ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Notes on Camp

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

After investigating the politics of cool on the last Trip episode, the crew turn their attention to another distinctly modern sensibility: camp. Digging into Susan Sontag’s formative 1964 essay on the camp aesthetic, Nadia, Keir and Jem think about how elements of the artificial, the theatrical and the sentimental come together in camp objects, from […]

This is Acid Man Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kea Milburn and I'm joined as usual by my good friend Nadia Idol. Hello, and my other good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. Today we're going to do something a little bit special. We're going to try something new to go along with our main episode on the topic of Cool. We're going to try a little reading group.

We're going to read together a text by Susan Sontag from 1964 called Notes on Camp. If you want to go and search on the internet, grab it off the internet and follow along with us. I'll pause the recording and do that now, because we're going to go through it. Aphorism by aphorism. It's a nice little text, which consists of a number of aphorisms. Let me just scroll to the bottom and see. Yes, 58 aphorisms, which we're going to go through, perhaps not one by one, but we're going to talk about each in the form of a reading group.

Perhaps before we do that, we should just have a tiny bit of context. Who could I go for that? Who always has an opinion and everything we talk about? Jeremy, can you give us a little bit of context on Susan Sontag? Well, Sontag's a critic, basically. There's one or two generations in the English-speaking world when critics generally, like critics of literature, art, photography, film have this huge cultural weight.

Now, it's the epoch when English literature becomes the default humanities subject for people to study at universities in the English-speaking world. whereas it would be philosophy in most other parts of the world. And so criticism really takes on this important social role, sort of as the development of mass media makes the production of culture, much more accelerated. There's just more and more of it.

So people are trying to make sense. She's in her early 30s when it's published. It's published in a magazine called Partisan Review, which is a kind of absolutely classic example of the left-wing little magazine coming out of New York, historically associated with the Communist Party, as the name Partisan would indicate. So it had actually survived the Red Skares of the 50s to a certain extent. And that's the context in which it gets published. As I say, notes on camp. I guess also in terms of the broader context, obviously there's a

close relationship between camp and queer culture. It's coming up just around the time. of Andy Warhol's first big public exhibitions in New York a little bit before. It's a gay liberation, obviously, it's really going to take off. But by this moment, there is quite a strong current of awareness of and sympathy for the plight of oppressed gay people amongst the sort of literate and artistic classes in particular in places like Britain and the States. and that is also bubbling along in the background to this essay being written. So before we get into the aphorisms, there's a little sort of introduction. Has anyone got anything they wanted to say about that or read out a few bits of the key lines from the text? I'm happy to read a few lines, but first I think let's explain what aphorisms are

because I had never heard that word before, but I knew exactly what it was. And that is this form where you write an essay in these different points, am I right? so like one, two, three, four, and it's written that way so that it's easy to follow along with often quite complex ideas. Would that be a fair description? I think the key point about aphoristic writing, which we associate with people at Nietzsche, is you don't really make your argument, you just make your point. You just, you explain a point, and you might have one line to sort of justify it, but you just express your key, pithy, philosophical or historical observations in a couple of lines and then you move on to the next one and yet they're not

necessarily numbered but often it's presented yet point 1.2.3.4 so it's a way of condensing like loads of ideas into quite a short space although of course as I say it does mean you don't really you don't really argue for them so you know I think it's quite problematic when highly aphoristic texts take on a sort of canonical status a lot of the time because they're basically It's basically, it's like a blog pageist. I mean, these days, if I get, if I see a piece of writing like this, I say this is like a blog, like rather than a proper article, because people tend to just say what they reckon,

rather than making carefully evidenced and weighed up arguments. But when it works as a form of writing, it's very interesting because you just very quickly get through all the ideas. And the best aphoristic writing like this, it does sort of, it does explain its positions. And as the numbers ascend, and the aphorisms build up. She does make a pretty clear case, actually,

a pretty clear argument for her overall position. So it makes it very, very readable. I think that's one of the main points. Yeah, I do think it makes it very readable. And for someone who perhaps is reading from outside the canon or outside academia or, like, you know, is not in intellectual circles, but it's interested in ideas.

I think as a form, it's a really good introduction to perhaps, yeah, a set of ideas. and then you can go on and read, you know, more stuff around that. But it gives, it's, there's something that's more digestible about it, which in terms of being able to get through 15 pages of a text, as opposed to, you know, paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs of kind of like a building, cascading argument, I think. Yeah.

I don't mind introducing this first bit. This first bit is just basically, she's, Susan Sontag is trying to explain the general thing that camp is and she says it's a sensibility and then she goes on to sort of explain or try to talk about what a sensibility is before we even get to the particular specific sensibility of camp and she says she distinguishes sensibility from an idea she says that camp is a particular sort of sensibility the essence of camp is its love of the unnatural of artifices of exaggeration and we're going to come back to that quite a bit in the aphorism it's something of a private code or a badge of identity, even among small urban cliques.

Then she goes on to talk about sensibilities. He said most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of pure subjective preference, those mysterious attractions mainly sensual that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. This did make me think of a point that we've talked about before, where Jeremy made this argument I was very suspicious of that underlying all politics is taste or aesthetics and attraction to certain aesthetics or taste. Yeah, I mean, that question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics is interesting, but I would also want to situate this obviously alongside Raymond Williams,

you know, the great British cultural theorist, cultural historian, at just the same time, he's working with his concept of structure of feeling. I mean, really, he's been using that for 10 years by this point, the early 60s. And the idea of structure of feeling is a way of, understanding the ways in which in a particular time among particular social groups, there can be a sort of pattern of responses and ideas and aesthetic preferences and political and ethical dispositions, which you can't really reduce to anything as coherent as an ideology, but has some sort of a pattern to it and involves the way people feel as well as the way

people think. And sensibility and structure of feeling, they're not exactly the same terms. I I mean, they're not exactly synonymous, but I think it's interesting to think about the fact that these guys, also Fouca, a bit later in the decade, and various other people, they're sort of trying to figure out ways of talking about culture and identifying and naming cultural phenomena in ways which is more complicated than just identifying a particular set of texts or a particular canon of work within a particular art form or even identifying. a particular ideology or genre and sensibility is one of these terms that Sontak is deploying here to try and do this work. I really like the beginning and I would like to propose even though Keir got in there before I did in this reading group for people who are perhaps just listening and not reading along that I would like to read that second paragraph. Yeah, cool, read it out. Yes, good idea. 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 of 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 go to 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 intentions, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy, modified by revulsion. And I want to say two things on that before we go on, because I just thought it's such a striking kind of opening, you know, second kind of big paragraph. One thing is that I feel the same way. I feel the same way of being strongly drawn to camp and also revulsed by part of it. And also just really interesting that she uses the masculine here. She said he can only, whenever his intention.

So those are two things that really stood out to me in that paragraph. But so interesting, as you pointed out, Keir, the stuff about like the love of the unnatural, like the badge of identity. There's already so much in that opening paragraph. I feel like we could do a whole microdose on it. Yeah, I think that's true, yeah. I mean, I think we should probably, we haven't really introduced the basic term camp in case people don't know.

I mean, I suppose we're going to be going all the way through it. But it's associated with all the things that we're going to be talking about here. on time talks about this essay sort of ideas of artificiality and but it's also I mean it's very crudely associated with certain kinds of feminacy that were thought to be typical of gay men in the second half of the 20th century that's what camp often meant when I was growing up most basically she she complexifies that doesn't she is that what I find interesting about this piece is because I didn't know what I was going to read and I think like like her analysis and observation of trying to break down, well, what is this actual thing? What is it? Is the whole

point of why this is such a brilliant piece? So, you know, it's moving away from those ideas towards something more complex, which I think is interesting. Well, Keir, I think you should explain a bit more, though, why you wanted us to talk about this to the, to accompany the episode on Cool. Basically, I don't feel much attraction to camp, the camp sensibility. And I worry that actually, like, this is written in 1964. So, you know, we're at a high point of Fordism, basically, and, you know, before the legalisation of homosexuality and these sorts of things. And, like, a camp sensibility, I think it's one of the dominant forms of interaction with culture today.

