On the Phrase "Ass Backwards"

Abstract

There are many lines of flight in actuality: the ellipse of a boomerang, the zigzag of a bluebottle, the deadly vector of a bullet. Pynchon's parabola, the trajectory of the rocket, is another such abstract diagram: a meniscus tethered by gravity. The title of Stefan Mattessich's <em>Lines of Flight </em>refers to that famous example, but it also draws attention to his own theoretical trajectory through a philosophy of abstract forms. As a "line of flight" is one of the principal concepts in Deleuze and Guattari's <em>Thousand Plateaus </em>(1980), the allusion should alert us at once to the critical thrust of Mattessich's approach. Mattessich assumes the reader's knowledge of Deleuze and Guattari's post-1968 philosophy, but only as part of a "welter of French theory" (2) with which the book is saturated. <em>Lines of Flight </em>is no undergraduate primer.