the preliminary: notes on the force of drawing

This article was downloaded by: [Cornell University Library]On: 16 November 2014, At: 15:42Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

The Journal of ArchitecturePublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20

The preliminary: notes on the force ofdrawingAndrew Benjamina

a Monash University–Philosophy, Melbourne, Victoria, AustraliaPublished online: 09 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Andrew Benjamin (2014) The preliminary: notes on the force of drawing, The Journal ofArchitecture, 19:4, 470-482, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2014.953191

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2014.953191

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and ourlicensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publicationare the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor &Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independentlyverified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and usecan be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/13602365.2014.953191

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2014.953191

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

The preliminary: notes on the forceof drawing

Andrew Benjamin Monash University–Philosophy, Melbourne, Victoria,

Australia (Author’s e-mail address:

[email protected])

Maintaining drawings’ identity as a question means that drawing is more than an historicalcategory. Drawings have force. The contention of this article is that drawing enablesarchitecture to stage a relation to an outside. It is not that relation. Drawing is prior to thebuilt. However, what is the status of that which is ‘prior’ and how is the gap that this‘prior’ holds in place to be understood. This article is a part of an attempt to provide thataccount.

1Beginning with drawing, perhaps even beginning

with a drawing, demands allowing the question

of drawing’s identity to endure, at the opening,

as a question. The question of identity, however,

should not be addressed as though it referred to

no more than a mere historical category. Drawings

have force. And yet drawing is not an act of per-

ception.1 Or at least the force of drawing is not

to be defined in terms of perception. Drawing has

another force. The contention here is that

drawing is that which enables architecture to

stage a relation to an outside. It is, however, not

that relation. While there may be accounts of a

subject’s experience or non-experience of architec-

ture, where the latter is equated with building

(thereby leaving the equation of the architecture

with the built assumed and therefore without argu-

ment), such a determination leaves architecture,

when it is understood as that which is prior to

building, and thus prior to the built, without any

adequate account. What has to be taken up is

how the place of this ‘prior’ positioning is to be

understood. There can be no simple phenomenol-

ogy of drawing. Another account is necessary. It

will involve a reconfiguration of both the experien-

tial as well as the ideational.

At the end of his detailed consideration of

drawing, a consideration whose effects are still

being worked through, Robin Evans projects a

revision of architectural history. As a project its

importance would be that it necessitated developing

a frame of reference and thus a theoretical approach

that worked from within architecture. He formulates

this project in the following way.

It would be possible, I think, to write a history of

Western architecture that would have little to do

with either style or signification, concentrating

instead on the manner of working. A large part

of this history would be concerned with the gap

between drawing and building. In it the drawing

would be considered not so much a work of art

or a truck for pushing ideas from place to place,

but as the locale of subterfuges and evasions

that one way or another get around the enormous

weight of convention that has always been archi-

tecture’s greatest security and at the same time its

greatest liability.2

470

The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 19Number 4

# 2014 RIBA Enterprises 1360-2365 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2014.953191

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

mailto:[email protected])

While this provides the basis for a necessary histori-

cal project, one which maintained the particularity of

architecture, it demands, at the same time, a specific

theoretical undertaking if the gap between drawing

and building is both to be maintained and thus

equally to be the object of theoretical reflection.

This ‘gap’ constitutes a specific locus of architectural

theory. Central to such an undertaking is a reposi-

tioning of drawing. Part of that project—and it

would only be a part—involves the attempt to

define the drawing as a site of experimentation

and furthermore as a site which, while containing

the potential for representation, was not itself to

be interpreted within the framework of represen-

tation.3 To invoke representation as the automatic

and simply assumed quality of drawing, such that

any drawing then becomes nothing other than an

earlier moment within the problematic of represen-

tation, would be to rid drawing of its capacity for

experimentation and thus to deny its potential. In

sum, it would be to fail to think the insistent pres-

ence of the ‘gap’ between drawing and building.

What continues as a concern therefore is the neces-

sity to maintain a gap. It should be present as calling

on thought rather than its presence being simply

assumed.

