INTRODUCTION: GUILT AND UTOPIA

Matthew Anderson

[...] it corresponds faithfully to my intention to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt

- Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents

In her celebrated short story Those Who Walk Away From Omelas (1973/ 2004) Ursula Le Guin depicts a utopia that depends upon the suffering of a single person - a child locked in a windowless cellar room no larger than a broom closet ‘‘It could be a boy or a girt It looks six but actually is nearly ten [...] It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protruded; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day It is naked Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores as it sits in its own excrement contin­ually” (Le Guin 2004, p.

There are no feelings of want or deprivation in Omelas Its inhabitants do not know hunger stress tension or pain It is a place of joy and happiness; there is a pervasive collective feeling of triumph - a triumphant feeling of life. Sexual longings are freely expressed and unselfconsciously fulfilled; indeed as the narrator explains there is no guilt in Omelas ‘‘One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt” (Le Guin 2004, p. 426).

Toward a Critique of Guilt: Perspectives from Law and the Humanities Studies in Law Politics and Society Volume 36, 1-13

Inhabitants typically learn of the child’s existence when they are between 8 and 12 years old and though many of them initially feel a sense of moral revulsion and sympathy they come to recognize and accept that the glorious achievements of their utopia are predicated upon the child’s suffering They might want to help the child but they understand that it would be morally wrong to sacrifice the happiness of Omelas for the sake of one inhabitant.

Not all of Omelas’s inhabitants are able to reconcile themselves with the terms of the pact that underwrites this moral economy however; some walk away But the narrator struggles to describe where it is they go when they leave ‘‘The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness I cannot describe it at all It is possible that that it does not exist’’ (Le Guin 2004, p. 429) As acts of individual resistance and self-assertion these departures are symbolically significant but not necessarily in the way intended; indeed it could be argued that those who walk away do not escape the logic of utopia for the place they walk away to is, etymologically the terrain of utopia - a ‘‘no place’’ a place that does not exist Thus in Le Guin’s account utopia anticipates and recuper­ates any attempt to escape the textual logic of its radical containment of the problem of guilt

Le Guin’s text belongs to a tradition of utopian literature that Thomas More inaugurates with the publication of his Utopia in 1516. One way to describe the significance of his text is to celebrate it for introducing the word ‘‘utopia’’ (a derivative of a Greek compound ou-topos - ‘‘no-place’’ or ‘‘nowhere’’ - which is a pun on eutopia, the word for ‘‘a place where all is well’’) and for its radical, proto-communist vision of a world without private ownership of property In a seminal essay on Utopia however the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt (1984) argues persuasively for reading it instead as ‘‘a strategy of imagined self-cancellation’’ (p.

In Greenblatt’s view the composition of Utopia thus reflects a personal crisis of identity that in its turn reflects an epistemological and ontological crisis a radical sense of skepticism about the status of the “real.” In contrast with his good friend Erasmus who looks at the world and sees the human comedy a parade of humankind’s vices and foibles More feels that the category distinctions implicit in such a worldview (eg truth vs falsehood, integrity vs hypocrisy the righteous vs the lubricious) are no longer salient.

As a result of this radical skepticism More feels isolated alone in his sense of individuality What exacerbates his sense of self-estrangement is not so much the dialectic between self and the world between his inner and outer self but rather that his sense of duplicity - the bedrock of his identity of his sense of himself as an individual - has no structural equivalent in a world unmoored from any reality principle In Greenblatt’s view what More enacts with Utopia is ‘‘the dream of a cancellation of identity itself” (p. 32) That is, More responds to the madness of the world by writing a book in which he imagines the possibility of doing away with individuality altogether.

[The] destruction of the individual as a private and self-regarding entity is a positive goal in Utopia; at the least, the ways in which a person could constitute himself as being distinct from those around him are radically reduced As we have seen More’s sense of his own distinct identity is compounded of a highly social role fashioned from his participation in a complex set of interlocking corporate bodies - law parliament, court, city church family - and a secret reserve a sense of life elsewhere unrealized in public performance Utopia cancels such an identity by eliminating among other things most of the highly particularized corporate categories in which a man could locate himself and by means of which he could say “I am this and not that. ’’ (pp. 41-42)

One of More’s central insights is that there is an essential relationship between private property and private selves: ‘‘[a]bolishing private ownership of property is causally linked in Utopia to what CB Macpherson calls ‘‘possessive individualism’’; to abolish private property is to render such self-conscious individuality obsolete’’ (Greenblatt, pp.

