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30 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
use” (1710:195). Such self-knowledge, believed Shaftesbury, was prerequisite to
three goals of philosophy: “Friendship, Society, and the Commerce of Life”
(1710:286).
THE CLOSETED BODY AND THE BODY SOCIAL
What guaranteed the sociality of this speculative habit was “taste,” the sense of
the fitting or the becoming. Taste, as a common way of seeing (an interesting
displacement of bodily functions), guaranteed the identity of looks, not only within
the subject, but also between agents. Taste dictated that, from the study of
himself, the [male] philosopher would “ascend beyond his own immediate
Species, City, or Community, to discover and recognize his higher Polity, or
Community, that common and universal-one, of which he is born a Member”
(1714:158). Thus Shaftesbury criticized the virtuosi’s “pretended Knowledg
[sic] of the Machine of this World, and of their own Frame,” suggesting that
“this super-speculative Philosophy” be replaced by “a more practical sort, which
relates chiefly to our Acquaintance, Friendship, and good Correspondence with
our-selves” (1710:291–292).
Taking it as (self-)evident that “in the very nature of Things there must of
necessity be the Foundation of a right and wrong TASTE” (1710:336),
Shaftesbury privileged critics as the arbiters of taste: “Now a TASTE or
Judgment, ‘tis suppos’d, can hardly come ready form’d with us into the World. …
A legitimate and just TASTE can neither be begotten, made, conceiv’d, or
produc’d, without the antecedent Labor and Pains of CRITICISM” (1714:164–
165). Against the virtuosi, who could be aligned with a revival of aristocratic
privilege based on excessive and pleasurable knowledges, Shaftesbury opposed
the critic, whose leadership of taste regulated such privileges according to
morality and normality (1714:163). It was only through taste, Shaftesbury
asserted, repeating his insistence that manners and morals should be one and the
same, that the virtuosi could become virtuous (1710:338).
Shaftesbury identified the greatest good as those networks of friendship
between men that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called homosocialism (1–2).
Shaftesbury distinguished this male-male sociality from more “effeminate”
intercourses between men and women, 9 and from the suspect sexuality of the
more marginal virtuoso. While Sedgwick, in her book Between Men, has
described the various tropes through which homosociality is played out, she has
not described the bodily metaphors through which homosocialism marks itself as
separate from homosexuality. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, the virtuoso kept his collection in a cabinet—a special room or closet
for the private display of his knacks, rareties, intricate machines, or trivialities. As
an externalization of his personal and antisocial taste, the virtuoso’s cabinet
threatened the homosocialism of philosophy, especially in the Greek model of
the public forum or dialogue favored by Shaftesbury and others. Whereas the