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Not Yet and Already There: On the Imagination of Real Life

TIM INGOLD

University of Aberdeen

I

Many years ago, in the course of writing a book on the meaning of evolution, I came across a book by the American theologian Henry Nelson Wieman. Entitled Intellectual Foundation of Faith, and dating from 1961, it set out a distinction between two kinds, or senses, of creativity. 1 In one sense, Wieman says, creativity is a characteristic doing of the human person. A human being is creative in this sense “when he constructs something according to a new design that has already come within reach of his imagination.” 2 It is found by looking back from a final product—what Wieman calls a “created good”—to an unprecedented idea in the mind of an agent, in whose doing or making it was actualised. The creativity of the idea, according to this definition, lies in the measure of its novelty, by comparison with what has gone before. That’s why creativity, taken in this sense, is so commonly identified with innovation.

But in the second sense, according to Wieman, creativity is what a person undergoes but cannot do. His argument is that behind the contingencies of what people do, and the miscellany of products or created goods to which these doings give rise, is the “creative good” that is intrinsic to human life itself, in its capacity to generate persons in relationships. This is the kind of creativity that does not begin here, with an idea in mind, and end there, with a completed object. Rather, it carries on through, without beginning or end. It is, for Wieman, “what progressively creates personality in community.” 3 To be sure, a person may create many things in the course of their life: things imagined, and subsequently made or done. But there is more to the creativity of a life than the sum total of a lifetime’s achievements. For every act carries its own burden of suffering: every doing is also an undergoing. And it is precisely in Wieman’s second sense, in the undergoing rather than the doing, that the creativity of the life process is to be found.

This is a sense, however, that has been largely banished by the human sciences. I think it is fair to say that by and large, they have understood creativity in the first of Wieman’s two senses. My question is this: what would it take to bring it back?

Three philosophers of the early twentieth century can help us in this enterprise—Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey—and it comes as no surprise to find that Wieman had been strongly influenced by all three. It was almost certainly from Dewey that Wieman took the key distinction between doing and undergoing, for Dewey himself had placed it at the centre of his reflections in Art as Experience, published in 1934. 4 Every experience, Dewey had argued, entails its quotients of doing and of undergoing, and the key problem for him was to figure out the relation between them. They cannot simply alternate, he thought, for otherwise there could be no continuity from one doing to the next, and life would fragment into a scatter of disconnected episodes. What happens in reality, to the contrary, is that undergoing always overflows doing, to the extent that whatever you do next takes into itself something of the experience of what you did before. Thus, while in our doings we fashion a world, in our undergoings we are the creatures of our own self-fashioning.

In his Creative Evolution of 1911, Bergson was already onto the same thing. “It is then right to say,” he wrote, “that what we do depends on what we are; but it is necessary to add also that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and that we are creating ourselves continually.” 5 This endless creation of ourselves corresponds precisely to Wieman’s idea of a creativity undergone rather than done. To understand creativity in this sense, however, is to read it forwards, in the unfolding of the relations and processes that actually give rise to worldly beings, rather than back, in the retrospective attribution of final products to initial designs. It is to recognise, with Bergson, that the generation of persons in relationships not only takes time but is also irreversible. Its time is duration: not a succession of instants but the prolonging of the past into the actual. “Duration,” Bergson wrote, “is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.” 6 There is no going back. What follows, then, cannot be factored into any multiple or combination of that which preceded it: before and after are truly incommensurable. It is as if in every breath, we open our eyes on the world for the first time.

Like Bergson, Whitehead was also keen to emphasise the difference in perspective that comes from relinquishing our view of the living world from the outside, as a fait accompli, for a position from the inside of its coming-into-being. From the outside you see creatures, each the embodiment of an evolved design, and each set apart from all the others and the environment to which it is adapted. But from the inside the creature turns out to be none other than the process of its own self-creation, a process that, at each and every moment, enfolds an entire universe into a singular nexus. Already in his Lowell Lectures of 1925, Science and the Modern World, Whitehead had been at pains to distinguish these outside and inside perspectives, reserving what he called “creativeness” for the latter. 7 Yet returning a year later to the same theme, in a second series of lectures, Religion in the Making, Whitehead concluded that in truth, there are not two things, the creativity and the creature: “There is only one entity which is the self-creating creature.” 8 Creativity in this sense lies in the capacity of living, growing things continually to surpass themselves. Whitehead called this self-surpassing concrescence. The world of life, he argued, is a world not of concrete, created things but of concrescent, crescent things.

