Silvan Tomkins

Catherine Hoffmann's Free Lunch with the Stench Wench is a performance of abjection and self-abjection through poverty with an apotropaic aspiration: to shed the shame through sharing, and to create opportunities for a common social subjectivity that refuses to be silent about the struggle of its own creation and maintenance. Despite its title, Free Lunch does not come with a free lunch for the audience but creates an olfactory situation, through the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat, which complements Hoffmann's narration and stage presence into a synaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychosocial fallout. Drawing on the psychological foundations of shame studies, sociological approaches and social-theoretical responses to austerity and social division, I propose to examine the gendered embodiment of shame and its exorcism in Hoffmann's performance, focusing on its physical codification in and beyond the visual. I explore the potential of shame to be re-weaponized against those who originally inflict it, and consider the shame that haunts every creative act, especially those with high political stakes: the failure to make a connection, the fear of being misunderstood.

In this article, I explore the way that the creation and presentation of Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988) confronted the choreographer, performers, and audience with questions about the ethics of sex and romance and the treatment of gay men during the AIDS crisis. To analyze the complex affective relationships within and around the piece, I follow Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical theory of the face in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s related theory of faciality, which I interpret as referring to a disciplinary situation in which subjects are created through a process of terrorizing and shaming.

According to Polarity Theory, all ideologies are fundamentally polarized by a conflict between Humanism, which idealizes and glorifies humanity, and Normativism, which portrays human goodness and worth as contingent upon conformity and achievement. Humanism and Normativism have, however, turned out to be distinct worldviews rather than opposite ends of a single bipolar continuum. Introducing a hierarchical model of their structure and developing scales to measure each facet, I previously showed that they are negatively related across views of human nature, interpersonal attitudes, and attitudes to affect, but not across epistemologies and political values. This report presents the eight-item facet scales and fifteen-item short-measures of humanism and normativism, along with descriptive statistics for each item in US and Swedish samples.

Taking as its starting point Christine Nystrom's definition of media ecology as the study of the interactions between communications media, technologies, techniques and processes, and human thought, feeling, value and behaviour, this article argues that media ecologists have inadequately developed the field's consideration of the phenomenon we understand as 'feeling'. With this in mind, I maintain that the affect-script theory of the personality theorist Silvan Tomkins has much to contribute to the media ecology perspective, not only in bringing to bear a nuanced understanding of emotional phenomena, but in what Tomkins' ideas might contribute to our understanding of focal areas of media ecological concern, such as literacy, the accelerated rate of technological change and forms of violence.

My concern in this paper is with how Silvan Tomkins’ theory of affects might help us to think about the affective response to art. For my purposes, there are two aspects of his account of affects that are particularly useful. First, he does not presume that there is a proper object of affect; hence the love of art is not automatically or necessarily about the diversion of libido or the investment of libidinal energy. The second significant factor in Tomkins' account of affects is the way in which he separates and yet entwines the drives, affects and cognition. It is this model of the embodied, feeling, thinking subject which promises to reach what most people seek or expect from the experience of art.