Guilt, shame and sadness as notions are not only interrelated, there is also structure and hierarchy involved. Tim Morton suggests that this could be made productive to confront the big challenges of this planet.

By Timothy Morton

In this essay, I shall be distinguishing between guilt and shame. I take guilt to be the sense that one has done something wrong, the ‘call of conscience’ that reminds me of my out-of-joint, uncanny existence. I take shame, on the other hand, to be the sense that I am something wrong, that there is something disgusting that is an irreducible part of me. I am not yet convinced that guilt is ecologically useful. But if forced to choose between guilt and shame, I would pick guilt, even though this would make me unpopular with some postmodern philosophers. Shame is the go-to affect in the contemporary academy, a sign of its increasing removal from the things of this world. Anyone who has recently experienced shame will assure that it drove her to murderous or suicidal thoughts. Sure, it’s a way to realize you are caught in the gaze of the other, just as a bullet embedded in your chest is a way to realize that there is more to life than what you make of it. Shame says ‘I am wrong’, and humans have had quite enough of this kind of exceptionalism – humans for a certain kind of ecological philosopher are a unique or uniquely attuned virus, a stain that needs to be wiped out. The so-called critique of anthropocentrism thus runs along strictly anthropocentric rail tracks towards annihilation of the race.

Guilt, however, proclaims ‘I have done something wrong,’ and thus it brings up the possibility of redress. It is not surprising that some ecological thinkers value shame, since it is possible to mistake ecological guilt for shame. Why? The particular kind of guilt with which ecological awareness is associated strongly resembles the realization at the heart of a noir detective story: the detective himself is the guilty party. The person who is looking is the one who is ultimately seen. The experience of having- been-seen is, without doubt the phenomenological essence of shame. Derrida experiences a moment of shame when he feels seen by his cat, for this reason. In the case of noir, however, it is important not to collapse the two levels of seeker and seen, the one who investigates and the one who is investigated, even when they are exactly the same person: Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly gives a particularly tightly looped rendition of this theme. The tension in guilt depends precisely on this unbreach- able ontological cut between being seen and seeing.

It is, however, quite clear even from this very cur- sory analysis that shame is more primal than guilt – hence the emergence of shame cultures before guilt cultures. Shame as it were is the phenomenological reduction of guilt, what guilt contains, like a chocolate wrapped in paper. Shame is the primordial fact of being-held-by some other entity, enclosed in it or held in its force field, gazed at. A radical passivity, a having-been-given to something. There thus arises the potent danger that in exploring ecological guilt, we will be caught in shame, since shame is more primal and thus more powerful than the guilt that wraps it, makes it manageable and workable. A shame culture, for instance, doesn’t do well with rape: a raped woman is liable to be killed for besmirching the family’s honor. If Earth has been raped by humans – to use a common image – does this not imply that the logical shame culture solution would be to annihilate Earth altogether? Or perhaps to annihilate ourselves, to erase the possibility that we humans could witness our rape? Shame is attractive to scholars because it guarantees the existence of the social, as if it needed guaranteeing – but at what cost?

There is a problem that is the inverse of this problem of shame, having to do with the fact that as the wrapping of shame, guilt doesn’t know what to do with shame except to contain it. Thus in guilt cultures such as Protestantism there arise all kinds of endlessly repeated compulsive rituals, which ward off the shameful essence by wrapping and re-wrapping it over and over again. How can we know, how can we prove adequately, that we have successfully atoned for our guilt? Doesn’t guilt imply a potentially infinite series of compensations, and wouldn’t this series be the very opposite of a biologically or ecologically homoeostatic feedback loop – in other words, isn’t guilt a positive feedback loop of the most dangerous sort, that could multiply infinitely, so that the more guilty I feel, the more I must atone, which makes me feel more guilty, and so on? Isn’t guilt in this sense an undead specter that haunts my biological being and drives me on and on to do ever more ridiculous feats to satisfy its irrational lust? The irony of ironies would be to destroy the planet in the very process of trying to atone for our guilt. Stranger things have happened.

