Touchlines
On Seeing and Reading as Ways of Telling
 
 
Tim Ingold
Transcribed from a lecture at Kunstverein, 16 June 2015
 
 
“(…)
 
“I’ve always been puzzled to figure out what it means to say of a text—of something written—that it’s non-visual, because surely reading is a visual activity. That’s why most of us, when we’ve reached a certain age, when we’ve spent too much time trying to read texts, end up having to wear glasses as I do. What kind of visual activity is it then? 
“I’ve found that in much of the scholarly literature on the subject, people are making a distinction between the text and the image, a very rigid distinction. The text is writing, and the image is a picture: they are two different things. 
            “But you can have no image that can’t be read in some sense, and no text that can’t be looked at in another sense. Whenever we look at anything, it is a mixture of reading and looking. But the argument often made is that you can’t do both at once; if you look too much you can’t read and if you read too much you can’t look. So for example if you took a piece of printed text you could, if you wanted, look at it and appreciate the font or the way the text is laid out, the artistry of laying out words on a page, but then you would forget what actually was being read. Or you could start reading what’s there, a story say, but you’d stop looking at the font. As though you couldn’t do both at once. I’ve been puzzled as to why this should be as so. Why is it that people say that we can’t read and look at the same time?
 
“I found similar arguments about doodling. You can be writing away by hand and then after a while start doodling and then start writing again. Scholars say at the moment you start to doodle your writing is lifted into visibility and as soon as it goes back to writing it again becomes invisible. But obviously you use your eyes to read, so in some sense these scholars are thinking that as soon as you can read what is on the page you’re not looking at it anymore, and as soon as it becomes a doodle, so that the writing is illegible, you can’t read it and start looking at it. As though you are moving in and out of reading and looking. In any real situation there’s an awkward balance between the two. You are part reading and part looking, but these things seem to be pulling in opposite directions. 
            “That seems to me to be odd, particularly when you think of the equivalent of listening to a song. If you’re listening to someone singing a song with words, then by the same logic you could say that either you can concentrate on the sound and hear the music, or you can concentrate on the words and hear what the singer is singing about. But you can’t do both at once. This seems absurd, because surely you can. Or at least when you’re hearing somebody sing a song there is not any difference between following the sound and following the words, because the sound and the words are in a sense one and the same thing. That’s what left me to think about this problem of the relationship between seeing and reading. When does seeing become reading and when does reading become seeing? 
 
“I think the problem is that when we talk about looking or seeing, we imagine that we are looking at something. We imagine light rays being reflected off the object out there and coming into the pupil of the eye and casting an image inside of it. So the light is acting as a vehicle of projection from forms out there to images in here, where there is an optical projection of the object into the image. So when we’re looking at an image, it is as though that reflective moment is reversed—it’s coming out of the eye into the world. Art historians often write like that, as though we cast our image. People even used to talk about drawing in that way. That a person, the artist, has a particular picture in her eye and projects the picture onto the paper, and then draws around the projected. (…)
“When we think about reading we find some of the same assumptions. We often use the word articulation when we talk about ‘articulate speech’ or ‘articulate writing’. ‘Articulation’ means joining together—like railway trucks on the railway line, each truck is joined to the next. So you think of writing as being letters strung together into words strung together into sentences strung together into texts. We have this idea of an articulate piece of writing as something that is strung together. And because we’re thinking of writing in that way, we also tend to think of reading as a process which first disarticulates the elements by recognizing the individual words and letters and then re-articulates them—joins them up again—to establish the message. That is to imagine writing as stringing elements together simply in a sequence, and to imagine reading as the disarticulations and re-articulation of these elements.
 
