Mounting a starry sky: methodological posibilities with images in education research

Abstract

This article explores methodological possibilities when working with an image, since, as Foucault taught us, there is an unavoidable relationship of irreducibility from the image to the word, and vice versa. We aim to outline some methodological paths to think about an ethical pedagogy of looking at the image based on Foucault's archeo-genealogical theories. To do so, we argue for the methodological power of an archeology embedded in the knowledge of images. This genealogical exercise allows us to think about a multiplicity of meanings about and with images anchored in Georges Didi-Huberman’s concept of montage where images as singular stars, when placed next to each other, allow for drawings of constellations that produce new spaces for the creation of thought, breathing zones and possible learnings of resistance. Drawing from the analysis of the Atlas Mnemosyne by the German art historian Aby Warburg, we use the term montage as a genealogical movement that seeks to emphasize the infinite work in front of an image, an exercise that allows us to think differently about what we are and what that we can become. In this scintillating ballet, a montage tries to apprehend the surviving and anachronistic dance that is the very historicity of the event that is the image – appearances, destruction and rebirths, or rather, an archeology of knowledge of and about the image that imposes a double condition on the order of knowledge: the inexhaustibility of the image and its abysmality. In its inexhaustibility we refer to the exuberance of its appearance, the way it opens us up beyond what is already known. It its abysmality we refer to, the dimensions of the image that are made irreducible to the provisional nature of the act of looking, a not-knowing which is insurmountable to our gaze in the face of the survival that make the images pulsate like living beings.