Lines of Flight in Narrative Transformation: From Deleuze & Guattari to Mediated Flyways of Becoming

In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduce a vocabulary that feels less like theory and more like a map for navigating life’s intensities: lignes de fuite (lines of flight), devenir (becoming), and agencements(assemblages). These concepts were not written for mediators or narrative practitioners. And yet—precisely because they describe how life transforms itself—they hold profound relevance for our work.
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Sara Cobb, in her influential narrative mediation model, draws on Deleuze and Guattari when she speaks of “lines of flight” as openings for new stories. These lines of flight are not escapes from reality but pathways of transformation—moments when a narrative system begins to move, fracture, or reconfigure itself toward new possibilities.

Today, I want to explore how lignes de fuite can help us reimagine narrative mediation and conflict transformation. What happens when we treat stories not as fixed texts but as living assemblages—dynamic, layered, and capable of becoming otherwise?
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How do lines of flight activate the hidden potential within an assemblage?

And how can mediators cultivate the conditions for these narrative flyways to emerge?

1. The Assemblage: Where Stories Take Shape

For Deleuze & Guattari, an assemblage is a constellation of forces—material, affective, social, symbolic—that temporarily holds together. An identity is an assemblage. A family is an assemblage. A conflict is an assemblage.

Narratives, too, are assemblages.

In mediation, we encounter narrative assemblages every day:
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• the story of injury and blame
• the story of being right or being wronged
• the story of who we are allowed to be within a system

These stories stabilize patterns of meaning—but they also stabilize certain “territories” of identity. A conflict narrative is territorial: it marks boundaries, determines who can speak, and defines what counts as truth.

Deleuze and Guattari insist that every assemblage contains virtual potentialities—alternative ways of being that are not yet realized. Transformation occurs not by fixing an assemblage, but by activating these potentialities.

This is where lines of flight enter.

2. Lines of Flight: Breaking Open the Territory

A ligne de fuite is often mistranslated as “escape route,” but in French the term also means a vanishing line, like the horizon in a painting. It is a line that pulls the assemblage toward something new—an opening, a destabilization, a movement toward becoming.

Sara Cobb uses the metaphor of lines of flight to describe the micro-ruptures in dominant conflict narratives—moments where something unexpected breaks pattern:

• a contradiction
• a forgotten detail
• a flash of humor or vulnerability
• a shift in affect
• an unexpected metaphor

These small anomalies can serve as flyways: routes along which stories begin to change direction. Cobb’s theory helps us notice how narrative systems can be nudged out of polarization. But Deleuze and Guattari remind us that lines of flight also carry risk: they can lead to creativity or collapse, to transformation or escape into chaos.

This is why mediation matters: it provides the container within which lines of flight can be held, explored, and cultivated toward generative becomings.

3. Narrative Practices as Generators of Lines of Flight

In narrative mediation, we invite participants to externalize their stories, re-member forgotten voices, and examine the organizing metaphors that structure their identities. These practices actually produce conditions of deterritorialization—the Deleuzian term for unmooring the assemblage from its fixed forms.

Here are some ways narrative practices activate lines of flight:

a. Externalization as Deterritorialization

When a problem becomes external (“the conflict is something we are facing together”) rather than internal (“you are the problem”), the narrative assemblage shifts. The identity-territory becomes mobile, less defended.

b. Re-authoring as a Line of Flight

When participants are invited to articulate unspoken hopes, values, or dreams, they create micro-openings—lines of flight that pull the story beyond its previous limits.

c. Metaphor as a Flyway

Metaphors destabilize fixed meaning and allow new relational possibilities to arise. They create hybrid spaces—half-fiction, half-reality—where imagination can do its transformative work.

d. Witnessing as Reassemblage

As parties hear their alternative stories reflected by the mediator or by each other, new configurations of meaning take shape. The assemblage reterritorializes on a different plane.

In Deleuze & Guattari’s terms:

Narrative practices change the very topology of the assemblage.

4. What Transforming an Assemblage Looks Like

When a line of flight becomes viable—when it carries the assemblage toward new potentialities—we see transformation at multiple levels:

Level 1: Affective assemblage

Emotional intensities shift. Fear loosens; curiosity arises. What was rigid becomes supple.

