The inspiration for this talk comes from an exhibition of work by the artist David Lemm, at the Edinburgh Printmakers’ Gallery, in the spring of this year (2015). Entitled Debris and Phenomena, the work consisted of a number of pieces in which iconic marks were superimposed upon old nautical charts. What had intrigued Lemm was that these charts, which he had found by chance amidst piles of waste paper, had once been important tools for navigators in shaping their perception of the maritime world. Does our perception really rest on such a fragile foundation that it can disappear with a few scraps of paper discarded in a bin? Intrigued by this thought, Lemm had saved the charts. They showed very little. Here and there were numbers, recording depth, with occasional contour lines, and on every sheet, a graded semicircle indicating all the degree points of the compass. On each sheet, Lemm had overprinted a schematic map of a small neighbourhood of the city of Edinburgh, in the faintest of colour, which did no more than separate the spaces affording pedestrian movement from blocks of buildings. This then provided the almost blank surface upon which were stamped fragmentary icons, in bold black ink. There were zigzags, hatched circles, crosses, a squiggle, an icon that looked a bit like a ladder, another that looked like a satellite aerial and yet another that resembled the outline of half a mushroom with dots.
On a very windy Edinburgh day in March I attended an event entitled Landmarks, in which the artist challenged us – his audience – to recreate a version of one of these prints by walking a route in the neighbourhood. Each of us was provided with a sheet of paper mounted on a clipboard. The sheet was blank apart from the shapes of the spaces in which we could wander, blocked out in faint pink on a white background. We were to proceed along a route marked out with a number of waystations, where Lemm had placed balloons and posted volunteers to guide us on. At every station he had also placed a rubber stamp and an ink-pad. Each stamp was cut with a particular icon, selected from the repertoire of icons that Lemm had used for his prints. The icon stood for a particular detail of the urban landscape visible from that point: perhaps a flight of steps, or some railings, or the lintel of a door – little details that could take some time to locate, but which held your attention once you spotted them. To discover them was at the same time to realise just how much passes us by, unheeded and unremarked: how much we simply fail to notice, which is almost everything. But to certify that we had been there and seen the detail in question, we were to stamp our paper at the appropriate place on the pink layout. Thus, after wandering for an hour or so, we returned with our sheet stamped with some ten different icons. Each of us had, in our modest way, recreated one of Lemm’s pieces, save that ours were on plain paper rather than nautical charts.
For Lemm, all of this was meant as a meditation on the fragmentary nature of experience, and on the tension between the bird’s eye view of urban space and the street-level view of the built environment and its features. He also wanted us to reflect on the idiosyncratic construction of narrative meaning, and on how this influences our perception of place. For me, however, the exercise brought to mind another set of concerns, which were perhaps highlighted by the fact that it was such a windy day. As I walked the streets, I felt almost as if I could have been sailing. And having already viewed the exhibition, and seen how Lemm had reused the old charts, I began to imagine that I was myself at sea, that my ample raincoat was a sail, and that the balloons that marked the waystations through which I had to pass were buoys. Suddenly, the features that I was to seek out began to seem like bric-a-brac afloat in oceanic waves. Holding my coat before the wind, was I sailing a flooded city? In reality, of course, I was on dry land, and the features were all firmly fixed in place. I was not sailing but walking, and the pavement remained firm beneath my feet. But what if it were otherwise? What if the ground of the city were an ocean, and its buildings ships?
This was not the first time the imbrication of land and sea had led me to ask about what the ground is and where we should look to find it. On another occasion, one wet and stormy February day a few years ago, I had walked with a group of anthropology students from Aberdeen University the short distance from the classroom to the beach. There we had stood, battered by rain and wind while continuing a conversation we had begun indoors concerning the perception of the landscape. Among other things, we had been reading the work of the pioneer of ecological psychology, James Gibson, on The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. For Gibson, it was a truism that – I quote – ‘The ground refers … to the surface of the earth’. He imagined the perceiver to be placed at the centre of a sphere made up of two hemispheric halves, with the sky above and the earth below, and the ground marking the interface between the two, bounded by the horizon. But more than just an interface, the ground was – in Gibson’s eyes – an ‘underlying surface of support’, even ‘the reference surface for all other surfaces’. Everything that affords life, he thought, rests upon this surface, much like the furniture on the floor of a room, or like scenery and properties placed upon the boards of the stage. Thus we have the earth on the one hand, and on the other, objects on the earth, including such things as mountains, trees … and pebbles.
