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Volume 22, Number 4 (1998) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum INSTITUTIONS IN FEMINIST AND REPUBLICAN SCIENCE FICTION ANNA LORIEN NELSON* & JOHN S. NELSON** In this essay we explore the images and reforms of institutions found in science fiction with a focus on republican and feminist projects in the genre. Science fiction recovers the institutional inspirations of earlier myths of law and politics (republicanism) while detailing their relevance to more recent concerns (feminism). Science fiction probes the politics of everyday life, reinventing societies, economies, biologies, geologies, ethics, and aesthetics for ordinary people. In yoking everyday politics to myth, speculative fiction tries to move us intelligently into cultural trajectories for the future. Science fiction is a primary source of specific thought-experiments that reimagine our institutions. Notwithstanding recent proclamations of “the new institutionalism” in economics and political science, neither discipline attends all that well to the business of rethinking institutions. Neoclassical economists abstract from markets to games, while mainstream political scientists study decisions and elections. Sociology and anthropology do better in their study of institutions, but not much. Science fiction, by contrast, encompasses utopias and dystopias among its many subgenres. It frequently examines institutions of law and politics. Yet science fiction is a diverse genre, and here we analyze only republican and feminist works. republican.1 Many political institutions addressed by liberals, socialists, capitalists, and even conservatives are inventions of modern republicans. The United States is by constitutional form a republic—not a democracy—and the politics of its institutions retain a spirit of republicanism. Soren Kierkegaard’s observation holds for the republican family of stitutions: “Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of times as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.”2 People who care about institutions cannot ignore republicanism. Republicanism predates modernity and influences modern politics less as a disciplined ideology than as a ramshackle set of principles, images, and myths that shape our thinking about forming, conducting, and revolting against governments. Classical republicanism also survives as the tradition of civic rhetoric.3 It even inspires the celebration of “the Republic of Science,” a mythos immensely important in the institutional imagination of science fiction.4 The republican tradition offers different conceptions of institutions. Ancient republicans regarded institutions as orders. These are “disciplines” in a pre-modern sense, closer to what we know today as the martial arts disciplines than to late-modern modes of discipline in universities or Foucauldian systems of surveillance and punishment in prisons.5 Today republican orders encompass civic organizations such as the Masons and Optimists. Unlike interest groups like the Chamber of Commerce, orders seldom lobby governments about policy. Instead they cultivate civic virtue and act directly to accomplish themselves what they hope to see happen in the community.6 Gradually, the practice of orders became secondary in modern republicanism, and mainly rhetorical. As an order, each institution comes to function like a forum, a small or partial public for its constituents. Thus modern republicans begin to conceive institutions primarily as venues. Etymologically venues are sustained forums for venting.7 The etymological root of vent speaks of coming, as in the famous declaration by Julius Caesar: “Veni, vidi, vici.” Venues are ways of coming, characteristically into public visibility and audibility. Republican institutions are inventions that prevent disorder and disaster through coming toget-her, as in political conventions.8 In modern times, conventions invent constitutions, and constitutions create further conventions and institutions. Accordingly, republican institutions in modern times are conventions, preventions, even interventions. Republican institutions are actively connective. In this sense, modern institutions are constitutive. Institutions stitch constitutions into everyday experiences of law and government. For republicans, institutions shape associations and structure their sensibilities.9 They connect individuals and their patterns of activity into cultures. Institutions color, texture, and tailor our acts into styles. Institutions involve the arts of decoration (from ancient Rome’s republican decorum) that endow people in society with daily manners. These reach from the everyday politics of politeness to the more sophisticated skills of informal governance and power called politesse (by the French republicans). Institutional arrangement and adornment connects with what the post-modern republican Hannah Arendt called “doing beauty.”10 It is intrinsic to good action rather than “merely or perversely ornamental,” as modern utilitarians or puritans would say.11 If feminism and republicanism have