I wonder if a triangle could be drawn (this might land me in Pseuds' Corner)?:

                           CAMP
                           /     \
                          /       \
                         /         \
                        /           \
                       /             \
                      /               \
                     /                 \
                  SATIRE ------ KITSCH

A relationship of Aufhebung?

I'm sure that is all true, though kitsch and satire go back well before that time as well, so possibly still it could have in some way been informed by both?

We would if we rendered the concept atemporal and ahistorical. But that is not necessarily being proposed

I just got a copy yesterday of Roger Shattuck's book Candor & Perversion, which I had found out looks directly at some of the questions that have been considered in this thread. Some of you know may know Shattuck as one of the leading Proust scholars (both of his books on Proust are excellent); it would hard not to have to consider these questions in the context of Proust. I was so struck by one passage in this book, which I wanted to type into the computer anyhow, that I wanted to copy it here. I don't agree with everything Shattuck says (and his conclusion doesn't take into account the responses to Benjamin's original article that went on in the correspondence with Adorno, who picked up on such issues very acutely), but obviously I'm drawn to this when he arrives overall at conclusions similar to my own. Interested in anyone's thoughts.

Roger Shattuck – ‘From Aestheticism to Fascism’, in Candor and Perversion (New York: Norton, 1999), pp. 276-282.

‘The second half of the nineteenth century in Europe set out to reinvigorate out post-Enlightenment immune system with an audacity we have not yet caught up with or assimilated. Distancing himself from Romanticism, Baudelaire chose a title (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) that suggests a form of therapy or redemption by vice and blasphemy. Poems of Baudelaire’s like “The Irremediable” and “The Heautontimorumenos” revel in venom, more than they recoil from it. In Baudelaire’s writings and in that of many later authors, much moral exploration took place in and near the claims made for the doctrine of art for art’s sake and for life lived as art. In his master fable of the heroism of modern life, “The No-Good Glazier” (1862), Baudelaire has his protagonist and alter ego respond to a mood of boredom and pent-up energy by dropping a flower pot out of his window on the poor glazier’s entire stock of panes. Sheer “Caprice” is the only motive proffered. The prose poem closes with a question: “These nervous pleasantries are not without peril, and often one pays dearly for them. But what does external damnation matter to the person who has found in an instant the infinity of sensual pleasure?” Two years later, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground explored the perverse pleasure of “Caprice” as the only form of individual freedom remaining in a piano-key world of determinism. Chapters 8-9 of part 1 read like an expansion (in large part ironic) of Baudelaire’s fable, complete with boredom and energy, the Crystal Palace as symbol of blind progress, and a mood of joking mystification surrounding the whole undertaking.

After this apparent convergence of Baudelaire and Dostoevsky on a morality of caprice, one can trace how the art for art’s sake aesthetic was steadily displaced by everyday living. The Franco-British figure of the dandy embodied the shift particularly well. Then the haughtiness of the dandy was retempered in flagrant hedonism by the “Conclusion” Walter Pater felt he had to remove from the second edition of Studies in the History of The Renaissance (first edition, 1873). The mild-mannered classics scholar proposed an unadorned amoralism of sheer intensity:

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. . . . To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. . . . Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most: for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

Anthologies still carry these incendiary pages. Does anyone find them scandalous today? The last sentence of Pater’s “Conclusion” quoted above has calmly dispensed with the question mark Baudelaire saw fit to use in the last sentence of “The No-Good Glazier.”

From her on, art for art’s sake and aestheticism fuse into an intensely blurred morality of Decadence. We tend to know the amalgam best in Huysmans’ fictionalised version of Against Nature (1884). But Husymans restricts and confines his hero’s universe where others extend and expand the dimensions of decadence. “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, #5). “L’art pour l’art means ‘The devil take morality.’ Art is the great stimulus to life” (Twilight of the Idols, 1888, “Skirmishes”, #24). In his first book, as in one of his last, Nietzsche was aestheticizing experience. From him and from Pater, the new gospel passed with a strong infusion of energy into Wilde’s seductive dialogues:

Gilbert. There is no sin except stupidity.
Ernest. What an antinomian you are!
Gilbert. . . . To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. . . . Aesthetics are higher than ethics. . . [Through aesthetics we shall attain to] that perfection of those to whom sin is impossible . . . because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul. “The Critic as Artist,” 1890)

Following such an extreme point of antinomian, decadent aestheticism, which ran rife across Europe at the turn of the century, the events of history seem to move in two different directions. In England and France this mood affected large segments of society without undermining the parliamentary system and democratic freedoms and without utterly subverting the bases of public morality. In Germany and Italy, the same mood contributed to forms of irrationalism, racism, and nationalism that produced the most vicious and destructive aberration of modern times, perhaps of all time. One could, at least, propose this double hypothesis. What happened in Russia is not unrelated.

To my knowledge, no one has undertaken a thorough examination of this cultural and political lineage. In Germany, it runs parallel to a philosophic line that connects Hegel on “The political work of art” and Burckhardt’s reflections on “the state as a work of art” with Walter Benjamin’s exasperating essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). Its last paragraph has attained a certain notoriety. Quoting Marinetti, Benjamin describes fascism thus:

The consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” . . Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicising art.

Those ringing sentences leave it uncertain whether Benjamin wished to suggest that the Communist response saves us from fascism or plunges us into an equal horror. It is a question on which our ideas should by now be clear.' (pp. 276-279)

Sorry, but any serious discussion of this subject must surely include the modern epitome of camp and campness.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/desertislanddiscs_20050925.shtml

working definition :- musical camp and camp in general = that and only that which Professor Julian declares is camp.

 

ooh....quotable quote of the day!