Thursday 24 September 2015

This song is about AtCS

From Eve Sedgwick's 2002 essay: "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: Or, You're so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You"

"[C]amp is most often understood as uniquely appropriate to the project of parody, denaturalization, demystification, and mocking exposure of the elements and assumptions of a dominant culture. And the degree to which camping is understood as motivated by love seems often to be understood mainly as the degree of its self-hating complicity with an oppressive status quo. By this account, the x-ray gaze of the paranoid impulse [to paraphrase bluntly, the colapse of criticality with a kind of self-victimising fatalism] in camp sees through to an unfleshed skeleton of the culture; the paranoid aesthetic on view here is one of minimalist elegance and conceptual economy.

The desire of a reparative impulse [ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French, from late Latin reparatio(n-), from reparare ‘make ready again’], on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer an inchoate self. To view camp as, among other things, the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance: the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition, for example; the passionate often halarious antiquarianism, the prodigal production of alternative historiographies; the 'over'-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products; the rich highly interruptive affective variety; the irrepresible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtiposition of present with past, and popular with high culture. As in the writing of D. A. Miller, a glue of surplus beauty, surplus stylistic investment, unexplained upwellings of threat, contempt, and longing cements together and animates the amalgam of powerful part objects [...]"

I have added the full text to an AtCS's google drive folder:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0ByfRFkOLaKOTZGF0Q29pdmszZGM

1 comment:

  1. Great reading. Is this a desire for a reparative reading of AtCs' work?

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