Reading and Writing Shame: A Review of Elspeth Probyn’s Blush:
Faces of Shame (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
Julie Walsh
Shame is a risky business: to feel it, to think it through, to write about it, or to ‘theorise’
it requires that something is put at stake. Experientially, shame tends to be identified as a
threat to one’s self-integrity; it penetrates and exposes the subject, and generates an often
painful degree of self-consciousness regarding the volatility of the boundaries that
maintain one’s identity constructions.
Consider the case of a chastised child: if he is able to recognise that his act of
transgression falls short of, say, his Father’s expectations of him then he may feel guilty;
but he will also feel shame if this recognition resonates with the image that he is trying to
hold of himself, for himself. Shame floods the child when he suspects that he isn’t the
good boy he thought he was! We might venture that if guilt is experienced before the
authority of the law, then shame erupts in the rifts of the subject’s own ‘internal’
landscape. It becomes most difficult, however, to keep these dimensions distinct (after
all, the generation of the child’s self-image can only be fashioned in relation to the
identifications he has with his parents). This difficulty indicates just how limited our
standard conceptual language is for thinking about the shape and structure of shame. The
deployment of customary binary framings which insist on the separation of the inside and
the outside, the subject and the object, or the private and the public simply don’t work.
Shame inhabits the spaces in between these less-than-stable categories. Undoubtedly the
experience of shame is an experience of exposure -we hang our heads, cover our body
parts; we have failed; we have been seen for what we are and our fraudulence is known.
In this regard, we are shamed because we have fallen and are caught in a state of ‘inbetweenness’ or ‘out-of-placeness’. Often there is a type of category confusion -or
category violation- at work in shame, the likes of which brings to mind the wisdom (now
most associated with Mary Douglas but cited also by Freud) that ‘dirt is matter out of
place’. It is because one’s privates are not for public viewing that airing one’s proverbial
dirty linen becomes a site of shame. Shame, then, can derive from the sense of failure to
observe the boundaries which keep things in place.
Elspeth Probyn’s Blush: Faces of Shame stands as an important contribution to recent
scholarly interventions regarding the place of emotions in contemporary cultural life.
Probyn’s particular treatment of shame as, among other things, ‘the body’s reflection on
itself’ (56) can be engaged with from multiple and potentially divergent discursive
perspectives. Whilst it is clear that the work of Silvan Tomkins (and subsequent theorists
of affect) guide Probyn’s general approach, the book’s theoretical range is broad enough
to maintain the interest of those readers who may be resistant to the so-called ‘Affective
Turn’. Variously, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Marcel Mauss, Gilles Deleuze, and
Konrad Lorenz provide the theoretical coordinates to aid Probyn’s investigation of
shame’s power and productivity in the cultural everyday. A compelling feature of
Probyn’s work, and a sign of its particular feminism, is her commitment to bringing the
personal details of an individual life –and I refrain here from saying ‘the private details
of an individual life’– to bear on a discussion of shame’s cultural (and therefore political
and ethical) dimensions. Probyn’s ‘story-telling’ impulse reflects the fact that shame
undoes the stitching of the public and private spheres. Some examples: She recounts a
journey -a sort of shame pilgrimage- to Uluru, the ‘big rock’ at the heart of Australia
(also still referred to as Ayres Rock), describing her intense emotional reactions to the
changing landscape and its multiple histories as a way of developing her understanding
of shame as a primitive experience tied to questions of belonging, land and place
(Chapter 2). She offers up her Grandmother’s poetry -in particular a poem entitled ‘Half
Breed’- to explore the shame-pride dynamic and to examine the phenomena of vicarious
and ancestral shame (Chapter 4). She shares memories from her youth concerning her
shameful experiences of being treated for anorexia; moments with lovers in which the
risk of shame is the inevitable counterpoint to intimacy; and anecdotes from her
professional career where shame creates the contours of ‘legitimate’ political
communities -‘I’ve been shamed by feminism, what feminist hasn’t?’ (75).
Probyn’s recounting of personal and intimate stories prompts an important
epistemological reflection. These ‘stories’ are not merely illustrative; their purpose is not
simply to illuminate the broader thematic concerns of a given moment. Rather, their
value lies in insisting that a knowledge of shame -and a knowledge of shame’s
relationality- cannot be achieved if one attempts to suspend the ineradicably subjective
experience of its operations. Blush exposes the ways in which the author’s desire to
know shame -although Probyn would probably rephrase this as her interest in shameaccounts for the text’s reflexivity; the pursuit of shame turns back on itself and
encounters further opportunities for the eruption of shame. In other words, in the act of
writing about shame one gets tied up in shame’s rhythms of concealing and exposing (or
binding and unbinding). Perhaps we could say the same of any subject; in writing of X
one will necessarily become obsessed with and infected by X. But I’d claim that the
principle of dangerous proximity to one’s subject matter finds a particularly powerful
expression in relation to shame. Maybe it’s the seduction of writing per se that accounts
for this; poised with pen over page, the writer chooses what to show and what not to
show, and thus mirrors shame’s powerful dynamic. Probyn tells her readers how one can
suffer as a result. She describes the psychsomatic anxieties that plagued her during the
course of her book’s composition:
‘on waking I would notice that my hands and feet hurt. It became clear that during the
night my body contorted itself: my fists tightened, my feet tensed, and I ground my teeth.