“When we write by hand that is not what happens. I think the idea we have of a text as a string of letters is something that is very heavily based on our experience with print, the printed word, where that’s exactly what we do. When the printer assembles his text he has—in the old days, before computers—he would have all his type and if you would want to write a word you would find the letters from your type box. You would need a B and an A and a C and a K and you’d put them together in the galley and you would have articulated a little bit of text.
“But when you handwrite, the line that appears on the paper is the actual trace of your hand and fingers as they move the pen against the paper. The line of handwriting, unlike the line of type, is the trace of an expressive gesture. In that way I think it’s exactly like the melody of a song. When you sing it is a vocal sonic trace of a gesture, which in this case is made by the mouth and the vocal cord. When you handwrite, the gesture is made with the hand, but the principle is the same: all that feeling, all that emotion is immediately translated onto the page and you can read it there. That means that when you’re reading handwriting you can read it in a completely different way than when you’re reading the letters that have been printed or typed with a keyboard, because you are not identifying individual elements and then restringing them together again, you’re actually following the line, just as you would if you were listening to a melody in music, with all its inflections and undulations. The underline can be thicker or thinner, just like the differences of amplitude when playing a musical instrument. So when you’re reading, you’re not actually looking at the words, you’re looking with them. 
“Think of children when they read, they will often put their fingers on the letter and move their fingers around with the letter. In medieval times that’s how monks used to read. In those days writing was written in what was called scriptura continua which means that there were no breaks between the words. You can look at a medieval manuscript and it’s just a letter line going up and down and up and down and it’s impossible—even for a trained eye—to see where one word ends and another begins. What the monks did was to not look at the stuff on the paper, they looked as if they were with it, they joined with it, with the fingers they traced the letter line and as they did so they mouthed the sound that corresponded to those letters and out of the sounds they could recognize the words. The words actually emerged from the performance of the sound. Because people never read in silence they always read vocally. In that way writing in those days were not so very different from musical notation. Nowadays we think of writing and musical notation as quite different. The writing is just the words, and the musical notation is just the sound. If we have a song, there are first the nodes of the music and then underneath the nodes there are the words written in separate registers. That is a modern development in which the sound was taken out of writing and the words were taken out of sound. Originally, these two were continually merged.
 
“So again with handwriting, when you read handwriting, you are actually following the lettering. When you receive a letter from someone written by hand, you can of course read what the person is writing, ‘We had lovely weather yesterday.’, ‘Are you well?’, ‘I am well.’, and so on. But as you read it you can also see and sense the emotion or feeling that actually went into the formation of those letters. With handwriting it seems to be that there is no contradiction, no tension, between reading and seeing. Because reading is not a re-articulation of elements, it’s following that line, and seeing too is seeing with—it’s following something as it goes along—rather than looking at. It is somewhat similar to the seeing you do if you’re watching birds flying in the sky. You don’t look at the bird because then the bird is gone. You follow it as it moves across the horizon. It’s a looking and reading with, rather than a looking and reading at.
“I began to think that the keyboard or the printed word and the camera have had a huge impact on the way we think about texts and images. With the camera we take snap shots, with the keyboard we string these letters together. Both the camera and the keyboard get in the way of what I call ‘the correspondence of seeing and feeling’ that goes on when you’re actually moving and seeing with things.
“If we think in terms of handwriting rather than typing we understand reading in quite a different way. The same goes for drawing. If we stop assimilating drawing to an image then drawing is not something we look at, it’s something that we look with, because drawing is in itself a trace of a gesture, of a particular movement. Paul Klee famously talked about ‘taking a line for a walk’, but you do the same thing when you handwrite as well. That means that with handwriting and drawing there’s not that same absolute division that you tend to get when you talk about image and text; they may be juxtaposed but there seems to be a big ontological barrier between them. With drawing and handwriting you can move in and out without crossing any barrier. (…) 
“That’s the main point I wanted to make. Does that make sense so far or have I got people thoroughly confused? No?
 
