Vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of the Liminal

Draw­ing is a fun­da­men­tal medi­um in the archi­tec­tur­al pro­fes­sion; it rep­re­sents the prin­ci­pal out­come of the architect’s work in the form of a project or build­ing. On this point, the com­po­si­tion of drawn lines is viewed as a spa­tial state­ment and the final­i­ty of an architect’s thought process as the for­mu­la­tion of an idea. This inquiry posits doubt and insta­bil­i­ty as a spe­cif­ic qual­i­ty in the draw­ing as a work of lines. The line is con­sid­ered an action­al moment embody­ing mul­ti­ple fac­tors and cir­cum­stances includ­ed in the seem­ing­ly mere ges­ture upon a trace of paper or dig­i­tal screen. The focus is on the pre­cise moment of a rela­tion­al chain between the architect’s doubt—non-finalized decisions—through line-mak­ing and the unfin­ished draw­ing. This exam­i­na­tion is devel­oped as in-depth analy­sis of draw­ing process­es and their pos­si­ble after-effects.

Stem­ming from neglect­ed val­ues with­in the archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing process e.g., doubt, fragili­ty, inti­ma­cy, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, my argu­ment con­sid­ers vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty a modal­i­ty with­in the draw­ing sug­gest­ing the poten­tial for aware­ness, eth­i­cal posi­tions and crit­i­cal­i­ty towards both rep­re­sen­ta­tion and con­crete out­comes; and as such, the nuanced space of lim­i­nal­i­ty, as an open and unsta­ble con­di­tion of the line, is crit­i­cal­ly exam­ined. The approach is large­ly based on my PhD dis­ser­ta­tion ​“The role of archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing in the dynam­ics of the liv­ing space par­ti­tion” and is expand­ed through an inter- and mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary plat­form with ref­er­ences to phi­los­o­phy, art and archi­tec­tur­al the­o­ry and graph­i­cal analy­sis in draw­ing. The first part is artic­u­lat­ed through ety­mo­log­i­cal, philo­soph­i­cal and anthro­po­log­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tions of lim­i­nal, lim­it and line; the sec­ond part devel­ops the main rea­son­ing regard­ing the state of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty with­in the lim­i­nal con­di­tion of the line; and the third part pro­pos­es an Atlas of Lim­i­nal Line Dynam­ics. The atlas is a form of open dis­cus­sion on the lim­i­nal activ­i­ty of spe­cif­ic lines, includ­ing the­o­ret­i­cal and graph­i­cal lev­els anchored in draw­ing prac­tices with­in art and archi­tec­ture. Instead of defin­i­tive­ness, the atlas sug­gests and encour­ages work­ing with unsta­ble and vul­ner­a­ble states of lines, includ­ing mis-inter­pre­ta­tion­al risks, in order to approach the crit­i­cal poten­tial in the act of drawing.

An Etymological Inquiry of the Liminal Condition

The rela­tion­ship between lim­i­nal­i­ty and line is found­ed on the ety­mo­log­i­cal analy­sis of the Latin terms refer­ring to lim­it, limen and line. Empha­sis is placed on the spa­tial rela­tions and nuances that these asso­ci­a­tions pro­vide and is based on the con­tem­po­rary philo­soph­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tions on lim­it by the French philoso­pher Régis Debray and stud­ies on lim­it and wall by Thier­ry Paquot and Michel Lus­sault. The con­strued def­i­n­i­tion of line is based on the anthro­po­log­i­cal and Eng­lish ety­mo­log­i­cal analy­ses by Tim Ingold. In this study Line is con­sid­ered an agent of spa­tial rela­tions in the prac­tice of archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing. The objec­tive of such an approach is to search beyond bina­ry spa­tial oppo­si­tions: opened-closed, divid­ed-com­bined, private-public…as it aims to tack­le the rich­ness of the ambigu­ous mean­ings these Latin terms pro­vide for spa­tial dynam­ics and dynam­ics in drawing.

Through his work on the con­cept of the lim­it in the book Éloge des fron­tières, Debray exam­ines the word line and empha­sizes the mean­ing of limen: ​“Limen, from where our lim­i­naire and our pre­lim­i­naires come from, is at the same time a thresh­old and a bar­ri­er, just as lime marks a path and/or bor­der. Janus, the god of pas­sage, has two faces.”^[1] To explore the con­no­ta­tion of the sacred con­tained in the spa­tial lim­it, Debray exam­ines the ety­mol­o­gy of the term in ancient lan­guages such as Hebrew and Ara­bic and con­cludes that the idea of sep­a­ra­tion in both lan­guages is relat­ed to architecture—civil and religious—where the sacral and the sacred are always sep­a­rate or the most hid­den part of the build­ing. He explains the con­nec­tion between the idea of sep­a­ra­tion and the con­cept of the sacred via the ety­mol­o­gy of the French word sacré (sacred) and its Latin ances­tor san­cire, which alludes to demar­ca­tion, enclo­sure, and prohibition.

Limen—liminis—is a close vari­a­tion of the term limes which mul­ti­far­i­ous­ly means house, dwelling, door, entrance, begin­ning, end, suc­cess, but just like limes it can also mean bar­ri­er. The Romans had two deities ded­i­cat­ed to the space par­ti­tion and the dynam­ics of spa­tial rela­tions: ​“Limenti­nus was the Roman god who guard­ed the thresh­old of the door (limen), while Janus was the god who guard­ed pas­sages and crossroads—the god of change and tran­si­tion. From the mul­ti­ple and oppos­ing mean­ings of these terms derives the mean­ing of the rela­tion of con­nec­tion, or bind­ing lim­i­er, liemier.”^[2]

From lim­it, limen and lim­i­er, we encounter the key terms relat­ed to the dynam­ics of spa­tial par­ti­tion and habi­ta­tion. Some mean­ings are relat­ed to par­tic­u­lar spaces com­mon for lin­ear move­ments e.g., mar­gin, pas­sage, road, street, a riv­er chan­nel, or even territory—somewhat autonomous spaces—while oth­er mean­ings are rel­a­tive to the qual­i­ty and char­ac­ter of spa­tial delin­eation e.g., edge, bor­der, demar­ca­tion between two fields, line which sig­ni­fies space, fur­row, trace, sep­a­ra­tion, bar­ri­er, link­age; and final­ly, some mean­ings are close­ly relat­ed to spa­tial habi­ta­tion e.g., house, dwelling, door, thresh­old and entrance. The com­plex­i­ty of the con­cept of lin­ear par­ti­tion is empha­sized by the French philoso­pher Chris Younès. Younès dis­cuss­es the study of lim­its and bor­ders in the phi­los­o­phy of Jacques Der­ri­da: ​“This is why Der­ri­da is so won­der­ful when he speaks about the ques­tion of lim­its: it is not to sim­pli­fy the lim­its, but to com­pli­cate them (…) to com­pli­cate means to be more com­plex, more cre­ative, to be able to do some­thing with it, not only to abstract. It is some­thing much more mys­te­ri­ous, in a way.”^[3] This pre­cise point, where the com­plex­i­ty of lim­it is high­light­ed in front of its def­i­n­i­tion as con­clu­sive, is the point that applies to the qual­i­ta­tive con­structs of the line: the com­pli­men­ta­ry force and fragili­ty of archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing with­in the cre­ative mys­tery of line making.

