[OSList] Earliest known reference to {holding the space}

Harold Shinsato via OSList oslist at lists.openspacetech.org
Mon Oct 20 13:40:31 PDT 2014


Hi Jennifer!

Thanks for referencing such a great research tool. I looked at all the 
books listed from 1900-1981. Check this out!

Nothing before '51, and over half of the 342 references were from 
1951-54. There was a dark age of holding space from '55-'70, with no 
references. And of the 342, over 96% treated "holding space" as a noun, 
rather than a process. They are about physical containers for stuff, 
livestock, or prisoners.

Below I list the exceptions - some of which seem to hint at the way 
"holding space" as an element of facilitation, though none do so 
directly. The Leibniz and Kant papers were interesting in that they 
peered into the concept of space itself, holding the concept if not 
actual space. Very interesting is that the military concept of "holding 
space" related to the Vietnam war starts to come close to the 
facilitation sense, but the last one by Robert Nozick seems to come the 
closest.

1953 - Princeton Alumni Magazine - "holding space" for slots in a talent 
show at Princeton.

1971 - The New Yorker Volume 46, Part 7 - page 85 - "Farther toward 
Green, a young woman named Vaughan Kaprow, shivering in the evening 
cold, began /holding space/ for another organization that had a special 
greeting for Billy Graham — the Pasadena Women's Liberation Group."

1973 - A Paper about Leibniz's Philosophy which looks at space 
differently, "/holding space/ to be relational."

1973 - the Michigan Library talked about "holding space" for sign ups 
for tickets (flights to New York), similar to the holding space for 
slots in a talent show in 1953.

1976 - Ecology - Volume 57, Issues 1-3 - Page 286: "Porter (1974) 
speculated that the high degree of coexistance on Caribbean reefs is due 
to a "balance of abilities" divided among the Caribbean corals, such 
that no one species is competitively superior in acquiring and /holding 
space/."

1976 - The Philosophy of Kant Explained - Page 89 - "It is thus obvious 
that we can only explain how we can have legitimate a priori synthetic 
judgments in geometry by /holding space/ as..."

1977 - Object Relations Family Therapy - Page 72 - " the family 
therapist gets transference information from the interactions in the 
shared /holding space/ of the family." Still a noun.

1977 - All quiet on the Eastern front: the death of South Vietnam: "Time 
was a secondary dependent variable, a function of our success in winning 
and /holding space/."

1978 - BBC transcript - Many reasons why: the American involvement in 
Vietnam - "it's because you're holding this space in the territory of 
the rural areas. Also you're /holding space/ in another sense altogether"

1979 - Arts Magazine - Volume 53, Issues 6-8: "Moss now opens wide gaps 
in the grid, erasing large segments of the retaining wall that had been 
holding space 'back'. A new spontaneity and elasticity develops between 
color and field: an energy."

1981 - Kant and the Transcendental Object - "And to all these impressive 
reasons for /holding space/ and time to be phenomenal, Kant adds the 
further reason that there are a great many axiomatic principles which 
govern things in space and time, which are not logically necessary, 
since ...

1981 - Robert Nozick: Philosophical Explanations Page 83 - " The word 
"I" might be the marker for the blank, /holding space/ in which the self 
can appear."

     Regards,
     Harold

On 10/20/14 7:41 AM, JenniferHurley-HFA via OSList wrote:
> If Google Scholar is any indication, the usage, at least in print, 
> seems fairly recent:
> https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Holding+space&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CHolding%20space%3B%2Cc0
>
> Jennifer Hurley
> Hurley-Franks & Associates
> 267-971-4598
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Oct 20, 2014, at 9:20 AM, Daniel Mezick <dan at newtechusa.net 
> <mailto:dan at newtechusa.net>> wrote:
>
>> This is extremely helpful, Jennifer! Thank you
>>
>> On 10/20/14 9:14 AM, JenniferHurley-HFA wrote:
>>> I have no idea about the earliest usage, but it's a phrase often 
>>> used by Quakers.
>>>
>>> Jennifer Hurley
>>> Hurley-Franks & Associates
>>> 267-971-4598
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>
>>> On Oct 19, 2014, at 7:33 PM, Daniel Mezick via OSList 
>>> <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org 
>>> <mailto:oslist at lists.openspacetech.org>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Since July 2011, I continue to wander, searching for the earliest 
>>>> known reference to the term "holding the space." Anybody know?
>>>>
>>>> http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/2011-July/334185.html
>>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoSn2Y-b6wI
>>>> -- 
>>>>
>>>> Daniel Mezick, President
>>>>
>>>> New Technology Solutions Inc.
>>>>
>>>> (203) 915 7248 (cell)
>>>>
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>>>> <http://twitter.com/#%21/danmezick/>.
>>>>
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>>
>> harold at shinsato.com <mailto:harold at shinsato.com>
>> http://shinsato.com
>> twitter: @hajush <http://twitter.com/hajush>
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