4.2 PRUEBAS
5.1.9 Menú de opciones
One of the questions that this thesis asks is; in what way can we understand embarrassment to be a ‘good feeling’? In its persistent return to ‘self’ it could be claimed that embarrassment is narcissistically satisfying (though not always pleasurable), or the experience might be considered somehow therapeutic. Alternatively, if the causes and outcomes of embarrassment are interrogated they might bring sociocultural knowledge; of habitus, or embarrassment might also bring
self-knowledge. But knowledge cannot be assumed to be unambiguously ‘good’,
and besides, there is a sense in which embarrassment’s relation to knowledge must be understood to be both negative and minor; it is a knowledge riddled with not- knowing, or in Sedgwick’s term; ‘opacities’. Might her observation on the
45 epistemology of the closet be applied to embarrassment’s epistemology? ‘Particular insights’ she says, ‘are lined with, . . . and structured by particular opacities.’58 The not-knowing or opacities of embarrassment are figured as doubtful situations, doubtful outcomes, and self-doubt (which I shall argue is a kind of embodied criticality) but always, always with the promise of a better outcome next time, with the promise of a coherent self that has, just for the moment escaped our grasp. In the midst of this doubtfulness and promise is something embodied, something irrefutably, insistently present, a freeze-frame of now, something real. Sartre writes of a ‘solidification of self’, Barthes of an ‘amorous panic’ and both of these borrowed fragments come close to expressing the momentary, exquisite discomfort of being, and being seen to be flawed. There is something about this visceral experience that is real in the sense of being empirical, derived from experience of life; not
conjectured, not theoretical, not abstract. Although this reality is a ‘feeling’ it is somehow concrete or as Sartre says; a solidification, that makes the self, for a moment, an overwhelming and solid presence to itself. Or, according to Gilbert and George: ‘When it hurts then its true for us’, they said. Their statement knots
together the two concepts; the hurt and the true-ness, and whatever value, or queer value might be ascribed to embarrassment is within that knot.
When it hurts, ‘it’ is experienced bodily, the pain, the stab, the wound, but this is in a minor register so the discomfort is more likely to be superficial; a scratch or a bruise. But also an affect, an emotional experience; feelings are also hurt. And this flags up the paradoxical nature of embarrassment as a problem of depth. Embarrassment is on the one hand, a shallow feeling. Some might say that embarrassment is only skin deep. And indeed, I have presented embarrassment as marginal, slight in its
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46 effects, and easily brushed aside. Ridout comments that embarrassment is ‘a flaring in the face rather than a searing in the soul’.59 The self that we are keen to protect in this sense is not some deep essence, or essential core, or soul, it is all on the surface, it is about who we are seen to be. So if embarrassment is all about image then yes it is superficial. And yet . . . , and with embarrassment there is always a ‘but’ or a ‘yet’; embarrassment always seems to have a supplementary cause, or meaning, or outcome. It always seems to indicate something else, something latent or liminal, as if it had a deeper meaning.
And yet, as embarrassment can also involve loss or damage to the self-image which
belongs to a private, internal domain, then the hurt it inflicts is deep. So
embarrassment is a predicament that compromises insides and outsides, deep and shallow, private and public. The self-image is an intensely personal feeling of deep and private ‘insideness’, but the losses embarrassment entails are right out there in public. We generally dismiss the damage of embarrassment as superficial, but if embarrassment ‘just’ bruises our ego, how deep does that hurt go?
In examining embarrassment’s knot of hurt and ‘true’ one of the theoretical resources used in relation to both subject and context of the self is Freudian psychoanalytic theory, and particularly, the diffuse, and sometimes ambivalent absorption of Freud into the cultural infrastructure as an enduring, but inexact cultural currency. And I would argue that it is in fact, the dispersed and dog-eared ideas of ‘Freudiana’ that are implicated in the experience of embarrassment, rather than the unadulterated Freud of a session on the couch. We are familiar with the lexis of psychoanalysis, with castration anxiety, penis envy and with the Oedipus complex, which have slipped into ordinary and imprecise usage, and we are alert to
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47 the equation of knowledge and sex, the interpretation of dreams, sublimated
meanings, Freudian slips. Whilst I hold out no hope of a cure for embarrassment, I propose that the ‘talking cure’ offers a productive framework for submitting
subjective and very personal experience to an analytical end.