reason to reinvent political institutions for post-modern conditions, the question remains how they might make common cause in such political experiments. At best, they seem an odd couple. Republicanism has promoted some of the West’s most masculinist, patriarchal politics. Even if post-modern republicans accept the liberation of women, how can feminists applaud principles and experiments from such a long-standing source of opprobrium and oppression for women? Yet feminists prize the defining institution of republicanism. From Hannah Arendt onward, feminists and theorists of feminist politics celebrate publics.14 As Arendt often noted, republic is from res publica, the thing that Romans took to be visible or otherwise available to everybody in the body politic.15 An appreciation of publics is apparent in the work of Seyla Benhabib, Lisa Disch, Jean Elshtain, Nancy Fraser, Nancy Hartsock, Mary Hawkesworth, Bonnie Honig, and Susan Okin.16 Virtually all feminists pursue public dimensions to their work, and the movement’s abiding slogan has been that the personal is political. Feminist science fiction reimagines public institutions to make them more flexible, playful, and responsive to everyday needs. Science fiction with a feminist and republican focus would free our institutions from Max Weber’s iron cage of routinization, legalization, rationalization, and bureaucratization. The new institutions found in science fiction include affinity families and familial firms; occasional cults and life-long schools; regulative carnivals and anarchic wild zones; women warriors and male mothers; cybernetic tutors, leaders, and friends; ritualized happenings, virtual communities, and civilizational way-stations. We find in such in-stitutional inventions the kind of story-experiments that help us rethink our theories of politics and our sense of how institutions might work. Fates are imaged as three sisters who spin and weave the threads of people’s lives. Lachesis casts lots to learn who gets what properties as an individual, spinning the lifelines for the cloth to come. Clotho then weaves these individual threads into the social fabric. Atropos, as her name implies, cannot be turned from her duty to end lives at their appointed times by cutting the individual threads. Like the Greek Fates, feminist science fiction focuses on a constitutive politics of identity. Orson Scott Card both Americanizes and feminizes the tropes further in his Tales of Alvin Maker. These books cast women in the role of the Fates, but now they weave lifelines of human individuals into the emerging fabrics of American culture. In Card’s fourth novel, tradition is amended so that at least some people have more choice than they did in antiquity. One of the women poised to inherit the duty of weaving wants different work. Her brother, better suited to the task, assumes the responsibility while enabling her to follow her dreams. No longer is she limited to “women’s work.” Ursula Le Guin does something similar with Penelope, the faithful and clever wife of Odysseus. Penelope is famous for keeping her suitors at bay by undoing at night what she weaves every day, waiting as she is for her wandering husband to return. Standing by her man, she conserves the old order by unweaving the fabric required for a wedding she does not want. By Le Guin’s account, however, Penelope helps to weave a new world. The Lathe of Heaven updates this archetypal weaver and unweaver in Penny Crouch, who contributes to a world made and unmade by manipulating the dreams of a man.18 When institutions need changing, political and legal skills are required to reconstitute the social fabric. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin makes the focal figure a woman of cosmic power, a “Weaver . . . a woman dressed in light.”19 In science fiction, republicans with an environmentalist bent (Card included) advance the trope of ecopoesis to celebrate constitutive action. This making, unmaking, and remaking of ecology parallels the feminist imagery of weaving, unweaving, and reweaving. In David Brin’s Earth, the physicist hero figurally weaves gravitational forces into a tiny and unthreatening black hole then eventually unweaves another that is larger and more dangerous. The novel treats ecosystems as woven, unraveled, then rewoven to save the Earth as a habitat for humanity. 20 Neal Stephenson’s villains in Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller use chemicals and machines to make an awful mess of the lands and waters.21 The hard-boiled heroes save the day, by repairing old institutions of regulation with new conventions of political action. Then the main protagonist literally stitches odds and ends from a hardware store into a device that stops a company’s pollution of the ocean and calls press attention to the need for government action. The same network of post-modern republican and feminist images of weaving and stitching is crucial also to the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, where the design of new institutions and constitutions dominates all three of the award-winning books.22 Feminist and republican works of science fiction dislike of the disciplinary disposition of modern institutions. This is especially evident in stories that reserve the designation of “Institute” for sinister organizations such as the “Oregon Oneirological Institute” that causes disasters in Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven.23 In Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, the “New York Neuro-Psychiatric Institution” is the madhouse that imprisons and torments Connie, the novel’s protagonist. The book calls none of its utopian organizations by any word remotely resembling “institution.”24 The question, of course, is how feminist, republican, or other post-modern politics would replace invidious specialization. The moves of post-modern republicans and feminists who write science fiction are particularly instructive. Local Knowledge as a Personal Responsibility Republicans rely heavily upon local knowledge as part of their focus on the complex of leadership, followership, and citizenship. Local knowledge is not a form of specialization. It is not about dividing tasks. Nor is it about assigning policies and operations to different bureaus in a rationalized apparatus for administration, the hallmark of bureaucratization. A genuine leader defers to followers in their spheres of personal competence and local knowledge. The good general pays careful attention to the judgments of commanders in the field. It is no mere coincidence that post-modern, activist epistemologies embrace the republican principle of local knowledge for resisting the modern, objectivist epistemics of abstraction, representation, and universalization.25 The science-fiction novel that examines this most amply and explicitly in republican terms is David Brin’s The Postman.26 The personal responsibility for eternal vigilance against abuses of power is a republican principle of citizenship. Citizens must be attuned to public affairs. Followers must cultivate a sense of the whole polity in order to know when to initiate and when to defer. This principle of responsibility complements republican tenets of leadership and deference to authority. The argument against specialization is not that it is inherently mistaken or bad but that it tends to be anti-institutional. It does not distinguish intelligently between traditionalism and institutionalism. Specialization denies every rationality and rationale except its own. It disrespects all institutions and actors save the economic: markets, firms, producers, consumers, and entrepreneurs. It loses the inclination and ability to appreciate even its own institutions. Life-Long Education as a Social Institution Feminists seek to undermine specialization or replace it. Life-long education is the chief device in feminist science fiction for displacing specialization. In Woman on the Edge of Time, the inhabitants are encouraged to be broad in their learning. Every seventh year, they take sabbaticals, refresh themselves, and start anew at other occupations. In feminist science fiction, life-long education is the main antidote or compensation for specialization. Education, from the Latin educere, means to lead out. Presumably education leads us out beyond our old selves. Education makes it possible to be on our own, able to learn for ourselves, even able to lead when required. In feminist imagery, education enables you weave the long thread of your own life into larger fabrics of culture, society, and civilization. In science fiction, at least, the feminist principle is that institutions are educations. The twentieth-century academy tends to regard education as its proprietary realm. Education itself becomes a form of specialization. The education promoted by feminist science fiction is different. In Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, people go into vocations akin to professions, but they keep learning about other things to avoid narrowing their vision.27 In The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri Tepper, people must practice at least one craft, one art, and one science.28 Craft makes, art performs, and science explores. Working together, these resist the monomania of specialization and disrupt the rationalization of institutions into bureaucracies. They cultivate in each person three distinct rationalities, leaving individuals less susceptible to domination by economic rationality alone. Venus of Dreams, the first book in a feminist trilogy by Pamela Sargent, includes a male worker, Chen, who has, apart from his everyday work, refined the craft of carving to a high level.29 By contrast, Iris is a specialist, a climatologist trained to help in terraforming Venus. Indeed, she and all those who are educated to read and write are called “specialists.” The apparatus of specialization in Venus of Dreams is associated with the old world of Earth in contrast to the new world of Venus. As the first settlers move to the surface of Venus, they learn crafts and sciences to augment old specializations, and leave behind the collar pins that identified their social castes based on work