Fantasies of the new class: Ideologies of Professionalism In Post

For Alvin Gouldner, one of the clearest examples of the new class’s growing restiveness was the dramatic emergence of the New Left in the 1960s. This movement, he noted, attracted students from disciplines most closely associated with the culture of critical discourse: the humanities, the liberal arts, and the social and theoretical sciences. It also attracted activists who grew up within professional households; their parents “commonly taught that authority was not right just because it was authority, that people had to be given reasons for their actions and policies.”¹ This ingrained sense of professional autonomy, in Gouldner’s account, ran up against the bureaucratic structure of the postwar university and other U.S. institutions. The New Left was thus a movement of young professionals who hoped to disseminate their version of the culture of critical discourse throughout the welfare state. Tom Hayden described the New Left’s class consciousness as follows: “Most of the active student radicals today come from middle to upper-middle class professional homes. They were born with status and affluence as facts of life, not goals to be striven for. In their upbringing, their parents stressed the right of children to question and make judgments, producing perhaps the first generation of young people both affluent and independent of mind. And then these students so often encountered social institutions that denied them their independence and betrayed the democratic ideals they were taught.”² Amplifying the new-class fantasies of the postwar era, the New Left envisaged themselves as the saving remnant of the educated middle class, attuned to anti-instrumental values in an era dominated by technical rationality.

However, this new-class politics pulled the New Left in at least two different directions. As Gouldner and Hayden’s comments suggest, the student movement was in part an expression of the educated middle class’s newfound sense of independence, which chafed at any restrictions placed on professional autonomy. In order to become “part of the system,” Mario Savio complained in 1964, university students “must suppress the most creative impulses that they have” and conform to a “depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy.”³ As several intellectual historians have suggested, this individualist tendency was not really at odds with the changing dynamics of postindustrial society, which tended to pit the entrepreneurial creativity of individual knowledge workers against the rigidity of established institutions. George Vickers argues that the New Left objectively represented “a force for the rationalization of social relationships and cultural values within capitalist economic organization, rather than a force for the abolishment of that economic form.”⁴ Sean Mc-Cann and Michael Szalay similarly argue that the student radicals were unknowing harbingers of expert professionalism—the newer model of professionalism that conceived of experts as independent entrepreneurs who sell their knowledge and abilities to the highest bidder. They point out that, as Hayden and other activists recognized, “[A] little noticed but important battle was shaping up between young professionals and the very organizational structures that had shielded their disciplines but that increasingly seemed hidebound and outmoded.” This conflict, McCann and Szalay argue, contributed to the “increasing doubtfulness about public institutions” that helped erode the welfare state.⁵

However, if the New Left was the vanguard of expert professionalism, it was also a movement of young professionals who distrusted the very notion of expert privilege and wanted to subject it to community controls. Hence, many of the New Left’s most influential political initiatives consisted of efforts to dissolve the boundaries between professionals and nonprofessionals so as to give nonexperts a greater say in the application of expert knowledge. These efforts were spearheaded by Students for a Democratic Society’s (SDS) community-development projects of the mid-1960s, which coincided with the federal government’s emphasis on community action in the War on Poverty. They culminated in various movements to reform social work, psychiatry, and other helping professions through the creation of community centers and free clinics, often staffed by volunteer workers disenchanted with established institutions.⁶ A key strand of New Left thinking, in other words, was oriented toward fashioning an antiauthoritarian version of social trustee professionalism, counteracting its paternalism but reinforcing its emphasis on social responsibility. In contrast to the libertarian strand described by Vickers, McCann, and Szalay, this opposing strand gave free play to the New Left’s communitarian ideology; New Left activists envisaged professionals as catalysts for the creation of local communities that would counter the anomie of postindustrial society. This version of professionalism, which influenced many of the progressive social movements that survived the 1960s, such as second-wave feminism, consumer advocacy, and environmentalism, was the New Left’s most important positive contribution to American political life.

As I argue in this chapter, this contradiction in the New Left’s orientation toward the new class was central to one of the movement’s most lasting literary legacies—the new utopian science fiction of the 1970s. The two most famous works in this genre are Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974),⁷ both by writers generationally removed from the student movement but sympathetic to its aims.⁸ Both novels enact the historical vision held by Gouldner and other new-class theorists, attempting to imagine what it might mean for professional expertise to displace economic capital entirely as society’s ruling impulse.⁹ In so doing, the two works dramatize the New Left’s conflicted class identity as movement intellectuals alternately demanded absolute autonomy for professional work and attempted to subordinate that work to community controls. Both Piercy and Le Guin try to resolve this conflict by imagining their utopians as at once professionals and nonprofessionals, as self-directed new-class experts and communalistic outsiders. Both construct high-tech, agrarian utopias in which small communities of skilled professionals till the land in the manner of premodern peasants. However, in both cases the contradiction at the heart of New Left professionalism reasserts itself, and this synthesis falls apart. Hence, Woman on the Edge of Time’s new-class utopia finally depends on the total eradication of professional autonomy. The Dispossessed, in contrast, recoils at the prospect of this loss and instead moves toward a libertarian conception of professional autonomy that approaches the emergent expert professionalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

