# 18 = Volume 6, Part 2 = July 1979
John Fekete
The Dispossessed and Triton: Act and System in Utopian Science Fiction
Science fiction occupies an important and relatively free space in our culture, regardless of how this space may actually be contested at the level of ideas and propositions. On the formal level, SF constructs its coordinate systems from the parameters of both technical discourse and fiction: it is able perhaps uniquely to combine a discursive/objective grounding for "metaphor" with a subjective/ evaluative appropriation of "fact." In other words, SF combines traditional logical-discursive structures with traditional artistic structures, science with fiction. As a result of all this, SF is endowed with perhaps the most abundant repertoire of words and sentences, speculative or conjectural models and rhetorical stances in contemporary social discourse.1 In addition, inscribed within this linguistic horizon is surely one of the most vital projects of our day: the redemption of an alienated scientific enlightenment as a renewed aspect of human subjectivity, and at the same time, the redemption of an alienated aesthetic imagination as a renewed aspect of human efficacy; science and art in fruitful tension with one another. All of this constitutes the formal horizon of SF and is, of course, open to a range of ideological varieties. Contemporary controversies in SF about politics, culture, and rationality have begun to live up to the formal potentialities of the genre, and have given rise to a wealth of considerations that bear acutely and profoundly on the nature and the future of the bureaucratically administered types of societies in which we live today. It is possible to go on to suggest that SF, as an emerging new cultural language of perhaps unprecedented resources, is a novelty with dynamic and powerful formal potentialities and may be in both form and content an exemplum of a break in one-dimensional culture.
SF provides models for the hypothetical emergence or transformation of human powers. It is generally accepted that, in so doing, SF has often had recourse to communicative symbols drawn from the natural and biological sciences and from engineering. More recently, the surge of social energy in the 1960's, with its attendant public controversies, has not only enlarged the market for SF but has specifically created the audience and the desire for an SF that would assimilate the symbolic languages of social science and philosophy. SF always involves, explicitly or implicitly, some technical discourse. The new attention to social-theoretical discourse (ranging from cybernetics, semiology, and communications theory to sociology, political economy and psychoanalysis as well as Hegelian dialectics and structuralist anthropology) is correlative to the renaissance of the utopian pole of SF, that pole which is explicitly concerned with the social and cultural politics of happiness in models built on alternative historical hypotheses. Now, it seems to me that one needs a double treatment of the utopian models that are proposed in actual works: on one hand symptomatology, to comment on relevant currents in our culture as they appear in the texts; and on the other, political, social, and cultural theory, to converse with the actual propositions. In other words, in dealing with the texts, one would like to be sensitive both to the substance of a given model, and also to its ideological parameters and boundaries of meaning
In what follows I shall focus on Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and Samuel R. Delany's Triton, a matched set of brilliant works from the mid-1970s, designed to model possibilities and limits of social and individual life. Both construct and explore with admirable virtuosity a virtuosity unhappily lost in my necessarily simplified review the structures and dynamics of relatively libertarian societies that are cast into a distant tomorrow. It happens that both are situated on the moons of solar systems next to older societies which resemble our own and which are set on the planets themselves. In presenting their decentralized, anarchist social models, both books make an important contribution to renewing a direction of speculation that has surfaced only infrequently in the utopian tradition since the post-Renaissance rise (and alienation) of science and the rise of correspondingly authoritarian models of the future.
To speak about bureaucratically administered society is to speak about social control rationalized both institutionally and (especially) within the individual. The bureaucratization of formal systems in the narrower sociological sense of the economy, the state, and the law, if it is to be effective, also implies bureaucratization at the deeper levels of consciousness in the culture. From a perspective of systems analysis, effective administration of society involves the internalization of motives, desires, and norms for functioning that is to say, bureaucratic management involves the colonization of the personality. Indeed, paradoxically, it is too great a success at such administration of the personality that produces today a crisis of subjectivity; that is, of possibilities for dynamic regulation and advance of social development. This problematic of personality is, of course, a traditional terrain for anarchism and both Le Guin's and Delany's books are centrally occupied with this anthropological dimension. Indeed, it would appear that the anarchist model is central to a political discussion of administered society in our own day in another, related sense. With the historical decline of collective subjectivity (the proletariat) as traditionally conceived on the Left, and the apparent disintegration of conditions favorable for its revival, the irreducible and very tentative and problematic unit of both political action and consciousness is not some mythical or hypothetical self-conscious sociological class in-and-for-itself, but of necessity the individual, i.e. a version of the protagonist of anarchist theory. This remains the case however much individuals may need, desire, and actually come to group themselves in communities.
