For our May 31 Campfire Learn Together, we are watching and discussing Ian Buchanan’s “Lines of Flight in the Classroom” — a lecture applying Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of lines of flight to the classroom as a social assemblage.
Lines of flight are not a theory of freedom. They are a theory of trajectories — of how desire flows through any living space, how those flows interact and interfere with one another, and what happens when a line crosses from a limit into a threshold and everything changes. The concept is often misread as a celebration of creative divergence. Buchanan (the speaker) is clear that this is a false trail. Lines of flight describe a structural instability in how we perceive, think about, and respond to the world. They describe what is actually happening in any room where people are learning together — including this one.
This is Stimpunks ground. We are made of lines. The question is who gets to follow them.
The concept of lines of flight began not in a philosophy seminar but at a campsite. The French psychiatrist Fernand Deligny followed Autistic children around a large outdoor space and mapped their wandering paths — what he called lignes d’erre: errant lines, wandering lines. Their movement had no apparent destination, but it was not aimless. They got something out of it, but nobody could figure out what. It was non-purposive, but not purposeless.
Deleuze and Guattari drew on Deligny’s maps to build one of the twentieth century’s most generative frameworks for understanding desire, flow, and becoming in social life. The philosophical tools the speaker uses to analyze what happens in any classroom were built from observing neurodivergent movement that neuronormative observers could not decode.
The errant lines were always signal.
The speaker describes three types of line running through any assemblage simultaneously:
The molar line is rigid and segmented — the curriculum, the schedule, the institutional demand, the prescribed path. It is not the enemy. It is necessary. But on its own, it produces rigidity and boredom.
The molecular line is supple and rhizomatic — the undercurrent of desire, the special interest running beneath the surface, what actually matters to the people in the room. The speaker describes it as the secret soundtrack. In the film he uses as his central example, a character named Muriel is trapped in a molar life that cannot accommodate her desires, so she plays ABBA incessantly — the molecular line running as an internal sound system, present but unlivable, unable to resonate with the world around her. Many in this community will recognize that portrait.
The line of abolition is the line that either opens a new beginning or dissolves the assemblage entirely. It can be positive — ground zero from which a new start is constructed. It can be destructive — the point at which overwhelm, shutdown, or chaos takes over and neither learning nor connection can happen. Every teacher, the speaker says, is acutely aware of all three. Teaching is the problem of managing the relay switches between them.
Every teacher would be aware of those three tensions, those three trajectories that run through the classroom assemblage.
The speaker’s key claim is that assemblages are not only spatial — they are durational. They are organized as rhythms, sequences, and strings of moments that hold together into a life. When we talk about our lives falling apart, we mean this literally: the things we did together, the ways we moved through time together, the small calculations we made every day about how much of something we could take — all of it suddenly separated. The question of how assemblages hold together, how moments get strung into something coherent, is what the concept of lines of flight helps us think about.
Cavendish Space has made this same move independently: it is not only a room layout. It is an ecology of rhythms, transitions, and participation structures. The five zones of Cavendish Space — Cave, Campfire, Watering Hole, Library, and Habitat — can be understood as designed environments for navigating these lines and the flow between them. The Cave protects the molecular line. The Campfire is the interface between molar and molecular. The Watering Hole is where the molecular line recovers and breathes. The Library holds the string that links moments into collective memory over time. The Habitat provides the environmental conditions without which no line can flow at all.
The speaker ends his talk by identifying what he calls the relay switches — the moments where a teacher chooses to shift from one line to another. Too much molar and the students implode with boredom. Too much molecular and the curriculum disappears and chaos arrives. The teacher is constantly calculating: what is the second last? What is the right moment to stop? What would be too much?
Cavendish Space answers this question by distributing the relay switches to the individual rather than centralizing them in a facilitator. Lily pads offer pause points between lines. The Edges are designed so transitions don’t consume overwhelming processing time and social energy. Interaction badges externalize each person’s real-time state so the calculation doesn’t have to happen invisibly. The result is what self-determination looks like as environmental design: not the absence of structure, but structure redesigned around the question of who operates the switches.
This is the Stimpunks inversion. In the classroom model, the teacher manages the relay switches on behalf of the room. In Cavendish Space, each person holds their own.
We are made of lines. Here, we get to follow them.
Join Us
Campfire Learn Together happens every Sunday at 10AM Central, online via Discord. This session is on Sunday, May 31. Open to the whole community — no preparation needed, no expertise required. Come as you are.
We’ll watch together, take a bodymind break, and then open up the reflection questions as a community conversation. You can participate by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome. Cameras optional. Silence is participation.
Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space. Our Campfire Learn Together page describes some of what to expect. If this is your first Campfire, you’re in good company — many of our regulars showed up for the first time not knowing quite what to expect, and stayed.
Main Takeaways
We are made of lines, not things. Deleuze and Guattari’s core claim is that what matters in any social space is not the objects in it but the trajectories running through it — how desire flows, how lines interfere with one another, what happens when a limit becomes a threshold. Mapping a classroom spatially misses what is actually happening. Mapping it as a field of lines tells you something true.
The three lines are always coextensive. The molar, molecular, and abolition lines are not sequential stages — they run simultaneously through any assemblage, including every learning space. No matter how rigid and segmented the molar line feels, the molecular line is never far away. The sense that another way is possible is always present, even when it is suppressed.
