Helen Thomas : Group two, Session two!

So we’re going to start off by reading out the statements by the first group to read this text going around in groups there are six statements and so somebody from each group is going to read one statement to each.

 

A. Disrupting dualism by acting away from action.
B. The object spare bag becomes props rather than symbols.
C. It becomes clear that it is always collective.

1. There are bags of food.
2. A tent for people and then on the top left there is a little fire in front and on the top right there is some sort of ah cake with A bag with berries or a container containing little brown things?
3. Heroism is a justification for aggression.
4. Can we still carry the global weight of our bags today?
5. How do we put them in a bag?
6. How can form of activism be strengthened through the understanding of the bottle of a hero?

Helen Thomas : Great, okay, so some of those make sense to us and some not. But we’ll be voting on those after the reading.

I’m just going to quickly do my introduction to The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and then I’ll read the text to you and then we’ll do the voting. Okay.

American novelist Ursula Le Guin, who died in 2018, was a prolific writer of fiction. She was the author of 21 novels. 11 volumes of short stories, 12 children’s books, as well as writer of essays, poetry and translation. The term speculative fiction is used to describe her most well-known works, including the Earthsea fantasy series and the Hainish Cycle. This is a provocative notion since it suggests the possibility of a different reality, which is certainly relevant when reading this essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

Except the reality in this essay is ancient history, reaching back to the origins of human culture. What is provided is a different perspective from the position of the not-hero, the grazer, the maker, the reproducer. The way she constructs a critique of the hegemonic social system is very different to that of Veronica Gago in her Eight Theses on Feminist Revolution, which seems set up to incite activism. Gago gives us provocations, examples and methods. In her essay, however, Le Guin touches upon several of the same issues, violence and its power, work and not work, and the capacity of the collective.

The difference is that she is not explicitly speaking from a feminist perspective. She does not assign gender roles. They are strongly implied, however, not least in the use of language. Specifically, lists and repetition of words. Exciting words like bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Placid words like uncombative, soggy, ageing. Le Guin gives us another perspective on progress, technology, and, most importantly, the role of fiction in our structuring of the world.

Do we think that Le Guin’s text is as provocative, as provoking towards action, as Gago‘s Eight Theses? We are in our climate crisis mentality, fully aware of the fallibility of a linear progress based on technological advancement. So does her argument give us something different to act on? What and how powerful is her message, or messages?

Ursula Le Guin, 1986, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

In the temperate and tropical regions where it appears that hominids evolved into human beings, the principal food of the species was vegetable. Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions, in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times, was gathered. Only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food. The mammoth hunters spectacularly occupy the cave wall and the mind, but what we actually did to stay alive and fast, was gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits, and grains, adding bugs and mollusks and netting or staring birds, fish, rats, rabbits, and other tuskless small fry to up the protein. And we didn’t even work hard at it – much less hard than peasant slaving in somebody else’s field after agriculture was invented, much less hard than paid workers since civilization was invented. The average prehistoric person could make a nice living in about a fifteen hour work week.

Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other things. So much time that maybe the restless ones, who didn’t have a baby around to enliven their life, or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off and hunt mammoths. The skillful hunters, then, would come staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and a story. It wasn’t the meat that made the difference, it was the story.

It is hard to tell 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 mine at bites, and all 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. No, it does not compare. It cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the Titanic, hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming and blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrents. And Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.

That story not only has action, it also has a hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild, the wild oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.

When she was planning the book that ended up as Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, Glossary. She had thought of reinventing English according to a new plan in order to tell a different story. One of the entries in this glossary is heroism, defined as botulism. And hero in Woolf’s dictionary is bottle. The hero as bottle. A stringent re-evaluation. I now propose the bottle as hero.

Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but bottle in its older sense of container in general, the thing that holds something else.

If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you, even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container. But what about tomorrow morning, when you wake up and it’s cold and raining, and wouldn’t it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little um to make her shut up? But how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn’t it be a good thing, if you had something to put baby UU in, so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf, a gourd, a shell, a net, a bag, a sling, a sack, a bottle, a pot, a box, a container. A holder, a recipient.

