Reflection: Your Own Arborescences and Your Own Lines of Flight

Prompts to consider

• Identify three of the tree-structures that organize your own thinking: the hierarchies of concepts you use, the foundational assumptions you derive other beliefs from, the fixed identities you organize your self-understanding around. Now try to think about any of them rhizomatically, not from the root outward but from the middle, connecting laterally to other things without first establishing a center. What does it feel like to try? And is there something you lose in tree-thinking that rhizomatic thinking would recover, or is tree-thinking necessary for certain kinds of understanding that Deleuze and Guattari undervalue?
• Deleuze and Guattari say becoming-animal means entering a zone of intensity shared with another form of life, not imitating it but genuinely being transformed by encounter with its mode of existence. Think about a non-human encounter, with an animal, a field, a piece of music, a radically different culture, that genuinely changed how you experience something. Not what you thought about it but how you experienced being in the world afterward. Is Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming a useful description of what happened? What does calling it 'becoming' add to calling it 'influence' or 'inspiration'?
• The molar, the molecular, and the line of flight: Deleuze and Guattari say political life is always navigating between rigid coded identities (molar), fluid becomings that blur the codes (molecular), and genuine ruptures that escape the territory entirely (lines of flight). Think about a domain of your own life, work, relationships, creative practice, political engagement, and try to identify which mode is dominant. Are you living mainly in the molar (fixed roles, fixed expectations, coded behavior)? Are there molecular zones where things are more fluid? And is there anything in your life that feels like a genuine line of flight, something that is actually changing the territory rather than just moving within it?