By this point, these efforts to work through the ideology of professionalism were not unprecedented within the utopian tradition. As Frederic Jameson argues, utopian fiction is typically circumscribed by its authors’ class position—generally, some segment of the intellectual stratum. Sir Thomas More’s foundational text, for instance, reflects “that public sphere that is in reality and in history unable to come into being: that situation of mandarin governmental power and authority that the humanist intellectuals are unable to achieve.”¹⁰ In America, the utopian tradition, beginning with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887),¹¹ similarly embodied a managerial vision of enlightened technocrats rationally planning society for the benefit of all. Conversely, in the dystopian tradition popularized by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), managerial idealism becomes synonymous with totalitarian nightmare.¹² What is distinctive about the new utopian fiction of the 1970s is the way that its conflicted attitude toward the new class leads to an amalgamation of these two perspectives. In attempting to balance the New Left’s demands for professional autonomy and public responsibility, this literature ends up developing an incisive critique of the very class that supposedly brings utopia into being—but without, for all that, relinquishing the hope that it might do so. Woman on the Edge of Time and The Dispossessed thus reflect the simultaneous idealization and distrust of the new class that runs throughout postwar fiction and social theory and reaches its sharpest articulation in the 1960s and 1970s.

The political destiny of the professional stratum was a particularly vexing problem for Marge Piercy, who was one of the founders of Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), an adult chapter of SDS that was oriented toward mobilizing disgruntled professionals. With Robert Gottlieb, she coauthored MDS’s central working paper (1968), one of the key statements of new-class theory within the New Left.¹³ Lower-rank professionals, she argued, were an ideal constituency for the radical movement. On the one hand, professional work embodied the promise of autonomous, nonalienated labor: “People in the service professions, the arts and sciences often do strongly identify with their work. What are you? I am a physicist. I am a doctor. I am a sculptor in welded steel.”¹⁴ On the other hand, this sense of vocation clashed with the bureaucratic structure and private-sector funding of most middle-class workplaces, which pushed professionals into projects at odds with their personal ethics. MDS’s function, Piercy and Gottlieb argued, was twofold. First, members should change from within the institutions they inhabit so that the institutions are based on “human rather than profit needs.” Second, they should question the notion and practice of professionalism itself, paring away the artificial barriers that separate experts from nonexperts. Every radical professional should learn “to sort out what is truly creative in his field, the red meat of it, from the part that is merely professional obfuscation.”¹⁵ Revolutionary professionalism, for Piercy, would eschew the rhetoric and symbols of authority with which experts surround themselves. However, it would maintain the creative aspects of professionalism, which offer the best hope for instituting a better social system.

At the same time, Piercy saw professionalism as an insidious force, one that threatened to corrupt political movements aimed at the transformation of U.S. society, including the New Left itself. Hence, after her involvement with MDS, Piercy became one of many feminists to break with the New Left on the basis that it perpetuated the sexism and authoritarianism of the society it wanted to escape. The problem with many movement men, she argued in “The Grand Coolie Damn” (1969), one of the most influential feminist essays to emerge from this period, was that they arrogated a pseudo-professional authority that mimicked typical workplace patterns: “To be a professional anything in the United States is to think of oneself as an expert and one’s ideas as semi-sacred, and to treat others in a certain way—professionally. Do you question your doctor when he prescribes in dog Latin what you should gulp down?” The New Left, for her, had become the ultimate other-directed workplace, in which male leaders “use all the forms of workers’ control and collective decision making to persuade others that they are involved in a ‘we’ that is never out of [the male leaders’] control.”¹⁶ Indeed, this tendency was worse within the New Left than in the bureaucratic institutions of the welfare state; the latter at least were governed by formal rules and a self-evident hierarchy that checked the professional will-to-power. The New Left, in contrast, gave free reign to a charismatic authoritarianism that was a direct consequence of its male members’ demands for absolute individual autonomy. The problem, for Piercy, was to discover new, communalistic models of professionalism that avoided the twin dangers of bureaucracy and charisma.

Much of Piercy’s subsequent fiction can be read as an attempt to respond to this challenge: how to transform professionalism into a radical social practice while avoiding the authoritarianism of the later New Left. As Heather Hicks observes, the central characters in Piercy’s various novels are often professional workaholics—typically computer programmers and scientists—who identify absolutely with their work and find pleasure and meaning in it; at the heart of her aesthetic is a “liberal feminist faith that women can be empowered by lives wholly committed to paid, public work.”¹⁷ At the same time, her novels offer a programmatic critique of the institutions within which this work takes place—the corporate workplace, public institutions, and the university. In the case of Woman on the Edge of Time, this critique is directed against medicine, psychiatry, and social work—disciplines that most dramatically lend themselves to the complaint that professionals are no more than agents of social control, charged with disciplining lower-class populations. The novel focuses on the plight of Consuela (“Connie”) Ramos, a Chicana woman involuntarily committed to a New York state mental hospital after she violently attacks her niece’s abusive pimp. Here, she discovers that she can project herself into various possible futures, including a future utopia that remedies all of the flaws of the present-day welfare state. Drawing on the antipsychiatry movement of the period and echoing Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962),¹⁸ the novel anatomizes the techniques that mental health professionals use to demean and dominate their clients—rigid rules about when patients can eat, who they can talk to, and so on. In addition, it portrays these professionals as motivated by a desire to further their careers, even at their patients’ expense; for example, Connie is a test subject in a project that involves implanting electrodes inside patients’ brains in order to regulate their behavior. Like Kesey, Piercy views this impetus toward social control as typical of welfare-state professionals and thus uses the asylum as a figure for the U.S. social system.¹⁹ Inverting the usual metaphor of the welfare system as a safety net, Connie instead thinks of it as an entrapping net of discourse cast over her by welfare professionals who presume to control the lives of the city’s underclass: “All those experts lined up against her in a jury dressed in medical white and judicial black—social workers, caseworkers, child guidance counselors, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, clinical psychologists, probation officers—all those cool knowing faces had caught her and bound her in their nets of jargon hung all with tiny barbed hooks that stuck in her flesh and leaked a slow weakening poison” (52). The conclusion toward which the novel moves is that members of this underclass must fight back against this professional control using any means necessary. Hence, in the concluding chapter Connie kills her doctors and nurses by poisoning their coffee.

