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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
We inhabit a world of more than humans. For life to flourish, we must listen to the calls this world makes on us, and respond with care, sensitivity and judgement. That is what it means to correspond, to join our lives with those of the beings, matters and elements with whom, and with which, we dwell upon the earth. In this book, anthropologist Tim Ingold corresponds with landscapes and forests, oceans and skies, monuments and artworks. To each he brings the same spontaneity of thought and observation, the same intimacy and lightness of touch, but also the same affection, longing and care that, in the days when we used to write letters by hand, we would bring to our correspondences with one another. The result is a profound yet accessible inquiry into ways of attending to the world around us, into the relation between art and life, and into the craft of writing itself. At a time of environmental crisis, when words so often seem to fail us, Ingold points to how the practice of correspondence can help restore our kinship with a stricken earth.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface and acknowledgements
Notes
Invitation
Letters from the heart
Digitization and loss
More than human
Being and becoming
A waste of knowing
The rigour of amateurs
The way of art
Notes
Tales from the Woods
Introduction
Somewhere in Northern Karelia…
Notes
Pitch black and firelight
Notes
In the shadow of tree being
Body
Shadow
Touch
Time
Art
Notes
Ta, Da, Ça!
Notes
Spitting, Climbing, Soaring, Falling
Introduction
Notes
The foamy saliva of a horse
The mountaineer’s lament
Notes
On flight
Notes
Sounds of snow
Notes
Going to Ground
Introduction
Notes
Scissors paper stone
Notes
Ad coelum
Notes
Are we afloat?
Notes
Shelter
Notes
Doing time
Notes
The Ages of the Earth
Introduction
Notes
The elements of fortune
Notes
A stone’s life
Notes
The jetty
Notes
On extinction
Notes
Three short fables of self-reinforcement
Notes
Line, Crease, Thread
Introduction
Lines in the landscape
Notes
The chalk-line and the shadow
Fold
Notes
Taking a thread for a walk
Notes
Letter-line and strike-through
Notes
For the Love of Words
Introduction
Notes
Words to meet the world
Notes
In defence of handwriting
Notes
Diabolism and logophilia
Notes
Cold blue steel
Notes
Au revoir
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface and acknowledgements
Invitation
Begin Reading
Au revoir
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Somewhere in Northern Karelia …
Figure 1
The boulder: a page from my sketchbook. (Photo by the author.)
Pitch black and firelight
Figure 2
The sun and the moon. Detail from a painting from the wooden ceiling of the stav…
In the shadow of tree being
Figure 3
Respirare l’ombra
[Breathe the shadow], drawing by Giuseppe Penone, 1987. (Court…
Figure 4
Gli alberi dei travi
[The trees of the beams], drawing by Giuseppe Penone, 1970.…
Ta, Da, Ça!
Figure 5
Ta, Da, Ça!
(stick, magnet, radiator), photo by Émile Kirsch, 2017. (Courtesy of…
The foamy saliva of a horse
Figure 6
Sea shells on stand, from Carol Bove,
The Foamy Saliva of a Horse.
(© Carol Bove…
Figure 7
Sea shells off stand, from Carol Bove,
The Foamy Saliva of a Horse.
(© Carol Bov…
Figure 8
Groynes on Aberdeen beach. A tree-trunk, tossed up by the storm of New Year, 201…
On flight
Figure 9
Thermal
, 1960, by Peter Lanyon (1918–1964). (Courtesy of the Tate Gallery, St Iv…
Scissors paper stone
Figure 10
Exaggerated cross-section of a palimpsest. (Photo by the author.)
Figure 11
Earth, atmosphere and ground as interface. (Photo by the author.)
Figure 12
The ground at the meeting of earth and atmosphere. (Photo by the author.)
Ad coelum
Figure 13
Open codex and closed book in cross-section. (Photo by the author.)
Shelter
Figure 14
Shelter in a rocky overhang. (Photo by Tim Knowles, courtesy of the artist.)
Figure 15
Barrel shelter with door open. (Photo by Tim Knowles, courtesy of the artist.)
Doing time
Figure 16
Punching the Time Clock: One-Year Performance 1980–1981
, photo by Michael Shen. …
The elements of fortune
Figure 17
New Year’s tin. (Photo by Tero Sivula, courtesy of Lehtikuva.)
