It’s conference abstract season again and while I’ve already submitted something on microfascism and management gurus to the Deleuze Studies Conference in Brazil, I find myself struggling with a submission for EGOS. The short paper form of EGOS has always irked me. While I understand how useful it can be to get meaningful feedback on a piece of work, I’ve always found it a miserable struggle to cut down a long paper to below 3000 words. It has never been clear to me whether the same norms of academic writing apply (i.e., “strategic” or “political” referencing to demonstrate command of a body of literature; meticulously differentiated and carefully couched contributions etc.) or whether I’m supposed to be communicating just the gist of the paper without the “bells and whistles”.

This is, of course, not the first time that I’ve submitted something to EGOS. While working on my PhD in 2015, I took the time to write up a short submission on the theme of  “Lines” and their relationship to organizational ethnography for a stream on the “power of organizational ethnography“. In reflecting upon this work, I could have done much more  to develop the notion of “linear thinking” that I struggled to articulate in the paper’s short space. Much of the thinking of this short paper would go on to form a chapter in my thesis that no one but me (not even my supervisors or external examiner) seemed to like.

The paper ended up being rejected with the following comments:

Unfortunately the ideas in this paper might need some further development. It does not become clear from the short paper how Deleuze and the ‘power of lines’ contribute to our thinking about the role of the ethnographer and the reflexive challenges that are faced in the field. This is not to say that there might be a good paper here but we had to make some hard choices on accepting papers.

Reflecting this paper, I think that this was a very charitable set of comments by stream conveners Juliette Koning and Jana Costas, but ones that I think were also reflective of the space from which I was writing at the time. The struggle was one that still troubles my writing, namely the figure of the reader. What can you assume that they know, understand, are already aware of etc. Obviously this is something that Patricia Dunker has made me reflect on further, but it also represents a pedagogical problem, namely how one is to teach/explain something. I’m posting the 2015 short paper below in full (warts and all) so that I might continue to reflect on this.

The Power of Lines: Deleuze and The Shopping Centre
Short Paper for the 32nd EGOS Colloquium: July 7–9, 2016. Naples, Italy.
With the recent publication of the second of two monographs by Tim Ingold (2007, 2015) on the nature and character of lines, the question of the line has once again risen to the forefront of contemporary anthropological thinking. Within anthropology and among practicing ethnographers the line has also become a source of interest and concern in the last decade- whether evidenced in Glowczewski’s (2005) observation of the crisscrossing storylines among hyperlinks which ethically tell the stories of the Warlpiri, or Gershon’s (2008) concern for lines of power among the multiple layers of complexity in the classroom, or Tierney’s (2008) exploration of the demarcation of the border between ethnography and fiction in Hauro’s “Demon Bird’- thinking on the line seems to be everywhere. As Ingold (2010) himself notes, this attention to lines follows in the tradition of artists like Paul Klee, who in taking lines for walks around the canvass, becomes a key example for the philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his writing on lines. Within Organizational Studies some have already begun to draw inspiration from this trend (see Holt and Mueller, 2010) but for those of us who wish to explore similar lines of thought through ethnographic work, there are still many avenues that might be pursued. This short essay, itself a product of our fieldwork at the shopping centre over the course of the last few years, will consider only one of these, namely reading through Deleuze’s work, the lines which constitute the shopping centre in time and through the subject, examining the ways that these manifest, develop, proliferate through and intersect with the shopping centre. We contend that despite Ingold’s prodigious efforts, the power of lines remains unrealized, for what lines offer is a way to problematize the role of the ethnographer and rethink the reflexive challenges that are faced in the field.

