ORIGINAL PAPER

Sensible Atoms: A Techno-aesthetic Approachto Representation

Sacha Loeve

Received: 17 June 2011 /Accepted: 26 June 2011 /Published online: 20 July 2011# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract This essay argues that nano-imageswould be best understood with an aestheticalapproach rather than with an epistemologicalcritique. For this aim, I propose a ‘techno-aesthet-ical’ approach: an enquiry into the way instrumentsand machines transform the logic of the sensibleitself and not just the way by which it representssomething else. Unlike critical epistemology, whichremains self-evidently grounded on a representation-alist philosophy, the approach developed herepresents the advantage of providing a clear-cutdistinction between image-as-representation and oth-er modes of existence of images, such as the one of‘imaginaction’ that I draw from a comparisonbetween far-field and near-field microscopies. Oncethis regime of imaginaction is distinguished fromrepresentation, I focus on nanotechnological per-cepts and argue that they follow a transmodal logic.I then draw the implications of this enquiry in termsof a new sensible condition that changes the way wethink of non-living objects. Finally, I conclude that iftechno-aesthetics dares to posit and articulate sensi-bility beyond the privileged sphere of subject/objectrelationships, it simultaneously engages us to consider

the political character of our responsibilities towardsthe design of nano-engineered sensorial spaces.

Keywords Aesthetics . Baumgarten . Bergson .

Deleuze . Nanotechnology. Near-field microscopy.

Philosophy of scientific instruments . Techno-aesthetics .Whitehead

Introduction

We cannot see or feel or hear the single atoms.Our hypotheses with regard to them differwidely from the immediate findings of our grosssense organs and cannot be put to the test ofdirect inspection. (…) If it were not so, if wewere organisms so sensitive that a single atom,or even a few atoms, could make a perceptibleimpression on our senses—Heavens, what wouldlife be like! To stress one point: an organism ofthat kind would most certainly not be capable ofdeveloping the kind of orderly thought which,after passing through a long sequence of earlierstages, ultimately results in forming, among manyother ideas, the idea of an atom.

Erwin Schrödinger, What is life? The PhysicalAspect of the Living Cell ([60]: 8–9)

These days, seeing atoms has become surprisinglycommon. While atomic landscapes and molecularmachines are almost part of our familiar world, thisquote from Schrödinger reminds us how challengingit is to make sense of this situation.

Nanoethics (2011) 5:203–222DOI 10.1007/s11569-011-0124-0

S. Loeve (*)Centre d’Etudes des Techniques,des Connaissances et des Pratiques (CETCOPRA),Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne,17 rue de la Sorbonne,Paris, cedex 05 75231, Francee-mail: loevesacha@yahoo.fr

The troublesome status of nano-images has beenwitnessed by an intense amount of cross-disciplinaryscholarship. Despite the wide diversity of approachesregarding the various meanings of nano-images, the fieldhas mostly been structured by an epistemological critiqueof these images. Yet this approach has led to privilegingone prevalent way of conceiving the relationshipsbetween ‘imaging’ and ‘imagining’ over others: The lessepistemic credit is given to ‘imaging’ (as referring to theproduction of images from nanotechnology as a milieu ofinstrumentation and nanoscale objects), the more theartistic, rhetorical, fictional or ideological ‘imagining’function of nano-images is emphasized—and vice-versa.Either the alleged cognitive function of nano-images isundermined in favour of their imaginative function; orthe evocative power of these images is submitted to anepistemological critique, denouncing the strategies ofmake-believe that play on likeness with commonperception. Critical epistemology leads to the conclusionthat a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) image doesnot really represent what it pretends to represent. Itshould therefore be considered as a ‘heuristic imagining’or as an ‘extended metaphor’, but not as an image, thatis, ‘a genuine and realistic representation of what isreally there’ [54]. With nano-images, everything happensas if, when questioned in the name of truth, they alwaysanswer by lying in some way.

The main reason for this puzzling situation is a lack ofphilosophical questioning over the meaning of represen-tation and its becoming in nanotechnological practices.The epistemological critique of nano-images takes forgranted that imaging must be a means to faithfullyrepresent nature, and that other things should bereferred to as ‘imaginings’ that serve a variety of non-epistemic ends (promotional, metaphorical, political,ideological, etc.). Actually, the real concern of criticalepistemology is a normative one: it is to safeguard acertain image of science and of its authority as anactivity that must remain guided by a theoretical idealof faithfully representing nature rather than by sometechnoscientific stances on redesigning our life-world.1

The epistemological critic of nano-images is moved bythe apprehension than one loses all definition of what a‘good science’ is. And the risk, some argue, is one of ageneral distrust of science by the public.

I do not deny the importance of these matters. But Iwant to take another direction regarding them: First,claiming that faithful representation of nature is no longerthe main epistemic value of imaging practices innanotechnology does not ipso facto disqualify theirepistemic value.2 It may redefine it. Then, acknowledg-ing that faithful representation of nature is no longer theexclusive business of scientific practice does not endorsea disqualification of the notion of representation itself.Rather, it may reinforce the notion of representation on apolitical level, by allowing our various partnerships withthings, objects, materials, machines, and other non-human beings to be politically represented [40].

Moreover, the claim that nano-images do notrepresent what they pretend to because they cannotpossibly show how a nanoscale object is ‘really’ like,takes for granted the old metaphysical distinctionbetween primary and secondary qualities (i.e.: essentialproperties of matter as opposed to their macroscopicappearance). There is an ontological background that isimplicitly taken as self-evident here. Indeed, it has beenstressed that since nanoscale objects and structures aresituated below the limit of light diffraction,3 they shouldbe considered as not only imperceptible—i.e., unob-servable because they are too small or too remote—butas ontologically invisible [11]. At the nanoscale, we arethus supposedly entering the realm of 17th centuryphilosophers’ primary qualities, the way things are inthemselves, independently of us. For 17th centuryphilosophers, the primary qualities such as bulk, figure,number, quantity and motion were meant to be out ofreach for the senses, but nevertheless fully knowable byrepresentation, unlike the subjective secondary quali-ties such as taste, smell, colour, taste, odour, sounds,

1 By ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt), I refer to the Husserlian notionof our ways of being in the world as that which is self-evident,given, and where ‘living-together’ takes place, prior to anyscientific explanation of it.

2 Tore Birkeland and Roger Strand [9] argue that nano-imagesare to be considered as real ‘images’ provided that weunderstand ‘image’ in terms of information about someprocesses and properties that matter in certain contexts ratherthan in terms of representation. David Goodsell [29] makes asimilar argument. As to Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison[18], they claim that the visual culture of nanotech hasdiscarded the ideal of faithful representation in favour ofanother one, that they call ‘right manufacture’. But they donot tell whether or not the ideal of ‘right manufacture’ entailsepistemic values besides engineering and artistic values.3 The Rayleigh criterion states that two points can be separatedonly if the distance between them is greater than half of thewavelength used to resolve their position. The smallestwavelength of the visible light spectrum is 400 nm (violet).The resolution of standard optical microscopy is thus limited to200 nm.

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texture, and affective tones. Primary qualities cannotbe sensed, and are themselves insensible.4 They justare as they are. And if they ‘look like’ something, theythus look like their intellectual representations in themind, not like their sensible representations, which areideas of how we feel when affected by things, not ofhow things are.5 Of course, the philosophy of Kant hasexpelled primary qualities out of the knowable realm bydiscarding any possibility of intellectual intuition. Theway things are in themselves can only be thought, but notknown: the real stand irremediably far away, and the lawsof nature are nothing but the laws of phenomenalrepresentation. But now, by depicting nanoscale objectsas familiar and ‘before-the-hand’ objects with recogniz-able shapes, colours, foreground and background, nano-technology seems to mark the return of the knowledge ofprimary qualities… under the form of secondary ones!Undoubtedly, nano-images cause trouble in the categoriesof representational epistemology. Instead of denying anyepistemic robustness to these images in order to ‘save’representation, I want to ask if nanotechnological imagescould better be understood outside the conceptualframework of representation. The approach I proposetowards this aim is a techno-aesthetic one.

