Sometime between Dostoyevsky's tale and LeGuin's, there was Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." The similarities (particularly to LeGuin's story) are so blatant that I was surprised to see it missing from this discussion.
The parallels are glaringly obvious -- but then again, there are also some vexing (thematic) disparities.
It’s a great observation. However, the utopian element is not emphasized in Jackson. “Lottery” is more about maintaining social status quo through scapegoating and violence (of course, it’s connected). I wanted to focus on pursuit of utopia so I skipped it but I may write about it separately.
That's what I was considering as "some vexing thematic disparities."
The problem is not only with utopia. As in "The Lottery," it can arise as tradition, or even when things are left to chance.
Meanwhile, LeGuin herself is a bit of a utopian. Consider -- in "The Dispossessed" -- how her own utopian vision (however acknowledged as imperfect) needs to be rescued by a deus ex machina -- an intervention from a more "advanced" world.
Contrast this, then, with the "ambiguous heterotopia" of Samuel Delany's (obviously-analogous) "Triton" -- where such "rescue" (or escape) isn't an option -- whose protagonist is left, in the end, tossing and turning in his (her?) own solipsistic trap.
I fully agree with your critique of utopianism, and have witnessed the problem repeatedly manifesting itself (even among purported "anarchists") among those on the left.
But that critique has its own limitations. The problem might be existential -- "baked into" the human (or even the transhuman?) condition itself.
I'll be very interested to see how you address this larger question. :-)
Thank you! So happy you mention Triton! It is wildlyunder appreciated but to my mind, it is the most profound meditation on the impossibility of utopia. It is also a prescient comment on intersectionality and identity obsession. The protagonist (Bron?) has changed everything about him/herself but the fact is that s/he wants to be loved by the one person who does not love him/her, and no tinkering with identity labels can resolve this profoundly human dilemma. And yes, Le Guin herself is a utopian. I dislike Dispossessed precisely for the reason you mention: her need to salvage the utopian dream despite the clear picture of in the novel of Anarres becoming the bureaucratic dystopian nightmare that the USSR was revealed as being at the time. Looking forward to your comments on the next instal,ent!
All valid observations -- with one minor quibble: There's a "USSR" likeness -- a statist dystopian nightmare called Thu -- in "The Dispossessed," and it coexists (as an adversary) with the "capitalist hellscape" on Urras, the mother planet.
The political culture of Anarres -- with its libertarian pretensions -- bears more of a resemblance (further fortified by speech codes and an earthly left-anarchist pedigree!) to the People's Republic of Berkeley and its spiritual siblings among the Earth's welter of bureaucratic NGOs. ;-)
(PS: Regarding the source of the "deus ex machina" -- the "advanced civilization" of the planet Hain [and its potential earthly counterpart, in case you were wondering] -- here's a tidbit from Gemini [Google's AI]:
"Ursula K. Le Guin began writing her famous 'Hainish Cycle' in the mid-1960s.... In contrast, the natural and organic foods corporation, The Hain Celestial Group [originally Hain Food Group], was founded decades later in 1993.
"While it makes for a fun coincidence, the name 'Hain' for the food company traces back to its founder, Irwin D. Simon, who named it after his business partner, Joseph Hain, well after Le Guin had popularized the fictional planet.")
I know about Hain, of course, but the coincidence is hilarious! I m a writing from a .”green” resort in California where the food is inedible and the selection of books in the library is enough to make you reach for Atlas Shrugged. You are right about Thu; but interestingly, when The Dispossessed was finally translated into Russian in 1994, it was seen as referencing the Soviet dissidents who defected to the US. An interesting example of the context influencing the reading of the text.
Wait . . . The Ones Who Stay and Fight was sincere??? I thought the author intended it to be satirical, a misinterpretation upon which my appreciation for the story was entirely dependent, 🤣!
I just read it again. It's insufferably smug when not read as satire.
Do you think she knows the Weimar Republic had strict laws against hate speech and defamation, which were strictly enforced through fines and prison sentences against hundreds of Nazi agitators (including Goebbels), but attempts at censorship only increased their support by casting them as unfairly treated? There were posters of Hitler's face with his mouth taped shut to express outrage over efforts to silence his message.
(I'm open to arguments that the Internet and social media have led to a critically dysfunctional marketplace of ideas, but that doesn't mean censorship is a viable solution to the problem.)