And there's got lots of real positives to it, basically. I think it's played a really big part in that one of the most substantial social changes, which is the acceptance of homosexuality, gayness as like a, just a normal part of life, a really massive change. But I think part of why that has happened is because Camp, as a sensibility, which is not synonymous with homosexuality, but associated with it, and associated in particular with, like, the sorts of performances of gay men in particular, like reaching back into the 1970s and onwards, you know, the performances on TV and these sorts of things,

I think part of why it sits so easily within contemporary culture is because it's so depoliticised. and it takes a non-serious attitude towards life, basically. And, you know, we live in an era where seriousness is required, basically. We need to seriously face up to the absolute multiple crises going on. You know, no serious political action means a world accelerating it into catastrophe. But the proposition of just straight seriousness, seriousness about politics is something this is very hard for people to take seriously because of like this this sort of like avalanche of campness of coolness of irony etc which is like swamp popular culture

and so I think it's important to try to pick these things apart in order to work out what like you know a post ironic a post camp seriousness could look like that's why I wanted to get into it yeah but what's that got to do with cool Because coolness has a similar, like it has lots of overlaps of cool, campness. So it's another way of which you can try to deal with seriousness, et cetera, through, you know, there's strong hints of irony in camp. It's an ironic sensibility, same as cool. So I see it as like a psychological posture, a sensibility in Sontag's terms,

which overlaps with and runs alongside cool. so just as we talked about hip which overlaps and runs alongside cool I think camp does as well to some degree and then it reaches out into something else which would be something like kitsch and then another attitude would be like geek or something like that

but I think camp is perhaps even more problematic in contemporary society and I think it might be like controversial to say that but I think it's a problematic thing that we have to not reject but like work our way through

okay yeah and i think i'm sure lots of people listening will already be thinking about this so it's worth saying the reason this essay by its ontag has subsequently in later decades come to be recognized as this huge classic is because it absolutely anticipates almost all of the key arguments around the idea of postmodernism as an aesthetic as a sensibility as perhaps an ideology as a way of relating to the world, which you get in broad fields of cultural theory, social theory, cultural criticism from the late 70s onwards. And arguably, she uses the word camp simply to refer to what would later come to be called postmodernism. And she anticipates a lot of that, and a lot of the debates are the same. And if people want a thoroughly exhaustive account of the genesis and various

interpretations of the word postmodernism, then I did like a three-hour lecture about that on the Culture Power Politics podcast a few years ago, which is a lots of people have found a useful resource. So if you're wondering, then yeah, if you're wondering if this all sounds like we're talking about postmodernism, yeah, that's a key issue. We're going to have to keep coming back to. Let's get into her words. Good idea. Well, I think at this point, the thing about taste then,

on the first page, in the second paragraph, she basically makes a justification for trying to understand tastes in a semi-systematic way. Although she's still making this slightly romanticist, to disavowal of the idea that you can actually do that. This is what critics often want to do. They often want to have their cake and eat it in terms of saying you can't really talk about this stuff because it's sublime, but I'm going to

talk about it now. She does a little bit of that. But broadly speaking, I would situate this actually alongside, for example, the work of Pierre Bordeaux that I talked about on the main episode on Cool, in terms of this is the thing that lots of people in different parts of the world are interested in at this time in history, partly because consumer culture is becoming so important, so socially and economic and central. They're interested in the idea that taste is not just something arbitrary and random. The taste is something everybody has, or variable aesthetic taste are things that all people have,

and there are things that you can somehow talk about systematically. They're not just sort of completely arbitrary or completely subjective. Yeah, totally. And let's not foreshadow what's to come. But she talks about, you know, so this is the age of mass consumption. You're saying, you know, this is something before they were tastemakers and the aristocrats, and now we need to work out what's going on, what tastemaking is now, and the different forms of tastemaking, et cetera.

So that's the historical context of which she's writing this, I think. Let's get to the aphorism, shall we? I want to mention the dedication, though. These notes are for Oscar Wilde. Yes. Oscar Wilde is a figure who runs through this, a very key figure. Yes, he does. So Wilde is this really interesting figure. Obviously, he wrote collections of aphorisms.

He wrote, indeed, this famous essay, The Solomon on Socialism. And he, he, why are this coming out of what was called the aesthetic movement or the aestheticist movement. So it's a movement partly associated with bohemians and artists, but also associated with kind of high, indeed, or high critics and experts on the arts and art history, people like Ruskin in the late 19th century, Victorian Britain, and elsewhere. And basically, it describes an attitude, an intellectual attitude or a dispositional attitude, which places a very, very high focus, a very high value, I should say, on aesthetics, on aesthetics as kind of defining

every aspect of existence. And this is going to feed into people like William Morris, for example, who both comes out of the asceticist movement, the aesthetic movement, and was a radical socialist. And he basically invents the modern idea of wallpaper, because it's a way of allowing people just in their own domestic spaces to experience forms of artistic beauty in ways which today we think of as fairly trivial. But Wilde is very himself, Wilde is very conscious, I think, of the sort of tension between what might seem to be a kind of aristocratic or elitist disposition and the utopian and egalitarian aspects of his thinking. And obviously that is a sort of tension which is being explored all the way through here

because there's this sense that there's this sense that a sensibility we might think of as aristocratic is also appropriate to a potentially appropriate to a genuinely post-capitalist disposition because if you want to live in a world in which scarcity has been abolished then what you want is for everybody to get to live

in a way that historically luxury for all Yeah, exactly, luxury for all, exactly, exactly. So that's partly why Wilde is the dedicatee here, I think, because it is really sort of returning to this set of questions which while did try to address himself to. And he addressed himself to them in terms which didn't really become, you know, widely appreciated until the 20s, I think. So it's really situating itself in that tradition, which would also include things we've talked about on the show like surrealism, I think a little bit, of people trying to think about, well, what is the relationship between art, you know, everyday life and revolutionary. politics and consciousness, if it's going to be anything more than, well, the job of art is to

report the dreary realities of oppression and make everybody stoically determined to overcome it. All right, so there we go. That was the dedication. That was me talking a lot about the sentence these notes of Oscar Wilde. So now, all right, let's go. Somebody say something about the first. Does somebody want to talk about the first aphorism? I mean, the first Afrinza is just, it says camp is a certain mode of asceticism. It's a way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, not in terms of beauty, but in terms of degree of artifice or stylisation. So that just sort of emphasises what Jen was saying about Oscar Wilde and the project of, you know, it's one of the projects that merges out of 20th century art as well.

Do you know what I mean? This sort of like supersession of art and then making living a form of art. And in fact, the phrase just before that is one should either be a work of art or wear a work of art. So that's one way in which we can sort of understand this, you know, about the aestheticisation of life, trying to treat life as something, as an aesthetic phenomenon in which you develop sensibility. But Camp is a very strange one because it's, in some ways, it's totally and totally utterly embedded or at least the version we get in the mid-20th century is totally embedded in pop culture and like this idea of artifice and etc, etc., etc., etc. something that is quite hard actually to then to see as some sort of precursor to,

you know, a more liberated society, a post-scarcity society. But perhaps it is we should go on and read on, I think. And then the next, the next aphorism, this is going to take a while. So she says, to emphasize style is to slight content or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized, or at least apolitical. I think we'll have to come back to that later on. I was really interested in number three. I really like what she does there with uncovering perspective. So I like this

idea that there's not only a camp vision, which is a camp way of looking at things, but then she basically says at the end of that part that it's not all in the eye of the beholder. And I think that's interesting. She introduces this idea of like campy movies, close. furniture, etc., which I think is like probably a dem or de, I don't know what the English words for it is, is like a past way of describing camp because I don't think campy just in the language is a phrase that's used today. We just say camp, but she's basically saying there's all these different things that can be camp. Campy. You have to, you have to say it in a mid-century, eastern, northeastern American middle-class accent. It's campy. Which I can't do.

