Written by Daren Leung
There is a need of an affective
turn in the humanities, beyond the traditional notion of social construction of
cultural causality in humanistic studies. Pruchnic (2008) emphasizes that
cultural affective theories have led humanities theorists to challenge the
previously dominant theories of social and ideological construction and to
adopt a more empathetic stance in the research of social phenomena. Therefore, drawing
on the insights from the extraordinary thoughts on affect and body, Probyn in
her book - Blush: Faces of Shame (2005) - formulates a new theoretical
framework on the embodiment between shame and interest with interpenetration
between Silvan Tomkins’s psychobiology of differential affects and Gilles
Deleuze’s Spinozaist ethology of bodily capacities.(Gregg & Seigworth,
2010). Probyn provides a cultural affective approach to investigate the feeling
of shame in “the perspective of body, as truly corporeal, that will lead us
into new understanding of how we inhabit society and what it means to embody
the social” (2005, 27), and to engage in the discussion in terms of the body, the affect of shame - interest and the disposition from habitus.
In Probyn’s
affective turn on studying the embodiment and affect, her inter-disciplinary approach
on shame comes cross anthropology, sociology, physiology, psychoanalysis and so
on. With the sociological training
background, Probyn realizes that it ignores the ideas about biology,
psychology, and the innate nature of shame. So she intends to go beyond the
sound structural determinism of Bourdieu’s habitus that our body, feelings and
sensations are ‘habitualized’ and dedicated by a certain social structure or
social order and collective history. Drawing on the insights from the extraordinary
thoughts on affect and body, Probyn formulates theoretical framework on the polarity
of shame-interest with the making of interpenetration between Silvan Tomkins’s
psychobiology of differential affects and Gilles Deleuze’s Spinozaist ethology
of bodily capacities.(Gregg & Seigworth, 2010).
Without ignoring the innate nature
of shame, Probyn tries to use Tomkins’s idea of the polarity of shame-interest
as her theoretical basis to exhibit the power of shame with the corporeal respective. To enrich the body knowledge in humanities study,
Probyn uphold the body potential ‘to affect and to be affected’, then the
feeling of shame appears as an “innate torment” to indicate the promised
connection or unaware interest is interrupted. Probyn says so,
“Shame only operates after interest and
enjoyment have been activated, and inhabits one or the other or both. The innate activator of shame is the incomplete
reduction of interest or joy.” (p.14)
Obviously, without
interest there is no shame, it disabuses the way to viewing shame as a
miserabilist condition that it must be erased at any cost. Significantly, this
quotation reminds us that the polarity of shame-interest Probyn highlighted has
two features of shame: 1) The more intense feeling of shame, the more
interested being interrupted. By Tomkins, interest would not disappear, but is
incompletely reduced. It means that the linkage between a person and a thing
broke. In other words, one is more interested in and cares about an object; one
is easier to put herself or himself at risk of being shameful, either being
disappointed by the object or disappointing the object. Moreover, 2) the
polarity of shame-interest illustrates the relation between our body and shame.
Shame is not only to be presented as an act of utterance, such as I said “I
feel ashamed”, but also to induce a corporeal, innate bodily association.
That’s why Probyn used “blush” to describe the shame. What’s more, apart from
seeing blushing as a physical reaction, as a metaphor of “masking” implies that
we try to hide our soul as well as that our face being covered by blushing. So,
feeling ashamed results a withdrawal which we cannot confront the society or
the object that we long for. In this way, shame is no longer negative but is
self-evaluative when we can find out our unaware interests in the world.
Beyond the distinction between mind
and body, Probyn is inspired by Deleuze’s notion of body which argues that
affects are ideas, so shame as the affective idea is produced out of the
clashing of the mind and the body which understands human as ‘entity’, and body
as a set of assemblages. The affective change that is triggered when one feels
ashamed will turn the assemblage of body in different order.
Rather,
the subjective for Deleuze is the affective assemblage of bodies of different
order and elements…Shame is a product of machine of subjective disposition,
which produce shame as both idea and affect.
(p.144)
By the possibilities of the assemblage
of body, it stresses that different affects
make us feel, think, and act in different ways, or in the subjective
dispositions. Moreover, shame can work over the body in the different orders, it
does this experientially—the body feels very differently in shame from how it
feels in enjoyment—but it also reworks how we understand the body and its
relation to other bodies or to the social. As a result, shame enlarges the man; it provides an
argument against considering expressions of shame as merely a personal
affliction. Shame, locates in bodies, becomes the entity that produces the mind
as ‘an impassioned witness’. While it is argued earlier that shame is about
self-evaluation with the polarity of shame-interest, Deleuze’s argument breaks
with a tendency to conceptualize shame in the common psychological term as an
interior quality. Shame in Deleuze’s
description comes from a complex disposition which is unlike the version of the
habitus (by Bourdieu, it combines the inherent and the lived experience of
social structure—the biology and biography of a person). Most interestingly,
Probyn deems that Deleuze goes further in radically ‘depersonalizing’ shame. Shame as an affect is transformative that
crosses many different orders of bodies.
To sum up, Probyn argues that
shame can entail self-evaluation and transformation. On one hand, with the
polarity of shame-interest, Probyn follows Tomkins’s corporeal notion to
suggest that shame is activated by “the incomplete reduction of interest or
joy.” She argues that the feeling of shame appears as “bodily withdrawal” to
show that the promised connection between a person and a thing broke or,
psychoanalytically, our unaware interest is interrupted. In other words, the
polarity of shame-interest can generate a process of re-identification on the
relations between one and a thing when one is feeling ashamed. So, shame is an
ethical and political issue when shame can produce a self-evaluative force in
one’s social life. On the other hand, with the subjective disposition from
Deleuze’s affective assemblage of bodies, Probyn argues that shame can work
over the body in different orders. It does this experientially - the body feels
very differently in shame from how it feels in enjoyment - but it also reworks
how we understand the body and its relation to other bodies or to the social. Shame,
being located in bodies, becomes the entity that produces the mind as “an
impassioned witness.” As a result, shame is transformative; it crosses many
different orders of bodies, by altering one’s embodied way from one’s favorable
habitus (in Bourdieu’s sense). Thus, shame can lead to a de-familiarization of one’s
habitus. Overall, with the interpenetration between Tomkins’s affect model and
Deleuze’s affective bodily capacity, the subjective disposition with the
different bodily order turns shame into a visceral, corporeal reminder for us
to be true to our interest, to be honest about why certain things are of our
own interest.
Reference:
Gregg, Melissa & Seigworth, Gregory J.
(ed) (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Probyn, Elspeth (2005). Blush: Faces of Shame.
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Pruchnic, Jeff (2008). ‘The invisible
Gland: Affect and Political Economy’. Criticism 50: p.160-175.