Within this framework, it happens that Le Guin and Delany create very different reality grids, one virtually the inverse of the other. Indeed, Delany, citing Michel Foucault's The Order of Things (Triton, Appendix B: 345), is sharply critical of utopian endeavors, which he sees as offering illusory consolation. By contrast, his model, which again following Foucault he calls heterotopia, proposes disturbance and dissolution. For an earlier generation, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 defined alternative nightmare visions of a totalitarian future. The former did so through a model of desublimated infantilism in a context of mass-produced behavioral happiness, and the latter through a model of sublimation, linguistic manipulation, and sadistic political power. For our own generation, Le Guin's The Dispossessed (already on the way to becoming a classic in the non-sectarian anarchist-socialist milieu)2 and Delany's Triton (which draws as much on structuralist models as Le Guin does on both Eastern and Western traditions of a dialectical reason)3 define alternative dimensions of our own situation, both dramatically and discursively through the social-theoretical materials which they self-consciously incorporate.
Both of these projects take as their implicit starting point the pervasive discord and fragmentation in contemporary life. But in spite of this shared background of intolerable alienation, the two books are focused differently. Le Guin's interest is in the emergence of the liberatory novum, of individual initiative, of understanding and communication; she works at the ascendant peripheries of the situation and toward the classical utopian aspirations of Western philosophy: reconciliation in the potential harmony of all. Delany, by contrast, presents the dominance of dispersion, of compelling convention, of statistical typicality, of delusion and a systematic distortion of communication; he works at the centers of common experience and immobility. As I probe each work in turn, I shall eventually argue in a critical vein that in spite of their intended opposition, at their limits the two works both present closed systems and therefore both exhibit the ultimately entropic qualities of rationalist models (of moral rationalism in the one case, of structural rationalism in the other). At the same time, it is worth noting that both authors conceive of their formulations (as their respective subtitles indicate) as ambiguous. Gone forever are the unambiguous "design for living" blueprints of earlier utopists, the closed systems of a crude rationalism in whose terms the end of the process is always given from the beginning, and the possibilities and alternatives open to future generations of humankind are usurped, exhausted, or foreclosed. The ambiguity that Le Guin and Delany announce at the outset indicates a shift from the substantive to the methodological at the gravitational centre of their modeling. Through the chosen forms both authors seek to delineate significant structural and axiological vectors of an unfolding and conflict-laden process. In other words, ambiguity is not in and by itself an index of pessimism or failure; rather it involves a suggestion of a process relatively open to the future.
1. The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Reconciliation
In The Dispossessed, Le Guin presents two worlds: there is the planet Urras, with its three politically obsolete regions (the totalitarian State-socialist region, the totalitarian profiteering region, and the totalitarian underdeveloped region), and there is the moon Anarres (which, in Latin, means beyond or without things and which here indicates both the absence of property and consumerism, and also the presence of extreme scarcity). One of the most interesting ideological features of The Dispossessed pointing up, I think, a problem in the philosophical culture of our day is that Le Guin incisively anatomizes the illusions of rationalist social-historical thought, charts its traps, and then at a different level proceeds to fall into them. She shows, to begin with, that the culture of the anarcho-communist society on Anarres, notwithstanding its admirable beginnings in creative and humane institutional innovation, is caught in the traps of its historical inheritance. This historical inheritance, in becoming alienated, has produced corrosion and degeneracy.4 After several generations, what remains on Anarres is what could be called a degenerate workers' culture, or a degenerate rebels' culture. First of all, with the legend of revolution there develops the illusion of a radical rupture between past and future, a rupture which separates Anarres from Urras and is supposed to have revealed the meaning of history. Such an image of rupture sums up a self-enclosed society in which the content of this rupture becomes a fixed standard used to correlate and measure all activities. That fixed standard, moreover, is provided specifically by Odonian ideology, which has been progressively devitalized and congealed into doctrine. Thirdly, the governing principles and interpretations that have been derived from and increasingly projected into this doctrine aim to establish the relationship of Anarresti society to its Urrasti past in the form of the determinate negation of this past. Since Urras is represented in the image of private property and exploitation, Anarres is organized as its opposite, as its negation, frozen into the double image of egalitarianism and communitarianism. Le Guin then shows that these have become, in their dogmatic forms, deeply problematic.
The justice and importance of challenging concrete social inequalities are becoming well established in our time; in the pursuit of humanity's regeneration, to advocate community in place of alienated fragmentation is at least of comparable value. Yet, looking around and ahead, it is possible to see that both these goals may also come to present new human problems. Ideological egalitarianism when put into dogmatic practice can produce an impoverishing denial of the entire world of culture and civilization; enforced equivalence can mean a disregard for quality in favor of abstract quantity in order to make dissimilar things commensurable. Thus every time that Shevek asserts his unique interests or his advanced talent, he is accused of egoizing instead of sharing. Inability, envy, and resentment can cut the world of human wealth down to a very limited scale. In the same way, the desire for harmonious communitarian society can only too easily translate into homogeneous socialization which is meant to produce commensurable experiences. All of these cultural distortions, as Le Guin recognizes with great insight, have deep roots in the major left-wing social and philosophical traditions, indeed, beyond those, in the very soil of "Western" intellectual and social development. On Anarres, the result is a stultifying and self-destructive decay of organic revolutionary culture into mechanical conventionality; the decay sediments bureaucratic walls that become internalized (and invisible) as a fear of freedom. The caveat addressed to contemporary radical politics or philosophy could not be more obvious.
