Tim Ingold. The Art of Paying Attention

okay Deborah yeah as Harvey said I'm not strictly speaking a scientist or an artist I'm an anthropologist but certainly when I began as an anthropologist about 40 years ago I thought of myself as being very close to science I had begun my undergraduate studies in Natural Sciences and had switched from there to anthropology but still I felt very close to science and felt that we needed to develop a kind of anthropology that would at least be consistent in what it says about human beings with what science has to say about humans about their evolution about their relations with their environment and so on and uh I I was was was on the other side of their horizon for me I knew nothing about art but over the last over these 40 years a strange thing has happened that I felt that art has come closer and closer to what I'm doing and science has moved further and further away so that over 40 years I don't feel that my position has radically changed very much at all of course he's changed a bit and I've grown and I've learned and I know a bit more and maybe I'm a bit wiser than I probably know less than I did 40 years ago but maybe I'm a little bit wiser but I don't think that I my overall attitude has changed but nevertheless I now find myself talking to people like you to people in arts practice and arts research where as I began talking mostly to scientists so the question I wanted to start with is why is that what has happened to science and art over these laws last 40 years such that particularly in the field of ecology the field of our understanding of the environment which is the area in which I've been most closely concerned I now feel that science has lost largely lost that kind of radical ecological awareness that it had 50 years ago and that that awareness has now been taken up by art that art in a sense has taken on the mantle of radical ecological awareness that science has lost and that gives art a very important thing to do in the world and that's basically the theme of my my talk but I want to begin with the idea of data we are now in living in a world surrounded by data in which data is one of the most commonly used words that exists in our vocabulary and I have to say that I find this slightly terrifying datum literally means a thing given it is something something that is is given to us as a gift it comes from the Latin word dari which is to give a gift is something that is is given to you and that is accepted with good grace and that you often will reciprocate in time and in kind an anthropologists have written the great length about how the giving and receiving of gifts is of the essence of everyday social life it's what lubricates our lives in in conversation in in in exchange we are continually giving and receiving accepting what is given and reciprocating in kind but that is not what data mean nowadays to most of us and certainly not in science for Sciences collecting data it's not a matter of receiving what is given but of extracting what is not data are not received they are mined extracted washed up deposited precipitated by whatever means we go out and extract this stuff and it comes this data comes in bits in bits in fragments that have already been broken off the currents of life in which they were originally formed from there herbs there flows and from their mutual entailments because for science even to admit to a relation of give-and-take with things in the world would actually disqualify the inquiry to be a scientist you are supposed to be objective which means that you are supposed to acknowledge no debt to the world for what you have received from it now of course when we talk about data it is commonly assumed by default that these are things to be counted they are counted and therefore data are normally understood to be quantitative scientists always want to measure things and there's no is no accident that we tend to think of data as things that are counted because in order to count anything in order to add things up and to say how many of them we have you have first to break them off from the currents in which they are formed you have to divide a world which is all process or flow or formation you have to divide that world into bits so in order to form a datum the world has already been divided up so it's no wonder then that we think that what we do with these data is then count them up nevertheless in my field of social anthropology and many other fields of the social sciences sociology particularly but many others it is now become common to talk about qualitative data and sociologists say we deal with both quantitative and qualitative data and textbooks write about quantitative and qualitative methods and even talk about quant crawl and how would you don't mention somehow combine the two the more I think about it though the more it seems to me that the idea of a qualitative datum is a contradiction in terms and not just a contradiction in terms but that it points to something fundamentally unethical in the constitution of science because what is the quality of a thing except the way in which it reveals itself to you to your presence it exists in the way in which something out there in the world opens up to you so it becomes part of your own perception part of what the world has given to you it is given to you in a relation a relation of offering up of giving and you accepting and yet in the very moment that you turn that things presents to you into a datum why you turn your back on it so it's like talking to people having an honest conversation with people only to say I'm not really having a conversation with you I'm going to write you up right so anthropologists talk a lot about rapport and the importance of establishing rapport with their informants very nice you befriend them you became good b-but rapport has two senses friendship and rapport and you're just like a double agent wheedling your way into people's lives so that you can then report on them and I have a feeling that the very idea of qualitative data carries this ethical doublespeak within it that there's something fundamentally unethical about it and this is a matter of I think some considerable concern and it will run through what they have today to say today because I think it's extremely important for for art but today of course the problem with data has become even greater we live in a world now not just of data but of big data and the data analytics and the the proliferation of big data it's intrinsically connected to the growth of the neoliberal economy of knowledge where we know very well that one serves the interests of the other and in this neoliberal economy of knowledge lie itself has become a disposable commodity and its forms whether human or non-human have become mere grist to the mill of data analytics which are designed to produce results or outputs whose value is judged by their impact or utility rather than by any appeal to truth this I think is a matter of immense concern that we are dealing with a data economy in which the truth of the matter is a secondary concern now imagine that you have in each of your hands in this hand a hard ball something like a cricket ball a sort of ball that if you threw it at a window the window would break and imagine in this hand you have a soft ball a ball made us something like a bath sponge or something something squishy no the scientist works with the hard ball and he throws less it is often the he but maybe a she but let's say he for now he's throwing this ball over and over again at the surfaces of the world the surfaces that he wants to investigate and and incessantly hurtling this ball against it until eventually the surface cracks and he achieves what he calls a breakthrough and then he receives another surface and yesterday his ball about that and that cracks - so it's science sees the world as this series of resistant surfaces that are that are not willing to give up their secrets that are holding them back this idea about about science holding back its secrets goes back to Galileo and Francis Bacon that you had to really trick nature or torture nature or twist nature in order for it to relieve to achieve that breakthrough to break through the surface with your hard ball and it was every hit every time you hit the surface with this hard ball that is a datum that is the way that hard science operates because hard science considers itself good science both this wobble that we'll do at the most soft science that's not not very good so with your with your soft ball you try doing the same thing and of course you never achieve a breakthrough because your ball will never break the surface it just it just squishes what happens when the ball hits that surface is that it bends a little bit it deforms and it takes on into its shape something of the properties of the surface as it hits against and there maybe the surface isn't quite so hard either so the surface takes on some of the properties of your of the throw the pressure so you imagine the sort of mutual squishiness in which the ball gets a bit squished and the surface gets a bit squished and both the ball and the surface take into themselves something of the characteristics of the other there is what you could call a sort of mutual responsiveness that the ball responds to the surface it's thrown against the surface responds to the force of the ball and I call that mutual responsiveness correspondence by correspondence I don't mean one thing matching up to another I mean something more like in the old days when people used to write letters to one another and you would write somebody a letter about how you're feeling and they would read it and digest it and mix it with the way they were feeling and they would write back and so there would be a kind of conversation of letters going back and forth over time people responding over time to one another and that kind of correspondence if you will is a is a labor of love it's giving back what we owe to the human or non-human beings with which we share our world what we owe to them for our own existence and formation this is what I mean by the give-and-take of life we only exist in the world as living breathing beings thanks to others thanks to the world itself thanks to the people who brought us up thanks to mothers who gave birth to us thanks to the air we breathe the earth that gives us food and so on so we owe our existence to the world and the world maybe owes something of its existence to us and correspondence is about that giving and receiving between us and the world and for me although many of my colleagues would disagree this is where anthropology comes in because I think of anthropology as a science of Correspondence and it's basic way of working which i think is becoming more and more central to art to a central way of working is what we call participant observation and the idea of participant observation is indeed that you correspond with whatever it is that you're studying you spend time with them you listen to what they're saying and you respond in a conversation so this you set up a kind of dialogue in which there's that the sensibilities and ways of being of others become in some sense part of your own sensibilities you begin to see things perceive things talk about things in the way they do because they become part of you in fact this idea I mean anthropologists like to think that they they invented this and that it all belongs to them of course they didn't and in fact exactly that method of that way of working in any kind of investigation was was advocated by by Goethe at the when everybody the beginning of the the 18th century Goethe advocated a method of science in which she said if for example you are investigating plants you should go and spend time with your plant actually hours and hours with it days and days really getting to know that plant really well so that you begin to see how it moves how it how it it's little gestures the way the plant reacts to things so that you oft after a while begin to understand the plant with the plants own eyes you become a plant like being yourself that's what Goethe recommended and of course there is a branch or or movement that isn't known nowadays as Goethe in science which is viewed by mainstream science with utter contempt which tells you something about where the problem lies because science is Curie or these contemporary science and talking about science today is a curiously restless field I sometimes think that it's like a marooned spacecraft that has taken off from Earth is hurtling through space with no idea exactly where it's going but also know exactly the idea exactly where it's come from it is but it's kept going by an extraordinary optimism a belief in progress a belief that whatever although whatever is discovered now means that what was discovered before was wrong we are necessarily going in the right direction towards whatever no one actually knows and and I was very struck but in a reading group we had with with colleagues in science and my talk talking bean anthropologists and scientists we are trying to find a common language and and one of the scientists the postdoc said to us that well in science we are always told that never to read anything that has been written more than five years ago and less our professors tell us so they actually knew nothing