Title

Consciousness, materials, image, object: the diagram

Description

This chapter is about bringing things back to life. Its basic argument may be expressed by means of a simple diagram. Draw two lines: they need not be straight; indeed you can allow them to meander a little. However, they should proceed alongside one another, like the trails left by two people walking abreast. Each is a path of movement. Let one of these lines stand for the flow of consciousness, saturated as it is by light, sound and feeling. And let the other stand for the flow of materials as they circulate, mix and meld. Now imagine that each of these flows is momentarily stopped up. On the side of consciousness, this stoppage takes on the semblance of an image, like a fugitive suddenly caught in the glare of a spotlight. And on the side of materials it takes on the solid form of an object, like a boulder placed in the fugitive’s path, blocking his passage. On our diagram we could depict both stoppages by a point or blob on each respective line. Now draw a double ended arrow connecting the two blobs. Unlike the original pair of lines, this arrow is not the trace of a movement; it is notional rather than phenomenal, and depicts a connection of some kind between image and object. Now that our diagram is complete, we can sum up the argument of this chapter, and indeed of the entire book. It is to switch our perspective from the endless shuttling back and forth from image to object and from object to image, that is such a pronounced feature of academic writing in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, to the material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which images and objects reciprocally take shape. In terms of our diagram, this entails a rotation of 90 degrees, from the lateral to the longitudinal.

Designer

Ingold, Tim

Date

2013

Source

Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture

Bibliographic Citation

Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group. Figure 2.3. Pages 20-21.

is composed of

English Ellipse

has attribute

English Arrow

English Solid Line

English Curve

depict things of type

English Typological or Classification

Coverage

anthropology

consciousness