I recently read the Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin and as its reputation has it, it is indeed an amazing thought provoking novel, and I wanted to share some of the thoughts it provoked in me, because I think they're interesting. This book is the most sprawling of Le Guins I've read(except for maybe the left hand of darkness, for which I was in a fugue state while reading, so I don't remember it very well, I think it was doing a gender?), so if my thoughts are equally as sprawling- and because I'm not a good writer also incoherent, I apologise.
1. provincialism
Provincialism is a big word that I learned in a anthropocentricism 101 class recently and it basically refers to the mechanism where centres of commerce, culture, etc(cities, basically) extract resources from the provinces, and it struck me that the relationship between Arrannes and Urras in the Dispossessed is quintissentially provincialist(this is a word now if it wasnt before) from Urras' pov. Arrannes remains a mining colony for Urras, the Odonian population being a tolerance, a solution to the problem of "people keep revolting". Obviously the Odonians don't see their home as a province, largely because of their indifferent hostility towards Urras, but this to me creates an even more interesting relationship. This relationship is one of fundamental miscommunication, where there is a minor mutual reliance between the two parties, but the parties perception of each other are fundamentally misaligned. I'm sure theres some really clever piece of political theory I could pull here if I was well read enough but I am not.
2. cancel culture
The parrallels here feel obvious, but I've been listening to alot of interveiws and debates with Slavoj Zizek recently, and the way he talks of identity polotics and cancel culture feels very relevant to mention here. Authority on Arranness manifests in two ways, the primary, or at least the first we learn about, is social pressure. Its not a direct 1:1 match, but I think social pressures in a sort of anarchist context track really well to the internet, which has this kind of fucked up anarchism stemmed from the compromise between capital and socialism that the internet is founded on(this is an idea from Jaron Lanier, I think, idk i havent read anything other than the last chapter of the society of the spectacle, thats like the only thing ive ever read, I lied about everything else I havent even read the dispossessed nothing is real etc etc).
3. end of the world capitalism
The other mechanism that power accumulated in Arrannes was through emergency measures which were never reversed after the emergency is over. While The Dispossessed was written before when most can agree that neoliberalism started, this feels like a mechanism of power accumulation that is particularly relevant today. This isn't just confined to governmental power accumulation, in fact the best example I can think of for how the online workspaces of COVID stuck in some companies who can now save on office costs, isolating us further and making the insane prevelance of the unregulated internet into a new normal, solidifying the power of facebook, google, et al.
3.1. ok the end of the previous part may have sounded a bit conspiritorial, and I don't mean it that way so I'm going to elaborate; COVID measures from several companies involved some form of work from home programme, which seems to have stuck in some places, but particularly in tech, where it is in the interests of the tech giants for you to be home all day so you are online and spending money online and etc etc, which is why I think the ability to work from home(or anywhere really, see: "digital nomad", whatever the fuck that is) stuck, often packaged to be some form of convenience for the worker. I don't have any figures on any of this so idk how true it is in a scientific sense, this is just observational on my part.
4. the enduring allure of space communism
The allure of space communism, of starting a commune on a different planet, is that you don't have to deal with displacing other people, or convincing them to join the revolution. In the Dispossessed, the Odonians settle on Arrannes because they are kicked out of Urras, specifically the nation of A-Io, this sort of banishment(from the Urran perspective) is a bit of an ideal solution to the unstoppable force/immobile object problem that was the anarchist revolution, but it also signalled a reluctance on the odonians part to try and convince those who opposed their revolutions, some of which were probably working class, given the "current"(time the novel is set in) state of A-Io. There is no need for a social revolution, no need to consider people who don't agree and try to find a way of coexistance, find a way to convince the masses that a better future is possible. One of the things that makes the Dispossesseds social commentary so interesting is that Le Guin takes this society of recluses, who have little conception of anything sociological due to not having to confront people with fundamental ideological misalignment, and injects the anthropological lens she is so skilled with.
5. psudoscience
This is a word that has been a bit of a buzz word recently, and I am using it somewhat provocatively, but not as a critiscism. The science in the Dispossessed is more of a philosophical statement that relates to so many of the themes in this book of duality, anachronism, political process based on action rather than plan, and the list goes on. These themes are present throughout Le Guin's work, the theme of Duality is most obvious in A Wizard of Earthsea where the central conflict is an externalised internal conflict between Ged and his shadow, and Le Guin's approach to ends and means can also be found in the Lathe of Heaven: "The ends justify the means, but what if we have no ends? All we have is means"(i dont have a page number for this go find it yourself).
6. time travel
Theres lots to be said about trime travel, but most interestingly in this book, there's a certain soft magic element. The science is explained with this amazing dialectic explanation, where the contradiction of two approaches to understanding time, one linear and one cylclical, is simply just left unresolved, somehow allowing for a universal instantaneous communication device to be developed(please do not try to explain this to me, I will not understand). It is not explained how this would only lead to the universal telephone and not what I call "actual time travel"(maybe this exists in another hainish book, as I said already, I've read only one chapter of a book in my lifetime), or an understanding of time as simultaneous in such a way where you can tell the future, as in story of your life(which uses an equally smart mathematical explanation for its time travel that is also quite neat). The existence of actual time travel, or at least some form of being able to see into the future would have interesting implications on Le Guin's philosophy regarding ends and means, but I also think their disinclusion is for the better. The limited effect of this scientific breakthrough creates a universe that maps very well onto our own world, which creates this great accessibility but also some usefulness in the concepts the novel explores, its far more allegorical than, say, the matrix(yes I know the matrix is a metaphor based off the only book I've ever read a chapter of, but I think I've communicated my point). Additionally, theres an interesting quote relating to the reading order of the Hainish books on the Ursula K. Le Guin website that I really like: "In Dispossessed, the ansible gets invented; but they’re using it in Left Hand, which was written fifteen years earlier. Please do not try to explain this to me. I will not understand."
7. semi related note on revolutions
There are two senses of the word revolution; 1. to revolt, and; 2. to revolve. In Terry Pratchett's "Night Watch", he conflates the two, and I've always been conflicted about this conflation, but I think the Dispossessed is making a similar comparison in a way I cannot quite articulate. I think a dialectic analysis of revolving and revolting is in order here, but I am ill equipped to make such an analysis, so if someone smarter and better than me could do that, that'd be really great thank you very much.