ENGL 4010: Carrier Bags as Weak Theory (SP23)

Carrier bags
AS WEAK THEORY
Stewart and Le Guin

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin
retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural
carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.
Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier
Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: “before the tool that forces
energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.” Prior to the
preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s long, hard, killing tools,
our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild
oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the
shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the
holder, the story. The bag of stars.
This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota: unknown lands
where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be
discovered anew.

Le Guin
Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but the bottle in its older
sense of container in general, a thing that holds
something else (150).

The Vuvalini, the Many
Mothers, and their
longing for shows,
for stories.
“Shows. Everyone in the
old world had a show.”
These shows are
thought as linkages
to others that might
still be out there.
“Do you think there’s still
somebody out there?
Sending shows?
Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015

Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe,
that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and
Le Guin
then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper
murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a
space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it
and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of
course, drifting in the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any
womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care. I’m
not telling that story (150-51).

The linkage, the
chain, b e t w e e n
discovery/invention,
violence, exploration
and the human here
is rather striking.
This linkage is not
without merit, but it is
certainly in need of a
complication.
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968

2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
I don’t know. I don’t
even care. I’m not
telling that story.

[B]ut how do you get more than one stomachful and one
Le Guin
handful home? [...] A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient...Many theorizers feel
that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to
hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation. But no, this
cannot be. (150)

The team found psychoactive compounds in an
animal-skin pouch constructed of three fox snouts
stitched together, Jose Capriles, Penn State, 2019.

Le Guin
[L]ong before the useful knife and ax; right along with the
indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger—[...]—with or
before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool
that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. (151)

Le Guin
So long as culture was explained as originating from and
elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking,
bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted,
any particular share in it. (151)

Le Guin
So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the
Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that
of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there
and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that
the central concern of the narrative, including the novel, is
conflict; and third, the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it. (153-54)

Russell Brandom maps an action sequence in Skyfall for The Verge.

Le Guin
I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural,
proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a
bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear
meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a
particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. (153)

Russell Brandom maps an action sequence in Mad Max for The Verge.

Le Guin
It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality. (154)

“Breaking down the chaos of a Mad Max car chase.” Russell Brandom, The Verge

Just prior to this, The
Dag, one of Immortan
Joe’s wives, was
asking The Keeper of
the Seeds about the
latter’s proficiency with
a rifle.
This scene is thus in
pointed contradistinction
to the gun
scene.
In an earlier scene,
bullets are referred to
as “anti-seeds”: “plant
one and watch the
thing die.”
Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015

Le Guin
Still there are seeds to be gathered, and
room in the bag of stars (154).

Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective
dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary.
Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and
landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary
impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a
series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail,
and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of
common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and
the lingering resonance of passing events. While most of the instances
rendered are from Stewart’s own life, she writes in the third person in
order to reflect on how intimate experiences of emotion, the body, other
people, and time inextricably link us to the outside world.

Stewart
It’s a mode of production through which something that
feels like something throws itself together. An opening
onto a something, it maps a thicket of connections
between vague yet forceful and affecting elements (72).

The Breakfast Club, 1985

Stewart
To inhabit a space of attending to things is to incite
attention to co-existing forms of composition,
habituation, performance, and event and to the “weak”
ontologies of lived collective fictions comprised of
diacritical relations, differences, affinities, affects, and
trajectories (73).

Stewart
For me, then, the point of theory now is not to judge the
value of analytic objects or to somehow get their
representation “right” but to wonder where they might
go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and
attending to things are already somehow present in
them as potential or resonance (73).

Stewart
Tracing the worlds that people make out of requires a
supple attention and the capacity to imagine
trajectories and follow tendencies into scenes of their
excess or end points (78).

Stewart
Matter in an unfinished world is itself indefinite—a not
yet that fringes every determinate context or
normativity with a margin of something deferred or
something that failed to arrive, or has been lost, or is
waiting in the wings, nascent, perhaps pressing (80).

Vegas, of course, is a different story with different trajectories to
Stewart
trace. And so is the story of the master-planned, and the story of the
homeless, and countless other stories that can be told. But they all
have their forms of alertness to the poesis of a something snapping
into place, if only for a minute. All of these stories of tracing things
that come together have their attachments to potentiality and
their constant production of the sense of being in something—
something grand, something degraded, something dumb—whatever.
Everywhere now you hear the question “how’d you get into that?”
Things don’t just add up.

Stewart
The moment when things throw themselves together
into something that feels like something is the kind of
cultural production that's often given form in literature and
poetry and folklore (76).

The look and feel of
Unknown Fields’ projects
and productions resonates
with Le Guin, and they
point toward what a
“Carrier Bag Theory of
Reports” might be.
“Here we are both
visionaries and reporters,
part documentarians and
part science fiction
soothsayers as the
otherworldly sites we
encounter afford us a
distanced viewpoint from
which to survey the
consequences of emerging
environmental and
technological scenarios."
Unknown Fields, Division Showreel, 2013

Images from Unknown Fields’ Tales from the Dark Side of the City, Perimeter, 2016.

Images from Emergence Magazine.

Carrier bags
AS WEAK THEORY
Stewart and Le Guin