This list of methods is a work in progress. Each entry appears as a particular manifestation – a display – and configuration of performative materiality
A
Animacy and embodiment
Animacy and embodiment pull in opposite directions: where the former is a movement of opening, the latter is bent on closure. For the living, animate beings we are, […] the term “embodiment” is simply not experientially apposite. We do not […] experience ourselves and one another as “packaged” but as moving and moved, in ongoing response—that is in correspondence—with the things around us.[1]
Annwn and Abred
The Circles of Abred emerge from the Circle of Annwn (pronounced anoon): a chaotic simmering cauldron containing all potential forms and manifestations. Annwn and Abred are more complex than merely “past” and “present”. They exist simultaneously, and there is a temporal progression within the Circles of Abred as the manifest forms, which have emerged from Annwn, are born, grow, die and are reborn.[2]
Apparatus
The larger material arrangement enacts a cut that resolves the inherent onto-semantic indeterminacy through which the “subject” and the “object” emerge. Apparatuses are the conditions of possibility for determinate boundaries and properties of objects and meanings of embodied concepts within the phenomenon.[3]
Archaeologies
Freud establishes the human soul and psyche as “material”, three-dimensional entities, where the unconscious is buried underneath consciousness like buried cities under the Earth’s surface; Benjamin treats historical documents as the material that needs to be freed from its historical context; Foucault constructs discourses and knowledge—discursive and epistemological practices—as material entities; and Kittler takes up the empirical materiality of media and links it to the realm of knowledge. But materiality—whatever it may be—remains the one common denominator of all these archaeologies.[4]
Attractors and bifurcation
It should come as no surprise, then, that the current penetration of science by historical concerns has been the result of advances in these two disciplines. Ilya Prigogine revolutionized thermodynamics in the 1960s by showing that the classical results were valid only for closed systems, where the overall quantities of energy are always conserved. If one allows an intense flow of energy in and out of a system (that is, if one pushes it far from equilibrium), the number and type of possible historical outcomes greatly increases. Instead of a unique and simple form of stability, we now have multiple coexisting forms of varying complexity (static, periodic, and chaotic attractors). Moreover, when a system switches from one stable state to another (at a critical point called a bifurcation), minor fluctuations may play a crucial role in deciding the outcome. Thus, when we study a given physical system, we need to know the specific nature of the fluctuations that have been present at each of its bifurcations; in other words, we need to know its history to understand its current dynamical state.
And what is true of physical systems is all the more true of biological ones. Attractors and bifurcations are features of any system in which the dynamics are not only far from equilibrium but also nonlinear, that is, in which there are strong mutual interactions (or feedback) between components. Whether the system in question is composed of molecules or of living creatures, it will exhibit endogenously generated stable states, as well as sharp transitions between states, as long as there is feedback and an intense flow of energy coursing through the system.[5]
B
Body
Why should the material world include only either things encountered in situ, […], or things already transformed by human activity, into artefacts? Why exclude things […][that] have been recovered and removed but not otherwise transformed? And where […] would we place all this diverse forms of animal, plant, fungal and bacterial life? Like artefacts, these things might be attributed formal properties of design, yet they have not been made but have grown. If, moreover, they are part of the material world, then the same must be true to my own body.[6]
Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?[7]
Boundaries
Boundaries do not sit still.[8]
C
Change
Causality, the core principle of classical dynamics, suggests that change occurs when one discrete entity (cause) influences another (effect), where both the causative and effective agents pre-exist their relation. However, once we replace causality with performativity as our central dynamic principle, the concept of change changes. Change is no longer a question of what causes what, but of what coexists with what.[9]
Chora
Kristeva characterizes the semiotic as a suppressed, unconscious language, which she also paraphrases with the term chora. The chora, or Greek khôra, is translated as space or womb. In philosophical contexts the chora was first used by Plato for something unnamable, inexperiential, and fluid, which is prior to the One, the Father. Kristeva associates the chora with the human drive and its unconscious articulation, which is thereby assigned to the realm of the semiotic. It is neither a sign nor a position, rather an inherently mobile and extremely provisional articulation. The chora is the space of meanings that cannot be reduced to a symbolic order, hence it transcends rational subjectivity. Kristeva employs the chora to create the relationship between the semiotic and its subject in process. In contrast to the neutral, rational subject in male dominated language, it is confronted with archaic, instinctive, and maternal aspects in the act of assigning meaning. Kristeva also conceives the chora as a pulsating pressure on or in symbolic language. You can imagine this process like an eruption that thrusts upwards. And an eruption is only possible in one moment, the process of assigning meaning: When the speaking person enters into the symbolic order and its power of definition, but at the same time suppresses the parallel unconscious meanings. For Kristeva, the chora does not generate a new language, rather it represents the heterogeneous, fragmented dimension of language. In her view, the chora is without unity and identity, yet it is subject to certain rules, which do not originate from the realm of the symbolic.[10]
Clouds
To observe the clouds, I would say, is not to perceive objects in the sky but to catch a glimpse of the sky-in-formation, of its clouding.[11]
Cultural materials
What matters is not any particular psychological structure (rationality) so much as problem-solving skills, rules of thumb, and routine procedures, that is “cultural materials” that can accumulate over time.[12]
D
Dérive
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”] , a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. […] In a dérive one or more persons […] let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.[13]
Détournement
Short for “détournement of preexisting aesthetic elements.” The integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu.[14]
Doing
“That rock over there is a rock because of doing,” he said. We looked at each other and he smiled. I waited for an explanation, but he remained silent. Finally I had to say that I had not understood what he meant. “That’s doing!” he exclaimed. “Pardon me?” “That’s also doing.” “What are you talking about, don Juan?” “Doing is what makes that rock a rock, and that bush a bush. Doing is what makes you yourself and me myself.” I told him that his explanation did not explain anything. He laughed and scratched his temples. “That’s the problem with talking,” he said. “It always makes one confuse the issues. If one starts talking about doing, one always ends up talking about something else. It is better to just act.”[15]
The relationship of the cultural and the natural is a relation of “exteriority within”. This is not a static relationality but a doing—the enactment of boundaries—that always entails constitutive exclusions and therefore requisite questions of accountability.[16]
E
Ethics
Ethics is not simply about responsible actions in relation to human experiences of the world; rather it is a question of material entanglements and how each intra-action matters in the reconfiguring of these entanglements, that is, it is a matter of the ethical call that is embodied in the very worlding of the world.[17]
Engagement
Suffice it to say, at this point, that even if the maker has a form in mind, it is not this form that creates the work. It is the engagement with materials.[18]
F
Falling tree
One of the recurring philosophical questions is: “Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?” Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in a forest. It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was…[19]
Fetish
Thus the fetish is an object that, by virtue of its sheer material presence, affects the course of affairs.[20]
Finality
“Believe me,” don Juan said to me once, “this sense of finality about the world is a mere illusion. Due to the fact that it is never challenged, it stands as the only possible view. To see energy as it flows in the universe is the tool for challenging it.[21]
Finitude
Man isn’t merely the measure of all things; man’s finitude is implicated in the very conditions of possibility of measurability and determinability.[22]
Fitting in
When I walk through a field and my attention is suddenly drawn to a few stones lying next to each other with a small plant growing between them, and I like what I see, what is that liking? Clearly the stones are lying there in a certain correspondence, if not accordance, because the wind and water have moved them, rolled them over the ground and made them find an impression, create a little group, a little nest where a plant could start growing and be protected—but where does my liking fit in? Is it merely in me, subjectively enjoying the sight, or is it something objective, an extended correspondence? I am with the stones and plant immediately, fitting in with them.[23]
Follow
[…] Deleuze and Guattari, who insist that whenever we encounter matter, “it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation”. And the consequence, they go on to assert, is that “this matter-flow can only be followed” (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 451). What Deleuze and Guattari here call a “matter-flow”, I would call a material.[24]
H
Human
Recent estimates suggest that human cells (i.e., somatic and germ) constitute only 43% of all the cells that form a human body […]. The other 57% of cells are microbial (bacteria, viruses, archaea, microeukaryotes), and therefore, in terms of cell abundance at least, humans are actually more microbial than human. This statement is also true when considering ratios of gene abundance—microbial genes within the human body are thought to outnumber human genes by between 150 and 1000 times […]. With a moment of reflection, this can lead to a medley of existential questions such as—what does it mean to be human?[25]
