The Politics and Poetics of Camp

Morris Meyer, Morris Meyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134890927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

The Politics and Poetics of Camp is a radical reappraisal of the meaning and discourse of camp. The contributors look at both the meaning and the uses of camp performance, and ask: is camp a style, or a witty but nonetheless powerful cultural critique? The essays investigate camp from its early formations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century to its present manifestations in queer theatre and literature. They also take a fascinating look at the complex relationship between queer discourse and decidedly un-queer pop culture appropriations on film and on the stage. The Politics and Poetics of Camp is an incisive, uncontainable and entertaining collection of essays by some of the foremost critics working in queer theory, from a number of disciplinary perspectives. This book makes a well-timed intervention into an emerging debate.

1
PERFORMING “AKIMBO”
Queer pride and epistemological prejudice
Thomas A.King

Aristocracy is a position vis-à-vis culture (as well as vis-à-vis power), and the history of Camp taste is part of the history of snob taste. But since no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist today to sponsor special tastes, who is the bearer of taste? Answer: an improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste.

…the soundest starting point seems to be the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, because of that period’s extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry…

Susan Sontag (117, 109)

I begin with Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” not because Sontag’s influential description of Camp as apolitical has not already been sufficiently criticized as inadequate, but because I want to play out the epistemological prejudices upon which her notes depend.¹ In this essay, I situate the development of modern male homosexual identity within early modern debates about the nature of self and the validity of the visual as the basis of knowledge about identity. Sontag placed the origin of Camp in late-seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century Europe. I will attempt to show, in the case of England, why this might be so. During this period, a model of the self as unique and continuous in the identity of its actions across time and space displaced earlier notions of the self as performative, improvisational, and discontinuous. Residual elements of this performative self were transcoded as markers of homosexuality, making them available for appropriation by an early homosexual subculture like the mollies, which became visible in London around 1700. Sontag took for granted the eighteenth century’s polarization of surface and content, artifice and nature, frivolity and sincerity. Her description of the basic Camp maneuver as the blocking out or emptying a thing of its content (110) depends on a differentiation of surface and depth that was subject to a great deal of hostile interrogation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The proto-camp gestures developed by men like the mollies may have actually worked to displace the epistemological clarity of dominant codes of identity. The early modern origins of English Camp may actually have been well-informed political practices deploying the surfaces of the body oppositionally against the accruing bourgeois capacity for shaping and controlling the subject through his or her interiority.

THE BACKGROUND: REREADING THE ARISTOCRATIC BODY

It was quite correct of Sontag to connect the development of Camp gestures with a shift in the concept of aristocracy from a class difference embodied in the very blood of a specific set of concrete and privileged beings to a stance vis-à-vis “culture” that was not inherited through birth but assumed by certain marginalized subjects. But how are certain gay men—Camp queens—aristocrats of taste? Several sets of ideologically sutured narratives need to be (un)identified here—aristocracy as homosexuality, homosexuality as an aristocracy of taste, and homosexuals as the bearers of gestures once naturally located in the bodies of aristocrats.

As Lawrence Stone has analyzed in detail, the English aristocracy was in “crisis” during the early modern period: the assumed place and privilege of the aristocrats were crumbling under the advent of real political issues demanding substantive actions; aristocratic display was increasingly interrogated according to models of interiority, moderation, and privacy proposed by the Puritans; and the development of new technologies was displacing the center of wealth from land to commerce (1965:262, 500; 187–188, 331, 584; 185, 259). The aristocracy failed as a ruling class in the seventeenth century through its inability to adapt its concept of nobility to new ideals of social utility. In light of the development of “real” or substantive political issues, the bourgeoisie interpreted the continued promulgation of aristocratic legitimacy through spectacular self-display and conspicuous consumption as empty gesturing, mere appearance with no underlying being.

For example, the upper classes had distinguished themselves by an impassivity or poise like the sprezzatura (nonchalance) described in Baldesar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. Translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, Castiglione’s manual advised the courtier “to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it” (43). As theatre historian Alfred Siemon Golding has noted, the upper classes originally presented themselves as impassive because emotionality was understood as signaling an imbalance of the four humors. The upper classes appeared fit to rule to the degree that they showed themselves to be free of the domination of the humors (Golding 75–76). Sprezzatura therefore signaled aristocratic legitimacy through an apparent freedom from excessive bodily movement—not only freedom from external bodily movements like labor, but freedom from internal bodily movements like emotionality and awkwardness. In other words, the upper classes constructed for themselves an aristocratic body purged of those elements it shared in common with other classes. During the eleven-year period of his personal rule (1629–1640), an attempted-revival of monarchial absolutism, Charles I was painted by Sir Anthony Van Dyck after Castiglione’s courtier—“celebrated,” as Roy Strong has written, “as the perfect cortegiano” (56). Plate 2, Van Dyck’s Charles I à la ciasse, shows the monarch in a moment of (studied) relaxation; and yet the graceful pose, with the left arm set akimbo, or bent from the hip, and the hand turned back, reminds the viewer, as Strong has suggested, that even in repose Charles was essentially a monarch (56). In showing themselves with arms set akimbo, the aristocrats were presenting their difference from other classes as a recreation of body through an act of will(power).

