Nothing is more complicated than a line or lines.
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Politics, in On The Line, 94
Lines are everywhere. Physical or imaginary marks, traces – drawn, inscribed, subtracted, written, spoken, limits, thresholds and connections, modes of thinking. The issue, however, lies in “the ways in which they were understood,” which “depended critically on whether the plain surface was compared to a landscape to be travelled or a space to be colonized, or to the skin of the body or the mirror of the mind.”1
For early builders, the line was the cord (the mason’s line) used for taking measurements and for making things level. Later, in the 16th century it stood for ‘a crease of the face or palm of the hand’ and for the equator, a line notionally drawn on the earth. Land bound by lines was transformed into property, resource, terrain and site of work, contemplation, or battlefield.
The diverse heterogeneous arrangements, transferred into a whole range of registers, are historically and semantically precise, and hence avowedly political. Making the surface or inscribed “both on a material soil and within forms of discourse,” lines reveal but also manipulate, contest and alter deep cultural and political forms.2 Shifting borders, zones of occupation, networks of distribution, migratory patterns, prompt the confluence of a multitude of histories, real and imaginary geographies, multi-scalar and multi-dimensional bodies. Bundling and unbundling of territorial rights, boundaries stretched thin and overlapping jurisdictions, shape an economics of exchange as a form of lived politics. Coordinates set on a blank surface or words shuffled around on a sheet of paper, meld the personal and the political, the molecular and the planetary.
Writing has nothing to do with signifying, but with land surveying and map-making, even of countries yet to come.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rhizome
The basic disciplinary and professional boundaries of architecture were signaled in the early treatises (trattati). The coalescence of geometry and optics, music, medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and law on the printed pages of the first books about architecture defines and delimits a distinct form of practice, distinct from the manual labor and the actual construction. Convergent lines, numbers and words replace templates and taut threads. The invention and writing of the idea (disegno) is depicted as the object of architecture and the surface of the drawing the site par excellence of the architect. New procedures, tools, techniques, visual conventions and norms of use as well as histories and epistemological assumptions are introduced. The same instruments are employed to measure the human body, to survey the land and project upon it social visions and civil ideals. Alberti uses the astrolabe, a navigational instrument, to describe the body in De Statua and the cipher wheel to form the words. The treatise becomes but a demonstration (dimonstrazioni) of the process of construction of ‘a picture,’ the “form of sympathy, of consonance of the parts.”3 From the scale of the letter to the scale of the body and the scale of the building and the city, a mental picture and a territory are being de-scribed with precision, with the aid of the imaginary lines (linee occulte, vinculi).4 The dense web of invisible lines, extended to the vanishing point of human existence to construe a tradition, mark the limits of a disciplinary field but also the boundaries of a field of action.5 They project “shifting forms of political authority and jurisdiction but also of new ideal representations.”6
Numerous transactions between the imaginary and the visual, the textual and the built, the legal, the political and the institutional, and multiple descriptions of the object of architecture constantly negotiating its limits and purpose, have been debated since. It is precisely within this fluid (and porous) zone of ‘hidden geometries’ and objects that architecture is invented as a culturally codified knowledge and set of practices.
In the early textbooks, the line of writing, the line in a drawing, and the pulling of a line on a construction site become analogical procedures. Marco Frascari, in his essay The Drafting Knife and Pen, suggests architectural drawing and writing as an act of cutting. Having recourse to the textual and visual descriptions of the anatomy of the body by the Roman physician Galenus and the latter’s “homology between dissection and writing,” Frascari writes: “The knife sections the body and also organizes the knowledge which is then written in treatises by the pen. The pen is a knife, or stiletto-that is the stylus (grapheion) which can pierce both a body and a treatise.”7 The operation of cutting is consonant with the function of line as a break in a surface, a fissure; a rift that mobilises distinctions, that transforms and demonstrates. Cutting the body, cutting the building, cutting the city, cutting the earth, cutting history, lines reconstitute the human, the visual, the social, the geographical, and the historical.
Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos
No longer objective and measurable but variable and ambiguous, plotlines connect and produce meanings, “a manifold woven from the countless threads spun by beings of all sorts, both human and non-human.”8 What is at stake is the way in which a plurality of stories comes to exist, objects to be constructed and dissolved, topoi to be debated—a fragile, yet infinitely real, knowledge that might blow right away leaving no trace. “Collective arrangements of enunciation”9 that make us responsible for new relationships, and which intensity and diffusion attributes a special role to the encounter with the residual and the untranslatable.
History is viewed as a ‘production’, in all senses of the term: the production of meanings, beginning with the ‘signifying traces’ of events; an analytical construction that is never definite and always provisional; an instrument of deconstruction of ascertainable realities.
Manfredo Tafuri, “The Historical Project,” in The Sphere and the Labyrinth
The various ways of linking what can be said, what can be seen, what can be occupied, what can be inhabited, produce a historical and political space. This nexus localizes and expresses in it objects and standpoints, words and things—an anthropological constitution of the collective.
In the light of pressing issues, growing tensions and the exhaustion of the political will, lines—physical, imaginary, ideological, may allow us to re-organise the language of history in different ways and provide views of territory articulated beyond national, and indeed, administrative boundaries. Today’s encounters with the planet have brought the world scale in our daily experiences, and at the core of pressing social concerns. In fact, the complications of what constitutes the very condition of the human in the midst of emerging notions of post-humans, non-humans, a plurality of mediated and virtual experiences, as well as humans whose bodies are perhaps all they have, expand beyond the acknowledgment of the ‘other’ and forms of subjectivity. Even language often proves inadequate to describe the scalar complexities of environmental and social phenomena. The confusion between the production of the Other and the experience of those who live in its vague borders, between colonial and global conditions has also marked architectural historiography, which has best worked to delineate its own distinct categories. Recent theories have tended to expose the several layers of exclusion from the historiography and from the profession of architecture. Architecture’s responsibility and social commitment might be lying in the recognition and formulation of different assumptions about fundamental issues of human existence on Earth. To ‘invent and name’ new constellations may allow a lingering over the idea of (common) humanity.
The idea behind this publication is to bring together a host of voices, to create a zone of dialogue and proximity. Fluid zones and thresholds traverse places and times, groups and societies as well as individuals. Entangled stories of song lines, trans-Saharan lines, survey lines, lines of colonization of land and most pervasive colonization of knowledge, alternative pedagogies and institutional activism, lines of transmission, cognitive processes and landscapes of memory, continuity of becoming, lines of fundamentally different kinds describe physical and conceptual dispositions, invoke modes of thinking, micro-geographies, and malleable boundaries with unexpected resonances. Distinct, yet intertwined, themes move beyond the context of a specific field presenting methodologies and approaches to the ways in which the writing of history, a more impermanent field than we think, might be fostered and might suggest the connective tissue to political subjectification. “Its subject of inquiry,” Ingold foretells, “must consist not of the relations between organisms and their external environments but of the relations along their severally enmeshed ways of life. Ecology, in short, is the study of the life of lines.”10