specializations. Another feminist strategy is to supplement specialization. We mean “supplement” in Jacques Derrida’s sense: to add something that transmutes, crowds out, or slyly replaces what it was supposed to augment only incrementally or categorically.30 Thus education can work to remake roles comprehensively, throughout a society and its institutions. Education in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed tries to eradicate “possessive individualism” from advanced-industrial societies.31 The moon of Anarres has syndicates rather than specializations, and people shuttle among duties through frequent re-postings by a Division of Labor.32 But then Shevek arrives with laser-like interests in physics and freedom. These lead back to specialization notwithstanding the strong ideology which opposes it. Shevek reveals to the Odonians on Anarres how bureaucratization happens even when it is undesired and in a world where it is meant to be impossible. Yet Shevek turns the space-time gulfs between planets and stars into informative communication through an “ansible” that shares ideas instantaneously. He epitomizes the interstitial innovation favored by feminists.33 Cultural Carnivals as Wild Zones In The Left Hand of Darkness by Le Guin, biology does some of this same work, but another supplement to specialization is a social institution of personal holidays for sexual relations and reproduction. The holidays are so frequent they erode specializations. With a sexual and reproductive cycle tied to kemmer, the Gethenians have time off from their work each month. This and the coldness of their world seem to lessen the impulse to become caught up in narrow careers and specializations. Since everyone can be, not only a parent, but a mother, all careers stay flexible to accommodate demands on mothers. Altered reproductive roles also provide a greater breadth of individual experience. Division of labor and specialization are not prominent among Gethenians because there are no sexual divisions of labor to be maintained. Everybody goes through the reproductive cycle and its experiences, leaving less biological impetus for divisions of labor to create career-long specialties. Yet even on Gethen, divisions of labor and the seeds of specialization emerge in politics. Governments encourage specialization, because interactions with the modern civilizations of the Nine Known Worlds leave Gethenians feeling subtly inferior. Institutions in science fiction are complemented by carnivals, festivals, and other kinds of wild zones.34 Feminist science fiction shows a strong interest in the liberatory and oppressive potentials of such in-stitutions. The Gate to Women’s Country uses a carnival to manipulate sexual reproduction, control men, and even mislead many women. (Trouble on) Triton, Samuel R. Delany’s reworking of Ursula Le Guin’s Dispossessed, is a fully feminist work that presents an institutionalized wild zone.35 Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen features a recurrent carnival that both liberates and oppresses participants.36 In addition to occasional festivals, Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels reflect an amalgamation of feminism, environmentalism, and republicanism on Mars, with cultures that make something akin to a daily carnival out of the “timeslip” that reconciles slower Martian rotation to Earth’s 24-hour cycle of day and night.37 Feminists worry about how utopian institutions can routinize and regulate. Even festivals and wild zones can be used by cunning oppressors to identify troublemakers and dissipate pent-up resentments before they lead to rebellion.38 Yet carnivals can override or set aside the divisions of labor, class, race, and gender that feed specialization and are fed by it. Itinerant Tutors as Schoolless Instructors Feminist science fiction often conducts education without familiar institutions like schools. No buildings are dedicated to it. In Venus of Dreams, elementary education in the matriarchal heartland of the American plains proceeds without schools. Lessons are delivered individually through electronics. In Woman on the Edge of Time, electronic technologies such as wrist-computers and cyber-tutors are used for personal education, even though there is no particular organization to produce or supervise the lessons. Indeed people make “lessons” for themselves. This playful and largely self-directed instruction is analogous to surfing the Internet. Thus cyberpunk science fiction and Internet surfers celebrate self-education as the true fulfillment of the personal-computing revolution.39 Education does not always require advanced electronics. Some science fiction stories imagine people wandering from village to village or contacting in other ways those who have knowledge or skills needed to educate themselves in various crafts. Other science fiction stories adapt the theatrical device of “the happening” to educational purposes.40 In many feminist works of science fiction, people acquire their best education from disseminated sources, spread throughout the culture. Sargent’s Venus of Dreams prizes