lines, wander and otherwise

by Michael Templeton

It may seem specious on my part to not provide a hard and fast definition of what is meant by the term ’wander lines,’ but the person who coined the term and worked out its implications refused to provide hard and fast definitions precisely because it is the ‘hard and fast’ we are determinably trying to refuse by following wander lines. This much can be revealed. Fernand Deligny coined the term ‘wander lines’ in the course of working with autistic children who, he observed, appeared to wander in what at first seemed to be random directions. He later discovered their wanderings to be quite deliberate. The shape of maps of these wander lines revealed patterns—patterns that were not evident before the children wandered the line. The lines became the pattern, and this runs counter, Deligny found, to the ways we have historically used lines. In a society built on maps, blueprints, recipes, rules and laws, and genres and forms, the line precedes the point of departure. Deligny’s insights have informed all sorts of theoretical work, notably Deleuze and Guattari and their theory of the rhizome. What seems crucial to me is to issue a call, perhaps, a call to resist the map and form which precedes the line. We are increasingly being swallowed alive by forms and pre-drawn lines. The digital universe provides a complex grid of lines on which we are increasingly compelled to plot our lives. This grid, this network of minute and complex lines has become the prescribed formal web on which we plot our lives to the extent that our in-most being is no longer an expression of our own internal drives and desires, but an expression of those of external, digitally coded systems. Deligny’s ethos of the wander line might end up being more of a lifeline than a theoretical abstraction.

The line--all lines--begin at single point in space. First, there is a blank page, then there is a point. From this, a straight line is drawn from one point to another. Other, more complex lines can follow. Paul Auster’s poem, “White Spaces,” offers some insight here. We begin with the title, a white space, a blank. The space can be a sheet of paper, a room, a city, a field in the country, an undifferentiated mass of trees in a wild and dense forest. In any case, it is a blank. We have gone nowhere, but we have isolated a moment in time and space on and in which to begin. Auster tells us: “Something happens, and from the moment it begins to happen, nothing can ever be the same again” (From Disappearances: Selected Poems, 103). The beginning is the point, and once we move from the point, the line is drawn. Nothing can ever be the same again. The point and the line are now here, in the world, subject to the endless processes of meaning-making, one of which is the critical question: Is the point and the line drawn from a sense of purpose and direction, or are we assigning a purpose and direction to the point and the line after the fact? Because we live in a world in which a point and a line need to have a meaning. Moreover, they must have a purpose so that we can place the point and the line in relation to other modes of meaning-making for the purpose of exchanging these things toward an increase in things and more exchanges. Without a purpose, the point and the line may as well not exist. To have a purpose means the point and the line are drawn from a plan, which is to say some form of a pre-existing line. In our world, we have difficulty grasping the appearance of a point and a line which do not correspond to some system of points and lines. We understand the weavers of tapestries, but we do not understand how the spider weaves the web. The web seems to emanate from a spontaneous and non-linguistic space, an autistic space. As Deligny explains, “the Arachnean path is not traced, no more than is a spider web, which is spun without preliminary drawings, unlike the work of tapestry weavers, whose work is sketched out in a very precise manner” (The Arachnean, 17). It is not that there is something intrinsically bad about following the plan, the work that is sketched out in a precise manner. It is just that it seems we should find some value in those points which occur simply because we happen to find or create them. There is value in the process of following Arachnean lines simply to see where they lead. Following the plan is ideal for building a house, for instance. We need to know that the structure follows mathematically precise lines that will support a structure that can protect us. When it comes to living the simple process of being who and what we are, there ought to be more freedom with how we choose the point and the line. If we allow ourselves to be too tied to previous plans, points, and lines, if we are tethered to someone else’s, we are in danger of forgetting whose direction (desires, plans, drives, intentions, etc.) we are following.

Auster’s poem swells outward into “a landscape of random impulse, of knowledge for its own sake—which is to say, a knowledge that exists, that comes into being beyond any possibility of putting it into words” (“Disappearances,” 104). Here we begin to see the benefit of following the wander lines. We are given over to the random, the spontaneous, and ultimately, the creative. What else is this random impulse into a knowledge that is beyond words but our own inner desires exploding out into the world in a form and style we did not know until we began with a point and a line? To follow the random lines is to wander. To experience an effusion of random points and to follow them along lines, which unfold as we take one step after another, is to follow and allow to unfold the trajectory of the wander line. To let free the impulse to simply wander, whether it be on the page or in and around the town in which we live, it is to allow for the uncoded unfolding of life itself. When we begin to place points and lines together within a system of communication, we can begin to see what is at stake.

A form of communication built on the non-logic of the wander line is what Bifo calls conjunction. A mode of communication that is formed on the basis of conjunction is one in which individuals “generate meaning without following a pre-ordained design, and without obeying an inner law or finality” (And, 20). In this mode of communication, we are describing something that is fundamentally creative. There is no script for how living humans communicate; there is no finite design or code which forms our living communication. What is more, our living conjunctive communication is made up of non-linguistic features (a-signifying semiotic chains, if you want the fifty-dollar words). Of course, this is where miscommunication and misunderstandings occur. But it is also where we become something completely other than we were when we began with a single point and a single line. Conjunction allows for individuals to engage one another in ways which make it possible to “become something other than they were before, in the way love changes the lover” (21). Conjunction is the following of wander lines wherever they may lead, and while they may begin in random points and directions, they become something quite deliberate, and they make it possible for “the emergence of previously inexistent meanings” (21). Conjunction and wander lines are life; they make possible, returning to Auster, to allow for a “drift, or a consistent sense of what is happening, even as it changes, moment by moment” (“What Spaces,” 104).