Campy. Oh, it's so campy. God. Okay. But yeah, but I thought that was an interesting point to make so early on this idea that it's not all in the eye of the beholder. So I think like she's basically saying, no, there is some kind of category that can be made of like what is camp. And then now I'm about to explain it to you. So, you know, that's quite, that's quite good. Because in a way, that's taking away like the argument against it being just about postmodernism is like related to postmodernism and like where perhaps there might be a differentiation. Is she saying like, like, Like, you know, she's effectively saying to me or I'm reading it as that there are some things that are objectively that can be like understood as camp. It's not just all subjective. It's not all, you know, anything can be anything. I mean, I don't, I mean, there are definitely critics who would say some things are or are not objectively postmodern as well in much the same terms. The next, Afrism is the list of examples of things which are part of the canon of camp.

She mentions Zalika Dobson, which is a novel, a bomb. Mike's Beerbone, Big Beerbone, Tiffany Lamps, Scopitone Films. Scopitone, if people don't know, if Scopatone was an early kind of video jukebox. It's pretty extraordinary. Go look it up on YouTube. Aubrey Beardsley drawings. Everybody should know who Aubrey Beardsley is.

They need to explain any more there. It's that list of, so I think we'd be here all day if we're unpacking that whole list. But it's sort of, it's a list that includes. things like opera and ballet, but also schlucky movies, King Kong and Turn of the Century Picture Postcards. So what's the last one? What does the last one mean? Stag movies seen without lust. It's porn. porn movies. Early porn movies. Yeah. Seen without lust. What does she mean? She means if you watch a 1970s porn movie about a man who's a plumber come to fix somebody's plumbing and you stop that movie before they have sex, it's very campy.

Right, okay She goes on in number five To say that camp involves an affinity For clothes, furniture, visual decor And pop music, ballet, opera, All these sorts of things. So I think the first sentence to number five Is interesting because she starts to give camp a persona

So it's not just that things can be camp And it's a perspective and we view things as camp But here she's saying like the camp taste itself Has an affinity for certain kinds of art other than others, which, you know, it's like Camp has its own views, which I think is like an interesting way to posit Camp

so early in the, so early in the piece. I think to add to Jeremy's list, though, the list Jeremy read out earlier, though, is in this section of five. She also says, she talks about movie criticism. She says, all of the, like the lists, the lists of movies, such as the top 10 best bad movies I have seen,

is probably the greatest popularizer of Camp taste today. And I think people will recognise that it's an important part of this. People love films which are so bad they're good. Yeah, but she's very, very keen all the way through. And one of her central preoccupations is the idea that something's so bad, it's good. And she's very careful. She wants to unpick that and say some things are so bad, they're good. But not all bad things are so bad, they're good.

Yeah, it depends how they're bad, basically. It depends if they're bad by accident as well, and we'll get into that a little bit later, I think. But people can get, so understand that. I think she ends up wanting to say they're not really bad at all, actually, the things. She sort of wants to end up saying the things that people say are so bad, they're good, they're actually not bad. They're just camp. Yeah, but we'll get into a certain mode of failure a bit later on, I think.

Yeah. I suppose the only point, the one I would pick out is from Afrizen-Sseum 7. She says, all camp objects and persons contain a large element of artifice. And this is what is really going to anticipate a kind of postmodern. sensibility, which really reaches a peak in cultural theories, I would say, in the early 90s. When I'm thinking of, for example, the black British critic Kabila Mercer in the early, I think it's in the early 90s, is making this argument that it's completely wrong for black critics to celebrate authentically Afro-Diosporic culture, like Afros and that kind

of thing. And I mean, he's quite preoccupied with hairstyles. And actually, what we should celebrate is hair straightening because it's not just embracing white norms. It's celebrating the plasticity of identity and the fact that your identities are always artificial and can always be changed. A highly tendentious argument, frankly, that doesn't really survive, not the advance of neoliberal consumer culture at all. But this is absolutely, you can see why. why this essay being written 30 years earlier comes to be seen as a kind of classic anticipator of that moment. So I really like number eight.

Well, I found it really interesting rather, that her making the point about the relationship between Art Nouveau and Camp. Because I have to say there's various different things about art Nouveau pieces that I have not seen as particularly Camp. So that was interesting for me because it changed and how I saw a lot of these various different, like, famous Art Nouveau pieces as she, like, weaves them into the articles. Because when she talks about the Paris Metro entrances, like I know exactly what she's talking about, I just don't see them as camp particularly compared to some of the other things in her list. So that was interesting for me. I think Art Nouveau is a good example. She talks about the Art Nouveau Paris Metro entrances, for example. and it's the fact that they're playful,

they're deliberately, slightly florid, slightly excessive, and deliberately playful. And that is, it's a very distinctive style of public architecture, given the historically most public architecture over thousands of years has taken, has obviously been taking itself very seriously, and that's the whole point. And so the idea of a public arts architecture that is quite deliberately aesthetically playful,

again, absolutely anticipates the idea of post-men modernism in architecture from the early 70s almost to this kind of celebration of playfulness. I also think number nine is a really interesting, a really, really important point that's made about, you know, the importance of like the relationship between camp and exaggeration. That's one really important point. And the other one is androgyny.

Yes. And I really like the way she phrases this bit of like what is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine and what is most beautiful in feminine. women is something masculine. And she talks about all of these different actors and actresses from the 1920s onwards that can kind of fit into that category, which kind of play with that kind of gender bending. And I think it's really important and interesting that she then goes into number 10 talking about it being role play, because of course that's a really important part of like uncovering what gender is about, which is that it's a social role which is put

upon sex, right? So that that kind of role play becomes quite a central part of our understanding of, you know, what a camp performance is, you know, of a person. This aphorism, Aphorism 9 of this essay is often seen as an absolutely foundational moment of anglophone queer theory for exactly the reasons you've just given Nardia, that it's explicitly, it points out that there is a whole aesthetic tradition within which the androgynous is celebrated as such for its own sake, like precisely for its capacity to go beyond and subvert gender binary. So that is really important, yeah. Although she qualifies it by saying that like an allied,

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 personal personality mannerisms. And she cites like the flamboyant femaleness. of Jane Mansfield or the exaggerated He-Manness. And it makes you think of like Tom of Finland cartoons and those sorts of things. Yes, yes, yes, that's right, yes. So it's like it can be like it can be both. Yeah, sorry, that's a really good point.

But then I think there's a bit there that what comes out for me on this page was like the point that Keir was making earlier about a potential like space or, you know, frame in which to critique camp or at least camp in the 21st century, which is that what starts to come across from reading as far as this page four for me is this kind of camp as amusement and amusing and as kind of an anti-earnest, you know, which I can now, Keir having made his argument in the beginning when we first started talking, I can now see within like how that could be problematic, as in a problematic escape in a certain kind of political reality. because, you know, these things, these, this cultural production and aesthetics don't exist in a political vacuum.

So I think that's interesting for me to read that now, given what Keir said earlier. Well, perhaps we'll get to this bit later, but I think it's a little bit like cool, where cool is something that emerges out of marginalised communities. And like Camp as well, you know, you can see how Camp can be extremely useful as a form of defence against iniquities around homosexuality or something like that. age where homosexuality is banned, etc. It's a way of relating to the world which protects yourself, but that might be different to when camp is the dominant sensibility for interacting

with culture. I'm not actually sure of that argument, but let's return to that as we go through the other aphorisms. Well, the next one is also really crucial in this history that we're talking about. Number 10, first sentence, Camp sees everything in

quotation marks. So we very much tend to associated that idea of everything being in quotation marks with 1990s postmodern irony. But she's specifically using that phrase right there. I think I've talked about this on the show before. It's massively ahead of its time. Yeah. So one of the famous essays about what is postmodernism, what is a postmodern aesthetic is this essay that got reproduced, got translated from German and published in New Left Review about how a garden gnome is not just a garden gnome anymore. A garden gnome always has to be seen in quotation marks.

