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12 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
order. This appropriation attempts to defuse the Camp critique by redefining the
actions of the queer within the nonthreatening context of compulsory
reproductive heterosexuality which, because the representational apparatus
cannot render a queer subject, constitutes, simply, its erasure. Because the queer
has been, as Cynthia Morrill describes, “hurled out of representation” at the
impacting moment of appropriation, all that remains is the object of camp which
now appears, illusorily, as a fossilized remnant. It is never suspected that the act
of appropriation itself has killed off the queer. In order to account for the
absence, the conclusion is that the previous owner of the object must long since
have passed away. Without a voice to claim possession of the object, the social
knowledge of the queer can be ignored because s/he has been relocated to the
mists of the bygone past. The perceived threat to dominant ideology by the
queer’s sexual nonproductivity is then silenced through benign renomination as a
discontinued productivity. Located in the past, the queer has been assigned to the
site of the grave, of death, of nonexistence, of nonpresence, and no longer needs
to be taken into account.
Ross’s unreflecting use of interpretive codes, by regarding them as simple acts
of perception (the trademark of the visual bias of objectivism), masks and
obscures the source of value production (Shapiro 5–30). Relocating the queer to
a past era by defining him/her as a discontinued mode of production is not the
neutral act of identification it is made out to be. Rather, it is a dominant
performative gesture of incorporation meant to muzzle an opposing voice by
substituting the act of appropriation itself as the referent of camp. Because the
act of appropriation includes the erasure of the queer, dominant (read Pop)
formations of camp translate this activity into a recognition that Camp was once
a homosexual discourse, but now refers, more correctly, to the redistribution of
objects plundered from the “dead” queer’s estate. This technique has been called
“the spatialization of time” by Johannes Fabian (25–35). Fabian explained how
unequal contemporaneous power relationships between Self and Other become
translated into temporal distance by conflating and then substituting the
oppositional terms of “now/then” for the directional binary concept of “here/
there” (27, 37–69). The “here” and “now” that signifies the praxis of everyday
life is replaced by the “there” and “then” signification of the not really real, a
substitution of terms that results in a denial of coevalness, or the state of “beingwith”
the Other (Berger and Luckman 22). Situating the queer’s signifying
practices in the historical past creates the impression that the objects of camp no
longer have owners and are up for grabs. This metaphorical manipulation forms
the basis for and justification of heterosexual/Pop colonization of queer discourse
and praxis. Thus instead of the harmless reassignment of values to junk store
items that Pop theorists have convinced themselves is “camp,” the actual
maneuver conceals a contemporaneous struggle over meanings and value
production by competing discourses.
Importantly, Ross does identify a knowledgeable social agent in his formation
of camp. This un-queer agent has some remarkable traits. As he describes: