WHO CARES ABOUT HOLES? MATTER AND ITS ABSENCE IN WOVEN TEXTILES
“Nothingness. The Void. An absence of matter. The blank page. Utter silence. No thing, no thought, no awareness. Complete ontological insensibility” (Barad, 2012). There, nothingness is nothing more than matter in action. In this study, the blank space is considered from the perspective of the hole in weaving as an entity. Drawing on the thinking of Karen Barad and Johnny Golding’s reflections on emergence, this paper explores the reality of the hole (structure unit) in weaving and its role in the reality of the whole (woven cloth). As an absence, a ‘not-something’ as opposed to a ‘nothing’, I interrogate our comprehension and use of this ever-changing site of passage. Can we capture the woven hole? And in so doing, what is our intention? While we might not intelligibly comprehend why and how the hole is inherent to woven cloth’s existence, a reflection behind its role might open new structural potentials.
PARADOXICAL LINES
Woven cloth construction relies on the intertwining of vertical and horizontal threads — respectively known as warp and weft. As such, the practice of weaving might be defined by its organised, hierarchical spatial structuring — one that is mechanically, socially, culturally and politically tense. It is a binary approach to being, in which a perpendicular entanglement of threads allows for the cloth to exist. When creatively thinking and experimenting with elements, weavers solely rely on this dualist way of constructing cloth, resulting in complete dependence on machine specifications. However, holes, those blank spaces and areas of nothingness which neighbour warp and weft are part and a part of the cloth. In the very construction of textiles — although their role seems evident — their inherent presence has been disregarded.
“There can be no knots without the performance of knotting” (Ingold, 2015). Quipu (see Figure 1), an Inca recording instrument made of knotted strands of yarn, could be considered as the first smart textile systems. This Andean apparatus was used to communicate data between people. Worn or carried, the numeral systemic ornament constituted a specific number of knots whose separation and distance conveyed an intended meaning. Spaces in-between knotted matter would mediate a message, from tax calculation to calendrical representation. By changing the trajectory to convey data, the unfolding and refolding of these threads had a sense of becoming. Deleuze and Guattari (2004), writing on the ways in which bended lines emerge, state that: “Always in the middle: one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one nor two, not the relation of the two, it is the in-between.”
To begin, let us contemplate the nature of textiles and more precisely, weaving. In a wonderful way, woven cloth is fundamentally antithetical. It is chaste and erotic, covering and revealing, divine and mundane all at once. Radically, woven cloth embodies a disturbing and unintelligible conflict. Simultaneously rigid and fluid, chaotic and ordered, textile thinker Claire Pajaczkowska (2005) remarks that “it is a grid, a matrix of intersecting verticals and horizontals, as systemic as graph paper, and yet it is soft, curved and can drape itself into a three-dimensional fold.” Continuously chasing “the dream of symmetry” that science and philosophy have desperately clung to ever since the eighteenth century, this binary mode of doing transcends woven textiles’ construction insofar as the duality of their meanings.
Beyond this concerning paradox, the author points out humans’ obscure relationship and experience of textiles as ‘things’ or ‘stuff’. The latter, tightly linked to its French origin ‘étoffe’ (a voluptuous version of ‘cloth’) appears to be a reductive “term for generic “thingness”, unspecified materiality, in a way that eloquently represents [...] the threshold between” (ibid). This “threshold” reflects the space established between human and cloth: an “imaginary-real” (Golding, 2020) liminal site of passage (see Figure 2). Seen as an ‘encounter’ (Heidegger, 1962) woven cloth might represent the “fission and fusion between subject and object”, one that is “at the nuclear core of textiles.” (Pajaczkowska, 2005).
In The Courage to Matter, Golding (2020) reflects on Heidegger’s lectures regarding the ‘logic of technē’, for whom technology would have no association with the machine itself. She writes,
“[...] it was all about (1) the ‘grasp’, both as in comprehending and as in reaching out or being pulled toward ‘the there’ (and vice versa, ‘the there’ being pulled toward being); and (2) the fact that the 20th century (for whatever reasons) named an epoch, not unlike had occurred in ancient Greece when, according to Heidegger, this way of ‘grasping’ (in-)formed the whole of reality and provided its framework.” (ibid)
Stepping back, delving deeper into the ‘technē’ of weaving and the hole as a structure unit I realise that I have conceived it as a hollow entity, an in-between space, a framed void that is bordered by those allowing its existence, warp and weft. Could the hole reflect “channels between visible and invisible realms” that “situates textiles as active mediators”? (Golda, 2019)