(Background for Four Ways to Forgiveness and A Fisherman of the Inland Sea )

Readers approaching the novellas collected in Ursula K. Le Guin's Four Ways to Forgiveness and, much more so, the major stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea will benefit from knowing that many in the original audience for these tales could see them in terms of a debate on "the social construction of reality." In terms of that debate, the doctrine that "All human knowledge is local" in Four Ways can be seen as a "weak," epistemological form of the idea that reality is locally created. And in Fisherman, "Newton's Sleep," "The Shobies' Story," and "Dancing to Ganam" may be read as rather realistic fiction: not merely as literalizations of a figure of speech concerning how our psychologies, stories, and interpretations "construct reality" but instead as representations of a pure case of the social construction of reality in action, with social construction seen as the most real of phenomena. Below I tell several stories showing why "social constructivism" should be taken seriously and (in its "weak" form) accepted. Readers who dislike philosophy as gyring narratives or who are offended by nontechnical sources, readers suspicious of the sciences and who dislike reformulations of subtle theories for "first-approximation" popularization in altered frames of reference-such readers should definitely consider moving on to my discussion of Le Guin's fiction in the 1990s. Readers without a background in philosophy should note that I usually clarify technical terms within my text, but you still might want to have a dictionary handy.

So, again, CAUTION, another Kulturkampf zone: a discussion by someone with little training in philosophy attempting to render a fictional premise plausible. College students in courses stressing social construction should keep in mind that their instructors may find the social construction of reality the only truth there is, and my approach to that sole truth repugnant. ¹ 

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Physics/Philosophy of Science:

I was taught at the outset of Chemistry 101 (in 1961) the scientific principle, "The observer is part of the system." I.e., in no science can one talk of some phenomenon in itself but only the phenomenon as observed. Most famously, it is impossible to determine simultaneously both the location and (vector) velocity of an electron. I would later learn that this indeterminacy means that the universe is not a machine whose future can be (theoretically) predicted; so Enlightenment scientists like Pierre Simon Laplace (math, astronomy, 1749-1827) and other really strict determinists will be disappointed in their hopes for at least theoretical certainty and predictability (Capra 45; ch. 4). But I was not doing philosophy in Chem. 101, and The Uncertainty Principle is still beyond me; what we could understand as first-year students is that all observations either potentially change the thing observed or are necessarily limited by the range of capabilities of the observer. An ethnographer cannot effectively observe "the village as such," but only the village plus an ethnographer living in the village. Astronomers cannot objectively observe the Crab Nebula, not because they change a nebula by observing it but because they are limited in their observations by being human astronomers on Earth or (later) sending instruments from Earth. The most interesting things about the Crab Nebula may have to do with phenomena not detectable on Earth and/or which humans have not evolved to perceive, not even with instruments we can conceive and build. More generally, we can say along with the followers of the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant that no one can observe and report on any "thing in itself" because we must observe the thing and perceive it in terms of human categories ("Kantianism," DoP).

If strict objectivity is impossible in the sciences, then even scientific knowledge is in some degree "constructed." If even scientific knowledge is constructed, in some sense (if not yet necessarily an important one), our entire vision of reality, to a significant degree may be not passively perceived but actively constructed. This much could be clear even to an orthodox materialist and empiricist in Chem. 101. Modern physics, however, goes farther.

When dealing with the exceedingly small, in the quantum world of the subatomic, "The observer is part of the system" can have a very strong meaning. This is a world in which particles are processes and arise and disappear out of a quantum field Fritjof Capra can present quite convincingly as philosophically equivalent to Dao, Brahman, Dharmakaya or Tathata: the Void of myth and mystics (Tao of Physics ch. 13, p. 175; ch. 14, esp. 198-201). "The crucial feature of atomic physics," in Capra's statement of orthodox doctrine out of Werner Heisenberg et al., "is that the human observer is not only necessary to observe the properties of an object, but is necessary even to define these properties. In atomic physics, we cannot talk about the properties of an object as such. They are meaningfully only in the context of the object's interactions with the observer" (126; ch. 10). In the "S matrix" interpretation of subatomic particles, this "impossibility of separating the scientific observer from the observed phenomenon" appears "in its most extreme form. It implies, ultimately, that the structures and phenomena we observe in nature are nothing but creatures of our measuring and categorizing mind"-i.e. those structures and phenomena are maya in Hindu terms: "illusion" (Capra 266; ch. 17).

