Shame, Temporality and Social Change

Ominous Transitions

Ladson Hinton, Hessel Willemsen, Ladson Hinton, Hessel Willemsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367549053
• eBook ISBN: 9781000347036
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

Winner of the Internationl Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS) Book Award for Best Edited Book 2021

There is a broad consensus that we are in a time of profound transition. There is worldwide political and social turbulence, with an underlying loss of hope and confidence about the future. Technological change and the stresses of late-stage capitalism, along with climate change, undermine social trust and hope for a future worth living. Shameless behavior is rampant, undermining respect for habits and institutions that hold societies together. Shame, Temporality and Social Change offers multi-disciplinary insight into these concerns.

Hinton and Willemsen's collection covers themes including racism, cultural norms, memory and vulnerability, with examinations of shame at its core. It explores the meaning and significance of shame in a world of social media, autocratic leaders and algorithms and what we can learn from myth as we progress. Increased awareness of the inter-connection of shame and temporality with the ominous transitions of our times provides thought-provoking insights for theory and practice and the ethical decisions of everyday life.

Psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers, anthropologists and academics and students engaged in cultural studies and critical theory will gain valuable insights from this book's rich and engaging variety of perspectives on our times.

Chapter 1

Man and machine

Dilemmas of the human¹

Ladson Hinton

Prelude

This chapter is composed as a reflection that unfolds, its dimensions revealed in the process of reading. Layers of thought and memory, of present, past and future, unfold as life experience, as a texture, not in a linear and machine-like fashion.

The central focus is a random happening on the streets of Seattle that disrupted the flow of the everyday, the familiar, and opened multiple dimensions of thought and imagination, leading from immediate impacts and impressions to a reflection on the nature of the human, the vicissitudes of capitalism, and the sad history of chattel slavery and its haunting aura.

The epilogue is a brief reflection on the appearance of the coronavirus.

The encounter²

One afternoon I went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, and when I emerged from the store, there was tension in the air. Cars were lined up in all directions. There was an African American man at the center of the nearby intersection, loudly and energetically singing gospel songs. His performance was stopping the traffic. His voice was loud and clear, and he threw his head back to give full-throated expression to his songs.

The drivers were confused, some clearly angry and impatient, honking at times, and others looked puzzled or curious. Clumps of people along the sidewalks were attentively watching the scene, and it quickly engaged my full attention. What was going on?

My Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle is at the edge of the urban core of Seattle, and 15th Street is filled with shops, restaurants, and coffee houses. To the south is a region of apartment houses and small dwellings, as well as halfway houses, whereas to the north is an upscale area of larger family dwellings. It is a varied neighborhood of the modestly affluent and the affluent, and many residents are connected with technology industries. The area is mainly white but with a broad smattering of people from varied racial and ethnic backgrounds. The atmosphere is moderately avant-garde.

The presence of psychotic or ‘disturbed’ people on the street is not at all rare in the neighborhood, but this man did not have an air of fragmenting anxiety or explosiveness. He felt present to me and connected to the surround.³ There wasn’t a hostile edge in his voice or manner, and his presence felt almost welcoming. I intended to cross the street to have a cup of coffee, and as I approached the intersection, I could see that he was nicely dressed, as if prepared for a performance. He was average height and build and was well-trimmed.

The man suddenly stopped singing, left the middle of the street, and walked to the street corner that I was approaching. His demeanor had become quiet and contained, and it felt as if he were leaving a stage, like a performer who had done his job. The traffic quickly began to move normally, settling back into its constant, synchronous pace.⁴

People faded back on the street corner as the man approached. I hesitated for a moment, unsure of what might then emerge, but shrugged it off and proceeded to the crossing to wait for the light alongside him. The now-contained world of stoplights, pedestrians, traffic, and crosswalks was reassembling itself. In a moment I was there beside him.

The man was half a head shorter than me, and as I came closer, I could see that he now looked depleted, emptied of energy and slightly anxious, his posture a bit slumped as he gazed downward. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, with a quick look of appraisal and a glimmer of fearful uncertainty, subtly cringing, probably feeling the gaze of an affluent white man.⁵

His songs and his proud, expressive voice were still alive in my mind, and I felt an urge to respond to him, something beyond good manners or protocol, perhaps like the call-and-response mode of gospel (Williams-Jones, 1975, p. 375). Feeling friendly, I looked at him directly and said, “You have a pretty good voice!” His visage changed abruptly, and his face suddenly looked almost joyful. Our eyes met, and I felt a momentary mutuality, a respect, a reciprocity. He shed the hint of cringe, the trace of shame at his visible performance (Jay, 1994, p. 311). The crossing light changed, and he gave me a quick nod, straightened his posture with a renewed air of pride, looked me in the eye, and said in a clear voice, “Thank you, brother! Thank you, brother!”

I was subtly but profoundly moved by this special moment of meeting. He and I crossed the street together, then he turned and proceeded quietly down the sidewalk, returning to his own workaday world, apparently satisfied that his more special work was completed for now. I went into the corner coffee shop and reflected on this incident that had disrupted my intimate territory. The experience has lingered in my mind ever since, provoking many dimensions of reflection.