about the history of their subject there are great figures in the past and we were talking about biology mostly in ecology great figures people like people like von X cool people like ludwig von bertalanffy great figures in their time who happen not to have become part of the historical narrative the approved historical narrative has been set to one side who these people knew absolutely nothing about and you had to go to research in the in the arts and humanities to find out who these people were I found this profoundly shocking so so science is continually cutting itself off from wherever we are now and in that sense shooting off into outer space convinced that it's on the path to a new world but with no idea what that new world is and having forgotten what the old one is the humanities have the opposite problem they are utterly somnambulist what humanities profess to do is to understand everything by putting it in its social cultural and historical context and I have to say that my anthropological colleagues keep telling me this - this is what they do they say we we observe what people do we do our participant observation we get to know them - really well and then we understand interpret and even explain what they're doing by putting them in their social cultural and historical context we they say we embed what people do in context and I think of the unruly child who is supposed to be going to bed at seven o'clock in the evening and keeps jumping up and leaping out of bed and waving his arms around and demanding attention and what do we say to get back into your context and be understood that that putting things in context it's a way of saying okay we've dealt with them now they're not a challenge anymore that was then it's all done all understood now we can get on with real life it is a way actually of taking things out of our presence and kicking them off and so between the maroons spacecraft of science and somnambulist humanities something something very important has got lost and I think what has got lost is the presence of things having things people whatever the world actually in front of us and challenging us by its very being there the very presence of things is what we are losing both to science and to the humanities because it's only when we acknowledge and recognize the presence of things before us that we can be curious about them and only when we recognize that presence can we care about them only then can we actually have an ethical stance towards the world an example of what I mean by this which brings us to art that I like very much comes from the the writings of of the great pioneer of modern abstract art Vasily Kandinsky in an essay wrote wrote in the in the 1930s and he he wrote this beautiful pastiche this spoof of an art exhibition he imagines an art exhibition and and all the bourgeois ladies and gentlemen going through it with their little catalogue and they're going through and they're looking up and along the wall there there's there's Countess so-and-so and there some cows in the field and there are some apples on the plate and there's a woman who doesn't happen to have any clothes on and there's this and there's a bowl of flowers and they look at this and they look at that and they look at their catalogue and say always this was done by such and such an artist and he belong to this movement and he wrote at this time and is influenced by these people and at the end they all come out and they can tell you these visitors to the exhibition everything you need to know about every work of art and if they forgotten they can check it up in the book and he says why ever did they go have any of them actually seen any art have any of them actually been moved by any art have they seen anything at all and and these problem simply is is that if if the way you deal with art is as the art historian does which is perfectly legitimate no why did this person name this particular picture when what was his biography who is who is influencing the artist and so on that's all fine but it's got nothing to do with this work as art because in order to perceive workers art you have to allow that art into your presence and not to put it away in cultural historical context in anthropology we have exactly the same problem it's why I've been fighting a bit of a campaign within my own discipline to argue for a distinction between anthropology and ethnography because ethnography tends to do just the same as what art history does it wants to understand everything by putting it in its context and in that way to take away the very presence of those people from whom you learned and that can be so challenging to one's own understandings of what it means to be so all of that that leads me to the the word that is the the center of my title which is about the importance of attending to things to bring things into presence is not to in it's not to interpret it's not to understand it's not to explain it's to attend to pay attention to what is there and by that attention I don't mean what you could call as say a stop and check like at a roadblock hands up attention means that you were doing something but you've got to stop and stop and then check and then okay then you can carry on again I don't mean attention in that sense I mean attention in the sense of of going along together that the word itself comes from Latin add add add tend area which means to stretch towards so attention is the kind of retching you know how when you when you listen to something and listening of course is a is a key form of attention never mind if you can't see this at the back but I'll just use this all right but but we tend to imagine you know that that we have a head here with with ears that are that are locked in locked into the head but I'm sure you have that experience that when you're actually listening to something you don't feel your head is like that and you think that your ears are like this stretching out stretching out too for what you're listening for so that so that you you're not a body with with ears locked into it and atomically you become what some people called an ear body you know you you your body is an ear and the ear is stretching out to what it is what it is listening for that's what I mean by by attention and it means thinking of the body in a way very different from the anatomical sense you know anatomically we might say now I have a head and trunk legs arms and and in the head there are two eyes and two ears and the nose and the rest of it we could we could describe ourselves anatomically as a set of organs structures that are bound together articulated in a fairly coherent way but thinking about the body in attention