A stone’s life
Figure 18
Selinunte – Ruins
, a photograph by Giovanni Crupi, dating from the 1880s or 1890…
The jetty
Figure 19
Cone
, by Wolfgang Weileder, 2014. (Photo by Colin Davidson.)
Figure 20
The jetty at Dunston Staiths, Gateshead. (Photo by Colin Davidson.)
Introduction
Figure 21(a)–(c)
Paper sheet with ruled line (a), screwed into a ball (b), and a part of the shee…
Lines in the landscape
Figure 22
Lines in the landscape. (Photo by Nisha Keshav.)
Figure 23
Ploughed field, drainage ditch and wood. (Photo by Nisha Keshav.)
Figure 24
Starlings on wires. (Photo by Nisha Keshav.)
The chalk-line and the shadow
Figure 25
Chalk-line (2019), by Matthieu Raffard and Mathilde Roussel. (Photo courtesy of …
Figure 26
The shadow of the chalk-line (2019), by Matthieu Raffard and Mathilde Roussel. …
Fold
Figure 27
The meeting of letters across a fold. (Photo by the author.)
Taking a thread for a walk
Figure 28
A wound-up pencil-line. (Photo by the author.)
Figure 29
Ball of wool, by Anne Masson and Eric Chevalier. (Photo by Christian Aschman.)
Figure 30
Vest and ball, by Anne Masson and Eric Chevalier. (Photo by Christian Aschman.)
Figure 31
Two chairs in one, by Anne Masson and Eric Chevalier. (Photo by Christian Aschma…
Letter-line and strike-through
Figure 32
Four stills from
Walk (strike through with pen)
(2016) by Anna Macdonald: (a) at …
Figure 33
Whooping Crane
, from
Birds of America
(1827–38), by John James Audubon. (Courtes…
Cold blue steel
Figure 34
The contents of my pencil-case.
Figure 35
Lines written by Gerry Grams, on the colour ‘blue’. From Shauna McMullan,
Someth
…
Figure 36
Something About a Word
, by Shauna McMullan (2011). (Courtesy of the artist.)
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Correspondences
Tim Ingold
polity
Copyright © Tim Ingold 2021
The right of Tim Ingold to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Internal branch images: Insh1na/iStock
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4412-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface and acknowledgements
Over the years I have made a habit of composing letters. Unaddressed, they have entered my notebook in the form of responses to things I have come across which have roused my curiosity. These things, however, never ceased to prey on my mind, nor did I cease to ponder them. It is as if we had embarked on a kind of correspondence. In this book, I open a collection of such curious correspondences. Nearly all began, for me, during the past decade, and most within the five years between 2013 and 2018. These were the years in which I was preoccupied with leading a large project, funded by the European Research Council, entitled Knowing From the Inside (or KFI, for short). The aim of the project was to forge a different way of thinking about how we come to know things: not through engineering a confrontation between theories in the head and facts on the ground, but rather through corresponding with the things themselves, in the very processes of thought.
The essays assembled here all exemplify this aim in one way or another, and they range over the four fields that the KFI project sought to harness to it: of anthropology, art, architecture and design. An earlier version of the book, with just sixteen chapters (including four essays and three interviews omitted from the new version), was published ‘in house’ by the University of Aberdeen, in 2017, as one of a series of experimental volumes resulting from the project.1 Although I have carried over nine essays from the original version into the new one, several of them have been revised, and others are almost completely rewritten. The remaining eighteen essays are new material.
I owe an immense debt of gratitude to everyone in the KFI project for their inspiration and support, and to the European Research Council for the funding that made it all possible. In addition I have many individuals to thank, both for inspiration and for allowing the reuse of previously published material. They are: Anaïs Tondeur, Anna Macdonald, Anne Dressen, Anne Masson, Benjamin Grillon, Bob Simpson, Carol Bove, Claudia Zeiske and Deveron Arts, Colin Davidson, David Nash, Émile Kirsch, Eric Chevalier, Franck Billé, Germain Meulemans, Giuseppe Penone, Hélène Studievic, Kenneth Olwig, Marie-Andrée Jacob, Mathilde Roussel, Matthieu Raffard, Michael Malay, Mikel Nieto, Nisha Keshav, Philip Vannini, Rachel Harkness, Robin Humphrey, Shauna McMullan, Tatum Hands, Tehching Hsieh, Tim Knowles, Tomás Saraceno and Wolfgang Weileder. My gratitude to all. This book could not have been completed without you!
‘Somewhere in Northern Karelia …’ is reproduced by courtesy of Penguin Random House; ‘In the shadow of tree being’ by courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery; ‘On flight’ by courtesy of Skira Editore; ‘Words to meet the world’ and ‘Diabolism and logophilia’ by courtesy of Routledge (Taylor & Francis).
Tim IngoldAberdeen, March 2020
Notes
1.
Freely available online at
https://knowingfromtheinside.org/
.
Invitation
Letters from the heart
Ideas come when you least expect them. If a thought were an expected visitor to your mind, and came knocking by appointment, would it even be an idea at all? For the thought to be an idea it has to disturb, to unsettle, like a gust of wind ruffling through a heap of leaves. You may have been waiting for it, but it still comes as a surprise. Those, however, who aim to get from A to B as quickly as possible have no time to wait. For them, the idea is an unwelcome guest, threatening to throw them off course, if not with losing their way altogether. Yet were it not for ideas, we’d be trapped. The life of the mind would be confined to a shuffle, where nothing really new could ever arise, only rearrangements of an existing pack. These days it has become usual to think of creativity like that: to suppose that there is no new idea that is not a novel permutation or combination of the fragments of old ones. It is as though the mind were a kaleidoscope, equipped with a fixed structure of mirrors and an assortment of beads of different shapes and colours. The mirrors are hardwired cognitive structures, the beads their mental content. Every shake yields a unique pattern, but while we celebrate its novelty, nothing new comes out of it. Each is an end in itself; there is no beginning. Unless … unless we attend to what is usually forgotten, the shake itself. The shake unsettles, there is a momentary loosening, a loss of control. What if the idea were the shake, rather than the pattern that results from it?
‘I’m all shook up,’ sang Elvis Presley; ‘my hands are shaky and my knees are weak.’ Elvis was in love, but I’ve experienced the same nervous agitation when unexpectedly overtaken by an idea. It is as visceral as it is intellectual, if the two can be distinguished at all. The thinker may sometimes seem detached, head in hands, isolated in a bubble, but the lover’s pose is much the same. What the thinker and the lover have in common is that they are uniquely vulnerable. They are in a condition of surrender, whether to the idea or to the beloved. But the condition is far from passive; on the contrary, it is passionate, an affectation of the soul that calls mind and body to contemplation that is furious in its intensity. And it is the fury of thinking, not just in anger but in ecstasy, that I want to celebrate in these pages. It is a fury, in my experience, that can be endured only in relative quietude, when all around is in a moderate state of balance. In the contemporary world, such balance is hard to find, and all the more precious because of it. My fear is that the imbalances of the world – of wealth, climate and education – will render thinking unsustainable, and jeopardize the life of the mind. Indeed we are faced with an epidemic of thoughtlessness, the root causes of which lie in the evacuation from thought of any consideration for its consequences, as if to think were no longer even to care, let alone to love.
It is left for us to decide, warned the philosopher Hannah Arendt, ‘whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it’.1 Arendt was writing in the wake of the destruction of the Second World War, but with the world once again on a knife-edge, her words carry equal force today. Only if we fall back in love with the world, she foretold, can there be hope of renewal for generations to come. And to do that, we need to relearn the art of thinking, and of writing, from the heart as much as from the head. In the past, we would think and write like this especially when scribing letters to loved ones, family and friends. As we set pen to paper, our thoughts would fly to the intended recipient, as though we were together with them in conversation. We used to write as we would speak, with feeling and concern, not to publicize a thesis but to carry on a line of thinking that responds, in its moods and motivations, to what we suppose might be going through the mind of the addressee. Working things out as we go along, ideas would appear here with a certain freshness and spontaneity, not yet weighed down by the burdens of subsequent elaboration. But with letter-writing it is not only the words we select that matter; it is also how we write them. Words written by hand, in a cursive script, convey feeling in the very gravity and inflection of the continually looping letter-line. This is more than words can say, yet words are saying it, not by way of the meanings we ascribe to them, but thanks to the expressive power of the line itself. You know me, and how I feel, from the way I write, just as you do from my voice. Everyone’s way is different.