The unity of observer and observed can go at least three steps further. Stepping in one direction, one could come to solipsistic Idealism, where we each individually dream the world between our ears, or we come to a shared, corporate Ideal: what we may call in a good sense, a «consensus reality» (Jürgen Habermas, Antonio Gramsci), or, hostilely, "Collective solipsism" (George Orwell). Stepping in another direction, the more wildly Idealistic among speculative cosmologists have noted that the universe took many unlikely evolutionary twists to get to a state that could sustain human life-and have added to that unimpeachable assertion the idea from quantum theory that an observer is necessary to collapse probability waves and get quantum events to happen. The steps from there can lead to the idea that the universe evolved to allow for humans to observe quantum events, thereby allowing the universe to evolve. In that case, human consciousness does not just construct reality but is the literal cause of the physical universe. The Greeks had a label for such a notion, hubris (noble pride, leading to a fall); Ashkenazi Jews call it chutzpah (comic arrogance); still, it is not quite absurd, and it is, paradoxically, a wildly woolly, Idealist idea arising out of the "hard," material science of modern physics: the Universe may exist because people perceive it; the Universe may exist so that people can perceive it.

Biology, Physiology, Psychology:

It is axiomatic in the biology I was taught that (ignoring free will),

environment

genotype-----------------------> phenotype.

time

That is, the genetic complement of an organism interacting with the environment over time yields what that organism is, at least is in terms of what can be observed and measured. The most immediate environment for any human organism is the person's society, and (with trivial exceptions) all of the environment is mediated by the person's culture. Hence, in a formulation of Arnold Gehlen, quoted with strong approval by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, we humans are by nature (with trivial exceptions) creatures of culture (Lorenz, On Aggression 256; ch. 13). Our being creatures of culture is significant for our ways of perceiving the world. ² 

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the American psychologist William James postulated that the world to human infants is, initially, a "blooming, buzzing confusion." ³  This doesn't seem to be the case, "Rather, even infants one or two days old are capable of refined visual discriminations" (Dember, "Perception" 41). One reason for this is summed up in a line by the character Forest in Le Guin's "Dancing to Ganam": ". . . we filter out most of what our senses report" (FIS 132). I.e., we individually filter out much of what we are capable of perceiving; to this add that there has been a historical filtering of data reaching us because our perceptions start out highly limited by the highly evolved organs we are born with: we see only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, hear only a range of sounds, and smell a millionth or far less of what an olfactorily well-equipped animal such as a dog smells. And the data received and used by the brain are fewer still (the lab frog starving to death in the midst of minced flies both does and does not perceive the fly meat).

As human infants grow into adulthood, our perceptions become even clearer, if not necessarily more reliable, in part because of training and expectations. Among older children and adults, there are variations in perceptions-experimentally testable variations-according to age, sex, and culture. For an example highly relevant for Le Guin, there are "differences in the style with which people perceive" as seen in "extremes of response to context." Some people perceive "the world as highly differentiated" and tend "to resist contextual influences" and are "said to be field independent"; people who perceive "in an extremely diffuse style" are called "field-dependent" and tend "to be highly susceptible to contextual effects. Thus, field-independent people are superior in locating a simple visual figure (e.g., a triangle) embedded in a complex pattern" or adjusting a rod to vertical in the absence of visual background cues. In North American, older people tend to be more field-independent than younger people; girls, "especially after puberty," and women tend to be more field-dependent than boys and men. "Perhaps these results are distinctive of cultures in which females are at least implicitly trained to be passive and perceptually diffuse, and in which males are encouraged to assume an active, perceptually articulated stance" (Dember, "Perception" 44). And perhaps some Daoists, Romantics, and ecoFeminists are right in seeing children and women more embedded in nature and the world, in which case being relatively "field-dependent" would simply correlate with women's and children's reality. What is significant here is that the world appears differently to people in even slightly different subcultures: North Americans of different age and/or gender. Little girls are more likely to perceive things as part of a whole more than boys will; little boys will see contexts-usually-more readily than old men. "Beyond sex differences," psychologists have found evidence that "the type of physical environment people construct for themselves or choose to inhabit can influence their style of perceiving," e.g., traditional Zulus and Bushmen, "whose environments are virtually lacking in rectangular forms" see things somewhat differently-literally see things differently-from people brought up in "the carpentered, right-angled world of people in Western cultures" (Dember, "Perception" 44).