Fol­low­ing the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Jacques Levi in the Dic­tio­n­naire de la géo­gra­phie et de l'éspace des sociétés, Paquot and Lus­sault pro­pose three basic char­ac­ters of lim­it: bar­ri­er, merg­er and ter­ri­to­ry.^[4] Rather than sum­ma­riz­ing these char­ac­ter­is­tics’ ety­mo­log­i­cal nuances and ambi­gu­i­ties, I point out prin­ci­pal spa­tial rela­tion­al process­es: sep­a­rat­ing, join­ing, spac­ing. Focus­ing on these rela­tion­al process­es, line is con­sid­ered an active graph­i­cal expres­sion of dynam­ic, nuanced and poly­va­lent spa­tial par­ti­tions and delin­eations in archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing (thick and thin, open and closed, curved and bro­ken, tex­tured and invis­i­ble, ori­ent­ed and loose, geo­met­ri­cal and, un-pre­cise etc.).

Liminality and Line

From the ety­mol­o­gy of lim­it and limes, line is one of the mean­ings of the Latin term limes. Accord­ing­ly, line is one of the pos­si­ble trans­la­tions of spa­tial par­ti­tion into an archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing. This par­tic­u­lar analy­sis of line is based on research by Tim Ingold,^[5] where he refers to an analy­sis by Samuel John­son from the Dic­tio­nary of the Eng­lish Lan­guage, also known as Johnson's Dic­tio­nary (1755), where he posits a line’s man­i­fold mean­ings: “… lon­gi­tu­di­nal exten­sion, thin wire, tight thread that con­trols the action, thread that holds fisherman's hook, fur­rows on the skin (wrin­kles), trace, sketch, con­tour, sil­hou­ette, every­thing writ­ten from one mar­gin to anoth­er; verse, rank, exca­va­tion; trench, method, plan of action, exten­sion, bound­ary, equa­tor, equinox, descen­dants or ances­tors of one fam­i­ly, one line rep­re­sents the oth­er part of an inch (unit of mea­sure), a let­ter, an expres­sion ​‘I read your line’, a cot­ton or flax fiber.”^[6] Fol­low­ing these con­no­ta­tions of the ​‘word’ line, one notices that the mean­ing of lim­its, con­tours, bor­ders and traces are com­mon for the terms lim­it and line. Ingold states that the basic deter­mi­nant of the process of draw­ing and writ­ing is pre­cise­ly a line that is the trace of a man­u­al ges­ture at the time of the cre­ation of a text or a draw­ing. We can find exam­ples of metic­u­lous engage­ment in the nuances of lim­i­nal­i­ty, lim­it and line in the poem ​“Tim­ber­line” by Michel Deguy,^[7] and also in the work of Ken­neth White in his col­lec­tion of poems Lim­ites et marges.^[8]

The rela­tion­ship between a drawn line and the archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing is one of the key themes in the essay ​“The Pre­lim­i­nary: Notes on the Force of Draw­ing,” by Aus­tralian philoso­pher Andrew Ben­jamin.^[9] Ben­jamin asserts that an archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing is always pre­lim­i­nary and is there­fore inex­tri­ca­bly linked to the mean­ings inher­ent in lim­it and limen. He explains that a pre­lim­i­nary draw­ing is lim­it­ing and relat­ed to time because it always exists before and after in rela­tion to the draw­ing. In this con­text, Ben­jamin uses the term line to clar­i­fy the pre­lim­i­nary virtue of the draw­ing and to fur­ther con­nect the terms line and limen via anal­o­gy: ​“In the con­text of the pre­lim­i­nary, the sec­ond line appears. No longer a drawn line but a thresh­old: in oth­er words, limen. That is not just the lim­it.”^[10] He explains the sta­tus of the ​‘pre­lim­i­nary’ in the draw­ing with the con­di­tion of the event that fol­lows. The draw­ing is pre­lim­i­nary if the fol­low­ing event con­firms it, this con­nects the final­i­ty of the com­plet­ed draw­ing to the term lim­it, while this restric­tion, or ​‘clos­ing’ of the draw­ing, is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly under­stood as open and there­fore the term limen is attached to the draw­ing. From limen the author derives pre­lim­i­nary as a virtue of draw­ing, as Debray explained, it is pre­cise­ly the limen at the root of the word pre­lim­i­nary (prélim­i­naire).

Embodying the Line

Paul Emmons, an archi­tect and pro­fes­sor of archi­tec­tur­al the­o­ry, argues that ​“the line-mak­ing deci­sion is the basic act of archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing.”^[11] Rely­ing on the the­sis of Alber­ti from Mar­co Frascari’s Eleven Exer­cis­es in the Art of Archi­tec­tur­al Draw­ing: Slow Food for the Architect's Imag­i­na­tion, Emmons reminds us that archi­tects make draw­ings and not build­ings, there­fore draw­ing is a basic archi­tec­tur­al craft. Accord­ing to him, the prac­tice of archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing is an embod­ied activ­i­ty that engages and informs the imag­i­na­tion of the archi­tect. Thus, in the embod­ied draw­ing process the archi­tect is express­ing and for­mu­lat­ing the finest cre­ativ­i­ty and is exposed to draw­ing plea­sures, risks and failures.

