Green Planets (12 page)

39
. Ibid., 53.

40
. Ibid., 90.

41
. Ibid., 322.

42
. Wolfe, “Remaking of Zero,” 16.

43
. Ibid., 16.

44
. George R. Stewart,
Earth Abides
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 12–13.

45
. Ibid., 24.

46
. Farah Mendlesohn, “Introduction: Reading Science Fiction,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–2.

47
. Buell,
Future of Environmental Criticism
, vi.

48
. Love,
Practical Ecocriticism
, 163–64

49
. Murphy,
Ecocritical Explorations
, 4.

3

Daoism, Ecology, and World Reduction in Le Guin's Utopian Fictions

GIB PRETTYMAN

For scholars who approach Ursula K. Le Guin's fictions from the perspective of Marxist critical theory, ecology and Daoism can be problematic aspects of her work. In the effusion of Le Guin scholarship that coincided with the establishment of the journal
Science Fiction Studies
(
SFS
) in the early 1970s, critics were quick to identify characteristic subjects of “wholeness and balance” and to link them to her ecological concerns and the Daoist dynamic of yin and yang.
¹
On the one hand, critical theorists saw in these subjects an inspiring awareness of systemic relationships, evocation of “non-capitalist habitats,” and rejection of capitalist alienation, particularly given the publication of her overtly anarchist utopian novel
The Dispossessed
in 1974.
²
On the other hand, they found her “mythopoetic” invocations of balance to be wishful thinking and to imply that radical political action was misguided.
³
Sorting out this ambivalence was especially relevant to critical theorists in terms of assessing Le Guin's utopianism, which they regarded as a positive historical development and a key aspect of
SF
as a contemporary cultural genre.

Starting with the hugely influential work of Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson, then, critical theorists have worked to highlight the radical energies of Le Guin's fictions while simultaneously downplaying politically troublesome aspects of her invocations of Daoism
⁴
and ecology. Although experimentation with non-Western spiritual traditions was a hallmark of the postwar counterculture, Daoism was (and remains) a poorly understood tradition for most critics. Both Suvin and Jameson viewed Daoism with distrust and dismissed it as politically misleading. Ecology, by comparison, represented a major cultural and historical issue in the early 1970s. As Peter Stillman notes, Le Guin was writing at the outset of the modern environmentalist movement, symbolized by the first Earth Day in 1970.
⁵
The field known as “deep ecology” was also coalescing at this time.
Rather than treating this issue directly, however, Suvin and Jameson interpreted Le Guin's ecological themes as fantasies that revealed the inescapable political contradictions of capitalism. In particular, Jameson described Le Guin's approach as “world reduction,” which he saw as a fantasy of escaping from the history of capitalism. Reduced thus to the status of compensatory fantasies, neither Daoism nor ecology was engaged as a strategic framework in its own right. Indeed, serious doubts were suggested about Le Guin's use of both.

In the essay that follows, I revisit this under-explored ground between the concerns of critical theory and Le Guin's intellectual uses of ecology and Daoism. I argue that Le Guin's fictional explorations of ecological relationships do perform real political work on a cognitive and epistemological level by emphasizing a range of challenges to conventional egoistic perceptions. From this perspective, what Jameson identifies as world reduction can be seen to serve a cognitive and material purpose by focusing on the primary epistemological implication of ecology: namely, the historical necessity to reframe familiar assumptions of egoism and anthropocentrism.