The first cultural device was probably a recipient. Many theorisers 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. Where is that wonderful big long hard thing, a bone? I believe that the ape man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky and whirling there it became a spaceship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilise it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely foetus. A boy, of course, drifting around the Milky Way without, oddly enough, any womb, any majority. I don’t know. I don’t even care. I’m not telling that story. We’ve heard it. We’ve all heard it. All about the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a news story. That is news.

And yet old. Before, once you think about it, surely long before the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous story, a tool, long before the useful knife and axe, right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder and digger. For what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug ones you can’t eat home in? With or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the carrier bag theory of human evolution.

This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense, inhabited largely by tigers, foxes and other highly territorial mammals, it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. 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. What Freud mistook for her lack of civilisation is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilisation, Lillian Smith observed. The society, the civilisation they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs. They owned it. They liked it. They were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was. But if that’s what it took to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was wrong. I was either extremely defective as a human being or not human at all.

That’s right, they said. What you are is a woman, possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the story of the ascent of man, the hero.

Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats with Oo-oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villages and how the missiles will fall on the evil empire and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.

If it is a human thing to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible or beautiful, into a bag or a basket or a bit of rolled bark or leaf or a net woven of your own hair or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solid container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred. And then next day you probably do much the same again. If to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all, fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.

Not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off. However, I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so. It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories.

It is the story that makes a difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story of the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing about the hero, the wonderful, poisonous story of botulism, the killer story.

Helen Thomas : Okay, so that’s, there we go, our extract of the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. She goes on to talk about writing. But this is what we’re going to talk about today. So now what I’d like you to do is vote on the list of statements that we handed out, in pairs. And what, could you put number five being the one that you liked the best, number one being the one that you liked the least, and four, three, two in between. So just five minutes doing that, and then we’ll put them onto the Google Doc and I’ll tell you which one’s the winner.

So I took part in an event this morning, and it’s about women writing architecture. And they said, and one of the questions was, why did you choose women writing architecture instead of women drawing architecture or women performing architecture?

And I think we now have our answer, because see, drawing on the table was definitely not very, very well appreciated as a response to the text. So now we’re going to start the conversation, which hopefully we can edit into a podcast. So it’d be really great to hear all your voices. And so you can pick, we can pick up this text in relation to anything that we’ve talked about today. And I think in relation to the Victoria Gago text, maybe I raised a couple of questions at the beginning, but also even in relation to my provocation, Can writing be activism? I mean, maybe that’s where we can start in relation to the points. Can writing be activism? Or we could start to discuss, some of the questions. I mean, what did you think of the text? Did, I mean, who, did you enjoy it more than the eight theses or did you, I mean, what do you think of it as a provocation towards activism? Does it work?

Student A : I think for sure writing can be activism. I think writing is also part of activism. I mean, already like the images that you showed in the beginning. I mean, this is also part of, like, a style of writing, right? So already just pinning out like the kind of essentials of what you’re fighting against. So everybody can see is already part of activism, actually quite an important one. But then also I think, yeah, for me the question is like for sure writing can be activism or is even activism. And I think both of the texts show it in a way in a different kind of way. So I think that the eight theses on the feminist revolution tries to do it as a manifesto somehow, or kind of to pinpoint like the essentials of the fight that Gago thinks of. And then Ursula Le Guin tries it on a like a whole different level. I think it’s like a whole book, right? It’s not only, I mean, this is just excerpts of the, or yeah, an essay. And this is just part of the essay. But, I mean, she does it in a much slower way, right? So I think she, maybe for her it’s not about like the essentials, about this kind of heroism, but about like the kind of in, like the behind that we don’t talk about. Yeah. I really like both of the texts. I think they’re really, really different from one another. Yeah. I think for me, it’s like the sentence, if activism can be strengthened through understanding of the bottle as a hero.