Thanks for the important historical reminder, Luke! Most people I talk to say something like “Well, if Weimar just had laws against hate speech, there would have been no WW2…” with complete conviction. This is why people need to know history. And I’m convinced Jemisin’s story is sincere. If not, then is the subtlest satire in the history of humanity, which I don’t think it is.
We do have a dysfunctional market place of ideas, largely because of the skewed influence of algorithms and consequent sorting out into different cultural worlds. When you have no narrative in common, you can’t really argue. But censorship will only make everything worse.
Thanks, Elana. I may have mentioned this to you before, but my late grandmother grew up in the USSR and her father, who was the mayor of their village (somewhere near Minsk), was sent to the gulags. I don't know much more than that, as it's not something Babi ever liked to talk about, understandably, and she died many years ago (peacefully, at home in Australia, where she was able to see her children and grandchildren grow up in freedom and safety). But knowing even that much about my family's history has always been enough to inoculate me against the delusion that Marxism / socialism / communism — or any other version of utopia — could ever be a good thing.
The conflation of speech and violence is one of the worst mistakes of the left. Speech, however vile, is not violence and apart from some very specific and enumerate instances (direct threats and the like) should never be censored.
Subscribing because of your take on Jemsin’s story. When I read it I was utterly horrified- probably the most morally grotesque piece of fiction I’ve ever encountered. (And I enjoyed the fifth season books!)
It's definitely stupid to use Omelas as some sort of argument against technological progress as the article you mentioned at the beginning does. But Omelas also wasn't meant to be making the point that utopia is impossible because it will always be built upon violence. In fact, I think that's exactly the opposite of the point it's making. When Omelas is first described, it's described purely as an idyllic place with no downsides. Then LeGuin breaks the fourth wall to ask the reader whether they find it believable and concludes that the reader probably doesn't believe Omelas could exist. So, she adds the suffering child to make it more believable to the reader: Now, it's not an uncomplicated utopia, but an apparent utopia with a dark secret, and somehow we find this more believable even though there's no sensible reason that a child being trapped in a basement would somehow be necessary to keep this society from collapsing. The point of the story is to illustrate this bias by coming up with a situation where it's clearly illogical yet still makes us think the less plausible version of the story is more believable. LeGuin is opposing the sort of cynicism that makes someone unable to accept that some things can just be good without having some secret sinister side, or that a better world is possible. The kind of pessimism that makes someone always look for a reason why any apparently positive development or apparently good state of affairs is actually bad. At the end, the ones who walk away aren't special because they choose to reject utopia because of the suffering needed to maintain it. They're special because they reject the tradeoff altogether. They think things can be made better in a way that doesn't require the child's suffering, and they're going to keep looking for a way until they find it. This cuts against both the impulse to create "utopia" through violent repression, which isn't really utopia according to the logic of the story, but also against the impulse to just give up because a perfect world seems impossible and to dismiss the project of improving the world based on cliches about how the world's flaws are necessary.
Of course, ultimately this still makes it a pro-progress story, and it runs against the point the techno-pessimist you mentioned at the beginning of the article was making. Canards against data centers and other tech are engaged in the exact bias the story is meant to caution against, the impulse to always assume the worst about something that could make the world better, and to stop people from trying.
The problem with your interpretation is that there is not a single utopia in human history that did not devolve into violence. Remember that historically, utopia does not mean a better society. It means a perfect society. This is what Le Guin portrays. She is very clear that Omelas is not just better than the US in 1973. It is perfect. And pursuit of perfection always leads to violence. Le Guin does not explain why there has to be a suffering child in utopia because there are multiple explanations of this phenomenon. But the simple historical fact is that the more ideologues strive for perfection, the more people will be dead or in dark basements.
I see this point as a criticism of LeGuin’s story, not as an argument for why it should actually be interpreted in a way that is the opposite of what it appears to mean. I also don’t think it’s true that pursuit of perfection always leads to violence. Arguably the goal of perfection precludes using violence, since if you want a world that is literally perfect, then that world can’t have violence in it. The authoritarian regimes that you point to as historical proof were flawed in ways that generally have little to do with wanting utopia and more to do with corruption and dogmatic ideology.