Towards a Techno-aesthetic Approach: AssemblingPhilosophical Tools

What I call ‘techno-aesthetics’ is an enquiry into theway instruments and machines transform the intrinsiclogic of the sensible and not just the way by which thesensible represents something else. It focuses on thefunctioning and production of images rather than onimages considered as fixed givens. Philosophicallyspeaking, techno-aesthetics is a pragmatic and provi-sory construction that takes as its point of departureAlexander Baumgarten’s notion of ‘aesthetics’ as‘sensible knowledge’ revisited with some philoso-phies that reject the distinction between primary and

secondary qualities and which consider the sensible asbeing rather than as a representation: Henri Bergson’sconceptualization of ‘images in themselves’ and‘perception into things’ [7], Gilbert Simondon’s owntechno-aesthetic attempt [62], Gilles Deleuze’s ‘logicof sensation’, and Alfred North Whitehead’s non-anthropocentric account of perception as ‘prehen-sion’, that is, any process by which an entity grasps,excludes, enlists the data, registers the presence of,responds to, or is affected by, another entity [69].

The outmoded and now quite unusual sense of‘aesthetics’ I chose to draw upon corresponds to themeaning of the term when coined by Baumgartenfrom the Greek αίσθησιs (sensation): ‘the science ofhow something is to be cognized sensitively’ ([4]:§115), or ‘the art of thinking analogous to reason (…),the science of sensual cognition’ (1954/1750: §1).Somewhere in the midst between Leibniz’s andWolff ’s rationalism and the nascent romanticism,Baumgarten’s aesthetics intended in the first place tobe a general theory of sensible knowledge and,thereafter, a set of considerations on fine arts [33].

Against Kant’s twofold reduction of aesthetics to 1.passive receptivity furnishing its materials to intellec-tual knowledge (in the Critique of Pure Reason) and2. contemplation of a disinterested subject (in theCritique of Judgment),6 it is another ‘romanticrationalist’, Deleuze, who once noticed how ‘It isstrange that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible)could be founded on what can be represented in thesensible’, since for him, ‘Aesthetics (…) truly

4 Note that Lucretius already stated that ‘even those things thatwe perceive to be sensible are produced (…) from insensibleelements’ ([44]: 860).5 This was Locke’s point: only ideas of primary qualities aretrue resemblances; ideas of secondary ones are not. Ideas ofprimary qualities resemble the real qualities in the bodies,whereas ideas of the secondary ones are only modifications ofthe primary qualities with regard to our own complexion ([42]:VIII §§ 9–21).

6 Baumgarten’s attempt was indeed promptly dismissed byKant as ‘the disappointed hope (…) of subjecting the criticismof the beautiful to principles or reason, and so of elevating itsrules to a science’ ([38]: 22n)—a rather harsh dismissalallowing the same Kant to hijack the term ‘aesthetic’ in orderto refer: 1. in the Critique of Pure Reason, to that whichremains in sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) when isolated and abstract-ed from all knowledge and conceptual representations, that is,the pure a priori form of empiric intuition or receptivity (i.e.Euclidian space and linear time), in which all phenomena aregiven and then submitted to the jurisdiction of understanding(Verstand); 2. in the Critique of Judgement [39], to the feelingsthat constitute judgments of beauty and the sublime, said to be‘aesthetic judgments’ as they are grounded neither in one’sobjective knowledge nor in one’s interest for the existence of anobject regarding its capacity to satisfy one’s needs or interests,but only on the sort of ‘superior’ and disinterested pleasure(and pain, concerning the sublime) provided by the purepresence of the object as a representation of the subject (andconcerning the sublime, by the feeling of its impossible fullpresence and partial withdrawal from representation).

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becomes an apodictic discipline, only when weapprehend directly in the sensible that which canonly be sensed, the very being of the sensible’ ([20]:56–57). Though Deleuze did not even mention hisname, Baumgarten awarded to the sensible an entirelogic of its own, a logic ‘of the sensible’—and not ofthe ‘empirical’, since the former, contrary to the latter,is not to be subjected to a transcendental double. ToBaumgarten, Aesthetica is not a derivative or aweakened form of intellectual knowledge, but ‘logic’syounger sister’ (Baumgarten [5]: §13): It has both agenetic relation to reason and a life of ‘her’ own.While intellectual knowledge proceeds distinctly,sensibility is the faculty of knowing confusedly. Butconfusion does not mean absence of clarity (i.e.,obscurity). Sensible knowledge has its own kind ofclarity: a confused clarity, whose degrees of perfectionare not to be situated on the same hierarchical scale asdistinct clarity.7 Artistic productions, then, are held byBaumgarten to constitute affirmations of ‘the con-fused’ elevated to its higher degree of clarity, on thescale of values proper to sensible cognition, andnothing like a translation of material things orintelligible ideas in the sensible. Despite the anthro-pocentric flavour of Baumgarten’s metaphysics, it canbe stressed that he construes the sensible as beingboth the subject and object of aesthetics: epistemo-logical, i.e., a way of knowing, and ontological, i.e.,that which is known, the ‘being of the sensible’, andnot the appearance of what is understood as ‘what canbe represented’.8

The main interest of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica forour enquiry concerning the logic of the nanotechno-logical sensible lies in the fact that he did not set apartthe epistemic— ‘imaging’—and the aesthetic—‘imag-ining’—, but attempted to unite them in a cognitiosensitiva that differs from a theory-driven kind ofknowledge.

It is Simondon who envisioned the foundation ofa techno-aesthetics in a letter to Jacques Derrida[62]. Though fascinating, the letter is mostly anaccumulation of examples: From Le Corbusier toelectricity, to the Mona Lisa’s smile, to the E V12Jaguar’s motor. However, Giovanni Carrozzini [15]has highlighted some salient features of the letterthat mark a shift from Simondon’s earlier consid-erations on the aesthetical dimensions of technicalobjects [61]. The focus of attention is no longer anaesthetic experience of technology or an aestheticdiscourse on technology, but a cognitio sensitiva thatproceeds from and within technological schemes,materials, and processes. The late techno-aestheticsof Simondon is thus nothing like a disinterestedcontemplation of the pure presence of things in asubject maintaining their functionality at respectfuldistance. ‘The techno-aesthetic feeling seems to be acategory more primitive than the aesthetic feelingalone where the technical aspect is only beingconsidered from a functionalist angle, which isimpoverishing’ ([62]; 18–19). Such a feeling rangesover a large spectrum where pure productivetechnical experience (making things) and purecontemplative experience (praising the presence ofsomething) are only limit-cases. It shows an ex-panded attention oriented towards intrinsic opera-tions and allures that do not fully appear. A‘technical analysis of La Joconde’ Simondon writes,would stress the absence of ‘the complete chain ofthe smile’ and decode ‘the mystery itself of the non-appearance’ ([62]; 11). Even if Simondon mighthave left his techno-aesthetics mostly unfinished, hedeveloped an interesting way to think of images in acourse of psychology on ‘imagination’ and ‘inven-tion’ [63]. To him images have a life of their ownand are only in part dependant on the subject. Hismethod is to follow the genesis of images step bystep by focusing on the way they ‘haunt’ subjects ordetach themselves and get embodied in objects of artor technology, along chains of transformation in-cluding animals’ tropisms, anticipations of actions,

7 Leibniz already distinguished between absence of clarity and lackof distinction. At the lowest level are the obscure and subconscious‘petites perceptions’, for which we have no concept and cannotrecognize any object. Then, apperception, which is clear andconscious, divides itself into confused and distinct. In clear butconfused apperception the object is associated with a multitude offeatures that we cannot list separately by recognising distinctive‘marks’ (notae) allowing the object’s properties to be distin-guished. Then, clear and distinct apperceptions, are in turninadequate (incomplete) or adequate (complete), as well assymbolic (mediated by artificial signs) or intuitive. The completeand intuitive ones constitute the intelligence of God. Baumgartenwas not so much calling for a rupture with all epistemologicalhierarchy as he was claiming that there is more than only one kindof epistemological hierarchy and that, consequently, the ‘clear andconfused’ kind of cognition is capable of an intrinsic kind ofperfection [45].8 As Leyla Haferkamp [32] notices, this even makes Baum-garten a compelling predecessor of Deleuze’s own transcen-dental empiricism as a ‘logic of sense’ aligned on a ‘logic ofsensation’.

