Drawing a Line

How might an understanding of “drawing a line” belong to the very gesture or practice which it seemingly describes? While this phrase serves as the literal form of an action, the fact that a line may be specified with any number of qualities that easily become metaphorical—being straight or crooked, circular or broken—indicates that such a description is far from neutral. Furthermore, there exists a rhetoric of drawing a line under (or over) a position or attitude, often thereby bringing an argument to a conclusion—if not necessarily to agreement. For example, one could be tempted to suggest drawing a line under the discussion of contested relations between performance and documentation, repertoire and archive, as this has very frequently been rehearsed already. However, the corollary of such a rhetorically drawn line is not simply to follow or adhere to it, but to cross it or overstep its mark—as will be the case in these reflections on (and with) various iterations, between 1965 and 1972, of Tadeusz Kantor’s work The Dividing Line (Linia podziału).