Sociology:

In 1966, the same year as Jacques Derrida "subversively declared that structuralism was finished" and to be supplanted by poststructuralism (Lehman 97), Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann published The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. For Berger and Luckmann, "reality," in quotation marks, is the subjective world that we human are "biologically predestined to construct and to inhabit," a social world of self and others. For each human, this subjective, learned world "becomes . . . the dominant and definitive reality. Its limits are set by nature, but once constructed, this world acts back upon nature," e.g., determining what of all the biologically possible foods people (ordinarily) will actually eat, what of all the possible sexual acts most people in a culture will actually perform. "In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world the human organism itself is transformed. In this same dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself" (183 [see also 180])-i.e., produces our social selves, our roles, our identities. Burger and Luckmann present an excellent and persuasive analysis of a "weak" form of social construction of reality, but still a powerful thesis. Human beings are socialized into human identities in specific societies, and those primary socializations give us, if not our worlds, at least our initial, and very strong worldviews: "The child does not internalize the world of his [initial] significant others as one of many possible worlds. He internalizes it as the world, the only existent and only conceivable world . . ." ; these primary socializations give each of us, "the world of childhood . . . . the 'home world' (134, 136; ch. 3).

Myths of Origin:

According to a very early account of Creation, that of Hesiod, "First of all the Void," Chaos, "came into being, next broad-bosomed Earth, the solid and eternal home of all, and Eros [Desire], the most beautiful of the immortal gods . . . ." From Earth comes Sky, parthenogenetically, and then mountains and "the barren waters." Then Earth lies with Sky and produces Ocean and the first generation of gods (Theogony II.116-53 [56]). Later creation myths had less symbolic sexual action, and more dialog. According to the Fourth Gospel of Christian Scripture, "In the beginning was the Word," the Logos, "and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," and "all things were made through him" (John 1.1-3). That is, out of nothing came all, via the Word. According to the P-code, in one Hebrew version, "When God," Elohim, "began to create heaven and earth-the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water-God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light . . . " (Gen. 1.1-5, Tanakh). I.e., language for the P-code authors and for John, "is not only a means of communication but also [is] an operational agent destined to produce being-it has an ontological value," and perhaps still does (Vajda 10.184). Doing some very rough and ready creative comparative mythology, then, one could say that in the beginning was Void, Chaos-a very active and potential Nothingness-out of which came All. Mediating the shift from nothing to all was either Desire and a Yin-Yang-like mystic marriage of the primal deities, or there was the Word or words: the Logos or logoi or, I will suggest, a conversation among elohim: the gods (see Gen. 1.26).

Alternatively-and a very significant alternative it is-that which was at the beginning and is now and is all that truly is is Brahman, "the one Being," that than which there is nothing greater ("Indian Philosophy" 9.316). "Not this . . . not that" but Being itself, what is left over after all things are removed, as opposed to maya, illusion, the "relative" world of appearances (Bhagavad-Gita 74-75; VIII. 73-74; VII. 39; II). 59-60; V), the world of "individual and separate things" (Capra 85; ch. 6). If we would free ourselves from maya, some mystic disciplines tell us, we must free ourselves from the chatter of the world, pre-eminently the chatter of our own stream of consciousness: "to silence the thinking mind" (Capra 25; ch. 2), to end "the mind's endless, idiot monologue" (Huxley 217; ch. 15). If the task at hand, though, is to recreate maya after immersion in Brahman, then, perhaps, the way is through «chatter» seen much more positively: the word as human conversation, social narrative, the telling of stories. As Le Guin suggests in her image of us "huddling about the campfire" telling tales: In the beginning of the human world, and so even now, was and is the human word, telling our stories, re-forming the (human) world, if not creating ourselves, at least preventing "our dissolution into the surroundings." ⁴ 

