Beyond Columbine by Julie A. Webber

Author:Julie A. Webber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang AG
Published: 2017-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

The National Wave of Shame Is Ironic

Thomas Keenan’s reading of the mobilization of shame as a conceptual event that can be read by public audiences is interesting in this regard since it focuses on the misplaced expectations that such audiences have with regard to shame. As Keenan maps “shame” beginning with the American experience in the Vietnam War and connects it to the Kantian Enlightenment strategy, which supposed that citizens could be shamed out of heteronomy; that is, they could be informed by news coverage of the war’s failures, calculate their costs and sacrifices and make a practical decision to stop support for it. Yet, he finds that the response to feeling shame can also be read as an act of defiance, of revenge against the moral authorities that would judge such acts as shameful. As he writes concerning shame as a tactic deployed by social movements or media for progressive causes, “Mobilizing shame presupposes that dark deeds are done in the dark, and that the light of publicity—especially of the television camera—thus has the power to strike preemptively on behalf of justice. With a wave, these policemen announced their comfort with the camera, their knowledge of the actual power of truth and representation” (Keenan 2004, 446). The “wave” were the acts of the soldiers in Kosovo to the camera with full knowledge that their crimes will be captured on film. In this case, representation, according to Keenan, doesn’t matter because the effect of the shame is that it becomes a badge of pride. Moreover, the soldiers are able to use the camera to communicate their revenge to mobilize new adherents to their cause. He quotes Keats while explaining the wave, which I read as indicative of many of these publicized attacks:

The wave announces—it performs, it enacts—that there’s no hiding here, nothng in the dark, nothing to be ashamed of. And it demonstrates this for the very instruments that are known for their revelatory abilities—the wave says, “Expose this, this is what I am exposing for you.” Like the hand at the end of Keat’s strange little fragment “This Living Hand,” the waving hands of Mijalic each say, “See here it is, I hold it toward you,” and they do what they say. (Keenan 2004, 446) ← 120 | 121 →

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