Deleuze says “whether we are individuals or groups, we are made up of lines” (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007. p.124) echoing a sentiment expressed in A Thousand Plateaus as “we are made of lines. We are not only referring to lines of writing. Lines of writing conjugate with other lines, life lines, lines of luck or misfortune, lines productive of the variation of the line of writing itself, lines that are between the lines of writing.”(Deleuze and Guattari, 2005. p.194) The line here replaces the point as the focus of analysis or, put another way, the connections between ideas, thoughts, moments or regimes of coding becomes, in Deleuze’s analysis, more important than the identification and categorization of the things themselves. Thinking in these terms, we might see the shopping centre as constituted entirely by lines. Parallel lines mark the escalator, flowing uphill into the shopping centre and downhill into the network of roads which connect its spaces to nearby towns and cities. Lines created by tiles form seemingly infinite grid, breaking only to betray areas of wear and tear, repair and heavy traffic; signs of heavy scuff marks, scrapes, prams dragging, cleaning carts grating. These lines extending from the floor, travel up the walls and intersect with ostentatious patterning which in turn weaves its way around signs adorned with various other lines of text. Diagonal white lines on a black dress adorn a mannequin in the window display of a trendy store because that particular pattern- endorsed by fashion gurus, mass-produced and worn by characters on television programs- is back in style this summer. Lines buzz in the mind from books read on the bus while travelling to the shopping centre, intermingled with the lines of multi-lingual (a trained ear might detect variants of Hindi, French and Japanese) conversations with which the bus route resonated. Lines from television, film and radio filter their way into conversation as opinions and ideas are repeated untraceably. Messes of lines pile high and offer value to the discerning Italian restaurant-goer who visits the food court. Policed and surveilled lines surround the shopping centre, creating a bordered and sovereign territory within which there are specific laws and codes of conduct; rules that often do not apply in the world outside. Lines themselves are, at times, the enemy, an indicator that further resources must be allocated in order to deal with the customers who have formed the line, lest a glut form or there be something which negatively affects the shopper’s perception of the space. However, lines themselves can be desired, like the sleek lines of a car sold in a temporary pop-up-store which are both often the subject of conversation. It seems that lines have the power to function as everything from an aesthetic choice to a vector, demonstrating variously despotic power, as it marshals men and women to attend to it, and a passive permeation, as they floats around the collective consciousness.

Our captivation with the lines of the shopping centre is entangled with Ingold’s own interest in, for example, the lines made by slugs (Ingold, 2012) or those implicated in the history of writing and inscription (Ingold, 2007). This fascination with lines is also found throughout Deleuze’s work. For instance, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (2001) often mentions lines in relation to time. His intention for much of this work, is to give a genetic account for not just thought and the conditions of thinking but thought of the subject. Paraphrasing Voss (2013), one of Deleuze propositions is simply that “thought” forms the “I” rather than the “I” “thought”. While a long-form discussion of Deleuze’s understanding of “the subject” (the “I” in this context) is beyond the scope of this paper, it is sufficient to say that Deleuze owes a great debt to Kant in this regard and that, for Deleuze, Kant’s work presents a subject profoundly fractured by the “line of time”. To use James William’s translation of Difference and Repetition “It is as if the ‘I’ is traversed by a fault line: it is fractured by the pure and empty form of time.” (Williams, 2011. p.82). This fracturing of the subject by what is referred to as the third synthesis of time is explained in many ways across the secondary literature, from discussions of inheritance in Hamlet, to the Nietzschean eternal return (see, for example: Voss, 2013) in each case emphasising the way that the subject is divided between the unity of the “I think” (the assumption of the naturality of which is a key concern for the project of Difference and Repetition) and the empirical experiences of the self. We shall return to this point, for what concerns us here is less this series of lines of thought and time which revolve around the exegesis of the Deleuze/Kant relationship and more what Joe Hughes says with regards to the chapter of Difference and Repetition wherein Deleuze develops this theory of time:

“This chapter in particular manages to bring together thinkers as diverse as Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Bergson James, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Ricoeur – and there are probably more […] Of course it would be impossible to untangle all of these lines, not to mention counter-productive” (Hughes, 2009. p.87-88).

Indeed, Deleuze writes with a rich plethora of references and draws from a wide variety of sources, some of them acknowledged while others remain uncited. Another way to think about this is to say that the work which we call Deleuze’s is an intersection of various untraceable lines, all of ambiguous origin which will have always produced the text, given the soico-cultural, economic, historical and intellectual climate of Europe at the time of inscription. This authorial ambiguity is a source of great pride for Deleuze and his co-authors, as can be seen in the famed introductory paragraphs of A Thousand Plateaus where the question of “who wrote what” parts of the text, which is itself to be viewed as a tangle of different living lines of thought, is treated with disdain; as though it could not have been written other than written by a many at once.

