About Lines of Flight “Lines of flight are everywhere. They constitute the available means of escape from the forces of repression and stratification. Even the most intense strata are riddled with lines of flight.” – Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Lines of flight are creative and liberatory escapes from the standardization, oppression, and stratification of society. Lines of flight, big or small, are available to us at any time and can lead in any direction. They are instances of thinking and acting ‘outside of the box’, with a greater understanding of what the box is, how it works, and how we can break it open and perhaps transform it for the better. The concept of lines of flight was developed by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It serves as an inspiration and challenge for my work, amongst other things. Below is more explanation and discussion of lines of flight, or at least one interpretation. For Example At the same time, skaters developed new forms of expression, for example through music and clothes. Skatepunk bands and baggy pants may have become popular initially as escapes from the mainstream, but soon the recording and fashion industries began to redefine them. Corporations discovered new ways to turn skateboarding into a profitable business, through video games, magazines, high-profile tournaments, and TV shows. For Deleuze and Guattari, skateboarding would be an example of deterritorializing lines of flight being captured and reterritorialized as striated space by the state apparatus! First, youth seek to escape from the standardization of everyday life through a creative new activity – a line of flight. Originally darting off in any direction and place, these lines of flight challenged some of the boundaries and constraints limiting what people can do in public spaces. They helped to deterritorialize skateboarding. By removing boundaries and constraints, skaters promoted spaces where any sort of action is possible and unobstructed – smooth space. These lines of flight are often captured, for example within skateparks and corporate industries. In these regulated spaces, skateboarding is redefined as a certain type of activity that should occur in certain places by people wearing certain clothes and listening to certain types of music. Skateboarding is thus reterritorialized within new boundaries and constraints. Rather than smooth space where anything is possible, skateboarding is forced into striated space, where options for movement are limited to rigid strata and uniform lines of thought and action. Reterritorialization is not a passive process. Governments pass laws limiting skateboarding in public spaces, schools ban skateboarding on their property, developers build physical obstructions to skateboarding, corporations market must-have skateboarding products, and media promote skateparks and skateboarding-related consumption. Together, these institutions govern and control social activities, societal order, and even people’s desires. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this entire structure as the state apparatus.
How to Embark on a Line
of Flight Quotes about Lines of
Flight "From lines of division and separation to nomadic lines of flight - lines that carry us away, a flow of deterritorialization" – Deleuze “One will bolster oneself directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections.” – Deleuze and Guattari “Territorialities, then, are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.” – Deleuze and Guattari “Find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.” – Deleuze and Guattari “Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which the Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.” – Michel Foucault “How can sense and meaning be oriented differently or organized in alternative, coherent communicative apparatuses? How can we discover and direct the performative lines of linguistic sets and communicative networks that create the fabric of life and production?” – Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri Links
|
