Quotes from John Ruskin
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
—The Two Paths, Lecture II: The Unity of Art, section 54 (1859).
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless:
peacocks and lilies, for instance.
—The Stones of Venice, Volume I, chapter II, section 17. (1851)
Whatever may be the means, or whatever the more immediate end of any kind of
art, all of it that is good agrees in this, that it is the expression of one soul talking
to another, and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it.
And consider what mighty consequences follow from our acceptance of this truth!
what a key we have herein given us for the interpretation of the art of all time!
—The Stones of Venice, Volume III, chapter 4, section 28 (1853)
from Culture and Anarchy (1869) by Matthew Arnold
Culture is then properly described…as having its origin in the love of perfection;
it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the
scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for
doing good… —p. 194-195
Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the individual remains
isolated. The individual is required, under pain of being stunted and enfeebled in
his own development if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march
towards perfection, to be continually doing all he can to enlarge and increase the
volume of the human stream sweeping thitherward… —p. 197
If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection, general
perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in
having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an
outward set of circumstances,—it is clear that culture…has a very important
function to fulfill for mankind. And this function is particularly important in our
modern world… —p. 198
The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our
being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are
just the people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: “Consider these people,
then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voices;
look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give
them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts
which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth
1
having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having
it?” And thus culture begets a dissatisfaction which is of the highest possible value
in stemming the common tide of men’s thoughts in a wealthy and industrial
society, and which saves the future, as one may hope, from being vulgarized, even
if it cannot save the present…—p. 201
This point of view, I say, of culture is best given by these words of Epictetus: “It
is a sign of…a nature not finely tempered…to give yourself up to things which
relate to the body; to make, for instance, a great fuss about exercise, a great fuss
about eating, a great fuss about drinking, a great fuss about walking, a great fuss
about riding. All these things ought to be done merely by the way: the formation
of the spirit and character must be our real concern”…—p. 202
In thus making sweetness and light to be characters of perfection, culture is of like
spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry…The best art and poetry of the
Greeks, in which religion and poetry are one, in which the idea of beauty and of a
human nature perfect on all sides adds to itself a religious and devout energy, and
works in the strength of that, is on this account of such surpassing interest and
instructiveness for us, though it was,—as, having regard to the human race in
general, and, indeed, having regard to the Greeks themselves, we must own,—a
premature attempt, an attempt which for success needed the moral and religious
fibre in humanity to be more braced and developed than it had yet been. But
Greece did not err in having the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human
perfection, so present and paramount. It is impossible to have this idea too
present and paramount; only, the moral fibre must be braced too. And we,
because we have braced the moral fibre, are not on that account in the right way,
if at the same time the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection,
is wanting or misapprehended amongst us; and evidently it is wanting or
misapprehended at present.—p. 203
For a long time, as I have said, the strong feudal habits of subordination and
deference continued to tell upon the working class. The modern spirit has now
almost entirely dissolved those habits and the anarchical tendency of our worship
of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is
becoming very manifest. More and more, because of this our blind faith in
machinery, because of our want of light to enable us to look beyond machinery to
the end for which machinery is valuable, this and that man, and this and that body
of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put in practice an
Englishman’s right to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes, meet
where he likes, enter where he likes, hoots as he likes, threatens as he likes, smash
as he likes. All this, I say, tends to anarchy…—p. 221-222
2
Now, if culture, which simply means trying to perfect oneself, and one’s mind as
part of oneself, brings us light, and if light shows us that there is nothing so very
blessed in merely doing as one likes, that the worship of the mere freedom to do
as one likes is worship of machinery, that the really blessed thing is to like what
right reason ordains, and to follow her authority, then we have got a practical
benefit out of culture. We have got a much wanted principle, a principle of
authority, to counteract the tendency to anarchy which seems to be threatening
us…The State, the power most representing the right reason of the nation, and
most worthy, therefore, of ruling…—p. 226-227
We want an authority, and we find nothing but jealous classes, checks, and a
deadlock; culture suggests the idea of the State. We find no basis for a firm Statepower in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self…–p. 238
When it is agreed that we want a source of authority, and when it seems probable
that the right source is our best self, it becomes of vast importance to see whether
or not the things around us are, in general, such as to help and elicit our best self,
and if they are not, to see why they are not, and the most promising way of
mending them...—p. 249-250
The learned Martinus Scrilerus well says:—“the taste of the bathos is implanted by
nature itself in the soul of man; till, perverted by custom or example, he is taught,
or rather compelled, to relish the sublime.” But with us everything seems directed
to prevent any such perversion of us by custom or example as might compel us to
relish the sublime; by all means we are encouraged to keep our natural taste for the
bathos unimpaired…—p. 250
from “The Function of Criticism At the Present Time” by Mathew Arnold
The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of
analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a
certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it
finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the
most effective and attractive combinations,—making beautiful works with them,
in short… —p. 140
For the creation of a master-work of literature two powers must concur, the
power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough
without the moment; the creative power has, for its happy exercise, appointed
elements, and those elements are not in its own control… —p. 140-141
3
[Criticism’s] business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is known and
thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of
true and fresh ideas… —p. 150
4
CHAPTER 1
Abjection
!