The question of “Who writes thus?” is germane to ethnographic thinking and has, as such, already been considered in different ways. Though the Writing Culture project, and its current iterations in the trends of cosmological perspectivism (de la Cadena, 2015; Viveiros de Castro, 2012) or attention to the thoughts and dreams of a forest (see Kohn, 2013) or the topology of a road and other manifestations of the discourse of material ontology more broadly (see Harvey, 2012 or Harvey et al., 2013) or to the various intersections with the postmodern (Spiro, 1996; Spencer, 2001), has accomplished much in the way of achieving similar reflexive and self-aware writing, it has never gone as far as one might in reading Deleuze’s antagonism towards the subject. The auto- ethnographic turn to examine the self as it conducts ethnography (Davies, 1999; Foley, 2002) is here also insufficient, for it is attentive primarily to that relation between the assumed object of study, “outside” and that which is revealed through reflexive practice “inside”. It is perhaps yet to be considered that the lines of thinking and time intersect the subject in ways, rendering nonsensical the distinction between inside and outside or indeed the notion of the subject as origin. To adapt Wilfred Bion (1989) thoughts might live in the shopping centre, produced by no one individual but simply awaiting a thinker. Even in a cursory reading, the challenge of Deleuze’s reading of the subject as a residuum (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000), as nothing more than a by-product of the habitual synthesis of time (Deleuze, 1991) or as fractured by time (Deleuze, 2005), is to push our understanding of the interrelation of ethnographer and field further. This is perhaps what it means to answer the call to “take Deleuze into the field” (Bonta, 2005); thinking through philosophy while doing fieldwork rather than viewing “theory” as an ex post facto addendum to the completed ethnographic project. It is to ask “What does it mean to think without the ‘I’?” acknowledging that under the scrutiny of such a reflexive gaze, the subject disappears entirely, unable to function as a font of knowledge, wisdom or interpretation, what space and time occupies the subject becomes a reflector of the field and all of its madnesses. To put it differently, the study of the field becomes one about attending to lines, some of which may seem far off or remote.

Within Organization Studies, such ideas will no doubt seem paradoxical, for we have taken to, either as or in lieu of reflexivity, glorifying the identity of the researcher as subject (see, for example, Alvesson’s (2010) “Seven-S” model of “self-identity in organization studies”). While such a comment may seem facetious, given the developments to the concept of “reflexivity” that have followed from authors like Chia (1996) or Linstead (1994) it worth reflecting upon the fact that it is still a popular opinion within Organization Studies that ethnography has the potential to unveil the “realities of how things work” in an organization as researchers seek to “get into the heads” of those who live and work there (Watson, 2011. p.1); as though reality were a thing “out there” which the brave ethnographer could uncover being by implication, able to understand it; able to interpret the fundamentally chaotic nature of the universe by distilling said chaos through the “I”, to organize it and make it manageable (and no organization is more immediate to our thinking than the “I”). Where the “I” becomes part of the process, as is the case for those influenced by the discourses around actor-network-theory (see Hardy et al., 2001), it is as a part of a laudable interest in process and the construction of research subjects, however, we are still, debatably, unable to follow the lines.

Let us illustrate this with an example. While sitting in the shopping centre on a bench and waiting for an interlocutor to arrive for an “interview” one might read in a book by Deleuze and Guattari (2005) about different types of lines. They speak of the line of molar or rigid segmentarity (a line of ossified binary systems), the line of molecular or supple segmentation (a line of deterritorialization) and the line of flight (a line of rupture that disrupts the other two lines). After thinking about these three types of line for a while, contemplating how the rigid line, can be thought in terms of sites of discipline (Deleuze, 1992) such as the school, the family, the shopping centre while the supple line might be considered in terms of the small modifications, connections or resistances that one might make against such discipline by appropriating for example, the spaces of the shopping centre for exercise or dancing as are done by various small communities. Contemplating the third type of line however, leaves one perplexed for, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, a single line of flight might overthrow a regime, change a state of affairs and upset the order of the world for along that line is that which slips by uncoded and uncontrolled. How it could this be understood and meaningfully developed in the context of the shopping centre? Dwelling on this one might write down in a field journal only this note “There is nothing more subversive than a line”, to be puzzled over at a later date.

