Beyond the Line, or a Political Geometry of Contemporary Art

摘要

Two incongruous points of departure gave rise to the following speculations on the notion of a political geometry and its relevance to contemporary art. The first is a remarkable painting by Florian Pumhosl of 2005: a single, black line that coils across a white ground. The second is a crucial passage in Carl Schmitt's The Nomos of the Earth, where the legal scholar coins the resonant phrase, "global linear thinking." The image and the text have no immediate kinship, yet they both raise questions concerning the kinds of pathways or lines, both lawful and clandestine, that have been inscribed and can be drawn upon the globe. Quite literally, the problem is one of geo-metricity; that is, not geometry as the universal science defined as a "branch of mathematics concerned with the properties and relations of points, lines, surfaces, and solids," but geometry as a social technology that maps political and juridical boundaries upon the surface of the earth. This historicity of geometry is not only to be understood as immanent to an actual practice of political cartography; it also allows us, in turn, to plot the conceptual diagram of power within contemporary society. In short, political geometry will refer in this essay to actual lines and figures, whether drawn upon the earth or a pictorial surface, as well as to the spatial formations of sociopolitical forces as they emerge and transform themselves within history.