Towards a Camp Politics

Peter Mandelson has been in the news a lot recently. He was just, you know, running the country a little bit. Until now I haven't had much affection for, nor interest in, Mandelson, what with his corruption and his fondness for appalling capitalists, but the last five days have revealed a surprisingly interesting and appealing character. The interest, it's true, has been generated more by reactions to Mandelson than by anything the Secretary of State actually did. First of all there was Decca Aitkenhead's (revoltingly brown-nosing, some might say) interview with him in the Guardian on Monday, in which he made several illuminating comments along these lines:

I've learned from experience that you can defeat people without killing them.



I noted with amusement that Mandelson had developed (or begun to demonstrate publicly - apparently he's always been like this behind closed doors) a fascinatingly ironic Machiavellian waspishness. In fact, an outrageous campness. Unsurprisingly, this really got up people's noses. Even supposedly sympathetic commentators such as Charlotte Raven were saying thing like this:

[Mandelson's] actions – in keeping with the flamboyance of his new political persona – have tended towards excess. Mandelson in his current incarnation is to politics as Strictly Come Dancing is to ballroom dancing. He has given it glamour and Saturday night appeal... Peter's revelation of its intrinsic campness has made politics look appealing and accessible to a nation of people who prefer appearing to do something beautifully than actually doing it at all. Mistrustful of effort and people who seem to be trying, we would rather this... Glorying in appearances, Mandelson has turned politics into a production.

This buys into the conventional equation of 'camp' with insubstantiality, with 'appearing to do something beautifully [rather] than actually doing it at all.' In fact it's part of a tradition of camp's interpretation by supposedly affectionate observers which began with Susan Sontag's 'Notes on Camp' of 1964. Sontag, who never came out as a lesbian, asserts that

the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural... It incarnates a victory of "style" over "content," "aesthetics" over "morality"

The word 'unnatural' is a sort of code word for the 'unnatural' act of sodomy. In fact Sontag makes the association of camp with homosexuality unabashedly clear, and pretends to celebrate 'homosexual culture' (camp). But in the guise of writing an affectionate analysis she sticks the knife in and twists:

every sensibility is self-serving to the group that promotes it... So is Camp taste, which definitely has something propagandistic about it... Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation

And by implication, neutralizes morality. So 'camp,' and by extension homosexuals, are superficial, insincere, immoral, and unnatural. And 'it goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least apolitical.' Er, thanks, Susan, but with friends like you...

The application of the term 'camp' to Mandelson is loaded with these suggestions of style over substance, aesthetics over morality, disengagement. But in fact Mandelson could hardly be accused of ineffectuality. And the search for morality or substantiality in politicians is, frankly, idiotic. Politicians don't need to be saintly, nor 'substantial' (whatever that means). They need to be good at politics, at getting people to do what they want (without killing them), at running the country. Mandelson is certainly expert when it comes to the first two, unlike Brown and the rest of the cabinet: we will probably never find out (no matter what all the right wing pundits and supposedly liberal sneerers say) about the last. Just beware of people who seek authenticity in politics. Helmut Plessner warned in his 1924 book The Limits of Community:

The community [which] understands itself to include emotional values of the highest degree... bespeaks the violence of an immediately vital and ultimate unveiling.[...] The emotional connection to all arises... from the consciousness that there must not be any secrets withheld from each other at all.

Plessner then asks:

Should and may a human being... make the value of sincerity exclusively into a guiding principle?... Is there not value in indirectness?

Indirectness and inauthenticity permit distance, individual freedom, dignity. Enforced immediacy, on the other hand, presents a nightmare vision of a country run by the kind of people who appear on the Jeremy Kyle show. Oh, wait a bit....