Reading and writing a logic of sense with migratory flows in the warmth of other suns

Abstract

This piece is about reading, and what reading can do. It is written from a tangled complex of arts, philosophies, and literatures as it moves across land, with sea, and into air, through the content and expressions of an art museum exhibition about migrations of human and non-human bodies. The complex is serialized, broken apart, and pierced with art, as well as ideas developed by Gilles Deleuze through his readings of Lewis Carroll, among others—also read and pilfered alongside the current writing. A fragment of what follows is grounded; it is about earth, and lays out dimensions of reading, concepts of difference, and creativeness. Moving across land, and passing through art galleries, a second portion is of seas, drifts on waves, and into a third section comprised of air, art, and related arrangements.

Keywords:

• Reading
• Deleuze
• migration
• art
• creativity
• posthuman
• post-qualitative
• post-structural

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Appropriated from Carroll (1871).

2 The title of this section is a doubling of sorts and feeds off of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) chapter “10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)” Also, of ruins and ruined methods, see St. Pierre (2021).

3 Details are outside the current article’s scope; see Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987, pp. 276-278) on molecular movements and becomings.

4 Ripped from Phoebe Bridger’s (2021) I Know the End lyrics, read alongside this project.

5 See Deleuze (2001/2005).

6 c.f., Carroll, 1865, Chapter 3.

7 c.f., Borges, 1941/1962.

8 Of breaks,to be clear, these literary characters are not biographed or autographed, they are nobodies simply carrying along ideas of what reading can do.

9 For a detailed view of the exhibition, and by convention, see Phillips Collection (2019).

10 The poetic lines are from Wright’s (1945) book Black Boy, which were picked up and put to use by Wilkinson (2005) in her book title about the Great American Migration of Blacks from the South and in the Phillip Collection’s exhibition about global displacement.

11 See Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) “War Machine.”.

12 Of the dark precursor and creative processes, see Deleuze (1968/1994) “Repetition for Itself.”.

13 Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover, cited by Guattari, 1992/1995, Chaosmosis.

14 Ripped from Emily Dickenson (1861,1873/1999) and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) “1837: Of the Refrain.”.

15 This is a crucial line drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1975/1986) Kafka: “The line of escape is part of the machine. Inside or outside…The problem is not that of being free but of finding a way out, or even a way in, another side, a hallway, an adjacency (pp. 7-8).

16 See earlier Note 10; this machine is composed, in part, with a view camera.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

A. Jonathan Eakle

A. Jonathan Eakle is an Associate Professor at the George Washington University who studies the arts and (post)humanities while working within major art museums.