In this dual process of engage­ment and cog­ni­tion, Emmons dis­tin­guish­es three aspects of archi­tec­tur­al imag­i­na­tion that are impor­tant for deci­sion mak­ing regard­ing the line: con­struc­tive imag­i­na­tion, inhab­i­ta­tive imag­i­na­tion, and mate­r­i­al imag­i­na­tion.^[12] ​‘Con­struc­tive imag­i­na­tion’ empha­sizes the role and impor­tance of dashed lines, as hid­den lines on the one hand, and tex­ture lines that indi­cate the type of build­ing mate­r­i­al, on the oth­er. Through the aspect of the ​‘inhab­i­ta­tive imag­i­na­tion’ Emmons con­sid­ers how an archi­tect is pro­ject­ed into draw­ing using the dif­fer­ent prop­er­ties of a line in the draw­ing. While inhab­it­ing a draw­ing, through the prop­er­ties of line, the archi­tect con­sid­ers the expe­ri­ences of future inhab­i­tants of the pro­ject­ed space. The aspect of ​‘mate­r­i­al imag­i­na­tion’ empha­sizes archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing as a medi­um. The notion of mate­ri­al­i­ty here refers to draw­ing tools and mate­ri­als used for drawing—from dif­fer­ent mate­r­i­al qual­i­ties of the line (graphite, ink, chalk) to dif­fer­ent types of draw­ing surfaces—and sub­se­quent­ly the focus is on the rela­tion­ship between these qual­i­ties of draw­ing with the mate­ri­al­iza­tion of the build­ing. Regard­less of the type or pur­pose of the draw­ing, an archi­tect inscribes and trans­mits visions, ethics and respon­si­bil­i­ties that cre­ate an inti­mate per­ma­nence; hence the draw­ing, and the act of draw­ing, become an intrin­sic exten­sion of the architect’s thoughts. Keep­ing in mind these per­son­al and frag­ile aspects, the vul­ner­a­ble expo­sure of a fin­ished draw­ing is emi­nent while it con­tin­ues its autonomous life open to inter­pre­ta­tions and mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions. In this light, the prin­ci­pal quest is how to main­tain and pre­serve the rich­ness, unique­ness and com­plex­i­ty with­in the act of draw­ing despite con­tem­po­rary draw­ing habi­tudes and beyond pro­fes­sion­al con­ven­tions and archi­tec­tur­al cul­ture; would it be pos­si­ble to dis­rupt the rela­tion­al chain archi­tect-draw­ing-build­ing-inhab­it­ing and to pro­pose a slight­ly dif­fer­ent, riski­er and more per­son­al archi­tec­tur­al idea?

Ben­jamin dis­cuss­es the com­plex­i­ty of the lim­i­nal rela­tion­ship between engage­ment and the knowl­edge pro­duc­tion con­tained in the activ­i­ties of archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing. He believes that this rela­tion­ship con­tains the ​‘inher­ent fragili­ty’ of the archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing. Accord­ing to Ben­jamin, archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing is more of a poten­tial­i­ty than a rep­re­sen­ta­tion. He high­lights the prob­lem­at­ic posi­tion of archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing in the his­to­ry of archi­tec­ture, as it simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­tains the safe­ty and respon­si­bil­i­ty of archi­tec­ture.^[13] Con­tin­u­ing Robin Evans’s stud­ies on the com­plex rela­tion­ship between draw­ing and build­ing,^[14] Ben­jamin believes that archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing is actu­al­ly a ​“lim­i­nal state in between poten­tial­i­ty and apo­r­ia.”^[15] In rela­tion to Emmons and Ben­jamin, we can see that the ​‘lim­i­nal state’ of archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing aris­es from a dual rela­tion: draw­ing between the activ­i­ties of draw­ing and cog­ni­tion (Emmons) and draw­ing between poten­tial­i­ty and apo­r­ia (Ben­jamin).

The play between the poten­tial­i­ty and actu­al­i­ty in archi­tec­tur­al think­ing is one of the main points in the essay ​“Lines of Archi­tec­tur­al Poten­cy” by Thanos Zartaloud­is. He argues that in this rela­tion is the pow­er of archi­tec­tur­al think­ing and claims that ​“the co-exis­tence of poten­cy and actu­al­i­ty has the effect of a rad­i­cal equal­iza­tion, a cer­tain egal­i­tar­i­an­ism of existence’s present futures, and this becomes the most vis­i­ble in the open plateau that is think­ing as an ethos, the con­tem­pla­tive way of being.”^[16] On this mat­ter Ben­jamin claims that draw­ing and line belong to the same part of the process. He sees the ​‘force of draw­ing’ in the com­plex­i­ty of the draw­ing process and ​‘work of lines.’ The com­plex­i­ty of the line, accord­ing to him, belongs to the dichoto­my between the sim­plic­i­ty of the line and the mul­ti­plic­i­ty of ele­ments that are con­nect­ed to it; he con­sid­ers the line an after-effect of draw­ing tech­nol­o­gy and a place of ideas that con­tains the nec­es­sary ques­tion of pos­si­ble actu­al­iza­tion.^[17] In this analy­sis, Ben­jamin devel­ops a the­sis about the mul­ti­plic­i­ty of the line in archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing and calls the line a ​‘mul­ti­ple event’ that is irre­ducible. He first explains that the line is the result of what is drawn by it and then adds that the line is not oppo­site to form and idea, nor is it defin­ing and final, but is pre­cise­ly in the space between poten­tial­i­ty and apo­r­ia because it is con­ceived as a set of rela­tions; hence, for Ben­jamin, this sit­u­ates the lim­i­nal, in-between con­di­tion of the line as an unde­fined, unsta­ble and frag­ile state that project a unique strength and pow­er to a drawing.

The Vulnerable State of Line-Limen

The inten­tion now is to exam­ine whether the spe­cif­ic act of line can posi­tion the object of draw­ing in a lim­i­nal state that pre­serves the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty res­o­nant with­in qual­i­ties of insta­bil­i­ty and ambi­gu­i­ty. Fol­low­ing Benjamin’s notion of the line as ​“a place of irre­ducible com­plex­i­ty” that can con­tain mul­ti­ple events, one can sep­a­rate the line from its his­tor­i­cal deter­mi­nants and empha­size the impor­tance of its tech­no­log­i­cal and geo­met­ric prop­er­ties. This places a new light upon the inhab­i­ta­tive imag­i­na­tion and sin­gles out the pre­cise rela­tion­ship between the draw­er and the process of draw­ing-mak­ing. A draw­ing process that is found­ed on embod­i­ment and inhab­i­ta­tive imag­i­na­tion and the con­tex­tu­al and polit­i­cal aware­ness of tech­no­log­i­cal and geo­met­ric prop­er­ties of line, opens the dis­cus­sion con­cern­ing crit­i­cal phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy in archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing.^[18]

