things thinging in a worlding world

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My argument has five components, each of which corresponds to a key word in my title. First, I want to insist that the inhabited world is comprised not of objects but of things. I have therefore to establish a very clear distinction between things and objects.

Secondly, I will establish what I mean by life, as the generative capacity of that encompassing field of relations within which forms arise and are held in place. I shall argue that the current emphasis, in much of the literature, on material agency is a consequence of the reduction of things to objects and of their consequent ‘falling out’ from the processes of life. Indeed, the more that theorists have to say about agency, the less they seem to have to say about life; I would like to put this emphasis in reverse.

Thirdly, then, I will claim that a focus on life-processes requires us to attend not to materiality as such but to the fluxes and flows of materials. We are obliged, as Deleuze and Guattari say, to follow these flows, tracing the paths of form-generation, wherever they may lead.

Fourth, I shall determine the specific sense in which movement along these paths is creative: this is to read creativity ‘forwards’, as an improvisatory joining in with formative processes, rather than ‘backwards’, as an abduction from a finished object to an intention in the mind of an agent.

Finally, I shall show that the pathways or trajectories along which improvisatory practice unfolds are not connections, nor do they describe relations between one thing and another. They are rather lines along which things continually come into being. Thus when I speak of the entanglement of things I mean this literally and precisely: not a network of connections but a meshwork of interwoven lines of growth and movement.

[...] These considerations lead me to conclude that the tree is not an object at all, but a certain gathering together of the threads of life. That is what I mean by a thing. In this I follow – albeit rather loosely – the argument classically advanced by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. In his celebrated essay on The Thing, Heidegger was at pains to figure out precisely what makes a thing different from an object. The object stands before us as a fait accompli, presenting its congealed, outer surfaces to our inspection. It is defined by its very ‘overagainstness’ in relation to the setting in which it is placed (Heidegger 1971: 167). The thing, by contrast, is a ‘going on’, or better, a place where several goings on become entwined.

To observe a thing is not to be locked out but to be invited in to the gathering. We participate, as Heidegger rather enigmatically put it, in the thing ’thinging in a worlding world'. There is of course a precedent for this view of the thing as a gathering in the ancient meaning of the word as a place where people would gather to resolve their affairs. If we think of every participant as following a particular way of life, threading a line through the world, then perhaps we could define the thing, as I have suggested elsewhere, as a ‘parliament of lines’ (Ingold 2007a: 5).

Thus conceived, the thing has the character not of an externally bounded entity, set over and against the world, but of a knot whose constituent threads, far from being contained within it, trail beyond, only to become caught with other threads in other knots. Or in a word, things leak, forever discharging through the surfaces that form temporarily around them.


—Tim Ingold
Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials, excerpts
University of Aberdeen, July 2010

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