For Julia Kristeva, the intolerable, or abject, body leaks wastes and fluids, in
violation of the desire and hope for the “clean and proper” body, thus making
the boundaries and limitations of our selfhood ambiguous, and indicating our
physical wasting and ultimate death. In her view, human and animal wastes
such as feces, urine, vomit, tears, and saliva are repulsive because they test the
notion of the self/other split upon which subjectivity depends. The skin of
milk, for instance, puts one in mind of the thin skin membrane that defines
the borders and the limits of the physical body; because human skin provides
only a relatively flimsy and easily assaulted partition between the body’s inside
and the world outside, this milky reminder disturbs our distinctions between
outside and inside, I and other, moving us to retch, and want to vomit in an
acute attempt to expel the scum from our being (Kristeva, Powers of Horror
2–3). As Elizabeth Grosz observes, “Abjection is a sickness at one’s own body,
at the body beyond that ‘clean and proper’ thing, the body of the subject.
Abjection is the result of recognizing that the body is more than, in excess of,
the ‘clean and proper’” (78). The abject body repeatedly violates its own
borders, and disrupts the wish for physical self-control and social propriety.
We disavow our excretory bodies because they are signs of disorder, reminders
of the body’s ambiguous limits (its leaking from multiple orifices), and of its
ultimate death: “Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss,
nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere,
cadaver” (Kristeva, Powers 3).1
Kristeva’s theory of abjection originates with her distinction between the
semiotic and the symbolic in Revolution in Poetic Language. Here, Kristeva
17
© 2004 State University of New York Press, Albany
I
APPROACHING ABJECTION
No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity,
No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not
Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce.
Victor Hugo, La Legende des siecles
NEITHER SUBJECT NOR OBJECT
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate
from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope
of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite
close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and
fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A
certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which
it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same,
that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere
as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the
one haunted by it literally beside himself.
When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects
and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly
speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing
me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness
ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject
is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or
something else as support, would allow me to be more or less
detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of
the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however,
through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of
2
APPROACHING ABJECTION
a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me
ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on
the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and
draws me toward the place_where meaning collapses. A certain
"ego" that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven
it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to
agree to the latter's rules of the game. And yet, from its place
of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.
Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion,
a crying out. To each ego its object, to each superego its abject.
It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not
the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that,
"I" puts up with, sublime and devastated, for "I" deposits it
to the father's account [verse au pere—pere-uersion]: I endure
it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. A massive
and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it
might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries
me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not
nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a
thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge
it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.
THE IMPROPER/UNCLEAN
Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The
spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the
retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from
defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of
being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads
me toward and separates me from them.
Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch
that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of
cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging
APPROACHING ABJECTION
sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the
belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and
bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire.
Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at
that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who
proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire;
"I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it, "I" expel
it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only
in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself
within the same motion through which "I" claim to establish
myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that
they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside
out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that "I" am in the
process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death,
During that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself
amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is
inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either
wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer
to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects.
The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even
more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious
chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell
of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of
signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would
understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without
makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this
defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with
difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of
my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as
being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might
live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my
entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung
signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not
and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of
wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is
3
4
APPROACHING ABJECTION
no longer I who expel, "I" is expelled. The border has become
an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that
I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I
might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is
now here, jetted, abjected, into "my" world. Deprived of
world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue's full sunlight, in that thing that no
longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I
behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders:
fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of
science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.
Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part,
from which one does not protect oneself as from an object.
Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and
ends up engulfing us.
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection
but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the
composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a
savior. . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they
heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality
is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in
crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law—rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles,*
a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter
instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who
stabs you.*. . .
In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains
of Auschwitz, I see a heap of children's shoes, or something
like that, something I have already seen elsewhere, under a
Christmas tree, for instance, dolls I believe. The abjection of
Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case,
kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other
things.
