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 ti
me.”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
While Jameson addresses Le Guin’s ecological ideals more explicitly than Suvin did, then, he similarly treats them primarily as symptomatic evidence of more familiar political issues. In his essay “World Reduction in Le Guin,” which also appeared in the Le Guin issue of SFS, Jameson considered the political ambiguities that her Daoist-inspired focus on ecology represents from a Marxist perspective.24 One of the major psychic processes that he identified in Le Guin’s work was “world reduction.” Pointing primarily to The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed, Jameson described Le Guin’s world reduction as “a principle of systematic exclusion, a kind of surgical excision of empirical reality, something like a process of ontological attenuation in which the sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists, or what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstractions and simplification.”25 The extremely cold and barren planet Gethen in Left Hand of Darkness, for example, represents “an experimental landscape in which our being-in-the-world is simplified to the extreme.”26 The moonscape of Annares in The Dispossessed is a similarly barren “experimental landscape,” particularly given that it serves as the setting for imagining a utopian society.
Jameson saw mixed implications in Le Guin’s world reduction. On the positive side, such simplification of our being-in-the-world tries to imagine away capitalism, and is therefore evidence of utopian desire. But clearly any resulting critique or alternative vision would be questionable to the extent that it is based on fantasized world reduction. From this perspective, as Jameson’s term suggests, world reduction is largely a wished-for escape from the frustrating complexity of lived existence in the modern world. Jameson saw this wish in part as “a symbolic affirmation of the autonomy of the organism,” but also as “a fantasy realization of some virtually total disengagement of the body from its environment or eco-system.” It yields a situation, he argued, “in which our sensory links with the multiple and shifting perceptual fields around us are abstracted so radically as to vouchsafe, perhaps, some new glimpse as to the ultimate nature of human reality.”27 In other words, world reduction suggests both regrettably escapist and laudably utopian impulses. Although he referred to Le Guin’s world reduction as an “experimental ecology,” however, Jameson didn’t explore its significance in terms of ecology per se.
The ambivalent significance of world reduction again indicates the problems that Le Guin’s invocation of ecology and Daoism pose from the perspective of critical theory. To point toward ecological ideals or seek a glimpse of “the ultimate nature of reality” is a laudable reaction to political alienation, but it also seems escapist when considered in relation to the “all-pervading psychical eco-system” of global capitalism. From the perspective of critical theory, ecological ideals of balance or wholeness seem to be outside of history. This perception is only amplified when the source of the ecological ideals is an ancient and mystical system such as Daoism, which Jameson takes to be a key source of Le Guin’s “anti-political, anti-activist stance.”28 Like Suvin, then, Jameson seeks to separate positive ideals and political longings from the particular frameworks of ecology and Daoism that Le Guin uses to formulate them.
At least in the case of ecology, this unwillingness to consider Le Guin’s frameworks seems to be a significant shortcoming, given that ecological crises are an important historical context in their own right. And in terms of Daoism, Suvin’s assessment also appears to be wrong in at least one respect: Le Guin in fact turned toward Daoism with even more vigor and subtlety in her later work, including her explicit utopian theorizing and her most experimental utopian work. Given these facts, there would seem to be room for critical theorists to engage more with Le Guin’s ecological and Daoist frameworks in their own right.
By the same token, Jameson’s insights reveal an important problem for critics who take Le Guin’s ecology and Daoism seriously, because world reduction is clearly a perplexing technique for someone who supposedly values ecological insights. Ecology as a positive framework emphasizes qualities such as diversity, complexity, and systemic balance, whereas world reduction seems to ignore those factors, or actively to fantasize them away. Critics who admire Le Guin’s ecological ideals, no less than critical theorists who distrust them, need to consider the relationships between her world reduction and her uses of Daoism and ecology.
YIN UTOPIANISM
Suvin and Jameson are certainly correct about capitalism as an all-pervading psychic ecosystem, and world reduction has remained characteristic in Le Guin’s work, including her later utopian novels Always Coming Home (1985) and The Telling (2000). Thus the basics of their reading are not at issue: Le Guin does attempt to imagine capitalism away, and both the desire to escape and the severely limited ability to do so are symptomatic of our historical period. However, I maintain that Le Guin’s Daoist ecology does more than simply confirm the basic diagnosis and the critical framework that interprets the symptoms. Insisting on an ecological perspective yields politically effective cognitive estrangement of the sort that Suvin posits for SF. Specifically, ecology involves two related cognitive processes: unlearning the egoistic and anthropocentric illusions that underlie the psychic ecosystem of capitalism, and learning the real limits that characterize the material ecosystem and circumscribe human culture. Seen this way, Le Guin’s world reduction is not just an effort to fantasize capitalism away, but a strategic response to the worldview of capitalism—and Daoism provides an essential framework for conceptualizing that strategy.
This is basically the artistic and political strategy that Le Guin outlined in her 1982 lecture “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” where she used the Daoist framework of yin and yang to contrast her utopianism with that of the Western tradition. “Yin” roughly signifies the dark, soft, passive, metaphorically “feminine” aspects of the universe, while “yang” is its bright, hard, aggressive, metaphorically “masculine” aspects. From Le Guin’s perspective, “Utopia has been yang. In one way or the other, 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.”29 By contrast, Le Guin claimed that she was “trying to suggest, in an evasive, distrustful, untrustworthy fashion, and as obscurely as I can,” that “our final loss of faith” in the “radiant sandcastle” that was the European and masculine u
topian tradition might “enable our eyes to adjust to a dimmer light and in it perceive another kind of utopia”—a “yin utopia.”30
Although she used the framework of yin and yang, it is important to notice that she saw her yin utopianism as a strategic counterweight rather than a mystical celebration of inevitable balance. In a response to the SFS special issue on her work, Le Guin noted that “all too often … I find the critic apparently persuaded that Yin and Yang are opposites, between which lies the straight, but safe, Way”—a conception of Daoism that she insists “is all wrong.”31 Her explicit theorizing in “Non-Euclidean” demonstrates instead how Daoism can be used to diagnose and combat imbalance. “Our civilization is now so intensely yang,” Le Guin declares, “that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal.” Le Guin glosses her envisioned “reversal” by citing a passage from Laozi’s Daodejing (Tao Te Ching):
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