As in the case of many New Left and second-wave feminist attacks on the welfare state, this imagined retaliation against the helping professions seemingly dovetails with contemporaneous right-wing arguments for dismantling public services. This attack seems particularly misguided in the context of Piercy’s representation of the public mental health system, which had already been decimated by the time Piercy wrote her novel. In the early 1970s, long-term involuntary patients such as Connie were increasingly rare; more commonly, after decades of deinstitutionalization and cutbacks, mental patients were living on the streets or in run-down welfare hotels.²⁰ As Maria Farland notes, by the 1970s, “paradoxically, even though [the] widespread expulsion of the mentally ill had already become a fait accompli, public outcry against involuntary incarceration began to gain momentum.”²¹ In conceiving of the damage done to mental patients as endemic to public institutions, Farland argues, antipsychiatric literature contributed to a shift in the treatment of mental patients toward the private sphere.²² In spite of the anticorporate communitarianism of Piercy’s novel, it too exemplifies this shift. Connie spends most of her time in the hospital longing to return to her bug-ridden apartment in the Latino ghetto: “Around her kitchen she would sing and dance, she would sing love songs to the cucarachas and the chinces, her chinces! Her life that had felt so threadbare now spread out like a full velvet rose.… Her ordinary penny-pinching life appeared to her full beyond the possibility of savoring every moment” (20–21). The correlative to this return to the private sphere is Connie’s recurring fantasy about taking revenge on her captors. In one of her hallucinations/future projections, she imagines herself as the gunner in an aerial battle against enemy cyborgs. As Connie watches, the pilots of the airships morph into the various welfare-state professionals who have dominated her life:

However, Piercy’s attitude toward welfare-state professionalism in the novel, as in the case of her MDS writings, is much more complex; at the heart of Woman on the Edge of Time is an idealistic effort to imagine a new, antiauthoritarian version of the social trustee ideology. This complexity can be glimpsed in the irony of Connie’s position in the hospital; as a young woman, after escaping from her Mexican immigrant family, she too aspired to be a public-sector professional and even took courses in psychology at a community college. Years later she again tried to enter the professional class, vicariously this time by becoming the “secretary–mistress–errand girl–laundress–maid–research assistant” (42) to a professor of romance languages at the City University of New York. Her downward trajectory—from would-be professional to sexual adjunct to object of professional scrutiny—reflects the perils that surround those who try to rise from the working class into the lower-prestige professions. The novel’s goal is not so much to destroy professionalism as to transform it into a social practice available to all. This is the point of the utopian future that Connie discovers—a decentralized, agrarian society in the year 2137, established after a worldwide anticorporate revolution by various minority groups. The part that Connie visits—a village in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts—incorporates some high-tech machinery but overall looks more like the kind of rural village from which Connie escaped as a child: “Most buildings were small and randomly scattered among trees and shrubbery and gardens, put together of scavenged old wood, old bricks and stones and cement blocks.… In the distance beyond a blue dome cows were grazing, ordinary black-and-white and brown-and-white cows chewing ordinary grass past a stone fence” (60–61). On one level, this society represents the destruction of the ideology of professionalism embodied in the doctors and nurses at the state mental hospital; it is a radically egalitarian society, without divisions of status and bureaucratic institutions. On another level, Mattapoisett represents the culmination of this ideology. It is a society in which everyone is a professional, occupying a technically specialized, self-chosen vocation. Routine seasonal work still exists in the form of agricultural labor, a task deemed necessary in order to foster a healthy relationship between people and the land. However, most of the routine white-collar jobs have been eliminated entirely: “after we dumped the jobs telling people what to do,” one of the utopians explains, “counting money and moving it about, making people do what they don’t want or bashing them for doing what they want, we have lots of people to work” (120–21). With these jobs out of the way, everyone is free to specialize; there is no need for a particular class to carry out the menial labor necessary for society’s survival. Mattapoisett is the kind of society in which, Connie imagines, her professional ambitions could have been fulfilled: “everybody studied as long as they wanted to,” she reflects. “They took courses all the time in fours and fives and sixes” (228). Indeed, Connie’s future double, the woman she might have become had she lived in Mattapoisett, is a brown-skinned plant geneticist. The central promise of Piercy’s utopia is that professional obfuscation will disappear, and the creative aspects of expert labor will be made available to all.