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simulacra, toys, fineries, symbols, machines, etc. Hemethodically avoids situating image-production’sorigin in an already constituted subject in relationwith an already constituted objective world. He alsoexpresses a strong disagreement with Jean-PaulSartre’s conception of imagination as ‘unrealization’[58]. Instead, he analyses imagination in the light ofinvention realizing worldly things.

What will follow is an attempt to characterizenanotechnological images in terms of the intrinsiclogic of the sensible they display. Three main lines areinvestigated: I first argue that understanding theproduction of nano-images entails shifting from theconceptual and practical space of representation intoanother one, which I call ‘imaginaction’ together withBernard Stiegler.9 To substantiate this claim, I leanespecially on a comparison between far-field andnear-field microscopies. Once this regime of imagi-naction is distinguished from representation, I thenfocus on the logic of nanotechnological percepts: Icharacterize them as being essentially transmodal.Finally, I draw the implications of this enquiry interms of a new sensible condition that may reconfig-ure our relationships with non-living objects.

From Representation to Imaginaction

Though it may be right in a certain sense, it is notenough to claim that nanotechnologies consist in an

instrumentation that renders sensible the insensible.The originality of nanotechnologies is not that theyproduce representations of the invisible, but that whatthey produce are not representations.

Regime of Representation

Since the rise of modern science, our world has beenpopulated with visible representations of invisibleentities/properties/processes.

Consider the principle of inertia: it states that abody perseveres in its motion without being subjectedto force. Yet one cannot naturally observe it. Mereempiric observation rather leads one to the adversetheory of impetus. Inertia can nonetheless be repre-sented in equations (Newton’s first law) and berendered visible in experiments that ‘reconstruct’ itwith forces of opposite vectors neutralizing eachother. As Gaston Bachelard explains, on the basis ofeveryday use and observation, we have long believedthat in order to produce light one has to burnsomething, conflating in that light emission andcombustion [1]. Today, we distinguish between theelectromagnetic phenomenon ‘light’ and the chemicalreaction ‘combustion’. Invisible as it may be, thisdistinction has yet been rendered utterly visible sinceEdison invented the light bulb, for it produces light byavoiding a heated resistance to burn.

Representation goes along with a sense of distance.Distance, first of all, in scientific judgment, criticaldistance: a representation is about something that isnot the representation itself; it cannot be purelyequated to the objects it attempts to represent, whichcannot be considered as being fully given in therepresentation. As Wittgenstein limpidly put it,‘objects I can only name. Signs represent them. Ican only speak of them. I cannot assert them. Aproposition10 can only say how a thing is11 not what itis’ ([71]: 3.221). The real that is represented stands faraway. It is never perfectly knowable. Only indirectlycan it be known, reconstructed in a space of artificialsigns, which Alfred Nordmann calls ‘artful construc-tions of immediacy’ [50]. Such ‘immediacy’ is not afeature of the whole representation, but only of itspoints of contact with the distant real. The virtue of

9 The concept of ‘imaginaction’ stems from a common workwith Bernard Stiegler and Xavier Guchet, during a three-yearseminar on nanotechnology hosted by the Institute of Researchand Innovation at the Centre Pompidou of Paris (http://www.iri.centrepompidou.fr/evenement/nanotechnologies/). But the term‘imaginaction’ is Stiegler’s [64]. He coined it in a workshop on‘hyperminiaturization’ by referring to what I was calling‘imagotechnology’. In a narrow sense, I was using this termto denote the apparatuses that do not produce images of adistant object but that include the object in their functioning sothat the manipulation of the object and the production of animage are one and the same process. In a broader sense,‘imagotechnology’ refers to new ways of ‘imagining matter’ asit entails a particular ‘schematism’, a Kantian concept that willbe made use of and explicated below. One way to differentiatebetween the two might be to say that ‘imagotechnology’designates the material setup that produces an ‘imaginaction’.But I will avoid referring the former to the object and the laterto the subject, as what interests me is the interweaving of thetechnical and the conceptual.

10 i.e., a ‘logical picture’ of a ‘state of affairs’.11 i.e., what ‘is the case’ or what is not: a fact.

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representations is to construct an aboutness-relationthat clearly specifies the conditions of an immediateagreement with the mediated and distant reality. Arepresentative picture is ‘like a scale applied toreality’ ([71]: 2.1512) in which ‘only the end pointsof the graduating lines actually touch the object that isto be measured’ ([71]: 2.15121). Termed ‘co-ordina-tions’, they ‘are as it were the feelers of its12 elementswith which the picture touches reality’ ([71]: 3.1515).And these co-ordinations have nothing to do withresemblance. As Michel Foucault put it, representa-tion is ‘the dissociation of the sign and resemblance’([25]: 70). A defining character of representations isthat they require the construction of a scene wherenatural phenomena are re-enacted and even artificiallyproduced in such a way that representations are inprinciple distinguishable from the technical meansdisplayed to construct them. They re-present nature.The scientific explanation is to be inserted in thisspace between the objective scene of representationand the awareness of its constructive operations. It isbecause the real stands in the distance and is inprinciple separable from the instrumentation thatallows its objectification that the scientific discourseis able to criticise its own representations in the nameof faithfulness to the real.

It is important to understand that representationdoes not necessarily mean ‘realism’. For the realist,the representation is ‘true’ because the sign refersto a state of affairs that is independent from it (asthe primary qualities for the early moderns).13 Forthe anti-realist (or the empiricist) the representationis ‘nothing more than a representation’: it cannot begranted the mysterious power to go out of itself;14 itrefers to unobservable entities from which nothingcan be ontologically asserted in the end. Note thatfor the anti-realist, this does not preclude therepresentation to be convenient, or even true inde-pendently of what humans think and do, suffices itthat different types of measures are correlated withsufficient predictive power. The point is that such a

debate between realists and anti-realists can onlytake place in the regime of representation.15

In the regime of representation, the sensible iscleaved in two: first, it is what ‘presents itself ’,mainly a source of ‘epistemological obstacles’ whichhas to be criticized by an appropriate ‘psychoanalysisof objective knowledge’ [2]. Thereafter, a ‘sublimat-ed’ sensible is produced in the form of phenomenabringing into light that which never solely presentsitself. To Bachelard, the laws of Joule and the lightbulb met in the electrified world of Edison, which isakin to a ‘second nature’ over and above the merelyempirical one.

Apparatuses of Representation

The classical entities/processes/properties of modernscience and the nano-objects are both invisible andrendered visible to humans by means of instrumenta-tion. Moreover, it should be recalled that atoms werealready accessible to imaging before the spread ofnanotech (Fig. 1).

Accordingly, the problem is not thus that atoms arenow instrumentally accessible to imaging and imag-ining. It is the way by which atoms are now renderedsensible and the concept of this sensibility that differ.As Karen Barad points out, if ‘atoms aren’t what theyused to be’, this is not only because our philosophicalconceptions, scientific theories and representations of‘the’ atom have changed since Democritus, and then,since the mechanical age of physics, but ratherbecause ‘our practices of imaging and imagining andintra-acting with them have changed, and so have we’([3]: 353–354).