Sol Pérez Martínez : I knew this text before, and I didn’t from Gago. And I think they’re very different. They both come from, I think, a place of struggle of the writers. Maybe I will pick up on this, where you left. I think, thinking about the images that you showed in the beginning, that it was actually people in the streets with writing. So a form of social activism. And that’s why I identify when they’re saying that this form of activism can be strengthened by the bottle as a hero, because you don’t put a hero, but you, it’s, we all part of the bottle. We’re all part of this collective thought and we’re all going to the streets. And that’s why I connect the writing activism with the bottle as a hero.

Burak Kaya : First, I want to say that I think that these two text selections are quite interesting because one really focuses on the genesis of this whole narrative. And the first text that we have read, the 80s, is basically really more about the last 50 years and how really, basically it’s really focused on neoliberalism and how it shaped different forms of exploitation of different bodies. And it’s quite interesting that you first read, for example, the carrier-back theory of fiction. And then, that’s the beginning and some things happen throughout the history. And then you look at this and, wow, still something similar is happening. The carrier-back theory of fiction was so refreshing for me. In a sense, that to me, it really felt original. It really felt like a new way of thinking. It’s like how people write history is embedded somewhere so much in the past according to this. And I think again, as I said before, this also allows, for example, allowed me to somehow really get back. At some sense, there’s really this like dualism of like the heroes and the others. And who, like, this shift of like the bottle from, like, from the aggression to somewhere else. And it’s still being able to be the author as a narrator, as a new voice to write history. I think, I think that is quite like, quite important. And I think this also makes it somehow, like, just writing makes it stay. Like, writing makes it history. And that is, I think, that is like the most, like, that is the best part about, about writing. That it’s, that like, that is the activist essence in writing. I feel like that it’s, you change the, you change the perspective and the narrative. And then like, maybe years later, this, this will be, this will be the narrative. And this will be the thing that you talk about. And this will be heard. And somehow I think maybe that’s, that’s how I, how I see it. I got lost a bit but, yeah, that’s my take on this.

Clara Richard Gostynski : I didn’t read the first text. I just went through it a bit now. But to me, I think there is a difference between maybe being active and to perceive. And somehow for me the text of Ursula Le Guin is not, it doesn’t feel like really a form of activism by writing. But more of a form of perception by writing. And to, also maybe even a call to somehow step out of action. And step back and like perceiving without having to reinforce a feeling or, or to reinforce somehow the pushing of a narrative. And maybe a narrative will somehow be enabled by itself or by other active forms. So, when I look at the first one, the first text, it more looks like maybe a, a form of how can we act and do, and the other one, the text by Ursula Le Guin is to me more like glasses you can put on or put off or like a possibility on how to perceive.

Monica Ciobotar : I’m going to talk a little bit about the question can writing be activism? We were reading these two texts. Very interesting. Most of them very different. One making kind of a manifesto and this one telling a story, a very metaphorical story about how our society is working. And I’m just thinking, what is the public? Like what people are reading them? It’s the people from the Academy, actually. Like, we are making these thoughts about feminism. How is it seen in the society and so on. But I’m wondering, the people who are not at the university, how, how are they approached by this? How do they approach this theme? And what type of information do they, do they get? Like for us, I was already talking with some colleagues. Of course, they understand that feminism is very important and also this process of arriving at gender equality and everything. But how do we reach the entire population?

Alicia Yerebakan : I think this question leads me to my opinion about the two texts. And for me, it’s exactly what you mentioned, that for me, the second text is definitely opening up this inaccessibility of the first text. So you have a story, you can read it, you can see a picture, you can see a movie. And as she says, it’s all about the story. So I think if I would show this text to maybe my family in Turkey and the other texts, I think they would rather understand the second text and maybe also feel more, more, I don’t know. It’s more, way more accessible, definitely. And that’s why I also really like this question. How can forms of activism be strengthened through the understanding of the bottle as hero? Because I also understand the bottle as something that you like kind of empty and refill. And so it always is like this process of turning around. Maybe also the first text speaks about, we were talking about this before, that the first text could also speak about feminism bottle that is always like turning around, emptying itself, refilling, emptying itself, which I would like see as the connection between the two texts. But for me also, the way she deals with like humor is also like kind of humor always wins in the end.