Walter Benjamin
Surrealism: the Last Snapshot
of the European Intelligentsia
Intellectual currents can generate a sufficient head of water for the critic to instal
his power station on them. The necessary gradient, in the case of Surrealism, is
produced by the difference in intellectual level between France and Germany.
What sprang up in 1919 in France in a small circle of literati—we shall give the
most important names at once: André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault,
Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard—may have been a meagre stream, fed on the damp
boredom of postwar Europe and the last trickle of French decadence. The knowalls who even today have not advanced beyond the ‘authentic origins’ of the
movement, and even now have nothing to say about it except that yet another
clique of literati is here mystifying the honourable public, are a little like a
gathering of experts at a spring who, after lengthy deliberation, arrive at the
conviction that this paltry stream will never drive turbines.
The German observer is not standing at the head of the stream. That is his
opportunity. He is in the valley. He can gauge the energies of the movement. As a
47
German he is long acquainted with the crisis of the intelligentsia, or, more
precisely, with that of the humanistic concept of freedom; and he knows
how frantic is the determination that has awakened in the movement to
go beyond the stage of eternal discussion and, at any price, to reach a
decision; he has had direct experience of its highly exposed position
between an anarchistic Fronde and a revolutionary discipline, and so has
no excuse for taking the movement for the ‘artistic’, ‘poetic’ one it
superficially appears. If it was such at the outset, it was, however,
precisely at the outset that Breton declared his intention of breaking with
a praxis that presents the public with the literary precipitate of a certain
form of existence while withholding that existence itself. Stated more
briefly and dialectically, this means that the sphere of poetry was here
explored from within by a closely knit circle of people pushing the ‘poetic
life’ to the utmost limits of possibility. And they can be taken at their
word when they assert that Rimbaud’s Saison en enfer no longer had any
secrets for them. For this book is indeed the first document of the
movement (in recent times; earlier precursors will be discussed later).
Can the point at issue be more definitively and incisively presented than
by Rimbaud himself in his personal copy of the book? In the margin,
beside the passage ‘on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers’, he later
wrote, ‘There’s no such thing.’
In just how inconspicuous and peripheral a substance the dialectical
kernel that later grew into Surrealism was originally embedded, was
shown by Aragon in 1924—at a time when its development could not yet
be foreseen—in his Vague de rêves. Today it can be foreseen. For there is
no doubt that the heroic phase, whose catalogue of heroes Aragon left us
in that work, is over. There is always, in such movements, a moment
when the original tension of the secret society must either explode in a
matter-of-fact, profane struggle for power and domination, or decay as a
public demonstration and be transformed. Surrealism is in this phase of
transformation at present. But at the time when it broke over its founders
as an inspiring dream wave, it seemed the most integral, conclusive,
absolute of movements. Everything with which it came into contact was
integrated. Life only seemed worth living where the threshold between
waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of
multitudinous flooding back and forth. Language only seemed itself
where sound and image, image and sound interpenetrated with automatic
precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot
called ‘meanings’. Image and language take precedence. Saint-Pol Roux,
retiring to bed about daybreak, fixes a notice on his door: ‘Poet at work’.
Breton notes: ‘Quietly. I want to pass where no one yet has passed,
quietly!—After you, dearest language.’ Language takes precedence.
Not only before meaning. Also before the self. In the world’s structure
dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth. This loosening of the self by
intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience
that allowed these people to step outside the domain of intoxication. This
is not the place to give an exact definition of Surrealist experience. But
anyone who has perceived that the writings of this circle are not literature
but something else—demonstrations, watchwords, documents, bluffs,
forgeries if you will, but at any rate not literature—will also know, for the
same reason, that the writings are concerned literally with experiences,
48
not with theories and still less with phantasms. And these experiences are
by no means limited to dreams, hours of hashish eating, or opium
smoking. It is a cardinal error to believe that, of ‘Surrealist experiences’,
we know only religious ecstasies or the ecstasies of drugs. The opium of
the people, Lenin called religion, and brought the two things closer
together than the Surrealists could have liked. I shall refer later to the
bitter, passionate revolt against Catholicism in which Rimbaud,
Lautréamont and Apollinaire brought Surrealism into the world. But the
true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie
in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic,
anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else
can give an introductory lesson. (But a dangerous one; and the religious
lesson is stricter.) This profane illumination did not always find the
Surrealists equal to it, or to themselves, and the very writings that
proclaim it most powerfully, Aragon’s incomparable Paysan de Paris and
Breton’s Nadja, show very disturbing symptoms of deficiency. For
example, there is in Nadja an excellent passage on the ‘delightful days
spent looting Paris under the sign of Sacco and Vanzetti’; Breton adds the
assurance that in those days Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle fulfilled the
strategic promise of revolt that had always been implicit in its name. But
Madame Sacco also appears, not the wife of Fuller’s victim but a voyante, a
fortuneteller who lives at 3 rue des Usines and tells Paul Eluard that he
can expect no good from Nadja. Now I concede that the breakneck career
of Surrealism over rooftops, lightning conductors, gutters, verandas,
weathercocks, stucco work—all ornaments are grist to the cat burglar’s
mill—may have taken it also into the humid backroom of spiritualism.
