Dangerous Lines: Deleuze and Guattari’s Psychedelic Maps of Knowledge

Of all the diverse characters appearing in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, from evolutionary biologists to avant-garde classical composers to obscure mathematicians to Beat poets, perhaps the most surprising is anthropologist and psychedelic counterculture figure Carlos Castañeda. Derided by the academic community for his fabrication of indigenous Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus, who serves as Castańeda’s guide in his ongoing spiritual unfolding, the author of popular 1970s books like Journey to Ixtlan and A Separate Reality is an unlikely figure for the French philosophers to invoke; and yet he is cited in close to half the plateaus that comprise their magnum opus. Castańeda’s most well-known appearance in this regard is in the ‘Body without Organs’ plateau, which relies heavily on his distinction between the tonal and the nagual – organised forms of living and being and the underlying creative dynamisms of reorganisation and becoming respectively. It is in the ‘Micropolitics and Segmentarity’ plateau, however, that we find the most extensive engagement with Castañeda and his ‘shaman’, who, similarly to Nietzsche’s Dionysus or Zarathustra, serves as what Deleuze and Guattari elsewhere describe as a ‘conceptual persona’.

In the ‘Micropolitics’ plateau, they describe the ways in which each of us – as well as the larger social and political formations we form part of – are composed of various lines. Most obvious among these are the ‘molar’ lines that assign us to particular categories. These are the rigid lines which, similarly to Foucault’s disciplinary apparatus, operate with binaries, concentric circles and temporal segments. We are told we are either this or that, man or woman, Black or White, passing or non-passing; we are situated within concentric circles of importance – family, community, bioregion, nation – wherein proximity defines our zone of interest and belonging and separates same from other; we are made to traverse various segments that define the linear unfolding of a life, usually some or other variation on birth, school, army, marriage, workplace or prison, death.

Underlying these molar lines, however, are more supple molecular lines. These are the lines of political movements, sub- and countercultures, minoritarian and fugitive modes of life. When molecular lines intersect or begin to resonate together, various forms of resistance and prefiguration become possible, undoing the rigidity of the molar lines. Beneath the molecular lines, in turn, are the lines of flight, leakage or escape (Deleuze and Guattari’s ligne de fuite connotes all these senses and more) – these are the flows of pre-individual desire that dismantle all fixity; they are vectors of transformation. 

Diagramming these three kinds of lines – molar, molecular and lines of flight – is precisely the first part of the schizoanalytic project outlined in the prequel to A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus, the second part of said project being the forging of new distributions of lines that can potentially enrich the possibilities of life. How has your desire been arranged? How can it be arranged differently? By no means, however, is the schizoanalytic task a safe or easy one, and it is at this point that Deleuze and Guattari turn to Castañeda to warn us of the four dangers of the lines: Fear, Clarity, Power, and Disgust.

In his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Castañeda recounts Don Juan’s lesson of the risks that are involved in the young anthropologist’s pursuit, which entails the use of psychedelics along with other mind and body altering practices. The first risk is Fear. As Castañeda puts it, Fear emerges because:

Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man [sic] is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyielding. His purpose becomes a battlefield.

When we are traversing the limits of our knowledge we are confronted with the unknown, the unexpected, the outside, and in the face of this it is sometimes easier to remain where we are, seeking stability in our existing knowledge. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, this is the danger of security, of desiring “the great molar organization that sustains us, the arborescences we cling to, the binary machines that give us a well-defined status, the resonances we enter into, the system of overcoding that dominates us.” It is the danger of essentialism, of Fatherland, of gender binaries and racial taxonomies – the great violence of the Porphyrian tree.

In the shadow of this tree, however, grow the rhizomes of the molecular lines and it is here that we confront a second, more insidious danger: Clarity. We have shattered the illusion of the molar lines, recognising their contingency or social construction. We have taken psychedelics or read Marx and we have seen through the game of ideology. Thus, we think we have a clear view of reality. This second danger, Don Juan warns Castañeda, “forces the man never to doubt himself. It gives him the assurance he can do anything he pleases, for he sees clearly into everything.” This is the danger of the self-righteous mission of the fundamentalist, conspiracy theorist, or revolutionary dogmatist: I have the one true dialectical grasp on the unfolding of revolutionary history and so anything I do is justifiable. When we succumb to the second danger, then, as Deleuze and Guattari observe,

[i]nstead of the great paranoid fear, we are trapped in a thousand little monomanias, self-evident truths, and clarities that gush from every black hole and no longer form a system, but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of justice, policeman, neighborhood SS man.