Par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant for this crit­i­cal poten­tial in the act of unsta­ble draw­ing is the res­o­nant activ­i­ty of the lim­i­nal line: an activ­i­ty sup­port­ing unsta­ble and ambigu­ous qual­i­ties in its ​“irre­ducible com­plex­i­ty” that keeps the force of the draw­ing in states of open­ness and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. Regard­ing the philo­soph­i­cal com­po­nent of this approach, it is impor­tant to high­light the influ­ence of Der­ri­da. The basis of the line prob­lema­ti­za­tion in Derrida’s work is the fun­da­men­tal notion of ​‘dif­férance’ which denot­ing the activ­i­ties of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion.^[19] Unlike dif­fer­ence (dif­férence), seen as a final, com­plet­ed process, the form ​‘dif­férance’ by chang­ing the vow­el ​’e’ to ​’a’ sets the term in a modal­i­ty of per­ma­nent activ­i­ty. ​‘Dif­férance’ makes it pos­si­ble to main­tain a dis­tinc­tion between active and pas­sive, inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or, vis­i­ble and invis­i­ble, empir­i­cal and tran­scen­den­tal with­out the need for syn­the­sis and ulti­mate deci­sion as a result of this activ­i­ty. In this way, poten­tial­i­ties, con­tra­dic­tions and apo­r­ias remain in a con­stant rela­tion­al con­nec­tion to dialec­ti­cal­ly placed oppo­sites. In this sense, ​‘dif­férance’ pro­vides a con­text for shift­ing from the motive of affir­ma­tion towards inde­ci­sion, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and dichotom­ic activ­i­ties. A line is a trace that dis­tin­guish­es and cre­ates a dichoto­my. Der­ri­da believes that the line is not in itself impor­tant, rather the way in which it achieves its effect. Accord­ing to him, the line is what makes the dif­fer­ence and brings the divid­ed enti­ty into the rela­tion­ship and is not in itself impor­tant. It is a con­di­tion for ​‘dif­férance’ as an activ­i­ty of dialec­tics. The per­ma­nent, rela­tion­al activ­i­ty of an unde­fined lim­i­nal con­di­tion is where the state of a line’s vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, based on dialec­ti­cal activ­i­ties, exists.

Atlas of Liminal Line Dynamics

Rather than con­clud­ing the com­plex­i­ties of the line’s lim­i­nal­i­ty and the crit­i­cal poten­tial in line’s vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, I pro­pose the dis­cus­sion in the form of the Atlas of Lim­i­nal Line Dynam­ics. The dis­cus­sion is curat­ed as an unfin­ished sequence of lines con­di­tions; open to fur­ther edit­ing, it gath­ers key ref­er­ences derived from phi­los­o­phy, the­o­ry of art and archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing. The objec­tive of this open col­lec­tion is to pro­pose mul­ti­ple poten­tial ​‘con­clu­sions’ as oppor­tu­ni­ties and sug­ges­tions to act towards crit­i­cal­i­ty in the archi­tec­tur­al drawing.

As elab­o­rat­ed ear­li­er, the most sen­si­tive and vul­ner­a­ble aspect in the draw­ing act is the per­son­al and inti­mate rela­tion con­tained and expressed through embod­i­ment. The ini­tial hypoth­e­sis is that vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty embod­ies the rich­ness, com­plex­i­ty and crit­i­cal poten­tial with pos­si­ble influ­ences regard­ing archi­tec­tur­al thought process­es and designed space. The under­ly­ing prob­lems are enclosed in the com­mon nega­tion of drawing’s insta­bil­i­ty and the reduc­tion of its com­plex­i­ty in order to meet the needs of con­tem­po­rary draw­ing cul­ture, to fit into pro­fes­sion­al con­ven­tions and to define the draw­ing as a final spa­tial state­ment. As it is not my inten­tion to roman­ti­cize the act of draw­ing or to mark its exclu­siv­i­ty, but rather to induce open­ings and pos­si­ble ques­tion­ing, I rely on Jonathan Hale’s con­cepts of ​‘crit­i­cal phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy’ and ​‘crit­i­cal poet­ics’ of archi­tec­ture. Hale empha­size the idea of embod­i­ment while he declares a dec­li­na­tion from phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy as ​“fun­da­men­tal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and back­ward-look­ing, appar­ent­ly too pre­oc­cu­pied with nos­tal­gia for a sup­pos­ed­ly sub­ject-cen­tered world.”^[20] Instead, he points out the neces­si­ty for the link between the indi­vid­ual and the social world and inves­ti­gates whether phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy can help in deal­ing with the wider social and polit­i­cal con­text. He pro­pos­es to break design habi­tudes and estab­lished pro­fes­sion­al con­ven­tions: ​“I would like to claim that this very inad­e­qua­cy in our attempts to repro­duce habit­u­al behav­iors is pre­cise­ly what allows space for new forms and new mean­ings to emerge […] New forms of expres­sion sug­gest new lev­els of mean­ing, even though they ini­tial­ly risk being dis­missed as mean­ing­less. And by the same token I would call this ​‘crit­i­cal’ because of the way these new forms resist con­sump­tion. By block­ing an unthink­ing assim­i­la­tion into tried and trust­ed cat­e­gories they chal­lenge us to ques­tion the ade­qua­cy of our exist­ing inter­pre­tive frame­works.”^[21] Hale points out the rad­i­cal poten­tial embod­ied in inac­cu­ra­cies, dis­tor­tions, impre­ci­sions and risks as fun­da­men­tal to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cri­tique and trans­for­ma­tion. In this per­spec­tive, the Atlas of Lim­i­nal Line Dynam­ics col­lects the unsta­ble, frag­ile, sen­si­tive and vul­ner­a­ble states con­tained in con­ven­tion­al lines and thus, it invites states of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty as essen­tial for an ambigu­ous and open draw­ing process. Fol­low­ing Hale on crit­i­cal­i­ty, Benjamin’s con­cept of the line as ​“a place of irre­ducible com­plex­i­ty” and Derrida’s notion of ​‘dif­férance’ as a per­ma­nent activ­i­ty, the open­ing of the unsta­ble and fragile—liminal—state of line ini­ti­ates the poten­tial for the eth­i­cal draw­ing act and soci­etal engage­ment in archi­tec­tur­al drawing.