But I am not pleased to hear it cautiously tapping on the windowpanes to
inquire about its future. Who would not wish to see these adoptive
children of revolution most rigorously severed from all the goings-on in
the conventicles of down-at-heel dowagers, retired majors, and émigré
profiteers?
In other respects Breton’s book illustrates well a number of the basic
characteristics of this ‘profane illumination’. He calls Nadja ‘a book with
a banging door’. (In Moscow I lived in a hotel in which almost all the
rooms were occupied by Tibetan lamas who had come to Moscow for a
congress of Buddhist churches. I was struck by the number of doors in
the corridors that were always left ajar. What had at first seemed
accidental began to be disturbing. I found out that in these rooms lived
members of a sect who had sworn never to occupy closed rooms. The
shock I had then must be felt by the reader of Nadja.) To live in a glass
house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a
moral exhibitionism, that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s
own existence, once an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an
affair of petit-bourgeois parvenus. Nadja has achieved the true, creative
synthesis between the art novel and the roman-à-clef.
Moreover, one need only take love seriously to recognize in it, too—as
Nadja also indicates—a ‘profane illumination’. ‘At just that time’ (i.e.
when he knew Nadja), the author tells us, ‘I took a great interest in the
epoch of Louis VII, because it was the time of the “courts of love”, and I
tried to picture with great intensity how people saw life then.’ We have
from a recent author quite exact information on Provençal love poetry,
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10/31/2015
Susan Sontag: Notes On "Camp"
Notes On "Camp"
by Susan Sontag
Published in 1964.
Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have
never been described. One of these is the sensibility -- unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication
but hardly identical with it -- that goes by the cult name of "Camp."
A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special
reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there
be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And
Camp is esoteric -- something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.
Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood's novel The World in the Evening (1954), it
has hardly broken into print. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended,
it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves. For myself, I plead the
goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp conflict in my own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to
Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no
one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention,
exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy
modified by revulsion.
Though I am speaking about sensibility only -- and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts
the serious into the frivolous -- these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the
realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been
brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their
reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the
faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free -- as opposed to rote -- human
response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is
taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the
facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has
good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)
Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility
which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any
sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is
no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea . . .
To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful,1 one must be tentative and
nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument),
seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility. It's
embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp. One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a
very inferior piece of Camp.
http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html
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10/31/2015
Susan Sontag: Notes On "Camp"
These notes are for Oscar Wilde.
"One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art."
- Phrases & Philosophies for the Use of the Young
1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an
aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree
of artifice, of stylization.
2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to
content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least
apolitical.
3. Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things. Camp is as well a quality
discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are "campy" movies, clothes, furniture,
popular songs, novels, people, buildings. . . . This distinction is important. True, the Camp eye has the
power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. It's not all in the eye of the
beholder.
4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp:
Zuleika Dobson
Tiffany lamps
Scopitone films
The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA
The Enquirer, headlines and stories
Aubrey Beardsley drawings
Swan Lake
Bellini's operas
Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards
Schoedsack's King Kong
the Cuban pop singer La Lupe
Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man
the old Flash Gordon comics
women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)
the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett
stag movies seen without lust
5. Camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others. Clothes, furniture, all the elements of
visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp. For Camp art is often decorative art,
emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content. Concert music, though,
because it is contentless, is rarely Camp. It offers no opportunity, say, for a contrast between silly or
extravagant content and rich form. . . . Sometimes whole art forms become saturated with Camp.
Classical ballet, opera, movies have seemed so for a long time. In the last two years, popular music (post
rock-'n'-roll, what the French call yé yé) has been annexed. And movie criticism (like lists of "The 10
Best Bad Movies I Have Seen") is probably the greatest popularizer of Camp taste today, because most
people still go to the movies in a high-spirited and unpretentious way.