Tellingly the world he imagines is one in which there is little room for the feeling of guilt In Utopia social order is based principally upon shame and honor rather than guilt a concern for the opinion of others rather than an inner estimation of one’s conduct (Greenblatt, pp. 48-51) In one sense, this is simply the corollary of his cancellation of personal identity: to diminish the scope of the inner life is to diminish the possibility of guilt But Greenblatt argues that the relative absence of guilt in Utopia is evidence precisely of its central importance in More’s life. ‘‘In keeping with our general conception of his character and situation we may ask ourselves what a culture shaped by the force of shame and honor might have canceled or effaced in More’s existence The answer I think is guilt, by which I mean pangs of conscience the inner conviction of sinfulness the anxious aware­ness of having violated a law or distanced oneself from God’’ (Greenblatt, p.

Greenblatt suggests that there are many signs that More did in fact feel a powerful sense of guilt in his life and that although some of these signs (eg the hair shirt he secretly wore and the self-flagellations he secretly practiced) have a cultural significance that precludes us from reading them exclusively as attempts to expiate feelings of guilt we should not doubt or underestimate the pervasiveness of such feelings in More’s life ‘‘[There] can be little question that More did experience intense and sustained guilt feelings: quite apart from any deeper psychological roots his whole mode of life with its mingled accommodation and resistance to the world would have called such feelings into being and they would have been confirmed by the religious ideal of purity that he never eschewed’’ (Greenblatt, p. 51) He even goes so far as to suggest that in 1516, the year he publishes Utopia, More’s personal feelings of guilt might be connected to intimations of a broader historical phenomenon - the rise of Protestantism ‘‘The strong emphasis in Utopia on shame and communal solidarity may have represented as well More’s re­sponse to certain elements he perceived as dangerous in the religious climate of his time Protestantism obviously did not spring up from nowhere in 1517; Luther’s crisis of guilt was symptomatic of a far broader cultural crisis as the events of the 1520s and ‘30s make abundantly clear’’ (Greenblatt ₽· 52). Thus the relative absence of guilt in Utopia might attest not just to More’s personal feelings of guilt and self-estrangement but also to the structural contradictions of the Roman Catholic church in the early 16th century.

NIETZSCHE AND FREUD

Nietzsche’s and Freud’s views of guilt provide a useful theoretical con­text for understanding the relationship between guilt and Utopia we have outlined in Utopia and Those Who Walk Away From Omelas. Both of them speak of guilt as the internalization of cruelty or the instinct of aggression, and see it as an inward turn that reflects a historical context Nietzsche views guilt and ‘‘bad conscience” as a kind of illness In The Genealogy of Morals (1887/trans. 1989) he writes ‘‘[I] regard the bad conscience as the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fun­damental change he ever experienced - that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the wall of society and of peace” (Nietzsche 1989, p. 84) In Nietzsche’s view when faced with peace (the absence of an enemy upon whom one might inflict cruelty) and social mores (proscriptions against being cruel to one’s fellow citizen) a civilized human is left with only one subject upon whom he may express his aggression and satisfy his appetite for cruelty: himself ‘‘[He] turns himself into an adven­ture a torture chamber an uncertain and dangerous wilderness’’ (Nietzsche 1989, p. 85) Deprived of the possibility of expressing his aggressiveness externally man turns inward and expresses it internally upon himself Thus begins the age - and for Nietzsche it is our age - of ‘‘man’s suffering of man, of himself’’ (Nietzsche 1989 p 85)

In Civilization and its Discontents (1931/trans. 1961) Freud similarly defines guilt as ‘‘an aggressiveness which [has] been displaced inwards’’ (Freud 196) p. 102) And he claims that finding a way to contain or otherwise manage the instinct of aggression is the central challenge for civilization: ‘‘[ ] the problem before us is how to get rid of the greatest hindrance to civilization - the constitutional inclination of human beings to be aggressive towards one another’’ (Freud 1961 p. 108) In his view guilt - the internalization of the instinct of aggression enforced by the surveillance of the super-ego - is the solution that civilization devises in response to the threat this instinct presents

What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless to get rid of it, perhaps? [...] What happens to him to render his desire for aggression innocuous? Something very remarkable which we should never have guessed and which is nevertheless quite obvious His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; that is it is directed towards his own ego There is it taken over by a portion of the ego which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego and which now in the form of ‘‘conscience’’ is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other extra­neous individuals The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt [...] Civlization, therefore obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it like a garrison in a conquered city (1961 pp. 83-84)

Freud makes it plain that the remedy attests to the severity of the threat, that is that the containment of the instinct of aggression comes at the price of a significant measure of happiness ‘‘What a potent obstacle to civiliza­tion aggressiveness must be if the defense against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself” (Freud 1961 p. 109) In the end the feeling of guilt proves to be almost as deleterious and detrimental to psychic wellbeing as the problem it is meant to solve.

Nietzsche and Freud both identify the same fundamental elements - civ­ilization religion and the characteristically conflicted inner life of modern (Western) humans - but whereas Freud speaks in biological and anthro­pological terms Nietzsche argues that guilt emerges in tandem with the Judeo-Christian tradition or rather as a historical consequence of what Nietzsche might describe as ‘‘the defeat of the nobles by the slaves” (Although it is plain that by ‘‘slaves” he means the Hebrew people it is not at all clear who the ‘‘nobles” are historically: on occasion he intimates that the age of these noble ‘‘blonds beasts” corresponds to a mythic golden age in classical Greece (Nietzsche 1961 p. 40) but these hints are suggestive only and cannot be pieced together to form a coherent history) Thus while Freud conditions us to think of guilt as a transcultural formation Nietzsche inclines us toward a view of guilt as the product not of civilization in general but of a specific cultural tradition a tradition shaped by the will to power Yet the commonality between Nietzsche’s and Freud’s views of guilt provides an illuminating conceptual framework for describing why guilt is absent from the worlds imagined by More and Le Guin or rather why it is present as a central theme through its absence They help us explain how a critique of utopia leads to a critique of guilt to a sense of the intimacy between guilt and the utopian imaginary

Nietzsche and Freud both describe guilt as aggressiveness that would naturally find outward expression or satisfaction but is redirected inward out of historical necessity I would propose here that with respect to Utopia and Those Who Walk Away From Ornelas, we think of this self-contained aggressiveness as a condition necessary for the possibility of the utopian imaginary Greenblatt’s reading of the context of Utopia suggests that the literary genre of utopian writing is from its inception a ‘‘strategem of imagined self-cancellation’’ a way of asserting and projecting oneself in the context of a world that does not make sense (Self-assertion can be thought of as a form of aggressiveness; that is aggression is not simply the expres­sion of an appetite for cruelty or physical violence) More projects himself into his world by imagining one in which the problem of individuality and self-assertion is negatively resolved canceled And by canceling individuality he does away with the possibility of guilt as an emotion since guilt is meaningless without a sense of individual, psychic interiority.

As we have seen Greenblatt argues that this is no mere coincidence: if guilt is largely absent from Utopia it is precisely because a personal feeling of guilt is so pervasive in More’s life In his view the feeling of guilt is indissolubly bound up with the sense of individuality that More takes aim at when he imagines abolishing the private ownership of property ‘‘Utopian shame opposes the undesirable development of inwardness through guilt, as its communism opposes the development of a sense of self-ownership; both are viewed as traps or nightmares” (Greenblatt, p. 54) And there is another way in which Utopia can be thought of as issuing from a sense of guilt for the psychic interiority that in Nietzsche’s view follows the advent of guilt - the inner recess of subjectivity that is carved out as a result of the redirection inward of the instinct of aggression - is the wellspring of the imagination that produces Utopia In other words guilt creates the interiority without which there would be neither the need nor the capacity to imagine its absence

In contrast, Le Guin turns guilt inside out She makes it the explicit theme of her plot and the structuring principle of the social order in Omelas. The internalization of aggression is radically externalized and contained in her story: all of the society’s aggressiveness is structurally directed toward and thus limited to the suffering of one person; it is literally self-contained Or almost - there are those who walk away But it can be argued that even those few acts of individual resistance and self-assertion are ultimately recuperated and contained by the logic of Omelas for the place they walk away to the place that lies beyond the boundaries of their society’s imagi­nary is the same place that More identifies etymologically as the terrain of utopia ‘‘no place ’’ By walking away from Omelas they walk into the logic of the imaginary they would escape

This irony recapitulates one of the most incisive critiques of utopian writing namely that although literary utopias typically do engage with ide­ology and present alternatives to dominant modes of (false) consciousness, the very act of imagining a world reinforces one of the central tenets of ideology in the age of (late) capitalism - the idea that the field of social, economic and political experience can ultimately be represented as a unified whole (The literary critic Terry Eagleton (1990) has offered one of the more eloquent and conceptually rich versions of this critique in his book The Ideology of the Aesthetic.) Utopian writing represents a totalizing gesture, which through its very form restores faith in the possibility of reconstitu­ting the world as a whole despite systemic structural inequalities and contradictions and the social fragmentation they entail. In this view the energies of utopian writing may be characterized as liberal or conservative but never as radical, for they retain the form of ideology.

