A Habitus of Humiliation
December 08, 2022
To be obsessed with humiliation is potentially dangerous. Wayne Koestenbaum operates on the fringes of this danger. Humiliation is a Pandora’s box. Its breadth as a subject is pretty much prohibitive of any one coherent thesis. Writing about humiliation, Koestenbaum does not attempt a central argument or even a codifying structure. But that does not mean that his Humiliation is an aporiac exercise, perhaps entertaining, but ultimately lacking in any salient conclusions. Yes, at times Humiliation seems to be a flag without a pole, a disjointed American lyric, a product/symptom of an internet throttled foment. But it only masquerades as such. In actuality, its rhetorical engineering is quite sophisticated, its foundation sturdy.
To what end? Koestenbaum’s agenda here is to implant in readers humiliation as a lasting optic. He wants humiliation to thoroughly augment our conscious schemas, to “color the way [we] see the world” (Koestenbaum 12) the way it does for him. In Koestenbaum’s estimation, the arena of humiliation features three parties: the victim, the abuser, and the witness. His approach to this project of implantation is to construct Humiliation as a ready-made habitus of experiences—i.e., he outfits us in the garb of each triangular role, licenses us to operate as each (perhaps concurrently) for extended legs of our engagement with the text. To come out the other side is to achieve the habitus and to carry in-hand humiliation as a POV that cannot be excised.
Humiliation, in all its ugliness, is Koestenbaum’s cathexis, on occasion an “object of intellectual romance” (28), but more often a pesky pebble underfoot, or at scale, a beast he will never quell. One could say it is his prime abuser, and in choosing to foreground it in his work, to write about it so exhaustively, he is further humiliated by it. When we pick up the text, we are made privy to that humiliation, and as such, we are rendered the witness.
Identifying the ways in which we bear witness requires the least excavation. An obvious secondary triangulation lies in Koestenbaum’s choice to write at all. Language itself is to any writer another perpetual abuser. If/when at any juncture Koestenbaum’s use of language proves inadequate, if we “don’t understand what [he] is saying…[he] will feel humiliated” (43). Of course, language imposes a definite ceiling on expression. Any and all attempts to put into words the precise churnings of the mind are doomed to fail. Koestenbaum is licked before he even begins. But he begins anyway, revealing the reflexive nature of these triangular roles. “Language creaming, ascending, and thickening—this process…alerts me to a violence committed, symbolically, against English’s body” (43). Koestenbaum’s poking, prodding, bending of the lexicon and syntax to fit his vain articulation of that which cannot be articulated about humiliation—this humiliates language itself. He is also the abuser.
And so are we. To thrust us into this mode, Koestenbaum risks the emotional appeal of his rhetorical strategy. He is cheeky and deliberate in feeding the friction of his relationship with us: “…if I fail to communicate my meaning, and if you tell me I’ve failed, then you will have humiliated me” (43). Apologies if it seems page 43 has oversaturated the proceedings here. This quotation immediately follows those featured above. I cite the cluster because it is demonstrative of how fast, fluid, and subliminal (almost transgressive) Koestenbaum can be in toggling our roles.
Here, our conversation (as it were) with the text is temporarily halted. We become its adversary. In lamenting his anxieties, failures, Koestenbaum reminds us of our responsibilities as adjudicators. From here on out, the pressure Koestenbaum feels to satisfy our demands for cogency and utility—demands we didn’t necessarily even know we had for him—has increased tenfold. The choice to stop reading at any time is a clause of any reader-writer contract, but to so willingly hang a lantern on this push-pull upsets its balance. When we pick up Humiliation, we implicitly settle into a position superior to that of the author. Serve us. When, page by page, we assess the validity and consequence of Koestenbaum’s content, subconsciously or otherwise, we debase him. But in foregoing tokens in the reader-writer game, weathering vulnerability, Koestenbaum strengthens his rhetorical gambit. It is just as necessary to play the role of abuser as that of the abused.
We are victims too. Again, the currents of the humiliation triangle are recursive. To humiliate Koestenbaum is to humiliate ourselves. This dynamic appears innumerably (see, e.g., the Abu Ghraib fugal node). But there are further ripples of our victimhood. Koestenbaum is humiliation’s most devout fanatic, its spurned lover. I find my relationship with Humiliation the text to be edging somewhere similar. In conducting these proceedings here, to ostensibly ingratiate myself with Koestenbaum and his capstone, I humiliate myself. “To study a subject is to humiliate the subject and to humiliate oneself by the process of studying it” (19). Writing this here and now, I also find myself at the mercy of language. “To write is to be nailed and buggered by incubi and succubi” (145). The regress continues. More on our victim status later.
