Materials, Memories and Metaphors:

The textile Self Re/Collected

Solveigh Goett PhD - textile artist & researcher

The Future of Textile Culture - Royal College of Art – November 2015
or Can knitting socks be scholarly
research?
Textiles are an integral part of human existence
and have been so since the beginnings of
humanity: essential for survival, they accompany
us through the journey of life, intimately linked to
lived experience.
From the moment we are born and long
before we can speak we are in touch with
textiles, learn through textiles about the
properties of the material world ….
…. what it feels like and how it makes us feel,
An example from the BBC memory experience:

‘I can recall the sense of frustration at being

unable to pull my left arm away from the metal
bar of my pushchair. The wool of my sleeve
had got caught on something underneath…I
can remember both my hands were enclosed in
knitted mittens tucked into knitted sleeves and
that I didn’t have the manual dexterity to free
myself.’
Such memories we carry with us as tacit
knowledge on our skin.

Wherever we go and whatever we do, we are

textile selves, our bodies, environments,
memories, thoughts and theories are clothed.
Textile knowledge does not only sit, somewhat
passively, on the skin, but it also emerges in
action, through thinking through the hands.

In his childhood memories Walter Benjamin

recalls how he found knowledge in his bedroom
drawer playing with his socks.
Rolled up they looked like little bags with a
present hidden inside, but when he tried to pull
the present out, the bag mysteriously
disappeared and he was left with just one thing,
a sock.

He could not get enough of this astonishing

experiment.
It made him realize that form and content are
the same and that truth needs to be teased out
of text as gently and carefully as the child’s
hand pulls the sock out of the ‘bag’ (Benjamin
2006).
‘
For Michel Serres textiles, less solid than a solid,
almost as fluid as liquid, provide excellent models
for a theory of knowledge: the world, he says, is a
mass of laundry.
Not everything in the laundry basket is made
from woven cloth, as Paolo Freire writes, we
carry with us the memory of many fabrics.
Textile metaphors are in abundance in academic
discourse as they are in everyday talk,
predominantly featuring weaving, a dominance
also apparent in the interpretation of textiles as
linear text and the paradigms of weaving that
underpin language and theory of Western
civilisations, as Kerstin Kraft points out, relating
weaving, done on a loom and limited by its size,
to settled people, stability, planning and
geometrical form, a forward movement of to and
fro.
Knitting, a three-dimensional craft first taken up
by people on the move, fishermen, sailors and
shepherds, done with a continuous thread and
potentially infinitive, provides a different concept
of knowledge, not in the tension between
intersecting threads, but along the looping line of
the continuous thread of selfhood, in, to quote
Connor, ‘the ceaseless unraveling and reknitting
of the body’ (Connor 2005:333).
Tim Ingold proposes that making might better
be understood as weaving, which emphazises
the mutual relationship between maker and
material and, movement as truly generative
rather than merely revelatory of a
preconceived idea –
“every movement, he says, like every line in a
story, grows rhythmically out of the one before
and lays the groundwork for the next” -
experience ‘continually and endlessly coming
into being around us as we weave’.
Jens Brockmeier, similarly, describes narrative as an
imaginative process of weaving ‘a fabric of cohesion’,
‘pictures and words, imagery and narrativity […]
interwoven in one and the same semiotic fabric of
meaning.’
I would suggest that the continuous thread of knitting
offers a more versatile and richer image to think with.

Anticipating and imagining a potential future requires

the intelligent manipulation and evocation of specific
images of the past, a referring backwards and
projecting forwards, the threads of the narrative
imagination looping between past and future in a
continuous quest to make sense of our being and
becoming, linking times, experiences and spaces.
Knitting can take seamlessly any form in the making.
While the tailored woven cloth gives formal shape to
the body …
… knitted fabric stretches with the body’s movement and
molds itself to its curves, following rather than structuring
its presence.

So suits, shirts and uniforms are usually made from

woven fabric, jumpers, socks and vests from knitted
material.
Knitted and woven fabrics differ not only in the
making, but also in the un-making: unpicking a
weave is a laborious and tedious task - no wonder
Penelope had to stay up all night, -
knitted fabric, by contrast, once the continuous
thread snaps, unravels almost by itself – just watch
the speed of a ladder running down a stocking.
‘
These are the opening lines of Margaret Atwood’s novel
The Robber Bride:

"Pick any strand and snip, and history becomes unraveled.

This is how Tony begins one of her more convoluted
lectures, the one on the dynamics of spontaneous
massacres. The metaphor is of weaving or else of knitting,
and of sewing scissors. She likes using it: she likes the
faint shock on the faces of her listeners. It's the mix of
domestic image and mass bloodshed that does it to
them…”

The torn woven fabric can never be made whole again, the
unraveled thread can be reknitted into a new fabric, and in
the process time is made, marked, coped with and
controlled.
Herzberg tells of a Jewish couple hiding in the cellar from
the Gestapo:

"During these two years in the cellar, his wife very slowly
knitted a skirt, which she unraveled as soon as it was
finished, only to start again."