The atlas is based on the rela­tion­ship between notions of lim­i­nal­i­ty and the line and under­lines the nuances of an open line dynam­ic while merg­ing archi­tec­tur­al, artis­tic and philo­soph­i­cal views on spa­tial rela­tions in draw­ing. Lim­i­nal line dynam­ics are defined through ety­mo­log­i­cal analy­sis, the con­cept of draw­ing inhab­i­ta­tion and draw­ing force con­tained in line’s ambi­gu­i­ty and inher­ent fragili­ty. The atlas intro­duces a change in per­spec­tive regard­ing the draw­ing as a pri­mal archi­tec­tur­al medi­um – from aspects of final­i­ty and con­clu­sive­ness towards qual­i­ties of insta­bil­i­ty and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty as a poten­tial for crit­i­cal activ­i­ty in the act of draw­ing. It col­lects essen­tial points form the works of Der­ri­da, Emmons, Fras­cari, Jacques Lucan, Joel Sakarovitch, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Klee and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky. Col­lect­ing the key points issued from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines and his­tor­i­cal peri­ods, these line analy­ses enforce mul­ti-faceted, eth­i­cal and com­plex atti­tudes towards the act of line-mak­ing. The atlas sug­gests nuanced and metic­u­lous work with var­i­ous rela­tions while embrac­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and fragili­ty as the essence of the spa­tial draw­ing process. The atlas col­lects: the invis­i­ble line, scale line, dashed line, poché, lin­ea­men­ta, trait, mean­der­ing line, tex­ture line, bro­ken and curved line, Klee’s line and fold. The vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of the lim­i­nal is essen­tial for crit­i­cal­i­ty in the act of draw­ing because it pre­serves the ambi­gu­i­ty and the undefined—or less defined—state of line that is ori­ent­ed towards ques­tions instead of con­clu­sions. The atlas is fol­lowed by a graph­i­cal study that aims to exper­i­ment and empha­size the un-pre­cise, con­fus­ing, inti­mate and uncan­ny states of spe­cif­ic lines. Using col­lage tech­niques, his­tor­i­cal and artis­tic line exam­ples, I indi­cate their nuanced lim­i­nal states by expos­ing modes of search and doubt. Each line in the atlas is a spe­cif­ic, unsta­ble and vul­ner­a­ble out­put and provo­ca­tion for crit­i­cal action.

Invisible Line

In his lec­ture ​“À des­sein, le dessin” from École supérieure d’art du Havre, in 1991, Der­ri­da empha­sizes draw­ing above paint­ing and work with col­or; he pays spe­cial atten­tion to the line as a con­cept for research­ing the com­plex­i­ty of space par­ti­tions – mar­gins, lim­its and bor­ders. Derrida’s inter­ests go beyond drawn marks, he search­es for ​“what is out­side the draw­ing, what comes to fill in or deter­mine its [drawing’s] inte­ri­or in some way.”^[22]

The high­light in Derrida’s work regard­ing the line is the ten­sion he places between the draw­ing and its close­ness to the project or plan (des­sein).^[23] Der­ri­da explains that he has a some­what prob­lem­at­ic rela­tion­ship to the draw­ing, and in order to open towards a line he tends to devi­ate from the con­cept of a project’s final­i­ty and com­plete­ness. ^[24] He declares the line itself invis­i­ble, and by virtue of this invis­i­bil­i­ty it deter­mines all rela­tions. The line is not what is impor­tant, but what it does and the way in which it achieves its action is. For Der­ri­da, the line is ​‘dif­fer­en­tial,’ it sep­a­rates (sur­faces, col­ors), it is ​‘dia­crit­i­cal’ and oppos­es each oth­er or else with anoth­er, it acts to dif­fer. Der­ri­da describes work on the line as work­ing on the cir­cum­stances around the line, what sur­rounds it and refers to it and work with the activ­i­ty of lines he names ​“the expe­ri­ence of blind­ness.”^[25]

Scale Line

Emmons explains the nature and log­ic of the scale line through its ori­gins on the Renais­sance site: ​“Since ear­ly archi­tec­tur­al draw­ings were made to rep­re­sent pro­ce­dures on the con­struc­tion site, the scale lines derived from the knot­ted lines of ropes that were stretched on site to lay out the build­ing in its real size. The pro­ce­dure involved first stretch­ing the rope along the main axis and then the sec­ondary mea­sures would be drawn from the cen­ter line. The graph­ics of the scale line were crossed out on paper as the rope lines were stretched across the con­struc­tion site.”^[26]

When, in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, the scale was marked on paper and thus became part of the draw­ing, accord­ing to Emmons the scale was reduced to an ​“exclu­sive­ly men­tal act of mea­sure­ment” and lost its embod­ied rela­tion­ship. In con­trast, he empha­sizes the val­ue of con­tex­tu­al­ized scale rela­tion­ships applied dur­ing the six­teenth cen­tu­ry, through rod-shaped scales on flat plates of dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als, with a mul­ti­tude of engraved dimen­sions from dif­fer­ent loca­tions. Emmons explains that these objects were used togeth­er with com­pass­es and con­sid­ered draw­ing tools. Fol­low­ing the elab­o­ra­tion of Emmons, scale line stands for the poten­tial of con­stant, active rela­tions between the imag­i­na­tion as the embod­ied draw­ing activ­i­ty relat­ed to the spe­cif­ic con­text and its met­ri­cal pre­ci­sion nec­es­sary for ade­quate con­struc­tion measurement. 

Dashed Line

The dashed line is anoth­er inter­est of Emmons. He reveals a wide field its of use and the var­i­ous mean­ings asso­ci­at­ed with it through­out the his­to­ry of archi­tec­tur­al prac­tice and the­o­ry; as he explains, the essen­tial qual­i­ty of the dashed line is to sig­ni­fy absence. The spe­cif­ic prop­er­ties by which the dashed line tran­scends its use in archi­tec­ture are con­tained in the man­ner it is drawn. Emmons believes that the dashed line exists simul­ta­ne­ous­ly on two lev­els: one trace is drawn on the sur­face, while the oth­er lev­el hov­ers above the sur­face of the draw­ing. ​“The pen, when ​‘touch­ing’ the paper, vis­i­bly releas­es ink; when sky­ward, it con­tin­ues its lin­ear tra­jec­to­ry but at a heav­en­ly alti­tude mak­ing its trace invis­i­ble, tran­sient and infi­nite­ly thin. In punc­tu­a­tion, a dash is a uni-vocal­ized phys­i­cal pres­ence indi­cat­ing an omis­sion or break in thought. Its deno­ta­tive pres­ence con­notes an absence.^[27] He empha­sizes the mean­ing of the verb to dash (from the Eng­lish term for dashed line) from Johnson's dic­tio­nary from 1755, which means ​“fly­ing above the sur­face” and adds that a dashed line requires spe­cial involve­ment and con­cen­tra­tion from the artist. The ambi­gu­i­ty and active con­di­tion of a dashed line is con­tained in its fun­da­men­tal rela­tions with absence and time, as it indi­cates spa­tial seg­ments that are above, below, in front or behind the draw­ing sur­face, it can also imply the infor­ma­tion about the pre­vi­ous or the future states of the drawn space. 

