Lines: A Brief History

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Anh-Linh Ngo: Something which has kept me preoccupied during our conversations in preparation for this ARCH+ issue, is how architects use drawings as a representational tool, rather than as an operational one. You talked about the plan and its legal status earlier. That is one very straightforward way of being ‘operational’ of course, but what I am thinking about now is the speculative character of the discipline. anthropography, n’, OED Online, (Oxford University Press: September 2019) accessed November 16, 2019. TI: We have inherited this word – ‘ethnography’ –as a sort of historical sediment. We should not interpret it too literally, as ‘a description of the people’. But I still dislike the term precisely because of its ‘ethno-’ component. In a time of populist nationalism and ethnic conflict, it lays us wide open to misunderstanding of what we do. This is the real reason why I think it is so critical that we change it. For many people, the word ‘anthropology’ sounds very theoretical and even colonial. It has problems too. But there’s a long history of separating out the academic ‘-ology’ disciplines – the study of this or that – from those that have more to do with creating a world than studying it. Traditionally art and architecture are understood to be speculative, to be proposing things that do not yet exist. By contrast, archeology is the study of the past, and anthropology is the study of societies: it is supposed to be studying what is there, not proposing things that are not there. But this distinction is actually incoherent. You cannot speculate or propose without a deep understanding of the lived world, and deeply understanding the lived world would be completely pointless if it wasn’t linked to some sort of proposition or speculation about how life might be. What’s the point of studying how life is if you’re not interested in thinking about how life might be? All of these disciplines are pointing both to the future and to the past. Once we’ve shown that this division is really an imaginary one, then we don’t have any further problems. Throughout the years of the 4A’s course we felt that we were actually establishing a new discipline, which wasn’t interdisciplinary in any sense, but a discipline in its own right that doesn’t yet have a name. In Euclid, the geometrical line is defined as the shortest distance between two points. This is in contrast to (a) the organic line, which outlines the boundaries or contours of a form, and (b) the abstract line, which traces the curve of a movement or growth. For these three kinds of line, and their different properties, see Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, (Routledge: Abingdon, 2013), pp. 134-6.

Again, movement is seen as a primary element in perception and cognition so that we see along a path of perception rather than a single still point of view and our knowledge of our surroundings comes from our moving through them. In fact our movement and the lines we leave and follow are so bound up with us that the traveller and their lines can be said to be one and the same thing. The story of this journey does not tell of objects, or things discovered but rather different topics, which are in themselves further bundles and entanglements of lines. Just as we are equivalent to our lines so the story walks just like a human or animal. The concept of lines that Tim Ingold introduces is interesting and does really deserve to be taken up and tested/applied by researchers in various fields also outside of anthropology. His concept doesn't build on the established 2- and 3-dimension treatise of texture and surfaces, but rather begins by itself and redefines all that it comes across to form a tentative, yet detailed, method of perspection (if I can call it that). See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, (Continuum: London, 2004), p. 156.AK: I think this is a very good point, which brings us to the distinction between a plan and a drawing. If we were to look at a drawing as composed by lines, what would be the peculiar quality of such a drawing that plans do not have? TI: I think this problem is present in all design disciplines: designers are saying, ‘we don’t really like this idea of laying down a plan that people have to conform to. We want to allow people to be generative and have a lot of movement in a space, and we want to accept whatever emerges out of this collective dynamic.’ But then what do the designers do? Do they set down some basic parameters within which there is a lot of flexibility? Or do they give people some instructions and say: ‘now off you go and do this!’ It’s not clear what the real solution should be. MK: Yes, they are all lines. Thinking about lines allows us to expand our idea of using drawings as tools of observation. You refer to this as ‘anthropography’. Sometimes you also use the word ‘linealogy’. How did you arrive at these terms? Ingold’s research on circumpolar reindeer herding and hunting led to a more general concern with human-animal relations and the conceptualisation of the humanity-animality interface, as well as with the comparative anthropology of hunter-gatherer and pastoral societies, themes which he also explored while teaching courses at Manchester in economic and ecological anthropology. These concerns led to a number of essays which were collected together in his book 'The Appropriation of Nature', published in 1986. The same year also saw the publication of another major volume, 'Evolution and Social Life', a study of the ways in which the notion of evolution has been handled in the disciplines of anthropology, biology and history, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Two important conferences also took place in that year: the World Archaeological Congress (Southampton), in which Ingold organised a series of sessions devoted to cultural attitudes to animals, and the Fourth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (London), of which he was a principal organiser. Ingold edited one of the volumes to arise from the Southampton Congress, 'What is an animal?', published in 1988, and was co-editor of the two-volume work 'Hunters and Gatherers', consisting of papers from the London conference and published in the same year. Learning is understanding in practice: exploring the relations between perception, creativity and skill (2002-2005). See http://www.abdn.ac.uk/creativityandpractice/

TI: I find these developments utterly terrifying. As in any academic discipline, in anthropology too, there are rogue elements that allow themselves to be co-opted into a deeply compromising agenda.

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Ingold’s eventual incorporation of anthropological examples from eastern Peru is really where we begin to see a master at work – Ingold intimately understands the data and interpretation flows in an engaging way … this is a vibrant read – at times when reading I shouted aloud, ‘Yes spot on!’ at other times I paced the room and exclaimed in frustration ‘No!’. That Ingold’s writing can produce such dramatic effects is a testament to the quality of his argument. Do I recommend reading this book? Definitely.’ Conventionally, creating things has been understood as imposing form onto matter. Funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, in this project I aim to challenge this ‘hylomorphic’ model of creation and to replace it with an ontology that assigns primacy to forces and materials. I will show that: (1) that things are not reducible to objects; (2) they are generated within processes of life; (3) a focus on life-processes requires us to attend to flows of materials; (4) these flows are creative, and (5) creative practice unfolds along a meshwork of interwoven lines.