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According to the J-code version of creation, ". . . the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being" (Gen. 2.7). I.e., human beings are one, psycho/somatic being: earth plus breath. Still, in spite of the resistance of the Temple elite, and, apparently, that of some of the delegates to the Council of Nicea, both Judaism and Christianity took "the breath of life" and made it into soul: a separable soul, dwelling in the body as a god in a temple, or a prisoner in a dungeon, with Christianity going for the soul big time. ⁵ Secularized, this split became, in Gilbert Ryle's phrase, "the ghost in the machine": mind within body. To resolve the split, one could become a materialist, and say that mind is a product of matter. Alternatively one could say-and Bishop George Berkeley did say in the eighteenth century-that "'To be,' said of the object, means to be perceived; 'to be,' said of the subject, means to perceive" ("Berkeley, George" 2.847). Among simple souls-and to the author of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Micropaedia's entry for Berkeley-Berkeley's insight got simplified to "to be is to be perceived." More specifically, in the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I (1710), Bishop Berkeley "brought all objects of sense, including tangibles, within the mind," rejecting the possibility of "material substance" ("Berkeley" 847). So if materialism is one extreme, balancing it after Bishop Berkeley is idealism: the world as idea, and the being of matter a function of its being perceived. Hence, as our ideas of the world change, the world changes: necessarily changes, ontologically changes, really changes.

Linguistics/Feminism/Physics:

Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge call attention to the Sapir-Whorf, or Whorfian hypothesis (republished 1956), "according to which the structure and lexicon of a language," its set of grammar plus vocabulary, "both molds and reveals a culture's basic categories of thought and perception." In Edward Sapir's formulation, "Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, ... but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society ... The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group ... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation" (Bright 13.212). Obviously, there are limits to the theory: "German has no single word for what we call 'efficiency,' but one can hardly claim that Germans have no such concept. The Hungarian language has no gender, yet patriarchy exists in Hungary nonetheless" (Patai and Koertge 133). Still Patai and Koertge note that the Whorfian hypothesis and other forms of social construction have been applied in very strong forms in a fair amount of recent academic work: They cite the assertion by Michel Foucault in History of Sexuality that there were no homosexuals before the late nineteenth century and the invention of the term/category "homosexual."

Both Le Guin and many of her SF readers would know about the Whorfian hypothesis, including the possibility of very strong formulations, wherein language structures the world. Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) was a famous student of Native American languages, and the daughter of Alfred and Theodora Kroeber would be unlikely to have missed exposure to his thoughts as she got informally socialized into what Carol D. Stevens has called "the family business": anthropology, starting with the ethnography of Native Americans. Additionally, anyone sophisticated in science fiction would get an introduction to Sapir-Whorf. The restructuring of reality by language is a strong theme in Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961); and Peter Nicholls cites a number of other works using Sapir-Whorf, including Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao (1958) and Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 (1966). According to Nicholls, in the 1975 essay "Towards an Alien Linguistics," Ian Watson has used the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky-with S.F. expansion-to suggest "that there may be 'a topological grammar of the universe, which reflects itself in the grammars of actual languages.'" And, Nicholls concludes his article, Watson has "used arguments from quantum mechanics to support the solipsistic view that the Universe exists as an external structure only through the consciousness of its participants and observers; language, in Watson's scheme, is reflexive, Nature sending a message to itself. . ." ("Linguistics").

Marxism:

Writing in 1909, E. M. Forster could see and foresee a world in flight from the human body and the world of matter. In the beginning of the third and last section of his far-future dystopia, "The Machine Stops," moving toward the end of the imagined world of the Machine, Forster presents "one of the most advanced" of future intellectuals, an antiEmpiricist historian who warns his audience to "Beware of first-hand ideas!" and asserts that "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy?" Forster's crank exhorts his audience to let their ideas "be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element-direct observation." Actually, the crank isn't all that crazy in suggesting getting a number of different points of view on a historical event, in this case, his specialty, the French Revolution. What is disturbing, though, even to those of us who want knowledge carefully located, is his idea that the farther away from events we get the better we can judge, until ". . . there will come a generation that has got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation 'seraphically free / From taint of personality,' which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine," i.e., in their own time, as ideologically constructed. "Tremendous applause greeted this lecture," Forster's Narrator tells us, because it "did but voice a feeling already latent in the minds of men-a feeling that terrestrial facts must be ignored" (Forster 191).

Not very much later in the century, advanced thinkers will bring back the idea that "terrestrial facts" don't even exist.

