«CAMP» (S. SONTAG), «INTENTIO SECUNDA» (U. ECO), «MANNERISM» (I. KANT) AS RELATED MODES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Abstract

The article compares Susan Sontag’s concept of Camp with Umberto Eco’s notion of intentio secunda and Immanuel Kant’s category of Mannerism. The study proceeds from the assumption that these intellectual constructs, despite belonging to different theoretical traditions, describe a related aesthetic logic based on distancing from the content of a cultural object and focusing on the forms of its representation. The author analyzes Camp as a sensibility that perceives cultural phenomena in the mode of citationality and activates the playful potential of aesthetic experience.

An important place in the article is occupied by the analysis of intentio secunda in Umberto Eco’s conception. It is shown that this type of reflection is directed not toward the search for fundamentally new artistic devices, but toward ways of perceiving already widespread cultural forms. It is emphasized that such a shift of focus brings intentio secunda closer to the logic of Camp; however, a fundamental difference remains between them. Whereas Eco calls for a critical distancing from aesthetically primitive cultural forms or forms profaned through excessively frequent use, Camp transforms their derivative character and artificiality into a source of aesthetic pleasure.

Particular attention is devoted to Kant’s concept of Mannerism. The author shows that Mannerism, like Camp, occupies an intermediate position between creativity and imitation, originality and copying. It is precisely this ambivalence that makes it possible to see in Mannerism the earliest conceptualization of cultural practices that would later be theorized within the framework of the aesthetics of Camp.

The article concludes that Camp, intentio secunda, and Mannerism represent different aspects of a common cultural logic oriented toward derivativeness, stylization, and aesthetic distancing. Camp appears as a form of «second-order» creativity aimed not at creating new cultural forms but at reinterpreting existing ones through citation, stylization, and an ironic play with their conventionality.

In addition, considerable attention is paid to the intellectual preconditions for the formation of Camp sensibility. In this context, the article analyzes the aesthetic views of Oscar Wilde, who proposed a «reversed» theory of mimesis according to which reality itself imitates art. It also examines Roland Barthes’s ideas concerning dandyism as a practice of symbolic self-construction. Reference to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum makes it possible to interpret Camp as a cultural orientation focused on the play of signs, quotations, and forms that have lost their direct connection with their original referent. Such a philosophical contextualization makes it possible to clarify the place of Camp in the history of aesthetic thought and to reveal its connection with broader theoretical issues.