II

Where life goes, art follows. Like the life with which it corresponds, art is always coming into being, always surpassing itself, always concrescent. As the painter Paul Klee wrote in his notebooks, “the work of art … is first of all genesis; it is never experienced purely as a result.” 9 For the artist the work goes on, even as life does. It is in the actual forming or making of things, in their generation or ontogenesis, that the real work lies. Completion kills it off. “Form is the end, death,” 10 Klee writes; “form-giving is movement, action. Form-giving is life.” 11 Yet for those of us whose lives are governed, to greater or lesser degree, by the logic of commodity capitalism, the generation of form is swallowed up in its results. What for artists are merely the cast-offs of a daily struggle to begin afresh are eagerly gobbled up by the art market as finished works, whose production is alleged to have entailed no more than the transposition, onto a material base, of the novel designs that motivated them. All the creative work is thus supposed to have been done in the mind, before even a finger is raised in its realisation. What counts is the novelty of ends. Indeed for many, the identification of creativity with innovation seems so obvious that it is barely questioned.

Nor has my own discipline of anthropology remained immune to this way of thinking. Alfred Gell’s influential work Art and Agency is a case in point. The object, Gell argues, indexes the agency of its creator, who is supposed to have projected it in the imagination, prior to its accomplishment in the material. To read back from index to agent—that is from the object to its creator—is to perform the cognitive act of what Gell calls abduction. 12 Here, Gell is loosely following the lead of the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Though Peirce’s writings on the topic are famously obscure, what he seems to have had in mind is akin to what we might now regard as “educated guesswork.” This is the procedure of the detective who, reading the material traces of an extraordinary event, is led back to an initial set of circumstances, from which the observed results would ensue as a matter of course. And so, according to this logic, the work of art—in itself extraordinary and unique—is so only because it can be traced to an unprecedented conception in the mind of its maker, from which everything about the work follows with an unremarkable inevitability.

Missing from such a backwards reading—a reading that goes from the work to the intention that motivated it—is any recognition of the form-generating potentials of the relations and processes in which persons and things are actually made and grown. After all, for the criminal investigator, the deed is already done, and the task is to unpick the steps leading up to it. But if we are to understand the creativity that brings things into being, then we have to move upstream, from deeds to the doing of them. We have, in a sense, to become criminals ourselves, complicit in the crime. As Bergson recognised, to understand the processes of formation—that is, to read creativity forwards—is to focus not on abduction but on improvisation. It is to track the ways along which the maker of the work follows the materials with which he or she is engaged. Where innovation delivers only endings, improvisation ushers in perpetual beginning. It is, in Bergson’s words again, “a ceaseless upspringing of something new.” 13 Newness, not novelty, is the name of the game. Criminals, after all, do not generally intend to get caught. No more do artists.

III

The work of art, then, carries on; that is, it perdures. For example, like most cellists, I play the six suites of Johann Sebastian Bach, written for unaccompanied cello, over and over again, in a forlorn attempt to get them right. I know that I shall never do so, since perfection is an asymptote that no mortal musician could ever reach, least of all a clumsy amateur like me. But I can keep working at it. And as I do so, the music itself keeps on going. It is not as though the work was done, finished, the moment Bach laid down his pen. What Bach had done was rather to birth the music into the world. And from that originary moment it has continued to flow, issuing forth in every performance. In this sense, the musical work is crescent, not created, continually coming into being for as long as it lives. It is like an ever-flowing current, and to begin to play is to push one’s boat out into the current, never knowing what will transpire. It is an enterprise fraught with risk. Mistakes and slip-ups happen, and when they do, there is no going back and correcting them. One can only attempt to regain one’s balance and carry on with the music.