Rather than trying to escape shame by moving outwards from shame towards guilt, perhaps it would be better to tunnel into shame, to try to reduce the reduction, as it were, to get inside the chocolate and see if there was a liquid center that was not subject to the violence of shame and guilt. Wrapping shame in guilt and disposing of it by shelving it is an endless task. Staying with shame is intrinsically destructive, either of self or of other – and murder–suicide is also a popular combination. Trying to get back ‘behind’ guilt is rather like trying to fold a piece of paper more than five or six times – it is possible but very difficult; immense pressures are involved. Thinking tends to break down and philosophy begins to look use- less. We encounter what esoteric practitioners such as yogis and mystics encounter, because we are operating at an ontological depth below the normal seen–seer boundary. So what we find in there, down there, must be regarded with some skepticism and treated as a spec- ulative discovery, like realizing that the Earth is not the center of the universe: it’s true, but everything in my ontically given experience (sunrise, the revolution of the stars) tells me otherwise.

Shame is perhaps the right track: ‘humiliation’ after all means being brought down to earth. Darwin is one in a series of great humiliators of the human, the being who arose from the humus, from dust and spittle. Some contemporary ecological philosophers think so, such as William Jordan.

There is a liquid center inside shame: it is a liquid center of sadness. This liquid center is present in phrases such as ‘What a shame’, which don’t seek to pin the tail of shame on the donkey of the addressee. Rather such phrases express something more like disappointment and loss: the loss George Harrison gets at in ‘Isn’t It a Pity’. This isn’t shame, if shame means the intense judgment of others, the registration in my body of the social bond, and murderous–suicidal feelings. Nor is it pity, if by that term we mean what Blake means when he writes “Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody poor”(‘The Human Abstract’). Blake is saying that pity sustains the social hierarchy by putting the pity-er higher than the pity-ee.

To get to this liquid center we must traverse a region of solidity that is like the sugar crystal coating that keeps the liquid center in place in a Swiss chocolate. This region is known as melancholy, depression. So the sequence goes:

Guilt >> Shame >> Melancholy >> Sadness

Where >> represents ‘reduces to’. Reduction it simply meansas the bracketing off of ‘noise’ caused by a certain conceptualization of subject–object relations. The phenomenological reduction is precisely this: I look directly at the attitude with which I hold a thought, strip- ping from my attention the ‘object’ about which I am thinking. I study the weather in my mind as I think, rather than the view ‘outside’ it. This seems counter-intuitive from an ecological philosophical point of view, which is precisely why I suggest it. There is a tendency to look away from the mind that is experiencing the tree, the cloud, the polluted lake, the radiation. Shouldn’t I be ashamed of myself even for suggesting that we look away from the cloud, the fallout, the mutagenic insect? Precisely – normative environmentalism wants me to feel guilty or ashamed, and in doing so it scratches at the itch of human being, an itch that is already rubbed raw by the very modernity that created the current ecological emergency. Instead of scratching the itch, I suggest we isolate and study the itch. What is it? Why scratch it? I suggest we look at the mind that is looking at the tree – away from the ‘object’ and back towards the ‘subject’. We will discover that this seemingly perverse introspection bears fruit.

Let us proceed, then, with the phenomenological reduction of ecological feeling. We shall descend from guilt to shame, then below shame to what is here called ‘sadness’. Thus when I strip from the feeling of guilt my relation to some abstract voice of conscience, I find myself confronted by the nakedness of shame. Likewise when I strip from shame the gaze of another who fixes me with the shaming look, I find sadness. With this sad- ness it appears as if we have arrived at an attunement that is less conditioned by a conceptual relation to another. Sadness is based on the unconditional, insofar as it is an attunement based on the fact that something cannot be grasped by our ego. In other words, sadness is close to things that are not-me, that are not conditioned by me such as opinions and thoughts and habitual patterns. Sadness just is the attunement to the ungraspability of a thing. For this reason one Buddhist scholar calls it “the genuine heart of sadness,” his translation of the Sanskrit bodhicitta (awakened heart, enlightened mind). Sadness is the footprint of coexistence in my inner space. It is unconditional, since it lacks an object – it is the lacking of an object, the sense that no object can be known or held fully.

Sadness is thus predicated on richness, but a strange richness that can’t be possessed entirely: “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea change / Into something rich and strange.” Ecological coexistence requires such sea changes. Because things exist, they touch me: ‘I am touched’, a term that reso- nates between a physical and an aesthetic event. Quite deliberately: the physical proximity of a thing is aesthetic, but this aesthetic dimension is causal, insofar as the proximate thing affects me, yet this causality is not mechanical, but rather a matter of appearance, the aesthetic. There are other beings, and they withdraw from me: the more I handle them, the less I am sure of them, the more richness they reveal. Anyone with a long-term partner can attest to that – your boyfriend or girlfriend is one of the weirdest people you know. Knowledge makes things more uncanny, because it discloses the dark futurality of a thing, its unknown unknowable qualities.