The concept originated from following Autistic children. Fernand Deligny mapped the wandering paths of Autistic children at a campsite — movement that appeared purposeless to outside observers but was not aimless. Deleuze and Guattari built lines of flight from those maps. The philosophical framework for understanding desire and becoming in human life was built from observing neurodivergent movement that the dominant interpretive framework could not read.
Teaching is relay-switch management — and Cavendish Space distributes the switches. The speaker concludes that teaching is the problem of managing transitions between lines on behalf of the room. Cavendish Space inverts this: through lily pads, edge design, and interaction badges, it gives each person control over their own relay switches. This is self-determination theory as environmental design.
Assemblages are durational, not only spatial. The speaker makes a pointed critique of assemblage theory’s tendency to over-focus on space. Assemblages are organized as rhythms and strings of moments. Cavendish Space has made the same move independently — it is an ecology of rhythms and participation structures, not just a floor plan.
The molecular line needs protection, not management. When the molecular line — monotropic attention, special interests, what actually matters to the person — is suppressed rather than accommodated, it goes underground. It becomes a secret soundtrack running beneath a life that can’t accommodate it. Cavendish Space’s Cave zone is designed to protect the molecular line — to give it room to flow without being immediately collapsed back into the molar.
The line of abolition is the line educators and designers must take seriously. The speaker describes how every classroom teeters near the line of abolition — the point where neither learning nor connection is possible. For neurodivergent people, undesigned environments activate the line of abolition as a baseline condition before any learning begins. This is why sensory safety, psychological safety, and the Habitat layer of Cavendish Space are not optional features — they are the preconditions for any line to flow at all.
Desire lines and lines of flight share a genealogy. Deligny’s literal maps of Autistic children’s wandering paths connect the desire-line tradition directly to lines-of-flight philosophy. The paths that looked purposeless were desire lines — evidence of actual desire, unmediated by the pressure to perform purposefulness for an institutional audience. Cavendish Space’s alignment with desire lines runs through this same origin.
Related Glossary Entries
Monotropism — The tendency for attention to flow strongly into a small number of interests at a time, producing deep focus and a tunnel of engagement. In lines-of-flight terms, monotropic attention is the molecular line at its most legible: intense, directional, and resistant to being interrupted and redirected onto the molar line’s schedule.
Omni-directional Learning — Learning that follows the learner’s own trajectories of interest and attention rather than a prescribed linear sequence. Where the molar line is arboreal and sequential, omni-directional learning is rhizomatic — it spreads laterally, follows intensity, and connects across unexpected nodes. It is the molecular line institutionally legitimized.
Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes — The three primordial learning spaces identified by David Thornburg. The Cave is for individual reflection and deep focus (the molecular line protected). The Campfire is for structured shared thinking with an expert (the molar and molecular in productive contact). The Watering Hole is for informal peer connection and lateral flow (the molecular line as collective phenomenon). Each space is a different relay-switch position.
Self-Determination Theory — The framework identifying autonomy, competence, and relatedness as the three core psychological needs for intrinsic motivation and flourishing. In lines-of-flight terms: autonomy is the molecular line’s claim to exist; competence is the capacity to navigate between lines without hitting the line of abolition; relatedness is the harmonizing of molecular lines between people.
Psychological Safety — The condition in which people feel safe to take interpersonal risks, speak up, and participate authentically. Without psychological safety, the line of abolition becomes the default: people withdraw, shut down, or perform compliance rather than engage. Psychological safety is one of the relay switches that determines which line the room is on.
Sensory Safety — The condition in which the sensory environment does not impose overwhelming load on the nervous system. In lines-of-flight terms, a sensorially hostile environment activates the line of abolition before any molar or molecular line can operate. Sensory safety is the environmental precondition for line-flow, housed in Cavendish Space’s Habitat layer.
Reflection Questions
On the errant lines
Fernand Deligny described the Autistic children’s wandering as non-purposive but not aimless — they got something out of it, but nobody could figure out what. When have you followed a line that looked purposeless from the outside but was deeply purposeful from the inside? What did others make of it? What did you make of it?
On your molecular line
The speaker describes the molecular line as the secret soundtrack — the desire running beneath the molar life that cannot yet accommodate it. What is your molecular line? Where does it flow when the molar line is too rigid to hold it? What would it mean for an environment to be designed around it rather than against it?
On relay switches
The speaker concludes that every teacher is constantly calculating the relay switches — when to shift lines, when to stop, what is the second last. Who has held the relay switches in your learning life? What happened when they were held well? What happened when they weren’t? What would it mean to hold your own?
On the line of abolition
The line of abolition can be ground zero for a new start, or it can be dissolution — the point where neither learning nor connection is possible. Where have you experienced the line of abolition in learning spaces? What triggered it? What, if anything, pulled you back? What environmental conditions make it less likely to be reached?
On the Stimpunks inversion
In the classroom model, the teacher manages the relay switches on behalf of the room. In Cavendish Space, each person holds their own. What does it feel like to hold your own relay switches? What support do you need to do it? What do you need from an environment to make it possible?
On being made of lines
Deleuze and Guattari say: we are made of lines and nothing else. What lines are you made of right now? Which ones are flowing? Which ones are suppressed? Which ones feel like they are approaching a threshold?
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