Thanks to Mary Potter, who mined the gold of this quotation from Tim Ingold:
“If, today, our world is in crisis, it is because we have forgotten how to correspond. We have engaged, instead, in campaigns of interaction. Parties to interaction face each other with their identities and objectives already in place, and transact in ways that serve, but do nothing to transform, their separate interests. Their difference is given from the start, and remains afterwards. Interaction is thus a between relation. Correspondence, however, goes along. The trouble is that we have been so wrapped up in our interactions with others that we have failed to notice how both we and they go along together in the current of time. As I’ve tried to show, correspondence is about the ways along which lives, in their perpetual unfolding or becoming, simultaneously join together and differentiate themselves, one from another. This shift from interaction to correspondence entails a fundamental reorientation, from the between-ness of beings and things to their in-between-ness. Think of a river and its banks. We might speak of the relation of one bank to the other and, crossing a bridge, we might find ourselves halfway between the two. But the banks are perpetually forming and re-forming as the river waters sweep by. These waters flow in-between the banks, in a direction orthogonal to the span of the bridge. To say of beings and things that they are in-between is to align our awareness with the waters; to correspond with them is to join this awareness with the flow. Just such a shift of orientation is needed, I believe, if we are to understand the world one that we can inhabit both now and for the foreseeable future. It is, in short, a condition for sustainable being.”
Tim Ingold, Correspondences, p. 9
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