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

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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.”

Næss, Arne. 2005. “Creativity and Gestalt Thinking.” In The Selected Works of Arne Næss, edited by Harold Glasser and Alan R. Drengson. The Netherlands: Springer. Braidotti, Rosi. 2014. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11(2–3): 163–184. doi: 10.3366/ccs.2014.0122. Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, International Library of Sociology. New York, NY: Routledge. The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it." Bailey, John. 1991. The Search for Signs of Inteligent Life in the Universe. Los Angeles, CA: Orion Classics.

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. I wanted to find a way to help doctoral students tap into the creativity and uniqueness they bring to their research and I found a short book by the novelist Ursula Le Guin in which she presents her ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (2019) as a fresh and potentially useful way of thinking about doctoral writing.

Ursula K. Le Guin was a celebrated and beloved author of science-fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children's books. Her ground-breaking works, including the Earthsea Trilogy and the Left Hand of Darkness, were enormously influential and drew on cultural anthropology, feminism and Taoism among other themes. Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.Donna J. Haraway is the author of the revolutionary 'Cyborg Manifesto' and Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books including 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.

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. The generative potential of storytelling is especially pronounced in speculative fiction, a genre that mines our current reality as raw material for imaginary worldbuilding (this includes things like sci-fi, fantasy and horror). The genre’s patron saint, Ursula Le Guin, died last year aged 88, but she left behind her a breathtaking legacy of fiercely intelligent books and short stories imbued with her own anarcho-feminist, anticolonial politics. One of her best-known novels, The Dispossessed, imagines a small, separatist planet administered according to anarcho-syndicalist principles, what she subtitles an “ambiguous utopia” full of contradictions and complexity. On the planet Anarres, prison does not exist, work is voluntary, any claim to ownership is dismissed as “propertarian”— yet, despite all this, greed and power can still take hold. It feels like a book of thinking aloud, in which Le Guin is trying to figure out different realities through writing. It speaks to the kind of writer Le Guin was: generous and open minded, investigative and bursting with ideas, willing to be wrong, yet always reaching for a world free from harm. it's possible to read this essay in a gender essentialist way (the phallic spear! the phallic club!), but i don't think that's the major drive. le guin's point isn't War Is For Men Gathering Is For Women; her point is that placing all narratives, all human stories, in the language of war is a very narrow definition doing us more harm than good. i also just really like this as a craft thought as much as a human-philosophy thought; her novel Lavinia is a bit of a meandering one, without a rising-action-to-climax-to-falling-action type of plot structure, and it's a much more honest (and, to me, interesting) book for that. (i'm rereading this essay because lavinia had me thinking of it incessantly--something about the way le guin explores at the "woman's side" of the aeneid, a poem that is [among other things] very much about war and imperialism, feels like this essay made manifest. you could illustrate this essay, i think, with the image in that book of ascanius showing other men his father's shield, describing the battles it has seen and the battles it foretells, and lavinia crossing the courtyard as he does so, carrying her child on her shoulder the way aeneas carries that shield.) Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Le Guin, Ursula K. 1989. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. 1st ed. New York, NY: Grove Press. Berman, Morris. 2000. Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1997. “enlightenment@science_wars.com: A Personal Reflection on Love and War.” Social Text 15(1): 123–129. doi: 10.2307/466820. The students who signed up were asked to find 3 objects which were somehow related to their research or to the experience of doing their doctorate, put them in a bag and bring them to the online pop-up session. These objects could be linked in practical ways (eg a coffee cup used every day), academically (a favourite book) or for more esoteric reasons related to reflections, memories, dreams, conversations or experiences that were meaningful to them even if tangential to the actual business of writing a doctorate. 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.