Line of flight


A line of flight is a concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and used extensively in his work with Félix Guattari. Translator Brian Massumi notes that in French, "Fuite covers not only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance. It has no relation to flying."
In the first chapter of the second volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, A Thousand Plateaus, the concept is used to define a "rhizome":
Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions.

In Manuel De Landa's book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, the line of flight is described as an operator which transcends the actual and ascends to the virtual. It is used as a synonym with Deleuze's terms "dark precursor", "desiring machine" and "quasi-cause".