“What I am trying to get at is a sense of reading, which is not looking at, not surveilling things, but actually joining with things in their movement, in their development. Which corresponds to what the word originally meant. To read in the original sense meant to be advised by things, to look at the way things are going. Somebody who is well advised, and has been listening and paying attention to what’s going on is ready. The word ‘ready’ and ‘to read’ come from the same etymological root.
“When I myself had to do history in school in England, we were taught about the king called Æthelred, the Unready. He just wasn’t ready for anything; he lost all his battles and was generally a disaster. But what that really meant was that Æthelred never listened to his advisers. He was unready because he did not read; he did not pay attention to what his counselors were saying with the disastrous consequences that followed. 
“When we talk about reading: Can you read the palm of my hand? Can you read the weather? Can you get an idea about whether it is going to start raining soon? Can you read me? We still use the words sometimes in that sense: Can you tell what is going on/what is going to happen? Reading in that sense is about telling. 
“‘Telling’ is, in English and related languages, a wonderful word. I’ve had some difficulties talking about this with people from Spain and I think it’s a similar problem in French, where there is no clear equivalent to the word ‘tell’ that we have in English and in its equivalent in Nordic and Germanic languages. What is interesting about telling is that it has a double sense. You can tell a story, which means you can recount the story with words about what happened. But you can also tell whether it’s going to rain or whether this thing has been done right or wrong. So ‘to tell’ actually refers to a skilled perceptual acuity. A skilled hunter for example can tell that an animal has gone by recently from the footprints, which an unskilled person might not even notice. The archeologist can tell from tiny discolorations in the ground whether perhaps there’s been a wooden structure standing there once or not. When we talk about telling, we talk both about recounting the story to the world, but also being able to make fine perceptual distinctions. And these two meanings are very, very closely related. They are related in the history of this word ‘to read’ which has a double sense. Do you read me? Can you tell? Are you ready? But also to read is to be able to pick up, to listen to the story that’s being told. 
“What I am suggesting is that we could think of reading as a way of telling. And if reading is a way of telling—both of telling a story and of perceiving—we could also talk of drawing as a way of telling—also as a way of perceiving things and of recounting an observation. So reading and drawing can both be ways of telling. But if they are ways of telling we first have to conclude that reading has got nothing to do with the articulation of elements, reading is about telling, it’s not about joining things up or dividing them up into elements, it’s about following the line. And likewise if drawing is a way of telling, it’s not about the reproduction of an image, it’s the trace of a gesture. 
 
“The original troubles I had when I started talking about visual anthropology, about what visual anthropologists could possibly mean when they say of a written text that it’s non-visual, is what does ‘visual’ mean? I think what they mean is that it has something to do with an image. And this assumption—that if you’re looking at anything, you’re looking at an image—is very odd, but art historians sometimes make it. One of them is James Elkons who has written a book in which he says that we are all blind to a degree because there is a great deal that passes before our eyes which we never actually register as images. What he is saying is, we only see when we’ve actually caught an image of the world. 
“When we cross the road, we do (and teach our children to), first look left, then right, then left again, and cross. Having done that and then being asked, can you remember the number plates or even the appearance of any of the cars you were looking out for? Of course you wouldn’t remember any of them, you would have completely forgotten what they were, because it was irrelevant at the time. But you still looked to see if there was any traffic coming, you didn’t cross the road blindly. So it’s a very odd idea in art historical writing that an activity is only visual when it involves looking at images. That’s why art historians can write books about seeing or the history of vision as if it involves nothing more than looking at works hanging in art galleries. As though people are only seeing when they are looking at works in art galleries, not when they’re walking outdoors looking at the flowers and the trees—that’s not seeing, no you can only see things when you’re looking at images. 
 
“The curious fixation on the idea that when we see anything, what we see is an image, is based on the idea of light acting as the vehicle of projections of what is out there in the world onto what is in here in the mind. If we reject that, if we think about seeing as a process of going along in the world, of responding figuratively to what is happening there, then you can think of vision as a kind of optical exploration of things. In just the same way, we might think of touch also as an explorative movement. The thing about touch is to touch something you do have to make contact with it and you feel it. You run your fingers along something and you feel the irregularity, so you can pick up the texture. If we think about vision and reading in that way then we have to think of it as something haptic rather than optical. Haptic meaning perceiving through a feeling, through an engagement with stuff rather than at a distance looking at stuff. This distinction between the haptic and the optical is very critical. The important thing is that it’s not the same as the distinction between vision and touch, these two distinctions actually crosscut one another; they’re independent of one another.
“So one can talk about optical vision, sure that’s the projected sort of distance, but one can also have ‘optical touch,’ which is touch at a distance. For example, in some surgery, the surgeon’s hands are gloved and he might be working remotely, so he doesn’t have the direct tactic envelopment in what he is working at. You can also haptic touch when you’re literally feeling something. And you can have haptic vision, which is the sort of vision that is closely engaged with something and follows it through. When we talk about vision we always suppose a distant relationship with what one is looking at, but with haptic vision it’s quite opposite, it’s like peering at something very close-up. As an embroiderer at work, just as close-up like that. And the medieval monks, reading their scripture, were just the same. They were so close to the letter line that they didn’t actually look at the page at a distance, they were actually getting right into it and following it through—they even wrote about it in those terms. When monks talked about reading they regularly compared it to hunting, to wayfaring, to finding one’s way around in a landscape. They saw the surface of the parchment, the surface of the text, as something like a landscape in which they had to find their way about. Imagine if you scale down and compare the landscape to the scale of the manuscript, then the reader is a really tiny thing right down in there. I thinks it’s analogy that came from Derrida: It’s as though your eye was right next to the nail and finding it’s way about. You can never see the whole thing, you can never see the whole shapes of the words, it’s just about following that line, very, very closely. That is a notion of reading that has got nothing to do with images, nothing with the articulation and disarticulation of words, as in a typed or printed text, and everything to do with following the line as it develops. Of course the word ‘text’ comes from the texture of weaving, from textile; it h
as the same base. And the analogy is kind of obvious, whenever you look at the medieval manuscript, where the writing is on a ruled page, the page would be ruled with straight lines, that used to originally be scored with a knife, and then the letter line would go up and down and up and down between the scored lines on the parchment. So the scored lines on the parchment were the exact equivalent of the warp lines of the loom. And the up and down lines of the writing were the exact equivalent of the weft. And that’s why we call a text a text, because it has its origin in those notions of weaving, where the first straight lines were actually the stretched lines of the loom.
 