According to Roy Bhaskar, there is "abundant textual evidence" for Karl Marx's "simple, commonsense realism," the sort of everyday, colloquial realism that asserts "the reality, independence, [and] externality of objects": i.e., that the "real" world we see out there is really there. ⁶ Most modestly stated, as a character in "Dancing to Ganan" puts it, simple realism is "the notion that there is, somewhere, if one could just find it, a fact" (FIS 118), maybe even many facts. There is also evidence, Bhaskar says, for Marx's "scientific realism": i.e., his belief in the reality of "the objects of scientific thought" and structures scientifically inferred-but scientific realism need not concern us. What should concern us is that "an entire tradition" of Marxism, i.e., much of "Western Marxism," has "interpreted Marx as rejecting" simple realism and has very influentially tended toward "some variety of epistemological idealism, normally anti-naturalistic and judgmentally relativistic" ("Realism" 407, 408).

Bhaskar traces this tradition back to György Lukács's 1923 History and Class Consciousness, where Lukács rejects "any distinction between thought and being as a 'false and rigid duality.'" This anti-realist tradition "proceeds down to the extraordinary claims made on behalf of Marx by e.g. [Leszek] Kolakowski that the very existence of things comes into being simultaneously with their appearance in the human mind' (1958 . . .) and [Alfred] Schmidt that 'material reality is from the beginning socially mediated' [1962]" ("Realism" 408). According to Bhaskar, no less a figure than Antonio Gramsci found "the very idea of a reality-in-itself . . . a religious residue." In his Prison Notebooks (1929-35), Gramsci redefined "the objectivity of things . . . in terms of a universal intersubjectivity of persons; i.e. as a cognitive consensus, asymptotically approached in history but only finally realized under communism." Pushing the matter, Gramsci, in Bhaskar's reading, holds "that human history is not explained by the atomistic theory, but that the reverse is the case: the atomistic theory, like all other scientific hypotheses and opinions, is part of the superstructure,'" i.e., part of the cultural superstructure raised up upon a deeper and more significant (human) reality. Suggesting that we take Gramsci on atomic theory quite literally-that atomic reactions happen because humans theorize atomic reactions-Bhaskar says that Gramsci's remark here "reminds one of Marx's jibe against [Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon that like 'the true idealist' he is, he no doubt believes that 'the circulation of the blood must be a consequence of Harvey's theory" of the circulation of blood (Poverty of Philosophy, ch. 2, sect. 3). Bhaskar finds Gramsci and some other Western Marxists "in favour of a historicized anthropomorphic monism," maintaining that "nature, as we know it, is part of human history." I.e., Bhaskar says these Western Marxist teach that the world is One and that One is centered in and made by humanity and our history ("Knowledge" 258-59)-an idea Bhaskar does not seem to like. Alternatively, we can see these Western Marxists returning, ironically, to the German Idealism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), where "The categories of human thought are . . . at the same time objective forms of Being, and logic is . . . ontology"-a path I will not follow (Fetscher 198). ⁷ 

Whatever its sources, it is something like Gramsci's vision of reality as the "intersubjectivity of persons" and "cognitive consensus" that George Orwell attacks in what is sometimes called «The Grand Inquisitor» section of Nineteen Eighty-Four (III.3-III.5). Orwell's immediate concern was the falsification of history under Hitler and Stalin (see Crick 119); still, at least for satiric purposes, Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four comes down squarely for old-fashioned British commonsense empiricism against the extreme idealism of Winston Smith's Inner Party torturer and instructor, O'Brien. O'Brien tells Smith,

I doubt that Orwell's criticisms had much effect, but there was this much change in Western Marxism in the generation following Orwell: Jürgen Habermas, in Knowledge and Human Interests (1972), at least according to Bhaskar, allowed for the origin of "the human species as a purely natural process" even while seeing "reality, including nature, as constituted in and by human activity." And Theodor Adorno, a little earlier-Negative Dialectics (1966)-advised giving up trying to resolve objectivity and subjectivity "and argues against any attempt to base thought on a non-presuppositionless [sic] foundation and for the immanence of all critique" ("Knowledge" 260).

I'll put the matter that, by the 1970s, there was a long-standing debate on the Left that had pretty well concluded on the impossibility of finding transcendent epistemological "Archimedean points" outside the world from which to observe the world. This meant the inevitability of "the immanence of all critique." We judge situations more or less from within them and cannot get a godlike overview; we are located at certain points in space-time, and that is that. So our judgments are relative. At least among people with a lot of academic philosophy-including those coming from very unMarxist positions-this lead to a kind of crisis in epistemology. Matters soon got worse. In the words of my friend and colleague John H. Crow, Modernism's "Epistemological uncertainty yielded (to) ontological instability"-postmodernism.

Linguistics/Postmodernism-Poststructuralism/Feminism:

In the 5th century BCE, in Elea, in southern Italy, the Greek philosopher Parmenides reacted against Heraclitus's theory of flux by, among other things, composing a poem "On Nature," privileging among the "ways of research" the "absolutely noncontradictory way that says only what is, Being, is really true." If you think something, you assert its existence (an idea that will get a lot of play later, with the Cartesian variation that one must first think oneself). Reality, then, is that which can be truly thought: grasped and communicated, and that which can be thought and communicated is reality. "The primal source of the Eleatic philosophy thus lies in the archaic sense of language, according to which one cannot pronounce 'yes' and 'no' without deciding upon the reality or unreality of the objects of the statements." So human language is not merely symbolic but "corresponds to reality in its structure," and it is "From the premise of the essential coalescence of language and reality follows Parmenides's theory of Being . . . " (Calogero and Starkey 6.526; see also Benjamin 8-10). Parmenides and his school, then, introduced into philosophy ideas similar to those in magic, myth, and mysticism. ¹⁰ 

By the early twentieth century, the linguistic ideas of Parmenides et al. were again very fashionable in philosophy. Fritz Mauthner, one of the founders of modern linguistic analysis in philosophy, could hold that "Every attempt to tell what is true just leads back to linguistic formulations, not to objective states of affairs"-a position that "bears some affinities to the views expressed in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractus Logico-Philosophicus (Popkin 16.855), another road I decline to travel. By the middle of the twentieth century, there was a good deal of emphasis among the intelligentsia for placing reality in words, but there was some hope that "The Age of Analysis" could produce, a science of "semiology" or a grounded philosophy of language, or (at least) an exposition of structures, that could serve well enough as a philosophy of the world.

As David Lehman tells the story-hostilely, among other things-that hope was called into question at Johns Hopkins in 1966 with Jacques Derrida's paper "Structure, Sign and Play and the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (coll. and trans. Writing and Difference 1978). The key passage, according to Lehman, takes precisely the view that can easily, and I stress can, lead to a vision of social construction. The moment came, Derrida asserts, in the development of the concept of structure "when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center of origin, everything became discourse . . . that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely" (Writing and Difference 278-80). Lehman paraphrases this-usefully for us, though arguably-as "Nothing exists ahead of language or outside it; there are no things or ideas except in words."¹¹  Alternatively put, "Il n'y a rien hors du texte," which Andreas Huyssen renders "there is nothing outside the text." Possibly looking to J. Hillis Miller's statement that "Language . . . thinks man and his 'world' . . . if he will allow it to do so" (Miller 224), Huyssen couples Derrida on the textuality of reality with the "insight that the [perceiving] subject is constituted in language" (Huyssen 259). ¹²  Or in Lehman's unnuanced reading, "Words speak us," whether we "allow" them or not: ". . . we are merely passive conductors of language" (106). Le Guin may agree; at least she does in a 1988 poem "For Helene Cixous" (Wild Oats 60).

Human beings, according to such theories, seem to be in a Westernized, secularized, language-centered version of the relationships among "the personal self and the Self that is identical with Brahman, between the individual ego and the Buddhawomb or Universal Mind." For the individual human mind, the mystic Huang Po taught, to go into the state of "no-mind," one "must not try to think it, but rather permit ourselves to be thought by it" (paraphrased Huxley 73; ch. 4). As the comedian George Carlin could state as part of his early-1970s act, "All we have is words," except Carlin'swe in this sentence may also be constructed by words, so that instead of Universal Mind thinking us, we are spoken by language.

In modernism of the J-P Sartrean Existentialist variety, there was no God to create us; our existence preceded any essence we might have, which was our job to create. Philosophically, the action was in the perceiving subject rather heroically making something of himself (and that's himself: Existentialism is masculinist). Roughly speaking, consciousness was king.