The bourgeoisie saw aristocratic affectation not as self-control, but as a dissembling of nature. As the physiognomical philosopher John Bulwer cautioned the orator in 1644, “Shun affectation; for all affectation is odious; and then others are most moved with our actions when they perceive all things to flow, as it were, out of the liquid current of nature” (244).² Defining the aristocratic body as dissimulated, the bourgeoisie constructed themselves oppositionally as “open,” as the Abbé du Bos described it in his Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting of 1719. One hundred years later, in his manual for actors and orators, Gilbert Austin quoted du Bos’s judgment that “nature, herself sincere and candid, intends that mankind should preserve the same character, by cultivating simplicity and truth, and banishing every sort of dissimulation that tends to mischief” (474). This “real” or “inner” self was not that to be discovered in the formal rhetoric of court portraits, masques, or processions: the “natural” self was that which would be “visible” only when the subject was not “performing.” Aristocratic self-display became resistantly represented by the bourgeoisie as empty shows, dissimulations concealing a lack of social being. The bourgeoisie associated aristocratic lack of openness with the arbitrariness characteristic of the period of Charles I’s personal rule and for which he lost his head—an arbitrariness associated with Italianate Machiavellianism and popery. The aristocratic adoption of a studied casualness as a way of marking their difference from the social body was reread by bourgeois critics as a kind of perversion, a disjunction of the self and the social body.

The juxtaposition of aristocratic affectation and bourgeois openness followed an already established tenet of the popular science of physiognomy, which held that identifications of gender, class, race, and so on, could be seen in the lines and manners of the body. As early as 1644, Bulwer had insisted that the lines of the body and its movements disclosed “the present humor and state of the mind and will” (5). Bulwer claimed that gestures indicated the interior complexion of the individual and were not dependent on culture or custom (16). This assumption of the purity of the semiotics of gesture had a utilitarian function: it was, as Bulwer wrote, “a great discoverer of dissimulation, and great direction in business” (5).

Against the spectacle of the aristocrats, the bourgeoisie argued that the surfaces of the body were politically meaningful only to the extent that they disclosed an integrity and capacity of self useful to the social majority.

Substituting a self (a content) where there had been a body (a surface), bourgeois liberalism held that consciousness was political, while the surfaces of the body were not. This model of the self-as-content favored the rise to ideological dominance and political centrality of the middle classes by insisting on the utility and consistency of the self against a simple privilege of place. It is important to note that what was at stake was not the invention of a model of psychological depth, but the increasing identity (or equivalency) of self-performance and self-originality: the performance of identity increasingly found its necessity in an origin located within the unique subject.

SEEING THE SELF, OR HOMOSEXUAL HERMENEUTICS

The paradigmatic body upon which these models of the self were negotiated was implicitly male.³ For this reason, the problem of effeminacy frequently served as a test case for the reliability of the semiotics of the body. For John Bulwer, “effeminacy” had several implications. Occasionally, he used this or similar terms misogynisti cally to describe the presence in men of behaviors that he attributed to women. More frequently, he used the term effeminacy to describe the arrogance, affectation, and sloth of the ruling classes, and what he perceived as their difference from the bourgeois values of dependability and productivity. In his manuals on the gestures of the hands, Bulwer distinguished effeminate gestures by their difference from two normative gestures representative of Protestant bourgeois values—the handshake, by which business partners sealed their negotiations and showed trustworthiness, and the hands raised in prayer or thanksgiving. In Bulwer’s “Alphabet of Manual Expressions,” the extended, open, or offered hand appeared frequently as a sign of good will. To the open hand, he contrasted excessive gesturing with the hands, which he described as “subtle gesticulation and toying behavior”—terms generally used to describe the actions of courtiers and women. Excessive gesturing was like the “sleight of hand” of magicians, pickpockets, and actors, all of whom “mock the eye” (229– 230). Gestural excess, then, was the lowest common denominator of all sorts of effeminacy.

Bourgeois ideology was increasingly concerned with limiting excess through a criticism of its content. Throughout his treatises on gestures, Bulwer seems caught between understanding effeminacy as a sign of excessive or dissimulated interiority (a false use of one’s body), or as a new kind of interiority, a new content (a characteristic use of the body by a particular kind of person). At one point, Bulwer argued that wagging the hand in a swinging gesture indicated that “kind of wantonness and effeminacy” that should disqualify a man from military service (62–63). Moreover, as a habitual mannerism, wagging the hand was not only effeminate as a gesture, it indicated an inherent effeminacy of the subject.

Bulwer’s hypothesis that habitual behaviors indicated innate character was part of the accumulating discourse that, by 1700, would produce the knowledge that a man who had sex habitually with other men was innately different from a man who had sex habitually with women. This corresponded with the politically motivated disclosures of the molly subculture in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. The mollies were an underground society of men who met in taverns to have sex with other men and to parody in improvised performances the increasingly normative concept of companionate heterosexual marriage prevalent among the Puritan bourgeoisie.⁴ The tendency to treat effeminacy as a test case for the normative definition of the self suggests that the writers of these documents understood the effeminate man as challenging the legitimacy of bourgeois morality. That the bourgeoisie were meeting resistance to their rhetoric of...