Hunter
To dream like a hunter is to become the creatures you hunt and to see things in the ways they do. It is to open up to new possibilities of being, not to seek closure.[26]
“To be a hunter means that one knows a great deal,” he went on. “It means that one can see the world in different ways. In order to be a hunter one must be in perfect balance with everything else, otherwise hunting would become a meaningless chore.”[27]
Hylomorphism
To create anything, Aristotle reasoned, you have to bring together form (morphe) and matter (hyle). In the subsequent history of Western thought, this hylomorphic model of creation became ever more deeply embedded. But it also became increasingly unbalanced. Form came to be seen as imposed, by an agent with a particular end or goal in mind, while matter—thus rendered passive and inert—was that which was imposed upon.[28]
I
Improvisation
A work of art, I
insist, is not an object but a thing, and as Klee argued, the role of
the artist is not to reproduce a preconceived idea, novel or not, but
to join with and follow the forces and flows of material that bring
the form of the work into being. “Following,” as Deleuze and
Guattari point out, “is not at all the same thing as reproducing”:
whereas reproducing involves a procedure of iteration,
following involves itineration
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 410). The artist—as also the artisan—is
an itinerant, whose work is consubstantial with the trajectory of his
or her own life. Moreover, the creativity of the work lies in the
forward movement that gives rise to things. To read things “forwards”
entails a focus not on abduction but on improvisation (Ingold &
Hallam 2007: 3).
To improvise is to follow the ways of the
world, as they unfold, rather than to connect up, in reverse, a
series of points already traversed.[29]
Incorporation
Studies have shown that the objects we hold become neurologically incorporated into our perception of the body—especially if we use them as tools that extend our body’s capacity.[30]
The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. […] To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body.[31]
Inhabit
[…] learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution. Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.[32]
Inquiry
The theorist does his thinking in his head, and only then applies the forms of thought to the substance of the material world. The way of the craftsman, by contrast, is to allow knowledge to grow from the crucible of our practical and observational engagements with the beings and things around us […]. This is to practice what I would like to call an art of inquiry.
In the art of inquiry, the conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the materials with which we work. These materials think in us, as we think through them.[33]
Intuition
Intuition as such is to be stabilized, so that we can conceive it as one and the same. But intuition as such is in no way stable, consisting, rather, in a wavering of the imagination between conflicting directions. That it should be stabilized, is to say that imagination should waver no longer, with the result that intuition would be utterly abolished and destroyed. Yet this must not happen; so that in intuition there must at least remain the product of this state, a trace of the opposed directions, consisting of neither but containing something of both.[34]
K
Knowing
Knowing entails differential responsiveness and accountability as part of a network of performances. Knowing is not a bounded or closed practice but an ongoing performance of the world.[35]
The only way one can really know things—that is, from the inside of one’s being—is through a process of self-discovery. To know things you have to grow into them, and let them grow in you, so that they become a part of who you are. […] knowing is a process of active following, of going along.[36]
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff “pure experience,” then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.[37]
L
Leak
We may conclude that things can exist and persist only because they leak: that is, because of the interchange of materials across the surfaces by which they differentiate themselves from their surrounding medium. The bodies of organisms and other things leak continually, indeed their lives depend on it.[38]
M
Matter
Matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is a substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity.[39]
Matter and form
Matter can itself be divided into matter and form: for instance, bricks are made of clay, shaped into cuboid blocks. Again, clay has its own matter—mud, say—and so on. Eventually, if one pursues this hierarchy of matter far enough downwards, Aristotle believes that one will reach the four elements, earth, air, fire and water.[40]
Mattering
Mattering is a kind of posthumanist performativity that emphasizes matter’s capacity to matter, to achieve significance in its being as doing. Matter here is not ground or essence, but agentive, “produced and productive, generated and generative”.[41]