Now as we stood on the shingle beach, we glanced down to observe the pebbles beneath our feet. Are pebbles, we wondered, objects on the earth? Gibson would say so, and so did we, when each of us stooped to pick one up and, having examined it, replaced it where it lay. Yet every pebble rested upon others, which in turn rested on others beneath them. If they, too, are on the earth, then where is the earth itself? Would removing layer after layer of pebbles take us any closer to it? Or should we think of the relation between pebbles and the earth in terms of the history of their formation? After all, it is only because of their incessant pounding and grating as they are washed by the surf at high tide that pebbles have gained their rounded forms. To think of a pebble as an object is to imagine it cut off from this formative process, as though it had been placed there, already shaped, like a piece of sculpture on a plinth. Yet as a stone, ground down from a piece that must once have broken off from solid rock, does not the pebble retain a connection to the earth as intrinsic as that of a seed to its parent body? Who is to say whether it is on the earth or of it?
Standing on the shingle, it was not in practice possible to draw any kind of line between these contrary conditions. We had rather to recognise that the ground on which we stood was not really a supporting platform upon which things rest but a zone of formative and transformative processes set in train through the interplay of wind, water and stone, within a field of cosmic forces such as those responsible for the tides. This became even more apparent as we lifted our glance to the surging breakers collapsing on the shore. What we saw were not objects and surfaces so much as materials in motion. Raising our eyes still further we saw wave upon wave capped with foam, gradually panning out to the level expanse of the ocean, which in turn gave way to the unrelenting grey of the sky. In short, looking out to sea we saw a world in movement, in flux and becoming, a world of ocean and sky, a weather-world. What would happen, we wondered, if we were to cast this perspective back upon the land? What if, instead of land-ing the sea, we were to try sea-ing the land? No sooner did we reverse our perspective than the solidity of the ground itself was thrown into doubt. It too began to heave and swell. And we were swimming in it.
That it is also restless, in ceaseless motion and change, is – in the words of sailor and philosopher Martin Dillon – ‘a lesson the sea can teach us about the earth’. Seen from the sea the ground is much more complex and dynamic than we might have thought. Far from being the homogeneous surface of materiality that we had imagined, upon which all else rests, it reappears as a congeries of heterogeneous materials, thrown together by the vicissitudes of life in the weather-world. Indeed wherever we look, the ground bears witness to the liveliness of the processes that have gone on or are going into its formation – to the effects of rain, wind, frost, and so on. In a study of the ways in which perceptual experience underlies aesthetic sensibility, philosopher Arnold Berleant observes that the prevailing restlessness of the fluid environment profoundly affects ‘all the parameters that ordinarily delimit one’s terrestrial existence and, on a larger scale, even our understanding of metaphysical being’. Berleant, too, casts his eye from the ocean towards the land, and finds not only that the land undergoes continual change – ‘slow, to be sure, but nevertheless incessant’ – but also that fluidity does not end there: ‘the atmosphere is itself a fluid medium’. Rather than being opposed, sea and land, along with the littoral that marks their perpetual dialogue, appear to be engulfed in the wider sphere of forces and relations comprising the weather-world, together subsumed under the great dome of the sky.
This dome, where the sun shines, storms rage and the wind blows – and not, as Gibson surmised, at the surfaces of solid objects and the ground they rest on – is where ‘all the action is’. To perceive and to act in the weather-world is to align one’s own conduct to the celestial movements of sun, moon and stars, to the rhythmic alternations of night and day and of the seasons, to rain and shine, sunlight and shade. Consider the mariner. Ensconced in his vessel, he feels the waves as they lap the hull and catches the wind in his sails, all the while scanning the sky for the movements of birds by day and of the stars and other celestial bodies by night. He perceives himself to be a point of rest in a world in which all around is in movement. In striving to rein in or harness the forces of the elements he is the precise opposite of the farmer who bends muscle and sinew to counteract the friction of an immobile and often unyielding earth, dragging himself and his equipment over the hard ground and inscribing tracks and pathways in the process. Indeed to describe the mariner’s surroundings from the farmer’s perspective, as a seascape, would be to confer on waves and troughs, or on becalmed or turbulent waters, a permanence and solidity that they lack in reality.
Setting sail, the mariner does not simply relinquish one set of surfaces, of the land, for another, of the sea. Rather he enters a world in which surfaces take second place to the circulations of the media in which they are formed. Here the grounded fixities of landscape give way to the aerial fluxes of wind and weather above, and the aquatic fluxes of tide and current below. These fluxes, and not the surface of the sea, absorb the mariner’s effort and attention. The space he inhabits is not, then, a seascape but an ocean-sky. It is, to adopt a distinction proposed by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, a space that is smooth rather than striated. Striated space, they say, is homogeneous and volumetric: in it, diverse objects are laid out, each in its assigned location. Smooth space, to the contrary, has no layout. It presents, rather, a patchwork of continuous variation, extending without limit in all directions. It is an atmospheric space of movement and flux, stirred up by wind and weather, and suffused with light, sound and feeling. Whereas the landscape of striated space, closed off and apportioned, has turned against the sky, in smooth space the surfaces of the land – like those of the sea – open up to the sky and embrace it. Here, no line separates earth and sky, for the one could not exist without the other.
