André Leroi-Gourhan, Anna Bostock Berger (translator), Randall White (contributor) · 1964–65 (English 1993) · PDF · Calibre ID 1003
Resurfaced in The Ruled Thread (2026-10-21).
Role in the triad
The source: graphism begins as rhythmic, abstract incision; writing linearizes it into a ‘needle-sharp, but also needle-thin’ line; the Jacquard loom exteriorizes the program.
Why this book
Ingold builds the close of his writing chapter on it; supplies the triad’s deepest claim (abstraction and the rhythmic incised line come first). Printed page = PDF page − 20 in the ‘Language Symbols’ chapters.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “They take the form of tight curves or series of lines engraved in bone or stone, small equidistant incisions that provide evidence of figurative representation moving away from the concretely figurative and proof of the earliest rhythmic manifestations.” (p. 188) | “If there is one point of which we may be absolutely sure, it is that graphism did not begin with naive representations of reality but with abstraction.” (p. 188) | “Four thousand years of linear writing have accustomed us to separating art from writing” (p. 192) | ”… a cosmos whose center they occupy without trying to pierce it by an intellectual process which letters have strung out in a needle-sharp, but also needle-thin, line.” (p. 200) | “The gesture interprets the word, and the word comments upon graphic expression.” (p. 210) | “Written language, phoneticized and linear in space, becomes completely subordinated to spoken language, which is phonetic and linear in time.” (p. 210) | “The program of the Jacquard loom is external to the organs of execution” (p. 250)
Themes
abstraction · exteriorization · gesture · graphism · incision · Jacquard loom · linearization · mythogram · picto-ideography · rhythm