Because the steam from my mouth clouds the lenses: Zugänge am und jenseits des Bildrands
Grundlagen Fotografie Wintersemester 20/21

Die Kurzbeschreibung des Kurses, Informationen zum Ablauf, Format und Zugänglichkeit können hier in kurze () nachgelesen werden. Bei Fragen dazu, meldet euch gerne bei den Synkrongespräche oder per Mail an hermans@burg-halle.de

Willkommen bei unserem *pad* , auch bekannt als Etherpad, einem Open-Source, webbasierten kollaborativen Echtzeit-Editor, der es Autor*innen erlaubt, ein Textdokument gleichzeitig zu bearbeiten und die Bearbeitungen aller Teilnehmer*innen in Echtzeit zu sehen. Wie du vielleicht bemerkst, zeigt es auch den Text eines jeden Autors in seiner eigenen Farbe an. Dieses Pad wird live synchronisiert, so dass alle, die es geöffnet haben, den selben Text sehen. Falls beim Laden des Pads eine Fehlermeldung erscheint, drücke STRG+F5 oder STRG+SHIFT+F5.

Padtiquette:
» Sei unterstützend und neugierig.
» Wenn du eine Frage hast, frage. Dies ist ein Experiment, gemeinsam textlich zu diskutieren und gestalten.
» Lösch bitte den Text der anderen nicht, du kannst deine Gedanken neben andere Sätzen oder sogar dazwischen hinzufügen
» bei Fragen oder technische Problemen die du nicht gerne vor alle lesbar/hörbar/sichtbar machen möchtest, melde dich gerne per Mail an hermans@burg-halle.de

-------------

Intro: Kollektive Vorstellungen

Schalte deine Kamera und Mikro aus aber bleibe im Google Meeting. Fulle die Selbstbeschreibung aus.

Name // Pronomen // Was ist dein Energielevel? (Skala 1-5) // Welches Emoji beschreibt deine Stimming? (emojipedia.org) // Was ist auf das letzte Bild zu sehen dass du gemacht hast? // Was ist auf letzte bild zu sehen was du gepostet hast auf social medien? // Was ist die letzte Hilfestellung dass du zur Zugänglichkeit genutzt hast (Untertitel, Übersetzung,...) // Was ist die letzte Hilfestellung die du für anderen gemacht hast // Wie wichtig sind solche Hilfsmittel für dich? (Skala 1-5) // Kommentiere die Selbstbeschreibung der anderen, wenn dir etwas auffällt

Wenn alle es ausgefüllt haben, schalte eure Mikros wieder an und wir besprechen die gemeinsame Vorstellungen.

---------------

Übung 1: Kollektive Lekture "Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction von Ursula K. Le Guin"

Die Originalfassung dieses Essays von Ursula K. Le Guin wurde 1988 erstveröffentlicht in der Zeitschrift Woman of Vision. Diese Fassung basiert auf der Neuausgabe von Ignota Books, 2019.

Einem PDF, in der originalen englischen Fassung, kann hier heruntergeladen werden für die individuelle, erste Lekture: https://box.burg-halle.de/s/Yw6Tf67R4XTJDns.

Bitte lese den Text einmal aufmerksam für euch selber. Sammele Notizen/Anmerkungen/Kommentare, sei es bezogen auf Inhalt, (Sprach)Verständnis, Kontext, eigene Assoziationen — es gibt keine falsche oder richtige Fragen oder Anmerkungen. Bitte notiere eure Anmerkungen zwischen Klammern direkt unten in den Volltext.

Anmerkung: die Entscheidung mit der englische Originalfassung ist einem Versuch ähnlichere Voraussetzungen zu schaffen. Wir können gerne darüber diskutieren. In der Burg Box liegt auch die rohe Textdatei als Datei um evtl. Online-Übersetzung zu vereinfachen.

Als erweiterten Kontext zu der deutschen Fassung findet ihr, bei Interesse, hier eine Besprechung der zentralen Konzepten (auf Deutsch): https://oya-online.de/article/read/3474-.html

Volltext für Anmerkungen/Kommentare/Fragen:

 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 fat was gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits,
 and grains, adding bugs and mollusks and netting or snaring 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 peasants 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 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 wrestled a wild-oat seed
 from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and
 then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool 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 sprouted 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 has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before
 you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids
 and the skills of 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 her 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
 reevaluation. 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, a 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 Oom 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 Oo Oo in so that you could pick
 the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd shell a net a bag a sling a sack a
 bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.

 <quote>
 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.
 </quote>

 So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But
 no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone,
 I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody 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 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 around 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. We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard about all 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 new story. That is news.

 And yet old. Before — once you think about it, surely long before — the
 weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife
 and ax; 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
 the 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 civilization is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilization,” Lillian Smith observed.)
 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.

 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 villagers 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 do 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 solider 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 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. The wonderful, poisonous story
 of Botulism. The killer story.

 It sometimes seems that the story is approaching its end. Lest there be
 no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid
 the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe
 people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is,
 we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished
 along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek
 the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

 It’s unfamiliar, it doesn’t come easily, thoughtlessly, to the lips as the
 killer story does; but still, “untold” was an exaggeration. People have been
 telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of words and ways. Myths of
 creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels....

 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. 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.

 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.

 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.

 Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs
 a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like
 a rabbit, like a potato.

 That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.

 So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great
 heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny
 grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets
 which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an
 imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world,
 and a mouse’s skull; 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. I said it
 was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from
 their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel
 was easy?

 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.

 It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.

 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, and sing to
 little Oom, and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story
 isn’t over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.