<snip>
The key difference between kitsch and camp seems to me to be
self-consciousness. Kitsch doesn't know it's kitsch, while camp not only
knows what it is but craves it. [Candice W]
Camp in some way implies a _change_ of audience. [Peter C]
<snip>
I find Sontag's definition (It's not a lamp, but a "lamp") extremely useful.
In other words, to take up Dominic's Derrida reference, *camp* is but one
further (re)iteration of what was *kitsch*. So self consciousness in that
sense. The process that began when 'yuck' became a word now confers yet
another set of quote marks upon the matter under scrutiny. (Austin is good
on quote marks, if I recall. And Judith Butler deals with *iterability* in
considering how subjective gender is enacted; hence my reference to *queer*
in one of my earlier posts.)
That craving for *kitsch* is trickier, although I agree it's characteristic.
Turning *queer* into '*queer*' is an epistemological break of some kind, a
change in the social subject from within. And so onto the barricades!
However, Peter is right to say that *camp* (only) _implies_ a change in
audience. It doesn't actually _enact_ one, so the barricades will have to
wait. Meanwhile it proceeds in parallel with *kitsch*, and as repetitively.
It knocks repeatedly against a parallel boundary wall, one of Bachelard's
epistemological obstacles, a very different sort of barricade, by which it
too is confined. And without, alas, breaking through.
<snip>
And where does the middle-brow fit in with all this comparative discussion
of high and popular culture? [Candice W]
<snip>
Mark and Peter were right to pick me up on 'high'. (I don't know what came
over me, officer. I really don't.) Rather than any binary, using whatever
terms, what I meant was a multiplicity in which one or another social
subject may become dominant for a time.
I think the middle-brows, along with the middle classes, are very much on
the way out. The key here is *precarity*, that rather fashionable concept.
Just as class identity through work is increasingly under threat, so too (I
think) is middle class identity defined as *transmissible taste*. More books
are sold (and read) through bookshop and publisher promotions, I strongly
suspect, than through any peer group recommendation (even including that
element of peer group recommendation that might be classed as viral
marketing). Although Amazon offers ('Customers Who Bought This Item Also
Bought') the simulacrum of peer group recommendations, this is actually a
way of creating subject 'channels', virtual shelving, without organic unity
and without, of course, any contact between participating customers.
<snip>
It occurs to me that there's another category/term to consider: fetish.
[Mark W]
<snip>
Partly what I was getting at with my references to 'ritual objects' and
other stuff which 'instantiates cultural values'.
You'll notice I am not adding to what I said then!
CW
_______________________________________________
'When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no
surprise for me, so of course I was surprised.'
(Wittgenstein)
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