This fantasy was, in a sense, a central part of postwar theories of the new class. Indeed, one of the striking aspects of Woman on the Edge of Time is the extent to which it literalizes idealistic notions of professionalism that run through the liberal social science of the 1950s and 1960s. For instance, the novel’s dissolution of the distinction between professionals and nonprofessionals reflects the basic impulse behind the Johnson-era Community Action Programs, with their vision of eliciting the “maximum feasible participation” of welfare clients.²³ While attending a political meeting between utopian villages, Connie remembers that she was once involved in a Community Action Program: “it was just the same political machine,” she reflects, “and us stupid poor people, us… idiots who thought we were running things for a change. We ended up right back where we were” (147). Piercy implies that Mattapoisett realizes the unfulfilled promises of the War on Poverty, which had been stymied by the bureaucracy and power politics of the welfare state.

Mattapoisett similarly literalizes a Durkheimian idea that runs through many postwar theories of the new class: the notion that professional communities synthesize the best of modern, technological and traditional, agrarian societies. In Talcott Parsons’s terms, discussed in chapter 1, professional organizations are societal communities—associations of skilled and differentiated individuals who nevertheless experience the feeling of social integration typical of premodern communities. Piercy’s utopians thus resemble pre-modern peasants. They till the land, share property in common, and have adopted many premodern cultural traditions. “We learned a lot from societies that people used to call primitive,” Luciente explains. “Primitive technically. But socially sophisticated.… We tried to learn from cultures that dealt well with handling conflict, promoting cooperation, coming of age, growing a sense of community, getting sick, aging, going mad, dying” (117). At the same time, the utopians’ lifestyle is more typical of late-twentieth-century professionals; each maintains a personal living space and pursues a series of casual sexual relationships subordinate to the imperatives of his or her career. Indeed, the premodern traditions they have adopted (in Mattapoisett’s case, those of the Wamponaug Indians) seem like a superficial veneer on an essentially modern cultural system. In the gemeinschaft tradition exemplified by the U.S. New Critics and by Mary McCarthy’s description of North Vietnam, agrarian cultures are imagined as direct outgrowths of their natural environment; the tribe’s identity comes from the land it cultivates, the local resources out of which it builds its homes and tools. This notion of culture implies an essentialist conception of race—a vision of generations of women and men living and interbreeding on the same land. In Mattapoisett, in contrast, all children are test-tube babies with no genetic link to the women and men who raise them, and culture is something selected from the historical record and freely altered or discarded. Each member of the tribe, Luciente explains, is free to move to another tribe and adopt its cultural ways: “When you grow up, you can stick to the culture you were raised with or you can fuse into another. But the one we were raised in usually has a… sweet meaning to us” (96). In addition, every culture has been adapted to fit with the egalitarian ideology shared by the tribes—the product of their revolution; like Gouldner’s new class, Piercy’s utopians have subjected all customary folkways to the antiauthoritarianism of the culture of critical discourse. Traditions having to do with lineage, descent, and sexual relations—the core elements of most cultures—have been discarded. In other words, in spite of the utopians’ desire to retain cultural diversity, to avoid “the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel” (96), the cultural differences they have maintained are superficial practices used to flavor an essentially rationalized, middle-class lifestyle.

Hence, Mattapoisett seems to represent an ideal synthesis of the two contrary tendencies that mark New Left thinking about the professional stratum. On the one hand, the novel depicts a community of highly educated, self-directed experts; on the other hand, those experts have dissolved the social space between themselves and the various class and ethnic groups usually excluded from the 1960s and 1970s new class. However, this synthesis hinges on the destruction of the very component of professionalism that made it attractive to many New Left activists—namely, professional autonomy. Connie is startled to learn that scientists such as Luciente must have all of their projects ratified by community consent; non-specialists judge the ethical and aesthetic consequences of specialist work. “In our time science was kept… pure maybe,” Connie complains. “Only scientists could judge other scientists” (272). In contrast, Luciente emphasizes scientists’ accountability to their communities: “[W]hat we do comes down on everybody. We use up a confounded lot of resources. Scarce resources. Energy. We have to account” (272). This argument also extends to artists and other humanistic intellectuals, who must subordinate their work to their community’s ethical standards. One of Luciente’s lovers, Jackrabbit, is a designer of “holies”—holographic installations involving sight, sound, and smell that interpret world history from the perspective of the triumphant, anticorporate revolution. The utopians perceive this work as identical to that carried out by Mattapoisett’s other experts. “We think art is production,” Luciente explains. “We think making a painting is as real as growing a peach or making diving gear. No more real, no less real. It’s useful and good on a different level, but it’s production” (261). As such, art is subject to the same community scrutiny. “If we don’t crit you, how will you grow?” (204), one of the utopians asks Jackrabbit at a community meeting that diagnoses the ideological failings of his most recent work of art. This aspect of Mattapoisett seems, on one level, like an extension of a problem endemic to all utopian fiction—that of imagining art in a society without social contradictions. On another level, it articulates one of Piercy’s central aesthetic assumptions—her rejection of the high-modernist emphasis on cultivating style and form for their own sake.²⁴ Such an emphasis is, for Piercy, an illusionary and amoral form of professionalism akin to that practiced by Connie’s doctors. One of the things that would be lost in Luciente’s future, she explained in an interview published after Woman on the Edge of Time, would be highly technical forms of artistic genius: “For instance, the violin prodigy who starts at age two and practices seventeen hours a day, yes, I don’t think there’d be any. Because I don’t think anybody would be willing to have their life warped in that way.”²⁵ This rejection of technical genius for its own sake does not exclude the need for expert writers skilled at their craft. This expert labor, however, must contribute to the red meat of literary enjoyment and ideological edification rather than perpetuate a version of new-class careerism.