Meaning
Meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility.[42]
O
Object and thing
“An object,” writes the philosopher of design Vilém Flusser (1999: 58), “is what gets in the way, a problem thrown in your path like a projectile” (from Latinum objectum, Greek problema). Standing before us as a fait accompli, it blocks our passage. To continue, we have either to find a way around it, to remove it, or to achieve a breakthrough. The thing, by contrast, draws us in, along the very paths of its formation. It is, if you will, a “going on”—or better, a place where several goings on become entwined. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it, albeit rather enigmatically, the thing presents itself “in its thinging from out of the worlding world” (Heidegger 1971: 181). It is a particular gathering or interweaving of the threads of life.[43]
Ocean of materials
Like all other creatures, human beings do not exist on the “other side” of materiality but swim in an ocean of materials. Once we acknowledge our immersion, what this ocean reveals to us is not the bland homogeneity of different shades of matter but a flux in which materials of the most diverse kinds—through processes of admixture and distillation, of coagulation and dispersal, and of evaporation and precipitation—undergo continual generation and transformation. The forms of things, far from having been imposed from without upon an inert substrate, arise and are borne along—as indeed we are too—within this current of materials. As with the Earth itself, the surface of every solid is but a crust, the more or less ephemeral congelate of a generative movement.[44]
P
Performative
A performative account insists on […] practices of engagement with, and as a part of, the world in which we have our being.[45]
Photography
The body which is simultaneously: project/material/performer of artistic practice finds its logical support in an image by the photographic medium. Photography is a “sociological” object which permits the seizure of reality itself; it can thus quickly seize the dialectic which renders a behavior significant, by becoming communicable to a collective audience.[46]
Practices
As the rings of trees mark the sedimented history of their intra-actions within and as part of the world so matter carries within itself the sedimented historialities of the practices through which it is produced as part of its ongoing becoming.[47]
R
Raw materials
Raw Materials + Labour + Machinery = Product + Profit[48]
S
Semi-Material
The fact that technologies rapidly become associated with a class of objects that are fundamentally material should not deflect our attention from the semi-material: another class of objects that emanate in our fullest relationship with the world as necessary mnemonics to our affective dimension.[49]
Sex
Sex is a sacrament, and crossing-over into other modes of consciousness. It is the central act of the Great Work of transforming consciousness and, through consciousness, the world.[50]
Storied matter
No matter which form it takes, matter yields terrestrial tales of resilience, creativities, uncertainties, evolution and dissolution in non-deterministic ways.[51]
T
The cook, the alchemist and the painter
The cook, the alchemist and the painter are in the business not so much of imposing form on matter as of bringing together diverse materials and combining or redirecting their flow in the anticipation of what might emerge.[52]
For the alchemist, by contrast, a material is known not by what it is but by what it does, specifically when mixed with other materials, treated in particular ways, or placed in particular situations.[53]
Thinking in materiality
In order to follow this fragile lead in almost complete darkness, the unequivocal alternative is to not think about materiality, but—tautologically perhaps—materialize it, and think in material. There can be no discourse on materiality, only discourse in materiality. This choice, taken without reservations, entails a rejection of survey, investigation and analytical study (the study of a subject from a hypothetical outside which positions work on and about its subject but can never speak with it) for the performance of its primary proposition (“I materialize”) and can only talk in action through the voice of material.[54]
Touch
We’re made up of the same stuff. If I stab you, I must instantly discover what it’s like to be stabbed. And vice versa. We know what we do to each other. When we touch someone, they touch us equally.[55]
Traces
Traces are a beginning. They indicate. That there is something to be found, but do not reveal what, where, and how. They suggest paths but do not say where they lead. That is why one follows them at first but leaves open whether to pursue to them.[56]
W
Workshop
That was when I grasped it for the first time: the whole workshop was Corodiak. The web of strings was his optic nerve, the tools and vices were extensions of his arms. The plans and sketches were an extension of his brain, the puppets and mechanisms the fulfillment of his dreams and ideas.[57]
World
Why not use art to look at the world, rather than stare sullenly at the forms it presents?[58]
“The world around us is very mysterious,” he said. “It doesn’t yield its secrets easily.”[59]
Footnotes
1 Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013), 94.
