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INTRODUCTION 7
distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about” (106). She adds
that sensibility or taste
has no system and no proofs. …A sensibility is almost, but not quite,
ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system,
or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It
has hardened into an idea.
(106).
As long as thinkers, whether gay or nongay, cling to this definition of Camp-assensibility,
they are invulnerable to critique, forever protected by invoking
Sontag’s own critical exemption.
In a recent essay, Gregory Bredbeck has tried to dismantle Sontag’s defense
system by pointing out the evasive strategy employed by defining Camp as a
sensibility: “a ‘sensibility,’ like that Regency term …is something understood
perfectly until articulated. Sontag’s essay demonstrates this slipperiness through
its recourse to the most basic theoretical strategy derived from Aristotle, division
and classification” (275). The promulgation of various kinds of Camp, argues
Bredbeck, effects Camp’s transformation into “the nominalists’ flatus vocus, an
empty universal term. It functions as all parts of speech, all parts of a sentence:
verb, noun, adjective, adverb; subject, object, modifier” (276), able to become
whatever one needs it to be for purposes of argument while simultaneously
claiming exemption from criticism. Bredbeck suggests that “A more productive
theorization might start by looking not at what the word means, but how it
functions…[as a] sign” (275).
In order to produce a new reading of Camp, one that can account for its recent
politicization, we need to jettison objectivist methodologies. Objectivism, as I am
using it here, refers to an empiricist route to knowledge that “posits a real world
which is independent of consciousness and theory, and which is accessible
through sense-experience” (Lovell 10). This real world can be “discovered” by a
knowing subject who is the “source of the sense data which validates
knowledge” (Lovell 11). An objectivist methodology becomes extremely
problematic in theories of social behavior where the human subjects of study are
unavoidably transformed into “objects” of knowledge that are used to generate
sense-experience for the observer. As a result, human actors are reduced to
“thinglike” status as their own knowledge and experience become rendered as a
structure of neutral surfaces readable only by the observer. As a mode for
interpretation of queer cultural expressions, the one-way dynamic of objectivism
most often results in the erasure of gay and lesbian subjects through an
antidialogic turn that fails to acknowledge a possibly different ontology
embodied in queer signifying practices. Instead, we need to develop a
performance-centered methodology that takes into account and can
accommodate the particular experience of the individual social actors under
study, one which privileges process, the agency of knowledgeable performers,