Those who have kept track of Tim Ingold’s recent books will find “The Life of Lines” a stringent continuation of the themes that he has previously covered. Those who have not been able to read as quickly as Ingold publishes may find his newest book a good place to start. It does not require readers to be familiar with his previous writing as it provides, in a sense, a succinct summary of it. The format of this volume makes reading easy: the content is divided into 30 very short chapters, most of which are less than four pages long. There are many instructive illustrations throughout the book (including several of Ingold’s drawings) and each chapter focuses on one key idea. Although the chapters are systematically arranged, they need not necessarily be read in the given order as readers may feel encouraged to browse the topics by headings, ranging from themes more intuitively related to lines (such as “walls,” “knots and joints,” “surface,” “ground”) to chapters in which Ingold develops his ideas about lines into a theory of (almost) everything, namely a theory of the cosmos (“wind,” “weather,” “atmosphere,” “sky,” “colour,” “sound”) and of the living beings within it (“to human is a verb”).
Unlike some of Ingold’s earlier works, notably “The Perception of the Environment” (2000) and “Being Alive” (2011), this is not a collection of previously published articles and presentations but of essays that were specifically written for this volume—which does add to its coherence. While his “Lines. A Brief History” (published in 2007) has some obvious connections to the book under review here, it is only in the present volume that Ingold creates a body of thought that he himself labels “linealogy.” This “linealogical” approach is set apart, most explicitly in the opening chapters, from alternative approaches that conceptualize the world as made up of “blocks,” “containers,” “chains” or “blobs.” Ingold has attacked the “block” approach in previous works where he has variously called it “the Sigma principle” and “the perspective of inversion.” Despite the variation in labelling, the “block approach” in all these instances stands for most conventional work in the natural and cognitive sciences that relies on thinking in modules and on integrating objects and their relations into systems.
A prototypical manifestation of this view is the world of mechanized printing in which letters and signs are depicted as clearly bounded individual entities (a fixed number of “types” in a type case) which can be brought into ever-changing complex assemblages and re-arranged accordingly. In previous books (most elaborately in “Lines. A Brief History”) Ingold has shown how this example of changes from handwriting into moveable letter types illustrates the more general tendency of modern thought to modularize and digitize. What can be seen in writing is paralleled in (other) social domains: individuals, social groups, cultures etc. are seen as made up of data points or are themselves treated as distinct modules in conventional kinship diagrammes, in social network analysis and in most of social theory. In all these contexts, social objects are defined a solo before they are subsequently positioned in constellations, systems and assemblages. In opposition to this, Ingold presents the “organic” lines as drawn in handwriting and through similar bodily movements that make up the living world. As it happens, an ethnographic study of typesetting may in fact show that typesetters, a profession that has virtually disappeared in the digital age, were much more aware of the flow of reading, and of typesetting itself, than is usually acknowledged, including in this book. Talking to a typesetter about this (my father was trained as one) left no doubt in my mind that the necessity and possibility of creating “ligatures,” merging letters so that they could be more easily read, was seen by typesetters long before Ralf Dahrendorf made the corresponding binding forces a point of attention for social theory. But the replacement of mechanical typesetting by digital technology underlines that there is undeniably a tendency towards increasing modularizing in theory and practice, and Tim Ingold has traced this tendency across a whole array of domains ranging from writing, music and architecture to the theory of living beings, the cosmos and social relations.
Where everything went wrong, in Ingold’s view, was when the mechanistic principles, and the modularist thinking that goes with mechanics, were applied to the living world. His own lineaology is an attempt to retrace this faulty step across various domains and to replace it with a different approach that is more appropriate to the living world. Although it is not made explicit in this volume, a linealogy thereby also provides an alternative to the growing popularity of actor-network-theory (à la Bruno Latour) to which many other social scientists—who are also critical of a mechanistic perspective on the world—resort.
Many social scientists will share a critique of an overtly mechanistic view of the world consisting of “blocks” and of cultures thought of as “containers”—or at least they will be uneasy with current manifestations of this thinking that was prominent in functionalism and structuralism. But Ingold’s critique is more radical and goes further by not only targetting thinking in “blocks” or “containers” but also the use of less loaded terms such as “blobs” and connected concepts such as “assemblages” or “chains.” The prototypical examples of thinking in blobs against which Ingold turns are Durkheim’s notion of the social as “superorganic” and Maurice Bloch’s explicit theory of “social blobs” (in his Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge) according to which there are core cognitive blobs but also continuities between universal core blobs and the narrative and cultural diachronic levels of wider blobs. For Ingold it is not enough to soften the nature/culture dichotomy by highlighting continuities between distinct levels, and by highlighting process, internal heterogeneity and complexity which allow for a modified but intact division of labour between the natural and the social sciences in the way that Bloch (and others) envisage it. Ingold’s linealogy is much more uncompromising to the degree that will no doubt irritate some readers.
When Ingold writes that life extends along lines (rather than blobs, containers or chains) he includes both very basic organic processes such as simple sea creatures “sending out tendrils” [11] or spiders creating their webs but also social processes such as people reaching out towards one another in a handshake or when developing the technical skill of joining two pieces of timber in a way that “one piece is made ready to receive the other” [23]. Importantly, the pieces (be it loops of string that make a knot, timber beams that make a wood cabin or humans that make a social relationship) do not fuse into one another or lose their identities in the composite whole. He describes the link between the entities as a “with” link of correspondence which he sets in contrast to an additive “and” link of assemblages. This is not just a new set of terms to describe the same phenomenon. Connections can only usefully be considered to be links of a chain when ultimately defined from the outside, through exteriority—just as a mechanic would externally link up pieces of a chain or clockwork that then make up a functioning mechanism [23]. This conventional view has entered the social science discourse when we routinely talk of “social mechanisms” or “articulations.” By contrast, Ingold’s lexicon of “correspondences” and “sympathy” seeks to grasp the internal and lasting links of living beings, beings that are directed at something, and oriented towards one another. It is the resulting processes of growth and memory that make living beings distinctive. This is clear, for instance, with regard to children who grow up together in a family and who retain kinship ties even if they disperse later on in life. But it would also be true for bones linked to one another when growing as part of a joint—or logs that were once made to connect to create a cabin. All of these retain traces of being connected in this way. These “with” kind of links are described and depicted by Ingold as lines, illustrated by the ligaments that bind the joints of bones [26], the roots and filaments of plants [44], the flagella of bacteria [5], the whirls of the wind [66-67], the lines of my gaze [86], the pulsating light of stars [95], the beams of light [98], the line of pitch in music [109], the lines of stories and dialogues [116] and the streams of knowledge that we join up in education [148-149]. In other words, this is the attempt to rethink pretty much everything in terms of lines, not just the more obvious things such as places that are made up by intersecting lines of movement but also the “threads of scent” [65], of sounds and beams that artists and skilled practitioners often depict. It also includes the surface of the earth that may appear to be made up of heaps of pieces (or blobs) of various granularity but which Ingold insists should be seen as the product of a mesh of lines (intermeshed lines of growth and decomposition processes) when rightly understood in terms of living processes. What we, in modernity, tend to represent and create as a flat surface with a clear above and below is in fact a snapshot of long-term processes of surfacing or submerging. Similarly, Ingold would insist that what modernity conceives of as a clearly bounded human being is in fact a product of an ongoing process of “humanifying.”
The essence of being human in this account, therefore, is not being a core of material substrate with some added properties on top (whether conceived in a Cartesian dualism of body and soul, nature and culture, or one of core blobs and narrative blobs). Rather, the essence of humanness is humans striving to humanify themselves, one another and the rest of the universe—the human aspirations to make the universe ready to receive us, if you will. This way of leading a human life in terms of its aspirations and apprehensions is again described by Ingold as a process of “laying down a line” [118] of growing and of leading a life as in a biography, a storyline.
Ingold’s line of argument is thought-provoking throughout. It replaces, en passant [154-156], the established notions of kinship, economy and religion which no longer appear as matters of shared substance, of production units and of shared beliefs but rather in terms of attending to one another, attending to the materials we live on and in terms of recognizing what we owe to the world that enables our lives. It also takes a fresh look at education (the subject of the book manuscript that Ingold hopes to finish next) by replacing the notion of knowledge as a corpus of information “out there” that is transmitted in education and culture with practices of retracing the trails of predecessors and of attending to things in a particular way. But here is the rub: what if part of the human way of attending to things (in some situations very successfully) is exactly this capacity to look at things “exteriorily”, from the outside, in the abstract—including perceiving ourselves ex-centrically as some kind of blob? It could be argued that all this thinking in chains, blocks, blobs and so forth, dreaded so much by Ingold, is one specifically human way of attending to the world. What if the essence of being human is not restricted to the ways of phenomenological linealogy but is to be found in the capacity of being able to switch between seeing or leading a life along such lines, on the one hand, and on the other hand abstracting objects that we then profitably see and treat as blobs, blocks etc. Is perceiving life as lines primary while thinking of it in blobs is a derived or inverted mode? Not necessarily, since punctuation and delimitation are also common experiences. It is intriguing to juxtapose the new proposal for a linealogy with existing theories of human eccentricity as proposed by Helmuth Plessner. Plessner tried to take account of the fact that humans may experience their lives in terms of flow and life-lines but do not do so throughout as they continually and even pre-discursively shift between embodied and eccentric perspectives in an open process. The human ability to imagine life after death while at the same time realizing the finality of one’s earthly life can be seen in this light, too. It is interesting that Ingold’s linealogy effectively denies death, which it sees merely as a deviation, a dent in the line, instead of “the end of the line” [132] while the general merit of this book on the whole is exactly to think things through to the very end.
While these nagging doubts remain, the theory of linealogy developed in this book, like much of Ingold’s writings over the last fifteen years, does a good job in challenging Cartesian and other dualisms. It is stimulating throughout and one is left wondering how rehabilitating linealogical thought could be employed to advance a rapprochement between the social and natural sciences that is more than one giving in to the other. And when “The Life of Lines” in turn and from the very start sets up another dualism, namely between “weaving from knots” versus “building from blocks” [i] one would hope that this will stimulate further discussion on how to combine the two. As in his other publications, Ingold finds instances of the first perspective in the non-European and pre-modern which he hopes to see put in place in a new post-Cartesian philosophy and post-Durkheimian sociology. I read this book as an invitation to investigate whether “weaving from knots” and “building from blocks” are indeed as incommensurate in social practice and in social theory as they are depicted here. In an academic landscape of entrenched divisions it could stimulate social theory at large if the invitation was taken up by many readers of this book.