it no longer becomes an anatomical unity but an effective one we become the body becomes a bundle of effects that are stretching out in all sorts of directions and and and if there's a coherence to it it's something like the coherence of a knot when you tie lots of strands together and they bundled together at the center for example apart from doing anthropology a thing I do is is play the cello and and and when I get my cello out and I sit down we're ready to play and there I am in the cello fits very naturally between my legs here and there's a spike at the bottom which which digs into the ground and out there I all I'm and somebody might say okay there's a there's an anatomical unity there I'm actually anatomically connected up to my cello I've become something like a cent or you're half human half cello that is these but down together but at the moment I begin to play that completely falls apart everything falls apart and instead I become the the anatomical unity collapses so that I then reconstitute myself as a bundle of effects I don't see a cello I don't see my body I see sound air metal rosin string pair or flying in different directions and out of all that comes something that we call a musical performance so that's what happens in attentions and I spoke earlier about participant observation and I'll come back to the observation side in a moment but and I want just to say a word or two about the kind of participation that is involved in this the sort of participation that is involved in what I have called correspondence because today participation also has become one of those one of those words it's a good thing now we should all be participating we sort everything has to be participate or participatory design participative planning but is very this participatory education or sometimes it's it's delivered in terms of say child centered education or user centered research or whatever that's not that's not the kind of participation that were talking that I'm talking about with correspondence because largely it means fitting in with what the other is doing or perhaps getting everybody else to fit in with you a genuine participation is one that is transformative that is not just a matter of of adapting to whatever require are out there but of carrying on a conversation in which all parties stand to be transformed such as in any conversation you and I are having a conversation and it's it's moving us both along and it's transformative for for both of us I got this idea from the writings of of John Dewey a great educationalist and philosopher the early part of the of the the 20th century strangely strangely unread nowadays where Dewey too was talking about education and arguing that education has to be participate arre but participation is only educational if it's transformative for all involved not just for one side rather than the other and this is really critical so participant observations for anthropologists and others it's a way of working in that sense we could call it a method but it is absolutely not a methodology and this distinction between method and methodology I think is very important good method is a way of working with things a way of working with things have going along with learning from them responding to them methodology however at least in the sense in which it is commonly understood today methodology is a way of holding things at arm's length keeping a distance from them as a guarantor of objectivity it is a form not of bringing things into our presence but a form of immunization so that the results of our research are not tainted by too close a contact with the things we study so methodology in that sense systems protocols for holding things at a distance for making sure that there is no personal contact with what we study methodology is the enemy of correspondence now I think I talked earlier about the neoliberal a comment neoliberal economy of knowledge and I think that and that of course has given rise for to ever more intense competition for innovation and what is called and I'm sorry to use this word excellence used to be a perfectly nice word and you know you say that actually yeah I want to do an excellent job and now you can't use it anymore because it's been hijacked but this but this competition for innovation and excellence has driven a kind of methodological arms race that draws scientists ever further from the phenomena they profess to study into a world of their own making but in the end of the day you cannot have science without observations that if if science is going to relate to the world at all and sometimes sometimes I do wonder about science whether in fact it has drawn us into a world so much of its own making that it doesn't really correspond to the world we inhabit at all I thought when the great crash the great financial crash happened in 2008 because it was revealed that all this money that people were talking about was actually a figment of people's imagination I thought that maybe the same thing would happen very soon for science that was a time when the great Hadron Collider had just been built and scientists were boasting about how they built the biggest man machine that mankind had ever known and you know there was a mouse this mouse is my hero the mouse who at through bit through the main electricity cable that powered the great Hadron Collider and put it out of action for six months that Mouse was a was was it was heroic in bringing these inflated ideas slightly down down to earth but but anyways big science hasn't collapsed yet though I suspect after awhile that it will because you cannot have any real science without observation and to have observation there has to be some kind of engagement between the investigator and the things that he or she is studying and and to highlight these observational commitments I think means recovering those experiences and performative engagements which methodology goes to such lengths to cover up I mean for any practical project of science you cannot actually hold things at a complete distance you have to involve yourself with them but methodology comes in to try and pretend that you're not doing so and this has a bearing on what we mean when we talk about experiments because of course there's a relationship between the word experiment and experience in silence the experiment tends to be a setup it's something designed to actually to trick the world into revealing what it otherwise would not through some form of deceit and subterfuge or sometimes through brute force it is in a sense a test we talk about experimental testing so one is putting one is designing a setup in which some aspect of the world in which