the intuition nurtured in Iris by everyday experiences over the specialized learning she acquires at the Cytherian Institute. Early in life, Iris benefits from education by “the band” that links people to “cyberminds.” Intuition 41 makes Iris’s knowledge of meteorology and climatology learned at the Cytherian Institute more effective than if she had only specialized skills. While Iris is obsessed by her specialization, her larger education keeps turning her toward more varied and overtly political pursuits. specialization and bureaucratization. The challenge for science fiction, as for politics, is to overcome what Nancy Kress calls the “institutional morbidity” of stultifying roles and routines.42 Recent works of science fiction suggest that post-modern institutions have no need to embrace the modern pathos of bureaucracy.43 Local knowledge, life-long education, cultural carnivals, and itinerant tutors enable feminist and republican science fiction to up-end Max Weber’s iron cage of bureaucrazation. They show how institutions can escape the trap of routinization, institutionalization, legalization, and rationalization. If “Everything is in flux,” as Marge Piercy observes, then our thinking about institutions would do well to attend to science fiction, “the literature of change.”44 22 See Robinson, supra note 4. 23 See Le Guin, THE LATHE OF HEAVEN, supra note 20, at 53. 24 See Marge Piercy, WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME 258, 380 (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1976). 25 See Clifford Geertz, THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE (New York: Basic, 1973). 26 David Brin, THE POSTMAN (New York: Bantam, 1985). 27 Nicola Griffith, AMMONITE (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992). 28 See Sheri Tepper, THE GATE TO WOMEN’S COUNTRY (New York: Bantam, 1988). 29 See Pamela Sargent, VENUS OF DREAMS (New York: Bantam, 1986); VENUS OF SHADOWS (New York: Bantam, 1988); CHILD OF VENUS (New York: Bantam, 1990). 30 See Jacques Derrida, DISSEMINATION (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) (trans. Barbara Johnson). See also, William Corlett, COMMUNITY WITHOUT UNITY (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989); Jim Collins, ARCHITECTURES OF EXCESS New York: Routledge, 1995). 31 See C. B. Macpherson, THE POLITICAL THEORY OF POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 32 See Ursula K. Le Guin, THE DISPOSSESSED (New York: HarperCollins, 1974). 33 See id., at 21. 34 On the feminist interest in wild zones, see Linda Williams, “A Jury of Their Peers: Marlene Gorris’s A Question of Silence,” in Ann E. Kaplan (ed.), POSTMODERNISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS 107-115 (London: Verso, 1988). 35 See Samuel R. Delany, TRITON (New York: Bantam, 1976). This novel was recently reissued by the Wesleyan University Press and the University Press of New England under the title that Delany first proposed. 36 See Joan D. Vinge, THE SNOW QUEEN (New York: Dell, 1980). See also Joan D. Vinge, THE SUMMER QUEEN (New York: Warner Books, 1991). 37 See Robinson, RED MARS, GREEN MARS, and BLUE MARS, supra note 4. 38 The carnival in The Gate to Women’s Country works this way, as does Jezebel’s, the elite gaming resort in The Handmaid’s Tale. See Margaret Atwood, THE HANDMAID’S TALE (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). And the same goes for the “proletarian zone” where Winston Smith and Julia rendezvous in 1984. See George Orwell, ORWELL’S NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982) (2nd ed., Irving Howe ed.). 39 William Gibson is generally regarded as the scion of cyberpunk: NEUROMANCER (New York: Ace, 1984); COUNT ZERO (New York: Ace, 1986); MONA LISA OVERDRIVE (New York: Bantam, 1988); VIRTUAL LIGHT (New York: Bantam, 1993); IDORU (New York: Berkley, 1996). See also William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (New York: Bantam, 1991). Despite the early reputation of cyberpunk as an extension of hard-boiled detection and thus a province of males, women are making important marks in this complex of aesthetics and politics. See Pat Cadigan: MIND PLAYERS (New York: Bantam, 1987); SYNNERS (New York: Bantam, 1991); FOOLS (New York: Bantam, 1992). See also, Emma Bull, FALCON (New York: Ace, 1989); and BONE DANCE (New York: Ace, 1991). Of course, women writers such as Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton have long since changed the face of hard-boiled detection as well. 40 Compare happenings in Delany’s TRITON and Kim Stanley Robinson’s THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1985). 41 Feminine or mystical intuition is prominent in science fiction. More surprisingly, perhaps, it works in much the same way in popular westerns. See John S. Nelson, COWBOY POLITICS (forthcoming). 42 Nancy Kress, BEGGARS IN SPAIN 341 (New York: Avon, 1993). 43 Alvin W. Gouldner, Metaphysical Pathos and the Theory of Bureaucracy, 49 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 496 (1955). 44 Marge Piercy, HE, SHE AND IT 417 (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1991). |
