Page 20 - Camp Project Final

Affect Theory
Scholars Laurent Berlant and Kathleen Stewart wrote
The Hundreds in segments of 100 words or less to describe their concept of affect theory. Affect is the intensity with which we experience emotion. It’s an impulse. Another academic compared it to tapping your foot when a song you like is playing. Berlant and Stewart are interested in the monotony of daily encounters and how they manifest themselves affectively and emotionally. Berlant and Stewart write, “This project pays attention to the relation of scenes to form, ovesrvation to implication, encounters to events, and a figuration to what sticks in the mind.”
“Camp salvages material otherwise doomed to oblivion” - Gilo Dorfles
Sontag’s project documenting Camp is similarly ephemeral. Camp is impsossible to define succintly, and it is deeply affective. Sontag calls it a “sensibility. “To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble,” she claims. Notes on Camp is an essay in a nontraditional, short form, similar to The Hundreds.
The Camp exhibit tried to document a phenomeon that is always changing. It put affect on display. In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said that he couldn’t define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. Pornography, like Camp, is steeped in affective judgments. Bolton’s attempt to curate Camp will inevitably fail, at least to a certain extent, because Camp cannot be captured or defined.
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