Now if we were to meditate about a functioningscheme of any far-field microscope, we would seethat they all bear some family resemblance: a certain

12 i.e., the picture.13 Wittgenstein avoided this difficulty by stating that the sign isalso a fact, and thus, that a relation of co-ordination is nothingmore than a relation between two facts.14 Bas van Fraasen is, by today, the most distinguishedadvocate of this tradition [66].

15 See the interesting attempt of Otávio Bueno. He develops anaccount of visual evidence as ‘the result of some partialmappings between the surface and the image of the sample,so that certain relations among the items in the sample arepreserved and represented in the image’. This partial matchingis of course inferred, and sometimes with the help of ‘thetheoretical image that was used as a guide in the elaboration ofthe experiment’, which is experienced as resembling theexperimental image ([13]: 134–135). Bueno argues that ‘bothrealists and empiricists can adopt the account’ ([13]: 137).However, he explicitly put that such a debate between realismand empiricism becomes merely a matter of more or less andnot a matter of interpretative clash.

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radiation (optical, electronic, ionic, X-ray, infrared,etc.) is emitted, focused through a set of lenses(whether optical or magnetic, as in the case ofelectronic microscopy), interacting with a sample, by

which it is transmitted and/or diffracted. Subsequent-ly, a trace of this interaction projects itself in the eye,on a screen, or is recorded by a detector. The result isnot necessarily an image that is meant to resemble the

Fig. 1 Imaging atoms and molecules before nanotechnology. aField ion microscope (FIM) image of tungsten atoms on theapex of a tungsten tip. Erwin W. Müller, [48]. The operationruns as follows: A sharp tip is placed under vacuum and cooleddown at cryogenic temperatures. An intense positive voltage isapplied to the tip. A small amount of inert gas (such as heliumor neon) is admitted in the vacuum chamber. The gas atomsmove toward the tip and strike it. Being positively charged, thetip atoms tends to take electrons from the gas atoms, leavingthem positively ionised. Once positively charged, the gas ionsare violently repelled from the tip and accelerated by theelectric field along a straight line toward a fluorescent screen.Each spot is the trace of a ion showing ‘where it comes from’, i.e.:from the immediate vicinity of the atom where it has been ionised.The gas used is called the ‘imaging gas’. b Field emissionmicroscope (FEM) image of copper phthalocyanine molecules

adsorbed on a tungsten tip. Erwin W. Müller, [48], from Joachim& Plévert ([37]: 103). The FEM is akin to a FIM withoutimaging gas: a strong field effect causes electrons to be expelledfrom the tip and projected on the screen, so as electrons canimage some of the fragments deposited on the tip by passingthrough them. c Transmission electron microscope (TEM) imageof a copper phthalocyanine crystal. H. Hashimoto, TokyoUniversity, 1974, from Joachim & Plévert ([37]: 105). dScanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) of a micro-crystallite of uranium. Scale bar: 20Å ([68]: 4). e STEM imagesof atomic clusters and single atoms (smaller spots) in Brownianmotion as shown by Albert V. Crewe (1927–2009) in TheInvisible World (1979), a National Geographic documentary. Notethat A. Crewe claims to having established the visibility of singleheavy atoms by STEM since 1970 [17]

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object; it can be a curve, a spectre, etc. In far-fieldtechniques, the notion of distance is somewhatmaterially present in the instrument. So is the notionof screening. One can find all sorts of filters and gridsin far-field microscopes. For instance, Low-energyelectron diffraction methods (LEED) display a set ofgrids blocking the inelastic electrons and letting theelastically scattered electrons pass through; oneobtains a pattern of diffraction on a fluorescent screen.One also uses a lot of mathematical mediations. Forinstance, the Fourier transform allows matching adiffraction pattern with the determination of thearrangement of atoms predicted by the theory, andthus to co-ordinate experience and theory by anisomorphic relation between their respective pointsof contact. The apparatus sorts out the data accordingto the plan of intelligibility chosen to study thephenomenon (a specific range of properties). Itperforms a test. The sense of the critical distance thatdefines the epistemic values of representation is alsomade possible by the distance that the technicalapparatus and the mathematical mediations introducebetween the representation and the real.

Apparatuses of Imaginaction

How different is this process in near-field microsco-py! With the scanning tunneling microscope (STM)and its innumerable avatars, ‘imaging’ is no more amatter of sending a radiation and gathering a tracefrom the distance. Instead, it is a dialogue that takesplace down at the level of the object and itsimmediate surroundings—including the atomic-levelpart of the instrument (the apex of the tip).

Imagine yourself using a STM: you go fetch theinformation in the near field, approach the object,touch it, feel it, brush it. Scanning at constant height,the STM records how its piezoelectric mechanismreacts, flinches and swishes, under the effect of a tinyshort-circuit between the sample and the tip, andtopographic images are generated from these data.Now, switch from ‘imaging mode’ (STM as aninstrument) to ‘manipulating mode’ at constantcurrent (STM as a tool): contact the object, kick it,pulse it, record its electronic ‘answer’. Now becreative: invent other manipulation modes (Fig. 2).Or invent a ‘semi-imaging’ mode: use the STM-xenon atom system as both a tool and instrument thatwill self-image its own operation (Fig. 3). Now use

not only the STM as a tool but the object too, forinstance, a naphthalene ‘Lander’ that acts as amovable template to ‘mould’ the surface (Fig. 4).Now switch from ‘tool-tool’ system to ‘tool-instru-ment’ system: Place the same molecular ‘Lander’ inelectronic contact with a step edge of the surface andmeasure the resistance of the molecular wire thereofobtained (Fig. 5). It is as if you were within thesample, on the surface, with the molecule as anAmpere-meter, except that one electrode is at thenanoscale and the other at the macroscale. Or else, asin the ‘manipulated atom image’ experiment, trap thecobalt atom under the electrostatic field of the tip tohave it part of the imaging system; now, scan the

Fig. 2 STM as a tool. Some STM manipulation modes.Courtesy of Andrew Mayne, Laboratoire de PhotophysiqueMoléculaire, CNRS, University of Paris-Sud

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sample and have a glimpse of ‘how it feels like’ to bea cobalt atom on a copper-(111) surface (Fig. 6).Could we not delocalize scientific instruments direct-ly at the nanoscale? This is part of Christian Joachim’sdream: ‘writing a new textbook in which each of theold devices is replaced by a single molecule, whichbecomes simultaneously the experimental apparatusand the subject of experiment’ ([37]: 59).

All this illustrates how nanotech plays with the linesbetween experimental system/technical object, technicalobject/epistemic thing [56], observing/manipulating,imaging/imagining, instrument/tool, instrument/object,knower/known, and even subject/object, that is, withall the fault-lines defining scientific representation. Ifthey are not dissolved, at least they are each timedisplaced, short-circuited and reconstructed in specificsetups, from which they re-emerge as movablepolarities. Even Hacking’s notion of ‘intervening’[31] would be far too shy here. For not only does theSTM interact with the sample (as all microscopessomehow do); nor does it only ‘interfere’: it ‘intra-acts’and ‘enacts the between’ ([3]: 359).

Regime of Imaginaction

Constructing a distant picture of nature—representing—is no more the problem. For probe microscopists,‘explaining’ the cognitive meaning of the image meansaccounting for the tightest interaction between the imageand the object. As Gimzewski relates, ‘traditionalscientists shunned this method because its intimacywas seen as a violation of objectivity and distance, agospel of 19th-century science and epistemology’ ([26]:260). It is still knowledge, but a knowledge that isinseparable even in principle from the technologicalapparatus that enable it. As Otávio Bueno notice, ascanning probe image is not only object-oriented, it isalso experience-oriented, ‘it is also about what it is liketo perceive DNA (…) from the perspective of anatomic force microscope’ ([13]: 134). Nanoscientistsare more interested in the singular way by which theobject interacts with the instrumental tool than in theuniversal laws that classically define an object quaobject of science. An STM image of an iron atom is notan instantiation of a general class of atoms: it is a reliefof an object situated in a particular environment,produced at the surface of the object with particularimaging settings, or produced as this surface, an‘object-image’ enacted in-between. In probe microsco-py, the image enacts and witnesses a tight communi-cation between scales that is already a possible actionon the object (even before the discovery of the STM’sability to manipulate single atoms). This is why I usethe term ‘imaginaction’ to refer to this regime ofimages.

Transmodality

Although the primacy of touch over sight has beenemphasized by STMers themselves [8, 27]16 it maybe more fitting to emphasize the transmodal charac-

Fig. 3 STM-object system in semi-imaging manipulation mode.Image of an individual xenon atom when pushed from left to rightof the frame during scanning along the Y direction. The grey scaleΔZ indicates the variation of the tip-surface distance [10]. Usually,imaging and manipulating with an STM are mutually exclusivemodes of operation, with the STM switching back and forthbetween imaging and manipulating. Here, the parameters havebeen chosen so that the STM does both imaging and manipu-lating at the same time. The STM-xenon atom system ‘self-images’ its own operation. The distance between representingand modifying has entirely collapsed

16 Note that there are others elements than probe microscopythat allow asserting the primacy of touch in the nano-realm:optical or magnetic tweezers used to grab proteins and measurethe forces of molecular motors [14]; nanotribology, the scienceof textures and friction at the nanoscale [6]; and molecularrecognition, that the chemist Jean-Marie Lehn describes asmolecules processing information by touching each other [41]in a way recalling Whitehead’s key concept of ‘prehension’[69].

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ter of nano-images. Transmodality here meanscapturing what is given in one sense to express itinto another: from sight to touch, from touch toaudition, etc. Or, ‘how to paint sound, or even ascream? And conversely, how to make colorsaudible?’ ([21]: 57).

Images Beyond Vision

Scanning a piece of mica with an AFM, you obtainthese very nice pictures (Fig. 7). But the raw data isnot the picture itself: it is the curve below, expressinghow the AFM ‘feels’ the mica in terms of variationsof amplitude of its cantilever’s vibrations duringlateral scans. The picture is just a visual displayobtained by a digital ‘collage’ of all the lateral curvesof scanning.

But who says that you have to set the system todeliver visual depictions? You can use a hapticinterface that will send a force feedback to your hand,which enables you to touch or to scratch the mica as

the tip’s apex of the cantilever does.17 You can usesound as well, turning your AFM into a kind ofphonograph, and listen to the mica.

Using the AFM to listen to cells has been reportedby Gimzewski and co-workers [28]—a practice thatthey have labelled ‘sonocytology’. It notably allowedthem to study the differentiations of cancer cells fromhealthy cells during the evolution of a tumour. Themethod has also led to a collaboration with the media

Fig. 4 STM-object system as a tool-tool system. Sequence ofnaphthalene ‘Lander’ molecules manipulated from a step edgeon a copper-(110) surface [57]. The arrows from a to d indicatemanipulation direction; the circles mark the modificationsinduced by the manipulated molecules on the surface step edge(tooth-like structures); e uses image optimization processing toemphasize the fact that the metallic nanostructures created bythe STM-Lander system follow an axis of the copper-(110)

surface crystalline orientation. This phenomenon is explainedas follows: During their displacement, the molecular ‘Landers’are trapping some copper adatoms lying on the surface undertheir polyaromatic backbone. Once they cross a step edge, themolecules drop these atoms on the downward terrace along thedirection of the copper rows. Researchers speak of ‘molecularmoulding’

17 The explanation for the alleged primacy of touch in thetransmodal sensible of nanotech is that touch, more than anyother sense, has a transmodal character. For Jean-Luc Nancy([49]: 17) ‘touch is nothing other than the touch of sensealtogether and of all the senses. It is their sensuality as such’.By touch, all the senses are substitutable to each other. This iswhy that there is no genre of art specifically dedicated to touch,remarks Nancy. Following Nancy, Derrida [24] undertakes toshow that behind the apparent privilege of sight in philosophyas the sense of distance and contemplation lays an oldhaptocentric tradition that awards privilege to touch in orderto dispute the legitimacy of any hierarchies between the senses.

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artist Victoria Vesna for the exhibition Cell Ghosts atSeoul in 2004 (Fig. 8).

The installation, where images of the visitor arecaptured, projected in particles, and reappearing lateras ghosts, also includes ambient sounds composed ofdata obtained by manipulating living cells. We canthus hear how a cell is ‘singing’ when it is gentlybrushed by the AFM, then manipulated, then sub-jected to chemical or temperature changes, and finally,succumbs to the deadly touch of the AFM.18 Ofcourse, cells do not sing, but they undergo specificchanges in their wall’s vibrations which could berendered with sound better than with images to

provide a real-time account of the rate of molecularevents inside the cell.

By means of this process, we understand thatdisplaying probe microscopy data in sound is neithermore nor less ‘artificial’ than making images fromspectrums’ lines—and therein that the meaning ofsuch images is not reducible to the depiction of theirvisual display, or to any of the features that aredisplayed in only one determined sensorial modality(audition, touch, etc.). Nano-images are not visualor haptic or audible, etc. They are essentiallytransmodal.

Transmodality Across Scales

Transmodality is not specific to the nanoscale. Atour scale, a lot of things can of course equally beseen, touched, tasted, heard, and smelled—but thisis multimodality, not transmodality. Transmodailityis nothing paranormal, but experienced everydaywhen one is reading aloud a written text, executinga musical partition or visualising musical tones andfrequencies. At least since the invention of writing,

Fig. 6 Feeling like a cobalt atom on a copper-(111) surface. A‘manipulated atom image’ [65]. What is shown here are notcopper atoms. It is the way a single cobalt atom trapped in theelectrostatic field of the STM tip explores a copper-(111)surface by random motion: large ‘bumps’ correspond to thezones explored by the cobalt atom when the tip is situatedabove a face-centered cubic site of the copper-(111) crystal,small ‘triangles’, to the zones explored by cobalt when the tip isabove a close packed site; dark zones are where the cobalt isnot likely to stay (above copper atoms). The overall image islike a cartography of a copper-(111) surface as ‘seen’ by acobalt atom—a rather rough cartography; listening to atomsreveals far more tenuous events occurring, as documented inStroscio and Celotta [65]

Fig. 5 STM-object system as a tool-instrument system. Here, asimilar naphthalene ‘Lander’ molecule is electrically connectedto a step edge. a is a schematic view, b the experimental STMimage, and c a simulation of the experiment showing standingwave patterns [47]. This simple system allows measuringsomething that could never have been measured otherwise:the electronic conductance of a single molecular wire connectedto a definite point of an atomic surface. For the narration of thisexperiment, see Joachim & Plévert ([37]: 59–61). Later on, thisexperimental system has evolved toward a slightly moresophisticated one: an Ampere-meter at the molecular scale

18 This illustrates a simple truth about touch: it the sense ofviolence in its most straightforward form. As Derrida [24]recalls, many taboos are expressed as a principle of ‘don’ttouch!’…or rather, ‘do not touch too much’—a half-permissivetaboo underlining the need to insert a minimal distance—sometact—in the relation between the feeler and the felt (a reversiblerelation since touch is also where self affection first stems: oneis always ‘touching-touched’ before becoming ‘seeing-visible’and ‘hearing-oneself-speak’). In order to allow the emergenceof awareness of the world and of the others, touch has to bemeasured.

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transmodality relies on the use of technical arte-facts. Nevertheless, at our scale, the way we usuallyrefer to things is mostly constrained by vision,perhaps because it allows pointing at things from adistance (‘look at this!’). Moreover, the assignmentof sensorial qualities (e.g. the redness) to sensorialmodalities (e.g. the sight) is therein mostly mono-modal. We do not know intuitively how the soundof the redness sounds like. If perceiving the sameobject through different modalities (i.e. multimo-dality) goes without saying, shifting from onemodality to another does not. Yet our machinesallow for it: These are indeed the transducers ofeveryday life, from tape heads to loudspeakers, topiezo-electric crystals (an essential component ofthe STM too), to antennas, to television’s cathoderay tubes, etc. Accordingly, the pertinent differenceis not between monomodality at our scale and trans-modality at the nanoscale. It is rather that transmodalityis less constrained by monomodality at the nanoscale: itshows itself unbounded, in its ‘free state’. It canthereafter be captured, transduced and displayed into amultiplicity of perceptual modalities with apparatusessuch as probe microscopes.

Note that I am not claiming that transmodalpercepts are real whereas monomodal perceptions

Fig. 7 Listening to the stones. Fast scanning of hydrofluoricacid-etched mica by AFM. Retrieved May 14, 2011 from http://www.asylumresearch.com/Gallery/Movies/Movie15.shtml

Fig. 8 Making cells sing. Cell Ghosts, James Gimzewski &Victoria Vesna 2004 (exhibition) [67]. For documentation on thepictures and their corresponding sounds, go to http://www.darksideofcell.info/composition.html

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would be mere illusion. Instead, I entirely followWhitehead in his rejection of the ‘bifurcation ofnature’ between primary and secondary qualities,when he writes that ‘the red glow of the sunsetshould be as much part of nature as are the moleculesand electric waves by which men of science wouldexplain the phenomenon. It is for natural philosophyto analyse how these various elements of nature areconnected’ ([70]: II). At our scale, transmodalpercepts are between monomodal percepts, andrequire machines to be experienced, operated andmade thinkable. At the nanoscale, transmodality is therule rather than the exception, as there are onlyinorganic and machine-like percepts at the bottom.

Schematism

If transmodality is the rule rather that the excep-tion in the nano-realm, it necessary goes withtechnological schemes and procedures governingthe way transmodal percepts are displayed intodetermined perceptive modalities. This set ofoperations can be referred to ‘schematism’ in thesense of the Kantian philosophy of knowledge—though in a way that Kant would never haveagreed with, since it is not about a ‘hidden art inthe depths of the human soul’ ([38]: 181), butabout a hidden art in the depths of the technicalapparatuses of nanotechnologies.

According to Kant, schematisation is the proce-dure of imagination allowing to sensibilize theconceptual and conceptualize the sensible. It is thatwhich allows one to draw a mathematical figure (atriangle) or to manipulate symbols (e.g., to make anaddition) and, conversely, to recognise a concept (atriangle) into a sensible intuition. A scheme is botha procedure of construction and a procedure ofrecognition. To Kant, any scheme has to be anabstract procedure, not a concrete image. For ifKantian schematism is performed by imagination,the faculty of producing and reproducing images, itis only under the jurisdiction of understanding, thefaculty of abstract concepts.

If nanotechnologies entail a schematism, it func-tions in a different way. Unlike Kant’s, it is less amediation between the sensible and the conceptual(with imagination bridging the two), than a mediationbetween the sensible and the sensible, mediated bythe computational. It can be putted by the following

sequence, highlighted by the semiologist PatrickPajon [52]:

‘Detect-Compute-Display’

An example can be provided by relating the wayprobe microscopists recognise a peculiar specimen,here a ‘molecular wheelbarrow’ (Fig. 9).

Figure 9a is a numerical collage of Δ-height curvesof a molecule adsorbed on a surface. STMers name

Fig. 9 Detecting-computing-displaying a molecular wheelbar-row. a Experimental STM image (‘blind image’); b ‘calculatedimage’; c comparison of experimental and calculated heightprofiles along the ‘wheel’ axis; d ‘visual-friendly image’(Molecular Mechanics chemical model); e ‘anticipated image’.Source: Nanoscience Group at CEMES-CNRS, Toulouse,France

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this image the ‘experimental image’. It is an imageobtained by detection, a ‘blind’ image. This firstimage is then computed into quantitative data bymeans of a program devised in the lab. The softwareuses several theories (quantum conductance throughan organic molecule and theoretical chemistry) andsemi-empiric methods of approximation to computethe experimental image according to other data(molecular orbitals coordinates, interaction potentialsof the surface, and imaging conditions). It allows forthe generation of a ‘calculated image’ (picture 9b).Then, the experimental and the calculated image arecompared (see the two Δ-height curves on picture9c). Sometimes, this comparison is done by themediation of a so-called ‘anticipated image’ thatshows how the experimental image would look likeaccording to parameters that are well-defined by thetheory.19 If they are assumed to be matching, thecalculated image will finally be displayed in a ‘visual-friendly’ way (here: a Molecular Mechanics chemicalmodel, picture 9d) allowing one to ‘visualize’ theinterpretation (here: the conformation taken by the‘molecular wheelbarrow’ when adsorbed on thesurface). As we saw it, the calculated image can alsopossibly be displayed in a haptic or a sonorousmodality. And it is also possible to look or listen tothe experimental picture directly, but it would be—and most of the time, it is—hard to interpret. Thecognitive interpretation of the image (‘what do wesee?’ ‘What do we hear?’) is generally occurring atthe level of the calculated image, because it is thelevel where the image gives grasp to the theory (notimmediately, but by the mediation of some associatedsoftwares to produce ‘anticipated images’). All this isa very mediated and complicated process. The reasonfor this may be that, paradoxically, the price to pay forthe shrinking of distance is a renouncement to the‘artful constructions of immediacy’ [50].

A New Sensible Condition

If one can talk about haptic or auditive as well asvisual images, and if nano-images are essentiallytransmodal, on what ground are we to assert that atransmodal percept is still an image, even before

being seen or transduced into an image-sound, animage-touch, image-vision, etc.? If there are onlymachine-like percepts at the bottom, are we stilltalking about the sensible? And what does it meanto perceive like a machine? Does it even meansomething?

Of course, these puzzling questions matter as far asone is willing to go beyond the bare fact that thesenano-images are given on a paper print or on acomputer screen, and ask what it means for oursensible condition that they do exist in the first place.

Perception into Things and Images in Themselves

These difficulties can be addressed by reading thephilosophical half a fiction staged by Bergson in thefirst chapter of Matter and Memory [7]. In order toinvestigate the relationship between matter andperception, he proposes a thought experiment whereone substitutes the perception impregnated with ourpast with a perception ‘confined to the present andabsorbed, to the exclusion of all else, in the task ofmoulding itself upon the external object’ ([7]: 24), a‘pure perception’, ‘impersonal’, deprived of anymemory and withdrawn from all individual contin-gencies. He warns the reader that one never encoun-ters such a ‘pure perception’, since our lived presentis always mingled with memories and orientedtowards our possible actions. From our actualperceptions, ‘we then retain only a few hints, thususing them merely as “signs” that recall to us formerimages’ ([7]: 24). Nevertheless, Bergson seeks toshow that ‘the individual accidents are merely graftedon to this impersonal perception, which is at the veryroot of our knowledge of things’ ([7]: 25). Oncememory is withdrawn, perception therefore appearsnot as a shadow above things, not as a mentalphotography,20 not as a representation, but as anoperation occurring into things. Perception is nei-ther a picture in our mind (‘Idealism’, referred toBerkeley), nor a secondary quality which does notlook like what it represents (‘Realism’, referred tothe ‘mechanical philosophers’ of the 17th century).Who indeed believes, like the idealist, says Bergson

19 It is this image that Bueno [13] calls ‘theoretical image’.

20 ‘The photography, if photography there be, is already taken,already developed in the very heart of things and at all thepoints of space’ ([7]: 31).

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that things might disappear when I do not perceivethem? Who believes, like the realist, that the realtable is distinct from the perceived table? Thethought experiment allows Bergson to claim thatthere is no difference of kind between perception andmatter, but only a difference of degree, whereas thereis a difference of kind between perception andmemory,21 the latter constituting the individuatedside of our apprehension of things. There is no otherchoice, he then argues, than to posit that the world iscomposed of images that exist ‘in themselves’ andnot ‘in us’, even without being perceived.22 Theseimages do not disappear once the perceiver is gone.They are less than what the realist calls a ‘thing’ andmore than what the idealist calls a ‘representation’.They are physical interactions existing in them-selves, each one constantly acting and reacting withall other images according to all the laws of nature(whether known or unknown).

‘By positing the material world we assume anaggregate of images, and moreover because it isimpossible to assume anything else. (…) Re-duce matter to atoms in motion (…) Condenseatoms into centres of force, dissolve them intovortices revolving in a continuous fluid (…):they are still images. It is true that an image maybe without being perceived; it may be presentwithout being represented; and the distancebetween these two terms, presence and repre-sentation, seems just to measure the intervalbetween matter itself and our conscious percep-tion of matter’ ([7]: 26–27).

What happens then between ‘presence’ and ‘rep-resentation’? In other words, if for images there is

merely a difference of degree, and not of kind,between being and being consciously perceived, thenwhat does the perception of the image add to theimage? Actually, in the perceived image, there is less,and not more, than in matter: Perception resultstherefore from a selection of images and not fromthe addition of a representational dimension. Here isthe trick: Bergson assumes some images to be slightlydifferent than others in that they insert some durationbetween their stimuli and their reaction on otherimages and that they can react sometimes differentlyto the same stimulus, whereas all the others interact ina fully deterministic and quasi-instantaneous way.These are ‘living bodies’, also termed ‘centres ofindetermination’. This is the only assumption Bergsonmakes: the existence of indetermination in somenodes of the universe (i.e. freedom in the weakestsense possible). These images do not perceive otherimages by representing, but by acting: ‘I call matterthe aggregate of images, and perception of matterthese same images referred to the eventual action ofone particular image, my body’ ([7]: 8). This latterimage-body is disturbing and tuning the field ofinteraction of the others in function of its possibleaction: The image-body acts on and reacts to asecond image; and as part of its action it responds tosome features of the second image while notregistering others. Our perception is then the mea-sure of our possible action: it results from thediscarding of what has no interest for our needsand our functions. Once perceived, the images arestill the same, only minus the qualities that areirrelevant to the perceiver’s action. Amongst allequally real scales of reality, what a perceiving agentdoes is to select a particular ‘frequency’ to interactwith some images at the scale where it needs to act,just as probe microscopes or other nano-sensor/actuator devices do. Perception is function of thescale where one undertakes to act.

Deprived of memories and without interiority,Bergson’s ‘subject’ of pure perception is really an‘imaginactor’ more than a producer of representa-tions. It acts on images and amidst images. Moreover,Bergson’s paradoxical appeal to commonsense phi-losophy in the midst of philosophical fiction relating asituation that no one can ever encounter as such, bearsundoubtedly some analogy with nanotechnology’saffordance of the familiar and the picturesque in themidst of the unfamiliar. Whether Bergson is right or

21 Which is directed controversially against classical empiri-cism (Hume, Berkeley, etc.), for which a memory is only asensation of less intensity.22 Simondon’s Imagination et invention [63] walks in thefootsteps of Bergson’s non-representational account of images:images do exist even before being perceived; they partake to acycle that begins before us. But whereas Bergson insists onactual perception as a subtraction, a cut into the plane ofimages, Simondon insists on invention as an antidote toproliferation: images require our potentials of artistic ortechnical invention in order to be guided into existence, alongthe lines of a common world. Otherwise, they may formautonomous worlds that catch people like dreams do. ToSimondon, invention is image-driven, but it also seems to bea way to expel images out of ourselves.

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wrong,23 the breach he has opened up (and promptlyshut down) in the representational philosophy ofperception might be the one where nanotechnologiesplunge us, with the restriction perhaps that the‘centres of perception and indetermination’ are nolonger limited to living bodies but extend to inorganicones as well—thereby rather an enlargement than arestriction of Bergson’s account of perception.

Inorganic Sensibility

The logic of the sensible deployed by nanotechnolo-gies is no more a phenomenological one, grounded onthe relation of man-and-the-world, and this is pre-cisely why a techno-aesthetic approach is needed. Formany phenomenological philosophies, the so-called‘nanoworld’ would probably not be a world at allsince there is no room in it for the inscription of thelived body and thus, no being-in-the-world. There isno flesh at the bottom.24

As Deleuze and Guattari put it when they dare thephenomenological concept of ‘flesh’ to constitute thebeing of the sensible and not just the ‘thermometer’involved in revealing it ([22]: 178–179),

‘This ground, this rhythmic unity if the senses,can be discovered only by going beyond theorganism. The phenomenological hypothesis isperhaps insufficient because it merely invokesthe lived body (…), a paltry thing in comparisonwith a more profound and almost unlivablePower [puissance]. We can seek the unity ofrhythm only at the point where rhythm itselfplunges into chaos, into the night, at the pointwhere the differences of level are perpetuallyand violently mixed’ ([21]: 44).

To Deleuze and Guattari, these processes areneither sensible nor straightforwardly thinkable bythemselves even if they might be encountered whenone gets trapped in what they name a ‘Drug

assemblage’: ‘a perceptive line of causality thatmakes it so that (1) the imperceptible is perceived;(2) perception is molecular; (3) desire directly investsthe perception and the perceived’ ([23]: 311). Toallow molecular processes to be experienced out of a‘Drug assemblage’ without falling into the abyss, oneneeds to get equipped with adequate instrumentationand sophistically elaborated materials.

So do nanotechnologies. Against transhumanists, itcan be stressed that nanotechnologies are not exactly‘enhancing’ the biological makeup—and herein thesensory performances—of the human. Instead, theystrive to render livable and habitable for humans, theunlivable inorganic depths of the sensible. Theyafford experimental access to a sensible that is notreducible to the modalities of the (post/trans/super)-human access to it. Like Deleuze’s account of theoperations of art as a matter of ‘capturing forces’ [21],the operations of nanotechnologies are a matter oftaking advantage of, playing with, amplifying andfiltering, the various sorts of processes (electronic,electrostatic, repulsive/attractive Van der Waals, mag-netic, optic, plasmonic, etc.) by which nano-objectsact, are acted upon, and interact. As suggested by the‘molecule-Ampere-meter’ and the ‘manipulated atomimage’ experiments, the ‘rendering sensible’ processtakes place both ‘vertically’ and ‘horizontaly’. To putit like Whitehead, it is about prehending nano-entitiesin a way analogous to the way they prehend eachother [69]—a way to access the way nano-objectsaccess their environment. As Nathan Brown [12]contends, nanotechnologies are challenging less thedifferences between physical, living, and humanbeings than they are challenging their respectiveaccess to the world and world-forming powers.Especially, they challenge the Heideggerian triparti-tion between the ‘worldless’ character of the physicalthing (the stone), the ‘poor in world’ character of theliving being (the lizard on the stone), and the ‘world-forming’ character of Dasein (man). For Brown, theworld-forming power termed by Heidegger ‘the open’is now attributable to inorganic objects as well, forthey display an inorganic sensibility to which we canpartly access. Nanotechnologies question the veryconfinement of the category of the ‘sensible’ insubject-object correlations where only the subjectivepole of the correlation is to be world-forming andsensible. In nanotechnologies, the object is no more amere correlate of the subject (Gegenstand) in a

23 For he himself distinguishes the thought experiment of pureand instantaneous perception from the ‘concrete and complexperception—that which is enlarged by memories and alwaysoffers a certain breadth of duration’ (Bergson [7]: 26). He willthen retrace his steps to correct what he himself declares to be‘excessive’ by bringing memory back in again.24 The late Merleau-Ponty grants flesh to be ‘the Sensible initself, this anonymity innate to Myself ’ (Merleau-Ponty [46]:139), ‘the formative medium of the object and the subject’(Merleau-Ponty [46]: 147).

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representation; it becomes, as Brown put it, ‘nothing-otherthan-object’.25 The ‘nothing-otherthan-object’means both the mode of existence of the physicalbeing as ‘not without access’ to itself and the world,and a threshold condition of ‘openness-towards’ thatmight pass through and between any being (non-living, living, human), and that humans can experi-ment or even become when ceasing to maintainrepresentational relationships with objects.

While we are becoming sensible to atoms, it is notonly our sensible condition that is affected but alsothe one of objects. Yet, thereafter, we are to compre-hend our own sensibility differently, by highlightingthe inorganic part of it. Indeed, if we are able to desirebeing the lizard basking in the sun, just as much canwe desire being the stone heated by sunlight. We donot need to project ourselves into the inorganic realmto make such a sensibility thinkable. It just has toarise to us. ‘It’s the same story for music when itelaborates a sonorous material to render audible thoseforces that are not audible in themselves. In music, it’sno longer a matter of an absolute ear but rather animpossible ear that can alight on someone, arisebriefly in someone’ [19].

Conclusions

What if the foremost transformative power of nano-technologies is neither scientific nor industrial, butrather aesthetical? This essay has engaged theaesthetical question of nanotech as a questionconcerning the sensible. Nanotechnologies can becharacterized by the arising of a new sensible beyondrepresentation. Unlike particle physics or astrophys-ics, they do not produce visible representations ofinvisible things. They are rather attempting at turning

an unlivable and transmodal ‘chaosmos’ into ahabitable ‘life-world’ where we would be able todiscern and to act on things in our usual perceptivemodalities—a crazy challenge, since there is no fleshat the bottom. The problem is not therefore thedisplacement of the divide between the visible andthe invisible, it is rather the way this divide is alteredfrom within, ‘enacted in between’ ([3]: 359) andreconfigured in terms of inhabiting, in an attempt tobring familiarity within the unfamiliar. Each nanotechrealization transforms space by inhabiting the kind ofmilieu where it succeeds (Nordmann [51]), and itsucceeds in a process that Simondon calls ‘concreti-zation’ [43, 61], that is, by turning some of theconstraints of its environment into an ‘associatedmilieu’, by determining which constraints matter andhow, by making sense of its environment.

If, as their promoters claim, nanotechnologiesreally are to revolutionize our everyday life regardingthe technologies we use and live with, then I arguethat this potential is not to be found in the endless listof incredibly useful applications that nanotechnolo-gies promise to deliver, but in the way they techno-aesthetically transform both our sensible conditionand the sensible condition of objects. Nanotechnolo-gies are not only a new way of rendering invisibleobjects sensible to humans, but a new way ofconstruing the being of the sensible—not only as asensibility to atoms (epistemological), but also as asensibility of atoms (ontological). Objects are no moremere correlates of a subject as in the relation ofrepresentation, where the subject is the only sensiblepole. Nanotechnologies render thinkable and affordexperimental access to a sensible that is infinitelydeeper than the modalities of its human access.Though ways of construing the sensible withoutresorting to the mirror games of representation hasbeen explored by certain philosophies—as the onesreferred to above—, it has never constituted the usualbusiness of a world-wide technology. Here we arenow.

Techno-aesthetics may help us to address issuesregarding the social use of nanotechnologies in termsof schematisation of transmodality, especially regard-ing future devices that would integrate sensory-motoraccess to nanoscale processes. Who indeed willchoose the perceptive modality in which such or suchimage-process will interfere with the gestures of use?Which kind of common space is to arise if it relies on

25 Following Graham Harman’s ‘object-oriented philosophy’[34, 35], Brown’s ‘nothing-otherthan-object’ also challengesanother Heideggerian dichotomy: between ‘thing’ and ‘object’.Heidegger was indeed praising the former—the jug or the oldbridge [36]—as unveiling the ontological structure of the worldand disqualifying the former as expressing modern science’sand metaphysics’ will to subject the world to categories ofrepresentation (substance/properties, matter/form, etc.). Nano-objects overcome this dichotomy: a nanomachine for example,is a technical object, but also a thing, since its mode ofexistence is not exhaustible to a conceptual set of representa-tions inherent to a specific corpus of science [30].

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a previous delimitation of perceptive modalities?Such issues could be addressed in terms of ‘distribu-tion of the sensible’, according to the term of JacquesRancière, who refers to ‘the system of self-evidentfacts of sense perception that simultaneously disclosesthe existence of something in common and thedelimitations that define the respective parts andpositions within it’ (Rancière [55]: 12). Indeed, byframing the modes of perception and enunciation of acommon nano-space with delimitations between whatis visible and invisible, tangible or intangible, sayableand unsayable, audible and inaudible, the nano-engineered perceptive spaces also tend towardsdistributing the roles: who will be granted thecompetences to determine which features of thenano-space should be rendered sensible and who willbe authorized to talk about it? These are social andpolitical questions.

If a techno-aesthetic approach is one that dares toposit and articulate sensibility beyond the privilegedsphere of subject/object relationships, it engages ussimultaneously to consider the political nature of ourresponsibilities towards the design of nano-engineered perceptive spaces. If nanotechnologiescannot succeed but by inhabiting and bringing somefamiliarity within the unfamiliar, the iconic strategiesthey use—as it is all about images—might also turnout to be counterproductive, inappropriate and aes-thetically impoverishing. Depicting atoms, moleculesand surfaces as familiar and picturesque objectssituated in a space that stands ready to be colonised,conceals the collapse of representation and maintainsinstead a poor relationship of adherence to the visual—arelationship to which nanotechnologies themselves canhelp us to get free of. Depicting the nanoworld as if itwas merely ‘ours’ is a manner of undermining the modeof existence of its inhabitants, a way of withdrawingfrom our relationship with nanotech the significance ofinterobjective relationships, and finally, a way to repressthe mutation of the sensible described here by attempt-ing to contain it in a parody of representation. Yet whenasked about ‘artists depictions’ they are fond of, veryoften, researchers answer that ‘it is just a representation’,i.e., the phenomena depicted are idealized, etc. Butprecisely these images are not representations since theyare using the same likeness and familiarity that hasalways been perceived as a threat against due represen-tations, that which should be maintained at distance byboth the epistemology and the apparatuses of represen-

tation. As Marc Pavlopoulos put it [53], these imagesare not lying because they do not represent what theyaim at, but because they seem to pretend that they arerepresentations. However, calling for a new detachmentwith regard to the aesthetic power of nano-imageswould be the worst strategy to endorse, as it would bethe best way to let this small world function unbe-knownst to us and reconfiguring our ‘life-world’without us.

This is where I believe that the practices of artistsand art critics might play a decisive role, a role thatscientific practices of nanotech are perhaps not able toplay. Indeed, what can be captured in the artisticrealizations concerned by nanotechnology are theways in which possible ‘distributions of the sensible’can be set up, given to experiment, and undone; theway in which a certain practice of transmodality cango against the instantaneous harnessing of attentionby the visual and the use of screens in order tolengthen and deepen perception, populate the inter-stices, ‘making strange’ [16, 59]. Artists—or rather,their productions—are also there to remind nano-facturers that, despite their Grand ambitions regardingthe design of our common ‘life-world’… they mightturn out to be bad artists.

Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to allwho have directly or indirectly contributed to the coming intoexistence of this essay: Catherine Allamel-Raffin, XavierBouju, Boo Chapple, Joël Chevrier, Christian Joachim, XavierGuchet, Andrew Mayne, Colin Milburn, Alfred Nordmann,Gritt Ruhland, and Bernard Stiegler.

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