A short train of thoughts on the parallels between Le Guin and Femke Snelting.

The book I brought to the reading was ‘Dreams Must Explain Themselves,
The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin’. It contains numerous essays,
letters, introductions, transcripts from talks and lectures from
1972-2002. Le Guin have been covering a lot of ground over the years and
this collection spans over several interesting and in my view important
topics, several of them relevant to Snelting’s text ‘A fish can’t judge
the water’, and I will slightly touch on a few (and I believe there is many)
of the similarities. Hopefully this will not lead to just forcing non existing
connections between them but instead bring something out of both texts,
it may very well (most likely) fail completely though.

One of Le Guin’s over-arching themes is the importance of imagination in
a world far to concerned with the material. A defence for the reality of
the imagination. And as I understand it, Selting discusses a very related
topic, the reality of software. Most likely the two concepts or ideas are
not to be considered completely one and the same, but they may very well
overlap. Or they can be understood as having similar functions and that it
is more a question of scope than of them having different properties all
together. Any way it may be interesting to layer them on top of each
other and see what emerges.

Snelting writes that we use tools to make sense of the world. The digital
world is a world we live in as much as the material, it has become “our
natural habitat”. Software is then the tool we use to navigate and make
sense of our sourroundings. In a very similar way Le Guin writes that it is with
the imagination we explore our world and discover both our selves and our
environment. It is a tool for understanding the world, as well as creating it.

“To make something is to invent it, to discover it, to uncover it..”
(Le Guin, World-Making)

The imagination, just like software, has the dual nature of creating and
explaining. I understand it as they mean it as a feedback relationship,
they are tools to inform to create to inform to create. According to
Snelting, software “produces culture at the same time as it is produced by
culture. Software is never politically neutral.

Le Guin writes about the political imagination as means to invent and
create alternatives, alternative realities we can inhabit. And we create
our world by inhabiting it. Just as writing literature, creating art or in
other ways using our imagination is a political act, and so is writing
software for Snelting. Its a way to to take control of the instruments we
use not only to sense the world but also to shape and make the world.

Le Guin writes about the political imagination as means to invent and
create alternatives, alternative realities we can inhabit. And we create
our world by inhabiting it. Just as writing literature, creating art or in
other ways using our imagination is a political act, and so is writing
software for Snelting. Its a way to to take control of the instruments we
use not only to sense the world but also to shape and make the world.

Snelting uses a literary metaphor to place them selves in the feedback
loop of the creative nature of software: “We want to be both the typist
and reader”. And interestingly enough, Le Guin uses the very computational
wording of “operating instructions” to express one of the functions of
literature. Literature in its broadest sense is mapping out what is
possible, and imagination is the foundation of expanding the map. Even
if it is just “A chart of shorelines on a foggy coast.”

When Snelting poses questions about the our relationship to software, how
living with software alters our working patterns? or if we can think of
ourselves outside it when our work is not only made with and through it
but also is software? Le Guin poses questions about how we can imagine new
worlds while living in it. The two authors seem to arrive at similar
answers, we not only can be, but should be both map readers, explorers and
map makers at the same time.

To finish of this rambling. A final crossroad where the Snelting and Le
Guin seem to be converging is the importance of community and
collaboration. Be it through open source software or literature; exchange,
co-creation and joint imagination is key to enrich and develop our
toolbox. Even in reading, Le Guin writes, we are in communion with another
mind. But there is a difference between reading as an act of listening
and to hear passively. You are not used but “you’ve joined in an act of
the imagination’. It is essential that we all participate and contribute,
but also to actively listen, to learn.

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine
them. We need to be taught these skills: we need guides to show us how. If
we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.”
(Le Guin, The Operating Instructions)

//Jakob Jennerholm Hammar | 06/10/2019

• Snelting, Femke. (2006). A fish can’t judge the water. OKNO Publix, Brussels
• Le Guin, Ursula K. (2018). Dreams must explain themselves – the selected non-fiction of ursula k. le g. Orion Publishing Co