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14 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
(153)
This is a confusing statement. On the one hand, he locates the pleasure of Camp
in an act of challenge to the dominant order yet, on the other, this challenge is the
result of the hard labor on the part of the producer of taste, the cognoscente, who
operates through exclusion. But it is the cognoscente who represents, reinforces,
and speaks from the site of power. The production of taste is not a challenge to
the dominant order, it is the dominant order. Ross’s glamorous producer of taste
has somehow become both challenger and challenged. Without queer visibility,
Ross’s bourgeois “camp liberator” has not only assumed the role of dominance,
but has also assumed the queer subject position which, through the act of
appropriation, appears now as vacant property that can be restored to circulation
within the economy of properly authorized signification. Ross is correct. This is
hard work. And it does operate by exclusion. The bourgeois camp cognoscente
“liberates” the queer’s oppositional signifying practices from their queer identity
and substitutes himself as signified. But because the queer constitutes him-/
herself processually, the un-queer is now unwittingly performing the queer. The
final effect is the reproduction of the queer’s aura by the un-queer camp liberator
who has been transformed into a drag queen with no other choice but to lipsynch
the discourse of the Other. While Ross’s camp cognoscente has successfully
appropriated the signifying surface, the lyrics were still written by the queer who
has now entered representation by producing his/her visibility on the back of the
un-queer bourgeois subject. It may be the bourgeois subject who sings the aria
but, like the terrifying phantom of the opera, it is the queer who taught her how,
and who still plays the “organ” accompaniment behind the wall of enforced
invisibility in the sewer system of “history’s waste.”
By providing a detailed description of the actions and motives of the un-queer
appropriator, Ross has located a position to which the queer agent can read him-/
herself back into the discourse by establishing a dialogic relationship. This can
be achieved by identifying the social knowledge displayed by Camp agency. As
Ross describes: “Pop experience already contains the knowledge that it will soon
be outdated, spent, obsolescent, or out of fashion” (151). In other words, the power
of Camp lies in its ability to be conscious of its future as an appropriated
commodity. Possession of social knowledge is not dependent on access to the
apparatus of representation. It is the arrogance of the dominant, derived from
ownership of the apparatus of representation, that creates a belief in a monologic
construction of social knowledge. When we recognize that the queer is not dead,
only rendered invisible by a historicizing metaphor, then we can grant the queer
agent the same knowledge as the un-queer appropriator. Operating from under
the cloak of invisibility, the queer knows his/her signifying practices will be,
must be appropriated. As a product of queer agency, it is the process of Camp
that selects and chooses which aspects of itself will be subsumed into dominant
culture. Queer knowledge can then be introduced and incorporated into the
dominant ideology because the blind spot of bourgeois culture is predictable: it