6. There is a sense in which it is correct to say: "It's too good to be Camp." Or "too important," not
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marginal enough. (More on this later.) Thus, the personality and many of the works of Jean Cocteau are
Camp, but not those of André Gide; the operas of Richard Strauss, but not those of Wagner; concoctions
of Tin Pan Alley and Liverpool, but not jazz. Many examples of Camp are things which, from a "serious"
point of view, are either bad art or kitsch. Not all, though. Not only is Camp not necessarily bad art, but
some art which can be approached as Camp (example: the major films of Louis Feuillade) merits the most
serious admiration and study.
"The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature."
- The Decay of Lying
7. All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy . . .
Rural Camp is still man-made, and most campy objects are urban. (Yet, they often have a serenity -- or a
naiveté -- which is the equivalent of pastoral. A great deal of Camp suggests Empson's phrase, "urban
pastoral.")
8. Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the
exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in Art Nouveau, the most
typical and fully developed Camp style. Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something
else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A
remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the
shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.
9. As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly
exaggerated. The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Examples: the
swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; the thin, flowing, sexless bodies in
Art Nouveau prints and posters, presented in relief on lamps and ashtrays; the haunting androgynous
vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged
truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual
pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is
something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. . . . Allied to the
Camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn't: a relish for the
exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms. For obvious reasons, the best
examples that can be cited are movie stars. The corny flamboyant female-ness of Jayne Mansfield, Gina
Lollobrigida, Jane Russell, Virginia Mayo; the exaggerated he-man-ness of Steve Reeves, Victor Mature.
The great stylists of temperament and mannerism, like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah
Bankhead, Edwige Feuillière.
10. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman."
To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest
extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.
11. Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of "man" and "woman," "person" and
"thing.") But all style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene. Life is not stylish. Neither is nature.
12. The question isn't, "Why travesty, impersonation, theatricality?" The question is, rather, "When does
travesty, impersonation, theatricality acquire the special flavor of Camp?" Why is the atmosphere of
Shakespeare's comedies (As You Like It, etc.) not epicene, while that of Der Rosenkavalier is?
13. The dividing line seems to fall in the 18th century; there the origins of Camp taste are to be found
(Gothic novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth.) But the relation to nature was quite
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different then. In the 18th century, people of taste either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill) or attempted
to remake it into something artificial (Versailles). They also indefatigably patronized the past. Today's
Camp taste effaces nature, or else contradicts it outright. And the relation of Camp taste to the past is
extremely sentimental.
14. A pocket history of Camp might, of course, begin farther back -- with the mannerist artists like
Pontormo, Rosso, and Caravaggio, or the extraordinarily theatrical painting of Georges de La Tour, or
Euphuism (Lyly, etc.) in literature. Still, the soundest starting point seems to be the late 17th and early
18th century, because of that period's extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry; its taste
for the picturesque and the thrilling, its elegant conventions for representing instant feeling and the total
presence of character -- the epigram and the rhymed couplet (in words), the flourish (in gesture and in
music). The late 17th and early 18th century is the great period of Camp: Pope, Congreve, Walpole, etc,
but not Swift; les précieux in France; the rococo churches of Munich; Pergolesi. Somewhat later: much of
Mozart. But in the 19th century, what had been distributed throughout all of high culture now becomes a
special taste; it takes on overtones of the acute, the esoteric, the perverse. Confining the story to England
alone, we see Camp continuing wanly through 19th century aestheticism (Bume-Jones, Pater, Ruskin,
Tennyson), emerging full-blown with the Art Nouveau movement in the visual and decorative arts, and
finding its conscious ideologists in such "wits" as Wilde and Firbank.
15. Of course, to say all these things are Camp is not to argue they are simply that. A full analysis of Art
Nouveau, for instance, would scarcely equate it with Camp. But such an analysis cannot ignore what in
Art Nouveau allows it to be experienced as Camp. Art Nouveau is full of "content," even of a politicalmoral sort; it was a revolutionary movement in the arts, spurred on by a Utopian vision (somewhere
between William Morris and the Bauhaus group) of an organic politics and taste. Yet there is also a
feature of the Art Nouveau objects which suggests a disengaged, unserious, "aesthete's" vision. This tells
us something important about Art Nouveau -- and about what the lens of Camp, which blocks out content,
is.
16. Thus, the Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken.
But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic
meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and
the thing as pure artifice.
17. This comes out clearly in the vulgar use of the word Camp as a verb, "to camp," something that
people do. To camp is a mode of seduction -- one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a
double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more
impersonal, for outsiders. Equally and by extension, when the word becomes a noun, when a person or a
thing is "a camp," a duplicity is involved. Behind the "straight" public sense in which something can be
taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up."
