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The Structure of Power

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

Since this group seems to be particularly good at interrogating ideas, I'm just going to present the following ideas about power in community without much commentary:

 

Economic Calculation as Coercion

“There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. . . . You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. . . . There is no freedom,” he says.

--The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.137

 

 

Social Convention as Coercion

No one on Anarres is threatened with legal punishment if they pursue what they want rather than fulfill their social obligations, so long as they do not harm others. Yet there are other forms of coercion besides legal punishment. John Stuart Mill developed his harm principle to demarcate limits on the state’s use of coercion, but he also worried about other ways in which liberty is restricted, including public opinion, the power of custom, and expressions of distaste

Such forces prevail on Anarres, imposing great pressure to fulfill one’s duties. In a key passage Shevek is talking to Takver and notes how they lie about their freedom: they say they make their own choices, yet in fact they go where PDC posts them and stay till they are reposted, even though it means being apart. Shevek had been told he “could do what he pleased”, in contrast to how on Urras he was explicitly called upon to do physics against his will. But, Shevek remarks to Takver, on Anarres “we always think [I’m a free man], and say it, but we don’t do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind,” we say “I make my own choices,” but then we do what we’re told. Indeed, notes Shevek, few Anarresti refuse to accept a posting, because people are ashamed: “the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate—we obey”.

 

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”.

--The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.137

 

 

Dismantling of institutional power

In the case of Anarres, however, it might seem (at least at first sight) that everything possible has been done to preclude such an eventuality. At both the theoretical and structural level, it is clear that the goal of the Odonian revolution that founded Anarres was, not the seizure of power, but rather the dismantling, so far as practically possible, of the mechanisms whereby power is exercised. While on Urras there seems to have been no shortage of authoritarian rulers, such as the infamous Queen Teaea, who wore a cloak made of the tanned skins of rebels who had been flayed alive, Anarresti society is so structured as to prevent the emergence of her revolutionary counterpart. 

At the psychological level, the influence of the family in perpetuating old patterns of dominance and repression has been minimized by the institution of communal child-rearing, while even the language which shapes their experience of reality, Pravic, is an invented one, specifically designed to reinforce the break with past habits of thought and perception, and to minimize the importance of both possession and hierarchy. Where the Urrasti “often used the word ‘higher’ as a synonym for ‘better’ in their writings . . . an Anarresti would use ‘more central’”—although it is unclear why the metaphor of center and margins is inherently any less hierarchical than that of relative height. 

As well, given that the initial composition of the society may be assumed to have been self-selecting, consisting in its entirety of revolutionaries committed to Odonian anarchist ideals, there are none of the problems arising from the continuing presence of counterrevolutionary forces within the new order, nor any of the structural problems liable to arise from the emergency measures necessary to deal with them. Indeed, on Anarres, the only emergencies that arise are the result of natural disasters, such as drought and famine, as opposed to those produced by the struggle between competing class interests.

--The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.251

 

...Anarres has actually failed to solve the problem of how to prevent the Revolution losing its way—indeed, it seems to be in the process of falling victim to precisely those problems identified by theorists such as Trotsky and Marcuse. For example, despite the decentralized structural mechanisms designed to prevent it, increasing power does seem to be becoming vested in some of the coordinating bodies. The PDC, it appears, is more and more taking on the functions of a government, with a corresponding interest in preserving the status quo, while the principle that people should rotate between the tasks for which they are best qualified and more menial work is being violated on a regular basis by those in a position to make decisions about who does what. The founding principle of mutual aid, in other words, is being compromised by growing bureaucratization.
--The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.253 

 

 

Law is what happens when community is lost?

“When the Way is lost, there is benevolence. When benevolence is lost, there is justice. When justice is lost there are the rites. The rites are the end of loyalty and good faith, the beginning of disorder."   --Lao Tzu

 

Let's translate those terms slightly.   

the Way --> perfect awareness of self and others

benevolence -->  good feeling towards others, willingness to cooperate

justice  -->  making rules about right and wrong, morals

rites -->  codified agreements about right and wrong, ethics

 

Translated with these terms, Lao Tzu seems to be saying that once we are no longer able to see each other with clear eyes we can only rely on people being willing to get along.  When that willingness is compromised, perhaps through bad faith, then people start having to make rules to follow.   Then the rules start getting written down and you start having arguments about letter vs spirit of the law, and that's when things really start to go to shit.

