Susan Sontag: Defining “Camp” Sensibility

Camp defined by the Wikipedia:

“The term camp—normally used as an adjective, even though earliest recorded uses employed it mainly as a verb—refers to the deliberate and sophisticated use of kitsch, mawkish or corny themes and styles in art, clothing or conversation. A part of the anti-Academic defense of popular culture in the sixties, camp came to academic prominence in the eighties with the widespread adoption of the Postmodern views on art and culture.

Much like the closely related notion of kitsch, camp has traditionally been viewed as hard to define. Susan Sontag, in her famous 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", emphasises artifice, frivolity, and shocking excess as the key notes. While the common use of the concept includes these, usually the element of naïve middle-class pretentiousness is highlighted. Typical examples of this latter use are Carmen Miranda's tutti frutti hats, low-budget science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s and the multi-genre pop culture of the 1970s and 1980s. It has been argued that this view oversimplifies the camp phenomenon in an undesirable way, as it tends to equate the camp with popular culture, viewed with condescending irony, while the original concept included works definitely outside the realm of popular culture (Sontag herself mentions Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, which may be considered a minor work by musicologists but is hardly in the same range with soap operas or superhero comics).

The first use of the word in print, marginally mentioned in the Sontag essay, may be Christopher Isherwood's 1954 novel The World in the Evening, where he comments: "You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance."

Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” essay was a series of theses, some of which include:

10. 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.

18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.

41. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

44. 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.

58. The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful . . .