Berry and DeCock, Computational Porosity

David M. Berry, and Christian DeCock (2026) “Computational Porosity: Benjamin, Lācis and Algorithmic Life.” Controversies of AI Society. https://doi.org/10.54337/aau.add.scai-11425

This interesting conference paper which will hopefully be further developed. The authors start off with a sophisticated discussion of Benjamin and Lacis’s concept of porosity, noting it as a product of the encounter between Naples and an exoticizing European gaze which then uses the concept to problematize the assumed arrangement of space in the North and elsewhere. Drawing on Jameson and Adorno, they also note the role the concept played in the development of Benjamin’s thought, particularly his concept of denkbild or “figure of thought.” B and DeC also point out the temporal, not just spatial, interpenetration of porosity. They tie the concept further to the Brechtian concepts (which Benjamin was influenced by) of estrangement (Verfremdung) and refunctioning (Unfunktionierung). [These specific aspects of Benjamin’s thought on porosity are not specifically returned to in the later discussion of computational porosity.]

"We argue that Benjamin and Lācis’s concept of porosity can be used to help understand how computational architectures structure contemporary social relations." (32)

The crucial difference is that computational porosity operates not through stone and concrete but through the material substrate of processors, networks and algorithms that increasingly mediate social existence. This includes the proliferation of enterprise software, algorithmic management systems, and platform-mediated labour that restructure how work is coordinated, controlled, and experienced in organisations.

They deploy the concept of computational porosity two ways:

1. “as a descriptive concept which helps understand how discretisation as a practice within computation is giving way to diffusion techniques”

2. “as a critical concept in the sense given by Benjamin and Lācis who saw it as an alternative to bourgeois ways of organising the lifeworld.”

Just as Naples resisted the rationalised planning of modern cities, computational porosity challenges organizational boundaries and hierarchies. In platform organizations, the distinction between employee and contractor, workplace and home, working time and leisure time becomes increasingly porous. Uber drivers, for instance, exist in a deliberately porous space where they are neither fully independent nor fully employed, where the car becomes simultaneously private property and workplace, where algorithms interpenetrate with human decision-making about when and where to work. (33)

The office diffuses into domestic home spaces and synchronous and asynchronous communication blur together making corporate surveillance and individual autonomy clash through activity monitoring software and flexible scheduling.

... computational systems create fluid boundaries between local and cloud processing, between human and machine cognition, and between private data and public circulation. The physical permeability [Benjamin and Lacis] identified in Naples’ buildings finds its contemporary parallel in the technical permeability of computational systems that allow data and processing to flow across previously distinct spheres and across planetary networks.

When we issue a voice command to ChatGPT or another LLM, the computation flows seamlessly between device, data centre and cloud, creating what appears as a unified interaction but which actually traverses across multiple computational domains. This technical arrangement mirrors the interpenetration of spaces that Benjamin and Lācis observed in Naples, though now operating through digital rather than architectural forms. Similarly, the diffusion processes that many AI systems now implement, make all cultural works diffuse and hybrid within the latent spaces of their neural networks, a process Berry (2025) calls diffusionisation. (33-4)

In a footnote:

The idea that porosity is now also an instrumental process, actuated through computational techniques for the diffusionisation of the lifeworld, raises interesting questions about how a practice of resistance can be integrated into the system. However, we want to suggest that porosity, as Benjamin and Lācis deploy it, points to the excess that cannot be captured fully, even when turned into a computational function. Thereby, computational porosity creates unforeseen lines of flight and potentials for resistance in social and political practice.

While computational porosity describes the broader phenomenon of interpenetrating boundaries between human and machine agencies, diffusionisation represents a specific technical manifestation of this porosity within AI systems. Through diffusion models, cultural artefacts are not simply stored or processed but become porous themselves as their features, styles, and meanings blur and intermingle within the latent spaces of neural networks. This technical process of diffusionisation thus intensifies the porosity Benjamin and Lācis observed in Naples’ architecture, as it operates not just on the level of infrastructure but on the very substance of cultural production itself. (34)

They describe using Google's “Smart Compose:”

As we compose, our thought processes become intertwined with algorithmic suggestions in ways that go beyond simple automation. The system learns from aggregate patterns of communication across millions of users, creating a kind of collective linguistic porosity where individual expression becomes mediated through statistically derived patterns.

This example thus layers all, or at least many of, the kinds of porosity they talk about (spatial, boundary-blurring, temporal, social, "diffusionist"). They also discuss agential porosity, “where human and machine decision-making become so entangled that attributing responsibility becomes difficult” (35). Through computational porosity, agency is distributed through [the assemblage] of human and non-human, with no clear [figure] in which it can be located. “This computational porosity obscures accountability whilst intensifying control and will create a number of difficulties unless reflexively understood.” They further discuss variations such as playful coding, and “workaround cultures” in which workers try to game the algorithms they are being controlled by.

Just as Neapolitans used architectural porosity to evade official functions and create alternative uses, workers develop tactics to game algorithmic management systems, exploit platform vulnerabilities, or repurpose enterprise software for unintended purposes. For example, call centre workers might share strategies for maximising metrics whilst minimising actual work, Deliveroo riders might use geographic quirks in the algorithm to secure better-paying orders, and remote workers might use mouse or keyboard automation to simulate work activity to evade surveillance software. These practices reveal the porous character of seemingly rigid computational management systems.

However, “The same flexibility that enables worker resistance also enables platforms to externalise costs, avoid employment obligations, and intensify exploitation through the blurring of work and non-work time” (35-6).

However, computational porosity is not merely analogous to architectural porosity. Rather, it represents an intensification and acceleration of the interpenetration of spaces and practices that Benjamin and Lācis observed. Contemporary computational systems do not simply enable movement between defined spheres but actively blur the boundaries between them. When we interact with AI systems or social media platforms, increasingly human and algorithmic agencies are diffused in complex ways. The “theatrical” dimension they identified in Naples’ architecture becomes literalised in computational systems that transform every interaction into a performance that can be captured. (36)

The concept of “explainability,” which Berry advocates in other writings, would create “epistemic porosity, where technical knowledge and democratic oversight must somehow coexist and interpenetrate” [it would be interesting to explore the connections between this concept and "legibility" per Enfield, et al.] Algorithmic management is another example of “temporal porosity” between past hiring decisions (e.g. encoded in training data), present applications, and future workforce composition.” There does not appear to be a set number of ways in which they want to discuss kinds of “porosity,” as they keep adding more, then circling back and revisiting ones discussed previously [perhaps one could argue there is a “porosity” to this mode of discussion.] It would be nice to have a set, clear list or overview paragraph of the forms or relations which computational porosity takes [not, of course, that Benjamin and Lacis bothered with anything of the sort], and how these tie back to their initial discussion of B&L’s porosity.

 [Whereas in my 2019 article I had looked at porosity primarily in terms of the relative openness or closedness of different spaces to interaction with each other, B&DeC seem more interested in how it creates mingled productions, blurred categories, “dissolved boundaries,” and recondite traces of (unevenly) distributed/delegated agency; this concern is likely linked to the project of “explainability” (which they do state in their conclusion); they are more interested in the politics of discursive articulation than in the politics of spatial articulation].

There are also possibilities for resistance: “For example, in adversarial machine learning, researchers and activists can deliberately exploit the porous boundaries of AI systems to reveal their limitations and biases. This recalls Benjamin’s (1930) attention to how Naples’ street urchins used the city’s new underground to subvert the purpose of this technology with playful chaos” (37). Apps like Signal “create deliberate impermeability within otherwise porous systems;” they give other examples workers’ collectives, unions, using apps.

“The European Union’s AI Act and similar regulatory frameworks create new porous spaces between technical systems and collective governance, opening possibilities for workers to contest how algorithms organise their labour” (38). The authors find parallels between use of silicon computing, and the tuff stone of Naples.

Whilst computational systems create new forms of algorithmic governmentality and platform capitalism, their porous character potentially generates possibilities for alternative social arrangements; a “chance to correct the incapacity of peoples to order their relationships to one another in accord with the relationship they possess to nature through their technology” (39, quoting Benjamin)

The key question then becomes how to mobilise computational porosity towards democratic ends. Just as Naples’ citizens used the city’s porous spaces to create autonomous zones and informal economies, we might identify how computational porosity enables new forms of collective organisation and resistance. For instance, the porous boundaries between local and cloud computing could support decentralised infrastructure projects that prioritise community control over corporate profit. The diffusional character of contemporary AI systems might be redirected towards collective knowledge production rather than data extractivism.

The conclusion turns more specifically to the subject of AI:

we can see generative AI’s outputs as a form of involuntary surrealism as they often contain unexpected juxtapositions, distortions, and a Verfremdung-­effect that can either enlighten or mislead, depending on context. Just as the Surrealists collaged disparate elements to jolt consciousness, AI often unwittingly collages fact and fiction.

Large language models, trawling through billions of data points and recombining them, might surface hidden cultural obsessions or biases in strange new forms. Indeed, image generators trained on internet data often produce biased or stereotyped images, spuriously classifying people by race, gender, sexuality, and personality .... When these biases appear blatantly in AI outputs, they can become an estranging mirror held up to society’s prejudices. It makes visible what is often obscured in polished human-made media, the deep-set biases in our collective imaginary. Thus, AI’s remix aesthetic can become a tool for critique, a way to see the “dream wishes” of society laid out unsparingly, much as Benjamin read the arcades of Paris as the dream wishes of the 19th century. (40)

Benjamin had seen that contemporary media and technology could be used for both fascism and freedom. B&DeC note that much current discourse on AI focuses on fears related to “boundary violations” between the human and the simulated. Such anxieties over borders have long been weaponized by fascism, and a better ground for progressive politics is needed. 

The question becomes not just how to maintain boundaries, but how to cultivate forms of porosity that enable flourishing rather than domination. Indeed, porosity functions dialectically in workplace struggles as it simultaneously enables new forms of worker coordination and new modes of managerial control. Workers will need to increasingly engage in collective reverse-engineering of opaque systems, sharing knowledge about how algorithms calculate work, predict demand, or evaluate performance. A critical concept of porosity must therefore resist managerial appropriation by foregrounding questions of power, exploitation, and resistance.

They turn to the question of “explainable forms of life” in the algorithmic age as a political, not just technical, issue. "This requires new institutional arrangements and technical practices that enable collective deliberation about how computational systems shape social life" (41).

Enfield: Legibility and Agency

N.J. Enfield (2026) “Legibility and Agency.” American Anthropologist 128(1):39-51

In this very interesting article Enfield argues that “legibility is foundational to human agency” (39). He casts this as a rebuttal to Scott (1998) which is perhaps not really necessary. His larger point is that legibility is “both agency-increasing and agency-decreasing” (48) depending on social and institutional context.

He begins with an interesting example of Mrkaa boatmen in Laos reading the surfaces of rivers to avoid hazards, and ties this into literature on other culturally and practically situated practices of “reading” water. Such learned skills can be seen as “tuning:”

Whether one is navigating the streams of Mrkaa or the swells of Micronesia, whether one’s readings are direct from nature or mediated by instruments, whether one cites qualitative descriptions of numeric measures, people become tuned to reading the cues around them. This tuning is an adaptation that opens channels for flow, whether it be the flow of attention, reasoning, or response and action. This flow defines the agent’s relation with their environment. The relation is called legibility. (40-1).

Enfield’s beef with Scott is not really about the kind of “High Modern” state [and capitalist] legibility that Scott was critiquing, but more with the way that the term “legibility” is broadly used today in ways derived from Scott’s critique, without including the “high modern” or “state” or “topdown” kind of modifier that would distinguish it from the more general phenomenon which Enfield wants to use the term for: “Beyond this narrow idea of a tool of state control, the mechanism of legibility has far deeper significance for human action and interpretation in social systems” (41), at all scales of human agency and interaction. [And Enfield does, I think, recognize that this contradicts rather the spirit and the polemical intent of Scott’s book, than the explicit content, because Scott in turn includes various caveats regarding local kinds of knowledge and also the nuanced position of local elites (relevant to Enfield’s argument later in this paper).]

Enfield posits two related aspects of agency: 1) flexibility, control over action, planning, anticipation, etc.; and 2) accountability, “comprising others’ evaluations of their actions, and the rights and duties that their actions presuppose, create, and invoke;” in other words, the social and ethical significance made by the social group of the agent’s ability to act.

People use categorization to simplify their environment and their range of responses to it; E makes three points about the relation between agency and categorization (each of which are clearly related to both flexibility and accountability):

1. Categories are “sieves for decision-making and action.”

2. Categorization “sets public coordinates for social agency.”

3. Categorization coordinates “behavior, action, and understanding in groups,” so the interpretations and actions of the group’s members will converge [thus making their actions in turn more legible for the purpose of accountability].

Enfield turns first to first-order legibility, in the relation between an agent and their environment, drawing on Ingold, Gibson, Kockelman, Bourdieu, etc. Legibility is not merely a “property” of the environment: “it cannot be defined without also referring to an agent who reads it” (42) [and a context and purpose for which they are doing so]. “When this relationship achieves an enduring equilibrium for a group of agents, this gives rise to a legibility regime.”

In addition to learned legibility (attuning your attention to found signs in the environment) there is also constructed legibility (attuned to constructed signs produced by tools, instruments, etc.). Enfield also distinguishes first-order legibility regimes as to different “sources:” ancestral, goal derived, expertise derived.

He turns next to second-order legibility, “manipulating the environment to guide others’ action,” and more generally, anticipating the actions and interpretations of said others. As the perceptions and actions of other people are among the things we are most attuned to in any environment, second-order legibility is “foundational to the logic of communication.” Enfield discusses several ways that humans, honeybees, etc. do this; legibility is thus “an organizer of activity” in Lynch’s words (quoted on page 43).

In second-order legibility, we construct signs that organize others’ activities in a mechanism that is fundamental to the agency of social interaction. It builds on first-order legibility (the capacity to read an environment) by reading others’ capacity to read and then heeding that reading in the design of other-oriented action. (43)

[This is thus made possible by the three points E emphasized about categorization, and is also linked to the accountability of the others whose actions we are anticipating.] Enfield summarizes his argument:

Our goal here is to understand legibility as a resource for agency in the broadest sense, and thus to recontextualize a widely held framing of legibility as a modern imposition of large-scale states and technologies. I argue that legibility is inherent to all frameworks for situated action, from mētis to census, and that the legibility-agency relationship is foundational to social coordination and, in turn, to sociocultural institutions.

Enfield now sets about this recontextualization by discussing legibility in a series of social contexts; first off, the reading of signs to establish deviance.

Following the logic of second-order legibility, being socialized in a community means becoming tuned to how others will read your behavior and then being able to adjust as needed. … we create signs of ourselves that heed others’ patterns of assessment and nudge them as needed, but in large part, our self-presentation is a way to avoid attracting attention or response at all.

Thus, beat cops patrolled neighborhoods looking for “suspicious” characters; the trick was to anticipate this legibility regime and not arouse suspicion. Other examples include visitors to Mrkaa houses failing to understand the rules of seating location and thus standing out as outsiders.

Enfield then turns to the “high modernist” legibility famously critiqued by Scott in Seeing Like A State. He notes that

Critiques of high-modernist legibility are not critiques of legibility per se, but of the methods of states as agents of large-scale social order. … The problem is the supplanting of old, functionally evolved legibility regimes with hastily arranged, cartoonishly simple, and inflexibly quantitative new ones. (45)

[Though it is not in fact the hastiness, cartoonishness, or inflexible quantitativeness of such imposed legibility regimes that are central to Scott’s critique, it is rather that legibility regimes with these qualities can nevertheless better serve the State’s interests than locally developed and situated regimes, and so will often be adopted.] E argues further:

High-modernist legibility is not fundamentally different from any dynamic coordination device that sets terms for members of a social group who would wish to understand, influence, and align with each other. Whether it is enabling or constraining depends on who uses it and how.

He follows this with an interesting discussion of semiotic interception, in which signs are “intercepted” or [rearticulated/reterritorialized] to have means other than intended; an example is a king who is tricked into lowering his head on entrance through a low doorway, and thus “bowing” to the owner of the house.

The ever-present possibility of semiotic interception means that, to be agentive, people must anticipate and imagine potential secondary readings of their actions, some with significant consequences. Semiotic interception occurs when we are read in ways we did not foresee or intend. This ignorance of one’s own legibility is a de-agentivising force. It creates conditions for flow piracy in the domain of social action, a key factor in the exertion of political power. (46)

["Flow piracy" is a great term, apparently borrowed from hydraulics? which is unfortunately not returned to or fleshed out, though "pirates" are mentioned again later.]

Two phenomena linked to semiotic interception are preference capture, “when legibility thematizes and exploits an established preference,” and preference installation, “when legibility creates and imposes a new preference.”

The concept of semiotic interception is then expanded on with an account of how witchcraft accusations are used by the relatively powerful to take advantage of the relatively powerless, e.g., by local landowners to seize the property of a widow, by [articulating] an accident or sickness as a sign of witchcraft. Enfield primarily emphasizes how semiotic interception is made use of by the powerful; the question of course arises, isn’t it also used by those with less power, to resist, challenge, or redirect the powerful? It would be interesting to see this explored in greater depth. Enfield’s own examples include the trickster fooling the king, and people under surveillance fooling the police, specifically through semiotic interception.

Turning back to Scott, he takes issue with a passage in which Scott had argued that cadastral maps served the purposes of outsiders, not locals, because locals already “know” whose land is whose:

But if it were true that “everyone knows” whose land is whose, there would be no land disputes at the village level. Of course there are such disputes and they are all too often resolved in favor of the powerful. (48)

We would like to think that no idyllic “meadow by the river” would be sullied by such disputes. But without the publicly warrantable accountability that certain forms of legibility can offer, we are at the mercy of the locally powerful: landowners, resource-holders, lords, big men, et cetera. In these contexts, the words “everybody knows who holds the meadow by the river” are the words of a pirate, gangster, or corrupt village chief. Societal structurelessness may seem ideal when juxtaposed against the excesses of an overbearing, malevolent state with its half-empty glass of tyrannical legibility. But structurelessness is also “a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.” [quoting Freeman, 1972]

This is a great and valid point, and even opens up some great further potential avenues for exploration (e.g. written constitutions and laws as legibility regimes, in order to make state power and process more transparent/contestable, a la Hammurabi, etc.). But first there seem to be some conceptual mashings-together which need to be cleaned up. First off, it is not clear that for Scott the opposite of State-imposed legibility is some complete lack of legibility; iirc there is a point where he describes complex urban street systems as “legible” to their inhabitants, though not to outsiders. Showing that achieved or learned legibility is not just State-imposed but an aspect of communication in all societies is a great point and a contribution, but it is needlessly limited by being posed as a rebuttal to Scott, who seems likely to have agreed. Second, “structurelessness” here is Freeman’s word, not Scott’s, and she is criticizing informality, not horizontality, per se (cf. Cohen, 2021, 12-13). Scott is not arguing for informality, against formality; he is arguing against centralizing systems of power-through-legibility which in turn leads him to posit the frequent inferiority of such systems in serving the needs of local people, compared to local and traditional systems. Those local systems can be formal or informal, and Scott frequently makes note of the fact that they are not necessarily lacking in exploitation and inequality—they simply will tend to be less exploitative and unequal than State-imposed systems. (For example, Scott’s “everybody knows who holds the meadow by the river,” evokes some locally legible agreement or understanding, a “publicly warrantable accountability,” which would not necessarily exclude formal mechanisms for maintaining and enforcing this understanding (I am thinking of the Andean villagers in Rappaport 1990); the fact that someone “holds” the meadow means that someone else is excluded from using it, so we are not talking about an idealized “structureless” commune of some sort). The general lesson that the “weapons of the weak” can often be the weapons of the strong is an important one, and it would be good to see it explored through Enfield’s concepts at greater length, but a polemical stance unhelpfully simplifies what is necessarily a nuanced subject.

Cohen, Yves (2021): “Horizontality in the 2010s: Social Movements, Collective Activities, Social Fabric, and Conviviality”, Mecila Working Paper Series, No. 40, São Paulo: The Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America, http://dx.doi.org/10.46877/ cohen.2021.40

Freeman, Jo (1972) “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” Berkeley Journal of Sociology. 17: 154-64.

Rappaport, Joanna (1990) The Politics of Memory: Native historical interpretation in the Columbian Andes. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Scott, James C. (1998) Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

Writing and Identity, Chapter 1

Roz Ivanič (1998) Writing and Identity: The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Philadelphia.

Summary of Chapter 1: Introduction

Ivanič introduces herself and her reasons for writing this book, which will be about the “social struggles in which the self is implicated through the act of writing” (2); as she nicely summarizes her thesis:

Writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped possibilities for self-hood, playing their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs, and interests which they embody. (32)

She will explore this topic through case studies involving “mature students” entering higher education over the age of 25; she argues that the particular challenges faced by such students in constructing an academic identity provide “crucial moments in discourse” (5) which reveal the workings of identity construction through [articulation], more generally. Much of this introduction is a brief review of the various terminologies that have been used to discuss identity, self, “persona,” etc. in various disciplines; the key points of which will be returned to in more depth in future chapters. Taking a departure from Goffman’s Forms of Talk she delineates four subjects she will be focusing on: 1) the autobiographical self; 2) the discoursal self; 3) self as author; and 4) possibilities for self-hood.

The first, autobiographical self, is “the identity which people bring with them to any act of writing, shaped as it is by their prior social and discoursal history” (24); this involves also interpretation or the representation of their past, to themselves. This is Goffman’s “writer-as-performer.” The autobiographical self is not necessarily conscious, nor often clearly available from the text itself. (I am reminded of an introduction to Plutarch’s Lives which I was recently reading, in which the author scours Plutarch’s writings for any biographical information, and has to admit that the few elements that could be scraped together might well be fictive.) Her research questions in regard to the autobiographical self are (25):

a. What aspects of people’s lives might have led them to write in the way that they do?

b. How has their access to discourses and associated positionings been socially enabled or constrained?

c. More generally, how does autobiographical identity shape writing?

The second, discoursal self is “the impression – often multiple, sometimes contradictory – which they consciously or unconsciously conveys of themself in a particular written text,” that is, “constructed through the discourse characteristics of a text. This is Goffman’s “writer-as-character.” Her research questions on this self are (25-6):

a. What are the discourse characteristics of particular pieces of writing?

b. What are the social and ideological consequences of these characteristics for the writers’ identities?

c. What characteristics of the social interaction surrounding these texts led the writers to position themselves in these ways?

d. More generally, what processes are involved in the construction of a discoursal self, and what influences shape discoursal identities?

The third, self as author, regards the writer’s development of an authorial voice, not to mention of “authoritativeness,” particularly in the case of academic writing. In the case of Ivanič’s mature students [or for my purposes, non-academic autoethnographers], she notes that “the writer’s life-history may or may not have generated ideas to express, and may or may not have engendered in the writer enough of a sense of self-worth to write with authority, to establish an authorial presence” (26). [Thus there is an intersectionality to the development of authorial voice, of the confidence to feel that you are the one to write about this in this way]. Her research questions here (27):

a. How do people establish authority for the context of their writing?

b. To what extent do they present themselves or others as authoritative?