“I haven’t talked about hands yet. But the hand has always been implied in other things I have been talking about. If we’re thinking about reading and drawing as ways of telling, well, clearly those involve the eyes, but you’re not going to have any trace of any gesture without the movements of the hand. So that means too that we have to think of the hand as a hand that tells.
“I called a chapter of a book I wrote Telling by Hand. The hand can ‘tell,’ I think, in a quite unique way. No other part of the body can both recount the stories of the world in its gestures and be an instrument of precise and skilled perception. The vocal cords can tell but are not much use as an instrument of perception. The eyes, the nose, and the ears can perceive but they’re not much use for telling. But the hands, uniquely the hands, can do both. They can do both because of extraordinary freedom of movement that they have and that is conferred by the precision grip. Scholars of various times have tried to list all the things that human hands can do, but these lists always end up being very arbitrary and often very gendered. They have lots of stuff about thrusting, throwing, and spearing, but forget about all those movements involved in doing the laundry, rubbing up roots, or milking. I think it’s actually impossible to produce a list of everything the hands can do, because they can basically do anything.
“But there’s one thing I really want to stress about this, because there’s a lot of writing about touch, as though touch was one thing. And I think actually it’s not. I think really it’s two things, and we need to make a very clear distinction between touch and feeling. There’s one kind of touch, which is the one that we’re very familiar with now from touch pads and the technology that everybody’s using, where basically you got an interface with the finger on one side, a glass screen, and some stuff going on on the other side, and you’re tapping. And then on the other hand you’ve got what happens when you actually hold something in your hand. Because when you hold something, you correspond with it. You’re going along with it rather than simply knocking at it. It’s the same distinction between at and with as when I talked about the difference between looking at and looking with. We live in an age now with the technology we have where it seems that the whole world is at our fingertips. We can just tap and it will take us to anything. And yet, the more it’s at our fingertips, the more it seems to be completely out of our hands. The one thing that you can’t do at the same time is tap with the fingers and hold with the hands. So think of the difference between the precision of a touch type interface where we can put our finger in exactly the right spot, tap what we need, and holding a child’s hand on the way to school. They are completely different things. If touch is what we use for the first, and feeling is what we use for the second, then one is touch without feeling and the other may be feeling without touch, or maybe a touchy feeling or whatever you want to call it. But there is an important distinction to be made between those two ways of tactile engagement with the world. Particularly because all the technological development that is taking place nowadays—not all of it, but the mainstream—has been toward the precision of tactile contact at the expense of the feeli
ng and sympathetic engagement. It’s why most of the technological development has been towards replacing the pen with the keyboard, rather than developing super sensitive pens, which would enable you to feel the paper between the pen even more delicately than we can at the present. It’s true actually that there are developments along these lines, but it’s taking a long time for the development to go in that direction, to think of ways in which technology can actually enhance our feelingful engagement with the world rather than at the expense of that engagement.
 
“How long have I been talking for?”