How the work of Tim Ingold unfolds Deleuze and Guattari´s ontology

Portuguese version HERE

11a International Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference, Unicamp, 2018: HERE

Nelson Job

Tim Ingolg

Deleuze & Guattari

In our communication I’m going to present the anthropology of Tim Ingold and the points where it unfolds Deleuze and Guattari´s ontology. We know how problematic it is to call Deleuze and Guattari’s work a “ontology” and I want to make clear right away that by “ontology”, going beyond the “study of being”, I’m following the Stoics and replacing, in a manner of speaking, Being by becoming.

That said, here is a short introduction to Tim Ingold: he is a British anthropologist born in 1948, son of an important specialist in fungi, Cecil Ingold. Since the beginning of his work, following the Steps of an author who influenced him, Gregory Bateson, Ingold was always a strange body in Anthropology, where many of his colleagues have a difficult time understanding his wanderings. His initial ethnographic work was among the skolts, natives of Finland, which he intends to resume in the near future. From 1999 onwards, Ingold started teaching in Aberdeen University, Scotland, where he finally found the freedom to minister his classes as he saw fit, for instance: his students were barefoot on class for greater contact with the environment. Ingold takes them to the beach to fly kites, and so to perceive immanence along the lines that join together the sand, student, kite and wind, even making wicker baskets, to work univocity along content and expression. Since the publication of his 2000 book, The Perception of environment, Ingold achieved the greatest international renown of his opus – which also began to influence Deleuze and Guattari, mainly on A Thousand Plateaus – even visiting Brazil a few times and finally having one of his books translated by Editora Vozes, Being Alive. Ingold is a frequent critic of the works of Lévi-Strauss and Bruno Latour, but more of this later. The anthropology of Ingold, according to himself, is anti-disciplinary, in the sense he criticizes the term interdisciplinary, making his anthropology flow together with art, education and psychology, while it has a philosophical derivation. Besides, in his latest book, Anthopology: why it matters, he adds that anthropology is philosophy with people in.

Concluding this introduction to Ingold, what moves me to this present communication is the fact that, despite the enormous influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, it seems that nobody else was able to advance their ontology up to this moment. What we usually get are original or not-so-original uses of their concepts, inserting them in unprecedented fields and advancing the understanding of the bibliography present on their texts. With Tim Ingold, it finally seems that somebody managed to go farther. This will be our present subject.

In the first place, the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari is understood as a “between” philosophy. What Ingold proposes in various moments of his work is that the place of between be replaced by the concept of along. The problem of between, for Ingold, is that it excludes part of the environment, and along includes everything, all the live inherent to the process. It is necessary to understand here that the ontology of Deleuze and Guattari would be something like the along. The idea here is only to make this explicit. However, the problem of between resonates on other authors, such as Bruno Latour and his famous Actor-Network Theory. Actor-Network Theory, despite the innumerous alterations applied to it by Latour over time, including disowning this name, separates the actors from the network, creating yet another dualism. In an amusing text of Being Alive, Ingold creates a spider in a conversation with an ant (ANT: Actor-Network Theory) declaring that the spider, that spins its web from itself, is in fact immanent to its “network”, which Ingold replaces with meshwork. Ingold’s critique to the idea of network is that it only concerns its nodes, and not what happens along them!

The question of the along took us inevitably to the question of meshworks in Ingold, which he drew from philosopher Henri Lefebvre. The meshworks emerge here, due to what was said before and being an image more efficient for immanence. And it is here Ingold brings another important contribution to the work of Deleuze and Guattari: it is in relation to the question of lines, whose entanglement will constitute a meshwork, as mentioned earlier. Ingold will depart from the use Deleuze and Guattari make in A Thousand Plateaus of the lines of painter Paul Klee, which on his own words, are alive; they are the point that went out for a walk. Ingold recovers Deleuze and Guattari’s idea where following the lines is different from “imitating”, or in other words, it is much more a question of itinerancy than “interaction”, due to the dynamism in the processes evoked here by Ingold. We will return to the interaction problem later. We can say that Ingold’s anthropology is about the itinerancies of the lines and their entanglements; he dedicated two books to the theme of lines, and they always appear along his work. These entanglements resonate with the haecceity Deleuze and Guattari recovered from Duns Scot.

