The Geo-logic of Immanence: Anselm Kiefer’s Erdzeitalter

Abstract

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the earth as a relationship between the flows of a plane of consistency, on the hand, and processes of geological strata formation, on the other. Anselm Kiefer’s, Die Erdzeitalter, is a 17-foot high sculpture shaped from a seemingly random pile of unfinished canvases and random objects that range from dried sunflowers to books made of lead. Seen through the lenses of Deleuze and Guattari’s geo-logics of immanence, Kiefer’s installation appears as a project of territoriality – i.e., a living being’s campaign to establish rhythms and coordinate flows within its environmental milieu.