The Shame of Being A Man: Steve Connor
The Shame of Being A Man: Steve Connor
The Shame of Being A Man: Steve Connor
Steve Connor
The shame of being a man
‘It makes women feel like to cry and die,’ said Chhunni-ma, ‘but men,
it makes them go wild.’
‘Except sometimes,’ his middle mother muttered with prophetic spite,
‘it happens the other way round.’ 1
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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DOI: 10.1080/0950236011004406 9
Textual Practice
to fall short. Second, I will briefly review some of the thinking about
shame, especially in its relations to guilt, that has been done in philosophy,
psychology, anthropology and sociology over the last century. I will suggest
that, where shame tends nowadays to be seen as a moral emotion, and to
be discussed as an ethical problem, its reach is larger than this. I will argue
that shame is not only to be thought of as a moral prop or provocation,
but a condition of being, a life-form even, and I will offer a brief, wild
phenomenology of it. Third, I will suggest that male masochism is not
so much the expression of shame as an attempt to exorcise it, by turning
shame into guilt and thereby taking its measure and making it expiable.
Fourth, I will consider the power of shame, suggesting that it has possibilities
beyond those traditionally claimed for it. Doubtless one can die of shame,
as Salman Rushdie has said; but, stranger than this, it seems one can live of
it too.
1 Being a man
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Most discussions of the nature of shame get their footing by setting shame
against guilt. A shame culture – the examples given are often ancient Greek
or Viking cultures, and contemporary Melanesian cultures – is said to be
one in which feelings of responsibility are borne in upon the self from
the outside in. By contrast, a guilt culture, such as ours is thought to be,
is one in which the self feels responsibility for itself, so that guilt is taken
deeply into, or may even be thought of as arising in the self. Shame is
therefore associated with the maintaining of codes of conduct in the group,
but does not lead to sickness and despair, as it does in Western cultures. It
is sometimes said that it is for this reason that shame is something that not
only manifests itself on, but also belongs to the skin or the outside of a
person. Though some have doubted the absoluteness of the distinction
between shame cultures like theirs and guilt cultures like ours, it remains
intact in many quarters, for example, in this recent characterization by Susan
Benson of the contrasting attitudes towards skin adornment in Melanesian
and Western cultures in terms of
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So, although guilt may reach further than shame into the self, it does
not include so m u c h . Shame is more superficial than guilt, but, as Helen
Lynd has pointed out, it involves the whole being. In fact it can give you an
agonizing entirety you m i g h t never have had before. It is synecdochic, the
part for the whole, the part become the whole. I am guilty of a crime; but
I am ashamed of myself. T h i s makes shame inexpiable.
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Shame is hot and cold at once, tiny and exorbitant at once – ‘It is too
small to refer to; but it pervades everything’.12 The question of cause is only
weakly operative in shame, and then, I suspect, as a prophylactic against it.
Shame is just the excessiveness, the immeasurability against which guilt
protects. It can involve social gaffes or infractions of codes, of the drinking
the fingerbowl kind – but it need not. Indeed, an explanation of shame
in terms of its causes and occasions wipes away the phenomenological
essence of shame, which is to be exaggeration and disproportion. Shame is
the inner certainty of unworthiness, of a baseness that one takes on and
inhabits.
Shame is a skin thing.13 The fact that shame belongs to the skin is borne
out by the fact that its characteristic preposition is ‘on’: Shame on you! Guilt
too is something that rests or descends upon one, but in a different modality,
so to speak, of the ‘on’. If, as I have said, one bears guilt as a burden, a weight
that presses redeemingly down on one, shame clings to the person like a
smudge, or an insect. Guilt pricks (agenbite of inwit) and is stigmatic (in
feeling compunction, from com-pungere, one feels pricked all over). Shame,
like mud, sticks. Recently, a number of world leaders and businessmen have
been the recipients of custard pies thrown by protesters. The pie in the face
(or the tomato, with which a woman defiled Tony Blair’s suit some time
ago, reversing the story of the woman with an issue healed by the touch
of Christ’s hem; all that matters is that it should be squishy) is shaming
because it reduces its victim to an object of comedy and pity. In a sense
it relieves its victims of whatever charge might be being brought against
them: capitalist exploitation, repression of minorities, etc. For the pie in the
face is the anagram of an accusation. It aims not to denounce, which would
require and allow a response, defence, acknowledgement, but to degrade,
which leaves no possibility of response, because it degrades the crime as well
as the subject, therefore depriving the subject of the dignity of his guilt. You
may have thought you were being wicked or doing wrong, but in fact all
you were doing was being ridiculous.
How can I bear the shame?, one thinks. But it is not a case of bearing
shame. Precisely because shame is of the whole person and not a part of the
person, there is nothing to bear and nothing to bear it with. Sartre represents
the national shaming of the French people during the occupation in his play
Les Mouches, not as a burden, but as an appalling sense of weightlessness,
and a longing for the heaviness of guilt. If there is somebody still there to
bear shame, to wear it as a mask or a caption, then shame has begun to be
beaten back, as it always must.
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in-itself for another. For Sartre, ‘shame is shame of self; it is the recogni-
tion of the fact that I am indeed that object w h i c h the O t h e r is l o o k i n g
at and judging.’ 1 6 T h i s definition is probably derived f r o m M a x Scheler’s
earlier definition of shame in terms of disproportion. For Scheler, shame
‘is always conjoined w i t h an element of “astonishment,” “confusion,” and
an experience between what ideally “ought to be” and what, in fact, is.’ 1 7
Scheler maintains that the h u m a n susceptibility to shame comes f r o m the
maladjustment between our absorption in our o w n projects, in w h i c h we
reach beyond ourselves, beyond the experience of littleness and l i m i t , and
our sudden resiling i n t o the feeble, needy c o n d i t i o n of the l i v i n g - d y i n g
animal self.
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m i n o r revival across the West and wherever else the wires can reach. Such
acts and urges are a reassertion of a male power of debasement that w o m e n
have often been unable to prevent themselves f r o m wanting for themselves.
For w o m e n w h o have taken on the glory of the stigmata there is an extra
humiliation, and therefore extra glory, in the shameful display of their selfish
hunger for glorious degradation. We have p u t aside the religious and
mystical languages w h i c h allowed the commerce of pride and shame to be
thought on, but we perhaps still have need of them to make sense of the
embracing of the signs of degradation, the degradation into the condition
of a sign, w h i c h are so abundant today. T h e Christian Emperor Constantine
forbade the marking of slaves in the f o u r t h century, on the grounds that this
k i n d of insult to the body was a shame for the perpetrators as well as the
victims. T h e survival of ideas of stigmata, i n t o cosmetic practice and sexual
ritual, is a refusal of the Levitican p r o h i b i t i o n on the m a r k i n g of the skin,
a shameful transgression at the heart of Christianity, w h i c h w i l l not allow
the new skin of the immaculate conception.
No doubt female masochism continues to exist and perhaps even
calmly to m u l t i p l y , b u t in traditionally circumspect and self-preserving
forms. It is striking that the theme of the contractual basis of masochism,
first identified by Deleuze in his ‘Coldness and cruelty’ essay, has been
stressed by female writers on the subject. So, if masochism represents itself
in one sense as a taking on of the helplessness and passivity traditionally
associated w i t h w o m a n (though not, let us note, by many male masochists),
it is clear that it also allows a traditional male exposure to risk and what may
be called the infinite of finitude, the finitude that goes infinitely far beyond
me in p u t t i n g a stop to my hubristic reaching after illimitability. It is hard
for m e n to write in shame w i t h o u t attempting to coin glory f r o m it. W r i t i n g
of sacrifice, Georges Bataille evokes the Christian ‘man-god’ w h o dies ‘both
as rottenness and as the redemption of the supreme person’. In its proleptic
embrace of the ‘empty infinity’ of its death, ‘the me raises itself to the pure
imperative, l i v i n g - d y i n g for an abyss w i t h o u t walls or floor; this imperative
is formulated as “die like a dog” in the strangest part of being’. 2 6 Deleuze
too looks to shame for its possibilities of glory. I am unpersuaded or perhaps
just insufficiently inflated by all these phallic, masterful, life-enhancing,
willing-to-power kinds of destitution, k n o w i n g f u l l well that I do not come
up to them, and meaning not to. Deleuze’s Life is shameless, an i m m o r t a l
mortality. N o t , alas, for me, and the legion such as me, the flight f r o m shame
into shameless becoming.
Female shame expresses itself as alienation: to be ashamed of one’s
body is to be alienated f r o m the ideal f o r m of it one wishes one had. Female
shame cooperates w i t h narcissism, male shame w i t h centreless self-disgust.
Females are encouraged to hate their bodies, as a way of keeping them in
agreement about the ideal forms of beauty attainable in the female f o r m .
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Men are disgusted by their bodies, not because they feel they fall short
of some equivalently agreed ideal male form, but because they are so much
like other men’s. Female shame is shame by reference to a model; male
shame is shame by reference to the transcending of models. Corporeality
used to be thought of as female; corporeality, the body as dog’s body, is
now male. Deleuze and Guattari are right to identify shame with the
animal, or with the becoming animal.27 What, now, are men but dogs?
What, now, do we want but intervals when we can stop pretending that we
are not? Dominatrices throughout the Western world know that their clients
have no desire to be treated like cats, pigs, sheep, monkeys, horses, or any
of the other animals that are victims of human use and abuse; but from
Istanbul to the Isle of Wight no dungeon worthy of the name is without its
kennel.
