Mar 08, 2022 (2nd post) for UWE Literature review
Architecture Foundation. 100 Day Studio: Tim Ingold – Making Growing Thinking, 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FptmjWzj6Vw.
Tim Ingold is a social anthropologist, currently Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.
In his talk, Ingold provides insight into his associative thinking process. He explores the interplay of concepts such as organism and object, growing and making or adhere and cohere. Ingold invites us on a walk through his head, were we meet figures like Jacques Monod, Richard Dawkins, Karl Marx, James Gibson, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson (in order of appearance) and with whom Ingold gets into a brief conversations and exchanges words and concepts, that he collects like mosaik stones and that he assembles in unconventional ways to create images that provide new perspectives that allows us to see “that we have to think quite differently about thinking itself.” (min 10:20)
It is a lecture that seems light and playful at first, but on closer inspection reveals how the explanation of Ingold’s associative thinking process is interwoven with insights, that can probably only be produced from just this kind of thought process itself.
It is “a thinking that flows, that joins with the world rather than joining it up” (min 21:30) as Ingold puts it himself, framed as a question, whether this kind of thinking is possible at all.
Ingold starts with a question raised by French biochemist and Nobel prize laureate Jacques Monod of how exactly one would recognise a living organism when you see one. It can not be decided by the form nor the function, as one might assume. Thinking of a perfectly human or animal looking and behaving robot, this becomes immediately clear. To distinguish a made object (artefact) from living being (organism) you need to look at the process of how they came into being, according to Monod: artefacts are made from the outside, organisms grow from within.
Ingold then asks: What distinguishes artifacts, made by humans from those made by animals, like for example a bee hive? He discusses this question with biologist Richard Dawkins’ idea of extended phenotype and Marx’s conception, that prior to a human made artifact is the thought, or the other way around every artifact “is the expression of a thought.”
So the presence of thought in the process of becoming, seems to be what distinguishes artifact from organism, Ingold concludes. Prior thought is needed for making, not for growing. Referring back to growing from the inside and the being made from the outside, Ingold thinks about the boundary that must exist to define inside and outside. A boundary that must have some kind of surface. In conversation with the thinking of James Gibson, Ingold states “So on the inside is stuff, on the outside is thought.“ (min 7:23)
Ingold then focuses on the meaning of making and growing. The imagined question “What are you making?” points to the desired outcome of the process: a product (or artifact).
“Growing invites a different kind of question”, like “what is going on here?” (min 8:45), this question then not points to a product, but to a process.
The two concepts of product and process and their relation to making and growing take Ingold into a conversation with Martin Heidegger through his essay “Bauen Wohnen Denken” (Building Dwelling Thinking). Like Heidegger, Ingold turns the conventional order of making and growing in relation to thinking “back to front” to show “that we have to think quite differently about thinking itself.” (min 10:15)
Ingold asks what comes first, making or growing? Conventional thinking (such as Marx’s) suggests that “You start with the idea and end with the object, and in between the start and end point, stuff happens”, (min 10:40) that can be described as “a sort of growth, sort of becoming, but it’s a growth that is bracketed between the two ends of making, between the initial idea and the final form.” (min 11:00)
In other words, there are the two ends of what Ingold calls “growing in making” and these two ends are the initial idea on one side and the made object on the other.
“That [..] might be how it looks from the outside”, Ingold gives to consider.1
From the inside, “joined with the makers of their work, it begins to look very different” Ingold goes on and describes what Ranulph Glanville would describe as a circular process, where maker and material are in some kind of dialogue, where one influences (or inspires) the other.2
Describing the process of making from within Ingold gives the example of making a basket which leads him to considering the concepts of adding and joining – adhere and cohere, ”between putting elements side by side, as say, in the mosaic and weaving them together along their length as in a tapestry or a basket.” (min 15:10)
Ingold then meets french philosopher Henri Bergson, who helps to weave the concept of thinking into the concepts collected so far. For Bergson thinking “was intrinsically linked to fabrication [..] the assembly of bits and pieces, as in the mosaic.” (min 20:30)
“The psychology of cognition has long held to the tenet that any new thought can only arise as a new combination of elements of old ones. So all innovation can only be recombination. [..] It’s as if the mind were a kaleidoscope with a structure fixed by the arrangement of its mirrors.”3 (min 21:45)
Thoughts, Ingold sums up, can only consist of the bits and pieces that the world provides. And he compares thinking to breathing – breathing in: thinking and breathing out: acting (or making).
Referring to the analogy of the kaleidoscope again, Ingold says that thought lies, not so much in a defined order of patterns, but “in the shake itself, in the disturbance of the mind.”
But “real thinking”, says Ingold, must be beyond recombination. “It’s about thinking, that continually overtakes thought. And that kind of thinking is not a making, but a growing.” (min 25:00) In other words, Ingold suggest here that real thinking can not be achieved in a traditional linear process.
Ingold suggest to look at what he does not give a name to, but what one could call being human or maybe less bold, design process4 not in the traditional linear way as:
- beginning: thought (or idea, or theory)
- middle: growth (or making)
- end: object (or human creation, or real thinking?)
Ingold rather wants to look at “both thinking and making as inside a process of growth, [..] so what we find in thinking and in making, is not a proliferation of ends, but the perpetuity of new beginnings.” (min 25:33)
1 ..the look from the outside stands for the traditional university approach, according to Ranulph Glanville in his talk “How design and cybernetics reflect each other”
2 Ranulph Glanville “How design and cybernetics reflect each other”
3 This could also be the description of what happens when a Korsakow-film plays”.
4 Like for example Ranulph Glanville did in “How design and cybernetics reflect each other”