"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste"
About this Quote
Sontag nails a habit that now feels like the default setting of modern culture: living through fragments. By calling the “taste for quotations” Surrealist, she isn’t praising mere erudition or the party trick of being well-read. She’s pointing to a way of thinking that treats language as detachable, portable matter - words severed from their original occasions and made to spark in new combinations. The parenthetical “(and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations)” is the tell: the real thrill isn’t citation, it’s collision.
Surrealism worked by forcing unlikely objects into the same frame so the mind would short-circuit into fresh perception. Sontag implies quotation does the same: a line from a sermon beside a movie tagline, a philosopher stapled to a pop lyric. The incongruity creates an electric little scandal, producing meaning through mismatch rather than argument. It’s a method that flatters the arranger: you don’t have to build a worldview when you can curate one.
The subtext is also a warning. Quotation can be a refusal of commitment, an aesthetic of secondhand intensity. You borrow someone else’s authority, outsource your risk, then disguise it as sophistication. In Sontag’s broader context - her suspicion of easy interpretation and her interest in art’s sensory charge - the quote reads like cultural diagnosis. The Surrealist taste isn’t just an art preference; it’s an appetite for montage, for consciousness shaped by excerpts, where the clever cut can replace the hard-earned sentence.
Surrealism worked by forcing unlikely objects into the same frame so the mind would short-circuit into fresh perception. Sontag implies quotation does the same: a line from a sermon beside a movie tagline, a philosopher stapled to a pop lyric. The incongruity creates an electric little scandal, producing meaning through mismatch rather than argument. It’s a method that flatters the arranger: you don’t have to build a worldview when you can curate one.
The subtext is also a warning. Quotation can be a refusal of commitment, an aesthetic of secondhand intensity. You borrow someone else’s authority, outsource your risk, then disguise it as sophistication. In Sontag’s broader context - her suspicion of easy interpretation and her interest in art’s sensory charge - the quote reads like cultural diagnosis. The Surrealist taste isn’t just an art preference; it’s an appetite for montage, for consciousness shaped by excerpts, where the clever cut can replace the hard-earned sentence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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