Let me now re-enter the portals of the city. I am surrounded by buildings, laid out on a grid of streets. But do these buildings rest upon the ground like solid blocks on an underlying platform of support? Or do they float like ships in the ocean? The conventional discourse of infrastructure and superstructure, of course, inclines us to the former view. But as I sail the windy streets, holding in my mind Lemm’s nautical charts, I wonder whether it might be otherwise. What if we were to think of buildings not as raised upon the solid foundation of the ground but as suspended in a world of earth and sky? Following our experiments in sea-ing the land I had begun to doubt what once I had taken for granted, namely that the ground is originally there, as a foundation for everything that might form the object of our perception. On the beach, when we looked for the ground, we could not find it. To be sure, the paved street is not like shingle, and the experience of treading their respective surfaces is quite different. The surface of the street seems solid enough. But this surface was not given from the outset: it had to be engineered. Only by way of its surfacing – by coating with a layer of hard and resistant material such as concrete or asphalt, as in road building or laying the foundations for urban development – could the earth be turned into a platform, an infrastructure, upon which the superstructure of the city could be erected.
We might suppose that hard-surfacing is definitive of the built environment. Yet it is also inimical to life and growth. There can be no life in a world where the earth is locked up below ground and the sky locked out above it. For it is in the nature of living beings that, by way of their own processes of respiration, they bind the medium of air with the substances of the earth in forging their own ways through the world. Were the whole earth hard-surfaced, it would be a desert. Nothing could grow there. Complete hard-surfacing – the state that so many theorists have taken as an original condition for there being a material world at all – turns out therefore to be an ideal that can never be realised in practice. Even in the most heavily engineered of environments, the hard surface cannot withstand the elemental forces of the sky and earth that erode it from above and subvert it from below. Eventually, it cracks and crumbles, and as it does so – as the substances beneath are exposed again to the light, moisture and currents of the air – the earth once more bursts into life, overwhelming human attempts to cover it up. Even as I walk the Edinburgh streets, I have to watch my step for tree roots that have lifted paving stones, for weeds that have grown through the cracks, and for water-filled potholes in the tarmac. The hard surface, it turns out, is but the thinnest of crusts, beneath which the earth, slowly but surely, continues to heave.
What, then, becomes of buildings? The architect might like to think that the ground is no part of the building as such, but merely a place-holder, a reference-surface, a plot for it to stand on, a purely horizontal platform for his constructions. He prefers not to dwell on the fact that there can be no building without excavating – without digging foundations on site, and without drawing or quarrying from the earth the materials from which the building is made, and to which, ultimately, these materials will return. For there to be building, excavation is as necessary as construction. However the architect’s plans and elevations do not show what is going on underground. The bulb of earth that absorbs the pressure of the building bearing down upon it remains invisible, as do the seismic shifts that occur where bulbs collide. Beneath the ground, the foundations of buildings converse with soil and tree-roots, with burrowing animals and subterranean streams. It is there, down below, and not at the ground surface, that the city has to contend with the forces of disintegration. But the contention is above as well, in the lashings of wind and weather. For the modern architect, weather is something he would prefer not to have to deal with. Indeed in making a mockery of reason, in its refusal to be contained, in its erosion of structure and its disdain for progress, the weather has long figured in the modern imagination as architecture’s nemesis. Knocking on the doors and windows of buildings, and on their walls and roofs, it is categorically denied admittance. Yet in practice there is no avoiding it. Even the residents of the hyper-modern city have to contend with the weather, despite their best efforts to banish it to the exterior of their air-conditioned, temperature regulated, artificially lit and glass-enclosed buildings.
Of the mariner, we have already observed that his attention is directed not primarily to the surface of the ocean, but to what is going on below, in the watery depths, and above, in the sky. Starting with David Lemm’s nautical charts, I have suggested that the ground of the city may not, after all, be so different from the surface of the ocean, and that buildings – like ships – are not so much raised upon the ground as sunk into it. As the ground heaves with the swell of the elements, so buildings converse with the earth and the sky, in the smooth space of the weather-world. Imagine a map of the city that would document such a world or help us navigate in it. On such a map, the outlines of buildings, as seen from above, would appear as mere shadows. The ground surface itself would not be represented since, like the surface of the ocean, it is unmappable. Indeed it is not really a surface at all but a zone of transformation, where earth meets sky in the ongoing generation of life. But the map would record the depths of foundations, corresponding to points on the seabed. A compass rose would enable us to plot the variable directions of the wind, which we feel on our cheeks and in the folds of our clothing. And a range of icons would be placed on the map at points corresponding to the locations of marker buoys. We would have arrived back to where we began, with Debris and Phenomena.
Tim Ingold is the Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen
[Published in The Evergreen Vol. III]
