Styled

Review of Michael Trask, Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013.

Camp Sites advances the beautifully counterintuitive argument that the midcentury US university’s transition between the consensus liberalism of the 1950s and the New Left radicalism of the 1960s was characterized less by rupture than by continuity.  Chief among these continuities was an interest in style—the political gesture conceived as a stance, the idea that “attitudes are politics” (13).  A major foil, the book further argues, for the postwar period’s evolving interest in style was the figure of the closeted homosexual.  Camp Sites accordingly lays out “the shift from a representation of queer sexuality as the abject other of mainstream liberal culture to an image of queer sexuality as the statist enemy of the counterculture and the New Left” (1).  Traversing a large number of academic disciplines and intellectual movements—including the campus novel, the rise of qualitative sociology, the teaching of writing, the development of method acting—the book persuasively demonstrates that “midcentury academic disciplines placed the theatrical, the synthetic, the artificial, and the constructed at the heart of their research programs” (2), making these into objects for scrutiny.
 
Camp Sites shows the more familiar narrative of the rejection of 1950s liberalism by 1960s radicalism to be a story that is largely enabled by scholarly and historical inattention to the consistent ways that these two broad movements scrutinized the figure of the homosexual.  In the 1950s, belief emerged as an intellectual and political summum bonum.  Belief, however, also took on a particular valence: “beliefs are what you publically pretend to have while privately admitting their emptiness.  Belief is a formal structure purified of content” (7).  The closeted homosexual—whose commitments were privately held rather than publicly expressed—gave the lie to this structure of belief, and thus became a figure of dissembling and threat.  But for much the same reason, as the New Left began to reject formalist beliefs in favor of a notion of authenticity  (or what the book calls “the gesture of conferring political meaning on acts by highlighting their obviousness” [105]), the homosexual again became a problematic figure, because his private convictions figured only his inauthenticity.
 
As the admirably wide research of Camp Sites demonstrates, considerable ink was spilled in those pre-Stonewall days discussing the status of homosexuals. However, the book does not only track the manifest discourses surrounding homosexuality in the period; it also tracks the (consistently negative) evaluations of camp style and camp aesthetics—the surfeit of non-ironic aesthetic excess that failed to reflect either the style of detached belief in the 1950s or the style of authentic self-expression in the 1960s.  If homosexuals were aligned with a camp style that kept them out of touch with the intellectual and political mainstreams of the postwar period, however, the book goes to lengths to show that those mainstreams nevertheless relied on the figure of the homosexual and on camp style as a lurking form of inauthenticity against which to define themselves.  Camp Sites draws attention to the historical fact that the radicalism of the New Left failed to embrace nascent gay liberation movements, observing that “The equation radicals forged between authenticity and a meaningful life rendered gay culture’s uncommitted and artificial persons beyond redemption, even if such figures would serve a role in defining countercultural commitment by their negative example” (1).
 
Camp Sites is written with splendid erudition and is carefully measured in its assessments of the historical terrain on which it stands—also the same terrain on which academics working at US universities in 2014 all stand.  Indeed, a book that tries to expose the ways that a logic of disavowal structured academic knowledge sets for itself a complicated task.  To commit itself to a hermeneutics of suspicion would involve complicity with the postwar academic mandate to expose rather than believe.  By contrast, to believe rather than expose might leave the study complicit with something that it also seeks to critique.  What we get in the end is a work that imagines that the past is irreversible, that the terrain on which we walk has calcified, and that our rejection or acceptance of the past will be partial and motivated.  Such a conclusion seems entirely true, and also somewhat flat.
 
Camp Sites is an enviably even-handed critical performance and, given its subject and its method, I found that surprising.  Though the book’s research and examples bear no similarities to the isolated anecdotes that often characterize New Historicist arguments, the book’s argumentative moves are nonetheless reminiscent of New Historicism’s.  The introductory chapter announces with some satisfaction that the method of Camp Sites will be to “Scrambl[e] the cognitive map of a period in order to extract its overriding ‘logic’” (16–17), and it further defends against any apparent “recidivism” in this move by reclaiming the extraction of cultural logic as a campy thing to do (17).  The cheekiness of this defense alone should make anyone who cares about style sympathetic to this study, even if the book did not otherwise have considerable merits.  But it is also worth noting that this cheek feels, significantly, more stylish than substantial.  The moment that New Historicism can be claimed by camp is necessarily the moment that New Historicism has lost its claims to political urgency.
 
Given such commitments to style, one might suppose that if a book extracts a cultural logic, and if it calls that move camp, then the book might make that move in a heightened or attenuated or dramatic way.  But it doesn’t.  I wanted the book to be angry at the past.  I wanted the book to assume a position.  I wanted that position to have the force of belief, and I wanted belief to matter.  These desires are my own, and they certainly do not describe a flaw in the study itself, which is otherwise entirely masterful.  Rather, I point to my desires here because I think that the ways in which they are unaccommodated by a work as otherwise successful as Camp Sites may say something about literary criticism more generally.  Such a careful, interdisciplinary, meta-analytical study can persuade, but it cannot make us believe.  The book extrapolates this fact as a historical problem, but, on its own terms, it necessarily can’t resolve that problem.
 
Ultimately, Camp Sites performs a sly and fascinating account of the ways that knowledge (in the form of paradigms, frameworks, analyses) and action (in the form of decisions, political aims) have very little immediate relation to one another.  One way to read Camp Sites is as a defense of thinking for understanding’s sake.  But what we do once we understand remains an open question—at least until the book’s final pages.
 
The epilogue departs from the book’s otherwise tight historical focus to take on queer theory as such, exemplified in work from the early 2000s by Jack Halberstam and José Muñoz.  Here, Camp Sites identifies queer theory’s commitment to antinormativity as another turn in the liberal university’s habituated rhythms.  In this conclusion, queer theory’s antinormative orientation becomes a style of intellectual engagement that, like all postwar forms of academic style, owes more to the institutional conditions of its production than to the individuals who exhibit it.  This point is not offered as a critique of queer theory, so much as a provocation: “In my view it would make queer work more rather than less interesting were we to admit that our favorite category, the antinormative, is most comfortable in the institution that houses us, even if we are reluctant to call it home” (229).  Like its ancestor the New Left, queer theory has perhaps never been as antinormative as it has thought itself to be.
 
The book’s connections between identity and behavior, thought and action, are forged by institutions much more than by people, though the people in question seem to occupy a position that, structurally, disenables them from seeing this.  Camp Sites calls for deeper, richer, more widespread, and more thoroughly canvassed analysis of the role of institutions as enabling conditions for intellectual thought, all the while paying equal attention to what we as intellectuals disavow and define ourselves against.  Few careful readers of Camp Sites will be left satisfied with the ways that academics of the past half-century have been shaping their inquires.