2 Graham Harvey, Contemporary Paganism: Listening People, Speaking Earth (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 2000), 28.
3 Karen Michelle Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 143.
4 Knut Ebeling, “The Art of Searching: On ‘Wild Archaeologies’ from Kant to Kittler,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 25, no. 51 (January 10, 2017): 7–18, here 14. https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v25i51.25152.
5 Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 14.
6 Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14, no. 1 (June 2007): 1–16, here 4. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127.
7 Donna Haraway in Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 159.
8 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 171.
9 Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (eds.), Posthuman Glossary (Theory) (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 245.
10 Ursula I. Meyer, Die andere Philosophiegeschichte, Philosophinnen 18 (Aachen: Ein-Fach-Verlag, 2007), 307–8. Translated for this publication.
11 Tim Ingold, “Being alive to a world without objects,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2013), 213–25, here 216.
12 De Landa, A Thousand Years, 43.
13 Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” trans. Ken Knabb, Les Lèvres Nues 9 (November 1956): https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html
14 Internationale Situationniste, “Definitions,” Internationale Situationniste 1 (June 1958): https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html
15 Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 188.
16 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 135.
17 Barad, 160.
18 Ingold, Making, 22.
19 Terry Pratchett in Harvey, Contemporary Paganism, 122.
20 Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” 12.
21 Carlos Castaneda, Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), introduction.
22 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 143.
23 Lars Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design. Revised and expanded edition (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 147–48.
24 Ingold, “Being alive”, 220.
25 Jake M. Robinson, Jacob G. Mills, and Martin F. Breed, “Walking Ecosystems in Microbiome-Inspired Green Infrastructure: An Ecological Perspective on Enhancing Personal and Planetary Health,” Challenges 9, no. 40 (2018): 1–15, here 3.
26 Ingold, Making, 11.
27 Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, 53.
28 Ingold, “Being alive”, 213.
29 Ingold, 222.
30 Karen Sherman, “The Glory Hole”, e-flux 87 (December 2017): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/87/164528/the-glory-hole.
31 Merleau-Ponty in Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 157.
32 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Documents Sur l’art), trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Presses du réel, 2009), 13
33 Ingold, Making, 6.
34 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge (published 1749 in German as “Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre”), ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs, Texts in German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 206.
35 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 149.
36 Ingold, Making, 1.
37 William James in Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things, 147.
38 Ingold, Making, 95.
39 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 151.
40 Thomas Ainsworth, “Form vs. Matter,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (February 8, 2016): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter.
41 Braidotti, Posthuman Glossary (Theory), 245.
42 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 149.
43 Ingold, “Being alive,” 215.
44 Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” 7.
45 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 133.
46 Gina Pane in Jennifer Blessing, “Gina Pane’s Witnesses,” On Archives and Archiving 7, no. 4 (2002): 14–26, here 21.
47 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 180.
48 Alain De Botton, Status Anxiety (London: Penguin, 2005), 107.
49 Michael Punt, “Synchrony and the Semi-Material Object,” in New Realities: Being Syncretic, Consciousness Reframed – The Planetary Collegium’s IXth International Research Conference, eds. Roy Ascott, Gerald Bast, and Wolfgang Fiel (Vienna: SpringerWienNewYork, 2008), 224–227, here 226.
50 Peter Redgrove in Harvey, Contemporary Paganism, 99.
51 Braidotti, Posthuman Glossary (Theory), 412.
52 Ingold, “Being alive”, 220.
53 Ingold, Making, 29.
54 My rephrasing of Céline Condorelli, Support Structures, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 13.
55 Sherman, “The Glory Hole.”
56 Werner Stegmaier, “Anhaltspunkte. Spuren zur Orientierung,” in Spur: Spurenlesen als Orientierungstechnik und Wissenskunst, eds. Sybille Krämer, Werner Kogge, and Gernot Grube, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1830, (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007) 82–94, here 82. Translated for this publication.
57 Walter Moers, Labyrinth of Dreaming Books: A Novel, trans. John Brown (New York: Abrams, 2013), e-book.
58 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 54.
59 Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, 22.