Seminar for University 'Performativity' Research Theme.
Institute for Advanced Study, University of Bristol.
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5.15pm, Monday 12th December 2005
Professor Tim Ingold, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen
'Up, across and along'
The painter Paul Klee has said that to draw is to take a line for a walk.
The line drawn is the trace of a gesture, just as the path on the ground
is the trace left by the footsteps of walkers. Lines and paths always
overtake their destinations, for wherever one may be at any moment, there
is always somewhere further one can go. But now suppose that the line or
path is cut into segments, and each segment rolled up into a point or dot.
To reconstruct the journey we have to join the dots. In the reconstruction
the original gestural trace is replaced by an assembly of point-to-point
connectors.
I argue that this replacement is symptomatic of the transition to
modernity in the related fields of travel (where wayfaring is replaced by
destination-oriented transport), mapping (where the drawn sketch is
replaced by the route plan) and textuality (where storytelling is replaced
by the pre-composed plot). It has also transformed our understanding of
place: once a knot tied from multiple and interlaced strands of growth and
movement, it now figures as a node in a static network of connectors. To
an ever-increasing extent, people in modern metropolitan societies find
themselves in environments built as assemblies of connected elements. Yet
in practice, they continue to thread their own ways through these
environments, tracing paths as they go.
I suggest that to understand how people do not just occupy but inhabit the
environments in which they dwell, we might do better to revert from the
paradigm of the assembly to that of the walk.
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