  

 

Individual to have dynamic interaction with society, only way to balance power

As Cogell comments, the “relationship between the individual and society must be dynamic”; the individual must actively choose to interact within and react to social precepts. Ketho, the Hainish ship officer who chooses to accompany Shevek back through Anarres’s wall, does so of his own will, arguing that his people have “tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?”. In his own language, Shevek responds, “We are the children of time”. Ketho’s and Shevek’s attitudes suggest the value of individual life, of course, but they also imply singularity; each life is new and free to choose its own journey—as do Shevek and Ketho.

--The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.159

 

Societies, anarchist or no, tend to stagnate, develop written or unwritten rules, regulations, and methods of control. Shevek’s anarchy fragments social order, destabilizing the innate human impulse to dominate—or obey—as part of a single-minded collective. His anarchy enables free choice, the true foundation of Odo’s concept of mutual aid. But Shevek’s anarchy must also be established individually, repetitively, constantly.

The motto carved on Odo’s tombstone, “To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return”, expresses that prime paradox of the successful Anarresti experiment; only individually can social anarchy be created and maintained. Shevek must be singular within the collective; he must also actively participate within his society.

--The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed   p.160

 

 

A Society Concerned with Process, not Result

"Utopia has been euclidean, it has been European, and it has been masculine. I am trying to suggest, in an evasive, distrustful, untrustworthy fashion, and as obscurely as I can, that our final loss of faith in that radiant sandcastle may enable our eyes to adjust to a dimmer light and in it perceive another kind of utopia. As this utopia would not be euclidean, European, or masculinist, my terms and images in speaking of it must be tentative and seem peculiar. Victor Turner’s antitheses of structure and communitas are useful to my attempt to think about it: structure in society, in his terms, is cognitive, communitas existential; structure provides a model, communitas a potential; structure classifies, communitas reclassifies; structure is expressed in legal and political institutions, communitas in art and religion.

 

Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost everywhere held to be sacred or “holy,” possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured or institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency.

 

Utopian thought has often sought to institutionalize or legislate the experience of communitas, and each time it has done so it has run up against the Grand Inquisitor.

The activities of a machine are determined by its structure, but the relation is reversed in organisms — organic structure is determined by its processes."

"Utopia has been yang. In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot.

Our civilization is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal.

 

The ten thousand things arise together
and I watch their return.
They return each to its root.
Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness.
Returning to one’s destiny is known as the constant.
Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.
To ignore the constant
is to go wrong, and end in disorder.

 

To attain the constant, we must return, go round, go inward, go yinward. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold.

Although they exist in history, these societies seem to have worked out or retained a certain wisdom which makes them desperately resist any structural modification which might afford history a point of entry into their lives. The societies which have best protected their distinctive character appear to be those concerned above all with persevering in their existence.

Persevering in one’s existence is the particular quality of the organism; it is not a progress towards achievement, followed by stasis, which is the machine’s mode, but an interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself."

 

"…a society predominantly concerned with preserving its existence; a society with a modest standard of living, conservative of natural resources, with a low constant fertility rate and a political life based upon consent; a society that has made a successful adaptation to its environment and has learned to live without destroying itself or the people next door."

--Ursula K. LeGuin "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RAW MATERIALS

 

 

 

Private property and political power interfere with human self-realisation?

Le Guin’s argument for Anarres is suggested both in the story she tells and the way she tells it. Her novel persistently portrays private property and political power interfering with human self-realization by disrupting genuine community, undermining equality, and constraining freedom—in part by blocking open communication. Only a society which relieves individuals of property and relations of power can permit the kind of open communication which allows human beings to freely realize themselves.

 

The argument is ambitious and obviously provocative. It draws its power from a concept of human nature that is at least partially romantic, emphasizing the human capacity to create and suggesting that human beings are only fully realized in becoming free artists of themselves. Their potential is blunted when they are subject to political rule or the exigencies of the market. The novel also draws attention to the rational aspect of human nature, for example through its central motif of scientific discovery. The core of the argument is that the full realization of both of these basic human capacities—for reason and for creativity— require an environment of genuinely open communication, an environment  which governments and markets necessarily stifle.

299

 

What is the basic nature of a human being?

What is involved in realising a human being?

 

Do you agree with the core argument that the full realization of reason and creativity in a human being require an environment of genuinely open communication?

Do governements and markets 'necessarily' stifle genuinely open communication?

 

 

 

 

As Bierman notes, “The ansible in Le Guin’s stories is the correlative for immediately felt, simultaneously held knowledge, the goal of communication—to feel and think together across the spaces and times that separate humans.”157

Shevek consistently desires communication, a specialized kind of interaction— one free of power. 158

 

Institutional power or individual power

 

 

Is the 'state' centralized authority or centralized power?

 

The state as an instrument of class rule would cease to exist: “State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.”[5][5] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, March 1880.   http://karlomongaya.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/ursula-le-guins-the-dispossessed-anarres-as-description-of-the-communist-future/

 

"In the end, the anarchist preference for decentralization is reflective of its own class origin as a protest of small producers, merchants, artisans, and other petty bourgeois who are ruined by monopoly capital and who are nostalgic for the early days of capitalist production: Their views express, not the future of bourgeois society, which is striding with irresistible force towards the socialization of labor, but the present and even the past of that society, the domination of blind chance over the scattered and isolated small producer."  

--Lenin, “Socialism and Anarchism,” November 24, 1905

 

 

Even the language in Anarres, Pravic, has been specifically constructed to correspond to the “non-propertarian” character of their society. In Anarres, there is no word that denotes ownership. Words that correspond to “mine,” “yours,” and so on have no equivalent in Pravic. In Urras, superiority is expressed in terms of height wherein higher is equated with better: the higher the price, the better; the higher your place in the social hierarchy, the better for you. In lieu of this framework, the Anarresti equates the term “more central” with better. This way of saying, is of course, in contravention of the Anarchist dictum of decentralization

 

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.   the USian idea was developd from pirate notions of anarchy and fair leadership (find pirate article)    The best they could do was to change the heads of the gbeaureas and the congress every few years or so.   

They were against political parties.

Bureacracy is a kind of centralization of power, and once things are systematized, it's very hard to change (ask anyone who's ever worked in a school system, or a 100-year old company!).   The Annaresti are coming up against this same problem, the settling in of power and habit.

Is there a better way to do it?

 

what actually occurs, that power settles into centralization?  what's the mechanism?

what are antidotes to the things we just described?

if we made a system of it, would the same thing happen?

how do you perpetualy refresh/reload?  Is that the solution?

 

Ultimately, we're discussing this in terms of community.

 

 

 

 

Does Utopia have to be totalitarian?

"In order to believe in utopia", Bob Elliott said, we must believe "That through the exercise of their reason men can control and in major ways alter for the better their social environment.... One must have faith of a kind that our history has made nearly inaccessible.[15]

“When the Way is lost,” Lao Tzu observed in a rather similar historical situation a few thousand years earlier, there is benevolence. When benevolence is lost, there is justice. When justice is lost there are the rites. The rites are the end of loyalty and good faith, the beginning of disorder.[16]

“Prisons,” said William Blake, “are built with stones of Law.”[17] And coming back to the Grand Inquisitor, we have Milan Kundera restating the dilemma of Happiness versus Freedom:

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise — the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another.... If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer.[18]"

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-a-non-euclidean-view-of-california-as-a-cold-place-to-be

 

 

Cool, decentrailsed Utopia as  communitas, or, living without history, or a story of permanent growth

"Utopia has been euclidean, it has been European, and it has been masculine. I am trying to suggest, in an evasive, distrustful, untrustworthy fashion, and as obscurely as I can, that our final loss of faith in that radiant sandcastle may enable our eyes to adjust to a dimmer light and in it perceive another kind of utopia. As this utopia would not be euclidean, European, or masculinist, my terms and images in speaking of it must be tentative and seem peculiar. Victor Turner’s antitheses of structure and communitas are useful to my attempt to think about it: structure in society, in his terms, is cognitive, communitas existential; structure provides a model, communitas a potential; structure classifies, communitas reclassifies; structure is expressed in legal and political institutions, communitas in art and religion.

Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost everywhere held to be sacred or “holy,” possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured or institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency.[21]

Utopian thought has often sought to institutionalize or legislate the experience of communitas, and each time it has done so it has run up against the Grand Inquisitor.

The activities of a machine are determined by its structure, but the relation is reversed in organisms — organic structure is determined by its processes."

 

"Utopia has been yang. In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot.

Our civilization is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal.

The ten thousand things arise together
and I watch their return.
They return each to its root.
Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness.
Returning to one’s destiny is known as the constant.
Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.
To ignore the constant
is to go wrong, and end in disorder.[25]

To attain the constant, we must return, go round, go inward, go yinward. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold."

 

"Although they exist in history, these societies seem to have worked out or retained a certain wisdom which makes them desperately resist any structural modification which might afford history a point of entry into their lives. The societies which have best protected their distinctive character appear to be those concerned above all with persevering in their existence.

Persevering in one’s existence is the particular quality of the organism; it is not a progress towards achievement, followed by stasis, which is the machine’s mode, but an interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself."

 

exploitation versus conservation/preservation/crystalization

"The way in which they exploit the environment guarantees them a modest standard of living as well as the conservation of natural resources. Though various, their rules of marriage reveal to the demographer’s eye a common function; to set the fertility rate very low, and to keep it constant. Finally, a political life based upon consent, and admitting of no decisions but those arrived at unanimously, would seem designed to preclude the possibility of calling on that driving force of collective life which takes advantage of the contrast between power and opposition, majority and minority, exploiter and exploited."

 

"…a society predominantly concerned with preserving its existence; a society with a modest standard of living, conservative of natural resources, with a low constant fertility rate and a political life based upon consent; a society that has made a successful adaptation to its environment and has learned to live without destroying itself or the people next door. But that is the society I want to be able to imagine — I must be able to imagine, for one does not get on without hope."

 

"Lévi-Strauss is about to make his distinction between the “hot” societies, which have appeared since the Neolithic Revolution, and in which “differentiations between castes and between classes are urged without cease, in order that social change and energy may be extracted from them,” and the “cold” societies, self-limited, whose historical temperature is pretty near zero.

The relevance of this beautiful piece of anthropological thinking to my subject is immediately proven by Lévi-Strauss himself, who in the next paragraph thanks Heaven that anthropologists are not expected to predict man’s future, but says that if they were, instead of merely extrapolating from our own “hot” society, they might propose a progressive integration of the best of the “hot” with the best of the “cold.”

If I understand him, this unification would involve carrying the Industrial Revolution, already the principal source of social energy, to its logical extreme: the completed Electronic Revolution. After this, change and progress would be strictly cultural and, as it were, machine-made.

With culture having integrally taken over the burden of manufacturing process, society..., placed outside and above history, could once more assume that regular and as it were crystalline structure, which the surviving primitive societies teach us is not antagonistic to the human condition."

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-a-non-euclidean-view-of-california-as-a-cold-place-to-be

 

decentralization or centralization?  which is anarres?

The economy, like the organization of social life in general, is more or less decentralized and democratically governed, although economic, social, and geographic units are federated to permit the coordination of economic relations and social activities between the typically small, always self-governing, local units. Decentralization and small size are essential to insuring responsible behavior, and not just because “power inheres in a center” (2: 58). Groups that operate on (or approximate operating on) a face-to-face basis facilitate personal responsibility and the maintenance of mutual trust and therefore cooperation. This is because small groups, generally speaking, increase the ease with which differences of opinion can be resolved or accommodated, reduce the incentives for shirking, and increase the ease with which shirking and other forms of irresponsible, trust-destroying behavior can be identified and sanctioned (for instance, by criticism, ostracism, or even exclusion). Because, moreover, economic and social life is decentralized, the norms and habits of solidarity—the willingness to cooperate, to pitch in, to play fair, even to sanction the irresponsible—are more likely to be carried over into forms of participation in larger, more anonymous contexts. When, for example, a planet-wide drought presents a society-wide crisis, a “labor draft” is instituted and the vast majority of Anarresti willingly, even eagerly, respond.

116-7

 

So there had to be a center after all. The administration and coordination of labor, transportation, communications, and distribution were in fact, and by necessity, centralized, and “from the start the Settlers [of Anarres] were aware that that unavoidable centralization was a lasting threat” (4: 96). By the time Shevek is a young man, a century and a half or so later, the center had become “basically an archistic bureaucracy.” The need for centralization and coordination unavoidably became the need for bureaucratic “expertise and stability,” and hence new sources of power, based on proficiency, knowledge, information, and strategic position, were created. The need for a humane social order, indeed for an anarchocommunist order, seems to require something like a state, and this “gives scope to the authoritarian impulse” (6: 167).

Nor is that all. In order for this relatively centralized, bureaucratic system to function well, in order for it to secure economic efficiency and production, and social and economic predictability and stability, it is indeed necessary to promote the virtues of solidarity, of fellow feeling, community spirit, a willingness to get along and go along, to work hard for the good of society, and to take seriously the beliefs and demands of public opinion, keeper of “the social conscience.” Apart from the fact that a quasi-state can, and in Anarres does, manipulate public opinion (6: 165), the real problem here is, of course, that the legitimate interest in and demand for solidarity and trust and community spirit and the rest can easily become an interest in and demand for uniformity and conformity. In a society in which “the social conscience, the opinion of others, was the most powerful moral force motivating the behavior of most Anarresti,” the lines between cooperation and obedience, persuasion and manipulation, conviction and conformity, tend to blur (4: 112; 6: 167). The problem is in the novel symbolized by the institution of the “Criticism Session,” a legitimate “communal activity . . . wherein everybody stood up and complained about defects in the functioning of the community,” but ended up attacking “defects in the characters of the neighbors”

121

 

how to encourage mutuality?

Other institutions and practices also encourage mutual trust and responsible behavior, or reduce the incentives or occasions for irresponsible conduct, or both. The practice of rotating leadership (and other) positions within organizations, for instance within economic and educational units, is one; it is difficult to be corrupted by power, and to misuse it, if one doesn’t have (very much of ) it for very long. Of course, the absence of a state removes a host of related temptations, including the training of experts in the use of organized coercion, perhaps the most potent source of human corruption and social injustice and conflict. The elimination of marriage and the nuclear family is likewise conceived, in part, as removing opportunities for domination and exploitation, and as encouraging more libertarian and egalitarian social relationships and habits (sexual relations and partnerships, for example, are as varied, and as temporary or permanent, as individuals wish them to be). The elimination of these institutions also serves to integrate people into community life. In general, people live a very public or communal existence on Anarres. Privacy is respected to a degree, but it is difficult to avoid social contact and communal living given the (largely) communal rearing of children, public housing and transportation, public schooling, communal dining, ongoing democratic governance, public service days (every tenth day, local communities organize, and people volunteer for, jobs such as garbage collection and grave digging), and the like that mark everyday life. Communal living does not only embody communal practices, norms, and values, it normalizes and promotes them. Individuals come to regard as quite ordinary and desirable reciprocal and cooperative arrangements, egalitarian practices and forms of sharing, the suppression of egoistic behaviors and attitudes, volunteering for social activities, and working as effectively as one can for the good of the social whole as well as for the benefit of self. The ethic of solidarity and mutual aid must be practiced to be efficacious, and on Anarres, generally speaking, it is.18

117

 

enlightened self-interest

We have seen how the vulnerability and weaknesses of the isolated individual lie at the root of his or her (enlightened) self-interest in maintaining a humane, anarcho-communist social order and, therefore, in maintaining a commitment to the communal values of solidarity, equality, and fair play and, relatedly, to the suppression and control of egoism and selfish forms of conduct like shirking and domination. Unfortunately, the need for a social order sufficiently stable, productive, and sophisticated to support this kind of community and the manifold needs of its members requires, it turns out, a good deal of centralization. Centralization, in turn, is the source of a host of problems which undercut the promise of reconciliation.

121

 

 

inclusion and exclusion

Another manifestation of this perhaps inevitable corruption of the ethic and practices of solidarity and mutual aid concerns practices of inclusion and exclusion. We have seen that noncooperators, shirkers for instance, are subject to various kinds of sanctions, the most extreme of which would generally be exclusion (for example, from a syndicate or a local community). Because of the importance of solidarity and cooperation, and the fear of egoism, the practice of exclusion can easily be used to punish and isolate those who threaten or question convention—those who might, for instance, wish to change organizational procedures or goals, or question prevailing notions of fair play, or hard work, or good work. The maintenance of community or organizational solidarity and cooperation at that point becomes indistinguishable from the suppression of individuality, freedom, and difference. Much of the drama of The Dispossessed centers precisely on Shevek’s exclusion from his society for this kind of reason, a treatment which he learns has become rather common. Shevek discovers the existence in the central city of a large group of “intellectual nuchnibi who had not worked on a regular posting for years,” not because they sought, like real nuchnibi, to withdraw from society, but because society withdrew from them, that is, isolated and excluded them because they did not conform sufficiently to prevailing notions of normalcy and morality (6: 173).