Lineamenta

The Latin term Lin­ea­men­ta, after which Leon Bat­tista Alber­ti named the first book of his trea­tise on archi­tec­ture, De Re Aed­i­fi­ca­to­ria (1443−1452), is a source of var­i­ous trans­la­tions and inter­pre­ta­tions. Mar­co Fras­cari seeks to ana­lyze how this notion became the top­ic of numer­ous trans­la­tions in archi­tec­tur­al the­o­ry. He believes that inter­pre­ta­tions of the lin­ea­men­ta in the Eng­lish lan­guage have dis­tort­ed and sim­pli­fied the mean­ing of the term. Trans­la­tions into Ital­ian (dis­eg­no) which, through the con­cepts of design and plan, bring the con­no­ta­tions of lin­ea­men­ta clos­er to project and design (dis­eg­no, pro­jet­to), but the author con­sid­ers them also inad­e­quate.^[28] He aims to reach the fine, oscil­lat­ing nuances of this com­plex term. He points out that the notion of lin­ea­men­ta arose from the rela­tion­ship between the draw­ing and the build­ing and accord­ing to the char­ac­ter of the lines used on the con­struc­tion site. Fras­cari finds that the ori­gin of the term, in addi­tion to the term linea—which means line—also includes the des­ig­na­tion of linen (linum), a mate­r­i­al that was often used to make thread for con­struc­tion sites. He con­cludes that the most ade­quate trans­la­tion is the deno­ta­tion line. Deno­ta­tion lines are mul­ti­ple, they mark, mea­sure, design and plan and are in con­stant rela­tion to the build­ing while retain­ing their inde­pen­dence. Fras­cari empha­sizes that a deno­ta­tion line’s use required great skill, aware­ness and the excep­tion­al edu­ca­tion of the archi­tect (soller­tia).^[29] Lin­ea­men­ta and its ref­er­ence in deno­ta­tion lines under­lines the poly­va­lent nature, risks and neces­si­ties for con­stant inter­pre­ta­tion and search for nuances.

Broken and Curved Line

Bro­ken lines in Kandinsky’s the­o­ry belong to the group of straight lines on which, in addi­tion to the basic force, anoth­er force act­ed. Volt­age and direc­tion are nec­es­sary for the move­ment of this line. In explain­ing volt­age and direc­tion, Kandin­sky sep­a­rates the point (which has only volt­age but not direc­tion) and the line along which a direc­tion deter­mines the move­ment of the volt­age. The break­ing of the base line (hor­i­zon­tal, ver­ti­cal, diag­o­nal) was caused by anoth­er force and thus formed an angle. Kandin­sky argues that these lines can be simple—created by a sin­gle blow of force, or complex—created under mul­ti­ple influ­ences of force. Dif­fer­ent angle degrees cor­re­spond to com­ple­men­tary stress­es: sharp, straight, blunt, free; and then to dif­fer­ent sounds and col­ors. The com­plex bro­ken line in this con­stel­la­tion is polyg­o­nal and can rep­re­sent an infi­nite series: ​“thanks to com­bi­na­tions of sharp, right, obtuse and free angles and thanks to con­nec­tions of dif­fer­ent lengths.”^[30]

Kandin­sky takes the bro­ken line as a tran­si­tion state between a straight and a curved line, where the ​“pas­sive” obtuse angle is clos­est to this mor­pho­log­i­cal defor­ma­tion: ​“The sim­i­lar­i­ty of obtuse lines, curves and cir­cles is not only exter­nal, but also con­di­tioned by inter­nal nature: pas­siv­i­ty of an obtuse angle, his sub­mis­sive atti­tude towards the envi­ron­ment leads him to large depres­sions which find their end in the high­est self-inden­ta­tion of the cir­cle.” A com­plex curved line is shown as wavy and ​“may con­sist of geo­met­ric parts of a cir­cle, or of free parts, or of var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions of both”.^[31]

Poché

Regard­ing its first usages in the Beaux-Arts de Paris, poché implies the tech­nique of paint­ing the sur­face of the walls in draw­ing accord­ing to estab­lished con­ven­tions. The hol­lowed walls, as well as the pil­lars, in place of their full mass, gath­er and artic­u­late ser­vice spaces in their vol­ume: stairs, cor­ri­dors, aux­il­iary rooms. Poché spaces can be small­er or larg­er and are entan­gled in the sup­port­ing struc­tures of a build­ing. While Jacques Lucan’s start­ing point for con­tem­po­rary inter­pre­ta­tions of poché is a tech­nique and method­ol­o­gy in archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing, Robert Ven­turi points out the dis­tinc­tion into open and closed poché.^[32] The closed one belongs to the tra­di­tion­al under­stand­ing of inter­sti­tial spaces, com­mu­ni­ca­tions and spa­tial cham­bers with­in a closed struc­ture and the open poché fur­ther com­pli­cates this notion. Ven­turi first defines open ser­vice spaces that are cov­ered or semi-closed under the con­no­ta­tion of open­ness, and then brings these spaces into the rela­tion to pri­vate and pub­lic at the lev­el of urban space. Venturi’s pro­ce­dure inverts poché space, where open and semi-open, pub­lic and semi-pub­lic spaces of the city are shad­ed and dark­ened in the draw­ing, while the enclo­sure of pri­vate spaces remains uncol­ored and bright. In the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry the con­cept of poché was devel­oped from the tech­nol­o­gy of draw­ing into tech­niques for archi­tec­tur­al and urban design. While poché can swal­low and hide spaces inside the vol­ume of the wall, it rel­a­tivizes and trig­gers the notion of space par­ti­tion and intro­duces the vibrat­ing vol­ume of the line.

Texture Line

The impor­tance of the tex­ture line is not in the shape it out­lines, but in the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the build­ing mate­ri­als it rep­re­sents. Emmons shows that from the begin­ning stages of a draw­ing, Renais­sance archi­tects tried to show the char­ac­ter of the mate­r­i­al intend­ed for con­struc­tion with var­i­ous lines. This man­ner of draw­ing was free in the sense of rep­re­sent­ing sub­jec­tive feel­ings towards cer­tain mate­ri­als until the adop­tion of the first con­ven­tions, which in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, result­ed in the use of sym­bols rep­re­sent­ing mate­ri­als.^[33] In addi­tion to the sym­bols con­tained in the con­struc­tion lines, in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, through the actu­al­iza­tion of the blue­print process, dif­fer­ent col­ors, types and thick­ness­es of lines were used to empha­size the char­ac­ter­is­tics and spe­cif­ic per­for­mance of mate­ri­als. Emmons pays spe­cial atten­tion to two mate­r­i­al sym­bols of build­ing lines: the sym­bol for glass (in the front view) and the sym­bol for ther­mal insu­la­tion (in cross section).

