Dwelling the Violences in Today’s World: A Critical Sketches on Tim Ingold’s Poetics of Dwelling

Editorial

This text seeks to briefly reflect on [1] poetics of dwelling, which is relevant as a theory in the social sciences due to the dynamic nature with which it describes existence as an active living, that is, as a living co-creator of reality, of what happens. For this reason, the author’s commitment to make dwelling as a participatory and relational experience between the subject and his environment that constitutes a fundamental perspective to understand the existence of social life as a constituted historical-concrete process through action.

Due to the above, Ingold’s proposal serves as a basis to trigger a reflection on violences in contemporary societies, because above all, violences are an action on and from the environment. It is also about violences (in plural) given the multiplicity of forms and characteristics that they acquire; the experts indicate the impossibility of gathering them beyond a few attributes that resemble them for their ability to nullify the power of the victim. In this sense, violences constitute actions of submission that affects the integrity and well-being of the violated people, whether in the physical, economic, political, psychological, moral or symbolic spheres [2, 3, 4, 5].

As can be seen, the broad descriptive spectrum of violent phenomena ranges from situations of self-inflicted aggression to those that take place within the framework of interpersonal relationships, especially at the domestic level, and linked to sexism with its disastrous consequences for women and girls regarding gender inequality in macho and heteropatriarchal societies. It is enough to verify the statistics of all kinds of violence against the female population within homes worldwide (to show, the violation of rights and violence to which women in Afghanistan and Iran are subjected today) and the wave of femicides that shakes the world.

Bullying —at the school and work level— is also part of the daily violence that occurs in interpersonal and social relationships. The same occurs with racism, commonly linked to another scourge, xenophobia, particularly reverberant today due to the growing number of international migrants in Western societies, which on many occasions is even associated with violence linked to religious discrimination that finds today in Muslims, as once in the Christians of Rome in the first centuries AD —or the cultural genocide of Spain in Mexico and Latin America in general— the same incomprehension and intolerance.

But violence is also those suffered by the victims of dictatorial regimes, or those that take place in wars such as the one currently being fought in the heart of Europe regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine; both manifestations of a political violence that, institutionalized or not, wreaks havoc in the democratic life of many nations, as is the case with populism of any ideological sign that has returned with force today to political life in the nations of the world. Along this line are also the violence of terrorism and drug trafficking that leave not only a disgraceful trail of deaths in their wake, but also tens of thousands of displaced people.

Full stop, however, deserve the institutional violence linked to the militarization and nuclearization of national and global security that puts all humanity in virtual danger of death; the omission and sometimes denial of climate change that cancels the quality of life of future generations; or those that involve phenomena such as job insecurity, misinformation and manipulation in the media (as a recent emblematic example we have the case of Dominion vs. FOX in the United States) and socio-digital networks, as well as the perverse uses of information, artificial intelligence due to the deregulation of the market and, in general, to a misunderstood exacerbation of the benefits of individual economic and political freedom to the detriment of the common good.

The described panorama, in addition, is seasoned with shootings in supermarkets, schools, restaurants, hotels; with political programs of exclusions and express discrimination to everything diverse (sexual, reproductive, economic, racial, cultural, religious, intellectual) that in an increasingly alarming way the citizens demand in an exercise of return to the iron-handed governments; it is also seasoned with insults, fallacies, disqualifications, lies and even humiliation that unfortunately make up for the lack of arguments and consensus in public discourse, even in the political-institutional sphere; with the putting into action of the radicalisms associated with the excesses of the so-called culture of cancellation that each day add more followers among young people and retrace the path towards the center and negotiation, canceling the diversity that characterizes us as humans; with disrespect, polarization and the great etcetera of attacks in the nature of public lynching that on many occasions appear governed by manichean narratives with emotional and moral overtones that justify the potential annihilation of the other, even if it is a discursive annihilation.

As in Ingold’s [1] terms, dwelling supposes the existence of an interweaving of rhythms of activity, therefore dwelling violences would have to imply the articulation of violent practices in different degrees, levels and contexts of activity that configure an ecological niche where, according to the author, the subjects have abilities to do certain things, and in this case to do violence, which is the action that is executed as living.

Thus, this doing that supposes the existence and in particular the constitution of social life, fruit or result of creation (poiesis) while dwelling is defined as a relationship of creative doing between the subject and the environment. In this way, dwelling violence’s is creating violence, it means, doing violence. The example of the racist, sexist or xenophobic joke illustrates how this activity, in this case communicative, operates in favor of the reproduction and maintenance of a regime of beliefs and practices that favor the exclusion, omission, discrimination and aggression of women, transgender, homosexual and black people, indigenous, migrants, etc.

As Ingold [1] rightly points out, dwelling is a way of being in the world, that is, a way of doing things. That is why it can be defined as an activity that allows the participatory relationship with the environment through the doing of the subject. Following this idea, violence constitutes relationship practices of subjects in/with the environment from the deployment, development, adjustment and transformation of skills that constantly shape it. Thus, doing in/with the environment occurs in a context of action that is materially constituted, that is, by certain material, objective conditions, where the subject himself is involved as materiality and as history through knowledge, since be it in terms of memory, learning or experience.

In this way, being-doing —which is in an interdependent relationship with the environment where dwelling takes place— supposes in turn a knowing or knowledge (not necessarily conscious, but practical) of the subject’s doing in said environment, configuring a kind of know-how (not necessarily mechanical or reproductive) vitally involved in said relationship. This means that dwelling violence demands the putting into action of a knowledge that is also a violent act as a configuration of a violent practice. In this sense, action beliefs —which is how Ingold [1] defines the set of knowledge that allows things to be done— play an important role in the constitution of the ecological niche, making the environment habitable in order to live it, to use it.

But using the medium actively implies participating in it pragmatically. Reflecting on violence, these would be forms of use that are explained within certain ecological parameters between doing and knowing. In the case of xenophobic practices, for example, it would be necessary to think that they find support in the idea of threat (knowledge) that the migrant supposes for the labor stability and the cultural purity of the autochthonous subjects, contributing to establish a type of relationship of exclusion (doing) with the migrant that at the level of activity or action may be given through bodily or facial gestures of disgust, displeasure, exclusion, or it may be knowledge or beliefs of inferiority or dangerousness.

Taking the above into account, in Ingold’s poetics of living a circular dynamic is observed where action and knowledge configure the dialectical unity that supports the exclusively material nature of action beliefs [1]. And although the author makes a correct critique against the representationalisms that make knowledge an instance of the symbolic-socio-cultural, he ends up not being able to offer a sufficiently convincing argument about the way in which action beliefs are intertwined with the doing from the relationship of sensitive perception that is triggered from the corporality of the subject in its practical relationship in/with the environment.

However, Ingold understands the sensitive associated only with the sensory, which makes him consider knowing as an appearance of meaning from the implication of corporality in doing. That is why the author focuses his attention on beliefs as action beliefs, that is, as practical, instrumental knowledge, from the body and its senses. This is an oversight when developing the doing-knowing binomial as an experiential-existential condition of the subject, since the subject’s corporality participates in the experience of doing- knowing not only as an instance of sensory-motor-cognitive capacity and competence, but also sensitively, that is, from the emotional-affective level. In this sense, Ingold overlooks the fact that dwelling is not only a being-doing, but above all a being-doing-feeling.

This opens the possibility of questioning ability as a starting point for attentive and sophisticated knowledge — the hard core of doing in the poetics of dwelling— to install affective feeling as the base instance of practical knowledge that allows the emergence of doing as the main category of dwelling. This would make it possible to explain the contemporary dwelling of violence as the emergence of a sensitivity from which an affectation on the well-being and power of the subjects in their different social contexts of existence is perceived.

Thus, the violence typical of contemporary dwelling does not constitute violent forms of relationship with the environment because abilities to violate are displayed within an order of production of violence, but rather that order is the result of a violent sensibility that impregnates violence doing, precisely because it is installed as sensible doing in an ecological spiral of materially mediated action-reaction where affects are a constitutive part of corporality.

Summarizing: although Ingold [6] presents the idea of sensitive dwelling as an experience of corporality, the author ignores the fact that the knowledge demands above all an existential-experiential implication that, although it is motor [7], is alien to the contexts of action as an ecological niche because it first and necessarily involves being affectively constituted from the movement itself in the perception of the world as situated corporality, beyond the instrumental doing of said corporality in the world.

This opens an opportunity to think about the logic of dwelling as a dialectic of being in doing, and not of being from doing. After all, there is no doing outside of the being that does, and there is no being outside of the corporeal- affective sensibility from which doing emerges. For this reason, the violences through which we dwelling the world today, although they can be explained as manifestations of a violent pragmatics of life as part of an order of production of violence, also need to accompany said explanation from the configuration of sensitivity provides axiological keys and not only instrumental ones in the constitution of knowledge that allows standardizing as well as questioning said order. In my opinion, this is what would explain the fragmentation of the attunement and re-attunement processes that participate within the rhythms of activity that configure dwelling as an opening operation of social life.