<<TRANSMATHOME

II          Imagination

Imagination is not a faculty of the ‘I think’, constrained to schematize on its behalf; like judgement, it is annexed to reason or understanding, in recognition of the particular interests of reason involved, but cannot be defined in terms of either. It is in between, but not produced by the poles it relates, or reducible to them. When imagination is unhinged from law and rule, and synthesis is not bound in a relation with identity, it becomes passive, passionate: this bears on the arbitrary freedom described in chapter one, since the passions, for Kant, involve the abolition of freedom, and the de-restriction of desire from principles of reason. Thus, whilst arbitrary freedom provided a space through which to choose against Law, it was only in the context of the network of faculties as constituted by Kant. The interzone does not remain open, however;  the moment was passing and transitory, the door opens and passing through it dissolves its conditions.

Imagination ‘belongs to sensibility’[245], only to sensibility, the conditions of which ‘carry with them their own differences’[246]; not the difference between subjective and objective elements, which sets the separation of sensation in subjective - pleasure and pain, and objective - sensibility as the forms of a priori intuition, but indeterminate quantities of infinity not accounted for by reason, not contained by its standard unit of chaos, which do not substantiate a soul, but a ‘multiplicité de fusion qui déborde effectivement toute opposition de l’un et du multiple (fusional multiplicity that effectively goes beyond any opposition between the one and the multiple)’.[247]  When imagination is annexed to understanding,  operating at middle range and contained by the generalizations of conceptual cognition,  its productive capacities are constrained by the condition that anything  it generates is reproducible. It becomes a labourer on the assembly line of knowledge, making things which could as well have been made by another, under different empirical circumstances. When annexed to reason, its generative capacities are necessarily understood as impotent in relation to the supersensible dominion of reason. In relation to sensibility, however,  imagination is neither under rule nor is there a standard according to which it may be judged as inadequate. It is a positive intensive distance from zero, the pure and empty form of time.

The subjective and objective division of sensibility, as has been remarked, are functions of understanding, not of imagination, just as the productive and reproduction relations of imagination are functions of recognition, not of intensities; when understood immanently,  imagination has neither image nor schema, destiny nor vocation, limit or condition, outside its relation with sensibility. Sensibility is not split into subjective and objective elements, but becomes a surface, a plane of consistency composed through the descriptions of imagination, populations of intensities, infinities of different orders, local absolutes without standard. Intuition is singular, as has been seen, and it is in relation to singularities that Deleuze understands imagination, as the process through which an idea is actualized, becoming concrete. It draws difference, contracting a point, a singularity, not as a unit, but as a complex articulation, which does not cancel difference but covers it with more difference, extracting the elements of speed from the differences it contracts and releasing them onto the surface of time, like spores from a pod..

In a sense, imagination might be said to be always sublime; it is intensive, objectively indeterminate in relation to identity, infinite and without empirical comparison, but nonetheless differentiated, patterned. A process with no relation to identity, it becomes divorced from the idea of production. But it is more accurate to say there is no longer any sense to the sublime (and it does have sense for Kant, as a cultural item), because without understanding to set extensive limits on synthesis, or reason to impose intensive penalities and feelings of respect for the law on imagination, convincing persons of their soul, the conditions of the feelings of negative pleasure and pain characteristic of the sublime are no longer operative. ‘Moral law...by thwarting all our inclinations, must produce a feeling which can be called pain’ [248] and pain can be connected with ‘all presentations in us, no matter whether their object is merely sensible or instead wholly intellectual’ [249]. Different qualities emerge, however, from an imagination not pressed by religious or moral ideals, nor rationalized from a position of safety through the superior magnitudes monopolized by supersensible reason, becoming divorced utterly from the edification of nature into a cultural property.

‘[C]omment se prolongent les continuums d’intensité? dans quel order les séries de transformations se font-elles? quels sont ces enchaînements alogiques qui se font toujours au milieu, et par lesquels le plan se construit morceau par morceau suivant un order fractionnaire croissant ou décroissant? Le plan est comme une enfilade de portes. Et les règles concrètes de construction du plan ne valent que pour autant qu’elles exercent un rôle sélectif.