- An Ideal Husband
18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which
knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.
19. The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who
makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying,
in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine Camp -- for instance, the numbers devised for the Warner
Brothers musicals of the early thirties (42nd Street; The Golddiggers of 1933; ... of 1935; ... of 1937; etc.)
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by Busby Berkeley -- does not mean to be funny. Camping -- say, the plays of Noel Coward -- does. It
seems unlikely that much of the traditional opera repertoire could be such satisfying Camp if the
melodramatic absurdities of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers. One
doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all. (Compare a typical 19th century
opera with Samuel Barber's Vanessa, a piece of manufactured, calculated Camp, and the difference is
clear.)
20. Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful. The perfection of Trouble in Paradise and The
Maltese Falcon, among the greatest Camp movies ever made, comes from the effortless smooth way in
which tone is maintained. This is not so with such famous would-be Camp films of the fifties as All About
Eve and Beat the Devil. These more recent movies have their fine moments, but the first is so slick and
the second so hysterical; they want so badly to be campy that they're continually losing the beat. . . .
Perhaps, though, it is not so much a question of the unintended effect versus the conscious intention, as of
the delicate relation between parody and self-parody in Camp. The films of Hitchcock are a showcase for
this problem. When self-parody lacks ebullience but instead reveals (even sporadically) a contempt for
one's themes and one's materials - as in To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, North by Northwest -- the results
are forced and heavy-handed, rarely Camp. Successful Camp -- a movie like Carné's Drôle de Drame; the
film performances of Mae West and Edward Everett Horton; portions of the Goon Show -- even when it
reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.
21. So, again, Camp rests on innocence. That means Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can,
corrupts it. Objects, being objects, don't change when they are singled out by the Camp vision. Persons,
however, respond to their audiences. Persons begin "camping": Mae West, Bea Lillie, La Lupe, Tallulah
Bankhead in Lifeboat, Bette Davis in All About Eve. (Persons can even be induced to camp without their
knowing it. Consider the way Fellini got Anita Ekberg to parody herself in La Dolce Vita.)
22. Considered a little less strictly, Camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious (when one
plays at being campy). An example of the latter: Wilde's epigrams themselves.
"It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
- Lady Windemere's Fan
23. In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all
seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the
exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.
24. When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition.
The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. ("It's too much," "It's too fantastic," "It's not
to be believed," are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm.)
25. The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress
made of three million feathers. Camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompel'oeil insects and cracks in the masonry. Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Steinberg's six American
movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is a Woman. . . . In Camp there is often
something démesuré in the quality of the ambition, not only in the style of the work itself. Gaudí's lurid
and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal -most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia -- the ambition on the part of one man to do what it
takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.
26. Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too
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much." Titus Andronicus and Strange Interlude are almost Camp, or could be played as Camp. The public
manner and rhetoric of de Gaulle, often, are pure Camp.
27. A work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it succeeds. Eisenstein's films are seldom
Camp because, despite all exaggeration, they do succeed (dramatically) without surplus. If they were a
little more "off," they could be great Camp - particularly Ivan the Terrible I & II. The same for Blake's
drawings and paintings, weird and mannered as they are. They aren't Camp; though Art Nouveau,
influenced by Blake, is.
What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp. Neither can anything be
Camp that does not seem to spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility. Without
passion, one gets pseudo-Camp -- what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic. On the barren edge of
Camp lie a number of attractive things: the sleek fantasies of Dali, the haute couture preciosity of
Albicocco's The Girl with the Golden Eyes. But the two things - Camp and preciosity - must not be
confused.
28. Again, Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of
being special, glamorous. (The curved line, the extravagant gesture.) Not extraordinary merely in the
sense of effort. Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not items are rarely campy. These items, either natural oddities
(the two-headed rooster, the eggplant in the shape of a cross) or else the products of immense labor (the
man who walked from here to China on his hands, the woman who engraved the New Testament on the
head of a pin), lack the visual reward - the glamour, the theatricality - that marks off certain
extravagances as Camp.
29. The reason a movie like On the Beach, books like Winesburg, Ohio and For Whom the Bell Tolls are
bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable, is that they are too
dogged and pretentious. They lack fantasy. There is Camp in such bad movies as The Prodigal and
Samson and Delilah, the series of Italian color spectacles featuring the super-hero Maciste, numerous
Japanese science fiction films (Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man) because, in their relative
unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy - and therefore
touching and quite enjoyable.
