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 things. In one case the things have already precipitated out, as data, from the processes of their formation; the task, then, is retrospectively to reconnect them. In the other, the things are ever-emergent, and the task is to enter into the forward movement of their ongoing generation. Consider, for example, the straight line, famously defined by Euclid as the shortest connection between points. Determine the points, and you have already specified the line. This line has no breadth; it is abstract and insensible. It is not like the taut strings of my cello, which have a certain weight and thickness, and which, moreover, bend and vibrate when bowed or plucked. It is not like the straight furrow of the ploughman that is cut as he goes along, and calls for his constant and vigilant attention so as to maintain its equidistance from, and alignment with, the adjacent rig. It is not like the rigging of the ship, which in its alternating tension and relaxation allows for the precise adjustment of the sails in response to prevailing winds. Nor is it like the perfectly straight lines that the artist Jaime Refoyo taught me to draw freehand, but only after having first instructed me in how to find a certain balance of forces and muscular tensions within my own body, calling also for a heightened perceptual awareness of my immediate surroundings. If there is rigour in these lines, it is neither immobile nor insentient. It lies, rather, in the precision of close attunement: in the tension of the cello string, yielding a determinate pitch on vibration; in the ploughman’s attention to the field; in the mariner’s attention to the wind; in my attention to my body and its environs.
It would seem that there are two varieties of rigour, virtually the opposite of each other: one that demands accuracy in the recording, measurement and integration of an unyielding world of objective facts; the other that calls for practised care and attentiveness in an ongoing relation between conscious awareness and lively materials. In the latter, and not the former, lies the rigour of correspondence. And this is where precision comes in. For it should not be confused with accuracy. Dancers, for example, are precise rather than accurate in the observations that allow them to attune their movements to one another. Here, precision rests on the capacity to flex in response to others’ movements. The same goes for any kind of craft, where the skill of the practitioner lies in an ability to attune the movements of the sensing body to tools and materials in a way that calls forth relations of line, surface, scale and proportion. The dancer and the artisan are amateurs. They are amateurs because their dance, their craft, proceeds along a way of life. Their practice is careful, attentive, rigorous, but its rigour is of the second kind. Let’s call it amateur rigour, a rigour that is flexible and in love with life, by contrast to the professional rigour that induces rigidity and paralysis.
The way of art
Corresponding with as much rigour and precision as I can command, I have tried in these essays to stay close to the grain of things. I want to show that the practice of thinking we often call ‘theory’ doesn’t mean having to lift off into a stratospheric realm of hyper-abstraction, or to mingle in our imagination with concepts that have drifted so far from the ground of experience, to which they owe their origin, as to have lost all touch with it. Quite to the contrary, theoretical work can be as much grounded in the materials and forces of the inhabited world as the conduct of any other craft. To practise theory as a mode of habitation is to mix and mingle, in one’s thinking, with the textures of the world. This means, if you will, not taking literal truths metaphorically, but taking metaphorical truths literally. The theorist can be a poet. For example, inspired by the poetry of Seamus Heaney, I might compare my digging for words to the crofter’s digging for peat, and my pen to a spade.6 I would be urged on by an intuition that a deeper truth lurks within the comparison, and in my theorizing, that’s the truth I’m trying to find. And I know that I’ll have a greater chance of finding it by going to ground than by lifting off. I should pick up a spade and dig! I should think, as I do so, of what the spade is telling me about the earth, or rather of what the earth is telling me through the spade. And I can then bring the lessons I have learned to my thinking on the page.
Taking metaphorical truths literally, however, is not just the way of poetry; it is also – and perhaps above all – the way of art. The work of the artist is to embody such truths, to make them viscerally present to us, so that we can experience them in their immediacy. The majority of essays gathered here were originally written in response to artistic provocations. Some were commissioned by the artists themselves, or by the curators of their works; others were composed on my own initiative. It is not my purpose to make any judgement, aesthetic or otherwise, of the art itself. I offer no expert interpretation or analysis. I write as an amateur respondent, not a professional critic. But working in the medium of words, I have set out to insert my own voice into the correspondence. And to be honest, I have very much enjoyed doing so. It has been a relief to drop my academic persona and write with my own voice, hand and heart. Above all, I have relished the freedom both to embrace fresh
