Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction

3: Daoism, Ecology, and World Reduction in Le Guin’s Utopian Fictions

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 Daoism4 and ecology. Although experimentation with nonWestern 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. 57 L e G u i n’s u to pi an Fict io ns| p r e t t y m a n 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...