Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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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
✏️ The Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution. Male-centric theories and stories always start with fighting and weapons and murder as the driving force (e.g. 2001 Odyssey), but why couldn’t it have been the carrier bag?
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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.
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The society, the civilization 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 either extremely defective as
a human being, or not human at all.
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It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my
humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing,
thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero.
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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. 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 narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the
story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it.
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One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict,
but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a
how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and
went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress,
struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine
bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole
which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since
its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.
✏️ I love this. Narrative isn’t just “conflict”.. there can be so much more, but the male-centric hero-based killer methodology only advocates for conflict.
It can be full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand.
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novels: instead of heroes they have people in them
✏️ Good reframing: not heroes, but people. The purpose isn’t resolution nor stasis, but continuing process.
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If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth
is tragic. “Technology,” or “modern science” (using the words as they are
usually used, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the “hard” sciences
and high technology founded upon continuous economic growth),
is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph,
hence ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying this myth will be, and
has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future,
etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now).
If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow
mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily
cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant
side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow
field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a
mythological genre than a realistic one.
✏️ What science fiction is generally thought of.. the techno-heroic model.. heroic undertaking of the hero using science and tech to conquer and kill, but always a tragic setting.
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Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny,
is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually
do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast stack, this belly
of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were,
this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep
even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is
time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too,
✏️ What science fiction can be, under the Carrier Bag theory. Where it’s about life and people and doing things and relating to each other.