Lines of Flight: Trajectories of Young Children Drawing

Figure 1.

Alex’s drawing.

Every drawing is a line of flight for a young child, an invention, a deviation, a surprise, an improvisation. They “begin anywhere;” their drawings unravel (Paul, 1978, p. 381), along circuitous routes, enacting dramas that lead to the filling of the page and the continuation of stories by other means. Stories evolve. A king stands within sight of a castle brandishing his sword, his footprints designating the path he has taken beyond its walls. A marauder is repelled; smiling, he falls to his death, while the knight who dealt the fatal blow grins sheepishly beside him. In the distance, something is happening in the castle tower: Escape or onslaught, evil or benign. Alex holds the drawing to be photographed, and recounts the story, embellishing as he goes, imagining an ongoing spectacle that continues to materialize long after the image on the drawing page is deemed complete.

Wood and Brown (2011) write: “A line of flight is essentially a movement of creativity, a practical act or a way of living that wards off or inhibits the formation of ‘centres’ and stable powers in favour of continuous variation and free action” (p. 517). Thinking of children’s making as the continuous generation of lines of flight allows us to see children’s art evolving in unpredictable ways, in tension with the assemblage of cultures—visual, material, popular, schooled, local, commercial, familial, institutional—in which they find themselves entangled at every moment, engaged in “a process [that] is always open to the possibility of a ‘line of flight’ that unsettles an emerging order through a new relationship of connections” (MacRae, 2011, p. 106).

The notion that children develop on predictable timetables demonstrates the omnipresence of what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “rigid segments” (2004, p. 237). Rigid segments are categories and constraints that divide and conquer. They are the boxes that we struggle to get outside: government regulation, developmental explanations, preconceptions and theoretical blinders that constantly attempt to regulate and normalize behavior. Alongside these rigid segments, intertwined in our experience, more supple segments also exist. Olsson (2009) identifies the postmodern concept of the competent child as a supple segment. She questions whether seeing the child as an active agent in his or her own life has become a new orthodoxy, rigidifying rapidly into a new way of governing and controlling the child, albeit by more subtle and apparently caring means. In either case, adult assumptions about children and childhood create a web of significance in which children are tossed about, as they move from home to school or preschool to playground and playgroup to Target and Toys “R” Us. Yet, amid the particular assemblages that young children inhabit, there are ever-present means of escaping such preconceptions. There is creative potential in lines of flight. As Olsson notes, these lines of flight “are the most interesting, because they imply the creation of something new. A line of flight runs like a zig-zag crack in between the other lines—and it is only these lines that, from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari, are capable of creating something new” (2009, p. 58).

Lines of flight are available everywhere, in every situation: Children may be particularly adept at identifying the creative potential in any situation, the opportunities to subvert, ignore, or improvise upon imposed constraints. Deleuze and Guattari make such claims for children, and level scorn at the low expectation that we adults inflict upon the young.

Adults can (and often do) construct situations in which lines of flight are contained, like snakes in a pressurized can. Think of joyless American classrooms in the era of No Child Left Behind, of art classrooms where children merely execute work envisioned by their teachers. Can we construct spaces where lines of flight are invited to erupt in the work of every child, in the spaces between children, and between children and adults and a curriculum that is always in the making? Are these spaces apt to be what Marjorie and Brent Wilson (2009) identify as “third drawing...