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INTRODUCTION 13
“Camp…involves a celebration, on the part of cognoscenti, of the alienation,
distance, and incongruity reflected in the very process by which unexpected
value can be located in some obscure or exorbitant object” (146). Because the
queer is rendered invisible at the moment when values are reassigned in the act
of appropriation, it looks as if the objects of Camp have suddenly materialized
from nowhere (which is precisely where the queer lives), appearing miraculously
as an act of discovery. As if receiving manna in the wilderness, the act of
appropriation is perceived as mysterious intervention, a sign of manifest destiny
that reinforces the moral authority of the dominant order. Having received the
divine dispensation, the bourgeois subject of camp celebrates the invisibility of
the queer, rejoices in the act of appropriation, and, in effect, derives pleasure
from the erasure of the queer. Ross indicates that the pleasure derived from the
act of appropriation stems from the altogether accidental and “unexpected”
quality of the exchange, as if to claim a protected space of moral innocence in
the silencing of the queer.
However, the celebratory lynching of the queer cannot take place without
knowledge. One does not become a “cognoscente” through celebrating random
and “unexpected value.” On the contrary, the connoisseur is, by definition, an
expert in establishing value, not discovering it. The cognoscente is an authority
not to be questioned. His is the voice that nominates “the original,” who
manifests the presence of the dominant order, controls the apparatus of
representation by speaking a signifying code into existence, and plays the role of
ideological logos (Price 7–22; King in this volume). But then you cannot lynch
the “dead,” and the appropriation is, of course, benign. Nobody is being hurt.
Thus the act of queer erasure becomes a valorized salvage effort on the part of
the cognoscente appropriator whom Ross then describes as a “camp liberator,”
who rediscovers “history’s waste [read ‘the queer’],” a kind of nineteenthcentury
archaeologist who, by “liberating the objects and discourses of the past
from disdain and neglect [read ‘by appropriating queer signifying practices’],”
enfuses himself with “glamor [read ‘queer aura’]” (151). The whole operation
becomes a bizarre love affair with the dead queer who, safely contained within
the coffin of a distancing metaphorical historicization, can now be loved and
cherished as the source of dominant cultural renewal. The act of appropriation is,
after all, a source of pleasure, and Ross describes the activity as a “necrophilic
economy that underpins the camp sensibility” (152). But curiously, Ross goes on
to say that
If the pleasure generated by [camp’s] bad taste presents a challenge to the
mechanisms of control and containment that operate in the name of good
taste, it is often to be enjoyed only at the expense of others, and this is
largely because camp’s excess of pleasure has very little, finally, to do with
the (un)controlled hedonism of the consumer; it is the result of the (hard)
work of a producer of taste, and “taste” is only possible through exclusion
and depreciation.