rich person living during the Age of Exploration, and there are these people traveling all over the world bringing back these artifacts that are mysterious to everyone, and these merchants that are trying to make some money off this stuff come up to you and say, "Oh, this is a magic lamp from India that I found. This is a dragon bone that we found in the Caribbean." If you're a rich person and you wanted to have something interesting to show guests when they come over to your house for dinner, you just bought this kind of stuff. "Hmm, dragon bone," you say. "Hmm, I guess I'll put that in my curiosity cabinet."

And it wasn't just dragon bones. It was a lot of real stuff too. Point is, this was a cabinet with a small selection of old stuff, bankrolled by the social elite, fueled by just intellectual curiosity. And then there was usually some fun narrative that goes along with the artifacts that tells an interesting story about how the world is out there on the seven seas, or how the history of the world came to be to where we are now. These artifacts are part of that story. Well, to Susan Sontag, the experience of the modern person in a museum today is not entirely unlike this.

this. You show up, you pay 20 bucks, and you walk around the halls very quietly looking at all this stuff that someone else has the resources to collect. You're given a particular narrative about the history of the world and how all this stuff fits into that narrative, and

And then you leave the museum feeling just a little more cultured than you were when you walked into the entrance. That's the mythology connected to going to a museum. In other words, a bunch of culturally privileged people, that's us, pay money to go satisfy their intellectual amusement. And then they're given an oversimplified narrative of how these things in the museum fit into past events. And then you can leave the museum and pat yourself on the back for understanding things more. You leave the museum and the feeling that washes over you is, hmm, well, wasn't that interesting?

But there's not a single reason in the world Sontag thinks that if the mythology surrounding the museum was different, the average person that leaves the museum might instead feel fired up about a new perspective they have of things, about taking action in the world they live in. Imagine a museum that was centered around not just an inert commemoration of things that have happened in the past, but instead a museum that focuses on taking an artifact, acknowledging the way that it's usually perceived,

perceived, but also acknowledging the many other perspectives that you could be viewing this thing through that would change your entire view of it. Picture how differently someone living in the United States felt about the Berlin Wall as opposed to someone living in East Germany. Now apply that to every artifact in a museum, and add in tons of alternative perspectives that would allow people to understand their history more broadly, feel more connected to their history. A la Simone Weil, they might receive the universe more openly rather than trying to project a homogenized worldview onto it.

There is no reason to Susan Sontag why someone leaving a museum doesn't have an entirely new perspective on the world of the present day. There's no reason why the experience somebody pays for when they go to a museum can't be for them to shake off emotional distance between them and the events of the world or the past, not just adding another layer of separation. There's no reason why it can't be about shaking people out of complicity with an oversimplified narrative, not just giving them more of a narrative to tack on.

There's no reason why we have to continue with this mythology that if you're bored when you go to a museum, oh, then that means you're just a moron. You know, it's not because of the insufferable self-gratification that's going on all around you. Gross. No, no, it's because you lack the intellectual sophistication to be amused by this curiosity cabinet in front of you.

Museums are missing out on a big opportunity there, she thinks. But anyway, to wrap up this episode today, Sontag says at one point, quote, "...compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action or it withers," end quote. We cannot be satisfied with just remembering the suffering of other people. We can't just sit around thinking about it. And things like museums, documentaries, the pictures and videos that we look at on our phones...

These are things that if we're not critical about the way that we engage with them all the time, they allow us to fall deeper and deeper into this cult of nostalgia. Again, to Susan Sontag, we are in a constant fight against this numbness, this apathy from our overexposure to things. But then we're also in a constant fight against people who are trying to manipulate your emotions by presenting images in a particular way. And I guess one thing's for sure to her, passively going through your life, taking this content in like it's just some pleasurable thing that you're enjoying...

Understand the consequences of not being critical of your relationship to pictures and videos. We all know somebody who's not putting in any effort in that area, and you can see the evidence of it in the simple, toxic way that they often view other people. What level of effort are you putting in? But pictures and videos are just one example of a technology we use that to Sontag is so normalized in our lives that we may be underthinking it.

On the next episode of the podcast, which will be out by the end of the month, we'll be looking at another example of what you could call a modern technology that we've normalized. Susan Sontag is going to offer a critique of the metaphor, and more specifically, how our use of the metaphor impacts the way that people understand and talk about things like illness and disease.

Because if the way we passively consume images goes on to hurt people in ways that we never intended, the way that we passively use metaphors goes on to hurt people that are suffering from things like cancer. On the next episode, we're about to see what happens when one of the great American cultural critics of all time gets us to question the specific ways that we use language to describe things that we don't truly understand. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.

Thank you so much for supporting the podcast. I can never do this without your help. Philosophize this.org for more ways to do that. Have a good rest of your day.