Micropolitics of desire: participant self observation, critical autoethnography and the (re)turn to the baroque

Abstract

Participant self observation is a form of critical autoethnography developed as a means to theorise institutional identifications and which seeks to unravel the question posed by Gilles Deleuze, ‘why do we desire what oppresses us?’ PSO is located within a baroque framework drawing on the ontology of the fold which entails a rejection of linearity and the embrace of complexity; and the epistemology of the Wunderkammer, created through the collection and artful display of textual, visual and kinaesthetic ‘research objects’. The paper presents a selection of these research objects showing how the analytical handling of these produces the fleetingly glimpsed objects of desire as points of identification.