(How are the continuums of intensity extended? What is the order of the transformational series? What are these alogical linkages always effected in the middle, through which the plane is constructed piece by piece in ascending or descending fractional order? The plane is like a row of doors. And the concrete rules for the construction of the plane obtain to the extent that they exercise a selective role)’.[250]

These questions always have an answer for Kant. In the end, all the doors lead to the same ends, to the standardized infinity of reason, because there is no longer imagination, only a soul, no longer a body, only an organism with personality, no longer time, only immortality, no real patterns, only a schema borrowed from an idea of reason. Imagination and time do not, for Kant distribute a surface, but describe a  corridor for the delivery of intensities to reason. This is why the sublime appears ejaculatory: an accumulation of heterogeneous force vectors constrained to be, whole, at the end, channelled along a single route. The critical path is ‘the only one that has remained unexplored’, Kant writes.[251] But Kant mistakes its nature and its intellect with mans’  existence and desire, and wraps the route around in a circle, forming nothing, as the ground from which nothing escapes. Through the doors, relations fly outside the terms related, outside the set which contains them, past One and the totality of being.

***

In the Kantian sublime, imagination ‘strains to treat nature as a schema’ for Ideas.[252] That is, it attempts to produce a material determination of time which realizes the indeterminate object of the Idea, making the standard infinite real. It is necessarily the case that it can only fail in this task, however, since to succeed would suggest that reason itself was reproducible, and that the infinite could be externalized as a perceivable quantity; this is not a possibility of aesthetics, only of Law. To Deleuze’s comment that the abyss exists only to be filled,  must be added the rider: but only by moral practices. Filling the abyss is legitimate only under the condition of Law.  This is why Kant is so careful to insist that it is not nature itself that is sublime, and why nature is limited to the function of mirroring the unregulated discord of the faculties. There is always, for Kant, a relation of symmetry between nature and the relations amongst faculties: in the case of understanding, which gives the law to the relations of faculties in cognition, nature mirrors this relation by appearing lawful; in the case of reason, there is no law to the relation amongst the faculties - their accord has to be produced, and so nature reflects this, appearing indeterminate, overwhelming, fearful. Were imagination able to schematize ideas in nature,  it would mean that the soul itself appeared in nature, or god did, or freedom. But this would render faith irrational, the soul  material, and freedom  a natural cause, undermining  the theoretical operations of reason and allowing ideas a constitutive rather than merely regulative rôle. Again, this is legitimate only in the context of practical reason..

In the sublime, a ‘rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object’ checks the breath and threatens the vital forces, producing pain.[253] But this stammering and stuttering of intensities only resolves into the quality of respect associated with the sublime when imagination is qualified as inadequate; where there is no standard set, no image according to which the infinite is measured and no unit which contains it as an interior form, the stuttering and stammering does not resolve inwardly, into the interiority of reason, but outwardly,  as the pure exteriority of the war machine, of another justice, another space-time, another origin, simultaneously making and passing through a door, an arbitrary freedom which is unrepeatable, unreproducible, image-free. The place of safety  which assures the proper resolve of the conflict in the sublime is the Person, the consummate cultured man of State, rather than a physical location (though it is that too, since it is only men, for Kant, who are capable of the sublime). The cultured man has nothing to fear from the sublime, since culture is erected on the interiorization of its unregulated forces and then turns these forces against nature,  in the specific form under which the State understands force - that is, in terms of violence.   But from the blind play of imagination consequent on the sensible affection of a body emerges a persistence of passion, an intensive unit of production positively differentiated from the zero-dimensionality of time, an opening, a field of openings, a holey space. At this juncture there is no sense any more in psychologizing force with the term imagination.

Deleuze is not a philosopher of enthusiasm, of affects accompanied by the idea of the good, nor, in any simple terms, is his philosophy aesthetics-based. The circuitous manner in which his deductions operate obviate the distinctions which have isolated science from art, history from nature,  industry from nature and nature from society, and his theory of synthesis is not concerned simply with formulating a science of  human perception, as Kant defines aesthetics in the first Critique It is not, in Irigaray’s words, a specular economy and nor can it be charted on the axis of impotence and power.  Deleuze takes the machinery of  the sublime - the oscillation of forces, the chaos of an unregulated network of faculties,  the indeterminacy of  nature - but instead of consolidating these within culture and according to the ends of reason, allows it to function like a electrical charge, a shock which communicates itself through all the faculties. So instead of the sublime being a momentary discharge which does not effect changes in the formations of common sense and good sense, it is a disturbance which travels through the faculties, in between, operating by relays, a weapon of thought rather than a tool of culture, which catches its breath at the thresholds of breathlessness, rather than sinking back into contemplation of its own magnificence.

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