Digitization and loss
Nowadays, this kind of letter-writing has all but ceased, to be replaced by the instant communication of phone and email. And with that, something of the care and spontaneity of letter-writing has been lost. Or, more to the point, the spontaneity of communication, since it is over in an instant, has become careless, stripped of the attention and deliberation that goes into fashioning lines on the page, in writing, and of the patience entailed in waiting: for the letter to reach its intended destination, and for the response to come back from the recipient. Conversely, care has lost much of its spontaneity: it seems more calculated and, by the same token, less personal, less imbued with feeling. It has become a service to be delivered rather than a recognition, in attention and response, of what we owe to others for our own existence as beings in a world. Now some might say that it is merely nostalgic to attempt to bring care and spontaneity back together again. I disagree, however, and I offer this book both as an example of how this can be done, and as a testament to the power of written correspondence in achieving it. For it is not a matter of going back into the past; it is rather about allowing the past once more to feel its way into the future. For life on earth to carry on, and to flourish, we need to learn to attend to the world around us, and to respond with sensitivity and judgement. Corresponding with people and things – as we used to do in letter-writing – opens paths for lives to carry on, each in its own way but nevertheless with regard for others.
In this book, I have compiled some of the ways I have personally corresponded, in writing, with everything from oceans and skies, and from landscapes and forests, to monuments and artworks. Ideally, I should have written these correspondences by hand. That I have written them on a keyboard is, for me, a shortcoming; that you should be reading them in print unfortunate. This regret is not a retreat into nostalgia, however, but a plea for sustainability. A world in which every communication is over almost before it begins, reducing life to a succession of instants, is simply not sustainable. Nor is it nostalgic to wish to preserve our capacities for humane expression. For we lose these powers at our peril. Never in human history, indeed, have they been at greater risk. We have stood by as words, severed from hand and mouth, have been converted into the liquid currency of a global information and communications industry. In hock to states and corporations, words have been reduced to mere tokens of exchange. And our technologies have evolved in step. Language has been distilled from the conversations of life, only to be inserted into the mechanisms of computation. Yet the much-vaunted ‘digital revolution’ will almost certainly self-destruct, probably within this century. In a world facing climate emergency, it too is manifestly unsustainable. Not only are the supercomputers on which it depends already consuming colossal quantities of energy; the extraction of toxic heavy metals for use in digital devices has also fuelled genocidal conflict around the world, and will likely render many environments permanently uninhabitable. Meanwhile, digitization continues to dissolve the archives of recorded history at an unprecedented rate.
Imagine a future in which all written words are tapped out, on keyboards or screens. To read these words requires a vision that cuts through paper or glass, in order to extract the meanings reflected from behind, rather than allowing itself to be detained at the surface. The linear traces of affect, which had once captivated the eyes of readers, are now written off as a distraction. They have been replaced by a vocabulary of emoticons, presenting surrogates for feeling rather than feeling in itself. With the expressive power of the line long forgotten, next to go will be the voice. The authorities have decreed that the musical qualities of vocal pronunciation, which had once so enchanted listeners as to lure them to follow along, or even join in, are held to distract from what is now believed to be the proper function of words, to convey information. So the voice is to be replaced by digital synthesizers, operated by neurotransmitters from the brain. In this brave new world, the lullaby, the lament, the carol and the hum, eviscerated of affect, are to be preserved in aspic, as mementos of a bygone past. Deprived of voice, people lose the capacity to sing. But this only compounds the earlier suppression of the hand, in the loss of its capacity to write. A society without handwriting is like one from which song has been banished. Yet it would take only a simple invention to bring it back: a hand-held tube, fitted with a tip and filled with dark-hued liquid. No digital interface can match the expressive potential and versatility of this instrument. Cheap, easy to use, requiring no external power supply, and leaving no pollution in its wake, it could secure the future of writing for countless years to come.
More than human
I sometimes wonder where philosophers have been, all these years. Some of their number have recently taken to telling us – as though it were a startling new discovery – that the world does not actually revolve around human beings, and that non-human entities of all sorts can enter into relations with one another, and even hold meanings for one another, which do not depend in the slightest on how they are used or perceived by humans, or even on any human presence at all. The fact that researchers in such fields as plant and animal ecology, geomorphology and soil science have been studying such relations for generations seems to have passed our philosophers by. Of course we have good reason to question the premises that underpin such scientific endeavours. For the most part they assume that the world of nature already exists ‘out there’, like an unmapped continent, and is simply waiting for us humans to discover it. There is certainly something duplicitous about the claims of science to account for the workings of nature, including the mind as part of nature, given that such claims derive their authority from the sovereign perspective of a mind that has already set itself on a pedestal, over and above the nature it purports to explain. That’s why, despite denials that for any species there exists an essence of its kind, science cannot escape the assumption that there is something exceptional about humans – something that lifts them up and over the natural world. It cannot escape this assumption because the entire scientific project depends on it. It’s the elephant in the room, invisibly presiding over the science of non-human conviviality, amidst disavowals of its presence and influence.