Obermeyer tells of a woman keeping despair at bay by

knitting bedspreads.

Her young, teenage foster son was on drugs. There

seemed to be no institutional support to help her. When the
interviewer asked her how she coped, she just said, I knit.’
‘Play is older than culture.’
Johan Huizinga (1998:1)
Play being older than culture, as Huizinga suggests,
the process may yet contain a further narrative in the
interplay of stitches, as Jennifer Vasal describes:
 “I’m a sucker for cables. Almost every piece I’ve
knit over the past several years is filled with them. I
love the way they wrap among themselves, twisting
and roping through the weave of the yarn. I
suppose there is a narrative of sorts in this – two
sections of stitches that cannot stop playing with
each other, that must rough and tumble, twist and
gyrate under the needles, caught in the act of love
or war as the rows progress.”

Unlike weaving knitting is a portable, quiet and low-

tech craft, which can be taken anywhere except on
airplanes.
Anna Freud would weave when she was on her
own, and knit while she was listening to her patients.
Having experienced several revivals over the years,
knitting has gone public with the advent of urban knitting
circles and knitting activists, micro-revolts and yarn
bombing …
Marianne Jørgensen (2006), Pink Tank
… mixing personal concerns and political protest in the
remaking of the fabric of society.
Knitting for others, both process and outcome can
become symbolic of a relationship, like the mittens a
friend told me about:
‘A pair of baby mittens knitted for me by my then eight year
old brother. No longer in existence, sadly – they would have
been 45 years old. The mittens were made for me prior to
my birth and presented from behind his back with pride
when I was born – he had learned to knit to do these gloves,
as he was so excited. He was responsible for naming me
and our relationship has always been a special one.

The mittens were a very tight tension, which expressed the

struggle he had on his own to produce them in secret. Also
they were apparently presented in a grubby state which
declares the same thing. The fact that they existed at all
represents the love he had for me even before I existed. The
mittens [...] no longer exist except as a memory, which
makes me feel very sad as our relationship has also
deteriorated slightly – this seems almost symbolic of that
fact.’
A piece of knitwear can be a material manifestation of
time contracted in memory, importing, as Bergson
says, “the past into the present, contracting into a
single intuition many moments of duration.”

Like my father’s jumper that he wore from before I was

born till close to his death.

It is solid and heavy belying what is often described as

the ephemeral nature of textiles.
What strikes me when I hold it is how small it is
and how small my father’s role was in my life.
It was knitted by my mother from the wool of a sheep
that my father looked after before they got married.
While the jumper shrunk with repeated washes, my
father expanded as a result of the 'economic miracle'
in Germany. My father never got rid of that sheep and
my mother never lost her tightly knitted grip over him.
Control Issues
A sock can become a concept through playful exploration
as in Benjamin’s story, ….
… it can be memory made art as in Waltraud
Mattern’s work ‘The Father I never knew’, who
remembers her father through a pair of soldier’s
socks he pulled over her boots when he put her to
bed, so it would be quicker to take the children to
the shelter when there were air raids during the
night.
A sock, unexpectedly, can slip into a narrative gap in
disturbing ways.
Unspeakable Memories
I once read that during the Nazi regime in Germany, hair
taken from concentration camp inmates was to be used to
make socks for submarine crews and footwear for railway
workers.

There is no evidence that this ever happened, but as my

father served on a submarine and my grandfather worked
for the railway, imagining their feet in those socks is
unbearable, bringing up the question so many Germans,
the children of the silent and abetting majority, have been
asking so many times, of what our parents did, knew or
indeed wore during the war.
The inhabited world, Ingold writes, consists not of
objects, considered as bounded, self-contained entities,
but of things, “each a particular gathering of the threads
of life.”
Jumpers, socks and mittens might be ordinary, humble
things, yet entangled with the narration of the self in
the world, in experienced and imagined realities, in the
most extraordinary way.
A technology of the entangled self that can take many
shapes and forms, knitting is also a technology of
intellectual rigor, of geometry and maths, that beyond
the creation of garments is used to craft physical
instantiations of abstractions, as Belcrato points out,
mathematical concepts, such as hyperbolic space …
 ….and to create models of brains and organs, that are
flexible and can be physically manipulated, thus leading to
a more profound understanding of scientific concepts.

In the light of the intellectual benefits of knitting (Kendrick-

Hands 2007), beyond and including mathematical thinking,
it is somewhat ironic that knitting lessons have been
removed from the school curriculum, presumably to make
room for the teaching of more serious subjects, such as
mathematics.
So on one side of the knitting pattern there is the
maths of knitting, an algorithm, a code, a
methodology to be followed strictly to ensure a good
fit – any multiplicity of meaning would be quite
counterproductive.
But if we turn the pattern over we find ourselves in a
different world, of desires and digressions,
suggestions and allusions, multiplicity of
interpretations, images to lead the imagination astray.
 ‘Take joy in your
digressions.
Because that is where
the unexpected arises.’

Brian Massumi (2002:18)

These images can be understood as reflecting the
spirit of their times, often with rather predictable
props & tag lines.
But I personally favour slightly more quirky and lateral
interpretations. Maybe knitting patterns actually
foreshadow, in an uncanny way, the future, announcing
in advance present day issues and concerns such as:
Childhood obesity
… and what causes it …
Scared children …
… and scary ones ….
… celebrity cults, from Elvis to Dynasty …
… drinking …
… smoking …
… gun culture …
… changing gender roles …
… or low budget production?
the manly art of wearing a cardigan
… and last, not least,
the disembodied mind.
Narrative imagination, Brockmeier suggests, creates
conditions for new meanings to be made that in their
turn will suggest new possibilities for action.
Actions, Aneeta Patel (Triggs 2006) says, are more
important than wool, linking not only threads, but
also people in joined experiences.
Understood as a practice of agency, be that in the
unfolding of real or fictive scenarios, narrative
imagination enables us to live simultaneously in
different realities of our own creation and to imagine
things and ourselves as different.
It may lead us into the poetics of magical thinking,
like wonder, curiosity and touch a way of engaging
with the world regarded as child-like in contrast to
the presumed rationality of adult thought, and by
extension the rigor of academic research.
Socks and knitting suggest a softer approach that
molds itself to the subject of inquiry, form and content
being one, just like Benjamin’s sock, or to follow the
magic, the socks Pablo Neruda dedicated an ode to:
Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin.
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.

They were so handsome for the first time

my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.
Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys keep fireflies,
as learned men collect sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.

Like explorers in the jungle

who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.
The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.

Pablo Neruda
References
Atwood, Margaret, 1993. The Robber Bride.

BBC Radio Four Memory Experience, 2006 [ONLINE]. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/memory/
[Accessed 20 March 2010].

Belcrato, Sarah-Marie & Yackel, Carolyn eds. 2007. Making mathematics with needlework.
Wellesley/Massachusetts: Peters, AK Limited.

Benjamin, Walter, 2006. Berlin childhood around 1900. Translated from German by Howard Eiland.
Cambridge/Mass. & London/England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Bergson, Henri, 1896/2004. Matter and memory. Translated from French by Nancy Margaret Paul & W. Scott
Palmer. New York:
Dover Publications.

Brockmeier, Jens, 2009. Reaching for meaning: human agency and the narrative imagination. Theory &
Psychology, 19 (2), pp.
213-233.

Connor, Steven, 2005. Michel Serres’ five senses. In: Howes, David ed., 2005. Empire of the senses: The
sensual culture reader. Oxford, New York: Berg pp. 318 – 334.

Freire, Paolo, 2004. The pedagogy of hope: reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. Translated from Portuguese
by Robert R Barr. London, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Herzberg, Wolfgang, 1990. Überleben heisst Erinnern: Lebensgeschichten Deutscher Juden. Berlin:
Aufbauverlag. Cited in: Leydesdorff, Selma, Passerini, Luisa & Thompson, Paul eds., 1996. Gender and
memory: international yearbook of oral history, Vol. IV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.204.
Huizinga, Johan, 1938/1998. Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture. London: Routledge.

Ingold, Tim, 2000. Making culture and weaving the world. In Graves-Brown, P.M. ed., 2000. Matter,
materiality and modern culture. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 50 – 71.

Kendrick-Hands, Karen D. 2007. Knitting, literacy and math study. [ONLINE] Available at:
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Kraft, Kerstin, 2004. Textile patterns and their epistemological functions. Textile: The Journal of Cloth and
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Lawrence, Kay & Obermeyer, Lindsay, 2001. Voyage: home is where we start from. In: Jefferies, Janis,
ed., 2001. Reinventing textiles volume 2: gender and identity. Winchester: Telos Art Publishing, pp. 61 –
75.

Massumi, Brian, 2002. Parables for the virtual. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Neruda, Pablo 1990, Ode to my socks. [ONLINE] Translated from Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden.
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[Accessed 27 May 2009].

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Triggs, Teal, Gerber, Anna & Cook, Siân, 2006. Handing down the ‘Memory Cloth’ at the Elephant &
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