Introduction: The Smooth and the Striated

Abstract

A Thousand Plateaus’ ‘1440: The Smooth and the Striated’ introduces smoothness and striation as a conceptual pair to rethink space as a complex mixture between nomadic forces and sedentary captures. Among the models Deleuze and Guattari describe for explicating where we encounter smooth and striated spaces, the maritime model presents the special problem of the sea (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 479). The sea is a smooth space par excellence: open water always moved by the wind, the sun and the stars, nomadically traversable by noise, colour and celestial bearings. Increased navigation of the open water resulted in demands for its striation. Although Deleuze and Guattari note that this took hold progressively, the year 1440, when Portuguese discoverers introduced the first nautical charts, marked a turning point in the striation of the sea. Maps with meridians, parallels, longitudes, latitudes and territories gridded the oceans, making distances calculable and measurable. It meant the beginning of the great explorations – and of the transatlantic slave trade and the expansion of the European State apparatus. The smooth and the striated concern the political and politics. While the smooth and the striated are not of the same nature and de jure oppositional, Deleuze and Guattari indicate that de facto they only exist in complex mixed forms. Moreover, the smooth and the striated work in different domains. If the sea is the spatial field par excellence that brings out smoothness and striation, art is perhaps the domain that can give the most varied and subtle expression of the complex dynamics between them. The present collection investigates the smooth and the striated in the broad field of artistic production. It was instigated by the Third International Deleuze Studies Conference