Emmons notes that the sym­bol for glass in front view is wide­ly known and con­sists of straight diag­o­nal lines whose seg­ments vary in length.^[34] He explains that the ori­gins of the marks for glass emerged from the ancient’s belief that the sun’s rays illu­mi­nate the earth in par­al­lel, at cer­tain angles. Emmons con­sid­ers the tex­ture sym­bol for ther­mal insu­la­tion espe­cial­ly impor­tant giv­en the insis­tence of the con­ven­tion that the wind­ing line should be drawn free­hand in a tech­ni­cal draw­ing, as opposed to all oth­er lines drawn with a straight-edge or oth­er mechan­i­cal draw­ing tools. As he shows, this line con­tains numer­ous ​“irreg­u­lar pock­ets of space that sep­a­rate the two sides of the line.”^[35] He clos­es his study in ref­er­ence to Renais­sance stud­ies in which such a line denotes air or clouds. This per­spec­tive on a tex­tur­al line empha­sizes the imag­i­na­tive inhab­i­ta­tion of draw­ing and its sub­jec­tive and emo­tion­al con­no­ta­tions; it empow­ers per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tions of the fine struc­tur­al and tac­tile rela­tions between draw­ing and build­ing material.

Trait

In the intro­duc­tion to the essay ​“Stéréo­tomie et Géométrie” Joel Sakarovitch presents the rela­tion­ship between draw­ing and stereoto­my.^[36] In research­ing the word’s ety­mol­o­gy, due to the inten­sive devel­op­ment of stereoto­my in France, the author con­cen­trates on French vocab­u­lary from 1691, in which the def­i­n­i­tion includes the pop­u­lar expres­sion art du trait: ​“the art of line draw­ing of shapes giv­en to stone (or brick) for the pur­pose of their assem­bly.”^[37] Sakarovitch trans­lates the term art du trait as ​“the art of line draw­ing” line draw­ing. Unlike oth­er crafts that work with the sur­face and for which pro­jec­tive geom­e­try (car­pen­ter, black­smith) was suit­able for work, stereoto­my required a geo­met­ric con­struc­tion that includes the vol­ume or ​“mass” of the stone. The author believes that through spe­cif­ic stone cut­ting tech­niques and through lines that mark the paths of the notch­es, the idea of orthog­o­nal pro­jec­tions and their manip­u­la­tion in geo­met­ric con­struc­tion was devel­oped. A sig­nif­i­cant part of the stereotom­ic process by which such a geo­met­ric con­struc­tion devel­oped was équar­risse­ment, which Sakarovitch claims is one of the first tech­niques of dis­play­ing space in two dimen­sions.^[38] The trait is a line draw­ing on the stone that links direct­ly drawn and built envi­ron­ments, thus it con­tains a spe­cif­ic final­i­ty. Con­se­quent­ly, and in dif­fer­ence with oth­er drawn lines, trait is deprived of the pos­si­bil­i­ty for mul­ti­ple inter­pre­ta­tions, it embod­ies respon­si­bil­i­ties and risks of errors in lines for cut­ting the piece of stone while the imag­i­na­tion remains in the domain of geo­met­ri­cal construction.

Meandering Line

Emmons points out the lines of move­ment with the notion of mean­der­ing line. He explains that move­ment through space is fun­da­men­tal to the gen­er­al dis­po­si­tion of space and is inex­tri­ca­bly linked to the built struc­ture. Mark­ing the lines of flow in the archi­tec­tur­al plan, he con­nects first with the move­ments of the game in the works of Alber­ti, and then with the stud­ies of effi­cien­cy through move­ment in space. He high­lights the remark of Charles Day (1879–1931), an effi­cien­cy engi­neer, who believes that after suc­cess­ful draw­ings of the orga­ni­za­tion of move­ment, ​“a build­ing should hard­ly be drawn around them.”^[39] The lines of move­ment in Emmons’s study are marked by ana­lyzes of the move­ment of space users, but the author uses these lines to sug­gest the move­ment of the archi­tect-drafts­man through space and to devel­op the empa­thy of inhab­i­ta­tion. Although these lines are not often present in draw­ings, they are the key to spa­tial orga­ni­za­tion, as they mark and pre­dict ways of stay­ing in space. How­ev­er, Emmons notes that the drawn lines of flow through space do not intend to be deter­mi­na­tive, they most often show move­ments that are cru­cial for the con­cep­tion of space, to which oth­er move­ments and activ­i­ties are relat­ed or not. He con­nects the line of move­ment through space to the con­cept of a point in motion in Klee's the­o­ry of art. Mean­der­ing line as an unpre­dictable line of body move­ment is rely­ing on the emphat­ic engage­ment of an archi­tect and the process of draw­ing embod­i­ment. It tends to fore­see the dynam­ics of future space usage or to ana­lyze exist­ing move­ment in built space, thus it per­ma­nent­ly stays in the stage of doubt, between the def­i­n­i­tion and uncertainty.

Klee’s Line and Fold

The line of the active point that ​“walks freely” is one of Klee's basic con­cepts. How­ev­er, this line is almost nev­er in unhin­dered move­ment, but is accom­pa­nied by events in the form of ​“com­ple­men­tary forms”, ​“sec­ondary lines” or ​“described around itself”, and oth­er lines move around the ​“imag­ined” main line. The move­ment of the active line can also be ​“restrict­ed to fixed points.”^[40] When such a line rounds one sur­face dur­ing its move­ment, it ceas­es to be active and becomes flat. The sec­ond type of line are pas­sive lines cre­at­ed by sur­face acti­va­tion, which Klee calls ​“line pro­gres­sion.” Pas­sive lines become active as inte­gral parts of the sur­face. Klee defines var­i­ous nuances and states of line activ­i­ty regard­ing the rela­tion­ship between line and surface.

Through the dynam­ics of Klee’s line, Deleuze devel­ops and clar­i­fies the fold (pli) – one of the basic con­cepts of his phi­los­o­phy, which inspired sig­nif­i­cant­ly archi­tec­tur­al the­o­ry and prac­tice. In explain­ing the fold, Deleuze insists on the dif­fer­ence between a point and a line: ​“There­fore, the labyrinth of con­ti­nu­ity is not a line that would split into inde­pen­dent points, like sand spilling into grains, but like a fab­ric or sheet of paper that is divid­ed into folds in infin­i­ty or to decom­pose into curved motions, each deter­mined by a con­sis­tent or per­sua­sive accom­pa­ni­ment […]” The space of the Deleuze’s line is rep­re­sent­ed as a per­ma­nent move­ment – by bend­ing inwards or strat­i­fy­ing into curved tra­jec­to­ries. The line of fold nev­er set­tles, it is in per­ma­nent state of def­i­n­i­tion and re-definition.

