Green Planets (13 page)

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 utopian 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):

 

The ten thousand things arise together

and I watch their return.

They return each to its root.

Returning to one's roots is known as stillness.

Returning to one's destiny is known as the constant.

Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.

To ignore the constant

is to go wrong, and end in disorder.
³²

 

Le Guin didn't cite any translator for this rendering of the passage; presumably it is her own, derived from comparison of prominent translations.
³³
Fifteen years later, in her own published translation of Laozi, Le Guin titled this passage “Returning to the Root” and rendered it in more natural and ecological language:

 

The ten thousand things arise together;

in their arising is their return.

Now they flower,

and flowering

sink homeward,

returning to the root.

 

The return to the root

is peace.

Peace: to accept what must be,

to know what endures.

In that knowledge is wisdom.

Without it, ruin, disorder.
³⁴

 

Here the confident subjectivity and intellectual abstractions of the earlier translation (“destiny,” “discernment,” “the constant”) are almost completely replaced by analogies to impersonal natural processes, a hallmark of Daoist thought. The result is a series of fundamental ecological insights: recognizing the enduring relationships between all things, recognizing their endless impermanence, recognizing their fundamental properties, and recognizing the “wisdom” of this “knowledge” as opposed to anthropocentric and egoistic constructions of order. Using these insights, Le Guin's yin utopianism seeks to challenge ego-logical frameworks by appealing to ecological ones.

As it was for Daoists in the Warring States period of Chinese history, it is the “ruin” and “disorder” of existing social institutions that leads Le Guin to her strategy of envisioned simplification and “return.” She argues for the need to compensate in the opposite direction from our “intensely yang” culture, and to undo the confident egoism that moves us farther and farther from “what endures.” Paradoxically, then, Le Guin's yin utopia imagines not a “no place,” but precisely a radical version of the here and now: “If utopia is a place that does not exist, then surely (as Lao Tzu would say) the way to get there is by the way that is not a way. And in that same vein, the nature of the utopia I am trying to
describe is such that if it is to come, it must exist already.”
³⁵
In suggesting this paradoxical utopian strategy, Le Guin asserts that her intent “is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I'm trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.”
³⁶
Le Guin lumps capitalism, progressivism, utopianism, and Marxism together as manifestations of the prevailing egoistic orientation toward endless growth. Instead, she wants to emphasize a radical knowledge of place, of here and now. Both ecology and Daoism represent critical frameworks for this approach.

Such cognitive world reduction, or “return to the root,” has become an increasingly significant aspect of our historical moment since 1975. No doubt, as Jameson suggests, it primarily reveals a desire to imagine away capitalism. However, it also represents the recognition of real limits and the real reductions that must eventually occur, one way or the other. In
Ecology as Politics
, published at the same time as the Le Guin issue of
SFS
, André Gorz notes that capitalism—specifically, what we would now call industrial capitalism—was confronting numerous concrete ecological limits. In the 1970s, oil shortages and pollution were the most evident examples of ecological limits. Kovel, writing at the turn of the twenty-first century, could point to a laundry list of devastating ecological statistics, including the encompassing crisis of global climate change. Now we can add physiological phenomena like the diabetes and obesity epidemics, which are essentially physiological limits on growth and consumption—points at which industrial “satisfaction” of appetites destroys the organism itself. Even the fictions and abstractions of postindustrial capitalism are reaching real limits, such as financial institutions that are “too big to fail” or digital “addictions” that unfit us for survival in the real world. In all these ways, assumptions of endless growth and ever-increasing consumption are, as Gorz said, encountering physical contradictions or “counterproductivities.”
³⁷
These are ecological limits of ego-logic, experienced from squarely within consumer culture (to say nothing of globalization's relentless effects on nonindustrialized peoples and cultures). To practice “ecological realism,” Gorz insists, the point “is not to refrain from consuming more and more, but to consume less and less—there is no other way of conserving the available reserves for future generations.”
³⁸
Cognitively, “to understand and overcome such ‘counterproductivities,' one has to break with economic rationality.”
³⁹
Le Guin, then, is expressing a basic ecological strategy of our times: trying to counteract the way of the ego.
⁴⁰

DAOISM AS ECOLOGICAL STRATEGY

Le Guin's Daoism functions as a critical framework for this cognitive reframing away from ego-logic and toward eco-logic in ways that go well beyond the familiar distinction of yin and yang and the ideal “way” of Dao. The Daoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) is a philosophical worldview—not a set of canonical beliefs or scriptural revelations like the typical Western understanding of religions. Therefore, Daoism contributes to Le Guin's work not as beliefs to be affirmed, but as strategies to be pursued. Daoism's most important ecological strategies are challenging conventional knowledge and recognizing the intrinsic characteristics of things, both of which serve to reframe the way of the ego.