Re. Christopher's:
"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."
I agree with what you are saying, on the other hand I noticed that what
Amazon offers is right on spot and I can recognize it is valid thanks to
previous contacts I had, see through professors or readers with whom I
communicate.
"Partly what I was getting at with my references to 'ritual objects' and
other stuff which 'instantiates cultural values'."
With Baudrillard, and before him see postmodernists and poststructuralists
in general, the "ideological genesis of needs," with Lacan the mirror, with
Deleuze and Guattari the body without organs, with Derrida, as you said, the
"camp" in relation to "kitsch", the "black as opposed to the white," the
same Taxonomic Aristotelian idea, and with Nietzsche the Platonic order, and
again with Derrida: the Word.
On 11/2/07, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> <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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