There is, here, no opposition between creation and imitation. To be sure, every performance of the piece may be a copy, but then every copy is an original, non-repeatable movement. We could say that the piece is reproduced on each occasion, in the sense that it is produced over again, but it is not replicated as it would be, for example, if it were replayed from a recording by means of an electro-mechanical device. The same is true in the art of calligraphy, which resembles musical performance in so many ways. As the cellist draws the melodic line from the resonant chamber of his instrument, so the calligrapher draws her inky traces from a resonant body: through the brush, every nuance and every inflection of the manual gesture registers in the sinuous line as it soaks its way through the fabric of the paper. With calligraphic as with musical performance, one can never draw out the same line twice. Rubbing out or retouching is not an option.

In her study of the power of calligraphy in contemporary Chinese society, Yuehping Yen has spelled out the three stages through which novices are normally inducted into the art. They begin by tracing the shadows of the model to be copied, which is placed directly below the translucent paper on which they write. In the next stage, paper and model are placed side by side, forcing them to improvise the necessary gestures for themselves rather than being guided by the shadows of the masters. Then, in the final stage of learning, novices are encouraged to shake themselves loose from the masters’ “clutching ‘hands.’” In this stage, “all the learned rules are banished into oblivion and the heart becomes the only guide of the hand.” At no point in this three-stage process of enskilment, however, do practitioners cease to copy. Every performance of a calligraphic work is a “going over,” in so far as it is modelled on previous studies, yet every going over is itself an original movement that carries the work on, even as it follows paths already traced. 14 This is a movement—to adopt a distinction proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—not of iteration but of itineration.

There is a remarkable parallel between this process of calligraphic learning and that described in a recent study, by anthropologist Eitan Wilf, of learning to play jazz trumpet. 15 Though the institutional context—a modern North American college—could hardly be more different from that of a Chinese seminary, there is the same concern both to emulate the masterworks of the past and, in doing so, to attain a level of proficiency at which performers can, as it were, cast off the shackles of their prior training and launch themselves into a creative space of their own. Where the novice calligrapher copies from works on paper, the trainee trumpeter is required to copy from audio-recordings of solos by the great jazz masters of the past. Attending closely to all the nuances of rhythm, tone, and timbre, they are instructed to tailor their performances to the model as closely as they can. Ideally, they should be able to replay the solo in synchrony with the recording of the original in such a way that the two become practically indistinguishable. In these moments, the recording effectively “disappears” into the student’s performance.

Wilf’s key insight is that these are also moments of profound creativity. It is not that the master creates, and the novice “merely” imitates. For in copying the master’s performance, the student does not just execute the work but inhabits it, both joining with and experiencing from within the ever-advancing swell of incipient sound on the verge of its release. Eventually, as one teacher put it, “you’re so tight with the soloist that he just melts away and it’s just you.” 16 In the same way as in the final stage of calligraphic learning, the ultimate fusion of the master’s and the student’s instrumental performance is actually a liberation, allowing the student, in a sense, to carry on from where the master left off, guided only by a heart that already beats to the rhythm of the original. For the jazz trumpeter, as for me, playing Bach on my cello, the music is always crescent, never created, always on the cusp of a never-ceasing current that runs through all its performances and through all the players caught up in them. On entering the current, the musician submits to a creativity that lies not in the doing of things, but in what he or she undergoes.

IV

The comparison of Western music, whether classical or jazz, with East Asian calligraphy compels us to acknowledge two points. The first is that the possibility to engage in what Wilf calls “rituals of creativity,” in which the student can experience an almost mystical fusion with the master whose work he or she is copying, is not as he thinks—uniquely afforded by the aural modality. For Wilf, music is peculiar because the source text or model, which the performer seeks to emulate, “consists of sound that unfolds in time.” 17 With something like a painting—say Picasso’s Guernica—one might attempt to copy the work and even to laminate the copy over the original, but one would not, according to Wilf, “experience the real-time dimension of painting the Guernica in synchrony with Picasso’s act of painting the Guernica.” 18 Yet in the practice of calligraphy, which, like painting, employs the visual rather than the aural register, this is precisely what happens. The calligraphic “source text” also unfolds in time, as does the manual gesture that produced it. As Yen shows, one cannot observe a work of calligraphy, let alone understand it, merely by looking at it. One has to inhabit it, and to reunite one’s vision with that of the calligrapher in the production of his or her “inked traces.”

