Sign up or Log in
Are.na
Aaron Dowdy
the life of lines
Info

a reading of Ingold's text

9 Followers
This channel appears in
group study, theory of the line, and life of lines
View
Grid
Table

inversion: turning the world in on itself so that its lines and movements of growth become boundaries of containment

"Both the science of meteorology and the philosophy of aesthetics are products of the modern era, and it was above all the operation of inversion that marked its onset. Michel Serres... compares the world that is given to us – in which, when standing, we cast shadows by sunlight and, when seated, stylus in hand, we write our lines – and this same world comprehended as a scene which, through an optical back-projection by way of the black hole of the eye’s pupil, is cast as though fully formed, in appearance but not substance – that is, as an image – in the interiority of the mind. ‘Modernity begins’, Serres writes, ‘when this real world space is taken as a scene, and this scene ... turns inside out – like the finger of a glove or a simple optical diagram – and plunges into the utopia of a knowing, inner, intimate subject. This black hole absorbs the world.’ The wandering shadow and the written line of the ever- composing, worldly being have here been surrendered to vectors of projection that serve to transmit the total composition from a now exteriorized world into the recesses of the mind." (74)

Serres, Image, Modernity

the material world often thought of as landscape and artifact.

but what of the air? there is no conceptual framework for accommodating weather in fieldwork analysis

air is a medium... affords locomotion, respiration, and perception (james gibson)

it is the very condition of interaction (because of their suspension in the currents of the medium that things can interact)

Sloterdijk: a medial factor
(personal note: think of Bataille and the sun)

Serres: temps in french same root for weather and time (the shape of time)

ingolds word choice: weathering (what things undergo in exposure to the elements)

through this beings draw from the medium the inspiration, strength and resilience to carry on along their lines

weathering brings out texture, allowing a bind in sympathy, where whirls of elements turn to spinning lines, and the tempest gives birth to time

"the time of weather is a time without history" steven connor

weather is time experienced not chronologically but kairologically: attention to rhythmic relations

weather-world

two principal kinds of of lines: traces and threads

traces are formed on the surfaces, thread strung through the air

"is the path... a trace or thread?"

tom brown jr: tracks exist near the surface of the ground

creatures must perforce breathe the air as they walk the ground

two winds: how can the path be of the earth and of the air (wind along and felt in the wind?

thread-becoming-trace and trace-becoming-thread

wind-walking as with Dreamings in northern Australia

like a breaststroke "the first is a movement of gathering or recollection, the second a movement of propulsion"

"breathing is the way in which beings can have unmediated access to one another, on the inside, while yet spilling out into the cosmos in which they are equally immersed."

<b>drawing</b> breath

wind-walking
Tom Brown Jr. - Wikipedia
Tom Brown Jr. - Wikipedia

wandering & drawing
paul klee - drawing is "taking a line for a walk"
simply, walking as inscribing the ground
but this doesn't work, the walker's eyes are too close to the ground relative to the expanse of their walking
(Derrida) for this to be a fair comparison, the lidless eye would have to be somewhere near the tip of the finger when writing

ingold challenges inscription, and instead offers impression examing the footprint
again thinking against the stamp which occurs against the hard surface, the footprint is not on a surface but in a surface

footprints are individual
paths are social

wandering: impression over inscription

in admiring the snail's trails (likening to the reproductive impulse, the pulling into and the depositing, a push-pull, the dance of social-life), Ingold makes his first uncited connection to Deligny vis-a-vis de Certeau's thinking: the line is tactical rather than strategic. Its paths are "wandering... errant," meaning that lines aren't straight as wanderings, but sinuous.

Ingold and Deligny

ingold wants to think a storm's whirl to that of the whorl of a treeknot: both made by the force of winding and unwinding. this carries the two meanings of wind: twisting coil movements and the air in motion. this is how ingold begins to affiliate "lines and the weather."

two winds that whirl
spindle whorl
spindle whorl
generalized exchange
generalized exchange

Ingold's definition of inversion for this context: the pathways of growth and movement along which life is lived are converted into boundaries within which it is contained.

major quote: "the logic of inversion... leads us to imagine the living being that has thus spiraled in on itself as an externally bounded object, deceiving us into thinking that it is not so much a movement in itself as a container for life." (54)

Ingold's inversion
Join Are.na to follow the life of lines
Sign upExplore