The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia Ursula K. Le Guin

1
The Dispossessed An Ambiguous UtopiaUrsula K.
Le Guin

• "Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
  I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the
  social organism. I'm going to go and unbuild
  walls."Shevek from Ursula Le Guin's The
  Dispossessed

2
You can go home again, the General Temporal
Theory asserts, so long as you understand that
home is a place where you have never been. p. 55
3
(No Transcript)
4
Literary honors and awards

• 2004 Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime
  achievement (YALSA)
• 2004 Arbuthnot Lecturer (American Library
  Association)
• 2003 Grand Master, SFWA
• 2003 Locus Readers Award "The Wild Girls"
• 2003 Asimov's Readers Award "The Wild Girls"
• 2003 Endeavor Award Tales from Earthsea
• 2002 PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction
• 2002 Willamette Writers Lifetime Achievement
  Award
• 2002 Locus Readers Awards Tales from Earthsea,
  "The Bones of the Earth,"
• 2002 Locus Readers Awards Tales from Earthsea,
  "The Finder"
• 2001 Endeavor Award The Telling

5

• 2001 Locus Readers Awards for The Telling and
  "The Birthday of the World."
• 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award, Pacific NW
  Booksellers Assoc.
• 2000 Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award,
  L.A. Times
• 1998 Bumbershoot Arts Award, Seattle
  Introduction "Ursula K. Le Guin Mutinous
  Navigator," by Vonda N. McIntyre offsite link
• 1997 James Tiptree Jr. Award for "Mountain Ways"
• 1996 Locus Readers Award for Four Ways to
  Forgiveness
• 1996 James Tiptree Jr. Retrospective Award for
  Left Hand of Darkness
• 1996 Nebula Award for "Solitude"
• 1995 Theodore Sturgeon Award for "Forgiveness
  Day"
• 1995 Locus Readers Award for "Forgiveness Day"
• 1995 James Tiptree, Jr, Award for "The Matter of
  Seggri"
• 1995 Asimov's Readers Award for "Forgiveness Day"
  
• 1995 Hubbub annual poetry award for "Semen"

6

• 1992 H.L.Davis Fiction Award from OLA for Searoad
  
• 1992 Searoad shortlisted for Pulitzer Prize
• 1991 Harold Vursell Award, American Academy
  Institute of Arts Letters
• 1991 Pushcart Prize for "Bill Weisler"
• 1990 Nebula Award for Tehanu
• 1988 Hugo Award for "Buffalo Gals"
• 1988 International Fantasy Award for "Buffalo
  Gals"
• 1987 Prix Lectures-Jeunesse for Very Far Away
  from Anywhere Else (tr. Laroche)
• 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction for
  Always Coming Home
• 1985 Always Coming Home shortlisted for National
  Book Award
• 1984 Locus Award for The Compass Rose
• 1979 Gandalf Award (Grand Master of Fantasy)

7

• 1979 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for A Wizard of
  Earthsea
• 1976 Jupiter Award for "The Diary of the Rose"
• 1975 Nebula Award for The Dispossessed
• 1975 Hugo Award for The Dispossessed
• 1975 Nebula Award for "The Day Before the
  Revolution"
• 1975 Jupiter Award for "The Day Before the
  Revolution"
• 1974 Hugo Award for "The Ones Who Walk Away from
  Omelas"
• 1973 Locus Award for The Lathe of Heaven
• 1973 Hugo Award for The Word for World is Forest
• 1972 National Book Award for Children's Books for
  The Farthest Shore
• 1972 Newbery Silver Medal Award for The Tombs of
  Atuan
• 1969 Hugo Award for The Left Hand of Darkness
• 1969 Nebula Award for The Left Hand of Darkness
• 1968 Boston Globe-Horn Book award for A Wizard of
  Earthsea

8
Understanding Anarchism in the Dispossessed

• Anarchism, which grew out of French social
  philosophy of the eighteenth century,
• Anarchists posit that many of humanity's problems
  come from living under governments.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau had begun The Social
  Contract by writing "Man is born free, and is
  everywhere in chains."
• All governments, whatever their official form,
  quickly become plutocracies (societies governed
  by the rich).
• Many socialists and communists argued that the
  path to reform lay through collective ownership
  of the means of production to ensure that there
  would be no rich. The transition to full economic
  democracy would be managed by a centralized,
  all-powerful government. Anarchists argued that
  such centralization could never lead to the
  hoped-for decentralized egalitarian society
  centralization leads only to more centralization,
  they claimed. If people want freedom, they must
  claim it directly.
• Keep free. Power inheres in a center. Youre
  going to the center. Mitis to Shevek p. 58

9

• Anarchists differ a good deal among themselves,
  but they tend to share a high regard for
  voluntary cooperation, local control, and mutual
  tolerance.
• Sharing is promoted as a social ideal, but only
  on a voluntary basis.
• All of these are values much promoted in the
  counterculture of the "Sixties" (which lasted
  from approximately 1967 to 1974). In many ways,
  Annares is an idealized hippie commune.

10
Anarchism in Practice

• Decentralization had been an essential element
  in Odo's plans for the society she did not live
  to see founded. She had no intention of trying to
  de-urbanize civilization. Though she suggested
  that the natural limit to the size of a community
  lay in its dependence on its own immediate region
  for essential food and power, she intended that
  all communities be connected by communication and
  transport networks, so that goods and ideas could
  get where they were wanted, and the
  administration of things might work with speed
  and ease and no community should be cut off from
  change and interchange. But the network was not
  to be run from the top down. There was to be no
  controlling centre, no capital, no establishment
  for the self-perpetuating machinery of
  bureaucracy and the dominance-drive of
  individuals seeking to become captains, bosses,
  chief's of state.

11

• 'The Day before the Revolution' published in the
  anthology 'The Winds Twelve Quarters Vol2' It is
  written by Le Guin 'In Memorial to Paul Goodman
  1911-1972'. An excerpt.... "Odonianism is
  anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff,
  which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to
  dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist
  economic 'libertarianism' of the far right but
  anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought,
  and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman
  and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the
  authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist)
  its principle moral-practical theme is
  cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the
  most idealistic, and to me the most interesting,
  of all political theories."

12
Is Anarchism Possible?

• Weve let cooperation become obedience. Shevek
  to Bedap.

13
Environmental Protection and Peace

• Ursula Le Guin, speaking about Vietnam in 1968,
  gives an insight into the writing of this story-
  The lies and hypocrisies redoubled, so did the
  killing. Moreover, it was becoming clear that the
  ethic which approved the defoliation of forests
  and grainlands and the murder of non-combatants
  in the name of 'peace' was only a corollary of
  the ethic which permits the despoliation of
  natural resources for private profit or the GNP,
  and the murder of the creatures of the Earth in
  the name of man.

14
Marx and Alienation in the Odonian World

• "The less he had, the more absolute became his
  need to be. He recognized that need, in Odonian
  terms, as his 'cellular function,' the analogic
  term for the individual's individuality, the work
  he can do best, therefore his best contribution
  to his society. A healthy society would let him
  exercise that optimum function freely, in the
  coordination of all such functions finding its
  adaptability and strength... His sense of primary
  responsibility toward his work did not cut him
  off from his fellows, from his society, as he had
  thought. It engaged him with them absolutely."

15
Alienation

• For Marx, the history of mankind had a double
  aspect It was a history of increasing control of
  man over nature at the same time as it was a
  history of the increasing alienation of man.
• Alienation may be described as a condition in
  which men are dominated by forces of their own
  creation, which confront them as alien powers.

16
Alienation and Capitalism

• To Marx, all major institutional spheres in
  capitalist society, such as religion, the state,
  and political economy, were marked by a condition
  of alienation.
• Moreover, these various aspects of alienation
  were interdependent.
• "Objectification is the practice of alienation.
  Just as man, so long as he is engrossed in
  religion, can only objectify his essence by an
  alien and fantastic being so under the sway of
  egoistic need, he can only affirm himself and
  produce objects in practice by subordinating his
  products and his own activity to the domination
  of an alien entity, and by attributing to them
  the significance of an alien entity, namely
  money."
• Money as a fetish. It is through the medium of
  money that alienation is transmitted.

17
The Four Aspects of Alienation

• The Object Produced
• The Process of Production
• Himself/Herself
• The Community of Fellows

18
The Object Produced

• 1) The Object produced- "The object produced by
  labor, its product, now stands opposed to it as
  an alien being, as a power independent of the
  producer. . . .The more the worker expends
  himself in work the more powerful becomes the
  world of objects which he creates in face of
  himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life,
  and the less he belongs to himself.
• The object produced is used to satisfy basic
  needs, but the worker lacks detailed knowledge
  and control over the product.

19
The Process of Production

• 2) The process of production- "However,
  alienation appears not merely in the result but
  also in the process of production, within
  productive activity itself. . . . If the product
  of labor is alienation, production itself must be
  active alienation. . . . The alienation of the
  object of labor merely summarizes the alienation
  in the work activity itself.
• Productive activity belongs to the capitalist,
  the process is no longer satisfying in and of
  itself. Instead it is tied into the generation
  of profit.

20
Himself/Herself- Species Being

• 3) Him/herself- Being alienated from the objects
  of his labor and from the process of production,
  man is also alienated from himself--he cannot
  fully develop the many sides of his personality.
  "Work is external to the worker. . . . It is not
  part of his nature consequently he does not
  fulfill himself in his work but denies himself. .
  . . The worker therefore feels himself at home
  only during his leisure time, whereas at work he
  feels homeless."31 "In work the worker does not
  belong to himself but to another person."32 "This
  is the relationship of the worker to his own
  activity as something alien, not belonging to him
  activity as suffering (passivity), strength as
  powerlessness, creation as emasculation, the
  personal physical and mental energy of the
  worker, his personal life. . . . as an activity
  which is directed against himself, independent of
  him and not belonging to him.
• One is alienated from his/her human potential.
  We become less human through our work and more
  like animals. (who only do things to satisfy
  basic needs).

21
Community of Fellows

• 4) Community of Fellows- "Man is alienated from
  other men. When man confronts himself he also
  confronts other men. What is true of man's
  relationship to his work, to the product of his
  work and to himself, is also true of his
  relationship to other men. . . . Each man is
  alienated from others . . . each of the others is
  likewise alienated from human life.
• Rather than working together, workers are pitted
  in competition against one another.

22
Emancipation- Praxis

• Human emancipation only occurs when individuals
  become species beings, or realize their
  potential.
• Praxis- concrete action informed by theory
• His ideal society does not rule over people and
  is nothing beyond the concrete relations between
  individuals.

23
Marx on Human Potential

• All that is solid melts into air, all that is
  holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to
  face with sober senses, his real conditions of
  life and his relations with his kind. Marx 1848
• Through change the realization of human potential
  may be realized.
• Species beings- human potential as a group,
  less than an individual phenomenon.
• Role of Capitalism- both positive and negative
  consequences

24
Getting Things Done

• they were simply busy getting things done. It
  puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed
  a human beings natural incentive to work-his
  initiative, his spontaneous creative energy- and
  replaced it with external motivation and
  coercion, he would become a lazy and careless
  worker The lure an compulsion of profit was
  evidently a much more effective replacement of
  the natural initiative than he had been led to
  believe. p. 82

25
Le Guin Offers a Critique

• Are the real conditions of existence realized on
  Annares? In what ways is this story about Shevek
  coming to terms with these conditions?

26
According to Marx

• In the ideal society, man "will fish in the
  morning, hunt in the afternoon, and write
  criticism in the evening, without for all that
  being a fisherman, hunter or critic".

27

• Odo wrote
• 'A child free from the guilt of ownership and the
  burden of economic competition will grow up with
  the will to do what needs doing and the capacity
  for joy in doing it. It is useless work that
  darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing
  mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter,
  of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone
  doing needed work and doing it well, - this
  durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of
  human affection and of sociality as a whole. From
  Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Page 207.

28
A Flawed Utopia
29
Commodities

• Are products of labor intended for both use and
  exchange.
• People produce what they need to survive.
• Commodities are the reified result of labor.

30
The Fetishism of Commodities

• Labor gives commodities their value. The
  fetishism of commodities involves the process by
  which actors fail to recognize that it is their
  labor that gives commodities their value.
• A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing,
  simply because in it the social character of
  mens labor appears to them as an objective
  character stamped upon the product of that labor
  because the relations of the producers to the sum
  total of their own labor is presented to them as
  a social relation, existing not between
  themselves, but between the products of their
  labor. Marx, 1867

31
Value

• Use value- objects produced for use by oneself or
  others in the immediate environment. With use
  value, objects are the products of human labor
  and cannot achieve an independent existence
  because they are controlled by the actors.
• Exchange Value- the value of something in an
  exchange. The value something takes one when
  exchanged in an open market.
• Surplus Value- the difference between what the
  worker is paid and what the worker produces

32
The Demands of Capital

• Capital- the objectified embodiment of past labor
  (dead labor). Its value can only be brought to
  life when living labor is applied to it.
• Capital is dead labour which, vampire like,
  lives only by sucking living labour, and lives
  the more, the more labour it sucks (Capital, p.
  342)
• Capital requires ever increasing demands on the
  workers time (machines arent making money when
  they are down).
• Human needs and hardships are secondary to the
  demands of capital to expand.
• -shift to continuous production provides and
  example of this tendency.

33

• Anarres
• Propertarian State- Capitalism
• Thu- Stalinist State
• How do Benbili, Thu and A-io represent what is
  happening in the U.S., USSR and the countries
  caught in between?

34
Theory of Simultaneity

• Note the alternating chapters, how does this
  relate to the theory of simultaneity?

35
Gender

• Le Guin is critical of dominant views of gender
  in our own culture. (Shevek informs the
  propertarians of Urras that about half of
  scientists are women).
• What is her critique?

36
Essential Human Nature

• What is human nature?
• Is Le Guin a social Constructionist?