Tim Ingold's 'Lines'

Lines: a brief history

A while ago when reporting on a lecture I went to given by Tim Ingold, I suggested that his two books on line were an essential read. ‘Lines: A Brief History’ and ‘The Life of Lines’ both open out our thinking about drawing into the theatre of life itself and help those of us that draw to invest our drawings with a wide range of possible meanings. I also stated at the time that I would provide a summary of the two books and give an indication of possible ways to use them.

Ingold, T. (2016) Lines a Brief History London: Routledge

In 'Lines a Brief History' Ingold points out that a wide range of human activities including walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing all need to proceed in linear directions and that embedded into the very language that we talk about these things are line metaphors. For instance in order to tell a story we move events from A to B, we stretch out our sentences into lines of text. As we walk we create lines, both physically, (Richard Long makes lines by walking through grass, but so do we all.) as well as metaphorically. The old idea of the Wyrd for instance uses the image of an invisible line that is connected to you from birth, (a sort of ghost of the umbilical cord), as you move through life this line entangles itself around all the people and things you interact with, eventually weaving a cloth that is literally the tapestry of your life. In this book Tim Ingold imagines a world in which everything is interwoven or interconnected by lines and lays the foundations for a completely new discipline: the anthropological archaeology of the line.

Ingold is very much a polymath and uses a wide range of sources to illustrate his points, including archaeology, classical studies, art history, linguistics, psychology, musicology, philosophy and drawing.

Ingold's book is a great help when writing artist's positioning statements. He uses visual metaphors to demonstrate that you can take a concept and use it across many different disciplines to illuminate the way that human beings think, and reminds us that thinking itself begins with embodied experiences. For instance the idea of the 'Wyrd' begins in the actual experience of one human being being linked to another by a 'line' or umbilical cord. He points out that one of the earliest uses of vegetable fibres was to twist them together to create lines, lines that we call threads, strings or ropes. As we began to use these lines of thread, the various uses we put them to allowed us to think about different things. This is an extended mind theory which suggests that we use the stuff of the world to develop ideas or trains of thought. Threads allow us to weave ideas together, strings to tie them together and rope to scale up and over them. For instance lets say we are fishing using a line and rod, we might develop all sorts of ideas that begin with the idea of a connection between one thing and another. A line physically connects two things together, but the way it does varies. Alfred Gell introduced us to the ‘spring-hook fishing trap’ from Guyana. It consists of a fishing line linked to a bent tree branch, which is held in place by an easily displaced notch, one that the fish in effect 'trips' as it pulls on the line. When the fish bites down on the bait, its mouth is caught on the hook and in its struggle to get away it un-notches the held down branch, which springs upright, its violent release throwing the fish up into the air, leaving it dangling. In Guyana it is known as ‘the trap that turns fish into fruit’. One minute the fish is swimming and whoosh! The next minute it is hanging like fruit from a tree. As a metaphor for the harsh often sudden confrontation of death within life it is very powerful, just as easily read by Western European art audiences as fishermen from Guyana. Alfred Gell is another anthropologist which I presume is why he is also read extensively by artists. Anthropologists watch how a society thinks and as outside observers often without a good knowledge of that society's verbal language, they will often see how things are used by a society to think with, much easier than that society itself. I.e. they are in a very good position to observe the extended mind at work and the extended mind theory is as far as I'm concerned essential to an understanding of how art works. What you make allows your audience to 'see' an idea, not just to think about a concept in the head, but to physically know it. Most of Ingold's references rely on the extended mind theory and for someone making physical objects that have ideas embedded within them, his insights can be a real help, especially when trying to find the right words with which to explain how something you have made relates to life's experiences. 

The Life of Lines

Ingold, T. (2015) The life of lines London: Routledge

In 'The Life of Lines' Ingold takes us on a journey through movement, knots, weather, atmosphere and surfaces, eventually coming to what for myself was a very important conclusion: "to human is a verb." In order 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 these lines and how they can be variously entangled. Following on from Lines: A Brief History, the book includes meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human.

The first section argues that our world of life is woven from knots, and not built from blocks. He shows how the principles of knotting and weaving underwrite 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. (Think of the way plant roots entangle themselves into and with the soil)

In the second section, Ingold argues that to study living lines, (you could just say moving through life leaves traces and that these can be read as lines), we must also study the weather. He asks what is common to walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling and writing, and decides that the answer is atmosphere, or particular types of weather. He then develops a meteorology that seeks the common denominator of breath, time, mood, sound, memory, colour and the sky. This section opens out an awareness of our emotional attachment to experience. For instance a 'pathetic fallacy' is often used to describe something non human using a human emotion. The weather in particular can be given human emotions to reflect mood. John Ruskin introduced the term and explained it with an analysis of a poem:

They rowed her in across the rolling foam—
The cruel, crawling foam...

Ruskin points out that "the foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which reason is unhinged by grief." He goes on to state; "Now, so long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight, which it induces: we are pleased, for instance, with those lines ... above quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow". (From Modern Painters)
In some ways Ingold's text could be critiqued in a similar way, it works at its best when the
analogies he uses ring true.

In the third section Ingold takes lines into human social life. He shows that for life to have meaning, the things we do must be framed within the interconnectedness of the lives we build. In continually answering to one another, these lives enact a principle of correspondence that is fundamentally social, the knotting together of our experiences as our life lines become entangled together being a process and a doing, rather than a thing that can be isolated out of the totality of the experience.

Again I found Ingold very useful, especially in the way he articulates the problems that emerge from a world dominated by scientific objectivity and social isolation. His reminder that nouns separate one thing from another being something that has had a particularly deep impact on my thought. 

If you are writing a positioning statement perhaps Tim Ingold is at his most useful when you want to humanise what you are doing. He has a way of writing that might not be scientifically verifiable, but which comes across as a heartfelt desire for everyday life to be the focus and centre out of which all meaning is made. He is after all an anthropologist and that's what they do, study human lives. 

This is Tim Ingold on walking, in this case on walking a city's pavements. 

“I have but one further observation to make in this regard, which brings me back to the subject of paving. It is simply that boots impress no tracks on a paved surface. People, as they walk the streets, leave no trace of their movements, no record of their having passed by. It is as if they had never been. There is, then, the same detach-ment, of persons from the ground, that runs as I have shown like a leitmotif through the recent history of western societies. It appears that people, in their daily lives, merely skim the surface of a world that has been previously mapped out and constructed for them to occupy, rather than contributing through their movements to its ongoing formation.” (From 'Being Alive') 

Ingold by implication, also reminds us that by wearing shoes we no longer touch the world. It is only on those rare occasions such as on sunny days on the beach, that we take off our shoes and socks and feel the ground beneath us with our feet. As he puts it, the situation reflects that in our society we have seen the 'elevation of head over heels'. In respect to this he then finally reminds us that in Japanese there exists the concept of 'kawada', (little hill) which represents a human being's fundamental orientation towards the ground and he warns us not to forget that we come from the ground and will return to it. 

See also:

Tim Ingold: On not knowing and paying attention

Tim Ingold's keynote speech for the art and materiality conference 

I swear I saw this 

In praise of verbs

To use or not to use theory

The exhibition 'lines a brief history'

The straight line