Reviews

Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum

gaybf's review against another edition

dark reflective sad medium-paced

3.75

fav quotes 

• The person doing the humiliation--aggressor, tyrant, bully, monolith, petty soldier, priest, poet--is humiliated by the act. (Even Jesus knew how to dish it out: he told Mary, Mother of God, "Woman, what have I to do with thee?") And so the humiliator (the instigator) is besmirched, reflexively, by the act--if only in the eyes of the victim and the witness. 
• Instant communication mechanisms are especially gifted at spreading humiliation's toxic cloud. Does virtual communication make desubjectification easy? The same could have been said about the telephone or the telegraph. Or the typewriter. For a long time, civilization has been in the business of siphoning the body away from the scene of vocal expression, of interpersonal confrontation. More and more, the industries of communication and entertainment--with their globalizing quest to amuse, stimulate, connect--secretly work to deaden, or desubjectify, the human voice. 
• I'm suggesting that we define humiliation as 'the intrusion of an unwanted substance or action upon an undefined body.' The pain of the intrustion--but also its suddenness and incomprehensibility (what substance is entering me?)--constitutes the humiliation. The subject ceases to be a subject and becomes a thing acted upon, the terrain on which a violation occurs. Giorgio Agamben calls the procedure "desubjectification" (...) 
• I keep circling around linguistic questions, rather than psychological or narrative situations, because whenever I encounter language (and especially when I try to write or read) I'm aware that verbal communication itself involves humiliation. Not merely the humiliation of trying to acquire mastery of a language, or trying to use language accurately and effectively. Not merely the humiliation of not understanding someone else's words, or of feeling like an outcast from the comprehensible and the comprehended. I'm aware, when reading or writing, that the material word's relation to its buried meanings bears humiliation's imprint. The word is victor; its meaning, connotation, implication, and history lie ravished at the conquerer's feet. Or else the word itself seems the victim, the residue, the liverwurst-stink. And the meaning is the unmolested kernel, the aura--the presiding, cerulean intensity. 
• I'm glad to see language turned into slobber. Rather, I'm glad to belong to a community, however scattered, of souls who like to see rules (of linguistic propriety, of sexual propriety) turned upside down. When, in Bruce LaBruce's film "Hustler White," I saw an amputee use his leg stump to penetrate his lover's anus (...) I felt not grossed out but filled with a sense of camaraderie--glad to be surrounded, in a Greenwich Village theatre, by like-minded perverts. (...) Was the onscreen amputee humiliated or satisfied? How would you describe an audience that finds occasion for laughter, excitement, and relaxation when watching amputee anal sex?
• Earlier, I asserted that humiliation is always a triangle: tyrant, victim, witness. In the case of the Sontag photos, the photographer (Leibovitz) is the unwitting tyrant, Sontag is the victim, and we (the viewers) are the witnesses. But the humiliation happens not inside Sontag's body, which no longer exists, but inside our bodies, watching. Indeed, the humiliation doesn't actually happen; it is a cloud of inference and aftermath, a nonlocatable atmosphere of outrage and distress. We use the word "humiliation" sometimes merely rhetorically, to describe a potential for agony, even if the agony is not always, in that instant, an actual experience; in these cases, humiliation can't be touched, measured, visualized, or weighed. 
