The life of lines

185 Pages·2015·1.932 MB·English

by  Ingold, Tim

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The Life of Lines
‘In The Life of Lines Ingold develops a philosophical and ecological
anthropology that is at once expansive, integrative, and inclusive. His
poetic narrative interlaces bodies, minds, landscapes, topographies, and
perceptions in a correspondence of lines. Taking us on a journey
through movement, knots, weather, atmosphere and surfaces, he guides
us to a critical conclusion: to human is a verb.’
Agustín Fuentes, University of Notre Dame, USA
To live, every being must put out a line, and in life these lines tangle with
one another. This book is a study of the life of lines. Following on from his
groundbreaking work Lines: A Brief History, Tim Ingold offers a stunningly
originalseriesofmeditationsonlife,ground,wind,walking,imaginationand
what it means to be human.
A world of life is woven from knots; not built from blocks as commonly
thought. Ingold shows how knotting underwrites both the way things join
with one another – in walls, buildings and bodies – and the composition of
the ground and the knowledge we find there.
To study living lines we must also study the weather. To complement his
linealogy, Ingold develops a meteorology that seeks the common denomi-
nator of breath, time, mood, sound, memory, colour and the sky. This
denominator is the atmosphere.
Finally, Ingold carries the line into the domain of human life. For life to
continue, he argues, the things we do must be framed within the lives we
undergo.Incontinuallyansweringtooneanother,theselivesenactaprinciple
of correspondence that is fundamentally social.
This compelling volume brings our thinking about the material world
vividly back to life. While anchored in anthropology, the book ranges over
an interdisciplinary terrain that includes philosophy, geography, sociology,
art and architecture.
Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of
Aberdeen, UK. His books for Routledge include Lines: A Brief History
(2007), The Perception of the Environment (reissued 2011), Being Alive (2011)
and Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013).
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The Life of Lines
Tim Ingold
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Firstpublished2015
byRoutledge
2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN
andbyRoutledge
711ThirdAvenue,NewYork,NY10017
RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,aninformabusiness
©2015TimIngold
TherightofTimIngoldtobeidentifiedasauthorofthisworkhasbeen
assertedbyhiminaccordancewithsections77and78oftheCopyright,
DesignsandPatentsAct1988.
Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproduced
orutilisedinanyformorbyanyelectronic,mechanical,orothermeans,
nowknownorhereafterinvented,includingphotocopyingandrecording,
orinanyinformationstorageorretrievalsystem,withoutpermissionin
writingfromthepublishers.
Trademarknotice:Productorcorporatenamesmaybetrademarksor
registeredtrademarks,andareusedonlyforidentificationandexplanation
withoutintenttoinfringe.
BritishLibraryCataloguing-in-PublicationData
AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Ingold,Tim,1948-
Thelifeoflines/TimIngold.
pagescm
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
1. Signsandsymbols--History.2. Writing--History.3. Drawing--History.
I.Title.
GN452.5.I5392015
301--dc23
2014039249
ISBN:978-0-415-57685-7(hbk)
ISBN:978-0-415-57686-4(pbk)
ISBN:978-1-315-72724-0(ebk)
TypesetinGoudy
byTaylorandFrancisBooks
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Contents
List of illustrations vii
Preface viii
PARTI
Knotting 1
1 Line and blob 3
2 Octopuses and anemones 9
3 A world without objects 13
4 Materials, gesture, sense and sentiment 18
5 Of knots and joints 22
6 Wall 27
7 The mountain and the skyscraper 32
8 Ground 37
9 Surface 41
10 Knowledge 46
PARTII
Weathering 51
11 Whirlwind 53
12 Footprints along the path 60
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vi Contents
13 Wind-walking 64
14 Weather-world 69
15 Atmosphere 73
16 Ballooning in smooth space 79
17 Coiling over 84
18 Under the sky 89
19 Seeing with sunbeams 94
20 Line and colour 101
21 Line and sound 106
PARTIII
Humaning 113
22 To human is a verb 115
23 Anthropogenesis 120
24 Doing, undergoing 125
25 The maze and the labyrinth 130
26 Education and attention 134
27 Submission leads, mastery follows 138
28 A life 143
29 In-between 147
30 The correspondence of lines 154
References 159
Index 166
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Illustrations
Figures
1.1 Blob and line 4
1.2 Transmission electron micrograph of the bacterium Vibrio
parahaemolyticus 5
1.3 Henri Matisse, Dance (1909–10) 6
3.1 From knot to weave 14
5.1 Joining timber 24
5.2 Bones and ligaments 26
7.1 The skyscraper model and the extrusion model 34
9.1 The three stages of plant formation 44
11.1 The storm from space 55
11.2 Overlapping circles and inter-running spirals 56
11.3 Spindle whorl 57
11.4 Tree-knots 58
13.1 Wind-blown dune-grass describing circles in the sand 66
13.2 ‘Me walking home today’ 66
16.1 The atmosphere refilled with air 81
17.1 My being with the tree and the tree’s being with me 86
19.1 The Starry Night (De sterrennacht), by Vincent van Gogh 95
19.2 The beam of light 98
20.1 Some of the possible meanings of a line 102
20.2 The variations of colour 104
22.1 The story of Ramon Llull and the Saracen 116
23.1 Growing-in-making and making-in-growing 121
29.1 Intermediacy and midstreaming 148
29.2 Articulate and personal knowledge 149
Tables
11.1 Linealogy and meteorology 54
24.1 Humanifying : humanising : : anthropogenesis :
anthropomorphism 128
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Preface
