Deleuze and Guattari argue that the capitalist system captures and channels people's creativity into the dominant territorialities of the system (Guattari 2016: 99). In this sense, lines of flight constitute ways of breaking through capitalism's control and normalisation, enabling people to escape the status quo not by going against it, but rather by moving away from it. In drawing experimental lines of flight, people generate new connections and open up multiplicities through ruptures that produce deterritorialised possibilities. To illustrate this, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 3—25) contrast the image of the tree with that of the rhizome. Trees constitute deeply rooted territories, with roots that grow in particular directions, as well as branches and leaves that flourish towards sunlight. Rhizomes, in turn, are deterritorialised: they have no beginning or end and develop in any direction, assuming forms that are neither fixed nor well established. Any point of a rhizome can connect to something else, whereas trees and roots fix an order and establish a struc- ture. Like rhizomes, lines of flight open up for multiple, open-ended creative trajectories—yet, if they become goal-oriented or structured, their flows are captured and they become territorialised again.
For Martine and Daniel, Esperanto acted as an open-ended escape route. Perhaps learning Esperanto would not have helped them to live in another country or improved their prospects on the job market. Never- theless, it opened up possibilities that contributed to rupturing with their previous lifestyle and that brought about unforeseen changes.
Yet, as with any line of flight, Esperanto can only address a finite number among multiple dimensions available (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9). As discussed in Chapter 4, the Esperanto-related multiplicities at stake relate to an enhanced appreciation of (inter)national diversity, which includes opportunities to travel abroad and learn more about the world from one's contact with fellow Esperantists from different national and linguistic backgrounds. Hence, insofar as Esperanto opens up for Martine and Daniel to engage with a given multiplicity, it also flattens the multiplicities to be addressed and restricts them to those concerning (inter)national diversity.
The couple repeatedly stressed that Esperanto 'enabled them' to meet certain people and do certain things otherwise. Juxtaposing their use of the verb to enable with Bruno Latour's remarks on the transitive form of the expression making do (2005: 216—217) can be of use for our anal- ysis. Latour comments on making do as in 'X making Y do Z'—which, in this case, relates to Esperanto making this couple travel and make friends the way they do. This is not simply a matter of causing or doing some- thing, but of providing an input to the actors involved, making room for them to act and impelling their action. In enabling them to travel in ways they would possibly not do otherwise, Esperanto also pushed part of their lifestyle change towards communicating internationally and travelling beyond Europe.
In many ways, Esperanto ended up making them do more than they had originally thought. At first, they were seeking an alternative lifestyle and became unambitiously interested in learning the language. Later, Esperanto provided them with lines of flight: as they became increas- ingly involved with it, the events they attended and Esperantist friends they made impelled them to turn travelling and meeting locals abroad into life priorities. Delving into Esperantujo, the couple—who used to spend their family holidays in Alsace with Martine's family—came to value internationality more than before. After mobilising their Esperanto networks to visit several countries, their latest trips were to attend the 2017 International Youth Congress, in Togo, and the 2018 Universal Congress of Esperanto, in Portugal.
Martine's and Daniel's process of becoming (Biehl and Locke 2010) Esperantists also involved an open-ended process of working their selves.
Through the Esperantist connections they established, the language made them engage with the world differently. Hence, Esperanto 'makes people do' in the sense of adding something to their initial drive to act; something that potentially operates changes in the lives of those who speak it. Learning and experiencing the world at present are conveyed in the couple's narrative as imperatives. Additionally, the contacts they established through Esperanto enabled them to keep in their lives in that small town some of the diversity and unpredictability of their previous life in Paris through the frequent possibility of having enriching inter- national, multicultural encounters with new people. When participating in meetings at the association Esperanto-Vendee, the couple were not longing for a future in which everyone would ideally speak the language. Likewise, they did not try to ensure the intergenerational continuity of Esperantujo in the long term through teaching the language to their children. Instead of being concerned about the language's making do— meaning getting by or surviving, in its intransitive sense—they were more interested in the transitive form of making do, read in terms of potentiality and open-ended multiplicities.
'Thanks to Esperanto', what seemed, at first, simply an interesting intellectual game of language learning became a wider engagement with international travelling. Over time, in a feedback loop derived from their Esperantist contacts and friends, this couple came to adopt a specific conception of individual, that is, of a cosmopolitan—a citizen of the world. As such, by refusing the label 'tourists', they regularly made themselves at home when abroad through their belonging to Esperan- tujo, thanks to which they mingled with locals who were simultaneously fellow Esperantists and national Others.
8.2 Doing Things Differently: Esperanto as a Powerful Alternative
In line with Martine's and Daniel's pursuit of an open-ended alternative lifestyle through Esperanto, Roberto Garvra (2015: 115) reminds us that 'people searching for meaning and authenticity not in a distant heaven, but right now and here' have historically been well represented among
Esperantists. As Gama's study illustrates—and as my ethnographic data corroborates—spiritualists, theosophists, vegetarians, vegans and LGBT+ are numerous in Esperantujo. In addition to these, others are drawn to Esperanto through their quest for alternatives of other kinds. This is the case of Idris.
Idris is Tunisian—and this is the trait that seemed to be most commonly used by people to describe him. A 43-year-old computer scientist living in Paris, he had been an active Esperantist for five years when we first met, in 2016. His mindset and the way he articulated his ideas quickly made him one of my key interlocutors, as well as a close friend during fieldwork.
Idris was born in a city close to Paris but, when he was five years old, his family moved back to Tunisia. After being raised speaking French and Arabic in a Tunisian mid-sized city, he decided to follow his Tunisian cousins path and moved to Ukraine for his undergraduate degree in Computer Science. On arrival, since he could speak neither Ukrainian nor Russian, he enrolled in a year-long Russian course offered by his university before commencing his degree. Even though his degree would be in Russian, he ended up having to learn both languages since his everyday life was to be in Ukrainian. Moving to Ukraine made him aware of obstacles in communication, which would be essential for shaping some of his further interests in life.