Intergalactic Encounters: Desire and the Political Immediacy of Children’s Drawing

Abstract

The author of this article creates a semblance between Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of a politics of desire and the four realities, as outlined by Brent and Marjorie Wilson. By making this theoretical move, the author advances the idea that children’s drawing unfolds from one moment to the next through the assemblages of desire that are most immediate to its scene of production. The four realities—as materialcompositions of desire—are exchanged and negotiated by those participating, the things and objects of which the scene is composed, the figuration of the scene itself, and the events and dramatizations that surface. As a result, the author argues that children’s drawing is an assemblage of desire that is always assembling on behalf of the immediacy of its political and material conditions. Drawing from case study data collected during the spring of 2011 at Penn State’s Saturday Art School, this theoretical essay leans curiously into those moments when the drawing of two children is leveraging and being leveraged in particular ways.