Secondly, we are not dealing here with any simple opposition between “Western” and “non-Western,” or “modern” and “non-modern” approaches to creativity. The tension between the “creative good” and “created goods,” as Wieman would put it—or as we might say, between a backward-reading emphasis on agency and innovation and a forward-reading emphasis on growth and self-discovery—is as evident in Western educational contexts as it is, to an ever-increasing extent, in the East. Anthropologist Fuyubi Nakamura, for example, has shown how post-war calligraphic artists in Japan have increasingly had to negotiate the contradiction between carrying on the lines of their predecessors, through a moment-by-moment improvisation that is continually answerable to the waywardness of their materials, and the demands of a commodity-driven art world for novel products that index the “creativity” of individual artists. 19

It might of course be argued that my choice of examples from music and calligraphy introduces a bias towards improvisatory performance. Even the music of Bach, though it has been composed, leaves a great deal of scope for interpretation. What if, instead, the work had been so comprehensively notated as to specify the performance in every detail? In such a case, could not the work be said to exist, as an already completed design, independently and in advance of any performance? How can we refute the argument that anthropologist Dan Sperber once put forward with regard to the art of cookery, to wit, that all you have to do is “convert into bodily behaviour” the detailed instructions or representations already set out in your cookbook? 20 Perhaps the classical musician, performing a heavily scored work, is only “converting into behaviour” what is written there. Since there would then be nothing in the music that is not already prefigured in the score, how could such a performance be deemed, in itself, to be any more creative than that of a mechanical printer, in running off a copy from a pre-composed file?

These questions point to a discrepancy between alternative understandings of notation, which we might call, respectively, representational and deictic. From the point of view of an uninvolved spectator, it might seem that the notation fully represents the work, in the sense that there is a one-to-one correspondence between markings on the page and behaviours in the world. For the practitioner, however, to follow the script or score is to correspond in quite another sense: that is, to answer to its commands in ways that draw upon already established skills of perception and action. Thus the instructions in a recipe book, for example, or in the musical score, do not so much map your moves as point the way from where you are now to where you need to go next. Like signposts or way-markers in a landscape, each is strategically placed at a critical juncture where there might be a risk of taking a wrong turn or missing the right one, but between which you are expected to find your way around, attentively and responsively, but without further recourse to explicit rules of procedure. As signposts direct the walker in the terrain, so the notation provides directions for practitioners to follow as they fare through the field of related practices that I have elsewhere called the “taskscape.” 21

A good example of this discrepancy is documented in a study by anthropologist Nicolette Makovicky, of bobbin lace-making in Central Slovakia. 22 Lace-makers use specialised, notational diagrams. Some, spurred by a concern to preserve a valued cultural heritage, have taken to treating these diagrams as repositories of traditional lore, as though in each was codified a particular pattern of lacework. Others, however, resist these efforts at codification and continue to treat the diagrams as “disposable tools,” whose place lies in the midst of the work itself rather than anterior to it, and which can be discarded or redrawn at will as it proceeds. These differences came to a head in the experience of one of Makovicky’s interlocutors, Hana Majerová. Employed to teach a beginner’s class in lace-making, Majerová was expected to instruct from diagrammatic representations of the traditional motifs her students were supposed to acquire. She soon abandoned this approach, however, in favour of training students in basic skills of stitching that would enable them to produce quality work of their own. For Majerová, making designs and motifs was inseparable from the overall task of working on a piece. Were she to be unhappy with the way the piece was working out, she would discard the design before starting afresh. Thus, as she put it: “I never know how it will turn out until I have actually made it.” 23 It is the process of making, not the notational diagram, which determines the final outcome.