One of the uses made of psychoanalytic theory in this thesis is as an endorsement of the self as fractured and faceted rather that a seamless whole; a condition of self that is extant in Goffman’s definition of embarrassment as a failure to present a ‘coherent self’. Psychoanalysis understands the self as divided, theorised as an
ego and an id with corresponding conscious and unconscious psychic apparatus.
Whilst the self exposed by embarrassment might be thought of as a sum of
(incoherent) parts, I will argue here that the embarrassed self is divided, but divided differently to the Freudian schematic.
The self that is exposed by embarrassment is not envisaged here as split between conscious and unconscious parts but more simply, between an inside and an
outside. Whilst both are largely ‘known’, the extent to which we can know ourselves inside out is of course not entirely complete as some parts may be repressed, or perhaps unexamined. The division of the self along the axis inside/outside is here theorised as an inner self that is the private self-image, the self we think our self to be which is vulnerable to exposure, and, an outer-facing self that is the public image of the self, perceived by others and is vulnerable to evaluation embarrassment when we ‘lose face’.
Barthes refers to an inner self as the ‘image-repertoire’ and also as the private life; ‘le privé’. He insists that there is something basically detrimental in its exposure; that exposure allows the other an advantage.
48 It is certainly when I divulge my private life that I expose myself most; not by the risk of “scandal”, but because then I present my image-system in its strongest consistency: and the image-system, one’s imaginary life, is the very thing over which others have an advantage: which is protected by no reversal, no dislocation.60
He suggests that this inner self is vulnerable, susceptible to damage or hurt, and also that it is perhaps the most fundamentally ‘true’ part of the self. But the public image of self is also vulnerable and this is what is at stake when we ‘lose face’. Although the ‘face’, the outer image is, to some extent, a front we put up, it is no less ‘true’ or truly ours than the private inside.61 Embarrassment may be caused by exposure and evaluation of either the private self or the public image; both are important to us and within the context of embarrassment and its epistemology, surface matters, so depth should never be misconstrued as synonymous with importance.
In Sincerity & Authenticity, Lionel Trilling ponders on the dictum, ‘to thine own self be true’. The self, for Trilling, is divided differently again; not topographically as an inside and outside, but rather as variable qualities, that of a good self and a less- good or not good-enough self that may bring discredit. Trilling asks if the self to which we should be true, or hold as ‘true’ is necessarily our ‘best self’. Instead, he offers another self which is; ‘less good in the public moral way but which, by very reason of its culpability, might be regarded as more peculiarly mine.’62 And this self with all its less-good qualities is mooted by Trilling as unquestionably ‘true’, as if in our natural pessimism, or modesty or anxiety we are conditioned to believe the worst of our self. Trilling argues that we feel, or should feel, an obligation to accept
60
Barthes, Roland Barthes, pp82,83.
61
See Goffman on the presentation of self as a front facing aspect and a less-public rear. Goffman uses the metaphor of a theatre to make his point. Erving Goffman, The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin Books, 1990 (first published 1959)).
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49 ownership of the less-good, culpable self that is particularly, peculiarly, our own. Is it then the truth of this ownership, of ‘owning up’, that hurts? If this is so, then the counterpart of this would be that it is the hurt we feel that gives provenance to the ‘true’ self; ‘when it hurts then its true’.
But the true-ness is a weak truth claim and must be qualified. Not just ‘when it hurts then its true’, but (as G&G said) ‘when it hurts then its true for us’. The truth that this hurt offers to tell is embodied and experiential, but above all personal. It hints at knowledge, it promises some form of knowledge, but what we can know is stitched to its indivisible lining of not-knowing that is doubt. We might also understand this truth that we feel to be intentional in the sense that my aim is true, or amorous in the sense of true-love which may not last but in the moment it is experienced, in this moment, it is true. It is so true that it hurts, and it is embodied and singular and particular, so that no other person could feel exactly this, or as Sedgwick might say, the hurt and the truth are ‘localised and nonce’.63
What embarrassment exposes may be either inside or outside; a best self, or some other less-creditable version, it may be the discrediting of our image or a ‘loss of face’; in any case, the skin may blush.
