#8 Quantum (and the Carrier Bag) Theory of Holding

What are you holding, touching, carrying (in your hands, in your body, in your words)?

What is holding and what does it mean to hold? I have been thinking about this word, concept, and act, as well as the many meanings of it—the material and semantic manifestations of what holding holds. To hold space for someone, to hold the door, to hold onto something, to hold on. It’s an act of doing that implies not possession, but relation. It is not taking, but carrying—for the faintest moment between other moments. It is transitory, not staking any claim at a certain permanence, yet generous. Can you hold this for a second?

It is also an act of restraint. We hold back our tears, we hold it in; states and institutions hold populations in place—physically, bureaucratically, ideologically. The opposite of holding, in this sense, suggests liberation: to release, to let go, to free ourselves from the constraints of what has taken hold of us. Hold your breath, then let go—surrender to the exhale to release the thing you’ve been holding onto.

In our relationship with the world, the body is the first site of holding. In our skin, in our muscles, in our bones, in our breath, we hold things. Emotions, after all, are not abstract concepts; they are felt and sedimented in our bodies. The body is a vessel that both holds and is held.

Holding bears at once what it’s in relation with—carrying, grasping, containing, touching—and its “opposites” like releasing, dropping, or letting go. I think about the quantum physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad’s meditation and lecture on “touching,” wherein, most strikingly, they note that touching, for a physicist, is nothing but an electromagnetic interaction—that, paradoxically, the one thing the physics of touching does not include is touching itself:

You may think you are touching a coffee mug when you are about to raise it to your mouth, but your hand is not actually touching the mug. Sure, you can feel the smooth surface of the mug’s exterior right where your fingers come into contact with it (or seem to), but what you are actually sensing, physicists tell us, is the electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons of the atoms that make up your fingers and those that make up the mug. (Electrons are tiny negatively charged particles that surround the nuclei of atoms, and having the same charges they repel one another, much like powerful little magnets. As you decrease the distance between them the repulsive force increases.) Try as you might, you cannot bring two electrons into direct contact with each other.

So, touching is the “effect” of this electromagnetic repulsion: “all we ever feel is the electromagnetic force, not the other whose touch we seek,” Barad notes. But Barad also introduces the quantum theory of touching, which is ontologically and “radically” different from the classical explanation: “Actually, it is radically queer,” as they put it.

Barad repositions touching as an “intra-action,” rather than interaction. That is, rather than the classical physics notion that two distinct objects touch each other (a hand and a coffee mug, or two hands), Barad suggests that touching occurs within phenomena. The physical act between two discrete entities is an entangled process. Drawing from “quantum entanglement,” Barad argues that these entities are not separate—because the boundaries between them are constantly being reconfigured. The entities do not pre-exist their relations but emerge through them.

Barad’s, or quantum physics’, notion of touching also expands it beyond immediate physical contact. The entanglement of particles, in their view, is not limited by proximity; something can be touched, or affected, across vast distances and without conventional physical contact. This carries ethical and political implications: if actions ripple across space and time, they always already implicate us in relations we might not immediately perceive.

So, holding, too, is not just about grasping something but about being constituted by the relation itself. This may be true both for the anger one holds in their body, in the chest, and for the coffee mug in their hand.

Barad’s quantum theory of touching offers a way to rethink interactions between entities as emerging out of these intra-actions, rather than pre-existing as separate, defined objects. Then, holding can also be understood as an ongoing relational process rather than a fixed state (of control or containment.) Relations emerge in social, political, ethical, physical dimensions through holding and constitute what we understand as entities or objects themselves. One doesn’t simply hold an object, have it within their grasp, or claim ownership over it, but the act of holding constitutes both the holder and that which is held.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory of fiction” offers another perspective on holding. In this little purple book holding a critique of the stories that tell the origin of cultural inventions, Le Guin expands on how the very first tool humans created was not the spear or the weapon (used for killing), but the carrier bag—a vessel for holding things. Elizabeth Fisher’s carrier bag theory of evolution, which Le Guin builds upon, suggests that the first cultural device was a recipient, a container to hold gathered products. Remarking on this most basic, primitive need—“If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you”—Le Guin further inspires the possibility of a new story:

We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about 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.

It is a metaphor for the way stories should be told, too—or for the shape of a story itself. As Donna Haraway writes in her introduction to Le Guin’s essay: “…the fitting shape of a story is a sack, a hollowed-out container to hold things that bear meanings and enable relationships…” Le Guin herself further expands, against the imperial nature and shape of a narrative—like that of “the arrow or spear, starting here and going there and then THOK!”:

I would go so far as to say that the natural, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings.

The world appears differently to me through the lens of holding. As I sit in front of my computer, writing this newsletter, I occasionally let go of my keyboard to hold my mug. I hold the mug, and the mug holds coffee inside of it; the coffee in its emergence holds water from my kitchen tap, coffee beans I bought at my local shop. The beans hold the seeds of the fruit that grows on coffee trees. The coffee cherries are held by the land, by the hands that pick them, by the water that carries them. I hold, in my hand, lands, labor, and other lives; I hold, in my body, histories, emotions, and the coffee beans. The structural and political dimensions of holding are not lost on me, either: Who does the holding? Who is expected to contain or absorb emotions? What gets held and what isn’t? Who is allowed to be held and who is insistingly assigned the role of “holding,” bearing the burden of systemic injustices? Who holds the power to decide which emotions, histories, or responsibilities are carried forward?

And what are you holding, how are you holding it? What would you like to release to hold other things?

I hope you have a nice week,
Thank you for reading–
Melis