I am not using “ego” here in its psychoanalytical meaning, but using it rather to indicate one's sense of being a separate, enduring, and self-centered actor in the world. This is the sense employed by eco-socialist Joel Kovel when he asserts in
The Enemy of Nature
that consumer capitalism is “the way of the Ego.”
⁶
Ego, Kovel argues, is “the anti-ecocentric moment enshrined by Capital” and “the secret to the riddle of growth and the mania of consumption.” From this perspective, global consumer capitalism constitutes the cultural, technological, institutional, and psychosocial apotheosis of egoism, turning natural self-interest into an imperative pseudo-subjectivity enforced by “the titanic power of the capitalist state and cultural apparatus.”
⁷
It is the “enshrinement” of egocentrism that makes capitalism “the enemy of nature,” Kovel argues. In a very real sense, the artificial environments that we have constructed around ourselves—everything from houses and cities to markets and media and virtual realities—are material manifestations of all-consuming egoism. Therefore, one can critique the ecological pathologies of global capitalism as “expressions of an impeded motion between inner and outer world.”
⁸
Such an approach is at once psychological, philosophical, and material.

In describing capitalism as “the way of the Ego,” Kovel formulates in socialist terms what critical traditions like Buddhism and Daoism have long asserted: that egoistic perceptions and institutions are inherently mistaken. Seen from sufficient distance, the egoistic “self” is clearly an unreliable category and even a kind of fiction, as everything about self-“identity” is in constant flux and ultimately
proves to be transitory. Buddhist psychology points out that to act as though one were a fixed and enduring entity leads to certain characteristic problems such as egoistic “attachment”—trying to grasp and possesses things that are in fact always changing—which it asserts is a primary cause of human suffering. Similarly, Daoist philosophy emphasizes the enduring context of Dao (Tao)—the fundamental nature of things and processes of the world—over egoistic illusions and scholastic definitions. In addition to the illusion of fixed identity, another egoistic illusion is the sense of being distinct and separate from the rest of the world. Buddhism and Daoism therefore also explore methods for recognizing fundamental interconnections beneath the appearance of separate “forms.”

Although these concerns of Eastern philosophy are often considered “mystical,” their similarities to the fundamental insights of ecology are evident: both frameworks emphasize systemic processes and aim to critique egoistic illusions. And as Kovel's combination of ecology and socialism suggests, these concerns are arguably compatible with Marxist critique as well. Theoretically, all these frameworks could contribute toward cognitive reframing that would undermine capitalism and the way of the ego. As Kovel puts it, “Recognition of ourselves in nature and nature in ourselves” and “subjective as well as objective participation in ecosystems” are “the essential condition[s] for overcoming the domination of nature, and its pathologies of instrumental production and addictive consumption.”
⁹

Le Guin's fictions, I argue, work toward this “recognition of ourselves in nature” by using insights derived from Daoism and ecology to challenge familiar contexts of ego. Daoism and ecology are thus at the heart of her political vision, both as cognitive strategies and material limits. In order to explore these assertions, I first briefly detail how Suvin and Jameson approach Le Guin's Daoist ecology and consider the implications of the world reduction that Jameson sees in her work. Then I describe how Le Guin's utopian strategy, informed by Daoism, uses specific forms of world reduction to challenge egoistic assumptions. Finally, I consider the implications of Le Guin's strategy relative to that of critical theory and demonstrate how material limits to egoism represent a problem for critical theory as such.

ECOLOGY AS SYMPTOM

As befitting his influence on the field of
SF
in general, Darko Suvin helped to set the tone for reading Le Guin from the perspective of critical theory.
¹⁰
He greatly
admired Le Guin's work, and famously consulted with Le Guin on the vision of
The Dispossessed
—though to what extent is unclear.
¹¹
Suvin also edited the special issue of
Science Fiction Studies
(November 1975) devoted to Le Guin's work.
¹²
In his own contribution to that special issue, “Parables of De-alienation: Le Guin's Widdershins Dance,” Suvin presented his basic solution to Le Guin's problematic valorization of Daoism and ecology by distinguishing between representations of “static balance” and “dynamic balance.” Le Guin, he argued, maintained an active and dynamic vision, a “widdershins dance” of critical perceptions of the world, that was equivalent in many respects to the insights of Marxist critique.
¹³
This dynamic vision represented “the quest for and sketching of a new, collectivist system of no longer alienated human relationships, which arise out of the absolute necessity for overcoming an intolerable ethical, cosmic, political and physical alienation.”
¹⁴
Suvin argued that Le Guin's work had matured from the comparatively simplistic and ahistorical “mythopoetics” of her “apprentice trilogy”—
Rocannon's World
(1966),
Planet of Exile
(1966), and
City of Illusions
(1967)—to the more complexly historical engagements in
The Dispossessed
.
¹⁵
He saw her utopianism as evidence that “the forces of de-alienation are on the rise in Le Guin's writing, parallel to what she (one hopes rightly) senses as the deep historical currents in the world.”
¹⁶
He interpreted her newest utopian fiction at that point, “The New Atlantis” (1975), as further evidence of “the realistic, bitter-sweet Le Guinian ambiguity” and of the “clear and firm but richly and truthfully ambiguous Leftism” which “situates her at the node of possibly the central contemporary contradiction, that between capitalist alienation and the emerging classless de-alienation.”
¹⁷