V

The creativity of making, then, inheres in the skilled practice that brings forth the work, and of which it is an outcome, rather than in any set of designs or representations that precede it. In the words of political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the design “is the stepchild, not the parent of the activity.” 24 But if that is so, then what is the role of imagination in creative practice? If imagination is not about the composition of novel designs in advance of their execution, as a condition of doing in Wieman’s sense, then what is it? In what follows I want to argue that imagination is not a mental capacity that permits the spontaneous generation of ideas, but rather a way of living creatively in a world that is itself crescent, always in formation. To imagine, as anthropologist Stuart McLean puts it, is “to respond creatively to the creativity of the world’s ceaseless self-transformations.” 25 This correspondence—this answering to a world that, in its relations and processes, also answers to us—is the generative dynamic that moves life forward.

In his famous essay “History as a System,” written in 1935, the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset insisted that appeals to the imagination in the name of such notions as soul, psyche, or spirit, are misguided. For they place, at the origin of our actions, a conclusion that is never actually reached. In truth, Ortega writes, “the only thing that is given us and that is where there is human life is the having to make it.” 26 In this, he seems at one with Bergson, who likewise held the view—as we have seen—that life is an endless process of self-making, or in a word, of becoming. Though otherwise sympathetic to Bergson’s stance, however, Ortega went one step further, insisting that there is more to the specifically human task of self-making than mere becoming, and more to life-making than mere living. For unlike other animals that become whatever it is in their nature to be, humans must perforce determine what they are going to be. The fulfilment of human being is always deferred, always not yet: “man,” says Ortega, is a “not-yet being.” 27

Another word for the “not-yet-ness” of being is aspiration. Nevertheless, humans do not aspire from nowhere. At every moment of life, they reach out from places already held, or prehended, towards the horizons of their present awareness. Thus the movement of human life, by comparison perhaps with that of other animals, is temporally stretched. Out in front is the “not yet” of aspiration; bringing up the rear is the “already there” of prehension. At once not yet and already, humans—we might say—are constitutionally ahead of themselves. It is not that they are becoming rather than being; rather their becoming is continually overtaking their being. This is probably what lies at the back of the minds of most of us when we say of our human selves that we do not just live our human lives but lead them. And it is precisely in leading life that imagination comes into play.

Recall that in Wieman’s definition, “to do” is to act upon an idea that is already settled within the imagination. The intention or design is there before the act. “To undergo,” by contrast, is to move upstream, to a fount of incipience where ideas have yet to crystallise out from the flow of action. As a creative good, the power of the imagination is not one of mental representation, nor is it a capacity to construct images in advance of their material enactment. It is rather the generative impulse of a life that continually runs ahead of itself. Following Ortega, we could say that imagination is another word for the aspiration of not-yet-being. As such, it leads from the front rather than directing from behind. But where it leads is not yet plotted out before the act begins. As we say colloquially, the propensity of the imagination is to “roam,” to cast about for a way ahead or to improvise a passage; it is not to map final outcomes and all the steps to reach them. And for Ortega, without imagination—without this capacity to run ahead of ourselves—human life would be impossible.

It seems that in every venture and at every moment, we are both fully prepared and yet utterly unprepared for things to come. Our preparation lies in an education of perception by which we become practised in both paying attention and responding skilfully to salient aspects of our environment. Through such attunement, we acquire a certain practical mastery, for example if we are walkers, in picking up and responding to irregularities of the ground surface, enabling us to keep our balance in tricky terrain. Musicians become masters of their instruments, enabling them to find their way through the most complex of passages. Weavers and lace-makers become masters in working with fibrous materials, enabling them to generate a regular pattern from the rhythmic repetition of basic movements. Yet with mastery comes its opposite: submission. As we have already seen in the case of playing the cello, to launch into the music is to push one’s boat out into the stream of a world in becoming, with no knowing what will ensue. This is to undergo an education in quite another sense, etymologically compounded from ex (out) plus ducere (to lead). To be thus led out is to be both impelled and drawn into the unknown.