Indeed, Piercy’s novel suggests that the only alternative to public control of expert work is a free-market dystopia in which professionals become the paid servants of corporate enterprise. As Luciente points out, professional autonomy was always something of an illusion: “But Connie, in your day only huge corporations and the Pentagon had money enough to pay for big science. Don’t you think that had an effect on what people worked on?” (272). The utopian world that Connie visits is only one possible future for the American welfare state. The dystopian alternative, which Connie briefly visits after some initial brain surgery, is one in which the world has been carved up by multinational corporations with cyborg CEOs who have transformed professionals into proletarianized corporate servants. In this section of the novel, which prefigures the cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, Piercy depicts a world of expert professionalism run amok.²⁶ The welfare state has been replaced by a social order in which medical professionals feed on the underclass, harvesting their organs to prolong the lives of the rich. Here, Connie’s double is Gildina 547-921-45-822-KBJ, a surgically altered courtesan contracted to a middle-level “flack” named Cash, whose name reflects the total subordination of professional expertise to economic capital in his society. Like all middle-level professionals, Cash enjoys some of the perks of the technological civilization of which he is a part; he gets to live in a high-rise tower above the polluted streets. However, he is also a paid employee who identifies absolutely with his corporate bosses. In both of the novel’s future worlds, the distinction between professionals and nonprofessionals has disappeared. Either professionals are assimilated into an egalitarian democracy, or they are proletarianized, literally becoming corporate property. For Piercy, the same dynamic applies in the present day; professionals (including artists) must choose their masters: corporations or the people.²⁷

However, even the subordination of new-class expertise to community consensus may not be enough to check the dangerous effects of professional self-direction. In “Grand Coolie Damn,” Piercy diagnosed the ways in which the New Left was infected by a charismatic authoritarianism latent within many of its leaders’ professional background. Her utopians in Woman on the Edge of Time solve this problem through their perpetual vigilance against “power surges” (220). When one of them must adopt a position of unique responsibility, he or she resigns after a year and pays penance, serving “in a job usually done by young people waiting to begin an apprenticeship or crossers atoning a crime” (246). More radically, the people of Mattapoisett have reengineered human beings so as to eradicate the original division of labor between women and men. Echoing Shulamith Firestone’s proposal for eliminating gender difference in The Dialectic of Sex (1970),²⁸ Piercy’s utopians grow test-tube babies in “brooders” so as to liberate women from the burdens of childbirth (93). The novel thus outlines the conditions under which a revolutionary movement wholly free from professional obfuscation might exist: a society without the will to power, guaranteed by an as yet impossible technological transformation of human beings. However, the very technology that allows Piercy’s utopians to eradicate the new class’s will-to-power threatens to reintroduce it in an even more virulent form. When Connie visits the community, they are enmeshed in a debate between “shapers,” who want to completely engineer the human race, developing superhuman traits such as heightened intelligence and strength, and “mixers,” who want to maintain the status quo (220). The former, Luciente believes, are in thrall to a power surge similar to that which impels Connie’s doctors to operate on her brain. Mattapoisett, in other words, is in danger of degenerating into a new-class dystopia, belatedly following the path toward Gildina’s corporate future. It is threatened by the amoral fascination with expert accomplishment for its own sake that pervades the new class’s culture of critical discourse. Professionalism, for Piercy, thus functions as the interface between utopia and dystopia, and the problem with this interface is that it is dangerously porous. The seeds of dystopia are sown in the professional ethos that makes utopia possible.

This failed synthesis of New Left professionalism also characterizes Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, published two years before Woman on the Edge of Time. Like Piercy, Le Guin was interested in creating agrarian utopias that embody the communalistic, antiauthoritarian tendencies of New Left social thought. Too much of the utopian tradition, she complained, “is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth.”²⁹ In contrast, Le Guin hoped to expand this tradition by exploring “non-European, non-euclidian, non-masculinist” utopias,³⁰ ones modeled after the cultures of preconquest Native Americans. She most fully realized this ambition in her experimental novel Always Coming Home (1985),³¹ an imaginary ethnography of a future society in which the surviving humans of a resource-depleted Earth have reorganized into scattered, matriarchal tribes. This interest in the premodern dovetailed with Le Guin’s political anarchism; her political ideal was the commune, governed by community consent and public opinion rather than by formal laws. However, unlike Piercy, Le Guin often placed a greater emphasis on the other half of New Left professionalism: its valuation of creative individualism and antiorganizational autonomy. Much of her most celebrated science fiction focuses on heroic, self-directed intellectuals who rebel against their society through the disinterested pursuit of their professional calling. This theme is central to The Dispossessed, which develops the thesis that such work is anarchistic in a more profound way than the communitarian societies that Le Guin heralds in her nonfiction.

Hence, The Dispossessed, like Woman on the Edge of Time, depicts an agrarian society that embodies many of the ideals of the 1960s New Left: an arid moon named Anarres, colonized by anarchists who fled their home planet Urras in order to establish a stateless utopia based on the political philosophy of their founder, Laia Odo. As Le Guin explained, she based this society on her extensive readings in the anarchist tradition, “the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.”³² The residents of Anarres have no currency and no laws; the planet’s scarce resources are shared collectively, and criminals are punished by their victims’ friends and neighbors. Marriage does not exist, although some individuals choose to form lifelong partnerships, and there are no restrictions on juvenile or adult sexuality. All residents, who live in scattered small communities, participate in the labor-intensive agriculture necessary to prevent mass starvation. However, as many of Le Guin’s critics have pointed out, the novel’s unique contribution to the utopian tradition is that it depicts this world as a flawed, dynamic society with its own internal contradictions.³³ Indeed, when the novel begins, Anarres is in the process of transforming into a subtly repressive regime. Although it lacks a formal justice system, public opinion and gossip fulfill the same function, rigidly controlling what people say and do. “On Urras,” a disgruntled anarchist complains, “they have government by minority. Here we have government by majority. But it is government! The social conscience isn’t a living thing any more but a machine, a power machine!” (148–49). In addition, the Odonians have embraced a narrowly instrumental view of their founding philosophy that evaluates everything based on whether it contributes to their world’s survival. According to Odo’s theory, society is an organism, with all of the parts acting together for the whole. The Odonians interpret this theory to mean that anything nonfunctional is a social danger, including the arts and advanced sciences. “Excess is excrement,” one of Odo’s maxims states. “Excrement retained in the body is a poison” (87).

This calcification of Odonianism into utilitarianism has particularly severe effects on Anarres’s scientists and artists, especially those with exceptional talents. The Dispossessed focuses on an Odonian temporal physicist named Shevek, who believes in the philosophical principles underlying his society but discovers that they leave little space for intellectuals such as himself. This problem is made clear in an early scene from Shevek’s childhood in one of his planet’s communal schools, when a school matron chastises him for claiming a patch of sunlight as his own. “Mine sun!” he exclaims when a fat child with a sagging diaper pushes him aside to share it with him. The matron, pulling Shevek away, explains Anarres’s central ideological tenet: “Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it” (24). On one level, the matron’s injunction highlights the absurdity of the propertarian creed that the Odonians have relinquished; no one can own the sun. On another level, the two children want the sun for different reasons. The infant Shevek gazes at the sunbeam with a look of “blank rapture,” gaining an aesthetic pleasure from it that transcends mere utilitarian considerations. Critics have therefore read this scene as the beginning of Shevek’s intellectual awakening: “To him,” Winter Eliott explains, “the sun represents ideas, knowledge, something brilliant and far away, to be reached after struggle and challenge.”³⁴ In contrast, the fat baby is a grotesque figure for the conformist utilitarianism of the average Odonian; he approaches Shevek “out of boredom or sociability” (24) and covets the spot of sunshine for its warmth. Neither Shevek nor the fat infant can own the sun, but one gets a higher pleasure from it than the other. This higher pleasure is reminiscent of Kant’s concept of the beautiful—an appreciation unsullied by considerations of utility or interest. Baby Shevek thus becomes an updated version of Trilling’s John Laskell from The Middle of the Journey: an anti-ideological dissident attuned to the anti-instrumental. This excess aesthetic appreciation, dismissed as excremental by the Odonians, becomes central to the novel’s account of creative professionals; the true intellectual, the novel suggests, is one who experiences disinterested pleasure in knowledge for its own sake.

A related problem is posed by the Odonians’ rejection of “egoizing”—any effort at individual self-expression that threatens or disturbs the community. Le Guin dramatizes this problem in another vignette from Shevek’s early education. While participating in a “Speaking-and-Listening” group at his school, he stumbles across a version of Zeno’s paradox, which he tries to teach to the other children. “Speech is sharing,” his teacher rebukes him, “a cooperative art. You’re not sharing, merely egoizing” (26). The point of the lesson is for the children to repeat what each of them already knows, thereby reaffirming their collective ideology. The young Shevek, in contrast, wants to communicate a troubling paradox that might disrupt their commonsense understanding of the world. The resistance he encounters affects both scientists and exceptional artists on Anarres. One of Shevek’s friends, Tirin, is publicly reprimanded for a play he writes that satirizes the Odonian way of life. “Tir’s a born artist,” Shevek explains years later. “Not a craftsman—a creator. An inventor-destroyer, the kind who’s got to turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man who praises through rage” (289). The problem that Shevek and Tirin face is that the Odonians are in a sense right; true intellectual accomplishment is egoistic. “I am that book” (212), Shevek reflects when his major theoretical opus is turned down for publication; intellectual work means projecting oneself into books or works of art that become permanent testaments to their maker. For this reason, when Tirin’s play is rejected, he goes insane and falls prey to a compulsive urge to rewrite it continually; he must fix the artifact that embodies himself but that is irremediably unacceptable to his fellow citizens. Unlike Piercy’s Jack-rabbit, he cannot relinquish his artistic autonomy in order to produce ideologically acceptable art.