Sadness in this sense is a resonance, full-bodied like the note of a cello or an oboe: “The oboe. The official instrument of the International Order of Travel Agents. If the duck was a song bird, it would sound like this: nasal, desolate, the call of migratory things” (Angels in America). The ‘full bodied’ quality of an oboe is not a testimony to a metaphysics of presence, but to a weird physicality that withdraws from access. The physical, ‘nasal’ sound tells of the body, of something that is there, yet not there, lost in translation, a migrating bird – an ‘agent’ that ‘travels’. The migratory thing is there yet not for long, it is not here yet it will arrive. It exists – yet it is not directly, ‘ontically’ given to me. It is not nothing – that would be easier; it does not reside in an inaccessible beyond – I can hear it. The resonance of coexistence. Melancholia, which psychoanalysis thinks as the default mode of sentience as such, is only the frozen phase state of this sadness, the rigid print of another in our inner space. Melancholy is an indexical sign, like a footprint, a sign that is a part of what made it: a foot, the call of a bird. Sadness itself is a withdrawn thing, a liquid core. The raw tenderness of sadness resembles what it re- sounds to, the departing of things, which is predicated on the physical incompletion of being. For a thing to exist, it must be fragile, in a weird Aristotelian application of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to physical things. Chögyam Trungpa, thinker of ‘the genuine heart of sad- ness’, describes the attunement of what he calls a “warrior”, a contemplative committed to “living in the challenge” of existence, which is necessarily coexistence:

The birth of the warrior is like the first growth of a reindeer’s horns. At first, the horns are very soft and almost rubbery, and they have little hairs growing on them. They are not yet horns, as such: they are just sloppy growths with blood inside. Then, as the reindeer ages, the horns grow stronger, developing four points or ten points or even forty points. Fearlessness, at the beginning, is like those rubbery horns. They look like horns, but you can’t quite fight with them. When a reindeer first grows its horns, it doesn’t know what to use them for. It must feel very awkward to have those soft, lumpy growths on your head. But then the reindeer begins to realize that it should have horns … when a human being first gives birth to the tender heart of warriorship, he or she may feel extremely awkward or uncertain about how to relate to this kind of fearlessness. But then, as you experience this sadness more and more, you realize that human be- ings should be tender and open. So you no longer need to feel shy or embarrassed about being gentle. In fact, your softness begins to become passionate. You would like to extend yourself to others and communicate with them.

Notice how Trungpa describes something associ- ated with sexual display, from a technical, Darwinian point of view – the growth of horns – to evoke the genuine heart of sadness. Sexual display is pure expenditure, pure gift, a sub-Kantian aesthetic of purposelessness. There are aspects of the physical being of life forms that are pointless. Sadness likewise has no object, no ‘point’. The feeling of ‘Isn’t it a pity’ is attuned to this structural incompletion, this fragility of a thing. It is thus a highly realistic attunement in a biosphere of necessarily vulnerable beings. It is almost shameful: “It must feel very awkward to have those soft, lumpy growths on your head.” But one does not stop there. Shame is only retroactive in relation to the more primordial sadness, the feeling of vulnerability and the courage to face it. To be ashamed is to have been open to shame, which is to be tender and sad, that is, open to the coexistence of other beings. Thus “you no longer need to feel shy or embarrassed about being gentle.” Shame is nowhere near adequate to get humans through imagining the 24,100 year time span appropriate to plutonium 239, or the 100,000 year time span of global warming. What is required is the ‘rawness’ that Trungpa describes here.

Guilt is to shame as the sugar coating is to a chocolate. But sadness is to shame as the liquid center is to the chocolate. If we want to progress ecologically, for instance if we want to have more people accepting the reality of global warming, then we need to walk them through an experience that is phenomenologically equiv- alent to accepting global warming, rather than bludgeon- ing them with facts or trying to ‘guilt them out’ or shame them, which will only breed denial. The best way to do this is to make contact with the liquid center of sadness, often frozen into melancholy, at the core of sentient being. This liquid core is the trace of coexistence, shorn of coexistents, unconditional, strange, palpable yet with- drawn, uncanny, sad. That way, no bludgeoning is required: we will have poured people into the right psychic space to accept the very large-scale, long-term issues that beset this planet.

Timothy Morton is Professor of English at UC Davis. He is the author of The Ecological Thought and several other books and essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food and music.

^{This article is part of Volume #31: Guilty Landscapes.}

Labelling a martyr is, in a way, an expression of collective guilt. Martyrs are a simultaneous reminder of the hopes and ideals that an individual stood for, and also the oppressive nature of humankind to smother those ideals. Memorializing martyrs then is a way of atoning for this collective guilt and to give renewed hope that the dreams of the fallen can somehow be realized. A popular way of memorializing martyr is to name streets after them – creating a potentially difficult juxtaposition. To what extent can a street, subject to all the pressures of the city, live up to the lofty ideals of an individual? And what does it say of us when a memorialized street itself becomes a symbol of broken dreams? Guy Tillim and Susan Berger have both created photo series that examine this deep irony.

Tillim looks at Patrice Lumumba, the great hero of African independence, who was murdered by his colleague Mobutu Sese Seko; after taking power of the Congo Mobutu subsequently canonized him as a hero and was regarded so throughout continent. Several African nations were quick to memorialize lumumba’s honor by naming streets after him. today, tillim’s shots of these avenues display a heavy sadness – faded signs of the hopes of an independent Africa embodied in dusty streets, toppled over statues, and stained concrete modernism. Over in the United States, Berger takes on Martin Luther King Jr. and the many MLK Boulevards across the countries that were baptized in his wake. These streets are often situated in some of the most destitute inner-city neighborhoods – a sign of the great white flight that emptied out many American cities in the latter half of the twentieth century and the systemic racism and poverty that persists today.

^{This article is part of Volume #31: Guilty Landscapes.}

Architecture has historically been a profession based on well-established principles, passed down from master to apprentice. These principles however have become ever more evasive, volatile and changing. each successive generation casts away the principles of their predecessors and declares their own.

Different movements and styles stake their claim to what is the ‘right way to build’. This has led to a highly accusational tendency within the culture of architecture; young architects are trained to be adversarial and have thick skins. What does this mean for guilt in the profession? if forced to always be on the offensive what room is left for honest introspection and self-evaluation? Architects, ever ready to accuse others, have rarely confessed guilt of their own.

^{This article is part of Volume #31: Guilty Landscapes.}

Last Thursday we organized a breakout session during the What Design Can Do conference in Amsterdam. The session on contact ironically began in mutual isolation. Upon arrival at the meeting point in the centre of Leidseplein, each guest was handed a pair of red ‘silent disco’ headphones (capable of receiving a radio signal) blocking out the voices of our friends and hosts. Our MC Lilet Breddels of Archis/Volume instructs us over the airwaves to head into the new Apple store across the street and “act like customers.”

As we peruse the gleaming titanium products, it becomes apparent that we are all participating in a radio-controlled distributed mini conference, connected by an FM signal, but disconnected from the speakers, whose location is unclear. Lost in the iCloud perhaps?

The disembodied voices discuss the various merits and pitfalls of social media, with anecdotes ranging from the crucial role it played in supporting protesters of the Arab Spring, the effect of Facebook on school results and of Twitter in citizen journalism, to the parents whose addiction to online games led them to be fatally distracted from feeding their baby.

Standing in this “chapel of technological capitalism”, the simple act of listening and thinking seems somehow clandestine. The impulse to drool over the latest gadget has been displaced by ideas. Shop assistants hover around suspiciously, and regular shoppers film us with their phones, no doubt expecting some kind of pre-rehearsed flash mob.

With the concluding remarks from our host, we are instructed to return to the square for some ‘real’ contact. Our headsets are returned, and traded for a square of fabric with velcro tabs. Together, we physically ’connect’ these sheets together, forming a large checkered rug, which through negotiation has become a platform for the most classic form of social contact: the picnic.

After a discussion of the disruptive effects of social networks, we each self-consciously resist the urge to check our feeds, and instead pour a glass of wine and peel an orange and speak to each other. It isn’t so hard after all!

