What is shame and where does it come from? Is it biological, social, psychological, political or something we don’t even know yet? These are all questions that dog at the heels of my research, which makes Blush: Faces of Shame by Elspeth Probyn a good start for my research.
Shame is not quite theory, not quite reflection, but an approachable hybrid of both as Probyn works out what shame is and why shame is important. And that’s her thesis -- that shame is important, and to lose shame, either by ignoring it OR making it into more than it really is, can cost us something of what it means to be a human being.
This is a common citation in most shame reading I come across, that there is something about shame that points toward what it is that makes us human beings. Typically, that finger probes into our messy, wounded vulnerability, challenging the ideals of Western philosophy that make the autonomous, individual, whole, hale and hearty speaking Man (and specifically that -- Man) the representative of the human species. To be human is to be fragile, to be powerless, to be relational, to need others as much as we need ourselves.
And yet while that’s a somewhat better definition, I wonder, too, if it’s too limiting a way to talk about shame. Must shame always be THE defining mark of the human? Or A mark? Perhaps it’s less of a defining mark as it is something that tells us about who we are AS human beings. This is where I find Probyn to be helpful.
Probyn relies heavily on the work of Silvan Tomkins, an affect researcher from the mid-20th century whose work came back into vogue in the 90s and early 2000s when queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick edited a new volume of his work. For Tomkins, shame in an indicator of interest that has not fully diminished, or as he puts it “The incomplete reduction of interest or joy.” Now, what the hell does that mean? It means that we experience shame when we are interested in something or someone (usually someone) and that interest gets disrupted, but not obliterated.
For example: You’re in a bar and you see a person that you find really attractive. You catch their eye. You smile, in a little flirty way. Maybe you wink. Instead of returning your flirtatious gaze, that person sneers a little and turns away. You blush and feel a little humiliated. Because your interest (the flirting) is interrupted (the sneer) but the person’s still there and you’re still there and apparently there’s not enough tequila in the world to fix this moment right now (not diminished).
If you could just put the sneering jerk out of your head, or weren’t really invested in them to begin with, then there’s no shame. But because you can’t and you were -- bam, there’s that blush. Where Probyn sees that as hopeful is that shame indicates that there is a connection, and it isn’r broken just yet. Or as Probyn writes:
“Shame illuminates our intenstive attachments to the world, our desire to be connected with others, and the knowledge that, as merely humans, we will sometimes fail in our attempts to maintain those connections” (14).
And here’s the rub -- shame exists in that space of potentiality, in that the connection could be eliminated -- or regained. As long as shame is there, that’s the possibility.
But wait, you might say -- I don’t even like that jerk! Nuts to them!
Except that you kinda do, shame replies. And that’s the other point that Probyn is making in the first chapter, as she wrestles with the question of whither cometh shame, the heart or the head (or the community or outer space)? Robyn is making the case that shame is biological, in that human beings tend to be wired up to experience shame, even before they are taught what to be ashamed about. I recall that Tomkins writes that shame occurs early on in infants, who blush and cry whenever their mothers fail to respond to their interested gaze. Shame seems to be part of the human hardware; what we’re ashamed about is social, psychological, political software. But because its hardware, hard-wired into our bodies and brains and informing both, shame plays an interesting role. Shame acts on the body physically, making us feel shame even before we can articulate what it is we feel shame about. This means that shame informs us about our interests -- even before we know them. Shame is the body’s way of registering interest, even when we don’t know what it is we’re interested in, even when we’re unaware that we actually want connection. Or as Probyn writes:
“In shame, the feeling and minding and thinking and social body comes alive. It’s in this sense that shame is positive and productive, even when it feels bad. The feelings of shame teaches us about our relations to others. Shame makes us feel proximity differently, understood as the body’s relation to itself, the self to its self, and comprehended within a sphere that is human and nonhuman, universal and particular, specific and general.” (34-35)
Or put simply: listen to your shame, because it’s telling you something.
