La vie dans un monde sans objets

Tim Ingold, author of Lines: A Brief History, works at the intersection of anthropology and phenomenology. The piece he has written in response to the textiles issue of Perspective could almost have been entitled “With Deleuze, against Gell” for its emphasis on things as opposed to objects, the forces that pass through them rather than their definitions, the weave and interlacing of threads rather than linear segments, and flows of materials rather than agency.Ingold’s piece in this issue of Perspective serves as a metaphor of textile phenomenology: a multi-directional process of thought, proliferating and leaking – to borrow the term he shares with Andy Clark. Ingold’s excursion into the world of craft to describe his reflective practice as an anthropologist, and that of the history of art into the rhizomatic work of the human sciences, stimulate a form of horizontal thinking, an environmental approach that sees links between the chef, alchemist and painter, and compares lace to the solar plexus or a spider’s web. Ingold observes and brings clearly to light the different vital forces that flow through actor-networks and thing-meshes, and in so doing senses a form of textility. [Anne Lafont]