have eliminated the social strictures that had produced the work of “higher culture” as a necessary form of sublimation in the first place. Art had once been meaningful precisely because it was in some important way removed from the demands of profitability. But one-dimensional society had rendered this mode of culture obsolete by blending “harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials.”25 It brought these different cultural practices, along with the individuals responsible for them, into alignment with their common historical denominator: the commodity form. Sublimation no longer seemed necessary, therefore, for the desires of the individual appeared to have been accommodated within the social order they contradicted. They had been reconciled with the society that once worked to exterminate them. The utopian promise of art had been superseded by suggestions of a utopia achieved within mass culture. In this context, the modern artist’s statements of alienation were transformed, becoming little more than advertisements for the status quo.
Susan Sontag, writing at roughly the same time, placed the blame for this problem squarely on the shoulders of the critic. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she argued, the relationship between the critic and the work of art had reached an impasse. Simply put, critics no longer felt compelled to respect art’s objectivity. “In most modern instances,” she wrote, criticism simply rendered works of art “manageable, conformable.”26 By interpreting aesthetic works the art critic implicitly assumed that form and content were somehow distinct, thereby doing violence to the work itself; interpretation, as Sontag put it, “violates art.”27 In response to this critical aggression modern artists had actively thwarted any and all attempts at interpretation by appealing directly to the senses. These artists looked to “elude the interpreters . . . by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be . . . just what it is.”28 Among the examples Sontag listed of this new, more insistently present work were the Theater of Cruelty of Antonin Artaud, the Happenings of Alan Kaprow, the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the films of directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Robert Bresson. The value of these works, in her estimation, was that they defied translation. They forced one to acknowledge the work’s “pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy . . . and its . . . solutions to certain problems of . . . form.”29 Yet directness was not the only means of forestalling the incursion of interpretation. In fact, Sontag argued, certain forms of indirectness could achieve the same end. In contrast to the brute materiality of the Theater of Cruelty, Pop Art had used “a content so blatant, so ‘what it is,’” that it too defied any attempt to translate/domesticate the work of art. Upon introducing this idea of Pop Art’s indirectness as a potential form of immediacy, however, Sontag ran head-on into the very same historical dilemma that so vexed Marcuse, namely, that claims to aesthetic “immediacy,” whether direct or indirect, were inherently reconcilable with the demands of consumer capitalism.
That Sontag eventually stumbled over this problem should come as little surprise, for the urgency with which she pressed for a critical “erotics of art” was based, primarily, in the reformulation of psychoanalysis advanced by Marcuse and Norman O. Brown in the 1950s. Brown and Marcuse, Sontag wrote, were two of the first thinkers to give some indication of the “revolutionary implications of sexuality in contemporary society.”30 Like them, Sontag believed that Freud’s theories of sexuality were deeply, inherently political. In Eros and Civilization, published in 1954, Marcuse had argued that Freud’s belief that human culture is necessarily repressive amounted to little more than a defense of the status quo. The repression Freud saw as integral to any orderly and efficient society was, for Marcuse, “surplus repression,” the subordination of individual desires and impulses to the demands of industrial capitalism. The corrective to this surplus repression was to be found, he argued, in revisiting and recovering the developmental state of “polymorphous perversity,” in which eroticism was not restricted to the genitals. By re-eroticizing and accordingly reconfiguring the entire human organism, we might release the body from the type of instrumentality demanded by industrial society.31 Similarly, in his 1959 text Life Against Death, Brown called for the reunification of mind and body. Unlike “revisionist” American Freudians, he believed that psychoanalysis held the key to healing both society and the individual. This would be achieved not through the reeducation of the mind, but through the recognition of the mind’s dependence upon the body. If the primacy of the body could be acknowledged, and an androgynous mode of existence accepted, Brown believed that the neuroses resulting from sexual differentiation and “genital organization” could be overcome. As Sontag summarized his argument, “The core of human neurosis is man’s incapacity to live in the body—to live (that is, to be sexual) and to die.”32 Much like the theory of art presented in Eros and Civilization, Sontag’s “erotics of art” was to constitute a move toward this re-eroticizing of the individual. For Sontag, that is, the attempts to reeducate the senses found in the works of Artaud, Kaprow, Antonioni, and others were not just aesthetic obligations but social imperatives. Through the direct experience of these works and their material refusal to submit to the demands of “critical” thought, she believed that individuals could be transformed. But the “Surrealist sensibility” that functioned through these works had also given rise to the “cooler” works of Pop artists like Andy Warhol. Like Surrealism, both of these newer forms sought to “destroy conventional meanings” and to create new ones through the use of “radical juxtaposition.”33 For Sontag, however, where Kaprow and Artaud had actively challenged viewers’ senses and sensibilities, Pop Art had ultimately looked only to entertain them. Warhol, therefore, was merely the legatee of those surrealists who made it fashionable for the French intelligentsia to frequent flea markets. The particular form of “disinterested wit and sophistication” in which he specialized may have stymied critical interpretation, but it nevertheless failed to acknowledge the more urgent task facing the artist, namely the personally and socially “therapeutic” work of “reeducating the senses.”34 Simply put, Pop Art was plagued by its dependence upon the more insidious form of the Surrealist sensibility known as camp.
The “Camp sensibility,” in Sontag’s phrasing, was not a way of changing the world through aesthetic experience but rather “of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.”35 Unlike the corrupted aesthetic Marcuse saw in mass culture, in which everyday images and objects presented themselves as truly fulfilling, the camp sensibility found in the world an image of failure. In her “Notes on Camp,” published in 1964, Sontag wrote that camp was “the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things being-what-they-are-not. . . . Camp sees everything in quotation marks. . . . To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”36 Unfortunately for Sontag, the “Camp sensibility” proved exceedingly difficult to pin down for this very reason. Following a few introductory remarks on the necessity of understanding camp as a sensibility, she literally reversed her position. “Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things,” she wrote, “Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. . . . It’s not all in the eye of the beholder.”37 To access the “Camp sensibility,” it seems, Sontag felt it necessary to work backward from “campy” objects—things such as Tiffany lamps, the National Enquirer, Flash Gordon comics, and the famous Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles. By looking to “the canon of Camp,” she believed it would be possible to extrapolate those characteristics that appealed to—and conditioned—“the Camp eye.”38 Through a brief survey of these objects, she surmised that camp could not be overly serious, overly important, or overly good: “Many examples of Camp are things which, from a ‘serious’ point of view, are either bad art or kitsch.”39 The camp object was one that proclaimed, whether naively or consciously, its own silliness, extravagance, or artificiality. It was an object in which form and content failed to coalesce. Like Baudelaire’s concept of the “significative comic,” the camp object was “visibly double.”40
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
