| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

How Boundaries Work

Page history last edited by Angela 9 years, 11 months ago

In the book there is an ever-present theme of 'walls'.  The book begins this way:

 

"There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on."

 

What is a boundary?  What do people generally use boundaries for? 

In Taiwan there are a lot of physical boundary lines in the city.  How do boundaries get expressed in Taipei city?

When you hear the word 'boundary', what are your emotional associations?

Why do you suppose people feel the need to turn boundaries into physical things? 

 

  

Throw Out All Boundaries?

Initially, it may be tempting to assume that Shevek aims to eliminate the wall separating Anarres from Urras. That is indeed the case if we are discussing walls merely as obstructions that enable injustice

In this sense, Shevek deeply admires Tirin because “he never could build walls. . . . He was a free man”. The same kinds of walls are demolished by Shevek’s General Temporal Theory: “there were no more abysses, no more walls [between people]”. … Each of these examples recognizes the capacity of walls to function simply as obstacles to freedom. However, we must also account for several of the novel’s most crucial insights: that it is only through maintaining a wall between self and other that Shevek and Takver’s relationship thrives, that Shevek’s grand unifying theory is a harmonization rather than a mixture of Sequency and Simultaneity physics, and, most importantly, that Anarres can only pursue the freedoms it envisions by maintaining a wall between itself and Urras.

 --The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.227

 

What are proper functions for walls, fences, etc.   What are the walls around you that you feel are good and right? Personally, socially, aesthetically, morally,?

What are improper functions?   What are the walls and barriers around you that you feel are wrong? Personally, socially, aesthetically, morally, politically?

 

Do the presence of walls enable injustice?  

Do a lack of walls make you free?

 

 

Morality as Boundary

Likewise, at the political level, Shevek’s society is not an attempt to eliminate morality, but “to throw out the moralizing, yes—the rules, the laws, the punishments—so that men can see good and evil and choose between them”. 

 --The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.227

 

“Then it’s true, you really have no morality?” [Vea] asked, as if shocked and delighted.

“I don’t know what you mean. To hurt a person there is the same as to hurt a person here.” [Shevek replied.]

“You mean you have all the same old rules? You see, I believe that morality is just another superstition, like religion. It’s just got to be thrown out. . . . I think you Odonians missed the whole point. You threw out the priests and judges and divorce laws and all that, but you kept the real trouble behind them. You just stuck it inside, into your consciences. But it’s still there. You’re just as much slaves as ever! You aren’t really free.” 

--The Dispossessed Chapter 7 p.219

 

Socially, what kinds of barriers are there between people?  

Another way to ask this is what are some social limits we place on relationships? (sexual partners, age/implied maturity, family/not family…?)  Let's try to make a list.

 

Which of these barriers that we've listed do you feel okay with, which make sense, or seem necessary? 

Which barriers bother you?  Which seem silly?

 

What do you personally feel are 'socially appropriate barriers'?  Inappropriate barriers?

Could we construct morality as 'socially appropriate barriers between people'?

 

 

Privacy

One might think that privacy undermines community, and that the problem with Anarres is that it still has some walls and does not live up to its ideals enough. I am suggesting, instead, that … to have a freely chosen community, as opposed to a collectivity that is an undifferentiated mob, individual autonomy must be preserved, and this requires privacy and some walls. Privacy is important for individual autonomy in a variety of ways. Privacy can provide an important emotional release from the effort we make to be civil and polite. A divide between the public and the private may help maintain our sanity and our integrity. Privacy can protect groups within a society, thereby enabling individuals freely to associate. There are of course dangers to privacy. Too much of it can inhibit personal development. Privacy can be a crutch for people who are not sufficiently autonomous, and crutches do not always help us develop what we lack. Perhaps most importantly, privacy lets us maintain close ties to family and friends. While sometimes such commitments conflict with commitments to the state, on the whole they promote community.

 --The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.140

 

What are the attributes of privacy?

What is the function of privacy?

When is privacy desirable?  Detrimental?

 

In the 70s, feminists said "The personal is political".  

What does that mean?

What does that imply for the social function of privacy?

 

Is privacy necessary for freedom?  

Does it interfere with freedom?  Is it neutral to freedom?

 

Is privacy necessary for initiative?