We now exist in a world that is completely overtaken by systems of meaning-making that cannot tolerate wander lines, conjunction, and the random drift from one meaning to another. It is precisely the random that is foreclosed and feared in our current world. Random occurrences and the unpredictable are always crises in the world today. These kinds of points in time and space are interruptions in flow which must, at all costs, remain constant and unimpeded. Consequently, we live in a world in which conjunction and wander lines are abolished in favor of connection: a mode of communication entirely dependent upon an expression of codes, digital codes, to be exact. Connection is built out of “an operative concatenation between previously formatted agents of meaning... that have been codified, or formatted according to a code” (Bifo. 21). Connection is inhuman. There is no way to communicate with and within a digital code except in the form and format of the digital code. We all know this. You cannot ask an online help system an ambiguous question. You can only ask a coded type of question so that the digital system can connect that question to a previously coded answer. And if your question is in fact ambiguous, it is not a valid question. If your current problem that gave rise to the question is not fitted to the coded set of questions, your problem is not a viable problem. You see where this is going. At some point, you are not a viable person, which means you are not a person. The digital world in which we live denies the validity of the wander line, and it denies the validity of life.

Rather than the Arachnean in which the spider weaves a web that unfolds simply because it unfolds, but always in its precise magnificence, we are now captured by systems of meaning-making that operate as webs. These webs have proliferated, and our ways of being in the world have become captured and controlled within these webs to the point that we now exist within what Ian Alan Paul has termed a “reticular society.” What Paul means by this is that we have allowed the digital connective logic to prevail and, as a result, we are captured and controlled in rigorous terms dictated by the logic of digital nets:

In societies where digital conditions prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of networks. What was once lived directly now indefinitely disintegrates into streams of data, fragmented and flowing, reduced to nonliving objects of mere circulation. Inundating culture, politics, and the economy, a calculated deluge of bits and bytes draws every possible experience, activity, and relation ever further online and thus always further elsewhere. The reticular society is nothing less than this online inversion of life, this networked subordination of life to what does not live. (The Reticular Society, 1)

Life is “subordinated to what does not live.” Our entire sense of our being is now located in this elsewhere that is the reticular society, and any remnant of our inner sense of ourselves has been devalued and denied to the extent that we have been forced to murder ourselves from within. The entirety of “culture, politics, and the economy” is now fully encoded within the reticular society which is in its absolute entirety situated and pinned to a pre-existing and fully coded system of lines and grids which dictate and determine everything we think, everything there believe, everything we desire, and everything we are. We do not exist. Our digitally formatted ‘other’ exists. The body, the heart, the skin—all are ephemeral and non-viable remnants of a world which belonged to the random and the wander line.

It seems to me that it is a damn fool tendency to romanticize these conditions or to project them into some childish Hollywood fantasy like The Matrix. There is no slick fight against the reticular society; there is only the everyday horror of our dying empathy, of anxiety and depression, of a humanity that no longer knows how to reach each other. This is a life in which our elemental humanity is denied. The reticular society and the world of capture and control, which comes with digital connection, has much more in common with the worlds created by Samuel Beckett in which a life is so stripped down it flails about for any point of purchase that resembles human existence; this is the world of the narrator of The Unnamable (as with Auster, the title alone is instructive) who has been so utterly hemmed into a single point that he throws questions in futile attempts at the formation of lines, asking what is “all this about staying where you are, dying, living, being born, unable to go forward or back, not knowing where you came from, or where you are, or where you’re going, or that it’s possible to be elsewhere, to be otherwise, supposing nothing, asking yourself nothing, you can’t, you’re there, you don’t know who, you don’t know where...” (Beckett. Three Novels, 370). On and on... This is what it looks like when we abandon the wander lines, when we lose touch with the Arachnean, when we lose our ability to recognize the points that come from our own spaces, as well as the ways of conjoining those points with others with wander lines.

All of this, then, is the possibly specious and very round about reason for not providing a hard and fast definition for wander lines. This is also why I will insist on following wander lines rather than the dictates and demands of systems outside of the points where I find myself. I have gotten into tremendous trouble by insisting on my wander lines. I have had my ass beat, and I have been thrown in jail. But I never seem to learn. What will have to be of primary importance for whatever I write in this column, will be to return again and again to that unspecified and undeterminable point, and “Never to be anywhere but here. And the immense journey through space that continues. Everywhere, as if each place were here. And the snow falling endlessly in the winter night” (Paul Auster. “White Spaces,” 110). If that doesn’t make sense, then that is just too damn bad.

Works Cited:

Auster, Paul. Disappearances: Selected Poems. Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 1988.

Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.

Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” And: Phenomenology of the End. Cambridge: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2015.

Deligny, Fernand. The Arachnean and Other Texts. Translated by Drew S. Burk and Catherine Porter. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2015.

Paul, Ian Alan. The Reticular Society. https://www.thereticularsociety.net/.

*Stay tuned for Michael Templeton’s next monthly installment in June.