30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance
what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles
too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better
able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.
31. This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's
not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary
detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the
failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from
moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere
of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can,
with the passage of time, become fantastic. Many people who listen with delight to the style of Rudy
Vallee revived by the English pop group, The Temperance Seven, would have been driven up the wall by
Rudy Vallee in his heyday.
Thus, things are campy, not when they become old - but when we become less involved in them, and can
enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt. But the effect of time is unpredictable. Maybe
Method acting (James Dean, Rod Steiger, Warren Beatty) will seem as Camp some day as Ruby Keeler's
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does now - or as Sarah Bernhardt's does, in the films she made at the end of her career. And maybe not.
32. Camp is the glorification of "character." The statement is of no importance - except, of course, to the
person (Loie Fuller, Gaudí, Cecil B. De Mille, Crivelli, de Gaulle, etc.) who makes it. What the Camp eye
appreciates is the unity, the force of the person. In every move the aging Martha Graham makes she's
being Martha Graham, etc., etc. . . . This is clear in the case of the great serious idol of Camp taste, Greta
Garbo. Garbo's incompetence (at the least, lack of depth) as an actress enhances her beauty. She's always
herself.
33. What Camp taste responds to is "instant character" (this is, of course, very 18th century); and,
conversely, what it is not stirred by is the sense of the development of character. Character is understood
as a state of continual incandescence - a person being one, very intense thing. This attitude toward
character is a key element of the theatricalization of experience embodied in the Camp sensibility. And it
helps account for the fact that opera and ballet are experienced as such rich treasures of Camp, for neither
of these forms can easily do justice to the complexity of human nature. Wherever there is development of
character, Camp is reduced. Among operas, for example, La Traviata (which has some small
development of character) is less campy than Il Trovatore (which has none).
"Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it."
- Vera, or The Nihilists
34. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse
things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a
different -- a supplementary -- set of standards.
35. Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves. We
value it because it succeeds - in being what it is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that lies
behind it. We assume a proper, that is to say, straightforward relation between intention and performance.
By such standards, we appraise The Iliad, Aristophanes' plays, The Art of the Fugue, Middlemarch, the
paintings of Rembrandt, Chartres, the poetry of Donne, The Divine Comedy, Beethoven's quartets, and among people - Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis, Napoleon, Savonarola. In short, the pantheon of high culture:
truth, beauty, and seriousness.
36. But there are other creative sensibilities besides the seriousness (both tragic and comic) of high
culture and of the high style of evaluating people. And one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has
respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.
For instance, there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement. Here we
do accept a disparity between intention and result. I am speaking, obviously, of a style of personal
existence as well as of a style in art; but the examples had best come from art. Think of Bosch, Sade,
Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka, Artaud, think of most of the important works of art of the 20th century, that is, art
whose goal is not that of creating harmonies but of overstraining the medium and introducing more and
more violent, and unresolvable, subject-matter. This sensibility also insists on the principle that an oeuvre
in the old sense (again, in art, but also in life) is not possible. Only "fragments" are possible. . . . Clearly,
different standards apply here than to traditional high culture. Something is good not because it is
achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to
be human - in short, another valid sensibility -- is being revealed.
And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the
theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks
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of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.
37. The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically moralistic. The second sensibility, that of
extreme states of feeling, represented in much contemporary "avant-garde" art, gains power by a tension
between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is wholly aesthetic.
38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of "style" over
"content," "aesthetics" over "morality," of irony over tragedy.
39. Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp (seriousness in the degree of the
artist's involvement) and, often, pathos. The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of Camp; it is the
quality of excruciation in much of Henry James (for instance, The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The
Wings of the Dove) that is responsible for the large element of Camp in his writings. But there is never,
never tragedy.
40. Style is everything. Genet's ideas, for instance, are very Camp. Genet's statement that "the only
criterion of an act is its elegance"2 is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with Wilde's "in matters of
great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style." But what counts, finally, is the style in
which ideas are held. The ideas about morality and politics in, say, Lady Windemere's Fan and in Major
Barbara are Camp, but not just because of the nature of the ideas themselves. It is those ideas, held in a
special playful way. The Camp ideas in Our Lady of the Flowers are maintained too grimly, and the
writing itself is too successfully elevated and serious, for Genet's books to be Camp.
41. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely,
Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous,
frivolous about the serious.
42. One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that "sincerity" is not enough. Sincerity can be simple
philistinism, intellectual narrowness.
43. The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness - irony, satire - seem feeble today,
inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp
introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.
44. Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an
experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
"I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex."