CONCLUSION

Against the backdrop of this cursory sketch of a few elements of the literary and philosophical tradition that informs Western notions of guilt and Utopia I would suggest that the seven articles in this volume are all expressions of a liberal utopian imaginary They are liberal in the sense that even when they argue for the need for a critical reevaluation of traditional (Western) narratives of guilt, their vision is ultimately one of continuity and revision not rupture This implicit faith that existing critical traditions still contain the resources and flexibility necessary for guiding the project of civilization is made explicit in the case of the last two pieces in the volume the articles by Chaya Halberstam and Linda Meyer which return us to the accumulated wisdom of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a touchstone for a critique of guilt.

The articles are utopian in a double sense On one level it is because they all issue I would argue from a commitment to a social imaginary that orients itself if only heuristically in accordance with an implied progressive vision of a justly ordered society and the hope of its future realization On another level, however it is because their operative concept of justice reflects a concern not just for the redress of particular wrongs but more broadly, for what we might call the integrity of the “real.” This is particularly pal­pable in the articles that address the guilt inscribed by traumatic histories of cruelty and violence The challenge that Ravit Reichman, Susan Pearson, Sara Murphy and Iain Morland recognize each in their own way is one not only of overcoming a societal unwillingness to reckon with a painful or violent past but also of literally coming to terms with of finding adequate language for experiences that defy linguistic expression These scholars call our attention to experiences of suffering that overwhelm any capacity to make sense of experience and thus have not been told - and must be told for precisely that reason The literary scholar Shoshana Felman (2002) has argued recently that traumatic experience exceeds the frame of law because its language registers a syntactic disruption that is irreducibly incompatible with law’s vocation to order She describes this gap between traumatic experience and linguistic representation as an ‘‘abyss’’ Moreover she suggests that whereas in trials law attempts ‘‘to close abysses’’ (Felman, 2002, p. 83) literary texts resist the effort to foreclose the resonances of trauma.

Under the practical constraints of having to insure accountability and to bring justice, the law tries to make sense of the abyss or to reduce its threat (its senselessness its unintelligible chaos) by giving it a name by codifying it or by subsuming its reality (which is inherently nameless and unclassifiable) into the classifying logic and into the technical procedural coherence of the trial But in so doing the law (trial or the lit­igation) inadvertently denies the abyssal nature of the abyss in pretending or in mis- guidedly assuming the abyss is something else something that can be assimilated to known rules or precedents something that can be enclosed contained within the rec­ognizability of known (stereotypical) legal agendas

But the purpose of the literary text is on the contrary to show or to expose again the severance and the schism to reveal once more the opening the hollowness of the abyss to wrench apart what was precisely covered over, closed, or covered up by the legal trial. The literary text casts open the abyss so as to let us look once more into its depth and see its bottomlessness (Felman, p 95)

Felman defines art as a language of infinity law as a language of closure and limitation ‘‘Law is a language of abbreviation of limitation and totaliza­tion Art is a language of infinity and of the irreducibility of fragments a language of embodiment of incarnation and of embodied incantation or endless rhythmic repetition' (Felman p. 153) Understandably some legal scholars such as Jane Baron whose article opens the volume take issue with what they perceive as the reductiveness of such binary definitions of the fields of law and art, and argue for a more textured and mediated conceptual understanding of law in the dialogue between law and the humanities

This volume is a contribution toward a cultural critique of guilt Several of the articles are expanded versions of papers that were presented at a Law & the Humanities conference on the theme of‘‘Guilt” held at the University of New England in June of 2003 I would like to thank Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick the editors of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, for providing a forum for this work Like the conference this volume brings together scholars of law and from across the disciplines of the humanities to examine the cultural conditions under which guilt is produced or occluded or to put it more prosaically how the work of guilt gets done Their articles exemplify the vitality of current research examining the intersections of law and culture while the range of their specific interests reflects the breadth and richness of their disciplinary perspectives For example they ask what is ‘‘law”? How do narratives contribute to the vital project of naming the guilt of traumatic histories of cruelty rape racism and genocide? How does medical science reckon with the residues of guilt it leaves behind inscribed upon the bodies of past patients in the wake of its ‘‘progress”? And if in the West attitudes toward guilt still reflect the legacies of the Judeo-Christian tradition how might some of that sacred tradition’s texts and accumulated wisdom inform contemporary expectations we may have of ourselves or of the others we judge in matters of guilt and remorse? At a time when the institutional signs of the establishment of a new paradigm are increasingly visible - eg the existence of a professional association (The Association for the Study of Law Culture and the Humanities which will hold its eighth annual conference in March of 2005); the launching (also in the spring of 2005) of a peer-reviewed journal, Law, Culture & the Humanities - this volume affords a glimpse of this emergent field of humanistic interdiscipli­nary legal studies