Yet it cannot be said that Le Guin's response is really free from comparable distortions. She does not share the Anarresti mystique of history as rupture; she makes it very clear through Shevek that a human act is one that links past and future in the present, i.e. that the past and the future co-exist in the present as memory and intention. Yet it is arguable that Shevek's image of time, though it opens up the society to its past and future, remains problematic. Shevek, the physicist, dreams of a General Temporal Theory that would unite Sequency and Simultaneity, the diachronic and the synchronic, the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, becoming and being, duration and creation, ethics and geometry, causal logic and parataxis, humanism and structuralism. His is a grand synthetic desire to correlate without tension all phenomena within a time-space continuum. Within its own conventions in the novel, this is the ultimate rationalist reconciliation. On Anarres, the social correlative of this cosmic quest is the city of Abbenay (Mind, in Pravic) where, we are told, "nothing was hidden."5 On Anarres, total harmony and total transparency are the fictions behind Shevek's illusion that a healthy society would and could coordinate all its individual peculiarities or what Le Guin calls "cellular functions" (10: 267) to represent that contribution which social theorists from Saint Simon to Marx expected each person, according to ability, to make to society. This rationalist dream of unitary cohesion (total coordination) is a symptom of our culture's illness, deeply embedded in all of its most hopeful formulations. It is a profound paradox that unitary cohesion, this curious emblem of our consciousness, should be embraced by both advocates and opponents of modern social administration, to the point where utopia becomes totalitarian and totalitarianism wears a utopian face.
This problem of unitary cohesion impinges as well on the anthropological dimension of Le Guin's model, as indeed it does on most of the radical discussions of human nature. On Anarres, it becomes evident that the abolition of profiteering ownership has still left a power structure of mental cowardice objectified in public opinion. In addition to the political-economic key to the social process that is basic to the outlook and language of the Anarresti, Le Guin through Shevek adds an anthropological key: he discovers that a transformation of the personality is essential to restore initiative and dynamism. Shevek recognizes that the overbureaucratized normative structure of Anarresti society has produced stagnation and decay, and he seeks to generate free spaces, well beyond the latitude left by the abolition of private property. He wants free spaces for the recreation of the spontaneity/negativity/otherness/non-identity that such a society needs as internal control mechanisms for continued development and vitality. At the same time, Shevek's conception points to a permanently revolutionary culture which requires a human personality that needs to be the revolution, and that places freedom at the peak of its value hierarchy, reaching for the future with empty hands joined in mutual aid with the empty hands of brothers who are sharers, not owners, and are dependent on each other. In my view, this goal a conventional radical goal, really of a renewed culture of harmoniously correlated revolutionary personalities is highly problematic. At the limits of this conception, society is again enclosed in a circle, this time with reference to an anthropological centre that gives it symbolic unity. The empty-handed, permanently revolutionary personality becomes the aim, meaning, and measure of all things. It is true that, from Jesus to Nietzsche and Marcuse, the anthropological imperative to change the personality has constituted a powerful demand to complement the social imperatives of institutional change. Nonetheless, one also has to consider that a universalizing anthropology, even with the best of intentions, is still totalitarian: a vain attempt of the cognitive mind to embrace and leave its unified imprint on all phenomena.
One further feature of Le Guin's outlook is as problematic as it is symptomatic of a pervasive cultural attitude in our day. Opposed to the walls of conventionality that public opinion erects, Shevek declares that the real revolution is a solidarity without walls. As it happens, on Anarres, where this solidarity is yet to be consciously willed as a goal for itself; it already exists in itself, though it has been alienated into obedient cooperation and conformity. As the Odonian rebels from Urras were exported to the moon and plunked down empty-handed in the howling desert that is Anarres, solidarity as a means of survival was a given of the situation at the very origins of Anarresti society, and was to be tested in the face of extreme scarcity. Out of the struggle to survive in the face of extreme scarcity is born the "bond . . . beyond choice" (9: 24), the brotherhood that begins in shared pain. The empty hand image thus does double duty for Le Guin: it signifies both the valued social absence of private property and the valued social presence of an environmentally coerced interdependence of the propertyless for survival.
Arguably, from the point of view of libertarian social theory, neither usage of the empty hand is legitimate, though in the fiction they sustain each other. First, once it becomes evident that the abolition of property domination fails to remove power and alienation from the social terrain, the whole nature of social domination needs to be rethought and reimaged (by Shevek, Le Guin, or any of us), including the question of ownership, whose interpretation will change in the overall context. Second, though the overwhelming survival necessities that test the solidarity of the empty-handed colonists are immanent in their history, nevertheless this environmental fate is really the product of transcendent intervention by authorial sleight of hand. Le Guin chooses to establish this bleak adversity as the laboratory for the socio-political experiment she constructs. Le Guin's interest is in the moral drama that is to occur within this environment, and it may not be proper to question the fictional logic. But metafictional or metaesthetic challenges are in order, especially insofar as asceticism is now once again becoming widespread in our culture from labor-intensive back-to-nature crusades, through conserver-society advocates, energy-shortage Cassandras, wage controls and service sector cutbacks, to all the varieties of residual Puritanism.