1 January 2014: feeling a bit depressed by the relentless passage of time, as I
often do on New Year’s Day, I cheered myself up by writing in my note-
book: ‘Today I am going to get back to work on The Life of Lines.’ Then I
went for a walk in the hills and thought about it. And that was that. Life
intervened, as it always does, in the form not of opportunities to write my
lines, but of the incessant demands of academic employment. I had been
meaning to complete the book for years, and had been accumulating bits
and pieces of writing with a view to putting them all together once a suitable
moment would arrive. But it never did. Days, weeks and months ticked by,
and I was still no closer to composing the book than when the year began.
Indeed almost seven years had elapsed since I first ventured into print on
the subject of lines. My book Lines: A Brief History was published in 2007.
Yet even before the ink was dry on the manuscript, I already knew that I
would have towrite somesort ofsequel. Notknowing exactlywhat itwould
be about, I filed it in my head as Lines 2. All I knew was that it would have
something to do with lines and the weather. For I had found, rather to my
surprise, that thinking about lines always brought thoughts about the
weather in its wake, and vice versa. Why was that, I wondered? Perhaps it
only provedthat Ihad completelylost the plot. Any level-headedreader,for
whom the idea that an anthropologist can study lines is hard enough to
swallow, would surely conclude that to take off into the atmosphere is to go
completely off the rails. What business has an anthropologist encroaching
on territory that rightfully belongs to the science of meteorology, or maybe
to students of aesthetics? These doubts nagged at me too, and yet the idea of
a unified field of linealogy and meteorology would not let me go.
An opportunity to contribute to the inspirational series of seminars that
anthropologist and ex-architect Trevor Marchand convened at the School of
Oriental and African Studies in London, in 2007, and to the subsequent
volume, provided me with an excuse to begin to set my thoughts on paper,
and a Professorial Fellowship funded by the UK Economic and Social
Research Council for the three years 2005–8 afforded me a window of time
to do so. Chopped up, redistributed and enlarged, much of the material
from that paper, which was called ‘Footprints through the weather-world’,
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Preface ix
has found its way into this book, particularly in the first and second parts.
Two subsequent developments, however, led me to realise that the issue of
lines and the weather would have to be part of a wider investigation.
One of these was a call issued by the Leverhulme Trust, in 2013, for pro-
posals for a programme of research on the theme of ‘the nature of knots’.
With my interest in lines, this was not a chance I could pass up, and with
colleagues from the University of St Andrews and University College
London I set about designing a programme under the title of ‘Knotting
Culture’. Though the proposal eventually fell by the wayside, I have the
Leverhulme Trust to thank for more than setting me thinking about
the knot, as a principle of coherence, in ways that laid the foundations for
the first part of this book. For after three punishing years as Head of the
School of Social Science, here at the University of Aberdeen (2008–11), the
Trust’s award of a Major Research Fellowship for the following two years,
2011–13, gave me the breathing space I needed to develop my ideas. The
long book that I had originally intended to write during the Fellowship,
which would have been called Bringing Things to Life, became two shorter
books instead. The first, Making, was completed in 2012 and published in
the following year. The second is the book now in your hands.
The other development that has borne fruit in this book, especially in the
third part, was the result of a fortuitous set of circumstances all of which
had something to do with walking. One was hearing the writer Andrew
GreigreadfromhisworkattheFestivalofWalking,WritingandIdeas,held
at the University of Aberdeen in August 2012. Among those present in the
audiencewastheartist,writerandcuratorMikeCollier,fromtheUniversity
of Sunderland. In the following year, Mike organised a wonderful exhibition
at Sunderland on the theme of walking, and a conference to go with it, both
entitledWalkOn.Itwasaprivilegefor metobeinvitedtocontributetothe
conference, and I have reworked the paper I wrote for it, called ‘The maze
and the labyrinth: walking and the education of attention’, into several
chapters of this book. The other crucial circumstance was attending another
conference on walking, held in September of the same year (2012) to con-
clude the Sideways Festival, in which a group of hardy souls had spent a
month walking the length and breadth of Belgium, along its lesser known
tracksandtrails.Ihadnotbeenamongthem,butattheconferenceatalkbythe
philosopher of education Jan Masschelein, whom I had never encountered
before, made me sit up. The ideas about walking and education that he was
putting forward were – to my ears at least – quite revolutionary, and they
have done much to shape my subsequent thinking, not least in this book.
Two other things have happened in the past year, 2013–14, which have
greatly facilitated the writing of this book. First, we had the pleasure of
hosting the mathematician and science educator Ricardo Nemirovsky, from
San Diego State University, as a visiting fellow in our Department of
Anthropology at Aberdeen. Ricardo and I ran a reading group, attended by
a number of other colleagues, doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows in