Geology of Morals, Migratory Flows, and Warmth of Other Suns in an Art Museum

• In Event: 21st Century Inquiry After Methodology

Abstract

Purposes: Purposes of this paper are to demonstrate a double articulation of content and expression using “concept as method” (Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017, p. 643; c.f., Colebrook, 2017), specifically by a post-qualitative application of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987, 1991/1994, 1975/1986) concepts to an art museum exhibition about migration.

Perspectives: During the past decade, philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari and their readings of Nietzsche, Spinoza, Foucault, and others, have inspired new areas of inquiry in education (e.g., by the session authors), and more generally in science, philosophy, and art, whose principal aim is to produce affects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994). Their philosophies, art, and affects are used in the present paper, alongside scientific fragments.

Modes of inquiry: Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) onto-epistemology drives their concept formations, such as in the concept “Geology of Morals” (p. 39) which is based upon structured, layered strata (e.g., of institutional orders in governments, religions, schools, etc.), and their various fault lines (e.g., of cracks, breaks, ruptures, and leakages). Deleuze and Guattari’s onto-epistemology is predicated in these various lines and on key notions of pre-personal intensities and sensations, affective flows, desiring in landscapes, all of which provide grounds and analyses for the current paper. In this vein, expressions herein are based in and of art (e.g., drawings by the author, museum pieces) and inspired by minor modes excavated from lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1975/1986) book about the writer Franz Kafka.

Data sources, evidence: In this paper, the content from which the expression is drawn is taken from a major museum exhibition about “The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement” arranged in an emblematic art museum in Washington DC, and from the accompanying bodies, human and otherwise, that transverse the museum exhibition and surrounding spaces. Included in the paper are bodies of art from gallery installations, video, paintings, documentary images, printed words (e.g., museum labels, Wilkerson, 2010) and oral texts (e.g., of visitors, artists, and docents), which explore real and imagined geographies about affective movements, refugees, and migration, such as those of paintings from Jacob Lawrence’s (1941) Migration Series, as well as works of contemporary international artists.

Results: So too does the paper enter into migratory series with other ones of this session by creative “experimentation in contact with the real” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 12) as well as the imagined—prime intersectional territories of the arts. Moreover, it shows tensions among past and present institutional practices and migratory flows. These expressive actions, content, and territories are closely aligned with AERA conference themes pertaining to education policy and various stakeholders.

Author

• Jonathan Eakle, George Washington University