To these three aspects of writer identity is appended the fourth subject, which is “possibilities for self-hood in the socio-cultural and institutional context,” in other words, what sorts of identities, positions, etc. are culturally available for writers to adopt or adapt. She discusses the term “subject position,” but prefers the term “positionings” to emphasize that this is a process; though at the same time she does not want to present “a rather cosy, over-optimistic picture of unlimited alternatives” (28), and so will use both “position” and “positioning,” depending on which aspect of [the conduct of conduct] she wishes to emphasize. She lists the following research questions on this subject (29):

a. What possibilities for self-hood, in terms of relations of power, interests, values, and beliefs are inscribed in the practices, genres, and discourses which are supported by particular socio-cultural and institutional contexts?

b. What are the patterns of privileging among available possibilities for self-hood?

c. In what ways are possibilities for self-hood and patterns of privileging among them changing over time?

Besides Goffman, she references Foucault’s technologies of the self; a glance at the bibliography suggests key interlocutors will be Fairclough, Bakhtin, and Halliday, among others.

A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 8

Summary of Chapter 8: 1874: Three Novellas, or “What Happened?”

In this brief chapter, D&G use their idiosyncratic definition of “novella” to explore the concept of lines of rigid segmentation, supple segmentarity, and (in particular) lines of flight. The image at the beginning is from a Buster Brown cartoon, the complete version of which is here. I haven’t found any explanation of the date, “1874.” [Update: according to Brent Adkins, this is the publication date of Barbey d'Aurevilly's Diaboliques, mentioned on page 194.]

They begin with their apparently quite original temporal distinction between novella, tale, and novel. Novellas look back over the past and ask, “What happened?” Tales are progressive, beginning at the beginning and proceeding forward, keeping readers wondering, “What is going to happen?” The novel, for its part, “integrates elements of the novella and the tale into the variation of its perpetual living present (duration)” (192). [Necessarily a reference to the Bergsonian concept.] Characters in the novella enact postures which are like folds, but the tale plays out attitudes or positions that are unfoldings. “The links of the novella are: What happened? (the modality or expression), Secrecy (the form), Body Posture (the content)” (194).

They discuss three novellas, by Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pierrette Fleutiaux. In each case these involve relations between 1) a molar, macropolitical “rigid line of segmentarity” (195), 2) a micropolitical “line of molecular or supple segmentation, the segments are which are like quanta of deterritorialization” (196); and 3) lines of flight. These correspond to territorialization/stratification, relative deterritorialization, and absolute deterritorialization; rigid segmentation invokes relations between units of a Couple, while supple segmentation those between Doubles. Most of the discussion of the novellas illustrates how these three kinds of lines interact and are not to be judged too simply; the first kind are not dead, but involve life just as much as the others; the line of flight does not necessarily lead to escape but could “bounce off the wall” and lead to a black hole.

In short, there is a line of flight, which is already complex because it has singularities, and there [is] a customary or molar line with segments; and between the two (?), there is a molecular line with quanta that cause it to tip to one side or the other. (203)

They discuss the work on lines of Fernand Deligny (a sometime colleague of Guattari) in relation to schizoanalysis, then delineate four “problems” which arise regarding the three types of lines. First, the particular character of each line (which is not to be taken too simplistically, nor is the clear distinction between each to be assumed to be necessarily clear); second, the respective importance of the lines: rigid segmentation is not necessarily first, nor is the line of flight necessarily last, nor first; though the supple segmentarity does exist between the two, flipping to one side or the other. Third, there is a mutual immanence of the three kinds of lines, and fourth, there are dangers specific to each line, including the line of flight (as mentioned above).

Part of the main point is that we (both as individuals and as groups) are traversed and composed of lines (202), which means much more than written lines, but all kinds of lines. They end with a discussion of written or spoken lines (drawn out of Fitzgerald’s autobiographical Crack-up) that links to the related theme of [articulation]:

When one person says to another, love the taste of whiskey on my lips like I love the gleam of madness in your eyes, what lines are they in the process of composing, or, on the contrary, making incompossable? (206)