you are interested in is is put to the test so whatever is put to the test has to undergo something the test is something that your apparatus your do whatever it is you're studying undergoes but that undergoing is framed within the doing of the experience of the experiment art is experimental too but in quite the other way about because in art the experiment is an experience enacted let's say it's not a matter of testing a preconceived hypothesis but simply of trying something out and seeing what happens and of course all life is experimental in that sense as we go through life every day every waking moment we are trying things out and seeing what happens as indeed as out my wife and I were trying to get here from the metro and you know we we tried it out to get a ticket one way and they didn't have done it anyway we found our way here but there was a lot of trial and error involved in it and the result is that we actually we actually got here so all life is experimental in that sense and I think we can get at this difference between the scientific and the artistic experiment by looking at the relationship between two key terms and that is doing and undergoing and again I got this these I got much of this from from reading John Dewey's think from 1934 art as experience in which he really focuses on the relationship between doing and undergoing because in the in the scientific experiment I said that you you're doing a test and whatever you're testing has to undergo something so there's a there's an under going here I'll just call it Yugi but that undergoing is framed within the doing of the experiment so we start the experiment here we end the experiment there and and so this is a doing you're doing the experiment but within that doing there's the undergoing of whatever it is you are testing but Joey's point is that in in life it's the other way around that undergoing is not framed within doing but doing is always framed within undergoing that is to say there is always an overflow of experience that goes on beyond the the the of any particular doing so you could draw it more like this that here is one doing and here is another doing that opened up and that's within the overall process of undergoing so what's happening there is that is that undergoing in a sense digests the ends of doing and extrudes them into a new beginning and the artist often or the maker is sitting here in the middle in a sense taking one life and being at that moment of transformation in which it starts a new life one example is that comes from anthropology is is is from a very famous study by bronislaw malinowski of people living in the Trobriand islands and he writes about about the making of ocean-going canoes and this starts with a tree growing in the in the forest and people see that tree that's going to make a good canoe the hull of the canoe so then there's the tree the trees living its tree a form of life but along come the villagers they they cut down the tree they haul it back to the village the canoe builder gets to work in hollowing it out and then it's carried to the beach and then it is launched on the sea and at that moment it begins a new life as a canoe now it's the same tree trunk but now it's riding the waves rather than living in the forest so the canoe builder stands at the threshold here from the life of the tree in the forest to the life of the tree as a canoe in the sea a Potter stands at the threshold between where the clay exists in the soil and clay starts its new life as a pot the carpenter at the threshold between the trees in the woods and furniture in the building and so on so in order to to to get to this sense of the experiment we have to put the relation between undergoing and doing in Reverse and that has a bearing on the question of observation and objective and objectivity because I want to argue that if observing is a part of undergoing then observing things is not to objectify them this is a mistake is very commonly made that that if you're going to observe you must it must mean that you're kind of standing outside and looking at things from a distance and objectifying thing things but this is not the case to observe is to correspond literally in the sense I set out it's to watch to listen to follow closely what is going on and to respond in time in kind and that is why there is no contradiction between participation and observation there's something we're always told as students so there's one of the problems with anthropology we do participant observation but you can't actually do that because it's contradictory you know how can you participate and observe at the same time it's like asking somebody to jump in the river and stand on the banks at the same time you you have to move backwards and forwards between the two but actually it there there is no contradiction between them the idea that there is a contradiction is just one aspect of a contradiction that lies at the heart of our own sense of humanity I mean the human is extraordinarily contradictory term because we don't know whether it refers to just a particular species of nature or a condition of being that stands outside of nature and I think actually the best definition of the human is that it expresses the existential dilemma of a being that can only know itself for what it is by standing outside itself and there's this peculiar dilemma and and that is also what lies behind the idea that you can't participate and observe at the same time that is to say to observe to know ourselves we imagine we have to stand outside in order to have any knowledge because we assume that knowledge can only be gained from the outside of things and whatever the argue for is the reverse and that is that actually all knowledge must grow from the inside of our involvement in the world that has made us be and allowed us to be the persons who we are so this it is the fundamental problem with science the that it it is founded on a dilemma that it tells us that we are parts of the world and yet it can only have the knowledge it has by saying that as scientists we stand outside the world so we need to be able to show how knowledge can grow from the inside of being from the crucible of our participatory and observational of involvement with the world around us that is within the give-and-take of life and of course that takes us right back to the issue of data from which I began and it takes us also to the idea of research which is a central topic for this conference research again is one of those words that has become used and abused to the point that no one any longer knows exactly what it means or it's lost its grounding and I want to insist that research is and