Hence, Anarres at once embodies the New Left’s communitarian ideals and its anxieties about lost student autonomy within the paternalistic university of the early 1960s. Indeed, the planet is in the midst of producing a conformist, bureaucratic elite, much like the university administrators against whom the New Left directed many of their protests. Anarres officially has no state apparatus. Nevertheless, because of the planet’s scarce resources, some centralized system of transportation and distribution is necessary in order to prevent mass starvation. Odonian philosophy attempts to resolve this problem by distinguishing between “administering things and governing people” (149); Anarres’s settlers have constructed a central computer, Divlab, responsible for distributing food and water to the various communities. In practice, however, this distinction cannot be maintained. As one of Shevek’s fellow dissidents explains, several informal power groups have emerged around the various institutions responsible for administering things, and these groups make policy decisions that affect the entire populace: “Learning centers, institutes, mines, mills, fisheries, canneries, agricultural development and research stations, factories, one-product communities—anywhere that function demands expertise and a stable institution. But that stability gives scope to the authoritarian impulse” (149). This bureaucracy spreads with every drought or famine that threatens the planet: “every emergency, every labor draft even, tends to leave behind it an increment of bureaucratic machinery… and a kind of rigidity: this is the way it was done, this is the way it is done, this is the way it has to be done” (290). Sabul, Shevek’s academic advisor at the Central Institute of the Sciences, exemplifies this petty-minded attitude. Sabul has established his intellectual reputation by insinuating himself into the new bureaucracy, in particular those portions of it that oversee the exchange of information between Anarres and Urras; this position has enabled him to plagiarize Urrasti ideas and publish them under his name. Shevek’s conflict with him concerns his efforts to publish his own work; Sabul edits everything that Shevek writes and insists on being listed as coauthor. Most problematically, Sabul shares the purely utilitarian mindset of the rest of the planet’s expert class. “Every Odonian has to be a functions analyst,” he tells Shevek during a final interview before he is fired. “[D]o you consider the work you’ve done here functional?” (234). The conflict between the two physicists thus replicates Shevek’s primal encounter with the fat baby. Shevek is interested in physics in itself as a source of pure aesthetic pleasure for himself and for the handful of fellow scholars who understand his work. Sabul, in contrast, is interested in physics for what it gives him—his reputation on Anarres and petty control over others.

In contrast, the propertarian mother-planet, Urras, seemingly embodies a very different attitude toward its intellectuals. Le Guin modeled this planet after contemporary Earth; it is divided into a capitalist nation named A-Io, a repressive state Communist nation named Thu, and a variety of poorer nations over which the two world powers fight for ascendancy. A-Io, which Shevek visits through an exchange program, seems to facilitate the autonomous intellectual work restricted on Anarres. The nation lavishes resources on its physicists, housing them in opulent apartments and providing them with personal body servants. Here, Shevek finally encounters people who understand his work. Back on his home planet, “[h]e had had no equals. Here, in the realm of inequity, he met them at last” (64). A-Io thus seems like the newer, corporate university that was emerging in the 1970s—a place that encourages competitive entrepreneurship among its employees. It quickly becomes obvious, however, that Urras is just as utilitarian as its anarchist neighbor. During a visit to the Space Research Foundation, Shevek encounters an engineer who explains Shevek’s function on Urras; they hope that his breakthrough in temporal physics will enable faster-than-light space travel and thus ensure Urras’s ascendancy within the League of All Worlds—a kind of galactic United Nations. Moreover, the government of A-Io views Shevek’s work as intellectual property that they have paid for by funding his visit. In terms of intellectuals’ condition, the chief difference between A-Io and Anarres is that the former sees the instrumental value of Shevek’s work, whereas the latter does not. “To be a physicist in A-Io,” he reflects, “was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State” (240). These conditions make genuine intellectual work impossible: “There is no way to act rightly,” Shevek realizes, “with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power” (305). Like Anarres, Urras conjures up many of the anxieties about intellectual labor that attended the student revolts of the 1960s, which revolved around the issue of to what extent intellectual knowledge should be paid for and influenced by government and industry—whether, for example, universities should willingly carry out military research.

Shevek’s goal is to create an anti-instrumental model of intellectual work that conforms to neither Anarres’s nor A-Io’s model, one that is faithful to his society’s anarchist ideology yet also leaves room for pure research. He accomplishes this through a critical reinterpretation of Odonianism. As we have seen, most Odonians derive a petty-minded pragmatism from Odo’s central analogy between society and the human body; the individual is subordinate to the social organism and tailors her acts to ensure its survival. Shevek, in contrast, derives an absolute insistence on the individual’s duty to pursue her professional calling. Theoretical physics, he realizes, is “the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength” (293). The Anarrestis’ error has been to think of the social organism as a kind of machine to which parts can be added or subtracted based on calculations about their utility. Shevek’s revised interpretation makes such calculations meaningless. Every profession, no matter how eccentric, is already an integral part of the social organism; it is an end in itself and must not be compromised. Shevek’s “radical and unqualified will to create,” he reflects, “was, in Odonian terms, its own justification. His sense of primary responsibility toward his work did not cut him off from his fellows, from his society, as he had thought. It engaged him with them absolutely” (294). Autonomous professional work, in other words, may seem entirely selfish and irresponsible, much like the professional work for profit carried out on Urras. For Shevek, however, this work is inherently anarchist and communitarian. “The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution,” he reflects, “and revolution begins in the thinking mind” (293–94).