Twittering Machine, Paul Klee

                                      

Angelus Novus, Paul Klee

 Again referring to Klee, Ingold quotes him when he says the shapes of genesis and growth of forms are more important than the forms themselves. And yet again: “art doesn’t reproduce the visible, but turn things visible”. Here it is possible to note the resonances with the philosophy of Bergson, when he says on his text “The perception of change”; the function of the artist is to make us see what was until then invisible to us. Ingold says in an interview he read so much Bergson in his youth that now he doesn’t know if he had a new idea or if he is simply thinking like Bergson! In a sense similar to Klee, Kandinsky’s paintings and writings are also important to Ingold.

And the lines take us to the rhizome, which by the way is a term took by Deleuze and Guattari from the book Naven, by Gregory Bateson. This is one of the most interesting critiques made by Ingold. He says borrowing this concept from biology is inappropriate! Explanation: what is, after all, rhizome in botany? In fact, a rhizome is an entanglement of roots. However, it is a sort of natural cloning process. A rhizome reproduces creating a network of similarities. And worse: if a part of the rhizome is attacked, the entire network falls apart! The banana tree is a typical rhizome. And the greatest threat to banana trees, one that will spread to the entire rhizome if one tree is contaminated, is... fungi! Curiously, it is exactly on the fungal mycelia Ingold will find the best example in biology of the philosophical rhizome. Based on biologist Alan Rayner, Ingold says fungal mycelia – what would be the fungi “meshwork” – possess the characteristics resonating more precisely with the philosophical concept of the rhizome, because fungal mycelia do not possess a center, can last millions of years, transmit information along the forest, being even considered nowadays the brain of the forest! There is a kind of “fungal revolution” occurring today on biology, thanks to the studies of many authors, among them Paul Stamets. Finally, if part of the mycelia is destroyed, different from rhizomes such as the banana tree, it reconstitutes itself, due to its non-centered processing!

Fungi Mycelium

It must be said that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept of rhizome, as a philosophical conception, is intact. The critique is against the, let us say, unfortunate image borrowed from botany. The study of fungi can offer a more efficient and precise understanding of this philosophical concept.

Another problematization made by Ingold is related to the concepts of smooth and striated in A Thousand Plateaus. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is a correspondence between the haptic (tactile)/optical and smooth/striated distinctions. For Ingold, the distinction between tactile and optical happens only on the striated, that is, the farmer, as close as it may bring his vision to earth and holding the hoe, and even if the Gothic stonemason can work on ground level, they are not nomads! In other words, the fact the tactile and optical are transversal in the farmer and in the mason does not necessarily resonates in transversality between the smooth and the striated. This transversality occurs only on the striated. This is important to Ingold, because he will spin an entire conception about what is atmosphere, which he developed inspired by the philosopher Gernot Böhme, in the place of “landscape”, in the sense that “landscape” is something untouched and atmosphere is eminently relational.

Another detail, from a more general scope, would be the question of ontology and epistemology, another item present on Ingold’s work. In his provocations on the order of an anti-discipline, following immanent and living lines, Ingold criticizes this separation and says there is no way to think about one without the other. Once again, if Deleuze and Guattari still talk eventually about “ontology”, their work is an example of immanence along ontology and epistemology, even if this is not explicit. If we consistently desire to have immanence as our starting point, it is necessary to learn immanence along epistemology and ontology, i.e., without the dualism between being and thinking. From the starting point of immanence, “being” would be converted in becoming, as I said in the beginning, and “thinking” would be converted in knowing, or rather, “knowledge” is converted in wisdom. This is the theme of one of Ingold’s most recent books, Anthropology and/as education, published this year, that circles around the idea that education, in the Ingoldian sense it resonates with anthropology, is more connected with attention than with “transmission”! Attention here is not a cognitive process, but an ecological one, in the sense of togethering. This “togethering” is, for Ingold, the difference between “interaction” (as mentioned before) and correspondence, the theme of his upcoming book. Interaction is an alternation between actions, and correspondence is togethering. Ingold gives the game of chess as an example. Interaction would be the individual alternation of response to the other player’s movement. Correspondence would be the itinerancy of both in the love of chess. This culminates in Ingold’s critique of the concept of “otherness”. It wouldn’t be a question of ‘other”, but, once again, of togethering. There is nothing more Spinozian and Deleuzian. It is not a question of “you and me”, but us! And, perhaps, us not only in the sense of correspondence along subject and object, but also the nodes entangling Ingoldian lines... (In Portuguese “nós” means “us” and “nodes”)

My purpose was to demonstrate the subtle benefits that Ingold’s peculiar anthropology brings to the Deleuze and Guattari´s ontology. In my opinion, Ingold brings a greater intimacy, so to speak, with immanence. In other words, it is different to philosophize “about” immanence and philosophize in immanence!