Also, if the point of LeGuin’s story actually was just, “utopia is impossible,” I think it would be a really stupid story! Not because the moral is false, but because it’s a terrible way of illustrating the moral that could never reasonably convince anyone of it. A story meant to illustrate that utopia is impossible should actually show in a logical way how utopian ambitions ultimately lead to a worse world. It shouldn’t just say, “Imagine a perfect society. Oh, but actually, this society is imperfect because it requires one child to suffer for reasons I haven’t explained and that couldn’t possibly make logical sense.” That’s just a nonsensical way to make the point that utopia is impossible, but it’s all the story does under the reading that this is what it meant. And this is true regardless of whether, “utopia is impossible,” is true or not. If it’s false, this would be a really stupid way to argue for it, and if it’s true, this would still be a really stupid way to argue for it. Given that I don’t think LeGuin was silly enough to think that describing a utopia and then randomly adding a bad element to it was a good way to make the point that utopia is impossible, and given that there’s another reading of the story that seems like the obvious interpretation to me, I will go with the other reading as likely being the intended one. Also, I'm pretty sure she *was* a utopian (though I don't know much about what her actual vision of what utopia would look like was), so I doubt she meant to argue that utopia is impossible.
History and politics are much more complex that formal logic. In fact, the rigid black and white thinking (good-evil, logical-illogical, utopia-dystopia) is what leads to violence. There have been many utopian movements in world history, not all of them authoritarian, at least not initially. All failed in spectacular and bloody ways. Don’t you think that this historical experiment should teach us something? Also, why do you think that your interpretation of Le Guin’s story is the only correct one? In fact, most interpretations assume that the society of Omelas is, in fact, utopia and try to argue for the difference between utopia and and utopian impulse, which is simply a search for something better than the current state of things without specifying what it is.
In the story, a man is executed in the view of his daughter for wring-think. This has nothing to do with Ukraine. And define “evil” for me. For Jemisin, everybody who does not subscribe to her blinkered vision of DEI is evil.
Jemisin is a novelist, not a political operator. But for Jemisin, people who claim that other people are not fully human, not deserving of human rights, because of their gender or race or national origin or religtion have broken the social contract of a free people and are not just engaged in speech that claim should not be tolerated.
This is also the opinion of Locke.
*These therefore, and the like, who attribute unto the Faithful, Religious and Orthodox; that is, in plain terms, unto themselves; any peculiar Priviledge or Power above other Mortals, in Civil Concernments; or who, upon pretence of Religion, do challenge any manner of Authority over such as are not associated with them in their Ecclesiastical Communion; I say these have no right to be tolerated by the Magistrate; as neither those that will not own and teach the Duty of tolerating All men in matters of meer Religion.131 For what do all these and the like Doctrines signifie, but that those Men may, and are ready upon any occasion to seise the Government, and possess themselves of the Estates and Fortunes of their Fellow-Subjects; and that they only ask leave to be tolerated by the Magistrate so long, until they find themselves strong enough to effect it? *
I find Jemisin's glorification of violence to be repellent and ugly, but when
Hamas groupies march through the street and scream that Israel has no right to exist, or the KKK lights a cross, waves guns around and says that Black people voting is not something they will allow, are they just expressing an opinion that must be tolerated in a free society? Should we debate whether other people are fully human? And I know what Jemisin is getting at because that kind off smirking, daring, transgression is how people try to excuse their own bigotry.
As much as I despise Hamas, I do not believe that all antizionists should be summarily executed. Sorry but Jemisin’s glorification of violence in service of her own self-righteous ideology is nauseating. A free society can, and does, limit certain forms of speech (child porn is one example). But moralistic glorification of killing because “we are good people, so we can go around exterminating bad people” is worse than bigotry. Where does this end? I actually heard a student claim that reading Heart of Darkness is “denying his humanity”. So let’s burn Conrad, shall we?
It's fiction, much like LeGuin's story, but not as good. FYI, there is an interesting essay on LeGuin by the British cultural historian Raymond Williams.
Sometime between Dostoyevsky's tale and LeGuin's, there was Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." The similarities (particularly to LeGuin's story) are so blatant that I was surprised to see it missing from this discussion.
The parallels are glaringly obvious -- but then again, there are also some vexing (thematic) disparities.
It’s a great observation. However, the utopian element is not emphasized in Jackson. “Lottery” is more about maintaining social status quo through scapegoating and violence (of course, it’s connected). I wanted to focus on pursuit of utopia so I skipped it but I may write about it separately.
That's what I was considering as "some vexing thematic disparities."
The problem is not only with utopia. As in "The Lottery," it can arise as tradition, or even when things are left to chance.
Meanwhile, LeGuin herself is a bit of a utopian. Consider -- in "The Dispossessed" -- how her own utopian vision (however acknowledged as imperfect) needs to be rescued by a deus ex machina -- an intervention from a more "advanced" world.
Contrast this, then, with the "ambiguous heterotopia" of Samuel Delany's (obviously-analogous) "Triton" -- where such "rescue" (or escape) isn't an option -- whose protagonist is left, in the end, tossing and turning in his (her?) own solipsistic trap.
I fully agree with your critique of utopianism, and have witnessed the problem repeatedly manifesting itself (even among purported "anarchists") among those on the left.
But that critique has its own limitations. The problem might be existential -- "baked into" the human (or even the transhuman?) condition itself.
I'll be very interested to see how you address this larger question. :-)
Thank you! So happy you mention Triton! It is wildlyunder appreciated but to my mind, it is the most profound meditation on the impossibility of utopia. It is also a prescient comment on intersectionality and identity obsession. The protagonist (Bron?) has changed everything about him/herself but the fact is that s/he wants to be loved by the one person who does not love him/her, and no tinkering with identity labels can resolve this profoundly human dilemma. And yes, Le Guin herself is a utopian. I dislike Dispossessed precisely for the reason you mention: her need to salvage the utopian dream despite the clear picture of in the novel of Anarres becoming the bureaucratic dystopian nightmare that the USSR was revealed as being at the time. Looking forward to your comments on the next instal,ent!
All valid observations -- with one minor quibble: There's a "USSR" likeness -- a statist dystopian nightmare called Thu -- in "The Dispossessed," and it coexists (as an adversary) with the "capitalist hellscape" on Urras, the mother planet.
The political culture of Anarres -- with its libertarian pretensions -- bears more of a resemblance (further fortified by speech codes and an earthly left-anarchist pedigree!) to the People's Republic of Berkeley and its spiritual siblings among the Earth's welter of bureaucratic NGOs. ;-)
(PS: Regarding the source of the "deus ex machina" -- the "advanced civilization" of the planet Hain [and its potential earthly counterpart, in case you were wondering] -- here's a tidbit from Gemini [Google's AI]:
"Ursula K. Le Guin began writing her famous 'Hainish Cycle' in the mid-1960s.... In contrast, the natural and organic foods corporation, The Hain Celestial Group [originally Hain Food Group], was founded decades later in 1993.
"While it makes for a fun coincidence, the name 'Hain' for the food company traces back to its founder, Irwin D. Simon, who named it after his business partner, Joseph Hain, well after Le Guin had popularized the fictional planet.")
LOL!
I know about Hain, of course, but the coincidence is hilarious! I m a writing from a .”green” resort in California where the food is inedible and the selection of books in the library is enough to make you reach for Atlas Shrugged. You are right about Thu; but interestingly, when The Dispossessed was finally translated into Russian in 1994, it was seen as referencing the Soviet dissidents who defected to the US. An interesting example of the context influencing the reading of the text.
Wait . . . The Ones Who Stay and Fight was sincere??? I thought the author intended it to be satirical, a misinterpretation upon which my appreciation for the story was entirely dependent, 🤣!
I just read it again. It's insufferably smug when not read as satire.
Do you think she knows the Weimar Republic had strict laws against hate speech and defamation, which were strictly enforced through fines and prison sentences against hundreds of Nazi agitators (including Goebbels), but attempts at censorship only increased their support by casting them as unfairly treated? There were posters of Hitler's face with his mouth taped shut to express outrage over efforts to silence his message.
(I'm open to arguments that the Internet and social media have led to a critically dysfunctional marketplace of ideas, but that doesn't mean censorship is a viable solution to the problem.)
Thanks for the important historical reminder, Luke! Most people I talk to say something like “Well, if Weimar just had laws against hate speech, there would have been no WW2…” with complete conviction. This is why people need to know history. And I’m convinced Jemisin’s story is sincere. If not, then is the subtlest satire in the history of humanity, which I don’t think it is.
We do have a dysfunctional market place of ideas, largely because of the skewed influence of algorithms and consequent sorting out into different cultural worlds. When you have no narrative in common, you can’t really argue. But censorship will only make everything worse.
Thanks, Elana. I may have mentioned this to you before, but my late grandmother grew up in the USSR and her father, who was the mayor of their village (somewhere near Minsk), was sent to the gulags. I don't know much more than that, as it's not something Babi ever liked to talk about, understandably, and she died many years ago (peacefully, at home in Australia, where she was able to see her children and grandchildren grow up in freedom and safety). But knowing even that much about my family's history has always been enough to inoculate me against the delusion that Marxism / socialism / communism — or any other version of utopia — could ever be a good thing.
Thank you! Glad to know we have so much in common!
It's important I think not to conflate stopping vile acts with stopping vile speech. The former is often easy to justify; the latter not so much.
The conflation of speech and violence is one of the worst mistakes of the left. Speech, however vile, is not violence and apart from some very specific and enumerate instances (direct threats and the like) should never be censored.
Subscribing because of your take on Jemsin’s story. When I read it I was utterly horrified- probably the most morally grotesque piece of fiction I’ve ever encountered. (And I enjoyed the fifth season books!)
It's definitely stupid to use Omelas as some sort of argument against technological progress as the article you mentioned at the beginning does. But Omelas also wasn't meant to be making the point that utopia is impossible because it will always be built upon violence. In fact, I think that's exactly the opposite of the point it's making. When Omelas is first described, it's described purely as an idyllic place with no downsides. Then LeGuin breaks the fourth wall to ask the reader whether they find it believable and concludes that the reader probably doesn't believe Omelas could exist. So, she adds the suffering child to make it more believable to the reader: Now, it's not an uncomplicated utopia, but an apparent utopia with a dark secret, and somehow we find this more believable even though there's no sensible reason that a child being trapped in a basement would somehow be necessary to keep this society from collapsing. The point of the story is to illustrate this bias by coming up with a situation where it's clearly illogical yet still makes us think the less plausible version of the story is more believable. LeGuin is opposing the sort of cynicism that makes someone unable to accept that some things can just be good without having some secret sinister side, or that a better world is possible. The kind of pessimism that makes someone always look for a reason why any apparently positive development or apparently good state of affairs is actually bad. At the end, the ones who walk away aren't special because they choose to reject utopia because of the suffering needed to maintain it. They're special because they reject the tradeoff altogether. They think things can be made better in a way that doesn't require the child's suffering, and they're going to keep looking for a way until they find it. This cuts against both the impulse to create "utopia" through violent repression, which isn't really utopia according to the logic of the story, but also against the impulse to just give up because a perfect world seems impossible and to dismiss the project of improving the world based on cliches about how the world's flaws are necessary.
Of course, ultimately this still makes it a pro-progress story, and it runs against the point the techno-pessimist you mentioned at the beginning of the article was making. Canards against data centers and other tech are engaged in the exact bias the story is meant to caution against, the impulse to always assume the worst about something that could make the world better, and to stop people from trying.
That's a fascinating observation -- and (as I point out in my own comment) it's consistent with LeGuin's own (well-established) utopianism.
However, as I also point out in that comment (with Samuel Delany as a counterexample), LeGuin's utopian vision is itself (arguably) flawed.
Perhaps we shouldn't assume the worst, but that doesn't necessarily mean we can (let alone should) assume the best.
IMO, a bit more humility is in order here. One needn't be a cynic to recognize the danger of hubris.
The problem with your interpretation is that there is not a single utopia in human history that did not devolve into violence. Remember that historically, utopia does not mean a better society. It means a perfect society. This is what Le Guin portrays. She is very clear that Omelas is not just better than the US in 1973. It is perfect. And pursuit of perfection always leads to violence. Le Guin does not explain why there has to be a suffering child in utopia because there are multiple explanations of this phenomenon. But the simple historical fact is that the more ideologues strive for perfection, the more people will be dead or in dark basements.
I see this point as a criticism of LeGuin’s story, not as an argument for why it should actually be interpreted in a way that is the opposite of what it appears to mean. I also don’t think it’s true that pursuit of perfection always leads to violence. Arguably the goal of perfection precludes using violence, since if you want a world that is literally perfect, then that world can’t have violence in it. The authoritarian regimes that you point to as historical proof were flawed in ways that generally have little to do with wanting utopia and more to do with corruption and dogmatic ideology.
