nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

If the imaginary impregnates sensations, it’s not by way of a representationaldetermination, or of a symbolic determinism: forms cannot be prescriptiveof forces. The operation of visualisation, in fact, displaces the iconiccontent of the image towards its imagination, or towards its perceptive speculationand emulation.As Thompson notes: ‘In visual imaging or visualizing, we do not experiencemental pictures. Instead, we visualize an object or a scene by mentallyenacting or entertaining a possible perceptual experience of that objector scene.’ 33 Haptic images draw the anatomical imaginary towards enactiveimagination, in a movement that with Simondon we could characterise as a‘transductive dynamism’, that is a fundamental operation of phase-shift, inthis case a leap from cognition to affect.The cartography resulting from a certain distribution of qualities and differencesis reinvested in an exploration via the deployment of a sensorimotorlandscape, through an amplifying transfer: it is this excess of the imaginationover the imaginary that hinders the fixation onto a single field of references,because the amplification is the counter-effectuation of the map, accelerationof other series, swelling of virtual spatial and temporal dimensions.In this respect, the use of biological images is not metaphorical – if bymetaphor we mean a binary set of correspondences, from ‘nature’ to an ultimate,symbolical order. 34Maps, in this sense, are useful for localizing – as speculative and pragmatictools of a contingent, relative system of representation; but in BMC, more fundamentally,they trigger and fictionalise further images and sensations, eventuallyproducing new different cartographies, according to each person’s experience.Imagination, thus, is not a return to the image from which it departs: arepetition of the same – but a displacement or drift: repetition of the different.It is as if the faculties of thought and imagination, in ‘jumping over’ thelevel of the perceived and the perceivable, mobilise the imaginations and thecontemplations that we are. Hence Deleuze’s ‘protestation’:Perhaps the reason lies in the illusions of psychology, which made afetish of activity. Its unreasonable fear of introspection allowed it toobserve only that which moved. It asks how we can acquire habits inacting, but the entire theory of learning risks being misdirected so longas the prior question is not posed – namely, whether it is through actingthat we acquire habits… or whether, on the contrary, it is throughcontemplating? Psychology regards it as established that the self cannotcontemplate itself. This, however, is not the question.The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether134