Shame and Modern Writing

Barry Sheils,Julie Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351657518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria moderna

Shame and Modern Writing seeks to uncover the presence of shame in and across a vast array of modern writing modalities. This interdisciplinary volume includes essays from distinguished and emergent scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and shorter practice-based reflections from poets and clinical writers. It serves as a timely reflection of shame as presented in modern writing, giving added attention to engagements on race, gender, and the question of new media representation.

1 Introduction

Shame and Modern Writing

Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh

It is not uncommon for the opening statement of a new academic work to impress upon the reader a self-consciousness concerning the legitimacy of its very existence; to call into question the terms of its own offering as if to outwit the shame of redundancy – of not being wanted, read or enjoyed. “Given the state of the field, who now needs a further book on X, Y or Z?” If such a sentiment is familiar, so too will be the conviction with which the book in question then answers itself: “it is precisely because of the present configuration of cultural, political or economic exigencies that the need for a book on X, Y or Z is most pressing.” With a prudent deployment of the chiasmus, the author has let us know that she is (already) all-knowing with respect to the prospect of her own exposure, a little like being both the emperor in his birthday suit and the bystander who calls him out on it. Might it be that such a play of modest self-effacement and barefaced self-advertisement has a special resonance for the production of writing from within the Academy? As the editors of this volume, we answer “yes.” Two of shame’s constituent components – knowing and seeing – are symptomatically heightened in a modern university system in which the operations of knowledge production and the directives of visibility – being seen to know – collide. But might it also be that, irrespective of institutional setting, the very act of writing – be it the private diary entry, the functional to-do list, or the crafted and much redrafted excerpt of literary prose – will inevitably leave on the page a residue or trace of shame? Again, our response would be affirmative. And to justify this double “yes” we must address with care the terms of our engagement, defending the contention that there is no such thing as a writing devoid of shame, but also allowing that shameful writing has different modes through which its histories and affective intensities interact.

This introduction provides an opportunity to argue for the intrinsic relation between shame and writing, while also reflecting on the pronounced tendency in the contemporary moment towards nominating “shame” as a phenomenon worthy of analysis. In other words, there are two interleaving concerns. The first seeks to identify shame in existing writing practices by acknowledging an economy of affective transfer between writer, reader and text, operating in excess of representation. At one level, this economy is manifested through the anecdotes of writerly subjectivity: reflective inhibition, intense frustration, the abjection of the body encountering an impossible task, useless feelings (common to poet and bureaucrat) when confronted with the empty page and the command to write. There are also the humiliations of finding oneself to have been already written; as well as the errors, missteps and solecisms that slip from the pen, there is the essential reduction of being metricized and forever more “on the record.” Yet, as we know from the years of “theory,” such ordinary anecdotes persist as textual figures, or deconstructive aporias inside every work we deem legible. And, once acknowledged, they testify to more than subjectivity, but to the linguistic act itself and the force of expulsion required by even the most impersonally scientific prose. What Jean-Jacques Lecercle nominates the “constitutive remainder” of language, the endless contamination of word and world, and the means by which writing consistently fails to be an autonomous structure of meaning, suggests an important point of apposition here: namely, that “[b]efore it is a practice, language is a body – a body of sounds.” Thus the violence of language, Lecercle emphasizes, “is to be taken at its most literal, as body penetrating body.”¹ The sound of writing, then, beyond the tip tap of the keyboard or the scratch of the pen, is the sound of a body entering into relation with other bodies, where the risk of shame is ubiquitous.²

Our second concern is with the descriptive purchase of the word shame today when thinking about the fact and force of writing-as-exteriorization. There is little doubt that over the last three decades shame has been enjoying a period of discursive prominence, both within the institution of the university as the subject of academic writing, and in culture more broadly as a theme deserving of serious attention. It is not difficult to suggest several reasons why this might have become the case. (1) The ongoing transformation of the public sphere and the rise of so-called identity politics, which have been cast in fresh light by the internet and new media forums.³ The public space and the people who occupy it have further fragmented, it seems, not simply into political, but also ontological segregations, with online persona granted a means of addressing themselves beyond any intended, or even recognizable, audience. Such an unprecedented circulation of opinion has undoubtedly made it more difficult within the “world” of Twitter, Facebook, WikiLeaks, etc. to define lines of trespass. Indeed, it can hardly be ignored that we are writing this book in the age of President Trump whose media presence relies on emotional hyperbole and ad hominem attacks and is at the same time surrealistically imprecise (e.g. “you are fake news”⁴). It is this imprecision, virtually obscuring an adjudicated object of interest, which induces in his opponents feelings of shortcoming before the task of formulating a proportional response – a response that will be adequately seen or heard – as well as the shameful temptation to shout-over or to simply disavow and close down all future attempts at engagement. In this way, our understanding of the historical moment converges with reflection upon the vicissitudes of our affective lives. (2) Theorizing within the biopolitical paradigm, broadly conceived according to Michel Foucault’s designation of a shift from the politics of territorial sovereignty to the government of populations.⁵ Though the modern globalizing university is itself an agent of ‘governance,’ there have been, within its frame, specifically through studies of sex, sexuality, race and colonialism, attempts to confront the shame of the institution. To frame biopolitical ordinances is to make conspicuous that shameful line between those bodies given the opportunities of formation and those rendered disposable through organized processes of representation. (3) The emergence of the Environmental Humanities. “Species shame” may yet be regarded skeptically as a specifically Western pathology, or even as a displaced Malthusian anxiety concerning overpopulation, but the hypothesized advent of a new geological epoch wherein the effects of human culture are said to have irremediably altered the planet’s ecosystems marks an important paradox of university discourse. As an epoch commonly dated to the first Atomic bomb in 1945, itself a result of the Manhattan Project’s hypertrophic research practices, what is now sometimes called the Anthropocene provides a good example of the university turning upon the shame of its own history. (4) The turn to affect. Though canonized in anthologies such as The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007) and The Affect Theory Reader (2010), affect remains a difficult term to delineate, sometimes associated with the materialism of modern brain science, and sometimes with the reputed demise of poststructuralism.⁶ Affect is often distinguished from emotion,⁷ and in the most general terms used to signal investments in prelinguistic embodiment, generative intensity and the inassimilable relations of becoming (see, for example, Patricia Clough, Brian Massumi, and, always standing in the background, the work of Gilles Deleuze).⁸ In the most optimistic readings, affect offers us a radical contrast to theories of emotion that conservatively bind us to an already coded world of objects. For Silvan Tomkins, the mid-twentieth-century psychologist whose work, introduced by Adam Frank and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, has proven so influential in this field, shame/humiliation takes its place as one of nine basic affects.⁹ Importantly, within this psychobiological paradigm, shame is not determined by particular scenes: although a certain scene might be “culturally scripted” to direct and contain our shame – say, a child being beaten by an adult – we cannot say of it that is it necessarily shameful.¹⁰ This is because the intensity of an affect remains independent of (autonomous from) the object it attaches to.¹¹ As we shall see throughout this volume, shame has most often come to occupy a space between affect and discourse: on the one hand pointing towards the auto-affective capacities of embodiment, and on the other to the reflexive component of being ashamed (the shame of shame, or shame’s impropriety), which involves the suspicion that we are feeling someone else’s shame, or, indeed, that our felt shame disregards, affectively short-circuits, the attempt to understand its historical conditions.

