thoughts

I have finished The Dispossessed. Here are some thoughts.

Anarchy and archy are opposed; anarchy, the ‘constant revolution’, is opposed to any form of stable system. Following Ubik, The Dispossessed sees stable systems as doomed to disintegrate, and the attempt to hold them together as retarding progress. Technologically advanced Urras is atomised, divided between rich and poor, with info-balkanisation and technologies of Power. Anarres is poor but has solidarity - they work together to solve problems, but bureaucracy still creeps into the system, drought and famine persist and force a sort of hardening of the mind - university positions are closed in favour of mandatory manual labour. The anarchist project struggles to resist the rule-formulation impulse. Each world has its merits - the women on Anarres are more physically beautiful, for instance. Everything is a game on Anarres - Shevek distinguishes himself from those people by saying, ‘I am not a salesman’ - everything on Anarres is about selling appearance to people. There was a complex sexual assault scene that i’m not sure was dealt with in the best way.

Following PKD, TD deals with the relationship between individual and society, seeing their influence as reciprocal. Shevek has developed a theory which promises to make possible the ‘ansible’, a device of instantaneous communication. The diplomat he tries to give this to says it’s tantamount to inventing speech: the diplomat has come from Terra, and can only receive news about Terra 11 years ago, because of the time lag. The ansible would facilitate proper communication. We can see how it goes: world atomises, technology resynthesises: the McLuhan position. Shevek wants to give this technology away so that everybody can use it, so that power cannot co-opt it. He had to stop doing science at home because people were becoming distrustful of him. Le Guin says that the most basic principle of a society is fear of the outsider - love always breaks down.

The book ends with Shevek bringing a Hainish commander back to Anarres with him - introducing another alien to the planet, breaking down the walls. The Hainish commander remarks that his society has been around for many millennia, and have tried all social arrangements, including anarchy. But, he remarks: I have never tried anarchy. And this is the point: yes, individuals recapitulate patterns over time, but each time they do the pattern changes, because the world onto which it is being imposed has a different shape, as does the brain doing the imposing (this being a logical implication of cultural evolutionary theory). Hence, the failure of a social system in the past provides weak evidence, at best, for the eternal non-functionality of that system. This undermines capitalist realist positions. ‘They say there is nothing new under the sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?’