Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores possibilities of unwriting the triviality barrier by examining the negativity bias to ‘seriousness’ in the academic humanities before turning to the ambivalence of digital culture to consider Camp as a tool that may extend to offline contexts for analyzing affect and joy.

Contribution long abstract:

While folklorists have long understood what Brian Sutton-Smith named the “triviality barrier” facing our discipline, scholarship in conversation with this limit tends to focus on it as something to overcome by demonstrating some underlying nontriviality in our work. We know our work is not trivial, so this paper explores the possibilities of, instead of continually rewriting the importance of our work, unwriting the broader notions of triviality that have erected this barrier in the first place.

As an ongoing consequence of early academic adherence to objectivity as elision of self, scholarship is valued in relation to its perceived ‘seriousness,’ a quality to which joy and affectivity are made anathema (a consequence of the extant structures of power to which humanity is anathema). And yet, drawing on negativity bias, a bias widely attested in psychological research, ‘seriousness’ in the humanities may be inherently affective in its tendency towards the dark, depressing, and damning underlying its subject matter and/or conclusions. Although a truly apathetic ‘seriousness’ lacks emotional data, a ‘seriousness’ that centers analytical negativity overlooks critical swathes of emotional data.

By way of example, this paper turns to digital folklore and its ambivalence to consider both the importance of affect and tools for analyzing it. Where joy and humour are as pervasive as, and often coterminous with, hatred and vitriol, affect is central to communication, and ambiguity abounds, concepts like Camp and its ‘serious unseriousness’ may support a critical framework to begin to counter our institutional aversions to joy.