122

 

However, there are asylums (6: 170) and sometimes “they make you go away by yourself for a while” (5: 150).

That should give us pause. “Everybody on Anarres is a revolutionary,” and no one is supposed to have authority. The only authority is public opinion (3: 76). No one is supposed to be forced or ordered on this anarchic world. Yet sometimes “they make you go away by yourself.” It turns out there is considerable social pressure, and this makes us wonder how much of even the classical liberal sense of freedom the Anarresti really enjoy. With no threat of punishment for breaking laws, why do the dirty work? Because, explains Shevek to Oiie, it is done together, in little communities, with others; and there is the challenge: “Where there’s no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things.” Curiously, Shevek adds “people . . . can—egoize, we call it,” using a derogatory Anarresti word for showing off (5: 150). Another motivator is “the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows” (5: 150). Someone who just won’t cooperate is made fun of, others get “rough with him, beat him up.” His name might be removed from the meals listing so he has to cook and eat by himself, which is “humiliating,” so he either conforms, or becomes a “nuchnibi” (5: 150–51).

 

 

 

 

Controlling the body or controlling the soul

18. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, argues that Enlightenment penal reforms that marked an end to punishment as a public spectacle and attack on the physical body were even more nefarious in controlling and disciplining one’s entire soul; discussed in Mark Tunick, Punishment: Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

145

 

communication systems that encourage powermongering or encourage power-free interaction

As Bierman notes, “The ansible in Le Guin’s stories is the correlative for immediately felt, simultaneously held knowledge, the goal of communication—to feel and think together across the spaces and times that separate humans.”1717. Bierman,“Ambiguity,”251.157

Shevek consistently desires communication, a specialized kind of interaction— one free of power. Shevek came to Urras “for the idea. For the sake of the idea. To learn, to teach, to share in the idea” (11: 345). He ultimately gives his General Temporal Theory to all of the worlds for much the same reason—to share it, “so that one of you cannot use it, as A-Io wants to do, to get power over the others, to get richer or to win more wars. So that you cannot use the truth for your private profit, but only for the common good” (11: 345). Shevek does not want to sell his ideas or to guard them from others; nor does he wish his ideas to support a particular government or power structure. Instead, Shevek recalls the foundation of Anarres, Odonian tenets and theories; he comments, “But the ideas in my head aren’t the only ones important to me. My society is also an idea. I was made by it. An idea of freedom, of change, of human solidarity, an important idea” (11: 345). By recalling the fundamental ideas behind his society, by freeing his own scientific theories and giving them to all worlds, Shevek undermines the tendencies toward control and law that have begun to regulate even the anarchist tendencies of Anarres. Thus, Shevek not only shares his physics but also the theories of freedom and anarchy that motivate his pursuit of ideas.

158

 

 

Discrimination -- determining difference and therefore worth? or predjudicial treatment based on difference? 

Sabul, a more senior physicist, uses guilt to try to force Shevek into admitting that his physics is irrelevant. He confronts Shevek by claiming that his work isn’t useful. “It doesn’t get bread into people’s mouths . . .” (8: 265). Sabul perverts the principle of mutual aid into determinism about what kind of physics is worthwhile (only survival-based occupations should be done), another kind of fatalistic ideology that the good of the whole outweighs the freedom of an individual to act.

At its worst, then, Anarres functions archistically as Urras does, or as Keng’s reasoning does. While they are looking at a fur cloak of an ancient tyrant queen, Shevek has a conversation with the Urrasti Vea in which he argues that the Anarresti have left behind the barbarity associated with such a regime. Vea counters that if one doesn’t have a tyrant to rebel against, then one cannot rebel against the internalized tyrant in one’s head (7: 219–20). Vea speaks accurately when implying that the social conscience (Le Guin’s terminology) on Anarres is capable of being perverted to tyranny. Conceiving time only in its linear form (as Arendt argues the west chose to do) or its cyclical form (as Le Guin’s Keng chose to do) leaves one in determinism. Both concepts of time are in fact necessary for grounding the possibility for acting on one’s own initiative.

