A Hundred Thousand Lines of Flight: A Machinic Introduction to the Nomad Thought and Scrumpled Geography of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Abstract

What is space? What is spacing? And how does spacing itself hold together? The author pursues these questions, which continue to haunt and transfix geographers, by drawing upon the collaborative work of two exemplary thinkers: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What emerges from such an encounter is a fundamental shift in the way space, place, and spacing are configured; a shift which will have enormous implications for anyone concerned with unfolding the relationship between society and space. Particular emphasis is placed on the radicalization of relations, of the spacing of relations, and of relational space. Such a radicalization effectively deconstructs the field of geography as we know it, and demands that we reconfigure both the world and our theoretical-practices ‘from the middle’. This yields a world of continuous variation, becoming, and chance, rather than one of constancy, being, and predictability; and it is populated solely by hæcceities, singularities, and events, strung together through joints, intervals, and folds. Accordingly, a fractal world of infinite disadjustment, destabilization, and disjointure is what is meant by the term ‘scrumpled geography’, and it constitutes the horizon on which one should situate deconstruction, postmodernism, and poststructuralism more generally. Unfolding the joints, intervals, and folds of such a world is precisely the task undertaken by Deleuze and Guattari. However, the author reworks their own undertaking by giving it a much more explicitly spatial inflexion and consistency. Thus, the paper not only clarifies the scrumpled geography embedded within the work of Deleuze and Guattari, it also demonstrates the revolutionary implications of a rigorously deconstructive and poststructuralist consideration of space, place, and spacing.