“A sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about.” So begins Sontag’s Notes on “Camp” in the 1964 Partisan Review. And what of the political anger and disillusionment across the United States and in the developed world? What of the gnawing desire towards superiority and control that accompanies authoritarian urges? What of the fear of loss of power to minority ethnic and religious groups? These may be the most discussed sociopolitical aspects of our modern political sensibility since Trump’s election in 2016 when a bitter, vindictive, hostile, crude, fat thug briefly took the reigns of America, then pushed and conspired to oppose the election of his successor.
What attracted his followers to him? I never encountered a George W. Bush fanatic during his presidency. Though not physically small, he talked about “compassionate conservatism” with a voice that hung in the upper register of middle pitches for men. He was neither sonorous nor mean. His eyebrows often had a look of surprise and self-doubt that was hinted at in claims he was a very reluctant candidate for president. I met people who voted for him but they seemed to accept him as an acceptable alternative to Gore or, later, to Kerry—not as a figure of passionate intrigue. Bush Jr. did receive a rally-around-the-flag effect that was based on circumstances that would later bring rebuke over the casus belli of the Iraq War. Similar sensibilities were true of the Obama years—there was a low positivity for him on the Left combined with a mildly deranged antagonism towards him on the Right.
Was the lack of Trump-like animating fanaticism due to the feeling that Bush Jr. was a compromise made to the electorate while Trump was, finally, a man who expressed the real hostility of those who vote Republican? There were hints of that in the spats of rightwing and Christian violence during the 90s, from Oklahoma City to the Olympic bombing of 1996–an undertow of strong feelings that were motivated by a righteous opposition to the norms of the political process. The resurgence of Christian Dominionist ideas, even as religiosity diminishes, has led to the speculation that the anger arises from fear of loss of influence and power.
The Vietnam era had also been wracked by spasms of domestic terrorism and unrest driven by ideals characterized as left-leaning (while the right was still stewing over civil rights and increasingly assertive women in labor forces). As the millennium approached the FBI identified animal rights and environmental activists as the heart of anger shortly before 9/11 pulled our sensibilities into a new orbit of fear and antagonism towards Muslims, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Like Sontag on camp, I think the current anger matrix is largely a sensibility, taste, or feeling that is exclusively subjective in nature. People have preferences that they largely don’t interrogate but instead rely on small communities to reinforce. Their preferences are driven by a range of stances that are ginned up out of selective signals. They gain a sense of belonging by hewing to them, and those who fashion themselves as leaders gain popularity and attention by fanning the flames of passion.
But if this is the case we first need to establish that there is nothing factual that people can use to ground these sensibilities. The alternative to this is admitting to an undercurrent of corruption that animates everything in our social, economic, and political lives. The playwright David Mamet recently remarked that he grew up in Chicago at a time when politics was corrupt and therefore he just assumes all politics are corrupt. Trump is his man because he seems transparently corrupt. So the sensibility can be also be ingrained by some historical fact that has unknown correlation to contemporary developments.
The recent refrain to “drain the swamp” seems to refer to a range of concepts in politics. Nancy Pelosi used the term to refer to members of congress who become lobbyists after leaving office. Lobbyists are suspected of distorting the will of the people through rewarding and threatening politicians with respect to their livelihoods and re-election possibilities. Trump used it in a variety of ways, however, along with “deep state” to suggest an unelected bureaucracy that was interfering with and harassing people. This ranged from clear examples of challenges to traditionally conservative ideas like private property rights when the federal government prohibits changing or polluting waterways, to more allusive feelings about prosecutions being politically motivated on election law and other subtleties. Everything is political and every judge, government bureaucrat, or even general is a political animal. Those with moderate political instincts are even more suspicious than the partisan hacks because the moderate’s motives are inscrutable. Only when clearly entrenched with a creed is one trustable and, even then, that trust may dissolve into conspiratorial infighting at any moment.
One compelling area of political anger is over the US economy. Put simply, presidents have little impact on the economy. It’s a well-known fact that the best economies have been during Democratic presidencies, for instance, despite the fearmongering that is routinely used to disparage the economic policies of Democratic candidates. But the reason this is true is that there is simply very little that presidents can do to change the direction and pace of economic development. The Federal Reserve has some tools at its disposal, as we know from current efforts to fight inflation, but the president can just do a few tricks like briefly releasing oil from US strategic reserves to try to increase supply in the oil markets. Other measures require Congress in the loop and have typically modest effects on short-term economic performance (with the exception of the stimulative effects of cash rebates, perhaps, as shown in the COVID era). In other words, Democratic presidents just lucked out.
Sontag considered sensibilities as a kind of taste or subjective preference. She didn’t have the language of contemporary linguistics or social science at her disposal in trying to build a description of the sensibilities of camp, but we can now refer to pragmatic considerations and, especially, the ideas of framing as a component of what a sensibility really is. It is a collection of observations and images that fit into certain relations to one another and often have a few curated ideas or images that serve to define a concept, and draw distinctions of it with other ideas. So a concept like “liberty” gets framed by Second Amendment rights to guns, as well as freedom to express oneself on social media sites, and gas-guzzling trucks. That becomes the frame and any intrusion within that illustrative structure is used to distinguish opposition and label others as enemies. I think that a sensibility is slightly more than that, however. The sensibility is the growing and changing mental model that contains frames and is subject to modification by frames. It contains beliefs, attitudes, and inchoate or murky perspectives on a range of topics that are held as moral feelings and aesthetic preferences.