must be the pursuit of truth if we live if we lose that if we say oh truth that's too hot I taught to handle I don't know what truth is then we we lose any grounding for research as a legitimate and ethical activity now of course there are all sorts of ways of defining truth but here is mine truth I argue is the Unison of imagination and experience in a world to which we are alive and that is alive to us that means that truth depends on our full and unqualified participation in the world from which it follows to that truth is absolutely not the same as objectivity these are very different things and I think at the moment we are in grave danger of conflating truth and objectivity because of the current panic about post truth nobody wants post truth but most of the people most of the commentators who are warning us of the dangers of a post truth era in which sort of anything goes in which using the data one can invent any kind of story is that they're assuming that truth means pure and simple objective fact it was a pure and simple objective fact that there were more people at Obama's inauguration than a Trump's okay and was post truth to pretend otherwise but if that is all we mean by truth how many people were at the inauguration was it this number or that number then that is a very very reduced a very impoverished sense of what truth is and I think it's a real challenge and this is a challenge for art as much as anything to insist upon what truth means beyond the mere facts of objectivity at the end of the 19th century the chemist friedrich august kekulé a he was the one who discovered the circular structure of the benzene molecule famously told about how he had a dream in which he saw snakes a snake writhing around and eating its own tail and he woke up from the dream and there was the structure of the benzene molecule already in his head he might have made that up but anyway he then gave a lecture it was the end of his career advising young scientists as to how to do it and he said this I like it very much he said to the to the aspiring scientist note every footprint every bent twig every fallen leaf and there you will see where next to place your feet so and then he called this way of doing science and so you're going walking very delicately through through the woods and noting every twig every every fallen leaf and then deciding yes that's the next place to put your feet he called that pathfinding and he thought of Sciences as a path finding or I would call it wayfaring and the thing is that the path finder corresponds with things in their formation rather than being informed by what is already precipitated out the path finder doesn't just collect but accepts what the world has to offer because he is paying acute attention to everything and I think it's here rather than rather than in arrogating to itself the authority to represent a given reality it is here that science can join with art as a way of knowing in being that is that in practice the hands and minds of scientists just like the hands and minds of artists absorb into their ways of working a perceptual acuity attuned to the materials that have captured their attention and so as these materials vary so does experience and what that suggests is that in practice scientists are differentiated by their actual experience of working with stuff that a glaciologist really having spent so much time with ice really appreciates and in a tactile haptic way the qualities of ice is almost looking at ice with icy eyes and and a botanist or a mycologist as my dad was would would would look at fungi with with eyes that already have a sort of fungal quality inside them and that was the science that I grew up with as the son of a mycologist in my childhood in which we were I and like my peers were were felt a sort of wonder in the beauty of the natural world it was a it was a science founded in care in attentiveness and in gratitude for what we owe the world for our existence what concerns me now is that science as it is presented to schoolchildren today has turned Wonder and gratitude into commodities they no longer guide its practices they no longer guide the practices of science but I used to but I used to advertise its results so that more and more science has listed art in order to promote its hard sell to offer images that beautify its results that's often its impact and mask often its collusions with corporations whose only interest in research is that it should drive innovation because in a neoliberal economy of knowledge only what is new sounds scientists often talk about the importance of what they call blue sky research of just being able to study anything because it's interesting and yet the rhetoric of blue sky research divorces that entirely legitimate curiosity about the world it divorces that curiosity from care why should this is what they say why should scientists care how their results are used that's not their concern scientists say we do the research we do the research because the world is there and we are curious about it of course our results might be used to build bombs or to make medicines or whatever that's not our job that's for politicians we just do the research but this kind of this kind of rhetoric shows the lofty appeal to blue skies to be little more than a cell serving defense of special interests increasingly concentrated in the hands of a global scientific elite that treats the rest of the world including the vast majority of its increasingly impoverished and apparently disposable human population as a standing reserve to feed the insatiable appetite of the knowledge economy but we must care and we care because truth matters and science if it's going to be ethical must be the pursuit not of innovation but of truth and that means that truth remember the Unison of imagination and experience in a world that is alive to us and to which we are alive that truth comes not after science but before it in the humble recognition that we are ourselves beholden for our existence to the world we seek to know and so we need to build a radical ecological awareness into the very foundations of science so remember my image of the marooned spaceship while consuming vast resources science I feel has largely lost its way it doesn't have any idea of where it has come from or where it is going and that is why the world needs art the world needs art to help science find its way again which means that art must come not after science as a way of communicating scientific findings or beautifying its results art must come before science by bringing the spaceship back down to earth thank you very much [Music] okay thank you so much Tim for inspiring inspiring