Seyla Benhabib can sum up for the (post)modern philosophers-and help illustrate why I have avoided technical sources:

If our (post)moderns are correct, there is no single, unified, perceiving "I"; if the crucial structure is language, perhaps there is no world outside of the discourse among many "subject positions"-the people who say "I" and construct themselves and the world(s) they talk about. Again George Carlin: "All we have is words"-literally, except the words may have us even more. If this theory is correct, all we can do (and do do) to create the «facts» of our world is tell one another fictions, stories. This is an idea Le Guin is willing to play with seriously, and possibly believe; but I think Le Guin remains with what Aldous Huxley has called "The Perennial Philosophy"-and remains (as a pretty consistent Daoist) a romantic affirming the worth of anarchic individuals.¹³  With her favorite old mystics, I believe Le Guin believes in the ultimate reality indeed of only the Dao, the Brahman, but of the validity also of individual life among the "ten thousand things," illusory or not, the validity of living with others in the world of maya.

1 My thanks to Dennis McGucken for making clear to me in a long e-mail message the limits of my sources on Western Marxism (Roy Bhaskar) and Jacques Derrida (David Lehman).  McGucken does a beautiful job locating Derrida in terms of a highly nuanced philosophical debate, but Lehman may be more helpful for the ideas that entered the more popular discourse of the academy and America's bicoastal intelligensia.

2 See Erlich, "On the Necessary Uncertainty of Historical Criticism."

3 The William James line is quoted in Le Guin's "The Field of Vision" (WTQ 231).

4 "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night," esp. DEW 28-29.

5 The Nicene Creed insists upon affirmation that the believer looks "forward to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come," which allows one to be a "mortalist" and believe that even when good Christians are dead, they are dead, and remain dead until the end of history and the universe, when, again one thing, body/breath are joined for "the life of the world to come."

6 Bhaskar carefully defines the realism he refers to because of the ongoing debate that got formulated in the Middle Ages as nominalism vs. Realism, where the Realists are what many would call Idealists.  I.e., Realists believe in the real reality of abstract Forms, Universals.  Nominalists (like me) say that those "Universals" or forms are just names (Latin nomen) people give to abstractions, mere categories of the human mind.  See below for highly radical nominalists becoming poststructuralists, postmodernists.

7 We might also see them returning to a formulation by Oscar Wilde (d. 1900) complementing his idea of life imitating art: "Nature is no great mother who has borne us.  She is our creation" (qtd. David Denby, "In Darwin's Wake," The New Yorker 70.2 [21 July 1997]: 60).  Denby quotes Wilde, "Decay" (40 [my colleague J. Kerry Powell noted "Decay" as a probable source for the quotation and recommended that essay and also Wilde's "The Critic as Artist]).  As with Orestes in Sartre's Flies—a murderer of his mother, acquitted by an argument privileging fathers in reproduction—note the sexual and gender implications in the lines quoted.

8 Cf. and much more so contrast merging with the Dao or Brahman, attaining Nirvana.  Cf. Le Guin's highly negative view of merging with some "Unist"—falsely One—movement; and strongly contrast Le Guin's favorable imagery of occasional, fleeting touch with Reality.  The temptation to lose self through merging with a Party, Church, or other mass movement is discussed in detail in Hoffer's The True Believer.  The «Grand Inquisitor» section of 1984 can be read usefully for Le Guin's presentation of such villains as Dr. Haber in LoH, Cob in FS, and Aspen in Tehanu.

9 I am not the only one to cite Orwell against contemporary Idealists.  Cf. Tzvetan Todorov, "Crimes Against Humanities," New Republic 3 July 1989, cited Lehman 45-46.  Lehman's Index cites Orwell eight times (314).

10 And which would go from philosophy back into systems of western mysticism; e.g., the ongoing "ontological value" of language in Jewish mysticism may derive from Greek philosophy as much as from the Hebraic idea of the mâshâl (language working in the world).

11 Some of the philosophically sophisticated may spot a figurative cloven hoof in my "usefully" in this sentence.  My one philosophy instructor was appalled to infer that I was a pragmatist.  And I still am, in part, but nowadays I''ll make that a vulgar pragmatist to differentiate myself from such respectable thinkers of "a resurgent pragmatism" (in Daniel Callahan's phrase) as Richard Rorty and Linda J. Nicholson.

12 I get the quotation from Writing and Discourse from Lehman 97 (my emphasis); the Miller quotation is from Lehman 106.

13 Huxley got the "Perennial Philosophy" phrase from Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (vii).