If the false egalitarianism of the Anarresti threatens to narrow human abundance, it may be that so too does Le Guin's fictive landscape. All the fine libertarian institutions on Anarres are condemned to the redistribution of poverty. Certainly the distribution of labor through the Divlab computer system precludes the flowering of the qualitative needs of personalities and of a plurality of lifestyles. The central determination of needs according to purposive rationality prevails over particular communicative needs, bonds, or desires. Oddly, Le Guin sees the function of environmental adversity only as providing the possibility of fulfillment and purpose to the worker and the possibility of solidarity to the community. She does not connect the material and cultural poverty on Anarres. Le Guin's interest is in the moral advance of people in the face of challenge. The one law that Shevek accepts is human evolution, which for him means a development toward morality. The anthropological transformation that consists of recognizing solidarity as an end in itself and not just a means to physical survival an adoption of necessity as a virtue is posed as a moral imperative.
I would say that it is arguable, on the contrary, that moral abundance, conceived as a goal for all individuals, is not attainable without material abundance. Only the exceptional individual like Shevek is likely to be able to appropriate the moral abundance of the human race by sheer will and insight. It can be added that the survival-dominated landscape removes The Dispossessed, in this respect, in spite of its many analogical connections, from having any extrapolative bearing on our own situation which at the moment hovers at, though it is prevented from reaching, the threshold of a post-scarcity society endowed with the material preconditions of freedom.6 Many-sided individuals, rich in human capacities, as well as creative forms of solidarity, presuppose the conscious appropriation of an abundance of objective mediation carrying the wealth of the human species into intersubjective relations. In any case, this is our heritage; the imminence of physical success is one of the greatest achievements of our civilization, won with great aspirations and at great cost. It seems to me that today we live in an extraordinarily fraudulent period of economic rationalization when scarcity is manipulated for social control at the same time that our world is literally destroying itself in order to remain within the structures of scarcity. Even so, we have no authentic choice, when we speculate about our future, but to postulate a society of great physical power. Neither the negative sides of material advance under conditions of domination the manipulation, disaster, and unfreedom to which instrumental reason lends itself nor the pernicious ideology of scarcity and survival are sufficient grounds to impoverish our horizons.
In other words, a narrowing of the objective horizons, the incorporation of the power of scarcity and survival necessity into the very structure of the situation, mark Le Guin's ambiguous utopia as less hopeful than is commonly supposed. Ambiguity in The Dispossessed pivots around the possibilities of anthropological revolution to provide the species with an evolutionary bias toward individuality and revolution, in preference to the entropic security-adaptation fostered in the society through spontaneously self-bureaucratizing cultural despotism. Yet the book's logic, notwithstanding its open-ended, tentatively hopeful attitude, is itself limited, on account of its physical parameters. These physical limits are characteristic of the author's outlook and preoccupations (whether in Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, Left Hand of Darkness, or The Dispossessed): scarcity or the powers of nature constitute the ineluctable barriers of adversity against which Le Guin constructs an essentially moral drama to test the possibilities of the human fabric in the face of evolutionary challenge.
Le Guin has tremendous, virtually ecstatic empathy with the ascendant claims of life (e.g. in "The New Atlantis") but also reticence in conceiving any imminent or non-catastrophic transition to physical success. The consequence seems to be that, notwithstanding its conceptual strength and socio-ecological depth, The Dispossessed fails to open the doors onto a non-ascetic and rich transcendence of property domination. In focusing the dilemma that J.S. Mill had articulated a hundred years ago that of the threat to evolutionary creativity from the pressures of increasing cultural homogeneity.7 The Dispossessed fails in the end to bring into a really strategic dynamic tension the physical and the anthropological. It fails to provide a multiplicity of technical life support systems for a diversity of subjectivity.
The choice of a scarcity and necessity-dominated environment instead predisposes the mapping of the fictional progression toward the less interesting range of problems flowing out of scarcity and having to do with distributive justice. The more interesting range of speculative freedom in a libertarian post-scarcity society, remain untouched. In the explicitly utopian context, there is a Le Guinian axis of pessimism, the questions, having to do with permanent revolution and the forms of romantic asceticism that is here translated into socio-economic and psycho-political detail. This tends to identify The Dispossessed as ultimately a less daring exploration of evolving metaphors for modeling the possibilities and impossibilities of the human situation than some of her other works, which have confronted instrumental rationalism and the powers of nature with more intensely evocative (if less extensively mimetic) resonance.
Yet it is important to note that Le Guin always opts for a fundamental feature of the enlightened secular epistéme: its devotion to the immanent powers and intentions of human rationality. If she errs, it is because Le Guin is so suspicious of technical reason that she prefers to experiment with sheer moral will in the face of a limiting objective environment. Such voluntarism, however, always opens up a gap between intention and structure. It is this gap that Delany seeks to close, by shifting the emphasis to the weight and density of instituted structure.
