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 Ingold
Aberdeen, March 2020
Notes
1 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
