Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp" (1964)

I like this piece a lot! And now I know it's the source of Sontag's famous definition of intelligence: "Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas."

Anyway, "Notes on Camp" comprises numbered "jottings" (fifty-eight of them, dedicated to Oscar Wilde and interspersed with various of his maxims), rather than laying out an argument, because Camp is a sensibility, Sontag says, not an idea susceptible of system and proof, and to capture a sensibility in words "one must be tentative and nimble."

A selection of points selectively arranged:

Camp sees everything in quotation marks.
Camp is a mode of aestheticism, a way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, whose particular terms are artifice and stylization. In addition to being a way of seeing, Camp is also a quality of certain objects and behaviors: there are campy movies, campy clothes, campy buildings, campy people. Nothing in nature is campy, however, because Camp embodies artifice; and, because Camp emphasizes style, it slights content in the general, is neutral to content in the particular, and is therefore apolitical. Means of its artifice include exaggeration, travesty, impersonation, theatricality; qualities of its style include glamorousness and extravagance. Because its terms are artifice and style, "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."

Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience.
If life is theater, then we are both always and never sincere. Camp sets the term sincerity not only [implicitly] against theatricality, as here, but more to the point [explicitly] against style, as well. In terms of style, sincerity is equivalent to content, or a commitment to content, and is therefore slighted: "One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that 'sincerity' is not enough." So much is true of the sensibility of Camp; the artist of Camp, on the other hand, is absolutely sincere--completely serious. "Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.'" There is such a thing as deliberate Camp, or "camping," which knows and means itself to be Camp and to be funny. Genuine camp doesn't mean to be either. "The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious." But they end up funny and so fail in their seriousness. The sensibility of Camp appreciates this failed seriousness: the art has reached admirably high even if only to fall and fail.

The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.
Yet what Camp appreciates is less the effort and intent than the failure and fall. It's not a matter of poignancy, it's that some failures achieve a greatness in their badness. Lists of "The 10 Best Bad Movies I Have Seen" make the case. The ultimate Camp statement reverses the (often true) statement "It's too good to be Camp": "it's good because it's awful."

Camp is a tender feeling.
And because it's good, it's enjoyable. "Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation--not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy." "Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature." "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." "Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles." "What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures."

Some quotes and bullets:

Camp and the image of the androgyne
"The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility."

Camp and the homosexual vanguard
"homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard--and the most articulate audience--of Camp."

Camp and affluence
Camp "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."

These Notes also provide:

• examples of entries in the canon of Camp (including Tiffany lamps, Swan Lake, and the old Flash Gordon comics)
  
• a "pocket history of Camp" (Camp dates back to the late 17th and early 18th century because of that period's taste for artifice and surface and symmetry)
  
• a case for Camp as "the modern dandyism" (Camp, like the 19th-century dandy, perceives itself as an elite in matters of taste and culture)
  
• a breakdown of the three "great creative sensibilities" (1. high culture, 2. the sensibility of extreme feeling marked by anguish, cruelty, derangement [think of Kafka], and 3. Camp)

Camp and detachment

In terms of comedy: "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."

In terms of time: "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."

In relation to irony: "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."