Lisa Prentice’s installation The Purpose of Shame fails from the get go. By drawing on emotional principle, she operates outside of critical protection. Using materials salvaged from the garbage of local building sites and images from her notebooks that were never meant for public view, Prentice attempts a supra rational (or perhaps just a non-rational ) dialogue with the modernist object(ive). Prentice’s suggestion that “I’ll go first” into the black-lit toke shack, attempts to reassert the galvanizing power of emotion that classical theory has sidelined, but that children and the stoned understand so completely. Frustrated by critical discourse’s devotion to reason even as reason fails, Prentice instead looks to sociology and non-classical psychotherapy as forms that have long upheld the importance of emotions and their transformative effects in social and political practice.