176

 

Individual or Institutional Violence

Just as violence and self-defense are central to all species, conflict and violence are integral to life on Anarres. On Anarres individuals are not subjected to social practices (such as states) that generate violence, institutionalize it, and encourage its continual recurrence. Whereas on Urras the police and military are organizations whose established and legal task is the application of coercion and physical force internally and externally, part of what makes Anarres utopian is that violence, which does occur, has been disconnected from institutionalized human structures and is limited, transitory, and specific to a single issue.

60

The fight between Shevek and Shevet does not threaten human survival on Anarres because it is limited and transitory. Two other types of violence, though rare, are more problematic. When Shevek claims his right as a free agent to depart for Urras and then to return, some Anarresti disagree. Having lived all their lives within their wall, they argue that the original “Terms of Settlement” prohibit all entry, including reentry, and so establish a self-segregation necessary to protect Anarresti principles and identity (or perhaps to enforce their fear of change). Strong feelings and vigorous arguments erupt at the PDC, and one member threatens violence (12: 358). When Shevek talks to a student group, violence erupts (12: 375). Later, some individuals turn from arguments to bricks to prevent Shevek from leaving (1: 4). Consequently, Shevek does not know (nor does the reader find out) how he will be greeted on his return to Anarres, especially because he is bringing Ketho, from the peaceful Hainish civilization. In short, some Anarresti use the threat (and then the practice) of physical force to try to impose their ideas of the right and the proper on their fellows, and in so doing curb open communication and the compulsion of the better argument.

60

 

What is 'useful'?

Bedap spoke more gravely: “They can justify it because music isn’t useful. Canal digging is important, you know; music’s mere decoration. The circle has come right back around to the most vile kind of profiteering utilitarianism. The complexity, the vitality, the freedom of invention and initiative that was the center of the Odonian ideal, we’ve thrown it all away. We’ve gone right back to barbarism. If it’s new, run away from it; if you can’t eat it, throw it away!” (6: 175–76)

 

Social needs more central than individual needs?

the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. . . . We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. 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. (10: 330–31)

It seems that as soon as we wall in a given space, there is more of it “inside” than it appears possible to an outside view. Continuity and proportion are not possible, because this disproportion, the surplus of inside in relation to outside, is a necessary structural effect of the very separation of the two; it can only be abolished by demolishing the barrier and letting the outside swallow the inside. 

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Abuse, or we choose what we're used to

Just as, at the individual level, adults who were abused as children frequently gravitate toward relationships that are similarly abusive, inasmuch as they reproduce a situation which, however unsatisfactory, is at the same time comfortingly familiar, at a collective level people experiencing the anxieties aroused by the possibility of the genuinely new may all too readily settle for something closer to what they have been psychologically prepared for.

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Cooperating or Obeying?

No one on Anarres is threatened with legal punishment if they pursue what they want rather than fulfill their social obligations, so long as they do not harm others. Yet there are other forms of coercion besides legal punishment. John Stuart Mill developed his harm principle to demarcate limits on the state’s use of coercion, but he also worried about other ways in which liberty is restricted, including public opinion, the power of custom, and expressions of distaste.16 Such forces prevail on Anarres, imposing great pressure to fulfill one’s duties. In a key passage Shevek is talking to Takver and notes how they lie about their freedom: they say they make their own choices, yet in fact they go where PDC posts them and stay till they are reposted, even though it means being apart. Shevek had been told he “could do what he pleased”(8: 269), in contrast to how on Urras he was explicitly called upon to do physics against his will (9: 272). But, Shevek remarks to Takver, on Anarres “we always think [I’m a free man], and say it, but we don’t do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind,” we say “I make my own choices,” but then we do what we’re told. Indeed, notes Shevek, few Anarresti refuse to accept a posting, because people are ashamed: “the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate—we obey” (10: 329–30).

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 that make you want to kill yourself ” (6: 166). 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”134-5

 

 

 

 

 

 

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