While not here pursuing the details of Evans’

position, it is the conception of drawing, and thus

the thinking of the architectural that it envisages,

that orientates these notes. As has already been

intimated, the key point is the ‘gap’. In the follow-

ing the gap will be repositioned in terms of the

‘preliminary’. However, what is both important

and significant about the presence of the space

that the gap constitutes is its distancing of any

automatic, let alone axiomatic, inscription of

drawing into the domain of representation. Cross-

ing the gap, it will be argued, is not the process

of presenting and thus of projecting the inside to

the outside. Equally, although this maybe a claim

that is more appropriate to the domain of art

rather than architecture, drawing is not the intro-

jection of an outside into that which then

becomes an inside.

Projection and introjection, when thought exclu-

sively as modalities of representation, are displaced

once the ‘gap’ identified by Evans becomes an

essential part of any account of the force of

drawing. In other words, if this ‘gap’ is maintained

there has to be another quality that marks out the

drawing. That quality in theoretical or philosophical

terms is potentiality. The virtue of experimentation

thought beyond the strictures set in place by rep-

resentation is that it demands that lines have a

potentiality whose actualisation then continues to

be maintained as a question. Moreover, in distan-

cing representation it becomes possible to interpret

works from the history of drawing in ways that are

no longer determined by the relationship between

the drawn on one side and completed projects (be

they paintings or buildings) on the other. Com-

pletion here will have its negative determinations

insofar as the unbuilt or unrealised are terms that

can always figure within the problematic of rep-

resentation.

As a consequence what arises is the possibility to

move from a set of lines that are taken to be rep-

resentational, or at least can be viewed as such, to

their reconfiguration in terms of potentiality

(to which it should be added that this is not to

471


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

deny that lines can always be attributed a rep-

resentational status). As with all attempts to recon-

figure thought, here the thinking of drawing in

terms of potentiality rather than representation,

there is an inherent fragility in play. If there is a

conception of abstraction that emerges with the

move from representation to one defined by the

relationship between potentiality and indetermina-

tion, then it is not there either as the denial or the

negation of representation. On the contrary, it is

situated within the move from stasis or the static

towards potentiality. What the presence of poten-

tiality allows for is a process, a movement, and

thus the drawing’s literal content that can hence-

forth be viewed in terms of a modality of indeter-

mination.4

Indetermination names the possibility of actuali-

sation, ie, it names potentiality. Hence rather than

mechanical modes of determination, a potentiality

—the terms demanded by the gap’s conceptual

retention—always has an indeterminate relation-

ship to actualisation. In other words, any actualisa-

tion has a necessarily indeterminate relation to that

which is produced (in part this is also true because

there is no necessity that drawings be the occasion

of anything other than drawing itself). Moreover,

it is only by allowing for the interconnection of

potentiality and indetermination that drawing is

able to figure as a site of experimentation.5 In

addition, once potentiality and indetermination

are taken to work at the limit whilst sustaining

the limit as a condition, they then become two of

the terms central to that rethinking of drawing

which takes the gap as a central and thus constitu-

tive component.

2If there were a way into drawing, both to drawing as

an object of thought as well as one with its own

history that avoids the trap of essentialism, then it

is a way that has to note—whilst deferring the

initial power of—the question: what is drawing?

The difficulty stemming from letting this question

determine any consideration of drawing is that as

a consequence what has to be assumed is that

any differentiation—differentiations between draw-

ings—is a determination of the essential. Within

such a setting the general or the essential would

set the limit by delimiting the way generic determi-

nations or historical conjunctures are then able to

figure. Particular drawings would always be second-

ary. Consequently, as a philosophical move, what

the deferring of the question of the essential

enables is that the presence of given determi-

nations, specific drawings, can then be given pri-

ority. And this will be a priority that is as much

temporal as it is evaluative. The other element to

note in advance is the aesthetic. In other words,

the recognition is that any drawing will exert a

hold that can be defined in terms of the aesthetic

(where the aesthetic is understood as the pleasure

that might be derived from looking at a given

drawing). If the possible power of the aesthetic is

noted in advance this then means that the aesthetic

dimension of any drawing can then be acknowl-

edged and thus not be allowed to dominate. Draw-

ings, after all, bring a range of possible qualities into

play.