Level 2: Discursive assemblage

The story changes: new words appear, new metaphors, new temporalities. The narrative ceases to orbit around accusation and begins to orbit around desire.

Level 3: Relational assemblage

Interactions change. Pauses emerge. Listening deepens. The assemblage of “us versus them” begins to break apart.

Level 4: Social and systemic assemblages

As identities shift, roles shift. New possibilities arise for agreements, collaboration, renewed kinship, or shared projects.

Lines of flight ripple outward through all these layers; they are not linear but systemic.

5. Toward a Practice of Flyways: Cultivating Transformative Potential

Deleuze & Guattari urge us to consider how a system becomes capable of becoming. In mediation, this means asking:

• What conditions allow a narrative to move?
• What intensities must be softened?
• What rigidities must be shaken?
• What unspoken desires must be brought forward?

Lines of flight do not appear spontaneously; they emerge when a mediator creates a field of relational safety, when listening is deep enough for contradiction to surface, when complexity is welcomed rather than flattened.

A line of flight is a kind of narrative grace: a moment when a system breathes and becomes capable of imagining itself differently. This happens through narrative accompaniment.

6. Autoethnographers as Cartographers of Narrative Flyways

These same principles--lines of flight, assemblages, and narrative openings—also illuminate the work of autoethnographers, who trace the shifting contours of their own lived narratives at the intra-level. Autoethnography, at its heart, is an act of mapping: of noticing where one’s stories harden or crystallize, where contradictions reveal themselves, and where new potentials begin to emerge. When read through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) vision of lignes de fuite, autoethnographic writing becomes a practice of sensing the lines along which the self-deterritorializes, moves, or transforms. These narrative movements often reveal moments of rupture—emotional flashes, symbolic images, dreams, metaphors, or affective intensities—that open pathways toward becoming otherwise. In this sense, the autoethnographer is not only documenting a life but tracing the flyways that carry that life toward new relational, spiritual, or ecological orientations.

This understanding resonates with Hinton and Kirmayer’s (2017) work on the flexibility hypothesis and the concept of the transformagram, which illustrate how healing emerges when individuals increase their capacity to shift narrative, emotional, and perceptual frames. Their clinical ethnography provides a framework for comprehending the shifting process. The Transformagram Approach builds on these insights by offering autoethnographers guided methods for identifying where their narrative assemblages become rigid and where new potentialities reside. Through structured exercises—such as mapping identity territories, tracing metaphoric lineages and timelines, or articulating emergent desires—autoethnographers learn to recognize the subtle lines of flight within their own stories. These practices allow them to cultivate narrative flexibility not only for personal transformation but also for relational and ecological expansion, integrating spiritual insight, embodied awareness, and regenerative worldviews.

By incorporating flyways into autoethnographic practice, we begin to see how transformation unfolds across multiple layers of the self: affective, symbolic, ancestral, systemic, and ecological. Autoethnographers thus become—much like narrative mediators--cartographers of becoming, charting where they have been, mapping where meaning is shifting, and tracing the pathways that lead toward more expansive, compassionate, and connected versions of self and world. Autoethnography, when understood through the lens of lines of flight, becomes not merely a method of self-inquiry but a practice of guiding the self through its own transformative flyways.
 
Conclusion: Narrative Mediators as Cartographers of Becoming

In A Thousand Plateaus, lines of flight are not merely pathways of escape—they are the engines of creativity and evolution. They allow assemblages to shift, identities to become porous, and systems to reorganize around new forms of life.

Narrative mediators are, in a sense, cartographers of these flyways.

We help map the vanishing lines that pull conflict toward transformation.

We cultivate the conditions in which stories can break open.

We accompany people as they navigate the uncertain, generative terrain of becoming otherwise.

We generate mediatorship and the conflict wisdom that arises from increased interconnectivity.
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In doing so, we participate in the ongoing work that Deleuze & Guattari describe so vividly: the work of shaping new assemblages—ones that sustain deeper connection, shared meaning, and desirable potentialities for the future. Through this work, we enact a mediatorship that activates conflict wisdom—an emergent property of heightened interconnectivity within the narrative assemblage.