But it was the relation of camp’s practitioners—as opposed to its objects—to another of Baudelaire’s concepts that Sontag found more worrisome. As she understood it, camp amounted to the reformulation of dandyism for the world of mass culture. Its intimate ties to mass culture, however, had effectively expunged the dandy’s “quintessence of character and . . . subtle understanding of the entire moral mechanism of this world.”41 In place of this character and understanding was mere “aestheticism.” Camp’s affected pleasure in the imperfections of the everyday was thus nothing more than the latest moment in the “history of snob taste.”42 More importantly, though, camp had only taken hold at a moment when “no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist . . . to sponsor special tastes.”43 In the absence of a true upper class “an improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals,” had come to serve as the “aristocrats of taste.”44 Camp’s appreciation of the mundane, its celebration of the art of the masses, could never have been mistaken for a truly populist—or even avant-garde—project. Rather, it was precisely the opposite.45 Unlike “true” artists, those who appreciated camp were virtually incapable of developing any deeper understanding of the world. Rather than providing a challenge to critical thought, they had merely inverted its standards.
Once again, though, for Sontag, the most profound challenge to critical thought would proceed through the senses rather than the intellect. It was for this reason, among others, that when faced with camp she experienced a “deep sympathy modified by revulsion.”46 In one sense, the “Camp sensibility” actively thwarted any attempt at easy interpretation—hence her decision to approach the phenomenon through a series of “notes” rather than attempting to fix its meaning in an essay. Yet, at the same time, the paradoxical immediacy of campy objects appeared to hold no social or political promise. To the contrary, camp seemed to render the notion of sensuous immediacy virtually nonsensical. As she observed, “Camp . . . makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp transcends the nausea of the replica.”47 Camp’s emphasis on surface and the presentation of self as performance, in other words, was not an attempt to foreground the tensions that might be contained within those surfaces and performances but a clever way of accepting, or even celebrating, them. The camp sensibility delighted in images rather than interrogating them. Her accusation of “aestheticism,” therefore, opposed camp not to reality but to the modernist notion of the work of art as a vehicle for critique.
Moreover, what made camp so repugnant was that its effects were virtually inescapable, so much so that Sontag feared her own attempt to define the “Camp sensibility” would result only in “a very inferior piece of Camp.”48 In spite of her efforts to avoid this fate by approaching camp obliquely, through a series of notes, her attempt to distinguish camp from non-camp ended in failure all the same. This is because in her search for the “contemporary Zeitgeist,” as Fabio Cleto has argued, Sontag linked camp “through a paradoxical combination of ‘aristocratic’ detachment and ‘democratic’ leveling of social (and cultural) hierarchies, with the dandification of the . . . masses producing ‘the equivalence of all objects,’ and the transcending of the romantic disgust for the replica, be that the parodic repetition or the infinite technological reproducibility of an original which no longer holds its epistemic privileges.”49 Sontag, in other words, presented postwar America as a culture plagued by a series of crucial indifferences regarding foundational concepts such as originality, objectivity, and aesthetic quality. The revulsion Sontag felt in response to the camp sensibility may have been rooted in a wish to reinstate the work of art in all its sensuous immediacy, but, as Cleto suggests, it was the obsolescence of this type of immediacy to which camp alluded. Camp thus revealed the social aspirations of formalist criticism to be a farce. The sociohistorical conditions that had given birth to camp as a phenomenon had left nothing untouched. Everything, to paraphrase Sontag, had been placed “in quotation marks”—not by camp but by the historical conditions of its emergence. As a result, the grounds from which critique might proceed seemed to have crumbled beneath her feet. Camp was not the opposite of modernist artistic practice but an indication of its collapse. The circumstances that Sontag saw giving rise to the “Camp sensibility” were thus the same as those that had allowed, in One-Dimensional Man, for the apparent reconciliation of art and society. These were the same conditions, moreover, that Marcuse believed had brought about the “repressive desublimation” of human sexuality.
In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argued that desublimation, as it existed in contemporary culture, was truly injurious to the individual. It “weaken[ed] the necessity and the power of the intellect, the catalytic force of that unhappy consciousness . . . which recognizes the horror of the whole in the most private frustration and actualizes itself in this recognition.”50 Where the work of art had once served to register one’s dissatisfaction with the social order—an idea that served as the cornerstone of modern art criticism—the technological society’s ultimately enslaving reconciliation of art and mass culture had left the individual incapable of recognizing his or her own unhappiness. Any sense of emancipation one felt within one-dimensional society was nothing more than that society’s “conquest of freedom.” And, much like the artist, whose statements of alienation had become easily assimilable, those who attempted to flout the rules of this social order succeeded only in strengthening its grasp: “Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. . . . are no longer contradictory to the status quo. . . . They are rather the ceremonial part of a practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.”51 Rebellion had been reduced to a set of signifiers so that it might become the ultimate in conformity. Even sexual perversion, which in Eros and Civilization was said to be essentially irreconcilable with a society that attempted to subjugate all activity to the logic of labor, had been successfully co-opted. One could “let go,” as it were, while leaving the “real engines of repression” entirely intact. Asking the reader to compare “love-making in a meadow and in an automobile, on a lovers’ walk outside the town walls and on a Manhattan street,” Marcuse explained that in the former situations, “the environment partakes of and invites libidinal cathexis and tends to be eroticized. In contrast, a mechanized environment seems to block such self-transcendence of libido. Impelled in the striving to extend the field of erotic gratification, libido becomes less polymorphous, less capable of eroticism beyond localized sexuality, and the latter is intensified.”52 The body’s increased sexualization had precluded its true re-eroticization. Perversion, desublimated only to be safely compartmentalized as a leisure