As a result, part of any repositioning of drawing

that begins with the abeyance of the represen-

tational is that even though the aesthetic must be

472

The preliminary: noteson the force of drawing

Andrew Benjamin

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

acknowledged, it is nonetheless essential to

attribute to drawing another and importantly

different quality. This other quality, while existing

in relation to the aesthetic, stops it from being

the primary concern. As can be noted, there is

now a distancing that has a threefold nature. A

definition of drawing in terms of the aesthetic; dif-

fering interpretations structured by the determi-

nations of representation; and the retention of

the essential as having a determining effect on par-

ticulars. All are distanced by the emergence of

what will be described as the preliminary, a move

sanctioned by giving the presence of the gap an

ineliminable insistence. This is an opening in

which the engagement with drawing becomes a

practice that is defined by the relationship

between potentiality and interpretation. Once that

possibility is allowed then what is to be addressed

is this other quality.

That quality, and the project of these notes as its

initial elucidation, will be named here as the force

of drawing. And here what will remain operative

is the continual interplay of line and drawing.

What the relationship between line and movement

raises is, of course, the question of the line’s

interpretation. If there is a drawing then there is

drawn presentation. Even if the problematic of rep-

resentation has been put to one side, it is still the

case that presenting is an activity. Once force is

attributed a presence within presentation such

that what matters is presenting, then presenting

has to be rethought in terms of modalities of

activity. However the activity of presentation is

often assimilated to the work of mimesis, in which

the mimetic is activity and thus it delimits the

conception of force proper to presentation. A

beginning can be made therefore with the

attempt to understand the relationship between

the mimetic and the force of drawing in order to

move beyond a conception of force defined by

the mimetic.

What of the mimetic? While there is an important

set of differences between the Platonic and the Aris-

totelian sense of mimesis, a productive affinity can

still be located in the way they are both defined by

a relationship to processes of presenting. And here

it is essential to be precise. There is a language of

presentation and representation, where the latter

can also be understood as re-presentation and

thus a giving again where, if there is a problematic

element within the process, then it can be located

in the effect that this giving has on the status of

what is there to be given. And yet, to insist on acts

or the movement of presentation is to insist on the

presentation as a result; more significantly, the

result is the presentation of what was initially static

and which in being presented is then able to be

judged. Particulars within this structure are con-

strained to present that which is essentially always

the same. (Such is the necessary constraint of any

essentialism.) Plato can be located at this point

insofar as what is at work in Plato’s critical response

to processes of presentation is related to the status

of what has been presented. In other words, the

presentation, for Plato, the process of mimesis as a

process of presenting is always defined in relation

to what it is that has been presented. (The position

is defined therefore in terms of a relationship

between the inside and the outside with any con-

sideration of the means of presentation having

473


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

been left to one side.) While this is clearly the case

insofar as the detail of Plato’s argument is con-

cerned, and especially in regards to the argument

formulated in the Republic, it is also true that

mimesis is a process.

Plato wants to distinguish between mimetic pre-

sentations that are ‘true’ and those that are ‘accu-

rate’. This is a distinction made by Plato in the

Cratylus.6 However, if the result, i.e., the presen-

tation, is taken as an end in itself such that it is not

the predominating concern, then what emerges

from Plato is the position that the mimetic is a pre-

senting that is determined by questions of truth

and accuracy that are structured by the determining

effect of that which is external to the presented

where that externality sets the measure for any pres-

entation. The external within the Platonic sense of

the mimetic is inextricably bound up with the

control exercised by the essential posited as necess-

arily external. For Aristotle the outside is absorbed

such that the mimetic is the acting out and is thus

the presenting of what there is. From within this per-

spective the differences between Plato and Aristotle

are elided since in both instances mimesis is a

process. The significance of the identification of

mimesis with processes of presentation is that it

gives rise to the possibility for reconsideration of

the opposition between the inside and the outside.

What this means is that while representation and

mimesis differ, insofar as the former is linked to

the static, as is found, for example, in the preoccupa-

tion with depiction, and while the latter involves

acts of presentation, both mimesis of representation

are regulated by that which is external to the

presentation.