2. Triton: Anarchism and Anomi
If Le Guin looks at social situations from the point of view of individuals who suffer or change them, Delany views the individuals from the point of view of larger systems of which they are parts and which they cannot control. His criticism of Le Guin, simply, is that life is much more complex in its dimensions than she presents, and not nearly so pliable to moral/political intervention as her work proposes. Indeed, he questions the very existence of the coherent individual agent who, for Le Guin, is the irreducible unit-subject of epistemology, morality, and politics. The object of his attention is the failed, lacerated, or splintered multiplex human being. In Delany's model, individuals are largely nodal points of over-determined structures among which they are distributed in proportion both smaller and larger than the supposedly unitary or atomic whole person.
Bron Helstrom, Delany's protagonist in Triton, lives on a moon of Neptune. Universal prosperity is at hand, even while war rages with Earth. In this context of both utopia and disaster, Bron, who is a metalogician, a technician trained in mathematical philosophy, drifts in and through all particular logics. The action pivots on his personal habits and interpersonal encounters which reveal the dimensions of the society and its multiple options. Explicit attention is drawn to a continual exchange of meaning between the experience of the physical body and the experience of the social body. In the end, when he can no longer tolerate his personality which, after all, is the point of convergence between physical body and social body Bron the metalogician simply steps out of its logic. He becomes a woman. If Shevek in The Dispossessed is an extraordinary man for whom both self and world tend to become transparent with the progression of the narrative and the growth of his will and understanding to the point of enlightened power, Bron in Triton is an ordinary man/woman for whom both self and world become increasingly opaque to the point of schizoid impotence, laceration, and dark paralytic despair.
Triton, whose very name is meant to resemble a host of other such fictive names,8 is a moon where people live their lives as clichés neither villains nor heroes. Everyone on Triton, however his or her personality is identified, can be categorized as a type, and everyone lives within certain conventions that correlate in their component parts, if not as wholes, with the conventionality of others. For example, each city sets aside a city sector where no laws officially hold, because such sectors fulfill a complex range of functions in the city's psychological, political, and economic ecology. There are types who choose to live there. Then there are those who choose to walk through the unlicensed sector only occasionally, whenever they feel their identity "threatened by the redundant formality of the orderly, licensed world" (1: 10). But, as Bron reflects, these are a type too. There are ordinary types, extraordinary types, sex types and logical types; there are dream clichés and cliché discourses. The world is a multiple web of cries-crossing conventions, clichés, and types, although it is fair to say these are neither the "type" of socialist realism (in the sense of the epistemological/sociological Lukácsian category), nor the "individual" of anarchism. In this way Delany answers the structure and ideological vision of Le Guin's anarchist optimism about the individual as a viable motivated basic unit; he presents instead assembled components and role structures.
Although there is political agitation on Triton, especially on account of impending war, most people there regard it as the "best of all possible worlds" (3: 116). Immigrants from Mars, Earth, and elsewhere all live like many Anarresti severed from their pasts in the ever-present synchronic totality of now, defined in ultra libertarian fashion. Personal preference finds expression in some 50 sexes, both homophilic and heterophilic, 100 religions, 30-37 political parties (all of which win each time), proliferating affinity groups (such as the Rampant Order of Dumb Beasts), endlessly variable clothing styles, and ad lib rearrangements of body and personality. In short, Triton represents a reality with multiple coordinates and variables, where it appears that anyone can have pleasure, community, and respect: "all you have to do is know the kind, and how much of it, and to what extent you want it. That's all." (3: 122). Moreover, the primary social principle is that the subjective reality of each person is politically inviolable. Consequently, there is no authoritarian restraint, jeopardy, or impediment to free initiative in self creation. Yet, there remains the acute pain of a certain important social type the ordinary type at the centres of culture whom, in Delany's view, Le Guin naively ignores. Pleads Bron, almost crying: "But what happens to those of us who don't know? What happens to those of us who have problems and don't know why we have the problems we do? What happens to the ones of us in whom even the part that wants has lost, through atrophy, all connection with articulate reason? Decide what you like and go get it? Well, what about the ones of us who only know what we don't like?" (3: 1 22).
It seems to me that this outcry signals a challenge to the entire program of moral rationalism. Delany refuses to admit the efficacious individual as a prominent character type and raises the question of the desublimated subjectivity in a condition which is not one of homogenization but one of dispersion (drifting pluralism) the heterotopian other side of the utopian expressive totality, depicted in conditions of stratified abundance. This is the other side of unitary cohesion; this is the alternative form of libertarian decay. Discontinuity, fragmentation, emptiness coordinated cybernetically in patterns. Delany argues for an infinitely complex matrix of intersecting conventions and statistical types (these are, when all is said and done, the chief forms of perceived community in the novel). Though the types and conventions never cohere into effectual personalities, such fragmentation at least resists the homogenization that, willy-nilly, underlies Le Guin's teleological conception of a unified and universal character-structure.
Delany brilliantly presents a multiplex computerized information environment (with corresponding multiplex subjectivities). The range runs across coded levels from intracellular DNA nucleotides to the space-time synapses of intersocietal communication, i.e. all the exchanges on every level within and between physical body and social body. The range is somewhat more advanced than our own, but along the same principle. Life is crystallized in the intricate complexity of the constituted, in the form of a multidimensional network of big-social messages. These messages always seem to be instituted in a code of conventions a code that might be deciphered statistically, emotionally, physically, or imaginatively, but which no subject is sufficiently powerful to escape. What this means is that the radical decentralization of subjectivity in the context of a big-politically permissive dispersion simply reduces any kind of transformative efficacy to insignificance. There is no entity that can initiate and sustain effective change on an important scale.
In this context of both total non-coercion and total administration, the political dimension announces itself only as an absence. Delany's own methodology may be called into question here. An extreme attention to relational factors (which is what conventions and topologies are) risks losing sight of the human substance which enters into relationships. Structural analysis, with its relational bias, to a certain extent generates that very emptiness which it then discovers in the personality structure. Delany's choice of parameters constituted information processes implies its own kind of pessimism. The centre of gravity in The Dispossessed is always in a process of constituting, in a meaning creating search after a potentially rational relation to ourselves, to others, and to our world of objects, including our cultural codes. Le Guin's work may be limited in its range and levels; but Delany's persistent attention to the already constituted web of conventional interface, where subjectivity is broken down beyond the status of a potent subject to the status of a typological component, is equally if inversely limited. It establishes impotence as the single decisive level on which the communicative hermeneutic (cybernetic, sexual, theoretical, scribal, cosmetic, political, etc.) is to be performed and appropriated.
Delany's structural analysis appears to be methodologically biased here toward weakness in the face of the power, scope, and multiplicity of the objective system; the price paid is an apperception of subjectivity in abundant variety but reduced and diminished. In consequence, any goal-oriented constitutive act capable of mediating between convention and novum is virtually ruled out in Triton. The constituted web of the culture on Triton comes into view as relatively impermeable to authentically innovative, much less utopian/rationalist reconstitution.9 The density of the established structures resists the clearness of rational purpose. Yet there is, in the end, an ironic paradox here: the other side of the irrationalist opacity is revealed as a hyper-rationalist informational framework on which the system depends. On Triton, as also in Delany's methodology, a totalitarian data-processing preempts or instrumentalizes any existential or intentional signification by drawing it into the cybernetic loop of classification. All meaning and potential meaning is instantly processed and classified. The ego booster booths that are found everywhere on Triton, that offer to let you "know your place in society" (1: 4), are parts of just such a circuit. They dispense three minutes' videotape and recorded speech from one's personal file, retrieved at random from the government's (almost certainly not meaningfully appropriated) information storage. In the end, the result is a cybernetic formal closure entered from the object pole, as in The Dispossessed it was a type of formal closure entered from the subject pole.
What would then be the source, locus, or dimensions of human renewal in such an environment? Two internal critiques are offered in Triton with possibly system-wide implications: the one is ethical/political in character, the other affective/teleological. First, the metalogical philosopher Ashima Slade notes that in a society whom ideal is the primacy of the subjective reality of all its citizens the conventional oblivion to other people's pain is tantamount to a political crime (Appendix B: 358). Slade thus retrieves the category of the political in a moral frame, but he does not chart a way to solidarity or humanity as a value. In fact, the only relation to the species that is already encoded and available for retrieval is the repressive sexist notion that Bron adopts about real manhood as the only valuable aspect of the species in light of the protection afforded to women, to children, and to the aged by male bravery and ingenuity, both of which are made possible not by solidarity, but by male aloneness. i.e. by the capacity to act outside society (6: 257).
The second critique is more substantial. The Spike, an internationally known playwright who leads a theatrical commune in productions of microtheatre for unique audiences, lashes at Bron for his emotional laziness (6: 228-29). This would seem to be a critical strike at the entropic drift that characterizes the ordinary citizen's motion from convention to convention; it is an implicit call for affective authenticity with an increase in energy level, for affectivity as an alternative principle of rationality and as an anchor for a change in personality, and hence in communicative relations.
The critique becomes goal-oriented when the Spike notes that codes of good manners come about for a purpose: to promote social communion. If, in the past, a congealed convention was a living dynamic process with an effective purpose, then this can be retrieved again for the future. Evidently, too, a person or society that cuts itself off from the past as do Bron and most others has no future. Yet, again no guidelines become visible for retrieval with a social intention; and the Spike goes off to pursue private affinities, away from the helpless Bron. There is certainly no movement of social regeneration (as there is in The Dispossessed), and we face the problem of what to make of the fragile and tentative internal criticisms that are offered.
Both Slade and the Spike are concerned with micro-theatre. It is only at that level of minimal connections that they feel logically or aesthetically confident. Slade explicitly warns that extrapolation from the microscopic to the macroscopic is logically not justified (Appendix B: 358). It seems as though, to avoid the liberties that moral rationalism takes with intractable objectivity, the way to societal change is closed off: the multiplicity of signification is declared approachable only at the level of single connections. One may presume, correspondingly, that the converse extrapolation from the macroscopic to the microscopic is equally foreclosed. Thus, at least, the creativity of micro-theatre is logically protected from the corruption of the system as a whole.
3. Act, System and SF Model
Generally, in the context of the bureaucratically administered societies of our day, how are we to interpret the significance of the micrological level with respect to social administration? Let us recall that Delany and Le Guin are both concerned with the place of the particular in the frame of the general. In Le Guin's model, a decaying overbureaucratized system is able to make use of nonidentity or particular opposition generated with it to advance and regulate its renewal just as our own bureaucratic society needs a comparable shot in the arm to keep going.10 In the society of Anarres, there is evidently no distance between general and particular, so that the social system possesses the capacity to avail itself of what are conceived as individual "cellular functions." I have already criticized this rationalist image of a cohesive system that can coordinate all activity harmoniously. It is this that Delany considers naive, and in contrast to which he argues - correctly in my view - that there is a gap between the individual and systemic levels.
Micro-theatre is a creative act at a micrological or personal level. There is no rational extrapolation immediately available of its implications for a macrological or societal system. Nor can it be deduced from the macrological level. There is proposed, in other words. a gap between the logic of societal system and the logic of personal act; indeed, neither can be deduced from the other. To speak of an administered society is to speak of societal rationalization processes; to speak of artificially generating negativity is to speak to the society's adaptive capacity from the point of view of systems theory. Only a collective agency able to act efficaciously at the system level could be grasped directly through categories of social analysis. The logic of personal action needs to be approached at the level of its own creativity. If human life is not a geometric problem where every unknown bears a determinate relationship to the known facts and to the system or organizing principles, then no system will be able to generate, account for, instrumentalize, or co-ordinate every particular within it. In addition to a theory of system, a theory of action - toward which analytic philosophers as well as social theorists like Jürgen Habermas 11 have already taken preliminary steps is equally necessary.
Let me cite a passage from another of Delany’s books, The Einstein Intersection (NY:Ace,1967):
Einstein . . . with his Theory of Relativity defined the limits of man's perception by expressing mathematically just how far the condition of the observer influences the thing he perceives.... Goedel, a contemporary of Einstein ... was the first to bring back a mathematically precise statement about the vaster realm beyond the limits of Einstein and defined: In any closed mathematical system you may read 'the real world with its immutable laws of logic' there are an infinite number of true theorems you may read 'perceivable measurable phenomena' which, though contained in the original system, can not be deduced from it read 'proven with ordinary or extraordinary logic'.... There are an infinite number of true things in the world with no way of ascertaining their truth. Einstein defined the extent of the rational. Goedel stuck a pin into the irrational and fixed it to the wall of the universe so that it held still long enough for people to know it was there. (128)
If we now ask what is the point of transition between bureaucratically managed spontaneity and free social creativity, then we shall, first, have to find an action theory that can identify a strategic levell2 of Einsteinian rationality where act efficaciously touches on system. And if we want to recover that positive or celebratory sense of self-activity which Marxism has shared with the best of the Western tradition since the Renaissance, then we shall also, secondly, have to approach the logic of action in Goedelian terms, where we look at actions not only in terms of their structure, their content, their cause-and-effect relationship, or their limits and genesis, but where we seek their shape, their texture, their feel, and their density.
It seems then that defining historical creativity beyond the obsolescent categories of the traditional proletariat (which was in orthodox Marxism supposed to become the key to a total reconciliation) requires that the logic of action be grounded in sensuous experience as is implied in the Spike's critique of emotional laziness. It may be that control and transformation alone are the domain of system rationality, but that creation and patterning arise from the logic of action as its oblique side-effects. To identify the gaps and the connections between action and system as well as the role of cultural media in this context is, it seems to me, a pressing challenge to a social theory of culture within the administered society; it is a challenge to learn the limits of system and the limits of reason in our time. At the same time, the capacity of SF to generate a virtual infinity of parallel models and to do so with a sophisticated self-consciousness about ideological/synecdochic/value parameters may yet be one of the most crucial human resources and one of the best grounds on which to learn to expand our minds and realities.
NOTES
1. Samuel R. Delany stresses this kind of point repeatedly in his theoretical writings; especially, Triton (NY: Bantam, 1976), pp. 333-40 (Appendix A). Further page references in the text are to this edition.
2. For a tribute to and analysis of Le Guin, see "The Science Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin," a special issue of SFS, 7(1975).
3. For a brief, partial, but intelligent discussion of Delany, see Peter S. Alterman, "The Surreal Translations of Samuel R. Delany"", SFS, 11(1977): 25-34.
4. Throughout this analysis, if in place of Anarres we read any radical movement or tradition Marxism, for example we will soon recognize that it is not only on the moon that comparable corruptions produce comparable decay.