63 In Touching Feeling for instance Sedgwick writes of ‘local theories and nonce
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‘EXPOSE YOURSELF TO ART’
Ryerson, M. Expose Yourself to Art (1978)64
The context within which I examine the embarrassment of the exposure and evaluation of the self is that of the spectatorial experience of the visual arts. In situations of spectatorship, the museum, gallery etc. not only may we look, but we are supposed to look, we have paid to look, and furthermore, we look in public, we are seen to look and our response is ‘on show’. The spectator–text relationship, that is, the encounter of an individual with a particular artwork is figured here as an experience that is resistant to the universalising of social analysis, but might be thought of as having a critical potential that exists in its singularity. The call to ‘expose yourself to art’ is not made in anticipation of a major confrontation, or act of indecency, but instead, a minor breach of the boundaries of self as an openness to
64 ‘Expose Yourself to Art’ is the title of a photograph that found moderate fame as a poster.
The photo, by Michael Ryerson shows Bud Clark (later Mayor of Portland) flashing to a statue of a nude woman by Norman J. Taylor, titled Kvinneakt.
51 both feeling and criticality. The self, as subject, looks at the art object, but
sometimes, such as in the instance of a perceived, or in fact actual reverse gaze, the object looks back. The self sees itself seeing, it is in fact ‘caught looking’, and is momentarily, and for itself, objectified. The confusion of subject and object positions is felt, uncomfortably as embarrassment. This is not to say that the effect of
exposing one’s self to art might be therapeutic in the sense dismissed by Bersani as the ‘redemptive aesthetic’, the idea that art can repair the damage inflicted by life and give value or meaning to otherwise pointless existence.65 But rather, that this exposure is damage (but obviously only minor damage; we can’t be shamed by looking, but we might be embarrassed).
The feeling of minor or superficial damage is identified here as ‘spectatorial
embarrassment’, a feeling of awkwardness in the encounter with art. In exploring its causes and effects I have drawn on arthistorical theories of reception and ‘the gaze’, on film theory, and also theories of the wider ‘field of vision’. Sources include Laura Mulvey’s polemic ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ which has been the catalyst for a wave of response, refutation and revision to the proposition that man looks and woman is looked at. In contrast to the intensely gendered look theorised within feminist studies, film theory, and queer theory. I have also drawn on an existentialist theory of seeing and being seen in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which neuters vision by thinking ‘man’ as ‘mankind’.
The embarrassment of looking, or ‘spectatorial embarrassment’ is examined here in relation to two co-existent but conflicting dynamics of visual art; firstly, that of ‘the gaze’; a disinterested aesthetic appreciation, and secondly, the emotive disruption of
65
Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
52 ‘transgressive’ art. The question in both cases is; ‘within the context of
spectatorship, how does embarrassment figure as part of the experience of art?’ Much art is of course, precisely about looking; about the politics of looking, the genderedness of looking, the ethics of looking. Furthermore, spectatorial response in some cases is appropriated as the content and the meaning of the work. One such is Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés where the spectator must put her eye to a hole in a door and peep through to see a strange view beyond. The faintly bucolic landscape we chance upon is occupied by a spread-eagled female nude holding a lamp. She, the body, is otherworldly but corpse-like lying in an uncomfortable nest of twigs and dried leaves. She is anatomically disturbing; the legs, spread wide, are impossibly jointed and unequal in size, her genitals are not so much mutilated as appear to be partially missing as if they have started to heal over.
(installation view) (through the keyhole)
Marcel Duchamp, Etant Donnés (1946-1966) mixed media
In a reconstruction of Etant Donnés at Tate Modern I peeped through the hole in the door, spying, a voyeur, feeling a little quiver of misdemeanor. I was unsettled by both the peeping and the strange vista. Her exposure exposed me. Then I sat for a while, just looking, from a comfortable distance, and noticed that many visitors
53 glanced briefly at the door, but then moved on. Peeping through holes is perhaps not conside