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Certain & Uncertain Part I Rex Butler |
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The
Complacency of Camp Take Madonna. If you read such books as Desperately Seeking Madonna: In Search of the World’s Most Famous Woman, edited by Adam Sexton, or The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identity and Cultural Theory, edited by Cathy Swictenberg, or Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, by Pamela Robertson, you will learn that Madonna is radical precisely because we cannot tell whether the image of woman she puts forward merely replays the worst feminine stereotypes or is a subtle critique of them from within; whether she merely panders to male voyeurism or somehow turns it against itself, making it self-aware and thus unpleasurable. Importantly, for these authors it is not in either alternative as such that the meaning or significance of Madonna’s strategy is to be found, but only in the oscillation between both, the undecidability between them. It is in the impossibility of giving a final meaning to Madonna — of determining whether she is for or against woman, repeats or condemns female stereotypes — that her significance is ultimately to be found. Or, as Adam Sexton concludes in a neat paradox in his Desperately Seeking Madonna, the final meaning of Madonna is that we cannot find a final meaning to her, and we shouldn’t even try to. It is just in the ambiguity and equivocality of her gestures that her radicality and cultural subversiveness lies. But what if, far from Madonna constituting an exception to or resisting the dominant tone of our culture, she was in fact typical of it? What if this undecidable irony that Madonna represented was not transgressive but the norm? What if it was not radical but conventional? And, certainly, reading these exegeses of Madonna, we get the sense that, far from her ambiguity upsetting her analysts, or making their reading difficult, it fits in only too well with their various models; their theoretical mastery is once again confirmed. Far from challenging or discomforting the possibility of interpretation, it seems — as the sheer number of these essays attests — positively to encourage it. The "guilty pleasure" Robertson refers to in her book is just the pleasure the analyst takes in speaking of Madonna like this, the pleasure of analysis itself, which remains undisturbed in its encounter with Madonna. But what if this "guilty pleasure" is no longer the special preserve of the analyst, uniquely able to speak for the rest of us, but of everyone? What if all of us in today’s society are given the sense that we maintain a distance from its ruling ideologies, if all of us maintain a sense of irony with regard to its institutions and beliefs? What if this was in fact the way post-industrial capitalism worked and not through any obvious coercion or dominance, any direct interpellation or forcing of us to believe? What if it was exactly through our sense that we do not believe in it, that we can take a critical distance onto it, that we do get the joke or irony of someone like Madonna? The crucial turning point here is the word "camp", which Robertson uses in her book. This was a term first discussed by the American novelist and critic Susan Sontag in her well-known essay ‘Notes on "Camp"’, first written in 1964 and published in the collection Against Interpretation. In that essay, she attempts to describe a new sensibility or aesthetic she has recently noted in certain subcultures, notable the gay in New York — although for her it began as long ago as the turning point between the 17th and 18th centuries. It is a kind of ironic mimicry and caricature of the values of mainstream society as a way of subtly undermining them. It speaks of the necessity for otherwise marginal groups to carve out their own identity when this identity is only given to them from the outside, and a way for the initiates of these groups to recognise each other within this surrounding society. It is the equivalent of an in-joke, a joke shared by a certain class of people, which others will not understand. As Sontag writes: "Camp is esoteric — something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it". © Rex Butler and REFERENCES This essay was originally delivered as a lecture to the Friends of the Department of Art History, University of Queensland. The spoken feel has been retained here. |
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