Thorsten Botz-Bornstein - The Philosophy of Lines: From Art Nouveau to Cyberspace

Perhaps no one before Klee had let a line dream. The beginning of the lines path establishes or installs a certain level or mode of the linear, a certain manner for the line to be and to make itself a line.

Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind

This book gives a philosophical account of the line as a phenomenon found in culture. It describes lines in many areas but primarily attempts to crystallize a philosophy of lines that emerged in Europe around 1850 and developed over the twentieth century to this day. The development was supported by thinkers and artists such as Heinrich Wlfflin , Adolf Loos , Felix Ravaisson , Henri Bergson , Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Paul Klee , Wassily Kandinsky , Piet Mondrian , or Henri Michaux . At the turn of the nineteenth century, a new scientific environment, manifesting in the emergence of non-Euclidean geometry, influenced modern art. However, while the reality of non-Euclidean geometry is abstract, mathematical, and technical, artists of early modernity used lines to create an existential-aesthetic virtual reality . This new geometry would not lead to the lines technical virtualization but rather to its poetic virtualization.

I extract, from the works of the above aestheticians and artists, a peculiar philosophy of lines that I find compatible with the aesthetics of lines practiced in East Asian calligraphy and painting. In both the Western non-Euclidean tradition, and in Chinese and Japanese calligraphy , lines are used to represent realities not only through affirmation, but also through negation. On the one hand, this aesthetics negates the concrete spatial dimension of the line; on the other hand, it does not push the line towards purely geometrical or digital abstraction. The line remains linked to a surface, an environment, and a body. This paradoxical concept of the line also inaugurates a peculiar idea of the virtual that has become important at the end of the twentieth century. However, in some points, this virtuality is different from, and even clashes with, what is most commonly understood as virtuality today.

I show that several Western aestheticians and artists slowly pushed the line towards various stages of negativity. Heinrich Wlfflin perceived the depreciation of the line as a boundary, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty saw lines as dynamic phenomena. Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that lines challenge the human intellect, not through their blurred character, but through a more sophisticated procedure of self-negation. For Kandinsky , the line existed as a negation of forces: the straight line is a negation of the plane. More radically, Piet Mondrian believed that in his paintings, lines destroy each other through an effect of mutual opposition. The French poet-painter Henri Michaux relied on a divestment (dsaisissement) of the line, that is, on the lines negative values. More recently, the British artists collective Tracey suggested that drawing is uncertain, defiantly idiosyncratic, marking specific difference rather than aspiring to universal values, stubbornly refusing resolved forms, and incorporating the principle of erasure the will to unmark (Tracey: xi). For all these thinkers and artists, the line is not simply present (abstractly or concretely), but its existence is linked to a complex ontology that employs both affirmation and negation. Such reflections go beyond the implied line or the guideline, which are known in art and architecture since Vitruvius and Leon Battista Alberti . The implied line is invisible whereas the negative line is drawn and most often visible. However, though physically visible, the negative line is not an object (not even a suggested or imagined one) but rather a Heideggerian Ding. It is an organism with existential dimensions, which becomes most obvious when we look at the lines link to the body. Again, this does not mean that the line is animistic or the personification of an ego. On the contrary, the line is emptied out: it is divested of all ego notions.

I compare these approaches to the way lines are handled in the East Asian tradition. Japanese and Chinese art, under the influence of Daoism and Zen Buddhism , have always had an understanding of the line that comes close to the one described above. One reason is that this tradition of lines has never been impacted by Plato or Euclid . Another reason is that it has traditionally operated with an alternative understanding of the virtual.

Much has been written about lines from anthropological, philosophical, or scientific points of view. In this book, I concentrate on the most peculiar characteristic of the line, which is its ambiguous ontological status. Lines can be physical phenomena, cognitive responses to observed processes, or both at the same time. My approach is always philosophical or aesthetic in the broadest sense. Archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, or geographers will find interesting philosophical ideas in this book, but they will also recognize that my method is very different from theirs. My purpose is not merely to show that lines as human-made artifacts have had different meanings at different times or in different places. Instead, I concentrate on the negative line or the self-negating line and detect common patterns in East and West.