Crucially, this movement of ex-duction, of a life that leads out into a world that is always incipient—always on the brink of revealing itself—is not intentional but attentional. When we say of a deed that it is done with intention, we mean that the outward cast of action follows an inward cast of thought. The mind intends and the body extends. This is what Wieman implied in his definition of “doing” as action predicated upon a design already lodged within the mind of the agent. Maybe I intend to play my cello: I take the instrument from its case; set up music and stand; apply rosin to the bow. Here, I am the subject and my playing the predicate. But once launched into the music, I and my playing become one and the same, and doing gives way to undergoing. While there is of course a mind at work in the attentionality of undergoing, just as there is in the intentionality of doing, this is a mind immanent in the movement itself rather than an originating source to which such movement may be attributed as an effect. Or in short, whereas the practitioner’s intention converges upon an origin, his or her attention comes from being pulled away from it. This pulling away which, rather than placing us in a position, drags us out of it, is quite literally a practice of exposure. Far from securing a place for ourselves in the world, it leaves us open and vulnerable.

VI

What, then, is the relation between preparation and unpreparedness, or between the modes of education that lie, respectively, in attunement and exposure? Earlier, I suggested that unlike other creatures that live their lives but do not lead them, the lives of humans are temporally stretched, between the already and the not yet. What then leads, and what follows? The usual answer is to claim that as intentional beings—that is as agents—humans deliberate before they act, in Wieman’s sense of doing what has already come within reach of the imagination. Thus the mind commands and the body submits more or less mechanically to its directions. Mastery, in this account, is cognitive: if humans lead their lives it is entirely thanks to their capacity to conceive of designs in advance of their execution, something of which animals—at least for a science of mind constructed on Cartesian principles—are deemed incapable. The chess master, for example, plans his moves in his head, by means of mental computations of wondrous complexity, whereas their subsequent enactment, entailing the grasping and lifting of a piece from one square and its transport to another, could hardly be simpler. It requires no great skill; any machine could do it.

I would like to propose, however, that in undergoing, the relation of temporal priority between mastery and submission is the reverse of that which is assumed in the cognitive or intentionalist account of doing. Here, submission leads and mastery follows: education as exposure precedes education as attunement. Rather than a commanding mind that already knows its will trailing a subservient body in its wake, out in front is an aspirant imagination that feels its way forward, improvising a passage through an as yet unformed world, while bringing up the rear is a prehensive perception already accustomed to the ways of the world and skilled in observing and responding to its affordances.

A life that is led is thus held in the tension between submission and mastery, between imagination and perception, between aspiration and prehension, and between exposure and attunement. In every one of these pairings, the first leads and the second follows. But the former’s lead is not commanding but tentative. It requires of its following not passive obedience but active delivery. Pushing the boat out, I call upon my powers of perception to respond. Yet in that very response I discover that unbeknown to me, I have been there before, as have my predecessors since time immemorial. Without even thinking about it, I seem to know the ropes. Heading out along the trail, into the “not yet,” I already know how it goes. Thus all undergoing is remembering. As the phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels has put it, “we are older than ourselves”: behind the selves we are on the point of becoming, but are not yet, are the selves that we already are without our knowing. 28 In this ongoing, itinerant process of becoming who we were, and of having been whom we become, there is no bottom line, no point at which we can uncover some basic human nature that was there before it all began.

I conclude by returning to Wieman’s notion of the creative good: what personality undergoes but cannot do. This undergoing is not passive. If it were, then submission would follow but not lead. Active undergoing, in which submission leads, is a kind of action without agency, or what I have elsewhere called “agencing.” 29 That we find this so hard to express owes much to the fact that the grammatical categories with which we are familiar today impose an opposition between the active and the passive voice of the verb according to which, as linguist Émile Benveniste observed in a classic study, the former is for “action done” and the latter for “action undergone.” 30 Yet as Benveniste shows, in the history of the Indo-European languages the active/passive opposition emerged through a decomposition of what ancient Greek grammarians called the “middle voice.” 31 It was this decomposition that put agency, as it were, out in front, separating the doer from the deed. In the middle voice, by contrast, the doer remains inside the process of his doing; “he achieves something,” writes Benveniste, “which is being achieved in him.” 32

