Notes on discussion for The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
Maria Todorova Intro
• Recall Buck-Morss on the confrontation between East and West. Existence of other system proof enough to think dream was possible.
• Remembering Communism- “The West as Intellectual Utopia”
• Intellectual importance of Science Fiction in Eastern Europe – Science Fiction Clubs
• A piece on failure
Kathy Oberdeck Intro
• connections to the political crises of history today
• contexts of thinking about LeGuin through personal history of the 1970s and now.
• Science Fiction as world building, parallels to what we try to do in history
• Confronting issues of truth and evidence (Telling the Truth About History and its tension with AHR on Scales)
• Will history be whittled down to a group of World Historians that tell the whole history
• Expand not only space but time as well
• Shevek reminding us time is multiple and variable
• Anarchist politics – read in US context as an anarchist novel
• Questions about the politics of anarchism
Discussion Points
• temporal and spatial mapping (“you are our past, we are your future”)
• is this really an anarchist text?
• what are the implications of Shevek’s theorization of time?
• Physicist as main character
• Shevek doing something beyond the utility of given society
• Physicists as dissidents in 1970s context
• Does Shevek actually think of being a physicist in terms of utility
• Does Shevek actually have space and time to be himself?
• Bedap “Intellectuals are always being led astray, because they think about irrelevant things like time and space and reality, things that have nothing to do with real life, so they are easily fooled by wicket deviationists.”
• Is Anarres utopia? Opposite of Bellamy plentitude utopia and instead human/social relations as utopia. Utopia in minds. Alternative to a revolution on Urras.
• A prison and yet a place where alternative notions of social relations can get worked out.
• Dream of lost possibilities (Soviet Azerbaijan versus Iranian Azerbaijan).
• Feminist politics – found to be possible in Anarres. Don’t have enough, but the not enough is shared. What reclaims Anarres is its rejection of the state of women on Urras.
• Collective violence at Urras.
• Sexual openness
• Odo almost exact quotes from Kollontai
• What is the importance of poverty in the work? Shevek argues that this is what makes utopia possible. Nothing but the solidarities.
• Strong romantic line in the novel.
• The diversity of human and social relationships on Anarres is the wealth. Minimum material conditions are met. Rethinking what we think of wealth, diversity, and richness. Connected to her spiritual (Daoist) perspective.
• critique of consumerism/materiality of life
• Occupying transitional moment between the formation of different visions of anarchism in the 1970s
Maria Todorova Intro
• Recall Buck-Morss on the confrontation between East and West. Existence of other system proof enough to think dream was possible.
• Remembering Communism- “The West as Intellectual Utopia”
- West as place where conversation of humanity can be sustained.
- Speech as something allowed
- Communism as a heterotopic space
- Mirror reflects upon you and you change
- Communism as representation, inversion of structures in the West
- Utopia is capacity to think the placelessness, the nonexistent, including the impossible
- Nowhere is placed somewhere in the West
- Mirror falls down in 1989
• Intellectual importance of Science Fiction in Eastern Europe – Science Fiction Clubs
- Scientificity of science fiction allowed for less ideological control
• A piece on failure
Kathy Oberdeck Intro
• connections to the political crises of history today
• contexts of thinking about LeGuin through personal history of the 1970s and now.
• Science Fiction as world building, parallels to what we try to do in history
• Confronting issues of truth and evidence (Telling the Truth About History and its tension with AHR on Scales)
• Will history be whittled down to a group of World Historians that tell the whole history
• Expand not only space but time as well
• Shevek reminding us time is multiple and variable
• Anarchist politics – read in US context as an anarchist novel
• Questions about the politics of anarchism
- blend of collectivist and Daoist anarchisms
- struggles against social Darwinist hierarchies
- is coagulation into even anarchist dogma inevitable?
- subjectivities and histories can only be experienced through language
- whose anarchism is this?
- no commodity fetishism? To what extent is this post-modernist?
- time – anarchist / physicist ; theories of simultaneity, alternatives to linear time
- Complaint of anti-utopians that utopia is out of time- Le Guin responding to this.
- Physics into social theory?
- Broader spatial and temporal scales as simultaneity for historical discipline. Might not be able to be organized in linear models. Utopian viewpoint of history that we might share with Le Guin?
Discussion Points
• temporal and spatial mapping (“you are our past, we are your future”)
• is this really an anarchist text?
• what are the implications of Shevek’s theorization of time?
- the threat is the annihilation of space
- but imprisonment only happens once, not continuously
- not acknowledged by Shevek?
• Physicist as main character
- what kind of character do you envision that is capable of thinking about utopian spaces?
- role of science in utopia?
- but Shevek is also criticized of being too mystical
• Shevek doing something beyond the utility of given society
• Physicists as dissidents in 1970s context
• Does Shevek actually think of being a physicist in terms of utility
• Does Shevek actually have space and time to be himself?
• Bedap “Intellectuals are always being led astray, because they think about irrelevant things like time and space and reality, things that have nothing to do with real life, so they are easily fooled by wicket deviationists.”
• Is Anarres utopia? Opposite of Bellamy plentitude utopia and instead human/social relations as utopia. Utopia in minds. Alternative to a revolution on Urras.
• A prison and yet a place where alternative notions of social relations can get worked out.
• Dream of lost possibilities (Soviet Azerbaijan versus Iranian Azerbaijan).
• Feminist politics – found to be possible in Anarres. Don’t have enough, but the not enough is shared. What reclaims Anarres is its rejection of the state of women on Urras.
• Collective violence at Urras.
• Sexual openness
• Odo almost exact quotes from Kollontai
• What is the importance of poverty in the work? Shevek argues that this is what makes utopia possible. Nothing but the solidarities.
• Strong romantic line in the novel.
• The diversity of human and social relationships on Anarres is the wealth. Minimum material conditions are met. Rethinking what we think of wealth, diversity, and richness. Connected to her spiritual (Daoist) perspective.
• critique of consumerism/materiality of life
• Occupying transitional moment between the formation of different visions of anarchism in the 1970s