But philosophers who call for a more balanced or ‘symmetrical’ approach, which would allow the participation of non-humans with humans on a level playing field, are no less two-faced. We humans, they say, are not in a world of our own. To the contrary, we share our world with an almost unimaginable variety of non-human kinds, forming relationships with and among them that ramify through ever-extending networks of influence and agency. And yet, at the centre of any network, you will always find a human. Why? Because human beings, according to those who take this view, are unique among living creatures in the extent to which they have the capacity to enrol other kinds into their own lifeways. They do so in their extensive use of inanimate objects as tools or for the manufacture of artefacts, in the domestication of plants and animals to suit their purposes, and through sundry other interventions. Thus humankind is posited as the pivot around which the balance of the human and the non-human turns. Yet the pivot is itself founded in one of the most potent myths of modernity. It is the myth of how, many millennia ago, the distant ancestors of modern-day humans broke the bonds of nature that hold all other animals captive, and launched themselves on the path of history. Paradoxically, an approach which purports to dismantle the distinction between the human and the non-human, and to level the playing field, is justified on the grounds that in their manner of engagement with material things, and in the progressive history of that engagement, human beings are radically distinct from all other living kinds. Hardly could a symmetrical approach rest on a more asymmetrical foundation!2
The truth is that in a more-than-human world, nothing exists in isolation. Humans may share this world with non-humans, but by the same token, stones share it with non-stones, trees with non-trees and mountains with non-mountains. Yet where the stone ends and its contrary begins cannot be ascertained with any finality. The same goes for the tree and the mountain, even for the human. It is a condition of life that everything leaks, and nothing is locked in. Of course we can tell things apart. Ask me to point to another human being, or to a stone, a tree or a mountain, and I can readily do so. But what I’m pointing to is not an entity that is in any sense self-contained. My attention is rather directed towards a place from which I see something happening, a going-on that spills out into its surroundings, including myself. I see the stone in its stoning, the tree in its arborescence, the mountain in its rising and falling. Even a fellow human being I see in his or her humaning. We should replace our nouns for naming things with verbs: ‘to stone’, ‘to tree’, ‘to mountain’, ‘to human’. At once the world we inhabit, and that we share with so many other things, no longer appears ready-cut, into things of this sort or that, along the lines of a classification. Instead we find ourselves pitched into a world in which things are ever-differentiating from one another along the folds and creases of their formation. Everything has – or, better, is – the story of its differentiation. Thus the story of a stone, a tree or a mountain, like the story of a human being, is also the story of those things or beings that, over time, become other to it – the moss, the bird, the mountaineer.
Being and becoming
Only when we appreciate things as their stories can we begin to correspond with them. So you, the reader, should practise this way of seeing before embarking upon the following essays. We are so used to taking a rearward view, to capturing things a moment too late, when they have already settled into the shapes and categories assigned to them. As in the game of grandmother’s footsteps, the world creeps up on us behind our backs, but freezes on the instant when we turn around to look. To correspond we need to go behind the scenes, to join with the creepers and to move along with them in real time. Immediately upon doing so, what grandmother sees only as statues come vibrantly to life. The statue is already cast, but the creepers are alive in the casting. Theirs is a stance not of being but of becoming. Corresponding with them calls for a shift, as philosophers would say, from ontology to ontogeny. Ontology is about what it takes for a thing to exist, but ontogeny is about how it is generated, about its growth and formation. This shift, moreover, has important ethical implications. For it suggests that things are far from closed to one another, each wrapped up in its own, ultimately impenetrable world of being. On the contrary, they are fundamentally open, and all participate in one indivisible world of becoming. Multiple ontologies signify multiple worlds, but multiple ontogenies signify one world. Since, in their growth or movement, the things of this world respond to one another, they are also responsible. And in this one world of ours, responsibility is not for some but not others. It is a burden that all must carry.
Now there are some who can only comprehend a way of thinking by first assigning it to a school of thought. And from what I’ve said so far, they would probably guess that I was schooled in phenomenology. It’s perfectly true that I have been influenced by thinkers identified with this tradition. Yet phenomenology has not, for me, been a point of departure. I have never thought of it as an approach or way of working that I might first absorb and then apply. Like most things philosophical, it has grown on me more or less serendipitously, and has wormed its way into my thinking without my really noticing it. No doubt, this home-grown phenomenology of mine takes all kinds of liberties with the canonical texts, many of which I am happy to leave unread. Textual exegesis is a task for trained philosophers, and not for amateurs like me. I have always been slightly bemused by scholars who bury their heads in the most arcane and impenetrable of texts in the effort, they tell us, to get to the bottom of our experience as beings in a world. You would think that the best way to fathom the depths of human experience would be to attend to the world itself, and to learn directly from what it has to tell us. This is what inhabitants do all the time, in their daily lives, and we have much to learn from them. That’s why I continue to insist that if we are even to begin to resolve the crisis in our habitation of the world, then we should listen to the wisdom of inhabitants, whether they be humans or beings of other kinds, rather than taking shelter in the closeted self-referentiality of philosophical discourse.
If, today, our world is in crisis, it is because we have forgotten how to correspond. We have engaged, instead, in campaigns of interaction. Parties to interaction face each other with their identities and objectives already in place, and transact in ways that serve, but do nothing to transform, their separate interests. Their difference is given from the start, and remains afterwards. Interaction is thus a between relation. Correspondence, however, goes along. The trouble is that we have been so wrapped up in our interactions with others that we have failed to notice how both we and they go along together in the current of time. As I’ve tried to show, correspondence is about the ways along which lives, in their perpetual unfolding or becoming, simultaneously join together and differentiate themselves, one from another. This shift from interaction to correspondence entails a fundamental reorientation, from the between-ness of beings and things to their in-between-ness.3 Think of a river and its banks. We might speak of the relation of one bank to the other and, crossing a bridge, we might find ourselves halfway between the two. But the banks are perpetually forming and re-forming as the river waters sweep by. These waters flow in-between the banks, in a direction orthogonal to the span of the bridge. To say of beings and things that they are in-between is to align our awareness with the waters; to correspond with them is to join this awareness with the flow. Just such a shift of orientation is needed, I believe, if we are to understand the world as one that we can inhabit both now and for the foreseeable future. It is, in short, a condition for sustainable living.
A waste of knowing
All knowledge is crap: the waste product of a metabolic reaction. That, at any rate, is the conclusion which inevitably follows from the model of knowledge production imposed by our masters, whether they be educational institutions, business corporations or agents of the state. According to this model, knowledge is produced by harvesting quantities of data, and feeding it into machines that digest or process this ‘input’ and excrete the results, also known as ‘output’, at the other end. This excrement is the marketable currency of the knowledge economy. To the extent that human beings are involved at all in the productive process, they are but operators or technicians, there to serve the machines: to keep them supplied and in working order. Ideally, their presence and activity – beyond ensuring that the machines work – should have no bearing on the results. Inputs go in, outputs come out, what happens in-between is of no particular consequence. And as the results pile up, and the excremental heaps of knowledge relentlessly swell, life itself is consigned to the margins, fated to scavenge what it can from the accumulated waste of data processing on an industrial scale.
It is not beyond our grasp, however, to imagine an alternative world, in which the machines have been replaced with people. These people might still speak of ‘data’, but they would intend the term to be taken literally, as that which is given to them, so that they might live and know. They accept, with good grace, what the world offers to them, rather than attempting to extract – whether by force or subterfuge – what it does not. They are nourished by this offering, just as they are by the food they eat, and, as with food, they go on to digest it. But for them digestion is, above all, a process of life and growth. In producing knowledge, then, they are also producing their own selves as people who know. They are of course aware that any such process entails a degree of friction: not everything can be incorporated into growth and some things pass through undigested. There is surely no craft that does not, in the fashioning of its materials, generate copious quantities of waste, whether in the form of dust, shavings, chips or off-cuts. It is no different with the crafts of the intellect. But in this alternative world, waste is not knowledge. It only becomes knowledge when it is re-entered into a process of life.