Does it interfere with initiative?  Is it neutral to initiative?

 

  

Does Negative Freedom Require Protective Barriers Around People?

The Anarresti value negative freedom, and we may think that this sort of freedom requires protective barriers. The very idea of a right to do as one pleases so long as one does not harm others can be seen as requiring the construction of walls around individuals that must not be penetrated.

 --The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.139

 

Liberalism is a holistic, comprehensive ideology with its own distinctive vision of the human good. This vision advocates the autonomy of individuals from received traditions and their liberation from constraints both external (political, social, cultural, religious) and internal (psychological), which it invariably treats as forms of oppression. ...

In addition to holding out this ideal of individual autonomy, comprehensive liberalism demands that each individual's choice of how to live be recognized and positively affirmed by everyone else, no matter what it involves (as long as it doesn't infringe on anyone else's equally free lifestyle choice). Comprehensive liberals also tend to treat the refusal to grant this recognition and affirmation as an act of illiberalism that ought not be tolerated. Many go so far as to think that liberal governments should force the recalcitrant to comply with the liberal ideal, at least in any area of life that can plausibly be described as public.

--Who are the Real Liberals on Gay Marriage? THE WEEK.com 

 

Demanding that individuals' choices always be 'recognised and positively affirmed' is a bit like building a wall around the individual and saying 'This person's choices may never be questioned or touched'.   Agree?  Disagree?

 

 

Integrity or Hierarchy?

Both cooperation and obedience involve interaction with an other, but the former is predicated on walls that maintain communal and individual integrity, while the latter depends on walls that enforce hierarchy. Public opinion matters a great deal on both planets; whereas it is openly expressed on Anarres, however, it is repressed into such intangibles as “reputation” on Urras. 

Slavoj Zizek argues that “the real aim of ideology is the attitude demanded by it” and that the most powerful ideologies are those that hide behind facades of complete utopia—exactly what we see in A-Io. Vea’s society believes that its citizens enjoy true freedom, but in fact they are far more bound to convention and public expectation than even the most restrictive Anarresti. Gradually, though, Shevek sees that Anarres is capable of drifting back into such fundamentalism, and this motivates his observation that, while “the opinion of the neighbors” is a mighty force, it is a force defied “perhaps not often enough”. In order for his world’s anarchism to work, his society must not just honor its past but continue to be “a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process.”

 --The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.225-226

 

What do you understand this passage to be saying?

 

What are 'healthy' walls?  What are limiting walls?  

Could 'healthy' walls promote freedom?   Do you need healthy walls for freedom? Or do only the absence of walls create it?

 

Which kind of boundaries between people maintain integrity?

Which kind enforce hierarchy?

 

 

An Internalised White Terror?

Bedap also sees the social conscience as a freedom-stifling “power machine, controlled by bureaucrats”, and gives the example of how the physicist Sabul prevents Shevek from publishing his new ideas in physics. “Public opinion! That’s the power structure . . . that stifles the individual mind”. Replace government and “legal” use of power with “customary,” says Bedap, and you have Sabul and the Syndicate. Le Guin presents other examples of how on Anarres social conscience can be as coercive as laws. Shevek’s child Sadik is shunned by her dorm mates because Shevek advocates going to Urras. Public opinion effectively censors Sala’s music and virtually exiles the poet and dramatist Tirin. Tirin “was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for his first free act.” Shevek adds, “we force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can’t see them, because they’re part of our thinking”.

 

So there are walls on Anarres, but they are mostly hidden. There is authority and control, but by virtue of being noninstitutionalized these are harder to point to. Bedap says the real problem on Anarres is the hypocrisy and self-deception: “It’s the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy.  It's the lies that make you want to kill yourself.” 

One might conclude that the solution is to get rid of the hidden walls and subtle forms of coercion, to better live up to the anarchic ideal. Shevek at one point reflects: “That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal [of letting the individual exercise his optimum function so as to contribute best to the whole society] did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it”.

 --The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.134-5

 

If the social conscience manifests as hidden walls, what if the social conscience is not healthy?  What if the social conscience has been informed by a something like the White Terror, or the Cultural Revolution?

Has an internalised martial law informed the social conscience of people living in Taiwan?   Has that affected how people approach governance? Initiative? Responsibility?  Freedom? 

 

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.