Ah, well if we are going up one further meta-level , I had Ian down as wanting to pursue the idea that 'camp' was like 'misuse of so-called gender politics' or like post-modernism in that it had a false air of being radical whereas it was actually deeply reactionary and served only to divert attention from 'the real issues'. No doubt all will be revealed

Back in 1973 or early 1974, I remember there was a Radio 3 programme in which various small newish works were played and commented on by a "jury" which included Sandy Goehr and Hugh Wood. Hugh was disparaging and scornful about a pretty inoffensive piece by Brian Dennis entitled Newton's Cradle, a small-scale repetitive pattern piece for two xylophones and a synthesiser which played a 2-note paradiddle mid-register riff. He described this piece (and by extension, music related to it - early Reich et al) as "camp". This was not a term he was using as an unthinking insult - he'd obviously thought about it. Trouble is that I can't remember actually what he did mean - he obviously thought that writing a brief tonal repetitive piece was not on and probably regarded it as insubstantial and barking up the wrong tree. The tinkly-tonal aspect (and nothing happening below middle C) no doubt pissed him off no end.

Chambers defines "camp" as "theatrical, affected. exaggerated, effeminately homosexual . . " - which I suspect was not the meaning which Wood intended. It might be worth asking him !

A Member has just now quoted a phrase about "the sensibility of camp, which is unfettered by the scruples of high seriousness".

But no, the only way to be really serious is not to be so. Here we might consider, say, the difference between Goethe and Herbert Spencer. Or perhaps Members have among their acquaintance some one who is always deadly earnest - he is not the most promising is he?

In order to produce a successful work (of Art or of Philosophy) its author is obliged to stand back from it in a detached or ironical way - it is only thus, paradoxically, that the highest seriousness may be attained! It goes back to the Greeks, all that.

I would put that point another way, Prof Grew, and say that there is something "wrong" (dishonest? incomplete?) with any kind of art which excludes an aspect of human nature (like the sense of humour) on what the artist sees as principled grounds. The phenomenon of what Koestler calls "bisociation" typical of (fundamental to?) the humorous mode of expression can be and often is used to devastatingly serious effect, although this depends on context: it can also be just silly (which isn't to be despised in and of itself). This is coming out far too convolutedly, I'm afraid. I suppose what I mean is that if we ignore or dismiss the humorous (for want of a better word) side of something we run a strong risk of not appreciating or understanding its serious side, since the two are inseparable parts of (most of) human intercourse. Think of the work of (to take two quite different examples) Mahler or Beckett.

Well, I do think that refusing to take horror or oppression seriously, let alone making it 'bearable', is one of the most dangerous strategies of all. Furthermore, such a strategy is much more amenable to the right than anyone else. Sorry to bring various other stuff up again, but I think you'll find the differing responses to the Simone Clarke and Jade Goody affairs of recently had much more to do with how either were viewed aesthetically than the real issues ([edit: silly party] propaganda, and a lot of the responses from the well-to-do who frequent the ballet, made much of how elegant and stylish she was compared to those opposing her, whilst much of the hatred towards Goody was more focused on the fact that she came from a council estate, and had Afro-Caribbean derived features which led them to call her 'Miss Piggy' and the like). One might also consider the Camp Islamphobia of Pim Fortuyn in this context. And Nazi anti-semitic imagery, involving mocking, grotesque caricatures of Jewish people, was part and parcel of the same phenomenon.

In an essay called 'For Interpretation: Notes Against Camp' (originally published in Gay Left), the writer Andrew Britton suggests that ‘If the transgression of boundaries ever threatened to produce the redefinition of them, the frisson would be lost, the thrill of ‘something wrong’ would disappear’ and more scathingly that ‘Camp has a certain minimal value, in restricted contexts, as a form of épater les bourgeois; but the pleasure (in itself genuine and valid enough) of shocking solid citizens should not be confused with radicalism’.


That's very interesting. It does rather rest upon the assumption that 'camping' something renders it harmless. In terms of demonstrating the 'failure of camp', I feel two films do this most successfully - Pasolini's Salò and Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany (for those interested in this incredible seven-hour epic, it can be watched for free online - http://www.syberberg.de/Syberberg2/Events_2003/uncut.html ). Pasolini's film is the more powerful of the two, because it incorporates the self-aware aspects of the very spectacle it portrays and shows how these in no sense diminish the horror, whereas Syberberg's film relies upon the assumption that what it portrays can be deflated by elucidating its own absurdity, a somewhat dubious premise.


What camp and post-modernism (overlapping though not quite identical phenomena - post-modernism still seems to require some sense of 'meaning', though Britton argues that style itself 'describes a process of meaning' (I'm not sure he's completely right about this, it may be true of reified styles, but not necessarily of style per se)) almost never subvert is the commodity principle - to that they are perhaps wilfully blind. Some of the ideals of camp are not simply reconcilable with the demands of the commodity, but are ideal for it. And the purveyors of capital can appropriate camp towards their own ends, as one can witness in many advertisements. A self-mocking advert is no less an advert. It's not for nothing that today many advertising executives apparently sport copies of Roland Barthes's Mythologies on their shelves and learn from its ideas.

The Marxist writer Alex Callinicos (in his book Against Postmodernism) would agree with you very much about both being 'no more than a way of opting out'. In the context of a reference to Sontag's essay on camp, he associates 'ironic distance' with Modernism itself and goes onto argue that this 'has become routinized, even trivialized, as it becomes a way of negotiating a still unreconciled reality which one no longer believes can be changed’, drawing parallels with other forms of retreat throughout history. So in a sense, one could say that Callinicos is presenting Camp and postmodernism as an appropriation of the most dated aspects of modernism in a changed historical situation where they have lost their critical force.


Like all liberal ideologies, Camp needs to remain blind to its own founding assumptions. These include snobbery, attempts to reconfigure neo-feudalist attitudes towards society (just like late 19th- and early 20th-century aesthetes who attempted to recapture their own positions of power through appeals to an 'aristocracy of taste' and the like - many of these people went on to support fascism). It is possible to turn postmodernism and Camp against themselves in this way, though few, with the exception of the likes of Pasolini, seem to have done so.


I couldn't agree more. There's some very good discussion of such things in a wider sense in Richard J. Evans's In Defence of History, which takes as one of its basic principles the fact that when all truth is relativised, not only marginalised views such as liberal postmodernists might approve are allowed into the fold, but so equally are those of Holocaust deniers. Without some notion of truth, the most fundamental weapon to fight them is lost. He also points out that only those who have never lived in a society where there is a truly stark distinction between truth and government-sanctioned propaganda, as under Soviet communism, could be so blasé about the very concept.

Don't you think there is some humour in Schoenberg? Such as in the Three Satires (perhaps a little heavy-handed, but certainly humorous), in Von Heute auf Morgen (likewise) or even in such movements as the Minuet from the Piano Suite (what Malcolm Macdonald calls the 'peri-wigged minuet')? There might be differing views on Schoenberg's comic strengths, but I don't believe his music is humourless.

The holy minimalists are a different matter, though.....

Now, now......