5. The Dispossessed (NY: Avon, 1974), 4: 80. Further page references in the text are to this edition. The formulation "nothing was hidden" recalls the giddy vision of D-503, the mathematician protagonist of that brilliant antiutopia entitled We, written in 1920 by the disillusioned Bolshevik Yevgeny Zamyatin (trans. Mirra Ginsburg, NY: Bantam, 1972) against the purveyors of unanimity and harmony. In that story, the rulers of the Euclidian One State are proponents of what they describe as "mathematically infallible happiness" and they are determined to "integrate the grandiose cosmic equation" (1: 1), "to unbend the wild primitive curve and straighten it to a . . . straight line" (1: 2) even if they have to perform frontal lobotomy on the population to excise the imagination, which is identified as "the last barricade on [the] way to happiness" (31: 180). One day, D-503 sees a man's shadow on the pavement and, looking ahead to post-operative perfection, says: "And it seems to me I am certain that tomorrow there will be no shadows. No man, no object will cast a shadow.... The sun will shine through everything...." (31: 183).
6. Cf. Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco, 1971). Bookchin argues that Marx's great contribution was to have drawn attention to the material preconditions of freedom; moreover, that freedom cannot be represented only as the absence of domination but must be concrete, precisely rid of the burdens of the struggle with necessity, rid of want and toil.
7. See Mill's 1859 essay On Liberty, which is devoted to an analysis of the new "social despotism" of the majority over the individual, in contrast with the earlier political problem of the tyranny of a minority over the majority. Mill takes the view that if social conformity is permitted to extinguish individuality, and thus genius, humanity will stagnate the degenerate.
8. See Darrell Schweitzer, "Algol Interview: Samuel R. Delany," Algol (No. 13: Summer 1976): 16-20.
9. To use Delany's terminology, the epistemological textus (web) as in Saussure's langue/parole interface resists textual formulation. At this level, any text is seen in Delany's terms to be limited to a metonymic bearing on the textus, at best giving a charge to the contours of its sector of the matrix of meaning. Unfortunately, Delany formulates his metonymic conception objectivistically rather than as a mediation. His modular constructions could be nonobjectivistically recast through the use of teleologically derived synecdoches to mediate our acting and relating, i.e. by introducing directional value vectors into the metonymic process.
10. Present-day administered society needs an artificially generated negativity an important feature of the stage of advanced capitalism that follows the "one-dimensional" period of the transition from entrepreneurial capitalism to programmed monopoly capitalism. As an explanatory model, "artificial negativity" indicates that the system, for its stable survival, needs to generate or make possible the emergence of new forms of particularity and opposition to take the place of that otherness which was obliterated by the earlier one-dimensional drive toward total identity. Thus, paradoxically, both spontaneity and the instrumentalization of spontaneity are survival necessities for a bureaucratically administered society in search of mechanisms to advance and regulate its development. Neither the classical market nor the classical working class can any longer function in that capacity owing to the structural evolution of the system itself. For a fuller discussion of "artificial negativity", see Paul Piccone (who coined the term), "The Crisis of One-Dimensionality," Telos (No. 35: Spring 1978): 43-54.
11. Particularly interesting in this connection is "Aspects of the Rationality of Action", delivered by Habermas at an international Conference on "Rationality To-Day," University of Ottawa, October 26-30, 1977.
12. Such a theory of strategic levels, of course, will have to challenge structuralism and reconstitute the multiplex field of human action as an interplay of meaningful units and levels of intention and efficacy.
ABSTRACT
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and Samuel R. Delany's Triton, a matched set of brilliant works from the mid-1970s, are both designed to model possibilities and limits of social and individual life. Both construct and explore with admirable virtuosity the structures and dynamics of relatively libertarian societies that are cast into a distant tomorrow. It happens that both are situated on the moons of solar systems next to older societies which resemble our own and which are set on the planets themselves. In presenting their decentralized, anarchist social models, both books make an important contribution to renewing a direction of speculation that has surfaced only infrequently in the utopian tradition since the post-Renaissance rise (and alienation) of science and the rise of correspondingly authoritarian models of the future.
Both books take as their implicit starting point the pervasive discord and fragmentation in contemporary life. But in spite of this shared background of intolerable alienation, the two books are focused differently. Le Guin's interest is in the mergence of the liberatory novum, of individual initiative, of understanding and communication; she works at the ascendant peripheries of the situation and toward the classical utopian aspirations of Western philosophy: reconciliation in the potential harmony of all. Delany, by contrast, presents the dominance of dispersion, of compelling convention, of statistical typicality, of delusion and a systematic distortion of communication; he works at the centres of common experience and immobility. As I probe each work in turn, I shall eventually argue in a critical vein that in spite of their intended opposition, at their limits the two works both present closed systems and therefore both exhibit the ultimately entropic qualities of rationalist models (of moral rationalism in the one case, of structural rationalism in the other). At the same time, it is worth noting that both authors conceive of their formulations (as their respective subtitles indicate) as ambiguous. Gone forever are the unambiguous "design for living" blueprints of earlier utopists, the closed systems of a crude rationalism in whose terms the end of the process is always given from the beginning, and the possibilities and alternatives open to future generations of humankind are usurped, exhausted, or foreclosed. The ambiguity that Le Guin and Delany announce at the outset indicates a shift from the substantive to the methodological at the gravitational centre of their modelling. Through their chosen forms both authors seek to delineate significant structural and axiological vectors of an unfolding and conflict-laden process. In other words, ambiguity is not in and by itself an index of pessimism or failure; rather it involves a suggestion of a process relatively open to the future.
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