Also, if the point of LeGuin’s story actually was just, “utopia is impossible,” I think it would be a really stupid story! Not because the moral is false, but because it’s a terrible way of illustrating the moral that could never reasonably convince anyone of it. A story meant to illustrate that utopia is impossible should actually show in a logical way how utopian ambitions ultimately lead to a worse world. It shouldn’t just say, “Imagine a perfect society. Oh, but actually, this society is imperfect because it requires one child to suffer for reasons I haven’t explained and that couldn’t possibly make logical sense.” That’s just a nonsensical way to make the point that utopia is impossible, but it’s all the story does under the reading that this is what it meant. And this is true regardless of whether, “utopia is impossible,” is true or not. If it’s false, this would be a really stupid way to argue for it, and if it’s true, this would still be a really stupid way to argue for it. Given that I don’t think LeGuin was silly enough to think that describing a utopia and then randomly adding a bad element to it was a good way to make the point that utopia is impossible, and given that there’s another reading of the story that seems like the obvious interpretation to me, I will go with the other reading as likely being the intended one. Also, I'm pretty sure she *was* a utopian (though I don't know much about what her actual vision of what utopia would look like was), so I doubt she meant to argue that utopia is impossible.
History and politics are much more complex that formal logic. In fact, the rigid black and white thinking (good-evil, logical-illogical, utopia-dystopia) is what leads to violence. There have been many utopian movements in world history, not all of them authoritarian, at least not initially. All failed in spectacular and bloody ways. Don’t you think that this historical experiment should teach us something? Also, why do you think that your interpretation of Le Guin’s story is the only correct one? In fact, most interpretations assume that the society of Omelas is, in fact, utopia and try to argue for the difference between utopia and and utopian impulse, which is simply a search for something better than the current state of things without specifying what it is.
Jemison is rejecting Gandhi's advice of non-resistance to evil. I'm for Ukraine fighting Putin and the US Army burning down the Confederacy.
In the story, a man is executed in the view of his daughter for wring-think. This has nothing to do with Ukraine. And define “evil” for me. For Jemisin, everybody who does not subscribe to her blinkered vision of DEI is evil.
Jemisin is a novelist, not a political operator. But for Jemisin, people who claim that other people are not fully human, not deserving of human rights, because of their gender or race or national origin or religtion have broken the social contract of a free people and are not just engaged in speech that claim should not be tolerated.
This is also the opinion of Locke.
*These therefore, and the like, who attribute unto the Faithful, Religious and Orthodox; that is, in plain terms, unto themselves; any peculiar Priviledge or Power above other Mortals, in Civil Concernments; or who, upon pretence of Religion, do challenge any manner of Authority over such as are not associated with them in their Ecclesiastical Communion; I say these have no right to be tolerated by the Magistrate; as neither those that will not own and teach the Duty of tolerating All men in matters of meer Religion.131 For what do all these and the like Doctrines signifie, but that those Men may, and are ready upon any occasion to seise the Government, and possess themselves of the Estates and Fortunes of their Fellow-Subjects; and that they only ask leave to be tolerated by the Magistrate so long, until they find themselves strong enough to effect it? *
I find Jemisin's glorification of violence to be repellent and ugly, but when
Hamas groupies march through the street and scream that Israel has no right to exist, or the KKK lights a cross, waves guns around and says that Black people voting is not something they will allow, are they just expressing an opinion that must be tolerated in a free society? Should we debate whether other people are fully human? And I know what Jemisin is getting at because that kind off smirking, daring, transgression is how people try to excuse their own bigotry.
As much as I despise Hamas, I do not believe that all antizionists should be summarily executed. Sorry but Jemisin’s glorification of violence in service of her own self-righteous ideology is nauseating. A free society can, and does, limit certain forms of speech (child porn is one example). But moralistic glorification of killing because “we are good people, so we can go around exterminating bad people” is worse than bigotry. Where does this end? I actually heard a student claim that reading Heart of Darkness is “denying his humanity”. So let’s burn Conrad, shall we?
It's fiction, much like LeGuin's story, but not as good. FYI, there is an interesting essay on LeGuin by the British cultural historian Raymond Williams.
Wow, thank you for writing this!! (Swoon!)