One of the interesting issues with the reception history of this essay is I don't know how widely it was read out some of the English-speaking world. I'm not sure actually now that I think about it. But certainly I don't think it was as read as widely before, say, the 80s and 90s as it might have been subsequently because there isn't any reference to this essay in lots of the early commentary on post-modernism coming from French or German writers. It's really clearly anticipating. lot of that. I don't know what else to say about it really. I think we all understand

what's meant these days by the idea of putting things in quotation marks. And she completely, she sees this as a sensibility that is defined by doing that. And of course, she doesn't just situate it like post-war. She doesn't just identify it rather with, say, post-war culture. She identifies it as a sensibility, which, well, as we'll see, stretches all the way back to the 18th century. It's an important point, because it gives us a marker for when we have exited the postmodern condition, which is when we can have us, once again, have a sincere love for the garden now with no quotation marks at all. Number 13 is one that I want to talk about.

So I actually don't understand what she means. This is maybe one of the few places in the text where I've actually got a question mark. So maybe, you know, one of you guys get this bit and can explain it. which is this bit where it says today's camp taste, Ephesus. Is that the right way to pronounce that word? Faces. I don't even know what that means. Eface is nature or else contradicts it outright.

So what does that mean? What does that mean? It effaced is nature. It means that it's not interested in any notion of naturalness, of like, people's sent to people's feelings or experiences be being natural. I see. Okay. Yeah. And she's contrasting it of like,

18th century pre-camp tastes in the gothic novels or artificial ruins, you know, that there the attitude to nature was quite different, basically. So is this linking to the fact of like saying like the art of, that part of camp is saying the artificial is good? Is it artificial rather than like manufactured or modern? I mean, I think you could see in terms of the distinction between culture and nature as well in a way and this idea that we're living in a world in which everything is cultural. like there's no there is no kind of there's no human nature left which isn't like an object of human intervention and social interaction and and it's about feeling okay about that and recognizing that that gives people forms of agency rather than just seeing it as something to romantically regret i think that's how i would see it you can see that as anticipating like frederick jameson saying well the postmodern is what happens when nature has completely disappeared which is sort of true you know i mean in broad socio-political terms the I always explain that to students as to say, well, in the period of modernity, we're very

conscious still that we are using technology and we are using new forms of social organisation to overcome what were historically big impediments to human happiness, but they are basically natural in nature. They're to do with scarcity of food. They're to do with the elements and the weather. They're to do with disease. And in the postmodern period, those are not the things that we're worried about anymore. Instead, what we're worried about is pollution, climate change, like health conditions brought on by having too much food. So we're no longer engaged in a struggle against nature. We're just engaged in the kind of struggle against the products of our own, of human activity. But again, Sontag is really important partly because she's anticipating the

idea of the postmodern, not just as, as Jameson puts it, the cultural logic of late capitalism and this kind of ideological capitulation to capitalism, but also as a way of inhabiting a completely human-constructed world in a way which is comfortable with the increase in agency, which that gives to people. In the next paragraph, this is where she says, she says that you can trace camp back to the kind of late 17th, early 18th centuries. She's talking about to some extent what today we would call the early modernity,

although you can trace that back usually to the Renaissance. As he's talking about, you know, people like in English literature, Alexander Pope, who famously has his very stylised kind of writing and was already saying in the late 17th century, the early 18th century, well, there's nothing new to say. There's just new ways of saying it. This idea indeed that you were living in a period when really all of the important stuff you could say had already been said by the classical philosophers or the Christian fathers or even maybe people like Shakespeare. And all that there was left to do now

was to stylistically innovate the ways in which you would say stuff that everybody sort of already knew. I mean, that was Pope's sort of aesthetic ideology. So it is really interesting. People already are thinking, like, by that time, oh, well, there's nothing really new to do. So you just have to kind of play around with things.

So again, again, she's sort of situated. what will come to be seen as a distinctively postmodern sensibility. She's seeing it really as a sort of current of thought and aesthetic practice, which you can trace right through the history of modernity, or at least right back to the first moment when people are fully conscious, that they are now inhabiting something like a modern period, which is different from pre-modern periods. I've got notes on 17.

I'd love to talk about 17. So I like here that she, you know, again, She's, as she has personified camp earlier, and now she's talking about camp as a verb to camp something, as something that people do, which I thought was interesting. But I really love this sentence. To camp is a mode of seduction, one which employs flamboyant mannerism susceptible of a double interpretation. So, like, in a sense, she's almost like nodding to like the doublo-ant-tondres of like, you know,

the carry-on films and that sort of stuff, which I think comes, you know, later culturally. Kenneth Williams from the carry-on films, he's the sort of epitome of camp in that. Exactly. Exactly. But then I felt like there was quite a lot in that number 17 because she then starts talking about, you know, behind the quote-unquote straight public sense, there is the private, zany experience of the thing, right? So she seems to be. be alluding to this idea of camp as a private language in a sense, which I thought was like there was there's a lot there, right? So to camp as a kind of mode of seduction with the flamboyant mannerisms and then talking about the public, this kind of idea of like the public, the

sensible being straight and then this the private camp experience of the actual same thing. The important bit there is that the double interpretation she talks about gestures full duplicity of a witty meaning for the cognoscenti and another impersonal for outsiders. And it immediately made me think about people like Kenneth Williams slipping the gay slang language Polari into around the horn or the Goon Show or something like that. The radio comedy shows of the New Year. Radio comedy shows from the 1930s and 40s, is it? No, 40s, 50s to the early 60s.

Yeah. And so it just sounds like this extraordinary inventiveness. where he's just making up these nonsense words to the public. But of course, those in the no, they know what he's really talking about. And it's quite subversive because, of course, homosexuality is banned, is illegal, etc. Oh, well, our editor say, why don't you troll off up to Mr. Owens' Latty? That's flat or house, translator's moat. And have a Polari with him, you say.

We'd like to have something odd and personal. Well, how... How about this mustard plaster? No, thanks, it's just their breakfast. Yeah, so that sort of thing. And I'd just at this moment like to say that during a role-playing game, I played recently, I hear Jeremy speak a bit of Polari. And as it's my role on this show to try to undermine the serious persona of Jeremy Gilbert,

I'd like to encourage him to do a bit now. Opa. Bona to Varda you, Ducky. Ah, you said it better than that, June. I did, I've been practicing. I can't. Ona to Varda, you, Ducky. That's it.

And now let us raise our voices and sing the party song. And you'll take me through. The party's flag is deep as pure. with fleur-de-lis in pale-shartreuse. Both working home and new-the-reach, we'll find our programme very sheets. The Jeremy Gilbert, who, like, compares, or whatever you guys call it, role-playing games, like, might be a little bit camp.

Might well be, yeah. It's different. It might be different to the Jeremy Gilbert on ACFM. Well, I mean, role-playing games might be inherently camp. That's one. That's another microdose. No, I have also featured Aubrey Beardsley in a game. This was the game we were playing, a game that I ran.

I have featured Aubrey Beardley, although sadly neither Kear nor any of the players ever realised they were talking to Aubrey Beardley. I think we did, didn't we? No, no. That was the M.R. Jeeves game. Yeah, it was, yeah. Okay.

This might be getting a little bit into the wits. A bit neat, let's get on. Yes, exactly. Exactly. But, no, that's interesting, Kea. So the bit that you thought was most interesting about that paragraph was a bit that I found least important. But there we go. That's what happens when you read these sort of readings, like these different bits kind of jump out at you.

And then through this whole page, I wasn't sure whether she was saying that Camp is kind of accidental and unselfconscious or the opposite. Because I felt like you could read both of those tendencies in Camp. I don't think she can quite settle on which of those is because she sort of wants to say you can't, like, she does want to say you can't try to be camp. You, if you try to be camp, you won't be really camp. But that doesn't really, I mean, that doesn't sit that easily with her claim. And then she talks about it as a performance, right? So then it's, so it's kind of like, there's that kind of like running contradiction, which I quite enjoyed that started to come out for me on this page, which is page six for me. me on number of 17.

I was like, she seems to be saying that both things can coexist, which in a sense would say that it would be post-modern in a sense. We should read out Afros and 18,

which is one must distinguish between naive and deliberate camp. Pure camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be camp, in brackets, camping is usually less satisfying. So she's definitely valorizing

accidental camp. But then she undermines it a bit later by praising Noah Coward. Well, I think the relationship between camp and innocence in aphorism 19 to 22. I would say she's developing an argument. So she tries to say the pure examples of camp are completely unintentional. They're dead serious. For example, she says the art nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it. He's not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. I just think that's wrong,

actually. I think he is trying to be charming. I think he knows he's being charmed. He knows he's being whimsical. And then she, by Aforism 22, she's saying, she says considered a little less strictly. Camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious when one plays it being campy. An example of the latter, Wilde's epigrams themselves. So I think she is trying to get at something. She can't quite nail, which is this idea that camp is about

a certain kind of suspension of ordinary norms of seriousness, which nonetheless, has a very serious intent. Well, no, but we definitely are doing every single aphorism, aren't me? Because in 23, she says, in naive or pure camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. I think that's one of the, that sort of somebody trying to be serious and it failing is like her idea, ideal of pure camp. Well, I know that's what she gets to mean her terms.

I'm still saying, I think I've got better terms for what she's trying to get. which is that she's really trying to think about an entirely different economy of seriousness to that which typifies kind of received canonical culture at the time she's writing. Yeah. What about this nation of extravagance on 24? When she says in 25, the hallmark of camp is the spirit of extravagance. I was thinking about a friend of the show George Batai and his emphasis on excess. And that is definitely a connection which has been made by probably the,

British critic who owes the most to Sontag, Richard Dyer, both in his classic essay in defensive disco. If we were going to do another reading, actually, another reading like this of a similar essay, we could just do in defensive disco at some point. But also in his

writing on musicals, musical theatre, this notion of excess becomes really important. And she says extravagance. I think she's talking about something quite similar. She talks in the next one after that, she talks about the notion of the too much Yes. So this is a really, really interesting bit because I actually think I found it quite difficult to understand 26 in relation to 27.

Explain that. So this idea of this lack of seriousness, it can't be taken seriously because there is too much, okay? But then when she comes on to the last bit of 27, there's all of these equations that come up for me, which is in 27 she basically seems to be saying, camp minus passion equals chic right but i don't quite understand that because sheik is quite serious yes i mean for example you know it's there's this story of like why does the you know queen elizabeth's like taylor's always dressed her in quite this camp way and it was deliberate and if you speak to you know the people who are like dressing her it's because she has to be seen as light and fun and not serious like sheik because sheik is kind of elitist

and sheik is like, oh, is intrinsically is looking down on something. They never wanted the queen to seem like that, so she was dressed in this kind of like camp way. That I kind of understand, but I don't quite get this camp minus passion equals chic in relationship to the argument around too much, because I think camp as too much, I kind of understand. I do understand there's essentially something cam. I mean there's an interesting point of contrast with cool though with the too much isn't it like cool is never too much that's partly its whole that's his whole point and partly one might say that cool maybe cool even emerges partly in contradistinction to count as she's describing it to some extent as far as it is often cool is often very you know heteronormative as we sort of discussed a bit on the show but also I think I also think going back to your point about the queen and Nadia I think that's really interesting because there's an attempt here to think through a certain kind of complicated class aesthetics in this essay, although she never really settles on it. And one of the things

that's going on with the Queen is, of course, the thing about chic, sheik is the style of a very specific class or class fraction. It is the style of the Hote bourgeoisie. And the Queen is not Hote bourgeois. She is an aristocrat who depends for her status on being popular with the working glasses and the petty bourgeoisie, much more than the Hope bourgeoisie. And also, this is partly what's going on at this time, actually. If you think just about fashion culture, this is 1964, this is also, as well as being the high point of Fordism, this is also, this is the high point of the global prestige of haute couture, this idea that there's this very specific hierarchy of fashion, according to which there are these Parisian fashion houses,

and they make clothes for very wealthy women, some of whom might still be titled aristocrats, but the social core of whom are actually the wives or like industrialists and financiers. Everyone's supposed to aspire for tobacco. Exactly. And they will dictate fashion to low prestige tailoring outfits and even retail outfits.

And then what's happening in the 60s is that starts to get challenged by the fact that actually suddenly, you know, youth fashion starts to emerge as a kind of autonomous zone of creativity of outside the circuits of Haute Couture. And cheap materials. Yeah, exactly.

And cheap synthetics being like very literally, but also like symbolically about modernism and being able to mass production, you know, and consumer culture, like versus like the gatekeeping of fashion. So are we setting up at something where camp, perhaps even cool actually, are sensibilities which are trying to displace chic, because we're getting into an age of not just mass production

but also what Mark Fisher would call popular modernism where lower and middle class kids are and making a claim for a different form of modernity or leading the way in which you should experience modernity because the distinction with like cool is definitely not camp is it because it's like cool is dispassionate or at least a display of dispassionate whereas Sontag is really clear that like camp

needs passionate engagement basically, engagement by the person who is producing something which could then subsequently be interpreted as camp, but also the person who is camping. But I think she's saying that, and I think this is where I agree with her, is that camp speaks to a wider class of things. It's, it's like a behavior, and it's also objects in a way that I think cool doesn't reach to in the same way. So like cool, you know, we discussed this on the previous episode, like cool is a, you know, is a posture and style definitely, but like, whereas I think with camp, there are just some like objects as well that are just, or like pieces of architecture or like paintings or like things,

like actual physical things, which can be more easily classified as camp, then you would have the equivalence of cool, because you don't have a lamp that says cool in the same way that a lamp that says camp. I don't think that things are objectively camp, though. I think they are available to be interpreted in a camp. way, I think Sontag would say. Well, I think that's a very interesting question. Again, I think she holds open the possibility that that might be the case, but she doesn't really settle on a really clear position on it, I think.

She does do temporality. She does kind of try and solve that problem by the temporality. I'm not sure at what point she makes this argument, but she's basically saying something that was, you know, very straight at one point in history, like plus a certain amount of time, then becomes camp. Yeah, that's just on, that's what I saw in Afrism 30, actually, that the canon of camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems 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're better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it's not our own. So it's that thing of basically that that's the attitude of camp towards the fantastic, basically.

It's like, it's a past fantastic, yeah. There is something about role-playing games. It's interesting there as well. I sort of, I can sort of get that. We don't actually play any games at the moment where we're living out what would be our fantasy, which would just be like a revolution, a successful social revolution.