On my immediate level of thought, I was struck how the event highlighted the presence of affluence, technology, and race in my intimate space, a space that I, for the most part, took for granted. However, in such territory, the boundary of ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ can always shift, in ways that are not clear, fostering an undercurrent of the uncanny.⁶ Disruptive and yet exciting, such openings can lend a sense of uncertainty as well as possibility to life.

At yet another level, one could also see the implicit presence of race and slavery as the shadow of capital accumulation, along with technology and the temporal landscapes and enclaves associated with it. The man, with his song, was disruptive, even haunting, to the comfortable surroundings on the 15th. There was also a hint of something different, an openness to new life. The presence of the man and his song, as well as the contrasting levels of experience that he invoked, provoked my mind into a whirl of reflection.

My perspective

This experience has percolated in my mind for several months now. It was dreamlike in a way, but to call it dreamlike would diminish it, not quite honoring its stark realness. My memories are probably different, perhaps quite different, from the experiences of others on the scene. I mused to myself, “Were those really gospel songs the man was singing? How exactly was he dressed?” The memory has its shifting shades of real and less real, but the core remains absolutely clear and influences my sense of those surroundings and my strong take on events. In 2020, a black man stood in that intersection near my house, singing gospel songs in an engaging fashion, not apparently angry or psychotic, and for a short period of time totally stopped the flow of traffic in my familiar world.

We tend to take our intimate surroundings for granted, but it is the everyday ‘grammar’ of our lives.⁷ The unspoken surround of past history is always with us (Slaby, 2020, p. 174). When we are surprised by disruptions of the synchronous, customary flow of everyday life, we often slow down or stop and become more aware how much we are woven, unconsciously entwined in a deep-woven network of history and culture. Disruptions of the everyday and customary can open up diachronic time, revealing hints of imaginative, creative threads that we usually overlook because they are inauspicious, unapparent, hidden in the flow of everyday consciousness (Alvis, 2018, pp. 211–238).

My experience on 15th Street was a prime example. What had caught my eye most immediately at that time, when I first left the pharmacy and engaged the outside world, was the locked parade of automobiles stretching in four directions. The machines seemed to exude a pent-up energy and growling impatience, and their drivers peered out, some honking impatiently, others looking puzzled or angry.⁸ When I spotted the man singing gospel was the fulcrum of the action, performing loudly in the middle of the intersection, it indeed felt like a fundamental encounter of man and machine – ‘machine’ with all its implications – in the midst of my everyday world (see note 1).

The everyday world has interconnections with the whole of human history, if you can let them surface in your mind. It is always there. ‘Details’ are not isolated facts but rest upon pulsating human life over millions of years. Without such a vast temporal perspective, human beings become creatures of the moment, lacking any anchor in the vast flow of time and lacking the sense of debt to the endless generations of ancestors who enable us to be (Bloch, 2008, pp. 2055–2061). To broaden that perspective, and its connection to the basic scene in the street, I will explore some deep background perspectives in myth, paleoanthropology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. These perspectives will highlight my experience on 15th Street, illustrating the ongoing, everyday presence of multiple dimensions of human history, from evolution to slavery and racism, capitalism, and technology.

A story about origins

Such a moving encounter evokes profound questions about the nature of the human, including the origin of our species. We seek insight about what is always already there in our human world. Using a genealogical⁹ approach, Bernard Stiegler often refers to the myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus to lend perspective for understanding human evolution and especially the meaning and use of tools (Stiegler, 1998, pp. 187–188).

This is a creation story that begins with the making of creatures to populate the new world. Before that there were only gods and no mortal creatures. The gods delegated an important task to two brothers, Epimetheus and Prometheus, who were also gods. They were to allocate special powers of survival to each new species to compensate for any deficiencies in their makeup. For instance, rabbits would be given speed to compensate for their lack of strength to fight. Epimetheus persuaded his brother to allow him to carry out the distribution of the special attributes. However, he was not a good planner and had a poor memory. By the time he got to the human race, he had used up all the compensatory powers. On the day they were to emerge into the new world, Prometheus came to inspect the results, and he found humankind naked, barefooted, and defenseless. Fearing for the survival of the human race, he stole the gifts of art and invention, along with fire, from Hephaestus and Athena, and gave them to the human species to compensate for their weakness.

From that time, therefore, humankind had a share of the powers of the gods and erected altars and created images to honor them. Soon, using their gifts, humans discovered words and speech, invented houses and clothes, and shoes and bedding, and grew food from the earth. They had some powers like the gods, but they were still human in other respects, such as mortality. Due to their unique origins, they were caught between worlds.¹⁰

Humankind was born of a double fault, an act of forgetfulness by Epimetheus and an act of theft, the crime of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• A note on the cover image
• Introduction
• 1 Man and machine: dilemmas of the human
• 2 On caesura, temporality and ego-destructive shame: ominous transitions in everyday life
• 3 Protecting our humanity in the midst of tribal warfare: thoughts for our time
• 4 From leper-thing to another side of care: a reading of Lacan’s logical collectivity
• 5 Hontologie: Lacan, shame and the advent of the subject
• 6 Nihilism and truth: tarrying with the negative
• 7 Towards a metacosmics of shame
• 8 Hineni, Hineni: answering to other through disaster and exile, shame and temporality
• 9 What lies beneath: shame, time and diachrony
• Index