Lines of Flight and Lines of Making

In Lines: A Brief History (2007), Ingold developed a typology of lines that cuts across writing, walking, making, and thinking. The distinction between lines of transport and lines of making is central. A line of transport connects two predetermined points and is valued for the arrival, not the journey. A line of making — also called a line of wayfaring — grows through a landscape; the maker does not know the destination in advance and discovers it through the process of movement. The distinction maps directly onto modes of creative production. Dylan's twenty pages of 'vomit' before Like a Rolling Stone were a line of making: a movement through emotional and linguistic landscape whose destination was unknown when the writing began. The compression from twenty pages to six minutes was closer to a line of transport — a clearing of path between known starting-point and glimpsed endpoint. Ingold's claim is that the