In emphasizing Le Guin's work as an “
SF
of collective practice,”
¹⁸
Suvin strongly downplayed her Daoism. Rather than “a static balancing of two yin-and-yang-type alternatives, two principles or opposites (light-darkness, male-female, etc.) between which a middle Way of wisdom leads,” Suvin argued, Le Guin's “ambiguities” are “in principle dynamic, and have through her evolution become more clearly and indubitably such.” He saw Daoism as merely a superseded early interest, arguing that her thought had “evolved” through the Daoism of Laozi (Lao Tzu) to the anarchism of Kropotkin and Goodman, and claimed that “attempts to subsume her under Taoism” would be “not only doomed to failure but also retrospectively revealed as inadequate even for her earlier works.”
¹⁹
He regarded Daoism as too simplistic and too mythical to be of use in accurately understanding the political implications of Le Guin's representations of “permanent revolution and evolution.”
²⁰

Suvin did not similarly dismiss Le Guin's ecology, but he downplayed it as well. Despite noting capitalism's “intolerable ethical, cosmic, political and physical alienation,” Suvin did not consider her ecological approach to cosmic and physical alienation at face value. Instead, he treated her ecological ideals primarily as metaphors of renewed collective relationships. His reading of “The New Atlantis,” for example, paid no attention to Le Guin's early depiction of catastrophically raised sea levels resulting from the greenhouse effect. Likewise, his reading of
The Word for World Is Forest
emphasized psychical rather than physical alienation. For Suvin, “the forest which is the word for the world in the language of Selver's people” represents (like Daoism) “a static balance, a closed circle of unhistorical time.”
²¹
Instead of considering Le Guin's concerns for material ecosystems, then, Suvin reads the novel in relation to “the all-pervading psychical eco-system of modern capitalism.” Suvin treats Le Guin's ecological concerns as just another item in the list of grievances against capitalism and its social order, or as an analogy for properly political alienation, rather than an urgent historical framework in its own right.

Fredric Jameson shares Suvin's commitment to critiquing the fundamental political implications of texts using the frameworks of psychoanalysis and critical theory. Jameson insists that a text's subject matter and intended themes are not especially significant in their own right, but rather constitute evidence of the author's imaginative attempts to address contradictions in historical social structures. Suvin captures this idea succinctly in a later essay with an epigraph from Roland Barthes: “What is the meaning of a book? Not what it argues, but what it argues with.”
²²
Like Suvin, then, Jameson reads texts symptomatically, such that their overt content or details are analyzed for what they reveal of psychic processes—deep fears or hopes from our collective “political unconscious”—and in turn those psychic processes indicate distortions and contradictions of the existing political order. In a way, this involves reading texts negatively: watching for the symptomatic places where they necessarily fail, as opposed to treating their intended themes and chosen subjects as positive content in its own right. At the same time, however, symptomatic failures can reveal the enduring hopes of people in the face of political alienation. Jameson labels this enduring hope “the desire called Utopia.”
²³