When one’s interlocutor arrives, the two of you slip into easy, familiar and casual conversation as this is not your first meeting. Even if the conversation was recorded, it would have been impossible to trace where or when the discussion turned to lines. Perhaps it happened while wandering past the Apple store and seeing a long line of shoppers queued up for the latest Apple gadget. Perhaps it was seeing a sign advertising a new line of lingerie. Perhaps it happened when you inadvertently revealed that you were reading about lines. Regardless of how it happened, the conversation has shifted and the discussion is now of the various lines that one might say in the shopping centre. “Thank you, come again!”, “You alright there, mate?”, “Have a nice day!” considering how these are scripted and inscribed into the employee through customer service training. As a mystery shopper, the interlocutor’s job is to evaluate how well the employee delivers these and other lines and report on how well they perform their roles. As the conversation evolves one learns much about the lines which both parties say and follow.

Can it be said that this conversation was “authored”? To do so, one would have to neglect the insight of offered by the likes of Foucault and Barthes about the death of the author. To adapt Barthes, conversation, as text does not have secret meanings instilled by an author but rather, is “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (Barthes, 1977. p.146). Despite our reflexivity, however, we would not ask who wrote these lines (The interlocutor, the ethnographer, both of them together, or perhaps the shopping centre itself- Could its lines dream themselves into the discussion, the space colluding to produce a discussion of lines) because to do so would threaten the validity of the “data gathering” that is taking place. The lines of thought seem too many and too entangled. Is Hughes (2009) thus right and is the complex inter-tanglement of the different relations of author(ity) counterproductive to attempt to parse- the text of a spoken conversation being as analytically rich as any work of philosophy- because any causal links or points of origin and genesis are the product of either the imagination or a set of relations so interlinked and inextricably intertwined that their complexity and nuance are ineffable? Did the shopping centre cause this attention to lines (rather than say, points) or were lines caused elsewhere and then imposed onto the shopping centre by a pretentious, navel-gazing academic who wanted to speak about Deleuze and lines? To ask this is to reveal ourselves to be looking for the author again, for an ethnographer as an autonomous- thinking subject- at the core of it all.

For another example, we might return to Ingold’s (2010) discussion of the interconnectedness of a tree, that is, an inability to draw lines around its boundaries and determine where the tree begins and ends, citing the problems posed by algae, squirrels and other things which don’t seem to fit traditionally in the definition of “tree”. Though Ingold himself does not make this point, when read through Deleuze, the examples of the tree or other instances of what he calls the “meshwork” (Ingold, 2015), one can think the human subject under exactly the same terms; as impossible to border with fixed lines.

Thus the question which we return to again, is that of the subject. We have puzzled over it and its assumed identity for millennia but perhaps have yet to develop an answer to the question of “How might one live?” (May, 2005) or, more relevantly, how one might research without returning to a subject. Therein lies the power of lines: a way out of the trap of the subject and the redux to the I think. By making the lines the centre of our analysis we might ask not “What is?” but the question which Deleuze and Guattari (2005. p.214) ask: “Whatever could have happened for things to have come to this?” for this is the question of ethnographic lines; not the rigid lines of a discipline nor the supple lines of individual experiments within ethnographic practice but lines of flight, radical ruptures with the organization of the “I”. Thinking thus is to begin trying to reject researching as an “I” who is thinking about those who are thought but, as Deleuze himself writes in a volume titled Who Comes after the Subject?, to think in terms of “pre-individual singularities and non-personal individuations” (Cadava et al., 1991. p.95). To put this another way, rather than being serf to the “grammatical fiction” of the I, one might- whether through experiments in writing via the “fourth person singular” or through cultivating an attention to lines- attempt to think differently.

Here we find that there is truly nothing more subversive than a line, for though we are all of us changed by our fields, we hold ourselves, nevertheless bound by the rigid li(n)es of the subject. However, inasmuch as the rigid lines of the subject constrain and subvert the creativity of our thoughts, making us always ask “Who said that?” or “What happened?” as we look for an author or origin, an attention to lines can also be what subverts this image and, in rupture, allows us to see the field differently and thus understand our mode of relating to it in ways other than those of separateness, author(ity) and identity. This is the power of lines; to follow a philosophical line of thought and see the linear thinking of the subject finally decline.

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