• (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) Humiliation of black people in the United States is a system; the system includes prisons, police, hospitals, schools, the food chain. The system, an ecology, includes you, whoever you are, and it includes me. I regret that in my eyes it may be possible for a black person to imagine harm and to see nonrecognition, dismissal, fear, dismay, longing, identification, curiosity. I have been guilty of looking at a black person in such a way that my face and my body have registered, however unintentionally and unconsciously, the moral morass of being 'the white person watching the black person'; and because my body and my face can't do much to take away the implicit stain of being 'a white person looking at a black person,' my gaze becomes the Jim Crow gaze, or an inheritor of the history of that gaze, and my eyes, however kind or inquisitive or disinterested or unaware of their effect, give the wheel of humiliation another fateful turn. 
• (Harriet Jacobs): "I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it. I cannot tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, nor how I am still painted by the retrospect." She cannot tell the full story. Acute feeling produces a shrinking away from the ability to describe it. It's difficult to know what Harriet Jacobs really felt; her words point toward that void but can never fill it. 
• But what if the model feels, at the time or later, years after the photo shoot, humiliated by the exposure? What if the photo came from a private session, not meant for Internet circulation? What if the model cooperated only because he was drunk or drugged or incapacitated, and later regretted his lapse in judgement? You could argue that the porn model is an "object" that I am humiliating, and that his humiliation contributes to the pleasure I take in porn. 
• "(Ingeborg) Bachmann claims that poets are precisely those who 'make the "I" into the ground of their experiments, or who have made themselves into the experimental ground of the "I." This is why they 'continually run the risk of going mad' and not knowing what they say." I run this risk. I am experimenting on myself--trying to exalt and eliminate certain memories of humiliation, trying to exalt and eliminate the "nose" I have developed (like a hunting dog's) to catch the scent of humiliation. 
• At the root of the confessional act--whether in a poem or on a reality TV show--seems to be the pleasure, conscious or not, of publicly avowing one's misery, of showcasing one's lowered status, of turning the "loss of face" into a new face, a smashed, pulverized face, the face of the smacked, stunned, and vanquished. I may be humiliated, but because I am seen in the process of exhibiting my shame, I therefore gain 'the pleasure of exemplarity.' To be exemplary--to be an example, a whipping boy, for the amusement of the passerby--to be a placard, an admonitory parable--to be a star of suffering
• (Oscar Wilde) "...For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob. // For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time." Ritually he revisits and rekindles the shock of his exposure. The transfiguration, involving beauty (and therefore aestheticism), is not exactly religious, though he uses the language of piety. "So perhaps whatever beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some moment of surrender, abasement, and humiliation." He can't change his circumstances, so he must change the point of view he brings to his situation. 
• We have an obligation to keep asking questions about experiences that aren't our own, experiences that are worse than our own will ever be--or that is what we pray, we pray that our experience will never grow so catastrophic as to encompass the lowest points in recorded history. (They fall together--these nodes of experience, these leitmotifs--just at the moment of death, I imagine, all particles of experience are hurled together in a terrible storm; they fall together because there is nothing more basic to two human beings standing near each other than that one has the capacity to destroy to debase the other.) 
• One lacerating outburst demonstrates Carson's Artaud-like willingness to make art directly out of her lowest moments: 
  "When nude
  I turned my back because he likes the back
  He moved onto me
  