No living being, however, can persist indefinitely, nor can it carry on its life in isolation. The continuity of life – and hence of knowledge too – requires of every being that it should play its part in bringing other lives into existence and sustaining them for however long it takes for the latter, in turn, to engender further life. It follows that all living, and all knowing, is intrinsically social, whether it be of trees in a wood, beasts in a herd or human beings in a community. Social life is one long correspondence. More precisely, it is a tangled mesh of correspondences, all going on concurrently, which weave into and around one another. They run, spinning here and there into topics like eddies in a stream. And they have three distinguishing properties. First, every correspondence is a process: it carries on. Secondly, correspondence is open-ended: it aims for no fixed destination or final conclusion, for everything that might be said or done invites a follow-on. Thirdly, correspondences are dialogical. They are not solitary but go on between and among participants. It is from these dialogical engagements that knowledge continually arises. To correspond is to be ever-present at the cusp where thinking is on the point of settling into the shapes of thought. It is to catch ideas on the fly, in the ferment of their incipience, lest they be washed away with the current and forever lost.
The rigour of amateurs
In the correspondences that make up this book, I have revelled in the freedom to throw off the shackles of academic convention, and to write unashamedly as an amateur. All true scholars, I believe, are amateurs. Literally, the amateur is one who studies a topic not – like the professional – in order to stage a career, but for the love of it, motivated by a sense of care, personal involvement and responsibility. Amateurs are correspondents. And in study they find a way of life that harmonizes with their whole way of living in the world. Admittedly, this appeal to amateurism is not without its pitfalls, especially in a political climate in which professional expertise is routinely dismissed as the posturing of a technocratic elite more interested in shoring up their own status and privilege than in listening to the common sense of ordinary, unlettered folk. Something must be added to our definition of what it means to be an amateur, lest we risk a descent into crude populism.
On reflection, the two words I think we need are rigour and precision. Amateur study, to be worthy of the name, must be rigorous and precise. Both terms, however, call for some unpacking. Thinking about the idea of rigour initially put me in mind of my own lifelong attempts, as an amateur musician, to master the cello. While they have involved years of practice, struggle, frustration and even pain, they have nevertheless brought a great sense of personal fulfilment. Rigour has its rewards. Recently, however, I had the good fortune to read an article by the artist and visual anthropologist Amanda Ravetz, and it forced me to think again.4 Ravetz is concerned with what it means to say of art that it is a process of research, in a context in which research of all kinds is coming under increasingly prescriptive regimes of assessment. Currently, the gold standard for research rests on three criteria: originality, rigour and significance. It is not unreasonable, Ravetz thinks, to judge artistic research by its significance and originality. Rigour, however, risks killing it off. But is this the same rigour, I wondered, that I bring to my cello practice?
One can question the etymology of the word. Ravetz traces it to the Middle English variants of rig, covering everything from the strip of the medieval ploughman to the spine of an animal and the roof-ridge of a house. My dictionary, however, finds the root of the word in the Latin rigere, ‘to be stiff’, with the further connotations of rectitude, rigidity, numbness and morbidity. Whichever derivation you prefer – and perhaps they are connected – hardness and severity seem to be at the heart of it. Rigour is bereft of feeling, yields nothing to experience, and induces instant paralysis in anything living or moving with which it might come into contact. Is this the way of the so-called ‘hard sciences’? Then it is one to which the amateur scholar must be resolutely opposed. For having chosen to align his or her entire life and being with the subject of study, the amateur seeks a softer and more sympathetic approach, one that both answers to the call of the subject and is in turn answerable to it. The response is tinged with responsibility, curiosity with care. There is what Ravetz calls a ‘correspondence with felt vitality’. And for her, this correspondence is anything but rigorous. This doesn’t mean that it is thoughtless, bland or insensitive to difference. The conventional opposition between expertise and common sense tends to imagine the former as consisting of peaks of knowledge, rising from an otherwise homogeneous and featureless plateau. The landscape of correspondence, however, is infinitely variegated. To correspond with things is to follow these variations. ‘The thinking that joins with things,’ as Ravetz puts it, is ‘heterogeneous, emergent, situated and cloudy.’5 It is continuously in touch with feeling, with lived experience. What does it mean, then, to study along these lines?
We are dealing, here, with a contrast between two kinds of thinking. There’s a thinking that joins things up, and a thinking that joins with
