Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing by Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark

REVIEWS Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark. Scenes of Shame: Psycho­ analysis, Shame, and Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. xii, 280. W riting in the inaugural issue of GLQ ten years ago, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick articulated the tentative possibilities of shame — “a conceptual tool whose powers we really have barely yet begun to explore” (15)— for queer identity politics: in re­ sisting the blandishments of politicized ego-psychology and the imperatives to “overcome” the toxic waste of cultural abjection, Sedgwick argued that “there’s no way that any amount of af­ firmative reclamation is going to succeed in detaching [‘queer’] from its associations with shame.” Moreover, in the M artha Stewart era of self-fashioning, that is a good thing because the potency of queer stylization arises not from the repudiation of the childhood scene of shame, but rather by “cleavfing] to that scene as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy” (4). Sedgwick’s conviction that shame remains basic to and residual in the processes by which identity is formed, and crucially underlies the political performatives of acting up and acting out, produces a different and less simplistic model of the tem porality of the subject than that generated by comingout narratives. Contingent and highly volatile, shame is “not a discrete intrapsychic structure, but a kind of free radical” (12) that accommodates highly individual histories of relations with others and self-understanding. The conceptual daring that approached shame not as some­ thing to be excised but rather as potentially enabling was very much a product of the deconstructive efflorecence of queer the­ ory in the early 1990s, a moment and a movement that took productive but ultimately risky liberties with psychoanalysis, and that tended to privilege the political over the sustained analysis of the literary. Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark of­ fer a number of correctives in Scenes of Shame, a collection of essays by diverse writers who understand shame as central to the emplotment of classic and canonic texts. Most of these essays are deftly argued and solidly predicated on the theories of shame and other affects advanced by Sylvan Tomkins and his followers; some of them make valuable observations about the corrosively regulating effects of shame in the matrices of 379 ESC 27, 2001 class and race. But while the individual readings are diligent, the collection as a whole seems dutiful rather than inspiringly original: there is not much risk-taking here; the writers seem generally to agree that shame is monolithically damaging and proceed to situate novels, their authors, and their texts on the couch to explain precisely why. None of these essays deals with queer theory or gay or lesbian literary production, and given the instrum ental role of this critical endeavour to return shame to academic currency, this omission strikes me as a missed op­ portunity to perform some im portant work of consolidation. Yet I cannot sufficiently praise Adamson and Clark’s excel­ lent introduction, “Shame, Affect, W riting,” which thoroughly surveys the conceptual basis of the field and envisions its appli­ cability to literary analysis. Their focus on the “affective role of language in literature” (6) begins by taking issue with the tyranny of the Lacanian preoccupation with the signifier that has diverted attention from other im portant developments in theories of intersubjective dynamics. How can we account more precisely for the flight from shame, the internalization of shame through identification with the shamer, and the split in the su­ perego between acquiescence and resistance? Sylvan Tomkins was a proto-sociobiologist who understood affect as a density of neural firing and emotions as a complex amalgam of affects; his enduring contribution to the field is a model of shame as a kind of master-affect, “absolutely crucial in its social manifes­ tations and in the development, through the interaction with others, of a sense of self and self-image” (14). Shame is thus instrum ental as a regulatory mechanism in communal life, for it is the emotion that functions most effectively to discourage expression of other affects like anger, disgust, and contempt. A corollary is Leon Wurmser’s neo-Freudian argument that shame inhibits both perception and expression and...

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