talk and now we have some time for for questions and I can hand down the microphone up there ah this already thank you that was absolutely fascinating much appreciated I'm curious as to if you have any thoughts on something that I've been thinking a lot about which is not the kind of notion of being so embedded in context on the one hand or the idea of distance on the other but the idea of extraction so if you think of sort of Bertold Brecht and you know the idea of making strange and if you think of Duchamp and the famous bottle rack you know what the artist often does is you know have a critical distance right so you take something you research you anything and you take a material you transform it you take an idea you put it out of context in this other kind of arena and that allows the audience or the viewer to have this encounter right so the art sort of happens as you know Simon O'Sullivan has really well articulated in his writing you know in that space between those two things so I'm interested in how you think maybe of presence in relation to it not being you know presence as in you're really actually there in the world with the thing but presence also as a kind of another form of extraction via attention specific to the thing but outside of all of the usual kind of ways in which you might yeah absolutely and and as I understand it I mean these sorts of examples you gave are precisely about how you bring something into presence that normally is simply doing its job in its in these ordinary contexts that you go to the toilet and do do a pee you know and they do everything about it but you bring the thing out is that goodness I hadn't really thought about this before so that the thing actually actually is it that that form of extraction is a is a way of exactly of taking things out of context ordinary context in order to bring them into your presence so that you attend to them in ways that you might not have done before and what that that suggests to me is that is that somehow we have to distinguish between two senses of extraction and two senses of D contextualization because there's a there's a kind of sense of extraction which which I mentioned talking about how scientists produce data where you simply harvest the staffers there's a kind of extraction which is yeah which is really just data harvesting and and an a/d contextualization that is related to that and that's clearly something completely different from the kind of extraction that you were just talking about which is to bring thing to something full front into into our awareness and likewise there are two senses of D contextualization and I don't think I could do it on my feet but I think it would be important to try and finesse the terms so as to be clear about what that difference is it might be that that one involves attention and the other doesn't or something like that and I'm not quite sure how to put it but you're absolutely right that there is a difference and this question from here thanks Matt for your fascinating talk my question is in a way a follow up of the previous one we live in a context in which things now let's people become increasingly obsolete surrounded by overwhelming distractions so it seems to me that one has to elaborate one has to develop strategies or rituals for paying attention sometimes defensive ones sometimes generative ones perhaps we can even talk of a catalyst of attention so I wonder is Professor Engel has listened ritual or strategy for paying attention perhaps thank you I don't know whether I have any such rituals but but I do think you're right that we well I think I think it's fairly obvious to everybody that the world as it is at the moment is one in which people are paying less and less attention and one of the reasons the other side of attention of course is distraction and that too is a word that can mean many different things but but a lot of us would say that that people are completely distracted for example on their on their phones they're not paying any attention to anybody because they're they're absorbed in their in their their phones or they have earplugs on their ears so they're not listening to the birds or the sounds around them so we have a situation in which in which so much of the sensory world has been commodified so we don't actually actively have to have to stretch out in order to listen in order to watch in order to see because the these things are being fed mediated in some way by by by by response television whatever are being fed directly into into us and we become the consumers of off sensation rather than the producers of lives in a inner world and so I don't know what your thing in a way is is is that attention is something that can be trained it's not innate it's not given with it it we can we can we can learn to be attentive and and so if you learn to play a musical instrument for example then you like a cello or one of the things you have to learn is is to play and tune and to play in tune you have to be able to be sensitive to the slightest variations of pitch you can see this is out of tune this is sharp this is flat and not everybody you know is attentive to those distinctions because it's a it's part of of a skill and and different people have different skills and they attend to different things and that's that's fine but my worry is that that because up until recently attention has always taken a backseat to intention in design in philosophy and so on it's it's a third that doesn't really matter or would never mind about the important thing is about the intentionality of things and and and I do think we have to reverse our priorities to pay more attention to it pay more attention to attention if you will yes hello and thank you for your speech professor Engel my name is Hollander my message to create students of social anthropology and my question is this though how do you answer to the critique that you had that your emphasis on introspection produces the same kinds of biases and universalization is that the evolutionists of the late nineteen hundreds produced sorry mrs. so so I I know the reason why this is that one of the curious things about about the technology here is that it's very difficult to attention that that I was looking in completely the wrong direction the fakers and and result is that that I didn't actually pick up exactly could you say it again because then I can't see where you where you are yes sure there you are okay now I can now I can attend yes sorry about that so yeah as I said I'm a student of social and approach and my question is how do you answer to the critic that you've had on the emphasis on introspection on the research that it