Male shame operates without models or objects. This may be one
of the reasons for the energetic production of consensual male narcissism
to match that of women. Without the projection and internalization of
narcissistic ideals, the intensity of shame being undergone by men might
become quite unbearable. (But it is quite unbearable.) To be ashamed of
oneself without a regulatory ideal, or sense of a standard, from which one
has fallen short, for that kind of unorientated self-disgust to prosper, would
be dangerous indeed. In one sense, a strong pedagogy of the masculine such
as we have today – with all these tips on male grooming, encouragement to
new forms of citizenship, the conduct manuals of women’s magazines, men’s
magazines, and, far from least, masculinity studies – multiplies the oppor-
tunities for regulatory shame. In another, it gives a containing shape and
syntax to shame, allowing shame to become savingly attached to men’s
actions or omissions and then their making good, rather than their being.
Thus it serves the purposes of masochism, and is enlisted (unavailingly)
against the true, speechless shame of the dog’s body.
Shame is the exposure of the first person. Shame must be in and of that first,
last person. T h i s is w h y shame cannot be w h o l l y negative: w h y it takes the
disgraced person in a sense beyond good and bad. T h e shamed person has
been given a k i n d of inviolability through being made to be identical w i t h
their w o u n d , or their mark. T h i s is perhaps the shameful secret of shame,
its secret, paradoxical potency; that you cannot be made ashamed by being
dehumanized, or brutalized, or impersonalized. To be ashamed you must
also be given yourself, or given to it: a new self, to be sure, a vacuum-self
made of n o t h i n g , n o t h i n g but shame, for ever, but, undiminishably, a self,
or a f o r m of being in shame. Shamed people often prefer the flight i n t o
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it. W o m e n may then have temporarily abandoned, in the sure and certain
hope of the life to come, some of the fugitive advantages that the inhabi-
tation of shamefulness can give. W h e n he writes of this male t r a d i t i o n ,
Deleuze seems to see w r i t i n g as the attempt to expiate shame, to find the
glory in shamefulness, as in his essay on T.E. Lawrence. But to write about
Kafka, to hope to ‘please’ the writer w h o wrote of the hope for an enduring
shame, wrote for and in the endurance of shame, can never simply be to
restore ‘the j o y the energy, the life of love and politics’. W h e n he glosses
the final phrase of Kafka’s The Trial- ‘it was as if the shame of it must outlive
him’ - w i t h the judgement that ‘shame enlarges the man’, Deleuze surely
succumbs to the double shame against w h i c h he warns himself. 3 1 For he
rewrites Kafka aggressively on his o w n terms, as he does in the superbly
cowardly reading he undertakes w i t h G u a t t a r i of Kafka, as a k i n d of
Lawrentian prophet of life and becoming. Shame is not to be identified w i t h
the ‘life’ on w h i c h Deleuze and Guattari so tediously and oppressively insist,
but then, life isn’t everything.
So shame is not a merely negative condition, any more than masochism
is the simple embrace of suffering, the mistaking of suffering for life. Shame
is a whole mode of being, not a deprived or depleted version of ordinary
‘full’ existence. Shame is not any k i n d of shortfall of being: it is an intolerable
excess of it. Shame is heightened attentiveness, w h i c h may be w h y shaming
or h u m i l i a t i o n are so i m p o r t a n t in rites of passage. G u i l t looks on itself,
face to face, seeing itself for w h a t it is. Shame seems rather to be of the
ear, for it cannot see r o u n d itself, or even of the listening, prickling skin.
It is an aversion of the eye, a straining to hear, an absorption, a curious
obedience.
I have kept circling back to Léon Wurmser’s insight that w h a t we
take to be shame is always in part a front or mask, protecting against the
annihilation of shame itself, than w h i c h n o t h i n g can be more annihilating,
aside f r o m pain and actual b o d i l y destruction. B u t any apotropaic also
harbours the thought and possibility of that w h i c h it forfends, becoming its
secret home. M a n y of the signs of shame - stony pallor, bowed head,
downcast eyes - are inhibitions or dammings of the flooding overstimulation
of shame that also hold and hoard it. T h e mask of shame preserves shame
for the ego, as well as preserving the possibility of an ego against it. There
is strength and value (its o w n k i n d of value) in this manner of narcissism,
w h i c h can open on to the being in unbeing of the self. There is elation
in the mortifications of shame, and also exaltation, longing, quickening,
tenderness, endurance, awe, astonishment and the taking of care. You cannot
live in shame, b u t u n t i l you’ve been ashamed you’ve never lived. This is w h y
shame has been so powerfully operative in the history of religious feeling,
in the heretical eruptions of spiritual and bodily destitution to be f o u n d ,
for instance, in medieval mysticism and seventeenth-century religious
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Notes
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