EsotericHoe's Book Journey

I have spent the past decade thinking deeply about containers to the point that containers inform my orientation to the world, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction anchors this perspective.

My first introduction to the basket as humanity's OG technology came from a former friend completing her PhD in communications regarding food technologies and Marxist praxis. She shared the history of the first tool being a vessel for gathering, intentionally woven strand by strand. A "feminine" object.

A month ago, I was participating in the "Collective Footnotes" anti-book club held by the Institute of Machine Unlearning where we discussed "Feminism Confronts AI". The conversation drifted into the definition of technology and naturally Le Guin came up.

​Staring down technofeudal futures driven by platform capitalism and algorithmic extraction, returning to Le Guin grounds me. With Donna Haraway providing the foreword to this edition, I can't help but think of the Cyborg Manifesto. Haraway’s cyborg rejects origin myths of pure, untainted nature; arguing that we are fundamentally entangled with our tools. The carrier bag gathers disparate, messy, hybrid parts and holds them together in relation. As Haraway noted over 40 years ago, we are already cyborgs embedded in these systems. Reclaiming the means of production means utilizing the basket/container to resist the architecture we currently exist within.

In addition to using the carrier bag to think through technology and capitalism, I find it helpful framing for thinking through relationality.

Taking separate, sovereign strands and bringing them into relation requires managing tension in real time. If we pull connections too tightly, the bonds can snap. If we leave things too loose, the structure fails to hold anything at all. The work is being flexible, learning how to interlace our histories and subjectivities into a shape with enough integrity to carry heavy realities—grief, conflict, survival—without breaking apart. Finishing a basket requires completing the rim, which sets the explicit boundaries defining what the container will hold.

When I think through containers, I think about my body as a container, I think of my time as a container, as space contained by multiple containers. And I think of Frank Ocean's Pink Matter:

"What do you think my brain is made for Is it just a container for the mind? This great grey matter Sensei replied, "What is your woman? Is she just a container for the child?" That soft pink matter"