Affect and Attention after Deleuze and Whitehead by Duvernoy Russell J.;

Author:Duvernoy, Russell J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

‘Lines of flight’ and paradoxes of normativity

Deleuze’s emphasis on experimentation responds to the potential hegemony of Whitehead’s first solution in human contexts. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘lines of flight’ function both as a descriptive metaphysical concept and, to some extent, as a prescriptive call. Descriptively, ‘lines of flight’ correlate with ‘movements of deterritorialization’ as processes that destabilise, dissolve or otherwise challenge ‘molar’ aggregates or assemblages. A ‘line of flight’ enables passages from the ‘plane of organization’ to the ‘plane of consistency’ causing the latter ‘to rise to the surface’ (ATP: 270).22 The plane of consistency is characterised by events, affects and flows rather than stable molar entities. In this sense, it is akin to the reality of actual occasions prior to consolidation in macro-level societies. Lines of flight therefore play the ontological role of enabling novelty through the destabilisation of sedimented forms towards the emergence of an alternative becoming. Whereas conventional identity categories are molar, becomings involve relational exchange at the molecular level: ‘all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects, or forms that we know from the outside and recognize from experience, through science, or by habit’ (ATP: 275).

A ‘line of flight’s’ processes of transition can occur at different levels or ‘strata’. In this sense, the concept of ‘line of flight’ is consistent with Whitehead in offering no privileged exception for the human. Lines of flight are ontologically descriptive, not normative. Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly insist that ‘lines of flight’ carry significant risks: ‘so much caution is needed to prevent the plane of consistency from becoming a pure plane of abolition or death, to prevent the involution from turning into a regression to the undifferentiated’ (ATP: 270).23

Though ‘lines of flight’ do not suffice as liberatory ends-in-themselves, they are particularly relevant to processes constitutive of ‘subjectification’. Indeed, the general tension between the two solutions that Whitehead proposes are exemplified in subjectification. Subjectification (the becoming-Cogito of prevailing neo-Cartesian models of consciousness) presumes to absolutise oneself against constraints of the merely material (res extensa). Deleuze and Guattari observe that ‘subjectification assigns the line of flight a positive degree [and] carries deterritorialization to the absolute’ (ATP: 133). Becoming a subject appears as emergent transcendence that escapes strict determinism and generates consciousness as a freedom or ‘line of flight’ from its preceding conditions. But this escape is relative, not absolute, and carries with it a backlash or reversal: it ‘has its own way of repudiating the positivity it frees’ (ATP: 133) as ‘subjectification imposes on the line of flight a segmentarity that is forever repudiating that line, and upon absolute deterritorialization a point of abolition that is forever blocking that deterritorialization or diverting it’ (ATP: 134).

It would however be too simple to define subjectivity only through this line of flight. Though a line of flight has a privileged relation to subjectification, it is not exhaustive, since the process of subjectification entwines with two other lines: (1) ‘a molar or rigid line of segmentarity’ and (2) ‘a line of molecular or supple segmentation’ (ATP: 195–6).

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