The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Terra Ignota): 1

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The only problem is that a carrier bag story isn’t, at first glance, very exciting. “It is hard to tell”, writes Le Guin, “a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…” The introduction of a singular hero, however, replicates a very specific and historical power relation. The pioneers and the saviors: likely male, likely white, almost certainly brimming with unearned confidence. The veneration of the hero reduces others into victims: those who must be rescued. “The prototypical savior is a person who has been raised in privilege and taught implicitly or explicitly (or both) that they possess the answers and skills needed to rescue others,” writes Jordan Flaherty in his book No More Heroes. To be a hero is fundamentally privileged, and any act of heroism reinforces that privilege. Paul, Anne Murphy. 2012. “Your Brain on Fiction.” The New York Times. Accessed March 20, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html. I came here after reading this one quote below and I am still trying to process the essay. Authors really give us strange, unusual perspectives which once we read seem so obvious. This essay is the kind that needs to be read again and again and would probably keep adding meaning to itself and for me as time passes.

Wagner, Jane. 2012. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers Inc. Original edition, Original screenplay published in 1986.Braidotti, Rosi. 2014. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11(2–3): 163–184. doi: 10.3366/ccs.2014.0122. The conversations stimulated by these objects and activities were fascinating, informative and insightful, although private to the group who participated so I will not share them here. Bailey, John. 1991. The Search for Signs of Inteligent Life in the Universe. Los Angeles, CA: Orion Classics. Richardson, Laurel. 2001. “Getting Personal: Writing-Stories.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 14(1): 33–38. doi: 10.1080/09518390010007647.

Wagner, Jane. 1986. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. 1st ed. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Y lo que propone Le Guin es preguntarse por la historia de quien recolectaba las “semillas, raíces, brotes, tallos, hojas, nueces, vainas, frutos y granos, añadiendo insectos y moluscos junto a la captura de aves, peces, ratones, conejos y otros pequeños animales inofensivos para aumentar la cantidad de proteína (27)”, que constituían, dice, del sesenta y cinco al ochenta por ciento de lo que los seres humanos comían en ese periodo de la historia. Los verdaderos responsables de mantenerlos alimentados, bah! Y que más allá de consumirlos debían transportar los alimentos, y ahí entra en juego el recipiente, la bolsa. “Un libro guarda palabras. Las palabras guardan cosas. Portan significados. Una novela es un atado que mantiene las cosas en una relación particular y poderosa las unas con las otras y con nosotras (38)”.Le Guin’s carrier bag is, in addition to a story about early humans, a method for storytelling itself, meaning it’s also a method of history. But unlike the spear (which follows a linear trajectory towards its target), and unlike the kind of linear way we’ve come to think of time and history in the West, the carrier bag is a big jumbled mess of stuff. One thing is entangled with another, and with another. Le Guin once described temporality in her Hainish Universe (a confederacy of human planets that feature in a number of her books) in the most delightfully psychedelic terms: “Any timeline for the books of Hainish descent would resemble the web of a spider on LSD.” Desde las cavernas venimos contando el relato del Héroe, de ese cazador de mamuts y de todas las emocionantes historias que traía para compartir en cada regreso. “Antes de que te des cuenta, los hombres y las mujeres en el campo de avena salvaje y sus hijos e hijas y las habilidades de quienes construyen y los pensamientos de quienes piensan y las canciones de quienes cantan forman parte de aquel relato, fueron puestos al servicio del cuento del Héroe. Pero este no es su relato. Es el de él” (29). Y pienso, de qué forma la civilización, cultura, sociedad que armamos gira en torno a este héroe y sus hazañas, y con ello a su capacidad por encima del resto. Harta de las idolatrías. Reid, William A. 1981. “The Deliberative Approach to the Study of the Curriculum and Its Relation to Critical Pluralism.” In Rethinking Curriculum Studies: A Radical Approach, edited by Martin Lawn and Len Barton. New York, NY: Routledge. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1989. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. 1st ed. New York, NY: Grove Press. It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with. ’ (Haraway 2019:10)

Fisher, Elizabeth. 1979. Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.With a new introduction by Donna Haraway, the eminent cyberfeminist, author of the revolutionary A Cyborg Manifesto and most recently, Staying with the Trouble and Manifestly Haraway. The session was organised into three stages. In the first stage, the students were asked to choose one of their objects and tell the group the story of how it related to their doctoral research or journey. In stage two they choose another object and wrote and then shared 30 words about how it was significant to them, and in the final stage, they wrote 3 words encapsulating the relevance of the last object. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.