This, for Wieman, is what it means actively to undergo. Such undergoing does not translate from an image in the mind to an object in the world. Rather, as we have seen in the case of Hana Majerová’s account of her lace-making, both the thing and the idea of it emerge together from the performance itself. This performance, moreover, is an act to which you submit: you do not initiate it; rather, it is a task that falls to you. And in undertaking it, you are perhaps surprised to discover capacities of perception and action you never knew you had. But where has it come from, this thing you performed? It has no point of origin; it cannot be traced to an intention. What we undergo is not done by an authorial agent with a design in mind. It is rather part of a never-ending process of attention and response in which, as we have seen, all human life is caught. Just as the “already” is always behind us, as far back as we care to go, so the “not yet” will always escape ahead of us, beyond the horizon of our expectations. And as we owe our very existence to what has gone before, and as what comes after owes its existence, at least in part, to us, so our deeds belong to no one: not to ourselves, not to others, but to history—or better, to life. The creativity of undergoing, in short, is nothing less than that of life itself.

Cite as

Ingold, Tim. “Not Yet and Already There: On the Imagination of Real Life.” In Imagining the Non-Present: Thought Experiments on Rich Temporality in Sound, edited by Carlo Diaz. SONUS Series. Ghent: Orpheus Instituut, 2025. https://doi.org/10.47041/SONUS.2026.2.

Footnotes

  • 1 Henry Nelson Wieman, Intellectual Foundation of Faith (New York: Philosophical Library, 1961).
  • 2 Wieman, Intellectual Foundation, 65.
  • 3 Wieman, Intellectual Foundation, 66.
  • 4 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934).
  • 5 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 7.
  • 6 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 4.
  • 7 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925 (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 140.
  • 8 Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making: Lowell Lectures 1926 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 102.
  • 9 Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, ed. Jürg Spiller, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Lund, Humphries, 1961), 78.
  • 10 Klee, Notebooks 1, 169.
  • 11 Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 2: The Nature of Nature, ed. Jürg Spiller, trans. Heinz Norden (London: Lund Humphries, 1973), 269.
  • 12 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 14–16.
  • 13 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 47.
  • 14 Yuehping Yen, Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2005), 123.
  • 15 Eitan Y. Wilf, School for Cool: The Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
  • 16 Wilf, School for Cool, 116.
  • 17 Wilf, School for Cool, 129.
  • 18 Eitan Y. Wilf, “Rituals of Creativity: Tradition, Modernity, and the ‘Acoustic Unconscious’ in a U.S. Collegiate Jazz Music Program,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 114, no. 1 (March 2012): 38.
  • 19 Fuyubi Nakamura, “Creating or Performing Words? Observations on Contemporary Japanese Calligraphy,” chap. 4 in Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, edited by Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
  • 20 Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 61.
  • 21 Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1993): 152–74.
  • 22 Nicolette Makovicky, “‘Something to Talk About’: Notation and Knowledge-Making Among Central Slovak Lace-Makers,” in “Making Knowledge,” ed. Trevor H. J. Marchand, supplemental special issue, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (2010): S80–S99.
  • 23 Makovicky, “‘Something to Talk About,’” S96.
  • 24 Michael Oakeshott, “Political Education (LSE, 1951),” in The Study of Politics: A Collection of Inaugural Lectures, ed. Preston King (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 80.
  • 25 Stuart McLean, “Stories and Cosmogonies: Imagining Creativity Beyond ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture,’” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 2 (2009): 231.
  • 26 José Ortega y Gasset, “History as a System,” trans. William C. Atkinson, in History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History, trans. Helene Weyl (1941; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 200.
  • 27 José Ortega y Gasset, “Man the Technician,” in History as a System and Other Essays, 112.
  • 28 Bernhard Waldenfels, “Bodily Experience Between Selfhood and Otherness,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3, no. 3 (2004): 242.
  • 29 Tim Ingold, “On Human Correspondence,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 23, no. 1 (2017): 9–27.
  • 30 Émile Benveniste, “Active and Middle Voice in the Verb,” in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), 146.
  • 31 Benveniste, “Active and Middle Voice,” 145–51.
  • 32 Benveniste, “Active and Middle Voice,” 149.

Colophon

Date
29 April 2025
Review status
Double-blind peer review
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