  Everything I know about love and its necessities 
  I learned in that one moment
  when I found myself
  
  thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon
  at a man who no longer cherished me." Tell it to me, Anne! Which is more humiliating--the action, or its repetition in a poem? Carson becomes an artist--an Artaud--because she has the nerve to put her little burning red backside like a baboon into a poem that is nominally an essay. Carson isn't humiliated. She is elevated (continued) 
• I identify with (Antonin) Artaud's description of writing (or any act of art making) as torture, as a process of being humiliated by ideas, images, internal phantasms, and external censors. Here is how Artaud characterized the book 'Interjections,' which includes those dirtied dictations: a "type of book absolutely impossible to read, / that no one has ever read from end to end, / not even its author, / because it does not exist / but is the fruit of a consortium of incubi and succubi nailed, stabbed, planted everywhere, / pullulating, in the body of Man, / turned over and over like a turkey on a grill." Ouch! That is what it feels like to write: I'm nailed and buggered and stabbed by incubi and succubi. And each stab, penetration, each pullulation, is a phrase that I try to turn into a complete sentence. The process of making art--no party--has the atmosphere of an internal crucifixion. 
• As Basquiat jabs language by graffitiing it, and thereby expresses both a humiliated relation to language and an active desire to humiliate the pants off it ('fuck you, language, for ripping me off') as well as to worship it ('words, you grand, sick creatures, you have stood above me, on your throne, for too long, and now I must crown myself the prince of the underworld text'), so Artaud, our man tied to the electroshock pallet, jabs language by making drawings that are also poems, artifacts that he calls "Spells," intended to cast hexes against enemies. 
• The words in Ligon's paintings, however, are sometimes so thickly painted that the shape of the individual letters disappears, and words become unreadable. "I FEEL MOST COLORED WHEN I AM THROWN / AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND," begins one Ligon painting, repeatng Zora Neale Hurston's words, but as we scroll down the painting, reading it, the words grow obscured with paint; and as articulation becomes smudged and encrusted, we feel that the attempt to combat humiliation with fervent, soulful speech meets the deafening interruption of paint itself. 
• (Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick inspired-) And although I'd differentiate shame from humiliation (shame is a flushed, abject feeling, while humiliation is the entire apparatus that causes the shame to erupt, the entire theater in which shame appears, a theater including torturer, victim, and witnesses), (Silvan) Tomkins links the two affects as one cluster: shame-humiliation. And he hinges his theory of shame-humiliation upon botched, thwarted encounters--moments when another person's strangeness, coldness, or unkindness interrupts one's own "interest or enjoyment." (continued) (...) ** Shame inheres in language. It is impossible to speak honestly without fearing the eruption of shame--an eruption caused by 'your refusal to respond, to enjoy, to reciprocate, to reward, to greet.' In a passage Sedgwick admired for its comforting resemblance to Gertrude Stein's litanies, Tomkins generally wrote: "If I wish to hear your voice but you will not speak to me, I can feel shame. If I wish to speak to you but you will not listen, I am ashamed. If I would like us to have conversations but you do not wish to converse, I can be shamed. If I would like to share my ideas, my aspirations, or my values with you but you do not reciprocate, I am ashamed. If I wish to talk and you wish to talk at the same time, I can become ashamed. If I want to tell you my ideas but you wish to tell me yours, I can become ashamed. 
• (John Waters casting Edith Massey) Another kind of viewer--I'm that kind, and so was Eve--understood that the act of making Edith a star, seeing her abjectness not as humiliating but as radiant and divine, came from the same universe of transvalued antipodes that made "Divine's obesity" not "unlovable and powerless" but "magnetically irresistible." (...) I'll close this fugue with an affirmation of fat, and a shout of praise for Sedgwick's energizing gesture of what she called "coming out as a fat woman." (...) (Sedgwick): " Denomination of oneself as a fat woman is a way...of making clear to the people around one that their cultural meanings will be, and will be heard as, assaultive and diminishing to the degree that they are not fat-affirmative." In other wors, if you don't affirm the worthiness of fat, you're a fat basher. 
• (his humiliations) Recently I wrote a commissioned essay about a painter. The curator told me that the painter was upset by my essay and that it would be pulled from the catalog. 
  
  Recently I wrote a commissioned essay about politics for a magazine. The editor told me, "Everyone here agrees that your piece won't fit in our issue."
  
  Recently I wrote a book review for a literary magazine. The editor called my essay a "botch" and didn't publish it. 

chelseamartinez's review against another edition

3.0

Koestenbaum's personal humiliations are sprinkled throughout the book and then come in a self-deprecating torrent at the end. In the middle is much musing on humiliated people, mostly celebrities, some of whom I have heard of. I read this at an odd moment considering that, unlike Michael Jackson, for example, the humiliated celebrities of the past month don't generally come off as credibly ashamed. Could be a whole new essay from Koestenbaum about that, which I would be eager to read.

lemonberry's review against another edition

reflective medium-paced

5.0

meganmilks's review against another edition

3.0

this book was frustrating. lots of forced connections, a lot of grandstanding and a lot of unconvincing pop psych and pop phil assertions. read a lot like ARE YOU MY MOTHER -- i wanted to like it, there's a lot to like about it, but the queasily ponderous writing style ("funny fact:" there's a website called tinypenishumiliation.com -- gee whiz!) was obstructive, as was the lack of real wisdom. and omg so many assumptions about and projections onto unwitting bystanders.

all that said, the last fugue/chapter is pretty solid and the chapter on artaud and basquiat is particularly interesting.

probably the style and voice issues have to do with the author writing to a general audience. i think about humiliation and shame a lot, so many of these ideas were already familiar.

meiklejohn's review against another edition

Couldn't finish - well-written, but far too much about bodily fluids and sexual violence, to a point at which the author is obviously just trying to shock. Not interested in being part of that.

livesinasociety's review against another edition

3.0

Eh.

nathanpage's review

4.0

My favorite part is when he starts speaking as Liza Minelli drunk on Larry King Live. And every other part.