might produce the same kinds of biases and universalization that the evolution is of the late 1900s produced first of all and I I'm no I don't I don't I don't I don't see that what about it but but on the other hand those people who were writing in the those evolutionists in the late 19th century had a lot of wrong ideas but but but they won't come that their ways of thinking deserve to be taken seriously and one of the things that was one things that distinguished the the evolutionism of the late 19th century and the cultural relativism of of the mid twentieth is this that that the evolutionists for all their faults and all their subscription to a rather ethnocentric kind of you know that what their universals always turned out to be white male universals and so on but but is that they felt that at least all human beings were part of that same process that we're all in it together it's just that you know if you are a nineteenth-century white male you were you were you are further ahead than everybody else but you are still in part of the same process whereas the relativists would say that all humanity is is locked up in its cultural worlds except us and we can look into all these worlds because we are not just a sentient we are transcend so in some sense the the the the relativist of the 20th century were much more arrogant than the evolutionists of the 19th century because they felt that they were really over an above cultural difference so over and above it that they could look into all these different cultural worlds whereas so they could see in but the people in the cultures couldn't see out but at least the evolutionists for all their arrogance ethnocentrism and the rest of it still had the sort of commitment to the idea that that there was a universality in the sense that we are all part of the same world and I think it's terribly important for anthropology and indeed art and everything else to recognize this that we are the the world might be a world of infinite and never-ending difference but we are all part of it and that's a lesson it's it's that in that sense of universality I think is something that we can take from those 19th century thinkers without having to say that it means when some sense were all the same I don't think there's any sense in the notion of universal human nature no but there is a sense in saying that that we all we all inhabit the same world of relations and processes and whatever differences there are generated within that I don't know whether that answers your question but anyway it's best I can do okay thank you be running over order schedule a little bit but I promised one more very very quick question so the one I need to do something I have to do yeah I understood I have understood that you relate the true to presence but we are sure that we can be present in the sense that for example before we have done a sort of involuntary intervention he passed me that microphone and started to speak yeah you didn't know yeah where you were yes who you were and what your experience was in that in that one so it's not that our subjectivity instead is built by the space-time organization so that our sense of presence is already constructed instead our true Bank it's on the edge between presence and non presence in fact if you put a situation that is on the static equilibrium like this out of equilibrium you have sort of cows coming and you don't your experience is more on the edge of presence you are not really present it's become some timely and especially your your spirit so it's more near to the mystic then to the grasp of all that for example I usually put system out of equilibrium to mix intervention and I see if I go to reconstruct this experience I need to use fiction because the subjectivity of the situation it's so extended at a limit of cosmic so that you cannot really be present again again on in the in that non presence okay really interesting and important important question I mean the first thing I would I I sort of agree with you I certainly agree in the sense that presence can only be relational that is to say that it's not something that here am I you know I just come with my presence and I'm here and and and that's it and you've got to accept it as what it is that said and that example of what just happened with the microphone you know I missed it because I was looking in completely the wrong direction was was exactly that that that for a moment the speaker was not present to me and therefore I couldn't form a relation and therefore I couldn't hear what he said so so that so that when we talk about presence it has to be relational I mean that that seems to me to be and that that was my problem with the notion the qualitative data for exam but but but and then then there's the question about then all the second thing it was so first presence has got to be relational second surely it is processable or temporal that's to say that it's not it's not a here it is it's not a it's not in the here and now it's something that is continually so in a sense is it's a continually becoming present a continual appearing and so perhaps the word like appearance will be better than presence and I have a feeling that there's this wonderful discussion by a guardian philosopher called corabeth oft who who said that although grammatically we talked about we would say it appears he said that philosophically speaking it would be better to say that piers it which means that he had what he meant was that somehow you are brought to that point at which you are at that cusp on which something is about to reveal itself for what it is you're at the but the at the appearing of what appears and you might say that the presence in this kind of way you were talking about is saying but we're something it's not there it's just just coming to be there and you're catching it at that moment and if you don't catch it it disappears like a dream it disappears when you when you wake up so that one is when it's living on that cusp you talk about between presence and absent presence and non presence I would say it's it's that cusp in which in which the world is continually on the point of revealing itself for what it is and that's very interesting okay thank you it kind of appears that we are running out of time and and so I once again want to thank Tim Engel for inspiring talk and paying attention is important but coffee is also important and there's gotta be some self thank you [Applause]

Channel: Art of Research Conference

Views: 9,277

Rating: 4.9532166 out of 5

Keywords: ingold, experience, observation

Id: 2Mytf4ZSqQs

Length: 69min 45sec (4185 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2018