Camp Materialism

What interests me here is to relate the aesthetics of camp not so much to subjects and history, but rather to their seeming opposite: objects and nature. Important work has been done in recent years to broaden perspectives about the performative aspects of camp and the specifics of camp gender performance. In this respect, the recognition of the dimensions of race and class has become an inestimable element of the respective critical discourse on camp, as have the many ways of attending to the ambivalent role of women—as muses, as accomplices, as performers, as spectators— vis-à-vis a phenomenon that is, if only superficially, associated with gay (male) culture. Now, all these contributions, despite their many argumentative differences, share the basic critical impulse of exposing what seems natural as historical, as something that has been mediated by society so thoroughly that it appears as the indisputably given—as nature. Needless to say, the semblance of nature prevents us from recognizing the traces of contingency and potentiality in what is. For obvious reasons, because they are sensitive to phenomena where second nature quite literally assumes the guise even of first nature, gender and queer studies are programmatically committed to the program of reading history in nature.

But, like any critical theory, gender and queer studies have sometimes been accused of ontologically prioritizing society, as though they were claiming that society was at the beginning of everything. In a lecture by Theodor W. Adorno, he answers the exact same accusation by saying two things that I found somewhat intriguing for our context, as well. First, one should not understand nature as some kind of neutral layer on top of which history is constructed. If one must, instead, understand nature and history as mutually mediated, it does indeed make no sense to speak of an isolated sphere of nature. Moreover, if there is a priority in the relation of nature and history, it must—at least according to the basic intuition of critical theory since Karl Marx—be on the side of history. But, Adorno continues, it would be wrong to ontologize this insight in the sense that there is nothing but society. What one would have to do to avoid this undialectical conclusion is not to fall back on a problematic idea of an isolated sphere of nature that could be separated from society and history, but to consider the element of nature in history. The critical stance would thus demand a double perspective: it should see nature (or what installs itself as such) as history, and history as nature. For, in the end, Adorno explains, one has to acknowledge that society itself is mediated by the creatures that form it, which is why it necessarily includes “a non-social dimension.” ¹

Adorno speaks of Wesen in this context. For several reasons, I think it is very fitting here to translate Wesen, which is usually translated as “beings,” as “creatures.” For I think it is the aesthetics of camp, at least in Jack Smith’s version of camp, that can help us understand this second side of the dialectical construction better: that we not only have to read history in nature but also nature in history. Ronald Tavel has importantly argued that Jack Smith is not camp, because he “believed” in a way that seemed too serious for that. ² It is beyond any doubt that Smith took what he did seriously and that we, too, should indeed take his aesthetic seriously. The question is whether the latter can be done if we ignore all the motifs that link this aesthetic to a camp sensibility. I think we shouldn’t do that and should instead understand Jack Smith’s oeuvre as camp, but as camp that takes itself deadly serious. One way to approach this seriousness is perhaps through the dialectical construction already mentioned: reading history in nature but also—and this will be the focus of my essay—nature in history. Since the first part of this construction has been theorized mainly with respect to the performing subject, my hypothesis is that in order to theorize the second part, it might be...