Desire Lines: Deleuze and Guattari on Molar Lines, Molecular Lines, and Lines of Flight

AbstractThe ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have been regrettably underutilized in sociology. No doubt their carnivalesque style can be bewildering, especially for those seeking procedural principles or methods. From their cornucopia of concepts, this paper demarcates what I consider to be key elements of their ontology of becoming - molar lines, molecular lines and lines of flight. My contribution here is twofold: an exegesis of these concepts and how they are deployed to map the social field, and an evaluation of the freedoms and dangers associated with each. Deleuze and Guattari's insights are nuanced and rich in contemporary relevance, providing purchase on many of the problems and possibilities marking our present moment of late capitalism. Through reference to concrete examples, I offer some preliminary suggestions of how their triad of lines offers a novel articulation of transformation, with provocative implications for sociopolitical thought. 'Run lines, never plot a point! ' (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003: 24)IntroductionMusing upon the nomadic character of creativity, Bob Dylan (in Scorsese, 2005) once suggested:[a]n artist has to be careful never to arrive at a place where he thinks he's 'at' somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming, you know? And as long as you can stay in that realm you'll sort of be all right.On the socio-political level, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ('D&G') offer a powerful anatomy of this realm of becoming, its openings and obstructions. Notably, they reverse a perennial maneuver of Western thought which relegates becoming to being, where becoming is rendered as what some prior being undergoes. For D&G, there are first 'becomings, such as actions, perceptions, variations', and it is 'from this flux of becomings [that] we perceive or organize beings' (Colebrook, 2002: 145). A parallel logic is usefully illustrated in D&G's critique of psychoanalysis and its subordination of desire to want or lack. Desire, they maintain, is infrastructural and 'of the order of production' (D&G, 1977: 296). Just as falling in love opens up new and unexpected possibilities that hardly coincide with what previously could be said to be lacking, desire creates its objects. 'Desire-as-lack' is not a universal cause but a contingent effect, a particular distribution and channeling of (unconscious) resources. Animated by superfluity rather than deficiency, desire is an overflow that is never fully captured by the turbines of definable interests.The title of this paper refers to the phenomenon of 'desire lines', those spontaneous pathways that break away from the prescribed routes restricting mobility. As the artist Ryan Gander (2002) describes: '[w]hen spatial designers plan pavements, there are always bits of waste ground left between them and when they don't design them properly you get these desire lines that have been worn away be people who cut across the middle. ' This offers an evocative image vis-a-vis D&G's triad of lines - molar lines, molecular lines, and lines of flight - which are key concepts of their social ontology. In this paper I offer an exegesis of these lines, showing how they are deployed both cartographically, to chart the vectors traversing any social field, and diagnostically, to interrogate the ways desire is variously delimited or enabled to embark on new pathways. Through reference to concrete examples, I will evaluate some of the possibilities, dangers, freedoms and constraints associated with each. Ultimately, D&G's lines prove to be a fruitful site to unpack the nuances and socio-political implications of what can otherwise appear an impenetrable philosophy.But why speak of lines rather than points or positions? Unlike a point, lines are always an articulation, bisection, boundary or breach of a wider field. They are compositional, implying relation and connection. …