I mean, maybe we'd really enjoy that. It's something about exploring, like, you know, fantastical narratives from different cultural traditions, which we don't really have much investment in outside of that, which makes it really interesting as an experience. So there is something there actually, which is we're thinking about. Following on from what Keir was saying, like it basically my equation for this bit, which is the argument she's making,

is that banal plus time equals fantastic, which I quite like the idea of, you know, this idea that, you know, over time things can become camp. And I think that's part of it. Like, you know, those kind of like seaside town postcards, or whatever which are like understood as camp like we're not camp at the time yeah and then in the next bit 31 she says you know many of the objects prized by camp tastes are old fashioned out of date day more day but it's not a love of the old as such exactly and she so she is really trying to

qualify all this so on the one hand it's really extraordinary that we're anticipating you know what simon reynolds end up calling retro mania in the 2010s by 50 50 years here of course it was lots of people pointed out when Simon published that book, the things he was talking about the kind of prevalent of certain kinds of nostalgia had been pretty typical of so-called postmodern cultures since the 70s. But here, indeed, she's identifying this as a sort of continuous tradition. A book I would situate this essay alongside is a book I really loved by the cultural historian Colin Campbell, which I'm sure I've mentioned before, the romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism, I think it's called. And it traces the way

in which you can see a whole history of ideas about the self, but also about consumption as a way of expressing some things about the self, right back to the late 18th century, the romantic period. But just because you can trace those things, they don't become really culturally central until really the 60s, the 60s and 70s. So the fact that all this stuff seems to become really important in the postmodern period in the 90s, really,

to observe that is not necessarily to contradict her points about how this stuff or all this stuff has a history and you can trace it back to late 17th century culture I think you can have both of those observations at the same time in a really useful way so she's at one time she's doing this sort of genealogy of what she calls camp which is really useful and she's also pointing out how it's become very important within certain zones of culture at the time when she's writing but of course it's going to become even more important in subsequent decades. And that's partly what makes this essay so pivotal. Also, I think in some ways her thinking about what is our relationship to the object

of the past, what is it that gives them a certain quality? It's really, really rigorous, actually. It's partly, it's interesting actually, partly because the term nostalgia doesn't come in here at all. And I think, I think, I think, I often think this, whenever people want to reach for the idea of nostalgia, when they're explaining why people have any sort of positive affect in relation to things from the past, I often feel like it obfuscates more than it illuminates. I often feel like it's a kind of analytical cliche, which doesn't really explain anything a lot of the time. And the fact that she doesn't use the word at all when she's talking about this camp relationship to the past, I think is actually really enabling.

And isn't that a function of like the temporal position that she's writing from, where thinking about nostalgia was not just something that people were not doing in 1964. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's a good point. It wasn't part of the culture, it just wasn't part of the culture in the way it would become 10 years later. Yeah, the whole thing with nostalgia

is very interesting because when we think about nostalgia, we think about it when you look back on the past with like rosed into spectacles or whatever. Of course, that's not what the camp thing is. She says here, things are campy, not when they are old, but when we become less involved. in them and can enjoy instead of be frustrated by the failure of the attempt.

So it's like it's basically what Camp enjoys is the failures of the past rather than its rose-tinted aspects, if you know. I really like this sentence in Number 33 when she talks about character. And what Camp Taste responds to is instant character. So the sentences, character is understood as a state of continual incandescence, a person being one very intense thing, which plays the idea of the performance that she was talking about earlier. Yeah, it sort of reminded me of Bergson's definition of, like, of comedy as like the sort

of comedy you'd get in a sitcom where one person is just one characteristic, is reduced to one characteristic. So, like, the complexity of a human being is eroded away, and basically one person is just intensely one thing, which is why Camp can be quite funny, I think. And I like this idea, wherever there is development of character, Camp is reduced. Yes, yes. It's against character development. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is interesting, which, again, is sort of anti-Bourgeois, given that the general and I think correct Marxian understanding of bourgeois culture in the 1840. 19th centuries is that the idea of the central protagonists of novels going through a very easily discernible forms of character development is really tied up with kind of bourgeois individualism, a kind of bourgeois set of assumptions about what selfhood is and about what life is and the life course is. And then in the next aphorism, she says, echoing something I said earlier, as if I had made it up, in fact, she does just sort of say what I said,

thought she couldn't quite say. She says, 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. Which kind of seems like she's saying it's consciousness of inflation, because it's giving the psychedelic response of showing you another way, of saying this is a framework through which you are used to, something as some kind of value judgment of good and bad. But here is a completely different

framework, which I think is quite psychedelic. Well, it's psychedelic in the wholly abstract sense in which like Mark uses the term. But I think it's really important if you're going to understand anything about the reality of psychedelic culture. That's not, psychedelic culture is never associated with Cam. No, not culture. Yes, no, no, no. I meant it in the former. I did not mean it in terms of psychedelic culture, I meant it in terms of, like, the metaphor for what cerebrally it does. I think it's really interesting. And I think, I mean, I get, I think this is interesting because, like, Mark's argument on paper makes a lot of sense, and it would connect with this in certain ways. And maybe we could say, for example, I mean, she doesn't mention, but who is

the ultimate, I mean, the ultimate incarnation of camp in like late 50s culture, has got to be Carrie Grant. And Carrie Grant, you know, was a famous early advocate of her LSD therapy. She said massively helped him. So there is something interesting going on there. But the thing about the psychedelic experience is that you don't, you do not have the psychedelic, come out of a psychedelic experience, really thinking, oh, wow, all social meaning is contingent. You come out of the psychological experience thinking, well, beneath all the contingencies of social meaning, there is some sort of profound truth, even if it's ineffable and can't really be expressed in words, and that's why I've just contacted. So, I mean, maybe those two things are not mutually exclusive.

To really tease that out, we'd have to think about what the relationship might be between camp and mysticism. I mean, maybe the ideal of psychedelic culture. Maybe I'm wrong, I'm changing my mind now, actually, because if I think about people like the memory pranksters in the 60s, and even people like Leary, actually, maybe what they are after is a kind of camp mysticism. And I'm sort of changed my mind a bit because I think, I mean, it's very unironic and it's very earnest in the way that we said that a psychedelic culture was anti-cool, but I think it's, but it is anti-cool more than it's anti-camp, because clearly there is something very camp, there's something massively camp about psychedelic culture and it's kitsy appropriation of Hindu symbols and

the kitsch is different though, this is I think, but it would it, it's not, it's not kits, it's not kits, it's not kits, it's not kits. It's kits adjacent, but it's not kit. Kitchen Jason But I know I think I think in Sontagian terms That is I think that is what 60s psychedelic culture was after It was after a camp mysticism

I like the camp mysticism bit Yeah apart from the seriousness Oh semi-seriousness Yeah yeah Because there is always that comedic dimension To the whole thing always And it becomes a really And it becomes and remains a really important part of the culture

And that's what Eric Davis for example He's always keen that we should acknowledge the perpetual weirdness of psychedelic culture in a way which obviously people like Aldous Huxley and the early Timothy Leary wanted to get away from. They wanted to purge psychedelic culture of its weirdness and make it just about a way of accessing either ineffable mystical truths or just fundamental scientific truths about human psychology. But the reality of psychedelic life and practice and culture is it constantly resisted all that. But you can never quite pin it down. You can't, I mean, this is Eric's point, you can't pin down the

psychedelic experience to just being an analogue of like a really good daisy ogre and meditation because it is much weirder than that. And that weirdness is really related to Camp as she's describing you. I wanted to pick up this throwaway statement that Jim just made that Carrie Grant was the epitome of Camp in that era. It sort of took me up, took me back a bit that statement. Because Carrie Grant, so Carrie Grant was, is an invention. He was born Archie Leach in Bristol and then he sort of like really purposely developed this, this sort of persona sensibility, definitely, and like style of dress. And I would always associate Carrie Grant with like style. There's definitely an element of cool, but it's also like an elegance,

which relates to chic about like Carrie Grant's sort of style of dress and sensibility. He can become appropriated, though. He could be appropriated. Like, that figure can be appropriated at a later point into some kind of, like, campness, potentially, as the earlier point that Sontag is making about, like, the ultra-masculine, like, he-man type. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, yeah. It's also, it's also like the complete artificiality of Carrie Grant as opposed to Artileach, you know, as this character that's built up, basically. Well, yeah, he self-consciously contrived. And it's this idea that what makes him so sexy

is the complete control over his every single gesture he makes and every thread on his body because it's completely artificial because it's completely inorganic and it's deliberately so. Yeah, but like the whole point of his performance

is not a campy performance because it's supposed to hide the artificiality of it basically. It's supposed to be, he would never break character unless he was like really just with his like, no, very, very close friends.