Sontag used an interesting approach to try to define the sensibility and tastes of camp, which is why her essay remains important despite the aging out of its many references. She used illustrative physical things like Tiffany lamps and Flash Gordon comics. She used attitudes about artifice and artificiality. She used theatricality, extravagance, and abstractions about gender, dress, and sexuality. She used witty quotes from the wittiest: “Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.” All of these partial frames connected together to complete the architecture of her notion of camp as a sensibility.
There is a technical distinction between the social science and linguistic concepts of framing that should be noted, however. In framing theory built around Fillmore’s ideas that semantics and syntax are joined together by a lexical frame, the frame serves as a technical unit for language understanding. For instance, we can create a frame around the idea of breaking an object for the sentence, “Marcy broke the lamp,” that includes the semantics of damaging an object with the grammatical roles of subject, verb, and object. This frame may also apply to other metaphorical uses of broke or breaking in, for instance, “They broke up.” In this case the frames are mapped together to reuse the semantics of broke for another application. Curiously, frames often do not map exhaustively, but are language-specific and culturally limited. So, “a bright mind” maps to “a bright light” but “a sunny mind” is rarely used and might convey something different to English users if written (a positive attitude, for instance, rather than just intelligent or inquisitive, due perhaps to the parallel expression, “a sunny disposition”).
Frames and “scripts” show up in what is today referred to as Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI). In this conception, a frame or script covers some activity like going to a restaurant. You are admitted, shown to a table, given menus, provided water, review choices, and so forth, in a scripted fashion that frames the event. In GOFAI this was conceived as one way for imparting everyday understanding to machines.
Both the linguistic conception of frames and metaphors as well as the extension to machine intelligence relate to the communications science concept of framing issues and attitudes. There are representations in the head of the person—the sensibility—about ideas, attitudes, or Sontag’s artistic culture.
What has more recently changed in this environment of rapid exchange of information, I believe, is that these sensibilities and frames are no longer primarily driven by elites. That is, with the internet and social media as influencers the framing is up for grabs. More, the framing effects and the interaction with sensibilities are now in many, sometimes automated, feedback loops.
This feedback structure has been proposed by communications researchers. Most recently by Entman and Usher in considering pump-valves in the sense that media and frame distribution and reorganization can both pump messaging as well as valve it (reduce its impact). This is perhaps the most interesting new way of looking at the impacts of modern media. The researchers identify platforms, analytics, algorithms, ideological media, and rogue actors (bots, hackers, etc.) as playing parts in this ecosystem. The feedback cycles are now enlarged. Where once there was extensive reliance on polling to drive talking points, now analytics coordinate through provisioning algorithms to amplify content that has high consumer interest. This often means extreme perspectives that would have been unlikely to gain traction when the framing was performed exclusively by elites. There may be several reasons for that. For one, the media channels are more narrow, largely free, and the framing no longer has to make optimal use of the available bandwidth and minimize alienating parts of the target population. They can all receive targeted messaging without softening any of the messages.
The result is an artificial enhancement of narrow fulfillment of frames that people find stimulating. There is an under-investigated assumption in many of the criticisms of the impact of these algorithms and how they decide on content. Did people really consume more varied content before the algorithms or did the growth of the platforms lead them to gather more content?
Perhaps reflecting the positive findings of McClosky and Brill reported in Chong and Druckman’s Framing Theory, the public debate over the roles of these social media systems and their impacts reflects positively on the public engagement with ideas about free expression. Whether on the left or right, there are fears that somehow social media systems are damaging, censoring, or allowing dangerous misinformation to be amplified in the public sphere. The question of how and why to regulate such technologies might be seen as a positive disposition towards public engagement that improves the structure of our sensibilities. This reflects a normative undercurrent that liberal democracy is enhanced by better informed and more engaged voters. But the converse impact was suggested as early as the 1950s:
Back in the 1950s, when survey research found citizens to be apathetic about politics, one response was that perhaps this state of affairs was not so undesirable. Because democracy requires compromise and the building of coalitions, it was suggested that the actual portrait of the electorate is perhaps a better underpinning for a stable democratic system than a hypothetical ideal electorate of highly interested, politically active citizens. High interest, it was predicted, would lead to constant factional disputes and little collective reconciliation on important issues. This is a problem of having too many strong opinions as opposed to too few.
The sensibility of anger is predictably destabilizing. It is a desire for change to restructure existing power structures and establish new ways of socio-economic engagement. The question, though, is why now and why with so little content to justify the anger? An important line of investigation is continued empirical work to understand better how these feedback loops of pumps and valves work to narrowcast destructive falsehoods to a receptive sensibility.
I disagree that a sensibility is hard to talk about, per se, though Sontag executed her study with fluidity. Erudite and witty, we feel admitted to a secret club where we banter with the brightest, most sardonic, lights. It was certainly novel to approach a concept like camp or campiness in Sontag’s era, but it paralleled a range of ideas in architecture, and in modernism in art and music. In our modern times, though, the sensibility of anger is absurdity without nuance. Camp was never boorish. It may not have been one’s favorite tea, but even at its silliest it was just inoffensively puerile. But the thuggery of Trumpy conspirators that continues to this day is simply lardy offal, and the frames of bizarre fears and retrograde schlock that girds the movement is rarely playful, or light, or clever. It is a sensibility of a brute contrarian with a framework of lies.
And that is why it is painful to talk about this modern, political sensibility.