Sontag's Notes on Camp As Applied to January 6
I’ve been sitting on this blog post for a while. I started drafting in February and ran it past an American friend. She said, “You’re not wrong, but too soon”. I put it away, but the idea sighed impatiently in the back of my mind. Why was the insurrection a little bit funny?
Before I get into the substance of the thing, I want to first acknowledge that the insurrection was a real, violent and terrifying event with violent dreams and violent ends. Protestors brought bombs and nooses and it was clear that their intention was to do harm. I do not want to minimise this. The footage aired at Trump’s unsuccessful impeachment trial was undoubtedly terrifying and provided a glimpse into the event that was otherwise sparsely documented by news media.
However, what I am interested in, is why, in the immediate aftermath, it was also a little bit funny. The first joke I saved was the one below. Ostensibly, the rioter is protesting the ‘stolen’ election in Georgia the state, not Georgia the country. The tweet says, without saying, these people are so detached from reality, so uneducated and mindless that they can’t tell the difference. I laughed. I saved the image, I moved on. But why was it funny, what was giving rising to the humour? Where was it located, culturally? Why was a violent and misguided attempted insurrection funny?
Jokes highlighting the ridiculous and surreal aspects of the insurrection followed quickly, if not immediately in its footsteps. Part of the reason for this may be that its documentation was unusually one dimensional; by this I mean that very little media captured the insurrection from the perspective of those inside the Capitol, congressional members and staffers who blockaded doors and fled. Broadly, photos showed costumed rioters aimlessly wandering around the House chamber, or engaging in ceremonial and ultimately pointless conduct, like sitting in the speaker’s chair.
At times the live coverage seemed to poke fun at this, with the New York Times’ live blog drily remarking, “The Capitol seems to be under the control of a man in a viking hat”.
Early reporting from inside the riot also seemed to reinforce the tone of dry amusement. For Slate, Aymann Ismail wrote,
“The mood was giddy, but it was chaos. Everyone was excited. People were chanting, “This is our America,” and “Whose house? Our house!” They were having fun, entertaining themselves. The priority seemed to be to have their friends take selfies with them inside the Capitol.”
In this vein, other photos showed a rioter cheerfully waving at the camera while he makes off with a speaker’s podium. He was quickly identified, arrested and charged. When his lawyer was asked about the photo of him participating in looting during the riot, he replied, "I don't know how else to explain that, but yeah, that would be a problem, I'm not a magician..."
Another protestor was later tracked and arrested through his work ID badge which he was photographed wearing in the Capitol building.
Other protestors documented themselves on social media, by live-streaming the entry into the building and posting photos and videos of themselves inside. In response, this behaviour was widely met with mockery and derision. As Vox explains,
“In short, those who stormed the Capitol didn’t leave social media breadcrumbs for law enforcement to follow to their front doors — they left entire loaves of bread.”
Other participants in the January 6 insurrection were also caught bragging about their participation on Bumble, a dating app similar to Tinder. As per NPR reporting,
Court filings say that exactly one week after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Robert Chapman, 50, told another Bumble user, "I did storm the capitol," adding, "I made it all the way into Statuary Hall." The unnamed individual was evidently not impressed.
"We are not a match," the person wrote, to which he replied, "I suppose not.”
This was not the only such incident. ABC America reported that dating app users were purposely using the services to catfish for Capitol rioters. This typically involved changing the political preferences in their dating profile to ‘conservative’ to “to catch users who boasted about participating in the riot and report them.” Successful catfish then passed this information on to the FBI. How stupid these rioters were, how silly.
The icing on the cake of these various missteps was the subsequent blacklisting of rioters on the No-Fly list. A viral video shows a white man crying in the airport, after being denied boarding due to his non-compliance with face-mask policies. However, the content of the videos suggests that he was also part of the January 6 riots, and as he appears to link the airline’s refusal to let him fly to his participation in the January 6 events. Other similar incidents were also documented and widely shared on social media.
So why the round-up? I think these incidents highlight where the humour was during and after the January 6 riots. But why is it funny? I suggest that we can understand the initial humour in response to January 6 through Susan Sontag’s notes on camp. Now, we may understand the term ‘camp’ a little differently now, but Sontag argued that camp exists in the camp between the intention of the work of art, versus how it is actually realised. Camp, then, is the enjoyable dissonance between these two states – intention and realisation. The bigger the gap between the lofty ideal, and the actual housing of these ideals, the funnier it becomes. Not only is it funny, but it’s also quite pleasurable to observe. To be clear, I don’t think camp is the gap between trying and failing, but rather we can see in camp someone attempting something (for example an insurrection) and it not turning out so well. When the attempt goes wrong, we are able to observe the intention, the intention to be great (in and of itself), rather than an interest in the thing that should be, or is claimed to be driving the action (for example, justice).
Initially, the humour of the Capitol riots came in the gap between the intention of the event and the housing of it. The January 6 rioters wanted to take over the government but seemed incredibly confused about what to do when they got inside. They took selfies, and videos, and smoked weed and played music. They seemed incapable of doing what they came to do, they weren’t even smart enough to keep their work IDs at home.
While Sontag’s concept of camp can help us explain why an insurrection is funny – it also highlights how camp can be a cover for more serious ends.
Yes, many of the rioters were inept and aimless, in the mob for the excitement, the adventure, the day out and the sense of being a part of something – what that something was shifted and changed depending on the person. Behind this campy mismatch, more serious figures searched for politicians, wearing tactical gear and carrying zip ties. A noose hung in the public space outside of the capitol. At first, these figures in tactical gear were also figures of mirth, they were making it too seriously, just another extension of the cos-play like atmosphere that pervaded the day - strange people, wearing strange things.
However, in the weeks that followed it became clear how close to the heart of US politics had come to disaster.
It is easy to make fun of QAnon folks and their conspiracy-minded compatriots who came to the Capitol that day. It was distracting, it was soothing and diverted us for a few moments from how this wasn’t funny at all, not one little bit.