do you know what I mean? And so it's that, so you can have a campy interpretation of Carrie Grant by celebrating the artificiality of it, whereas Carrie Grant himself wouldn't not celebrate the artificiality and so would not perform in a campy way, I think. I think the next bits are fairly easy to summarise because she presents this typology. She says there are basically three great creative sensibilities. She says the first one is the sort of classical sensibility according to which, you know, the purpose of art is a kind of high moral seriousness, maybe tragedy. Which is the second one she associates with modernism and avant-gardeism,

which is really about a kind of expression of the anguish, the angst, the agony of existence. And the third one is Camp, which she ultimately says is anti-moralistic and it's anti-tragedy. She says it rejects more moralism, rejects content over style, and she ultimately says in 39, and tragedy or antitheses? Just back in 36, I think it's a justification of a point that Nadia made earlier where she's saying, she's sort of saying like the addition of like the avant-garde sort of sensibility and the camp sensibility to the sort of like high culture sensibility is a good thing basically.

Something is good, not because it's 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 relieved. sorry, revealed. And so she's sort of saying that, like, you can see, like, the development of these sensibilities is good because they increase the range of experiences that can be both expressed but also lived in,

if you know, I mean, lived fully in. Something we've made before about, like, an increasing complexification of the possibilities of life, as a axis upon which you can sort of think about things as being good or bad, that moralism. She's saying it's a good thing that camps emerge because it adds another possibility that people can have it. So we move on to 40.

Style is everything. Now, could I return to my favourite character, say, Carrie Grant here? No, no, no. He's taken over from Mr. Stats at this rate. Jeannet's statement that the only criterion of an act is its elegance is virtually interchangeable as a statement with wilds in matters of great importance. The vital element is not sincerity, but style.

And this, I mean, this does become, this is a real point of debilessing. and it's easy to just kind of almost laugh at it now as a historical curio, but there's a real, real debate in like criticism in an aesthetic theory from around, from about the 1880s through to the 1960s as to whether you should value style or substance in your assessment of art and literature in particular, you know, whether the content, the message is what matters or whether it's merely the skill at relaying it. And of course, it's a distinction that goes back much further. I mean, arguably, this is a debate that goes right back to the beginning of classical philosophy. This is Plato-stroke-Socrates saying the whole point of philosophy is to figure out the truth. And the enemies of the philosophers are the rhetoricians, the sophists, the people who just teach you how to say, how to make persuasive arguments, irrespective of whether they are true or not. Exactly. And this all reaches forward into 21st century politics and like the importance of posturing and style and presentation.

you know, over ideas, as we're seeing in today's world. Yes. Yeah. I mean, to some extent, it goes into the sort of gamified world as well, what matters is to win, no matter what it is, no matter how you've done it. Then Afrizen 41 is the whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful and anti-serious. Camp involves a new more complex relation to the serious. one can be serious, but the frivolous and frivolous about the serious. Which is problematic you were saying, Keir, right at the beginning, right? When you come to talk about the plane of, like, politics and culture.

Yes, to some degree, yeah. But what I would say is, like, I haven't got a problem with people being frivolous about the serious, unless that is the totality of the way in which you're allowed to relate to the world. Yes. I mean, she goes on in the next one. She says, one is drawn to camp, when one realizes that sincerity is not enough. sincerity can be simple Philistinism, intellectual narrowness. I mean, this is interesting in terms of the historic context, actually, isn't it, as well? I mean, what he's responding to here

partly is the culture of the 1950s, within which a lot of radical culture, and this includes philosophy and theory, it includes Jean-Paul Sartre and also in Accuse, it includes, you can think in Britain, you can think of the theatre of the angry young men and various social realists. a lot of it is already predicated on a certain kind of critique of the inauthenticity of consumer culture, which is escalating in importance really rapidly over the course of the 1950s. And her response is saying, well, just being serious, just being authentic, like isn't really enough in itself, because it can just be reactionary conservatism. And therein really is going to lie the basis of a whole critique of sort of simple forms of Marxism,

for example, which is going to end up informing the whole field of like cultural studies, cultural criticism, film criticism, all kinds of things in the subsequent decades, actually. There is going to be this constant dialogue, if you like, really, between people saying, oh, you know what, I mean, capitalist culture is all just bullshit. Like, what we need is truth. And then other people saying, well, saying you just need truth, it's not really enough because just being in favour of truth can just be banal or it can even be, sometimes it can even be reactionary? I'm not sure that it's authenticity specifically that she's talking about

here. I mean, what I take from that, I actually found this number 42 kind of difficult to grapple with because I wasn't entirely sure what she meant, whether she was saying that something about authenticity and truth there or whether, you're right, because she's putting sincerity in quotation marks in the first sense. And what it feels to me, she's saying, and I'm this. might be wrong because it's not expanded upon in the same in the same way as some other bits but it felt like she's saying where is the space for play and joy and interpretation and that's what like she's positing against this intellectual narrowness but in that sense I kind of go well okay I'm on board but in another reading of it which is which is maybe speaking

a little bit to what you were both saying is that like I think sincerity is important and And if we're saying that, campness is like necessarily takes away from that, then that creates a problem. And then, well, I asterisk this one in 43, she says, the traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness, irony, satire, seems feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard, artifice as an ideal, theatricality. This is like 25 years earlier, an absolutely direct repost to Frederick Jameson's claims about postmodern culture, in which he claims, well, the whole problem with postmodern culture is we've lost the capacity for actual satire on parody. What we're left with instead are mere pastiche, is mere pastiche.

There's this whole distinction between pastiche, which doesn't have any sort of critical intent and parody in satire which does and Jameson clearly doesn't valorise or value prestige and I can, I mean one can see Jameson's point and that perspective of Jameson's

is itself quite useful. I mean it becomes a really useful critical tool for thinking about postmodern culture in the 90s and 2000s that you just get pastiche for the sake of pastiche which doesn't seem to really mean anything but what's really fascinating is she is quite clear

here referring to, with her reference to theatricality, something like what Jameson would call pastiche, but saying, look, there's a reason, there's a reason why this becomes a mode of aesthetic operation, because it's mere irony and satire, are themselves sort of redundant. She calls the culture, like, saturated, but it's that saturation. The culturally oversaturated medium, I mean, that condition of cultural oversaturation is exactly what a later theory is critics are going to call, you know, the postmodern or even post-modernity. So it's very, very interesting. I'm not taking sure I'm buying. The artifice has an ideal is like the necessary appropriate response to that, because you can just say this, you could say the

same thing about theatricality that she says about sincerity. You know, sincerity can just be reactionary, can just be phyllis dying. Theatricality can just be nihilism. And that, that's what Jameson ends up responding to. I mean, in Jameson's defense, I must leap in to defend his own. I've just said it was useful. No, no, no, no, but I'm just saying it might be the distinction between, you know, where camp is like a marginal sensibility and when it's a dominant sensibility. Yes, I think that's a good point, yeah.

It's a good point. Yeah, but I agree, I think, you know, theatricality and artifice as a response to the failures of irony and satire, I think we've basically played that through, haven't we? You can come to our own conclusion. and theatricality is not a good response either basically or not a sufficient response to failures of irony and satire. This is acid, man. Okay, what's the next one anyone wants to talk about?