Garth Lenz is a photographer who uses his images to communicate larger environmental issues and broadcast clear messages for change. His work on the Athabasca oil sands, in the photo series ‘The True Cost of Oil’, aims at documenting the scale and scope of environmental transformation occurring due to oil extraction. As the title suggests, lenz asks the viewers to ask themselves what cost are they willing to bear, for their oil consumption.

^{This article is part of Volume #31: Guilty Landscapes.}

What design can do for… contact! Breakout session for What Design Can Do, Friday May 11th 2012, 13.45–15.30. Open and free for everyone.

While almost everyone is connected to one another through the internet and social media, real contact seems to be in decline. Virtual time is replacing public time. This breakout session will try to break through this development and find an answer to the question ‘What design can do for public contact’.

^{Detail of work by Philip Beesley at Venice Biennial}

Featuring Axel Timm of the German architectural collective Raumlabor; Francisco van Jole, internationally renowned internet journalist; Younghee Jung, leader of Nokia’s corporate research team in Bangalore; and Ole Bouman, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI).

Meet us at 13.45 sharp at Leidse Plein, Amsterdam to experience (the limits of) connectivity. This intervention is brought to you by NAI and Archis/Volume with DUS architects. Limited participation available, please RSVP at the latest by Thursday May 10th to rsvp@archis.org.

In stores soon!

Guilt has been effectively used to control and manipulate the masses. But it can also be the start of a change for the better: awareness, concern, action. Engagement and guilt are never far apart. Engagement is sublimated guilt. We can build on guilt, but can we build with guilt? Is guilt a material to design with?

In three sections: revelations, confessions, and atonement, the issue presents a global scan of large-scale guilty landscapes and our design relation to them. A major section is dedicated to the Chernobyl ‘exclusion zone’ as a post nuclear disaster area, with other contributions focusing on landscapes transformed by mining industries, waste, human atrocities and more, as well as ways to atone for these criminal acts.

The content for this issue was developed in collaboration with Unknown Fields Division. Contributions by Liam Young, Kate Davies, Ilkka Halso, Timothy Morton, Brendan Cormier, John Gollings, Michelle Kasprzak, Vincent van Velsen, Kris Verdonck, Neil Berrett, Yan Lu, David Maisel, Will Wiles, Nele Vos, Michael Brenner, Chris Jordan, Greg Barton, Brandon Mosley, Edward Burtynsky, Bas Princen, Mario Petrucci, Tokyo Hackerspace, Safecast, Aram Mooradian, Garth Lenz, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, William Fox, Make It Right Foundation, 51N4E, Kelly Nelson Doran, Protei, Subhankar Banerjee, Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu, Guy Tillim, Susan Berger, Noero Wolff Architects, Jonathan Gales, Captains of Industry, Nicole Koltick, Youarethecity, Regina Peldszus, Bryan Allen. Interviews with Michael Madsen, Peter Swinnen.

Volume #31- Guilty Landscapes
160 pages
Binding: Soft cover
ISBN: 9 789 077 966 310
Price: € 19.50
Release: 4 May, 2012
Editor in chief: Arjen Oosterman

Contributing editors: Ole Bouman, Rem Koolhaas, Mark Wigley
Co-editors for this issue: Liam Young and Kate Davies
Feature editor: Jeffrey Inaba
Design: Irma Boom and Sonja Haller
Publisher: Stichting Archis

We recently had a little lottery draw to win a copy of ‘Project Japan: Metabolism Talks’, signed by the authors, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist! Take a look at the draw to find out if you were the lucky one selected.

Jeffrey Inaba, Volume’s feature editor from C-LAB, talks about the convergence by technology, automobile, and higher learning corporations and international policy organizations on the city — and how they are making the City 2.0. The lecture is part of the program of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2012 and takes place at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) on Thursday 3 May from 8 pm. Click here for more information!

Volume’s presence at the Storefront For Art And Architecture in New York was well received by a good crowd attending the event. Justin Fowler, editor of the Volume in New York, gave a presentation about his opinion on Crisis, one of the themes of the day.

Fowler’s presentation tackled issues such as the aging population and war survivors, leading to what he calls a ‘Trauma Generation’. The presentation created a link between the trauma generation and urban planning. “Human development corresponds with urban development”, he stated, illustrating his presentation with various projects aiming overcome issues of the aging population.