Unlike Odo’s original creed, however, Shevek’s reinterpreted anarchism does not entail the planned creation of a new society. Rather, it is an anarchism enacted through each individual’s unconditional relationship with her work, a relationship that transcends all external political and social imperatives. This is the political vision that Shevek ultimately brings to the people of Urras after he escapes from his propertarian keepers at the university and joins a working-class resistance movement. Facing the crowd at a mass demonstration, he praises his home planet in conventional Anarresti terms: “We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association.” However, he also articulates his newfound understanding of Odonianism. “You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere” (265). What Shevek offers the unemployed and hungry crowd, who are soon massacred by government troops, is not a concrete plan for building a better society but rather his own vision of absolute intellectual freedom. Anarchist utopia, for him, is embodied in those who can “be” a revolution rather than just “make” a revolution. Shevek dramatizes this principle through his most important act on Urras; he smuggles the notes for his General Temporal Theory away from A-Io into the hands of the League of All Worlds. He thus ensures that his ideas do not become the instrument of A-Io foreign policy but are instead made available to scientists throughout the universe. As he explains to the Terran ambassador, his gift ensures “that one of you cannot use it, as A-Io wants to do, to get power over the others, to get richer or to win more wars. So that you cannot use the truth for your private profit, but only for the common good” (304). Indeed, his theory’s function is to create a universal community of ideas that Shevek could find on neither Urras nor Anarres; it enables the construction of the “ansible,” an instantaneous communications device that plays a central role in Le Guin’s other Hainish novels.

The Dispossessed, ostensibly a utopian exposition of communitarian anarchism, thus becomes a vehicle for Le Guin to develop a model of absolute professional integrity opposed to the bureaucratism of the postwar welfare state. In so doing, the novel dramatizes the New Left’s similar emphasis on unfettered professionalism as a revolutionary force. Le Guin’s depiction of Shevek specifically owes much to Paul Goodman’s writings on professionalism. Goodman, the author of Growing Up Absurd (1960),³⁵ was a formative influence on the New Left and 1960s counterculture. Le Guin frequently cited him as a key figure in the anarchist tradition that she drew on when writing The Dispossessed.³⁶ His basic political principle was that anarchism does not consist of trying to reform society according to some concrete model. Rather, to be an anarchist “is to live in present society as though it were a natural society.”³⁷ In Shevek’s terms, one must “be” a revolution rather than “make” a revolution. From this perspective, Goodman concluded that authentic professionals—those who follow their calling irrespective of the pressures of the society they live in—are the most thorough anarchists. “Professionals,” he argued, “become radicalized when they try to pursue their professions with integrity and courage—their professions are what they know and care about—and they find that many things must be changed.”³⁸ However, as Goodman also recognized, the vast majority of professionals are not authentic in this way; they inhabit and perpetuate institutions that prostitute professional knowledge to pecuniary ends. He therefore called for a “new reformation,” a revolt of professionals against their own class; “the closest analogy I can think of is the Protestant Reformation, liberation from the Whore of Babylon and return to the pure faith.”³⁹ This reformation would distinguish between the true professionals and the false professionals of American society. The former are the “mandarins” or “monks” that control the school system. They breed a dangerous conformism, much like the deadening small-mindedness that Shevek encounters on Anarres. Like the clergy of the medieval church, they are bound to a centralized institutional system and to the orthodox beliefs that it embodies. In contrast, the true professionals are guided by an autonomous professional ethic independent of existing institutions; “scientists and inventors and other workmen are responsible for the uses of the work they do, and they ought to be competent to judge these uses and have a say in deciding them.”⁴⁰ Goodman thus hoped to replace the “old” new class of scholastic Jesuits with a “new” new class of protestant ministers, one guided by an innate, spiritual understanding of its professional responsibilities.

Goodman, like Le Guin, arrived at an idealization of the nonconformist, self-directed professional in a manner that highlights the New Left and counterculture’s proximity to the emergent expert professionalism of the postwar era. Crucially, however, both Le Guin and Goodman made this ideal attractive by reconciling it with the New Left’s anticapitalist and communitarian ideology so that professional work, carried out within an institutional setting, could seem inherently antiestablishment. As we have seen, Shevek’s disinterested interest in knowledge for its own sake differentiates him from the physicists on both Urras and Anarres and transforms him into an anarchist icon capable of throwing both planets into revolutionary chaos. More so than Piercy’s imagined destruction of professional autonomy, this model prefigures the version of new-class fantasy that survived within the academic humanities throughout the 1980s and 1990s, long after it became evident that the reformist hopes of left-wing new-class theorists such as Alvin Gouldner had come to naught. This version of the fantasy still nods toward social trustee professionalism’s ethos of responsibility and allows humanistic intellectuals to imagine that their work serves a political constituency outside of the academy. However, its primary function is to defend the absolute integrity of autonomous professional work, severed from its connections with the regulatory state or from any sort of political movement. With this fantasy, we move farther away than ever from the organizational idealism that animated segments of the professional stratum in the early twentieth century and toward a model of intellectual agency at once more grandiose and less ambitious.