Bridges are important. As the world becomes more siloed and sheltered from opposing views, and as social media continues to amplify differences rather than bringing tribes together.

An excellent example was Susan Sontag, who was a bridge between the New York intellectual world of her own yesteryear—with its seriousness, its New Yorker moral importance, and its belief that culture in New York was a world stage for public argument—and the then new crowd of norm-challengers.

Hal Foster, writing recently in The MIT Press Reader, describes Sontag as a transitional figure between being a sort of magazine-style critic and an academic theorist. Her force came from translation between these worlds. Through selection—editing, if you will—and presentation. Sontag took difficult cultural objects and gave them a measured but powerful cultural relevancy. She could introduce a broad American readership to Artaud, Barthes, Benjamin, Bresson, Godard, Pavese, Cioran, and Weil without the encounter feeling like closed-door academic specialization. Sontag made the foreign, the severe, and the avant-garde feel like necessary equipment for modern life.

That mediating role is increasingly valuable today. Sontag’s authority was derived from a kind of heightened subject matter delivered in accessible American language. She wrote lofty subjects into terms anyone could read. “Notes on Camp” did not invent camp, but the essay completely changed the visibility of the term. By publishing it in Partisan Review, she placed a coded, theatrical aesthetic into the circus of American life. Decades later, when “Camp” became a Met Gala theme, the distance between private sensibility and public spectacle had largely collapsed. Sontag had helped open that path, and it must be opened anew rather than torn asunder by groupthink of our frightened era.

Today, one might say that culture is divided between closed systems: academic language too specialized to travel fast and far, internet commentary too fast and flippant to grow roots, and popular criticism that is broadly reduced by identity-sorting and sameness. What is missing is the ability to move difficult works back into the public language, and to treat mass culture seriously again without surrendering to self-categorization.