pp. 82-86
Lived cartography never imitates. Its element is not the imitative “as if.” It is the inventive “thus .” “Thus” is “as if ” with a little something extra that exceeds all expectation. To make “as if ” reproduces a form. To do “thus” gives the form a singular twist. It brings self- surpassing to form,
not through projection but through a creatively catalytic gesturalesque. When a human child plays animal, it is easy to mistake what it is thinkingdoing for a human game of imitation, as if the child were trying to make its own form conform to the animal’s. It’s all so cute, and easily sentimentalized.
[...]
Think of a child playing the animal. It is certainly easy to sentimentalize the scene. But what if we take it seriously— that is, look to the aspects of it that are truly ludic in the most creative sense. Simondon writes that the child’s consciousness of the animal involves far more than the simple
recognition of its substantial form. One look at a tiger, however fleeting and incomplete, whether it be in the zoo or in a book or in a film or video, and presto! the child is tigerized. Transformation- in- place. The perception itself is a vital gesture. The child immediately sets about, not imitating the tiger’s substantial form as he saw it, but rather giving it life— giving it more life. The child plays the tiger in situations in which the child has never seen a tiger. More than that, it plays the tiger in situations no tiger has ever seen, in which no earthly tiger has ever set paw. The child immediately
launches itself into a movement of surpassing the given, remaining remarkably faithful to the theme of the tiger, not in its conventionality but from the angle of its processual potentiality.
Remaining processually faithful to a vital theme has nothing to do with reproducing it. On the contrary, it involves giving it a new interpretation, in the musical sense of performing a new variation on it. The child does not imitate the visible corporeal form of the tiger. It prolongs the tiger’s style of activity, transposed into the movements of the child’s own corporeality. What the child caught a glimpse of was the dynamism of the tiger, as a form of life . The child saw the tiger’s vitality affect: the potentially creative powers of life enveloped in the visible corporeal form. The tiger’s vitality affect passes through what a formal analysis might isolate as its corporeal form. But it never coincides with that visible form. The life’s powers that come to expression through the form’s deformations sweep the form up within their own supernormal dynamism, which moves through the given situation, toward others further down the line. This transsituational movement is in excess over the form. It is the very movement of the visually given form’s processual self- surpassing.
This is what the child saw— all of it, in a glimpse; all in a flash. Not just a generic animal shape: a singular vital movement sweepingly immanent to the visible form. What children see: the immanence of a life. Not “the” tiger: tigritude. Children do not just catch sight of a tiger form. They have
an intuitively aesthetic vision of the tigeresque as a dynamic form of life. It is this they transpose when they play animal. Not onto their own form but into their own vital movements. This is what Whitehead means when he says that a synonym for intuition is “envisagement” (Whitehead 1978,
33– 34).
There is no resemblance between the form of a tigeresquely self-performing child and the visible, corporeal form of a tiger. The child does not receive and reproduce a visible image of the tiger. Rather, tigritude visionarily animates the child’s bodying, in the direction of a differencing.
It is precisely this pro cess that is definitive of the image. There is no such thing as a passive image. There is no such thing as an image privately received in the interiority of a subject. All images are active, and their activity plays out situationally, which is to say relationally. The tigeresque roars
forth as the commanding form of this situation of play. It carries analog potential as opposed to conformal power. Analog potential is a power of integrally linked variation; of differential mutual inclusion. The child does not produce a conformal correspondence between its own corporeal form
and that of its tiger analogue. It enthusiastically lends its own corporeality to ludic in-forming by the commanding form of tigritude, under visionary deformation and variation.
The child’s ludic gestures envelop an elaborate enactive analysis of the givens of the situations in which a tiger might be found, extrapolating from the postures typical of the visible corporeal form, and launching them into the improvisational movement of a lived cartography that is one with its own activity. Under what circumstances does a tiger pounce? What possesses this cat to swim? To eat a child? To climb a tree? Wait: is a tiger’s - esqueness sufficiently feline to inspire it to climb? To be determined. To be invented. When does a tiger travel to other planets? What makes a tiger fl y? The child’s enactive analysis of tigritude does not start from visual forms grasped statically as postures. It departs from dynamic situations, extending the animal’s - esqueness beyond all known territory.
[...]
What child plays animal once? Playing animal is a serious vocation. The enthusiasm of the body in play moves from situation to situation, play to repeatedly varied replay. The serial variations on tigritude compose a lived cartography of tigeresque corporeality. All manner of dependencies on
the given, all manner of lived importance to which a tigeresque corporeality is susceptible, are surpassingly dramatized. All of the experienced affective compositions derive, by vital extrapolation, from the spectacle-spectator polarity of the primitive scene of animal perception that catalyzed the continuing activity. All of the variations on the affective complex experimented with were already
mutually included in embryonic dynamic form in the unicity of the perceptual gesture that launched the play series.
Across the serial variations, tigritude begins to escape. It begins to surpass given situations in which we might reasonably expect a tiger to find itself, and the modes of importance those situations present. The tensions of tigeresque corporeality in- forms the childlike corporeality in play. It
immanently animates it— and is animated by it in return. The replay series stretches out the tigeresque tensions , prolonging them into a transindividual tensor . The situational tensions put into play undergo an inventively deforming pressure that vectorizes them in the direction of the supernormal. Tigritude takes flight. The givens of the tigeresque situation, as conventionally known, are surpassed, following exploratory tensors extrapolating from the child’s enthusiasm of the body.
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In this section of the book, Brian is building the concept of the tigeresque. In fact, he is building the quality of esqueness and using the tiger connection to make it felt. Of the concepts I've encountered in the past few years, it's one that really stays with me - I feel its force. And part of the reason I feel it is that he makes such an effort to demonstrate, through the writing, how he is not speaking metaphorically (and, by extension, how the child is in no sense "imitating" the tiger, but rather becoming-tiger, and that this becoming-tiger is not about form but about affective force).
Let me break it down a bit:
p82: To make “as if ” reproduces a form. To do “thus” gives the form a singular twist. It brings self- surpassing to form, not through projection but through a creatively catalytic gesturalesque.
When engaging in animal play, the child does not generally seek to mirror a "real" animal. In fact, especially with young children, it will be an affront to them should you ask them, unknowingly, what they are (you've likely heard the frustrated sigh of the 3 year old telling you that they "obviously" are a racoon, a rat, a cat, a dog, a grandmother, a father, a house etc). So - not as if, but thus, this way, under these conditions, singularly so.
p. 83: The child immediately sets about, not imitating the tiger’s substantial form as he saw it, but rather giving it life— giving it more life. The child plays the tiger in situations in which the child has never seen a tiger. More than that, it plays the tiger in situations no tiger has ever seen, in which no earthly tiger has ever set paw. The child immediately launches itself into a movement of surpassing the given, remaining remarkably faithful to the theme of the tiger, not in its conventionality but from the angle of its processual potentiality.
What the child is doing here, following Ingold's vocabulary, is creating an intensive line that connect quality-of-tiger to quality-of-child. This is not a zero sum game: it produces more life, more-than child-life. Play allows the child to surpass the given (a given the child has not yet interiorized as its envelope, as adults tend to do) and embody "processual potentiality." The child is not "acting like a tiger" (metaphor), but becoming-tiger (concept).
p. 83: The child does not imitate the visible corporeal form of the tiger. It prolongs the tiger’s style of activity, transposed into the movements of the child’s own corporeality. What the child caught a glimpse of was the dynamism of the tiger, as a form of life . The child saw the tiger’s vitality affect: the potentially creative powers of life enveloped in the visible corporeal form. The tiger’s vitality affect passes through what a formal analysis might isolate as its corporeal form. But it never coincides with that visible form.
Style is what the child connects to: it connects to the operative quality of what makes the tiger more-than its form. What the child connects to, following Daniel Stern, is the vitality affect of a certain tiger-like quality.
Here you see the concept being built. This tiger-like quality is the tigeresque.
p. 84: The life’s powers that come to expression through the form’s deformations sweep the form up within their own supernormal dynamism, which moves through the given situation, toward others further down the line. This transsituational movement is in excess over the form. It is the very movement of the visually given form’s processual self- surpassing. This is what the child saw— all of it, in a glimpse; all in a flash. Not just a generic animal shape: a singular vital movement sweepingly immanent to the visible form. What children see: the immanence of a life. Not “the” tiger: tigritude. Children do not just catch sight of a tiger form. They have an intuitively aesthetic vision of the tigeresque as a dynamic form of life. It is this they transpose when they play animal. Not onto their own form but into their own vital movements. This is what Whitehead means when he says that a synonym for intuition is “envisagement” (Whitehead 1978,
33– 34).
The concept of the tigeresque begins to take form: esque-ness is: the more-than of form; the capacity to activate a transsituational movement; the quality of a flash that shifts the ground of an event; dynamic form.
And all this has a connection to play, a concept for which there is a necessity not to be in the model of the "as if" but in the momentum of "thus," of invention and creativity. [this is the thesis of the book]
p. 85: The enthusiasm of the body in play moves from situation to situation, play to repeatedly varied replay.
Play, and esqueness, are now linked to "the enthusiasm of the body," a quality of bodying that exceeds form. This is what Brian also calls, following the child-becoming-tiger, a certain "lived cartography of tigeresque corporeality."
And now that we have the concept, the felt-event of tigeresque, it becomes possible to have a better purchase both on what a body can do, and how play creates a certain bodying.
p. 86: Across the serial variations, tigritude begins to escape. It begins to surpass given situations in which we might reasonably expect a tiger to find itself, and the modes of importance those situations present. The tensions of tigeresque corporeality in- forms the childlike corporeality in play. It
immanently animates it— and is animated by it in return. The replay series stretches out the tigeresque tensions , prolonging them into a transindividual tensor . The situational tensions put into play undergo an inventively deforming pressure that vectorizes them in the direction of the supernormal. Tigritude takes flight. The givens of the tigeresque situation, as conventionally known, are surpassed, following exploratory tensors extrapolating from the child’s enthusiasm of the body.
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