If academic writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences has conventionally been granted a critical function, and more lately a melancholic cast of mind (consider the influence of Judith Butler’s work), then perhaps, with the fourfold tendency towards shame just outlined, it has become, at last, a truly confessional mode. Certainly we can say of recent works (especially by those working within anti-colonial and queer paradigms) that there is an increased recognition of the embodied relations that stand at the heart of our knowledge economies, which has consequences for our understanding of academic writing conventions. Whether it is Jacques Derrida standing wet and naked before his cat, Elspeth Probyn receiving an email from an angry, humiliated colleague, or Sedgwick facing the empty space where the Twin Towers once stood, the shame idiom has come to involve the interpenetration of personal anecdote with theory.¹² Dodie Bellamy (whose life writing is discussed further by Kaye Mitchell in this volume) writes of how oppressive she finds the impersonality of academic essays: “how exciting – and important – [it is] to undermine the patriarchal hegemony that created the MLA Style Sheet.” Or, as she puts it more succinctly a page later: “what the fuck I wanted to do was to shit on academic pretension.”¹³ Inevitably, such confessions are as narcissistic as they are honest: as invested in the affective capacities of being an embodied self as in the admission of particular historical transgressions. In this context, the noticeable move away from the term guilt towards shame in university writing (a longer-term trend discussed further below) stands alongside the ubiquity of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), a novel whose protagonist David Lurie is a Communications Professor (erstwhile Comparative Literature Professor) transgressing the terms of his office by sexually accosting a student.¹⁴ Lurie’s adamant refusal to display his shame in the University’s Committee of Inquiry, which he deems an improper and performative extrapolation from the rationalization of his admitted guilt, haunts the rest of the novel. Having initially dismissed as unnecessary his personal humiliation before others, by the end of the book, once associated to a series of violent humiliations in the South African countryside, including the rape of his daughter by local men (or boys) and the hopeless labor of euthanizing unwanted dogs, Lurie comes to embody the very necessity of shame. Disgrace is a novel in which the university discourse can be no more separated from the decolonizing politics of South Africa than the exchangeable abstractions of the law can be separated from the shameful entanglements of non-exchangeable bodies contesting space.

With this chastening coordinate in mind, we introduce the essays in this volume – all originated from the American and European university systems. While it is clear that this work, like any other, can be read for what it omits, we aim to draw together two facets of shame through the question of literary and academic writing. First, the general shame produced by all writing: that of being superfluous, of exposing more than it seems necessary to expose. And second, the historical situations which force us to read shame’s general auto-affective character in more specifically political ways. After giving further thought to the general dynamics of shame – its pathology, tense, and questionable, though mythopoeic, universality – we shall consider three particularizing histories which underlie, we suggest, the constituency of modern writing: the shame of the anthropological gaze, the shame of bearing witness to historical catastrophes, specifically the Holocaust, and the shame of acknowledging the structural violence of colonization.

Shame, Writing, Action

We can begin, then, by considering the grammar of shame. The first and quite obvious observation to note is that shame can be deployed as a noun and as a verb.¹⁵ And yet it is rare that we encounter the abstract noun “shame” without at least the implication of action, and of movement. If I am paralyzed by shame, trapped within the confines of my own self, it is probably because I have been caught out. While it is me who feels exposed, trapped in my body, it is also always my body entered into a relation with other bodies – I am ashamed when I find myself delineated or differentiated by being out of place. As Liz Constable reminds us, there is a sense in which shame cannot be said to ‘belong’ to anybody, despit...