Student B : I really agree with the accessibility. Perhaps it’s not so much in the end about if writing can be activism, but the way you write, which kind of determines that. But then again, I feel like that kind of doesn’t do justice to the first text because even though it is highly complicated and inaccessible, I feel like some ideas or some perhaps also understanding of these topics, it cannot be formulated in an easier accessible way because it’s just, it’s a very complicated topic and I feel like some parts can be in a way broken down, but I feel like others also perhaps cannot and it will always be kind of hard to grasp them.

Jaehee Shin : My first surprising, last question gets the most points, but my impression about second text was more approaching and understanding and re-drawing. It’s more like connected like drawing and the first text is more direct and concrete. We gave much more points for the concrete question, except I think it’s really interesting why we use writing for the activism. Drawing something like abstract and something personalized interpretation could be a bit more difficult or more sensible. It could be interesting, but maybe it’s also something limiting for these kind of topics. So maybe.. I’m very curious, what is your answer about writing could be activism, part of activism to Helen?

Helen Thomas : So he’s coming to that. I mean, as I said, I don’t think writing in itself can be activism, but I mean, I’ve heard some very interesting points here. And I’m, you know, I like this, the analogy of the bottle as being community that you made, you know, that a container is actually community. If the bottle is the hit, it’s the hero. I mean, I hadn’t thought about it in that way. And I think that’s a really, really interesting point. And also this issue of how writing is being done. I think that is, which is, I think, what you’re talking about and what several people have mentioned. I mean, you, what one of you said made me think about writing as giving authority to something. And I thought that was interesting. I mean, that’s, you know, in that way, I can see that writing is activism. In that something is written about, it makes it into something. It makes it into what we could call an historical fact or a thing that is a fact that is potentially true. It just makes it have an existence. And that is, in a way, activist. That is a social thing. An idea exists if it’s written about. And that, and so when you’re talking about different ways of writing, a way that’s really accessible that everyone can understand, you think, well, that has a kind of authority, you know, that it’s very permeable. We can imagine it and everyone can have some access to it. And if it’s really complex and difficult, then the authority, it has a different kind of authority. You know, it’s maybe a bit intimidating. So we think it’s more important. But on the other hand, it also leaves more room for interpretation. Something which is difficult and vague gives you space to interpret. So the idea of the authority in the text is somehow dispersed. So, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I’m coming round to seeing from what you guys have been saying that writing itself can be activism. I still think it has to be somehow socialised. That, you know, action is in the world. And when we read a text, it’s in our heads. But if we read it together, then it starts to become a social situation. And we’re all talking about it. I mean, does anybody else have anything to say?

Student A : I was also thinking that the statement heroism is a justification for aggression is also interesting because I think it could be working for both texts. Like one is more aggressive about killing and seeing this kind of aggression, and the other one is also statement aggression, and also seeing, like pointing out some statements that are in a way aggressive towards some parts. I’m not saying that it’s right or wrong; it’s just like it’s interesting. And then I made it a connection like if the bottle is a hero and the bottle is the community, like then right now reading the statement like community is a justification for aggression, I don’t know, that makes you think when you are among many people and you think you’re justified in doing something, then goes a little bit away from feminism, away from writing, but that’s what I was thinking. Yeah, like community is a justification for aggression. Wrong or right, I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t want to say, I don’t want to, but it was interesting for me.

Monica Ciobotar : Also about aggression because we have these two texts, the first one which was kind of aggressively written and this one was kind of an anecdote. It’s a story with some links to reality and now heroism is a justification for aggression. I guess the second text is also telling us that heroism doesn’t actually need aggression.