... shame is a painful thing to write about. It gets into your body’ (129-130).
Probyn surmises that at the root of the matter lay
‘the terror of not being equal to the interest of my subject. The idea that I would not
interest readers triggered what seems to be a mixture of fear and shame’ (129-130).
Might the shame-writer’s confession of such anxieties elicit the reader’s pity? It is
possible, but perhaps equally possible is a suspicious or even hostile reader-response: but
you wanted it; you hooked up with shame knowingly. This response, (versions of which
are heard in criticisms of confessional writing or other modes of life writing), indicates
just how threatening shame can be: it isn’t only that the shame-writer has become
infected by her material, but she also threatens to pass on that shame to her readers. The
shame of shame rebounds, and defies simple logics of proprietorship.
My own approach to ‘doing shame’ differs somewhat from Probyn’s. The thesis put
forward in Blush is that shame is productive because it acts as a catalyst for a reevaluation of the ethical relations between the shamer and the shamed. Probyn reasons
that because ‘the shame response alerts us to the presence of another and attunes us to
our actions in the world, it’s hard to see why we would want to get rid of it.’ (94). In
other words, we can learn from shame. When well-managed, shame can function in the
service of reflection, transformation, and ultimately reparation. From a sociological
perspective, there is certainly nothing here that I would want to disagree with, but if one
chooses to bring a more insistent psychoanalytic lens to the matter then it strikes me that
Probyn’s account misses something - I shall endeavour to explain.
In her discussion of the role of shaming in the good society, Probyn claims that ‘shame’s
success depends on whether it produces reintegration as opposed to disintegration’ (88).
This is an important statement because it allows us to consider Probyn’s general
appraisal of shame’s ethical import alongside her investments in a story-telling mode of
writing. What becomes clear throughout Blush is that the question of shame’s
productivity is a question of its secondary function. If we let it, shame can do good work
after the event, so to speak. Probyn states that she wants to ‘reanimate a sociological
comprehension of how we feel shame, so that we may more broadly envision using the
effects of shame productively’ (40). I too am interested in the effects of shame and the
ways in which shame is put to work -or made use of- in different relational settings. But
I am also interested in a type of pleasure and productivity in shame that seems to fall
outside of Probyn’s interests (she comments that ‘there is nothing pleasurable about
shame…’(2); and that ‘the body feels very different in shame from how it feels in
enjoyment’ (137)). It is my suspicion that in addition to the secondary satisfactions of
reintegration and reparation that Probyn investigates, shame may entail a primary type of
felt pleasure, but, crucially, one that will not yield to a narrative framing. I suggested
above that Probyn’s personal investments in story-telling cannot be divorced from the
knowledge she seeks to gain of shame (she confesses that ‘deep down, all I ever want to
do is tell and listen to stories’ (40)). These investments are also evident when she turns a
critical eye on the general state of academic writing and, presumably, the associated
knowledge that such writing produces; ‘when narrative is the most human of needs, why
is it so rarely present in theoretical writing [?]’ (138). I welcome this questioning of what
it means to ‘write theory’, and especially appreciate the generosity of Probyn’s storytelling style: Blush can be read as a redress to the narrative deficit in academic discourse.
Alongside my positive appraisal, however, I am left wondering if there isn’t a particular
irony in the project of putting shame to work in the service of narrative. Shame is, at
bottom, a threat to narrativity; it shatters and undoes narrative coherence. In a storytelling mode -which is, for Probyn, the quintessentially human mode- we seek to turn
shame against itself and use it to re-establish a story, hopefully a better story, a more
ethical account of one’s self in relation to one’s environment. I can’t argue with that (I
don’t want to!). But what I do want to suggest is that the pull to reintegration may
overlook what is positive about disintegration, or the possible pleasures of being undone.
There’s a quotation from Charles Darwin that Probyn makes reference to a couple of
times in her book: ‘It is “the thinking about others, thinking about us… [that] excites a
blush.”’ (45). What’s wonderful about Darwin’s formulation is that it reminds us that the
complex reflexivity and bodily significance of shame ‘excites’. Ultimately, in keeping
with her reading of shame as affect, Probyn’s take on the blushing phenomenon reads
somewhat differently: ‘Blushing is the body calling out its interest’ (28). If there is still
work to do in thinking about the ways that shame may involve a primary pleasure, then
the difference between interest and excitement may be a good place to start.