I spent too much of my childhood feeling guilty, not knowing of what. Later on I realized the crime had been my mother’s unhappiness, but “later on” was too late. I came to hate the memory of my feelings with a passion—it was the endlessness, the mysteriousness, the impalpability of the feelings that struck me as disgusting, and above all the way the mystery had been something inside me, shaping me, lending me my individuality. Guilt and “character” were inseparable in the world I grew up in. I felt obscurely—I hadn’t read Nietzsche yet, or Laing and others on the nuclear family—that the conjunction stood in the way of understanding, and certainly of action.
It is hard to be sure in retrospect how much of this was talked about later with friends. Most of it did not need to be: it was common ground, shared memory, instinctive revulsion. Out of it came conversations, which I do remember, about the difference between guilt and shame, and between “guilt culture” and “shame culture.” We wanted, roughly speaking, to exit from the one and enter, or reenter, the other. The advantage of shame, it seemed to us, was that it was public and punctual—a happening, an event, a particular scandal with others. It was a condition to be acted upon, not lived with. The terrible line in Yeats about the lost generation of his youth, “They convicted us of guilt” (the identity of the they is uncertain, which is part of the point), is at least followed immediately by “Bid me strike a match and blow.” That’s what we wanted.
Guilt and the family were intertwined. Maybe guilt was simply the name we had for all those things, monotonous and multiform—the bewilderment, the dreadful warmth, the disavowed loves and hatreds, the crazy power and powerlessness—that went with mum and dad and two-and-a-half kids. No doubt Nietzsche was right that this was the horror—this drama of “internalization”—that had first made humanity interesting. Guilt-tripping was a word we were fond of back then. We were fascinated, in spite of ourselves, by the intricacy of the messages and prohibitions that guilt culture fed its citizens. A guilt trip was a journey, a labyrinth, almost a quest—but to nowhere, that was the problem. Shame culture would be superficial by comparison. But that was all right: we wanted a society of faces, superficies, customs in common. Everything would be easier to interpret, and therefore more boring. But societies should not be ranked according to their opacity (their openness to “thick description”); otherwise bourgeois society—the world of Dostoevsky and Studies in Hysteria—would never be surpassed.
The grammar of guilt and shame gave grounds for hope. “I feel ashamed” is so much lighter a speech act than “I feel guilty.” Shame, which as a noun on its own has an ominous finality, shades off naturally in common usage into the merely regrettable or embarrassing: “What a shame…,” “It’s a shame that…” Guilt seems to have no such gradient built into it. Shame culture is a boast culture—the assemblies in the Iliad are a prime example. Talking about what you’re ashamed of (or, in Achilles’ case, who has shamed you and how) is invariably a form of boasting. But again, this was fine by us: better vaunting ambition than groveling atonement.
I stand by the wishes, and much of the analysis, that lay behind this bygone politics. But it seems we were mistaken. If guilt culture comes to an end, as it has in the past two or three decades, then it turns out shame culture does too. Shamelessness rules. And the twin of shamelessness—reading Nietzsche should have warned us of this—is ressentiment. Troll culture. “The feeling of having shared all your feelings online; the twitchy anticipatory regret and delight of waiting for people to like your updates; the vertiginous feeling that there are no rules, no shame, no guilt, in this new world” (as Stephanie Burt recently put it). The sense of being nobody in a non-world, and taking continual petty revenge.
Now we look back, what happened isn’t hard to construe. Shame became old-fashioned because the reality of a “public realm”—a world in which people were present to one another, face to face, existing with friends and enemies, negotiating, talking—all this collapsed. (Inevitably my shorthand for the collapse calls on recent examples from “social media”: troll culture and the like. But these are symptoms, not causes.) Guilt culture did not disappear—it was not transfigured or annihilated in any recasting of the family unit—it was “reformed,” softened, ameliorated. Consumer culture stood in need of subjects happy with their childhoods, ready to make infantile wishes the matrix of grownup lives. “No drama” became the watchword— least of all a drama of lost dangers and obscurities, unfocused longing, endless returns to the scene of the crime. Freud must be wiped from the culture’s memory.
Shame culture had been patriarchal—a patriarchy with “standards,” responsibilities, dignities, disdain for the easy triumph. Half a century ago, a lawyer being browbeaten by Senator Joe McCarthy asked him, knowing the question would strike a blow: “Have you no sense of decency, at long last, sir? Have you no sense of decency?” “Sense of decency” and “shame” look to be synonyms. “At long last” is touching. But it’s the “sir” in the sentences that seems to me the fulcrum—and that makes the locution a thing of the past.
No one wants the “sir” back. But the question, the tone, the disbelief, the expectation of wounding—those I regret.
T. J. Clark’s new book, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come, will be published this fall.