Koestenbaum’s tailoring of a humiliation habitus extends beyond imposing its roles upon us. In form, Humiliation is decidedly—almost maniacally—disorienting. The only organizing principle Koestenbaum adheres to conversely affords him carte blanche to tangent, tangle, divulge, divert, fracture at will. His noded fugue states portend juxtaposition. On page one, a note on the strip search of a Rikers Island inmate is followed by an aside on Liza Minelli. Later, the demise of Richard Nixon is somehow augured with junk TV program The Swan. And so on. Koestenbaum sees this kind of dissonance as core to the project: “…some of my fugal juxtapositions are literal and logical, while others are figurative, meant merely to suggest the presence of undercurrents, sympathies, resonances shared between essentially unlike experiences” (4).
Sure. But more than that, Koestenbaum is keyed into the affect of Humiliation’s moment. He conceives it against a fraught backdrop, a culture obsessed with itself, buoyed by slop. Humiliation mimics our experience of this foment as it is: a barrage of disparate stimuli to be processed and dissected. By extension, it mimics the experience of the internet, “the highway of humiliation” (20) where Nixon, Abu Ghraib, Marquis de Sade, Alec Baldwin, and Michael Jackson in that or any order are keystrokes away. If humiliation is to take effect as an optic, it must be fit to withstand and permeate this perpetual, scattered flood of material, hence the text’s construction as a simulation/microcosm of said flood, of our world. We do not process information in chapters. If the fugues were neatly organized into more distinct buckets of concern, the optic could never be properly affixed.
Koestenbaum figures a fugue as “a mentally unbalanced condition of dissociated wandering away from one’s own identity” (4). It follows then, that to exit a fugue is to return to one’s self. Humiliation charts this same trajectory. We traverse the series of densely populated fugues with Koestenbaum, humiliation our north star. Our arrival at the last fugue is a needed reprieve from the onslaught, a summit. Where its predecessors are muddy, the last fugue is crystalline, because it is personal, and “humiliation is always [ultimately] personal” (166). It sees Koestenbaum catalog his own experiences of humiliation, times when he was its actor in one or more capacities (points of the triangle). In a sense, Koestenbaum returns to himself, reclaims his identity. We are invited to do the same. This completes the download of the habitus. Though its potency may wax and wane, it is undeniable. Humiliation is installed as a fixture. We are marked and changed by our habitus, and see the world differently.
Does this render Koestenbaum the superlative abuser? To maintain the humiliation optic is to be infected. Everyone has experiences of humiliation and categorizes them accordingly in the ethereal banks of memory. Perhaps some are repressed. Humiliation is ugly. To have it texture every waking experience like a cloud is burdensome. The optic is not a key, but a nadir, “a whimpering beast inside each of us, a beast whose cries are micropitches, too faint for regular notation” (4). To the extent that Koestenbaum’s project is successful, the humiliation optic cannot be lobotomized. The implantation is irreversible and we take up humiliation as a lifelong intellectual and bodily tension. Of course, in picking up Humiliation, perhaps we were asking for it. We gave our consent. But only Koestenbaum knew humiliation’s true scope, its awesome power to torment, and he bound us to it anyway. To be made ever aware of humiliation is humiliating. We again find ourselves scorned victims.
Or is Koestenbaum a cipher? While Humiliation is born out of (and encapsulates) the hyperactive info-sensory goulash that is modernity, it might also provide its antidote: “Humiliation may be execrable and unendurable, but it is also genuine. And in a world that seems increasingly filled with fakeness, humiliation at least rings true” (60). The humiliation optic is a tool that can help us parse the artifice of everyday life, to get at what is true and meaningful. And it is abreactive. Aware of humiliation’s range of torments, Koestenbaum also recognizes the facility it has to cleanse: “the aftermath of humiliation can be paradoxically relaxing” (13). We hold the tension of humiliation, but we can release it (at least temporarily) to expunge that which is ugly inside ourselves.
To be obsessed with humiliation is potentially dangerous. In forbidding passivity, casting us readers as the active players on humiliation’s stage and subjecting us to a harrowing facsimile of a present rife with juxtaposition and crass objects, Koestenbaum incriminates us in that danger. Perhaps he passes on his curse. But the humiliation optic is also a gift. Through it, we enter the world as it really is. And find our way out.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. Humiliation. Picador, 2011.