- A Woman of No Importance
45. Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century's surrogate for the
aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem:
how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.
46. The dandy was overbred. His posture was disdain, or else ennui. He sought rare sensations, undefiled
by mass appreciation. (Models: Des Esseintes in Huysmans' À Rebours, Marius the Epicurean, Valéry's
Monsieur Teste.) He was dedicated to "good taste."
The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and
velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not
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defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp -- Dandyism in the
age of mass culture -- makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object.
Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.
47. Wilde himself is a transitional figure. The man who, when he first came to London, sported a velvet
beret, lace shirts, velveteen knee-breeches and black silk stockings, could never depart too far in his life
from the pleasures of the old-style dandy; this conservatism is reflected in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
But many of his attitudes suggest something more modern. It was Wilde who formulated an important
element of the Camp sensibility -- the equivalence of all objects -- when he announced his intention of
"living up" to his blue-and-white china, or declared that a doorknob could be as admirable as a painting.
When he proclaimed the importance of the necktie, the boutonniere, the chair, Wilde was anticipating the
democratic esprit of Camp.
48. The old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity.
Where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually
amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the
connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.
49. It is a feat, of course. A feat goaded on, in the last analysis, by the threat of boredom. The relation
between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in
affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence.
"What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in
normal relations to Art."
- A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated
50. Aristocracy is a position vis-à-vis culture (as well as vis-à-vis power), and the history of Camp taste is
part of the history of snob taste. But since no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist today to sponsor
special tastes, who is the bearer of this taste? Answer: an improvised self-elected class, mainly
homosexuals, who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste.
51. The peculiar relation between Camp taste and homosexuality has to be explained. While it's not true
that Camp taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap. Not all liberals are
Jews, but Jews have shown a peculiar affinity for liberal and reformist causes. So, not all homosexuals
have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard -- and the most articulate
audience -- of Camp. (The analogy is not frivolously chosen. Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding
creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators
of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and
homosexual aestheticism and irony.)
52. The reason for the flourishing of the aristocratic posture among homosexuals also seems to parallel
the Jewish case. For every sensibility is self-serving to the group that promotes it. Jewish liberalism is a
gesture of self-legitimization. So is Camp taste, which definitely has something propagandistic about it.
Needless to say, the propaganda operates in exactly the opposite direction. The Jews pinned their hopes
for integrating into modern society on promoting the moral sense. Homosexuals have pinned their
integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes
moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.
53. Nevertheless, even though homosexuals have been its vanguard, Camp taste is much more than
homosexual taste. Obviously, its metaphor of life as theater is peculiarly suited as a justification and
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projection of a certain aspect of the situation of homosexuals. (The Camp insistence on not being
"serious," on playing, also connects with the homosexual's desire to remain youthful.) Yet one feels that if
homosexuals hadn't more or less invented Camp, someone else would. For the aristocratic posture with
relation to culture cannot die, though it may persist only in increasingly arbitrary and ingenious ways.
Camp is (to repeat) the relation to style in a time in which the adoption of style -- as such -- has become
altogether questionable. (In the modem era, each new style, unless frankly anachronistic, has come on the
scene as an anti-style.)
"One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."
- In conversation
54. The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no
monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists,
indeed, a good taste of bad taste. (Genet talks about this in Our Lady of the Flowers.) The discovery of
the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is
depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his
good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes
upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he
ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.
55. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous. It
wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless but a sweet
cynicism.) Camp taste doesn't propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who
succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.
56. Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs
and awkward intensities of "character." . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who
share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as "a camp," they're enjoying it. Camp is a
tender feeling.
(Here, one may compare Camp with much of Pop Art, which -- when it is not just Camp -- embodies an
attitude that is related, but still very different. Pop Art is more flat and more dry, more serious, more
detached, ultimately nihilistic.)
57. Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles. The
absence of this love is the reason why such kitsch items as Peyton Place (the book) and the Tishman
Building aren't Camp.
58. The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful . . . Of course, one can't always say that.
Only under certain conditions, those which I've tried to sketch in these notes.
1 The sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive, but also its most perishable, aspect. One may capture the ideas
(intellectual history) and the behavior (social history) of an epoch without ever touching upon the sensibility or taste which
informed those ideas, that behavior. Rare are those historical studies -- like Huizinga on the late Middle Ages, Febvre on 16th
century France -- which do tell us something about the sensibility of the period.
2 Sartre's gloss on this in Saint Genet is: "Elegance is the quality of conduct which transforms the greatest amount of being into
appearing."
http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html
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