Well, I mean, she then talks about dandyism a little bit, which is sort of interesting. Camp is the answer to the problem, how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture. Then she moves into this, return to this thing, which is like a classic of postmodern, as well, our classic symptom of postmodernism about there's no distinction between the unique object and a mass-produced object. There's no distinction between high culture

and low culture, basically. The two bleed into each other. Yeah, that whole page gets into various different aspects of what she calls homosexuality. And I like this one sentence in 51, where she says, but homosexuals by and large constitute the vanguard and the most articulate audience of camp and that's like the bit where she's saying not everything camp is gay and everything gay is camp but like I like this vanguardist kind of positioning it was quite interesting to read but I thought it also what she actually meant is like gay men well it's an interesting point I think there was I mean it was less visible but there was there was a kind of lesbian subculture about about which I think you would say a lot of the

things she says about camp in certain ways around the same time. I can't see it. Maybe it exists, but in my mind's eye when I was reading this, I couldn't see what that would be. Well, there were lesbian bars and there were so-called male impersonators. There's the culture of male impersonators who were often. I mean, sometimes now we would say they were transmen, but a lot of the time they were also people call lesbians, but there's no question that... Do you mean, but rather than drag? Yeah, yeah, I don't mean, yeah. But yeah, it was never as visible and it was never talked about culturally in anything like the same extent, to the point where, of course,

like in Britain, in British law, the possibility of female homosexuality just wasn't discussed, it wasn't acknowledged. Could I just go back a bit to number 49 in which she tries to put the idea of boredom and camp together? She says like the relationship between boredom and camp taste cannot be overestimated. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies and societies or circles capable of experience the psychopathology of affluence which I thought was quite interesting actually in it. The situation once again

in sort of like the post-war 30 glorious years the long boom, you know, the experience of like masses of people experiencing very rapid growth in their living standards. And if you remember that article from way back about we are all very anxious in which the author

puts, he sort of aligns sort of like Fordism with boredom as the dominant affect and then pre-fordist capitalism with misery as the affect and then a neoliberal capitalism is associated of anxiety or something like that. I thought that was sort of interesting in fact. You could also, yeah, yeah, it's interesting. And then she goes on in the part of the Afrism afterwards she's starting to talk about the history of camp taste is part of the history of snob taste. It's this thing of like aristocrats used to set taste. Now we don't have any real

aristocrats, who's going to set the taste? Well, here's the answer, she says. An improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves as the aristocrats of taste, which I thought was quite funny. Also, there are aristocrats, so I'm not sure what she meant. She must have meant in like a different cultural sense. Well, I mean, this was the high point of aristocrats, losing their power, their wealth in really, really rapid dimensions because of like death taxes. And also, technically in New York, there aren't any aristocrats. Well, that's awesome. In the sense of there isn't titled nobility. Yes.

The bit of number 51 that I thought was just plain out wrong is when she says, Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary culture. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual, asceticism and irony. Well, she's talking about Manhattan here, isn't she?

Well, that is true. But like in the episode on Cool, we were emphasised in fact that and in fact in previous episodes we've gone over this before about like the black American or the black Atlantic experiences as one of the dominant forms

in which people are pioneering the experience of modernism and that seems to be cut out here is there a black camp is one thing we might say well they will I mean black camp will be Emerging disco of course yeah yeah big big big little then

well it's even there in I mean in rock and roll a little Richard was a you know would play in drag and playing gay bars. Yeah, hugely camp performance, yeah. So there is Black Camp and it is completely central to the entire story of modern music. So, yeah, she doesn't really have her finger on that particular pulse.

Perhaps it because it is Manhattan in the 60s. Yeah, she isn't going to the jazz clubs in Harlem. Yeah. This bit at the end of 52, it says, Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation

and sponsors playfulness, which I do think has been like a really major part of that. Like I said earlier, that really significant social change over the last 20 years, now 20 or 30 years, we'd have to say, in which homosexuality has gone, has just, you know, the attitude towards homosexuality in society, such as Britain and the US, etc., really fundamentally changed. And I think Kamp and the ability of that playfulness to dissolve that moral indignation that was previously raised by homosexuality has played a really big role in that. I just thought that was very prescient.

Yes. Poignant, yeah. 54? Yeah, again, one of these sentences in 54 where she says, 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,

which I thought was like an interesting logic. So if you kind of like have a restricted view, of what pleasure is, then you effectively are unable to understand how to experience pleasure. That's what I take from that. And that camp like liberates you

from that kind of earnestness. Yeah, and then the next afferam is camp taste is above all a mode of enjoyment of appreciation and not judgment. Camp is generous, it wants to enjoy. It only seems to like malice and cynicism. No, it only seems like malice. Oh, sorry.

It only seems like malice. Sorry, it seems like. Yeah, sorry, that's because my head was going, have you spent the time in a company of gay men bitching about people walking past? It seems like judgment to me. It seemed, to me, I actually, like, the camp persona, when performed, is actually very judgmental, you know, as a performance, as a performance. That doesn't say, does not say that everything camp is judgmental,

but I would actually agree with that anecdote, like not necessarily because of that. But that was one bit where I really like the idea of Camper's enjoyment and of generous. But then I couldn't fully come on board with the judgment. Because I think part of why it's joyful and hilarious is because it's incredibly judgmental. Yes, I think that's right. Yeah. Final words. Well, she just kind of seems to like end the piece by starting to make. make more kind of succinct statements, which are kind of like makes it enjoyable to read

and are thought-provoking. But she doesn't kind of like then go on to expand on them in the same way that she does with, you know, sensibility or, you know, like other other aspects like earlier in the piece. So like right towards the end in a number 56, she's got this idea of like camp is a tender feeling. And then she goes on 58 to go. go, the ultimate camp statement is it's good because it's awful. But then she says one can't always say that. So there are bits where I feel like I would have liked her to expand on, but also I'm quite happy to be left with those thoughts to kind of discuss it on ACFM.

Okay, well, that's really interesting. I think I've said everything I had to say about it earlier on, really. I think it's still, it's obviously really prescient. And I suppose it does sort of anticipate something of contemporary sensibilities, like really importantly, doesn't it? But are we post-camp now, do you think? key, yeah. I don't think we are post-camp actually. No, I don't. And so on other shows, we talked about comedy as I was talking about is, you know, can we reach a post-ironic sincerity

when we have engagement with politics? Because like the great danger of irony in terms of politics is that any sincere statement is cast as naive, basically. With camp as like a dominant affect, no, sorry, a dominant sensibility, which is totally, I'm totally not convinced that it's dominant sensibility, but I think it fits very well with dominant sensibilities, which is like an anti-political, anti-sincere sort of sensibility. But the question would be like, can you have a post-camp's sincerity, I suppose, is that another way to put it? And would it, what changes when you rephrase it from, can we have a post-ironic sensibility to a post-camp sensibility? I'm not sure. Yeah, and I was also thinking when I was reading all of this about like the commodification of

camp and like where camp sits in the 21st century and like can camp be commodified and I was as I was reading through her various different definitions or like trying to come to like you know a theory of or an understanding of camp there were certain parts of it where I thought definitely you know these camp things or these camp behaviors have been you know packaged and resold back to us in the 21st century but there were other aspects to it where I thought actually that can't be commodified or you know co-opted by capitalism. And that's mostly, I think, the areas or the aspect of her outlining of camp that I mostly enjoyed. I mean, I suppose just to try to answer my own question, this is a conversation I'm having in my own head that unfortunately you're listening to. One of the

first episodes we did, we criticised this notion of authenticity, and we talked about performances of authenticity from now-forgotten Labour politicians such as Owen Smith and his love of non-frothy coffee. Non-froffy coffee, his refusal to call, to his claim that he didn't understand what a latte was, we call it froffy coffee. So like authenticity or return to sort of like some idea of naturalness is not the way to get to contemporary notions of sincerity, which does lead you to think, well, okay, it has to go through an embrace of artifice in some sort of way, which does mean

we are looking for a post-camp sensibility and that is a slightly, a slightly different thing to a post-ironic sensibility, perhaps. Okay, that was really interesting, yeah, okay, so go read it, notes on camp, everyone. Thank you.