The various links below are some lines of flight from The Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity. The idea of lines of flight (ligne de fuite) can be found in A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and it refers to how things connect rather than how they ‘are’.
Deleuze and Guattari refer to tendencies that could evolve in creative mutations, rather than a ‘reality’ that is an inversion of the past. In their collaborative works Deleuze and Guattari are not interested in offering an analysis of “things”, that is the image of the world as an object, which is in turn made up of other objects. They wanted to avoid the kind of thinking that assumes the universe is a closed totality, the truth of which is essentially static and unitary, and to replace it with an understanding of the world as an open-ended dynamic process, the constituent parts of which are also not objects of identity, but further processes.
Their metaphysics is one of a multiplicity of dimensions, of lines and directions”, a collection of dynamic elements that they name an “assemblage”. An assemblage is a set of connections that come together for a period of time and which, when taken together, produce a recognizable behaviour or effect.
The Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity is a salvaged MA and it can be understood and interpreted as an assemblage. If the world is made up of assemblages, and these assemblages are constituted by lines, then lines of flight are those lines that reach outside of the assemblage. They are those parts of the assemblage that escape the structure of which they are a part, and serve to connect such an assemblage to that which is outside itself.
Gary
Australian Topographics — Tumblr blog
Mallee Routes: Photographing the Mallee — website.
On the Road Tumblr blog
Rethinkng Documentary Photography blog
Walking Adelaide blog
Other
The Association of Adorno Studies
Alan Walls’ Reflections of Walter Benjamin in Fortnightly Review