Towards the Subliminal in Drawing’s Vulnerability

The Atlas of Lim­i­nal Line Dynam­ic opens man­i­fold ques­tions regard­ing lim­i­nal draw­ing and its entwine­ment with vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. While point­ing out spe­cif­ic line stud­ies and sug­gest­ing their graph­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tions, the atlas pro­pos­es a trans-dis­ci­pli­nary frame­work for fur­ther engage­ment in crit­i­cal draw­ing practices. 

Dwelling on the ety­mo­log­i­cal analy­sis (line, limes, limen) and the con­cept of pre­lim­i­nary drawing—interstitial draw­ing activ­i­ty and cog­ni­tion (Emmons) and poten­tial­i­ty and apo­r­ia (Benjamin)—the line is intro­duced as an unsta­ble and ambigu­ous ​“place of irre­ducible com­plex­i­ty.” Accord­ing to Ben­jamin this com­plex­i­ty is embod­ied in the rela­tion­ship between engage­ment and knowl­edge pro­duc­tion and results in the ​‘inher­ent fragili­ty’ of the draw­ing. Hale’s con­cept of crit­i­cal phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy enabled fur­ther stud­ies on the crit­i­cal poten­tial con­tained in the ​‘inher­ent fragili­ty’ of lim­i­nal as vul­ner­a­ble draw­ing state. He pro­posed work with inad­e­qua­cy and the risk of being dis­missed as mean­ing­less in order to dis­rupt and break estab­lished norms and habi­tudes and thus open­ing spaces for new lev­els of mean­ing. As the atlas aims to indi­cate, the dis­rup­tion tac­tics and the break with con­ven­tions are embod­ied in drawing’s vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. The vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty with­in the act of draw­ing is the act of expo­sure of the most sen­si­tive and frag­ile, more intu­itive and less ratio­nal, spa­tial atti­tudes. The expo­sure of per­son­al doubts and ambi­gu­i­ties of spa­tial reflec­tions, com­bined with sen­sa­tions of embod­i­ment and inter­pre­ta­tion­al risks, ini­ti­ate the poten­tial for the eth­i­cal draw­ing act and soci­etal engage­ment with­in the draw­ing. This draw­ing atti­tude can be defined as the prac­tice of vulnerability. 

The trans-dis­ci­pli­nary frame­work of the atlas expos­es the essen­tial mat­ter of the sub­jec­tive and per­son­al (beyond dis­ci­pli­nary) in rela­tion with con­ven­tion­al and habit­u­al draw­ing acts. As a par­tic­u­lar crit­i­cal draw­ing tac­tic,^[41] the atlas empha­sizes the activist engage­ment with lines as a pas­sion­ate entwine­ment with vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty found­ed in draw­ing plea­sure and fol­lowed by pos­si­ble agony and resent­ment. Elab­o­rat­ing on vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and inti­mate expo­sure in his dis­course on affec­tion and love, Roland Barthes relies on Win­ni­cott and finds ways to acknowl­edge the inevitabil­i­ty and neces­si­ty of agony: ​“Do not wor­ry any­more, you have already lost it.”^[42] Yet, Jean-Luc Nan­cy in his book Le Plaisir au Dessin fur­ther elab­o­rates the explic­it com­plex­i­ty of draw­ing plea­sure and its essence of ambi­gu­i­ty. ​“Ambi­gu­i­ty seems to be con­sti­tu­tive of pleasure—if it pleas­es and if, in pleas­ing, it sat­is­fies, it bor­ders on dis-plea­sure. If it stim­u­lates, it’s very exci­ta­tion, its ten­sion is dis­plea­sur­able.”^[43] Nan­cy fur­ther refers to draw­ing as an open, unsta­ble and vul­ner­a­ble [œuvre] in dif­fer­ence with the fin­ished char­ac­ter of accom­plished work [ouvrage]. ​“But the work [œuvre] undoes itself by itself [se défait d’elle même]—it makes demands on itself; it reopens the desire from which it has arisen […] All its force resides in what makes it sor­row over itself, its idea or form. In sorrow—lacking relief, suf­fer­ing, in sus­pense, in desire for what it knows can only sat­is­fy though repeat­ed exci­ta­tion.”^[44] In the line with Barthes’s and Nancy’s thoughts, the final­i­ty in lim­i­nal draw­ing is absent, sus­pend­ed, dis­placed. As open and vul­ner­a­ble, lim­i­nal draw­ing remains ambigu­ous as it is always in the state of becom­ing. This state of plea­sure in reversibil­i­ty and dis­place­ment, Jean Bau­drillard defines as a very essence of seduc­tion: ​“There is, above all, a strat­e­gy of dis­place­ment (se-duc­ere: to take a side, to divert from one’s path) […] To play is not to take plea­sure. Seduc­tion, as a pas­sion and as a game at the lev­el of the sign, acquires a cer­tain sov­er­eign­ty; it is seduc­tion that pre­vails in the long term because it implies a reversible, inde­ter­mi­nate order.”^[45] The prac­tice of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, as a very par­tic­u­lar force in the act of draw­ing, is the mat­ter of sov­er­eign­ty, of anoth­er kind of pre­ci­sion, beyond pro­fes­sion­al habi­tudes and dis­ci­pli­nary prin­ci­ples, with par­tic­u­lar self-ref­er­en­tial order and rig­or of reversibility.

The Atlas of Lim­i­nal Line Dynam­ics is a propo­si­tion for exten­sive, active and engaged work with line’s ambi­gu­i­ty; it sug­gests that vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty is nec­es­sary for sophis­ti­cat­ed and nuanced accu­ra­cies embod­ied in draw­ing as a per­son­al act of expo­sure and mind­ful expres­sion of eth­i­cal and cul­tur­al posi­tion­ing of spa­tial doubts. Draw­ing with the vul­ner­a­ble, ambigu­ous line dynam­ics is the per­for­mance of plea­sure and seduc­tion. As an accu­ra­cy, this draw­ing is beyond con­ven­tion­al pre­ci­sion – through the work with lim­i­nal states of the line, it dis­rupts con­ven­tions and devel­ops its own field of action beyond the lim­i­nal, in the sub­lime (ety­mo­log­i­cal­ly: sub-lim­i­nal). Rely­ing on Kant and the rela­tion­ship between the plea­sure and ambi­gu­i­ty, Nan­cy under­lines that ​“the sub­lime sen­ti­ment car­ries a mix­ture of plea­sure and dis­plea­sure, as well as a con­ta­gion of form by the form­less.”^[46] It is the plea­sure from the act of draw­ing that reveals its inher­ent vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and imbues the line with crit­i­cal poten­tial; with­in the potentiality—as a res­o­nant form of dis­place­ment and reversibility—the draw­ing strays from the con­scious, work­ing field of lim­i­nal into the frag­ile demar­ca­tions of sublime.