We become, in short, what they call micro-fascists.

Even once we ward off this second danger, however, a third danger soon arises, this time at the intersection of the molecular and molar: the danger of Power. Here, having conquered Fear and Clarity, we find ourselves with new knowledge and thus new traction over ourselves and the world. We are the revolutionaries suddenly in control over a country or the spiritual practitioners who decide that we have mastered our practice: we become totalitarians – Men of Power who, as Deleuze and Guattari say, “will always want to stop the lines of flight, and to this end to trap and stabilize the mutation machine in the overcoding machine,” recuperating the molecular lines so that we can nurture a particular molar formation. This third danger is exemplified, in our current time, by authoritarian leaders attempting to unilaterally determine the course of history and by the Silicon Valley rationalists and tech billionaires who are so sure of their lofty plans for this world, not to mention the plastic shamans and influencers confidently selling us false alternatives.

What of the fourth danger? Deleuze and Guattari tell us that this one, Disgust, perhaps outweighs all the others. Here, they appear to diverge slightly from Castañeda, for whom the final danger is Old Age, or Death, but what we’re being warned of is in fact the same thing. Indeed, when Don Juan says of this final danger that “[t]his is the time when a man has no more fears, no more impatient clarity of mind – a time when all his power is in check, but also the time when he has an unyielding desire to rest,” we should bear in mind Nietzsche’s last man, who represents a failure to respond to nihilism through the cultivation of a will to power, recalling here that for Nietzsche power is to be understood as transformative puissance (‘power-to’ – an expansion of what Spinoza would call the joyous passions) as opposed to a malign pouvoir (‘power-over’ – resignation to the sad passions). It is primarily herself that the ‘übermensch’ overcomes.

Deleuze and Guattari say of this last man that he may embark upon a journey along the third line, the line of flight, that becomes a line of abolition – a line wrought by the passive nihilism of a reactive disgust towards all the lines. For them, such journeys “emanate a strange despair, like an odour of death and immolation, a state of war from which one returns broken.” Crucially, it is this fourth danger – the line of flight become line of death – that typifies fascism. Whereas the conservatism and pouvoir of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes exemplify the dangers of the first two lines, in fascism the regime itself becomes suicidal, as attested to by Hitler’s Telegram 71 in which, confronting the failure of the Nazi project, he declares that, “if the war is lost, may the nation perish.”

From moment to moment then, we are – as are all the sociopolitical arrangements around us – constituted by a complex entanglement of lines. Here, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us,

[t]he study of the dangers of each line is the object of pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to represent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and draw lines, marking their mixtures as well as their distinctions.

This task of cautious mapping seems increasingly important in the face of all the dangers of the lines we currently confront in a time of encroaching neofascism, widespread social apathy and a collapse of healthy systems of collective meaning making. Whether we’re examining the values and trajectories of our own lives, of political systems, of philosophical schools of thought or of spiritual practices, we would do well to recognise how easily we can fall into phobic and controlling forms of conservative reaction; how we can so quickly assume a false sense of superiority and special insight; how we can become enamoured of power and assert unilateral control over the entanglements of molar and molecular forces; and lastly, how we can, ridding ourselves of the traps of Fear, Clarity and Power, turn into the last man, caught up in ressentiment, cynicism, and passive nihilism.

To diagram is not enough though. At the same time as we are undertaking this urgent project of mapping, we should also be pursuing the more positive task of experimenting with new arrangements of all the lines that ceaselessly construct us and the world. This, Don Juan tells his student, entails stopping the world – disentangling ourselves from this construction, even if only partially and for fleeting moments, whether facilitated psychedelically or otherwise – in order to see. To do this – to conquer the four enemies in order to see – is to obtain knowledge, however fleeting, in the face of our impermanence, and it is this impermanence, the impermanence of all things, that makes this what Castañeda calls ‘the path with heart’.

“Don Juan sat motionless facing the peyote field. A steady wind blew on my face. ‘The twilight is the crack between the worlds,’ he said softly, without turning to me.” Carlos Castañeda, Journey to Ixtlan

Works Cited

Castaneda, C. 1968. The Teachings of Don Juan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Castaneda, C. 1972. Journey to Ixtlan. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Trans. by B. Massumi). London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.