Helen Thomas : But I think going to this issue of aggression and does community justify aggression? I mean, I think that’s a, I mean, I think you’re right to say nothing’s right or wrong, but I think it’s an extremely emotional thing. I mean, I think, it’s something we haven’t really touched upon in our discussions about the role of emotion in the writing. I mean, Alicia mentioned humour and I think in a sense, it’s not emotional, but it is very, it is beyond the abstract. It is something that’s quite human and personal. So I don’t know, I think we haven’t discussed it, but does anyone have any thoughts on that?

Alicia Yerebakan : When we started reading out the second text, I first thought she, I felt like I was in the womb of my mother. So it actually already had me in like the first, and I think this is always with the recipient, the emotions of course played the biggest role. So as soon as you’re triggered by something, you’re in it or you’re already the recipient. And if you’re not triggered at all, you won’t receive the text. So. Of course, can writing be activism if it triggers something? And if it’s not, then it’s even not in a group of people. If we would all be sitting here and would say, oh, both of the texts don’t trigger any emotions, then also this wouldn’t. So I think emotions are quite important when it comes to activism. And as you said, like with the aggression of a community, then maybe, wrong emotions or bad emotions come out and then they can be like a justification for aggression.

Student C : I maybe have like one thing to add that also about emotions, maybe because like for me, for example, it’s sometimes like quite difficult to like put emotions into words. And I think this is also a reason why written, written text for me, for example, is really important or like really activist somehow because it gives us also a vocabulary to talk together, right? So there are like so many things that like we all personally feel or like, ah, this happens to me so often. And then when you see it written, you see, ah, no, it’s actually a common thing. It’s not something personal, but it’s something like that happens to so many people. And it’s, so it gives the justification that it’s structural or also can be a structural problem. And I think like that has also to do with the thing that you said, that texts have to be socialized in order to be activist. I think already like kind of helping me to like find words somehow also is like part of that socialization.

Student B : I feel like about also about the emotions because in the end, perhaps it’s not so much about the medium in which, in which the activism happens in a way, if it’s written, if it’s spoken, if it’s on the street, I don’t know, but more like in the end, what happens in your head. And if you are touched by it, or in a way, if a seed is planted, that then you start to think about and it grows. So in the end, it’s about that. And then I feel like it’s fair to say that perhaps if you speak with someone or you speak in a group that triggers you more in a way, because you can kind of engage with the people more. And when, when it’s written, it’s written, and then it’s there, then you cannot change it according to the person. But then, as you said before, when it’s written, it’s also, in a way, it’s more clear because you, you think about it way more than when you speak. So it’s also perhaps more precise to the point you want to get to. And then it becomes more emotionally engaging again when you read it instead of just saying the idea out loud.

Clara Richard Gostynski : Maybe I can conclude also with your idea or the ideas that were here, not conclude, but like my idea of that writing can be activism, maybe not alone, but I think reading can definitely be activism or reading out loud, something that is written. And I think, for example, today was very important that someone was reading the texts and we didn’t read it for ourselves. So we all read the texts at the same time. So collectively, we were getting the information of the texts together. And I think it’s very important how people read certain texts through history, how people read speeches to people. And I think this is also interesting, like, and this causes emotions on people.

Helen Thomas : So I think we can, I think that’s a great point to conclude on because I think, you know, I mean, I’ve learned quite a few things from hearing you talking. That’s been really interesting with you. Thank you. And I think this last point, I mean, for me, it’s a relationship between, I mean, it’s interesting you talked about emotions and thinking because do emotions happen in your body or in your head? And I think it’s when they start to act together then it becomes activism. That’s maybe one proposition for activism. And certainly, I think feminism talks a lot about the body as a situated place. So yeah, I think, it’s fantastic. And I think that it’s been actually really fruitful comparing the two texts because they are so different. But in a way, they say a lot of the same things in different ways. So thanks, everyone. I think that we can finish now. If I can work out how to turn it off.

*** On 8 March 2023, Studio Adam Caruso X Women Writing Architecture hosted a workshop at ETH Zurich as part of the Parity Talks: Get Your Act Together! which explored the question “Can writing be activism?”. This discussion script is a voice recording of one of the three group workshops in session two, led by Helen Thomas and Alecia Yerebakan.