Striated & Smooth

The vast majority of the visible world is invisible to us. I'm not talking about things you might see through a microscope or light of different wavelengths: I'm talking about our ability to notice things.

In their book 'A Thousand Plateaus' Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari use the terms 'smooth' and 'striated' to refer to a fundamental distinction - one that affects almost every aspect of our lives:

Smooth spaces are ones without conceptual structure. If you are in the middle of desert, an ocean, a jungle, or pine forest the space is 'smooth': there are no paths or meaningful structures to speak of. Nothing to point you in a particular direction. Very little to react to. Just a muddle of nameless indistinct things. Of course if you know a bit about jungles or deserts you will contest this - this is because you are able to add meaning and structure to what you see. 

Contrast this with your experience of a busy city - almost everywhere you look is overlaid with meaning and significance, structure and direction: pavements and roads, walk/don't walk, entrances, elevators, benches and signs. Stuff that you have a distinct reaction to in other words.

It is not that there is literally more to see in a city than in a pine forest. But you might walk for an hour in a city and be able to describe dozens of things that you 'saw' whilst in a forest you might say 'all I saw was pine trees'.

Cities are heavily striated spaces: the visual field is overlaid with (affective) significance, and this enables us to 'see' it. Picture significance as rails carrying us through insignificance. In a city, there are so many rails you can barely see the insignificance beneath them. But actually it is still there: look closely at the point where the pavement meets the buildings - you will spy an entire universe of unnoticed debris. Insignificant stuff lurking all around you.

The two pictures above were taken from the same spot: ahead, striated space. To the right smooth space: a few paces into the dense forest and there is just pine forest in every direction. So we don't venture there - despite the fact that it makes up the vast percentage of the territory, we don't see it - instead we follow the paths.

Human thinking is precisely like this. Herds of people, following a narrow path through conceptual space. What lies beyond the path has become invisible. The path is all that there is. If you stray from the path you, too, risk becoming invisible.