SUMMARY OF ARTICLES

In her article Law’s Guilt About Literature, which opens the first section, ‘‘(Re)thinking Law through Literature’’ Jane Baron a professor of law, focuses on what she sees as the guilt that contemporary legal scholars have felt in the face of an unflattering image reflected in literature of the law Baron is concerned that this sense of guilt has led legal scholars to leave unchallenged the view of law as doctrine a view which she argues prevails in much literary scholarship and more importantly that it has inhibited the development of an urgently needed reconsideration of what ‘‘law'' is - a project that could lead to a better far more nuanced understanding of what legal culpability means both conceptually and practically The next article by the literary scholar Ravit Reichman is not a counterpoint to Baron's though it examines an instance in which the language of literature lays bare the moral collapse of legal language at a particularly consequential juncture in 20th-century European history She argues that Albert Camus in his post-World War II novel The Fall (1956) tells the story of a bridge of complicity between medicine and law implicating both in the creation of the Nazi formulation of race.

In the next section ‘‘Bodies of Guilt,’’ three scholars consider guilt’s relation to the concrete material performance of law and to history They remind us that the incommensurability between the practice of law and a sense of justice is embodied not abstract - indeed that the body (animal or human) is often the site upon which competing notions of culpability con­verge and are most plainly felt and contested Iain Morland a literary scholar who has extensively studied the plight of intersexed patients (ie people who are born with genitalia that do not clearly indicate a single sex) highlights what he sees as the persistent failure of physicians to engage in frank self-reflexive dialogue with an earlier generation of intersexed patients many of whom had surgery performed on their genitalia without informed consent He is concerned not just with the issue of informed con­sent and culpability but with how the story that physicians tell of the ‘‘progress” of their field reckons with the painfully scarred bodies it leaves behind Susan Pearson an historian echoes several of the themes of Mor­land’s article She recounts an instance in the history of United States law in which progress was occasioned by an active reframing of the legal signif­icance of bodily pain Specifically she describes how animal activists work­ing in the United States during the second half of the 19th century successfully lobbied for the passage of anti-cruelty legislation by focusing attention on the effects of cruelty on animal bodies As a result, she suggests, these activists introduced new narratives of guilt and human innocence for in most states the newly defined crime of cruelty to animals consisted not in mens rea but rather in the effects of actions; in other words the locus of guilt shifted from the human mind to the animal body In the last article of the section Sara Murphy a literary scholar focuses on the violence and cruelty visited upon African bodies marked by pernicious (Western) cultural con­structions of race and on how the story of that inhuman history gets told She focuses on how Toni Morrison in her novel Beloved (1987), situates North American slavery in terms of the traumatic and thus raises far- reaching questions about the structure of guilt and authority.

The two articles of final section ‘‘Longer Views’’ reach back explicitly or implicitly to some of the earliest meditations in the Judeo-Christian tradi­tion on questions of guilt and judgment Chaya Halberstam a scholar of religion examines the sophisticated readings by rabbinic interpreters from Late Antiquity of two exemplary narratives of guilt in Genesis: the story of Cain’s murder of Abet and of Judah’s mistreatment of his daughter-in-law Tamar She reveals that early rabbinic thought recognizes both the pressing social need for determinations of criminal guilt but also after the example of the two stories from Genesis that guilt is never absolute Moreover she argues that the two understandings of guilt need not be harmonized: a legal understanding of guilt need not require a philosophical or theological counterpart In the closing essay Linda Meyer a legal scholar explores what could be called the after-life of guilt - remorse She suggests that while we commonly expect offenders to be perpetually remorseful for their crimes this stance is not only unrealistic but also existentially impossible for the only options available then for offenders and victims alike are death or forgiveness

REFERENCES

Eagleton T. (1990) The ideology of the aesthetic. London: Blackwell.

Felman, S. (2002) The juridical unconscious. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Freud S. (1961) In: J. Riviere (Trans.) Civilization and its discontents. New York: W. W. Norton (Original work published 1931)

Greenblatt, S. (1984) Renaissance self-fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: Univer­sity of Chicago Press.

Le Guin U. (2004) The ones who walk away from Omelas. In: N Wood (Ed.) Perspectives on argument, (4th ed.) (pp. 425-429) New Jersey: Pearson Education (Original work pub­li_sh_ed 1973).

Nietzsche F. (1989) In: W. Kaufmann (Trans.) On the genealogy of morals. New York: Vintage (Original work published 1887)