The presence of the external as regulating presen-

tation has a further implication. Any form of exper-

imentation, and it would be an open question to

the extent that the terminology of experimentation

would even be appropriate in such an instance,

would also be regulated by the external. The pos-

ition is therefore that once the opposition between

the inside and outside, an opposition which hitherto

had defined how both presentation and re-presen-

tation were to be interpreted, and thus also

drawing and lines understood, are both put to one

side, it then becomes possible to rethink the pres-

ence of drawn lines. Hence an essential part of

taking the force of drawing as the point of orien-

tation is that it brings a twofold distancing into

play. Distanced as part of such an undertaking is in

the first instance the negative and positive determi-

nations of mimesis and representation, and then in

the second, a relationship between an inside and

an outside as determining how drawings are both

to be understood and evaluated. With this twofold

distancing an opening emerges. The gap is main-

tained.

3To write of drawing is to write of lines. To the extent

that such a proposition is itself viable, what then

becomes necessary is a fundamentally different

explication of both drawing and lines. A reposition-

ing needs to occur, moving from a setting defined

by either representation or mimesis and thus

towards a setting that has been opened by having

deferred the assumption inherent in the question:

what is drawing? Deferred at the same time would

be the question: what is a line? A line is drawn.

474


Andrew Benjamin

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

Drawing and lines coincide. However lines are never

just drawn. The drawing of lines, lines having been

drawn, hence drawings, are the after-effects of tech-

nologies of drawing. To that extent is the line from

the start an after-effect. Technologies bring with

them the geometries that such drawings would

have allowed. Lines therefore are not simply

abstract.

There is, however, a further reason for the

impossibility of any founding form of abstraction,

namely that lines are ideational. And yet, while

present, ideational content is not determining in

any absolute sense. Rather it is a content that will

have, inter alia, located places for the body, or

yielded the body as a specific place for possibilities

of inhabitation. Both would emerge once a line is

either a horizon or the creation of perspectival

depth. And the drawing of the horizon line and

the creation of depth are but two instances within

a vast range of possibilities. The presence of both

the after-effect and the ideational underscores the

impossibility of the purely abstract or the minimal

line.7 Drawing therefore can never be a site of

pure abstraction, if abstraction is understood as an

original form of singularity. Moreover, a constitutive

part of what arises from the need to think the

process of drawing and the work of lines, and thus

to develop what has been called the force of

drawing, is the accompanying recognition of the

insistent presence of a form of complexity.

However, the complexity in question is not difficulty.

On the contrary, lines can have a clear simplicity.

The complexity is that a line is, at the very

minimum, the staging of elements that cohere in

their irreducibility. The line is an after-effect of tech-

nologies of drawing and a site of the ideational.

Equally, and at the same time, lines and drawings

are the loci of potentialities raising thereby the

necessary question of the possibility of actualisation.

All of these are (in) the line. Drawings, regardless of

any content that can be ascribed to them, and

which exists merely on the level of meaning or relat-

edly in terms of representational content, still bring

forms of complexity into play. This is because lines

and drawings are already made up of these

elements. Lines and drawings do not ‘contain’

them as though what was ‘contained’ was then sec-

ondary to the line themselves. The contrary is the

case. Lines and drawings enact them. The

complex coherence of these elements, again as a

minimal condition, is what lines and drawing

already are. What structures the presence and

thus the visibility of the line is not any form of ‘invisi-

bility’ in which the invisible is a prelude to the

visible.8 On the contrary, the line as after-effect

brings into play a staging or an enacting that is

always there in excess of the mere mark such that

were the line to be identified with its literal pres-

ence, its complexity would have been effaced. As

a result the complex of relations, a complex that is

the line’s original irreducibility, would have been

refused. The line as the site of an irreducible com-

plexity entails that the line can be recast as a

plural event. The latter is a conception of the

‘event’ as the presence of an irreducible plurality

that is always already present. There is the further

implication that the plural event needs to be under-

stood as the site of original relations.9

Once both the impossibility of the minimal and

the affirmation of the plural event comprise the

475


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

point of departure then the argument will have to

be that lines are never just drawn. The line is

always the site of a set of inscriptions. Lines have

therefore an original plurality. That plurality is not

adduced. (This has allowed for the recasting of

the line as a plural event.) In the first instance

what is always drawn into the line is the process

of which the line is the result: namely, what has

already been identified as the after-effect. If there

is a history of the line that no longer entraps the

line within its own idealisation, then it has to be

the history of the line as an after-effect. Such a

history would take the connection between the

line and its production as axiomatic and thus as

already present. Any engagement with the line

therefore would take that already present connec-

tion as generating a point of departure. Moreover,

precisely because of the line’s relationship to the

technology of production (the line’s production)

any resulting history of the line would be freed, in

the first instance, from idealism, and, in the

second, from the equation of history with the

history of meaning.

The line acquires, as a consequence, material

presence. While such an undertaking would be

central to the creation of the history of the line, it

remains the case that taken on its own it is still

not sufficient. The line is not just the result of the

technology of its production. As noted above,

lines and drawings are the enacting of an inherent

ideational content. And yet, that content is not

there as part of an opposition between form and

idea. (Materialism as a philosophical position, the

position informing these notes, assumes an

already present deconstruction of the form/idea

opposition.) Nor does any one line’s ideational

content have a determining effect, such that lines

and drawing are as a result the same as their idea-

tional content. The gap will always have to be main-

tained. Though now this gap is also internal to the

work of drawing and lines once they are conceived

as a set of relations.

Given this process of reconfiguration, another

project is announced. Hence what is intended by

the attribution of an already present ideational

content, a presence that maintains the original

relation to technology in place, is that the relation,

which, as has already been noted, forms an essen-

tial part of a materialist account of the line, has to

be taken up in its own right. The insistence on

both potentiality and force indicates that there is

another sense of the after-effect that is operative

as a result. Not only is the drawing, in the first

instance, an after-effect of the processes of its

own production and the inscribed presence of

the ideational, it is also the case that, in the

second, once it can be attributed a potentiality

and thus to the extent that the question of the

actualisation of that potentiality remains or

becomes germane, then the process of actualisa-

tion is itself also an after-effect. Again it is an

after-effect that has to be thought in terms of a

necessary indetermination rather an already

assumed determination.

Given this opening, moreover given that this

opening depends upon the suspension of a certain

vocabulary and mode of thinking, the presence of

this other project, a project in which lines and draw-

ings are rethought in terms of the plural event,

attains its own force. A central component of that

476


Andrew Benjamin

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

specific task is that the question of drawing can now

be reposed. However, its being reposed has two

underlying assumptions. The first is that the question

is no longer defined by a search for the essence of

drawing. Secondly, there is a concomitant abeyance

of both mimesis and representation. That reposition-

ing, the question being asked again such that its

reiteration marks development, will always hold

modes of differentiation as primary. The primacy of

particularity means that general terms—drawing,

line, etc.—have to announce these differentiations.

The question—what is drawing?—will have been

absorbed therefore into the particularity of

drawings.

In other words, the opening question that sought

to ground drawing in the essential cedes its place to

another. Namely one that seeks to determine in

what way a drawing is a drawing. The ‘that’ of

drawing becomes the operative presence of a par-

ticular drawing as a drawing. In addition, part of

thinking the possibility of a response to the question

of drawing is to suggest that a drawing is always

preliminary. (To which it should be added that it is

the reworked status of the latter that will come to

have a significant effect on any subsequent thinking

of drawing.) Once the ‘preliminary’ can emerge as a

question, insofar as its identity is not assumed, then

responding to it, as a question, has to be the next

stage in the development of the overall argument.

The ‘preliminary’ is fundamentally part of the ques-

tion of the drawing’s presence as a drawing. More-

over, by insisting on particularity it becomes possible

to incorporate the diagram within a history of a

drawing.

The preliminary is positioned by a limit. The pre-

liminary already limits. The preliminary brings time

into play. There is already a before and an after.

Whatever it is that is ‘preliminary’, is usually prelimi-

nary to an occurrence that is yet to occur. With this

sense of the preliminary another line emerges. No

longer a drawn line but a threshold: in other

words, the ‘limen’. The ‘limen’ is both limit and

threshold. It is not a mere limit. The question

then is what does it mean to suggest that the

limit does not delimit the preliminary, if the limit

is meant to enclose and thus to provide a point

of finality in which the limit works as an enclosure

and thus as a form of closure? Once delimited by

closure the limit becomes the closing down of

potentialities. One approach to drawing tends to

identify in the drawing that which occurred after

it. The drawing’s preliminary status is as a result

only ever confirmed after the event. The drawing

is then understood as having been completed (or

not) by what did (or did not) occur after it. This

is, of course, a specific understanding of what is

meant by the preliminary. It is an understanding

of the limit in which the status of the preliminary

is, as a consequence, the result of a subsequent

instantiation.

Equally, of course, that which takes place after-

wards also has the effect of demanding that the

set of lines or the drawing occur within the frame-

work of representation such that they have to be

interpreted within the terms set by that framework.

In other words, it is only the assumption of a relation

to a posited outside that has the effect of creating a

positioning that then becomes the place of the

477


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

drawing. The outside determines the inside. In

addition, the way an outside is established is

always secondary in relation to that drawing or set

of lines. The determining effect of the outside

needs to be suspended if drawing is to have a

status that would occasion a link to be established

between architecture and drawing. If the link is

neither assumed nor posited then it has to be

created. This is the result that the gap demands.

Within the space opened by these considerations,

drawing would need to be rethought not as prelimi-

nary to that which occurred after but as a pure

limen; hence, the now-possible identification of

drawing as only ever liminal. Drawing that takes

place at the limit becomes drawing as the limen.

4Another question needs to be posed. Another

beginning: What is the limen? This question,

while admitting of a form of generality, is itself

delimited. What delimits it is the necessity to indi-

cate how it is that any one drawing or set of draw-

ings function as the limen. Generality becomes the

inscription of the particular as an original site.

Moreover, the limen is the term that is essential if

the threshold is to be understood as a line that is

crossed. However, the crossing is not a simple act

of pro-jection. It is rather that the limen brings

force into play. A drawing has to be activated. Its

potential actualised, the presence of passage and

force are held in place by the identification of a

drawing with the limen. As has been suggested,

the limen has a doubled presence. It is both a

limit condition and a threshold. If these consider-

ations are to be taken a step further then instances

of the particular will have to be taken into consider-

ation. Here two particular drawing will be taken.

The drawings in question are: Leonardo da Vinci,

Sketch of a youth; fortification (approx. 1493;

Fig. 1) and Michelangelo, Studies for the Sistine

Chapel and the Tomb of Pope Julius II (approx.

1513; Fig. 2). What is important about both draw-

ings is the way in which they refuse any easy for-

mulation of a distinction between the architecture

and art, while of course sustaining that very

difference.

478


Andrew Benjamin

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

Da Vinci’s 1493 drawing uses a single sheet to

present both a youthful male face and the reiteration

of an element of a wall that is inseparable from its

presence as fortification. In addition there is

another building at the bottom left that now

recalls the Tempietto of Bramante (the latter docu-

mented in 1502 and constructed in 1510). The

drawn walls that are most clearly fortifications are

present in both plan and elevation. Here on the

level of architecture is a drawing of that which

both contains and excludes. As such the drawing is

of a limit condition. And yet, because the wall,

even a wall that is equally a type of fortification,

has both to contain and exclude, it does, as a

result, have to register within itself the possibility

of passage. What is drawn has to include therefore

the presence of the threshold. Taken literally, the

threshold becomes the inscription of passage and

circulation: hence the presence here of ramparts,

arcades, windows, etc. If the threshold is understood

as a term that constructs the line, then the drawing

itself is equally a threshold.

In addition, the drawing of the boy also occurs as

a limit condition. It occurs at a threshold of possi-

bility. Its place has a determining effect on how its

identity is to be understood. Placed it awaits.

Indeed, it is a drawing because it awaits. In awaiting

what then becomes the question—and its presence

as a question needs to be insisted upon—is its actua-

lisation. That is, its ‘use’ is not assumed, and that it

harbours potentiality indicates that not only is the

drawing itself a limen, the way any one drawing is

liminal indicates that the force of drawing is only

ever particular. Thus drawing will have its own

specific way that it works as a limit and as a

threshold. That it—and the ‘it’ here then because

of the different elements within ‘it’—creates a site

of experimentation because the gap is maintained

at the limit. Maintaining drawing as the limen

draws drawing into the particular.

The demand that arises with a drawing of this

nature is to locate it within later paintings and archi-

tectural projects, realised or not. Such works would

then allow this preliminary drawing to be construed

as literally preliminary. Whilst such a practice is poss-

ible—even if futile in the case of this drawing—such

an undertaking, if attributed a sense of finality or

completion, would close the gap. To maintain this

page as a locus of drawing is to maintain its liminal

479


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

status. Any investigation of its presence as drawing

would involve beginning to understand its potential-

ities. The latter are movements across the threshold.

The potentialities in question could be given an his-

torical determination, where history meant nothing

other than chronological context, or they could be

allowed other possibilities and thus differing forms

of movement could be held open. Furthermore,

once a drawing is reworked such that its effect reg-

isters in a way that breaks the hold of an already

determined historical context by registering, and

thus partially creating another, such a possibility is

dependent upon the drawing as limen. Indeed, it is

possible to go further and argue that it is only the

preliminary status of any drawing that occasions its

afterlife.

Michelangelo’s Studies for the Sistine Chapel and

the Tomb of Pope Julius II has a far more detailed

history in terms of use.10 The page contains a

sketch for part of the tomb for Pope Julius II. He

died in 1513. The drawing also consists of other

studies. There is a drawing, thus an experiment, of

the Libyan Sibyl that then ‘appears’ in the Sistine

Chapel. In addition, there are the slaves that were

to be included in the tomb. The make up of the

sheet is described by Cammy Brothers as indicating

‘Michelangelo’s ongoing practice of thinking

through distinct projects on a single sheet’.11

Michael Hirst demonstrates that there is at least a

year between the drawing of the Libyan Sybil and

the addition of the other elements.12 The sheet’s

own history, though this is also the case with the

Da Vinci drawing, underscores its presence as an

exemplary instance of drawing. The architectural

elements of the sheet can be recognised in the

actual tomb undertaken by Antonio de Ponteas-

sieve.

Nevertheless, as a number of commentators have

pointed out, they are ‘more complicated—and

beautiful’ than the actually completed work.13

However, while it is possible to trace points of con-

nection or points of non-connection, what con-

tinues to insist is that the elements on the sheet

cohere to the point that each one functions in its

own right as a drawing. Each one is a limen. Actua-

lisation is a process. Indeed, it is clear that the dis-

crepancy between the drawing of the Tomb, the

subsequent model drawings and the actual realis-

ation of the project did not merely mark points of

formal and material discontinuity. It is rather that

it is in the discontinuity, as a result of the disconti-

nuity, that the specificity of each is established. Dis-

unity is what is essential. Moreover, it is the

incoherence that provides the ground of any sub-

sequent coherence. The coherence of incoherence

names the gap.

While the differences may be slight, the funda-

mental point is that these differences allow for the

project of establishing coherence. In addition, it is

also the case that incoherence—insisting on the

effective presence of incoherence—becomes the

affirmation of the presence of potentiality at

the work’s centre. While the non-representational

status of the drawing is due to the primacy of its

potentiality, it is also true that the maintenance of

a spacing within and between works allows pro-

jection to be a project rather than an assumption.

Again pro-jection and actualisation indicate what is

at stake in maintaining the force of drawing. There

needs to be an insistence therefore on the centrality

480


Andrew Benjamin

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

of the drawn as a site of potentiality. This needs to

be understood in terms of the doubling of the

after-effect. On the one hand, the work is an after-

effect of both the technologies of drawing and the

inscribed presence of the ideational, on the other it

has, or can have, an after-effect. The latter is the

potentiality that is held by the limen. An engage-

ment with the drawn necessitates recognising and

affirming the demands that drawing as limen

makes. It opens up drawings as sites of work. In

addition, it is only by holding to the drawing as a

limen that it then becomes possible both to concep-

tualise and historicise the different modalities of

drawing that comprise drawing’s history.

Notes and references1. For an example of a position that adopts an uncritical

acceptance of both perception and meaning in an

understanding of drawing, see: Alberto Perez-Gomez.

‘Architecture as Drawing’, JAE, Vol. 36, No. 2 (1982),

pp. 2–7.

2. Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building

and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press,

1997), p. 186.

3. It should not be thought, however, that positions

which see representation as the basis of the creative

or the imaginative do not exist. The contrary is the

case. The argumentation of this paper is meant,

however, to challenge such assumptions. For an argu-

ment that departs from an acceptance of the centrality

of representation, see: Sonit Bafna, ‘How architectural

drawings work—and what that implies for the role of

representation in architecture’, The Journal of Architec-

ture, 13:5 (2008), pp. 535–564. For a different ques-

tioning of representation other than the one argued

here and which is set in the context of a study of

Lebeus Woods, see: Aarati Kaneka, ‘Between

drawing and building’, The Journal of Architecture’

15:6 (2010), pp. 771–794.

4. There is an important link between ‘indetermination’ in

the way that term is being used in the context of this

paper and the concept of the ‘diagram’ that appeared

with the emergence of animation software within the

design process. Indeed, it can be argued that the possi-

bility of using terms such as ‘indetermination’ and the

‘limen’ to think through the presence of drawing,

and which stems from the incorporation of abstraction

and the non-representational into more general con-

cerns, are a mark of the shift to a rethinking of

design as that which now occurs in the era of digital

reproducibility. For a detailed study of the relationship

between drawing and the diagram, see: Anthony

Vidler, ‘Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstrac-

tion and Modern Representation’, Representations,

No. 72 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 1–20.

5. While the term is pursued in a different direction, it is

important to note that Jonathan Hill also addresses

drawing in terms of experimentation. See his

‘Drawing research’, The Journal of Architecture, 11:3

(2006), pp. 329–333.

6. The reference here is to Plato, Cratylus (transl., H. N.

Flower; Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press,

1977):

I call that kind of assignment in the case of both

imitations—paintings and names—correct, and in

the case of names not only correct but true;

and the other kind, which gives and applies the

unlike I call incorrect and in the case of names

false. (430d)

7. In this regard see my ‘The Doubling of Space: Notes on

the Impossibility of Architectural Minimalism’, in,

P. Allison, ed., Beyond the Minimal (London, Architec-

tural Association,), pp. 101–102. And, in addition, for

work on the line, see my ‘Notes on the Line’, in,

481


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

IvanaWingham, ed., The Line. A Design Element across

Architecture, Interiors, Art and Graphic Design (Basel,

Birkhäuser, 2013).

8. Hence Derrida mistakes the nature of the line and the

‘trait’when he approaches them both in terms of ‘invisi-

bility’. Such an approach might be adequate if all that

were wanted was an account of the experience of

lines. Such an approach, the purely experiential, fails,

however, to account for the nature of the line as an

after-effect. See Jacques Derrida, À dessein, le dessin

(Paris, Francopolis Éditions, 2013), pp. 36–7.

9. I have developed the concept of the ‘plural event’ in

the first instance in my The Plural Event (London, Rou-

tledge, 1993). The plurality in question is not semantic.

It is ontological. Hence the term ‘plural event’ names a

site which by its very nature is comprised of elements

and thus relations that cannot be reduced and thus

which are taken to obtain originally.

10. For a detailed history of this drawing, see: Paul Joanni-

dies, The Drawings of Michelangelo and his Followers

in the Ashmolean Museum (Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 2007), pp. 120–124. See, in addition,

Erwin Panofsky, ‘The First Two Projects of Michelange-

lo’s Tomb of Julius II’, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 19, No. 4

(1937), pp. 561–579.

11. Cammy Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the

Invention of Architecture. (New Haven, Yale University

Press, 2008), p. 38.

12. Michael Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings (New

Haven, Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 37–8.

13. P.Joannidies, The Drawings of Michelangelo and his

Followers, op. cit., p. 124.

482


Andrew Benjamin

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cor

nell

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

5:42

16

Nov

embe

r 20

14

the preliminary: notes on the force of drawing

Documents