The Dynamism of Images

Andrea Soto Calderón

This course offers an analysis of the dynamism of images from a threefold approach. First, an initial elaboration of certain operations of the imagination that deal with material processes, particularly the capacity that intuition introduces in forming differential perception. Then progressing to consider the productivity that J. F. Lyotard’s reflections on simulacrum and phantasm can have in contemporary situations. And finally, we propose to move from phantasm to fantasy in order to consider the place that images can occupy in the creation of other fictional desires.

Session 1: Imagination and intuition (3 hours). With a presentation by philosophy researcher Lulu Tagua Martín on insurrectional living.

This session will focus on the genetic dynamism of the imagination and its respective capacity to break up a body schema in order to contend that the imagination is not only part of the anticipation that influences the behaviour of different actors in a community, but also constitutes the enabling conditions for these actions to take place. Our proposal is to argue that an intimate connection exists between imagination and intuition that helps to broaden the potential of images to articulate the consistency of said invention process. 

Session 2: Simulacrum and phantasm (3 hours). With an intervention by artist Lúcia Prancha on the deceleration of images

This session will briefly expand on Jean François Lyotard’s development of the notion of phantasm in his book Libidinal Economy (1974) in order to understand how the motor schema of plasticity operates against a chiaroscuro metabolic background that is needed to understand the complexity of our contemporary images. Libidinal economy refers to a way of organising the desire and affective energy of individuals that goes beyond the traditional structures of power and economic production. Libido in this case refers to a force that mobilises desires, passions and social forces. Rather than conceiving of libidinal energy simply as individual desire, Lyotard (influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis) suggests that societies develop “libidinal economies” that structure the flow and circulation of desire within broader systems of power. If we consider J. F. Lyotard’s analysis to mean that drive devices order energy flows by immobilising them, then the question is how to produce differentiating movements. Where mobilisation or acceleration is not necessarily understood as introducing greater speed, but as experimenting with new energy relations and combinations in order to articulate a different system of fluctuations.

Session 3: From phantasm to fantasy (3 hours)

This session intends to argue the close relationship maintained between image, change and fantasy as that which needs to be endowed with modes of envelopment in order to provide consistency to a differential perception that allows for different deployment in the space of appearance. Appearance and reality are of course not separate, although they are different, but each mode of existence needs to configure its ways of appearance and from these institute its specific reality. Intuition in this framework would contribute to the formation of a capacity different from the tendency that indicates the force of habit and would introduce another affective regime in order to condense an image different from the one that has saturated a specific sense.

Andrea Soto Calderón has a doctorate in Philosophy and is a professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has carried out research in Valparaíso, Barcelona, Lisbon and Paris. Her research focuses on the transformations of the aesthetic experience in contemporary culture, artistic research, the study of images and the media, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. She has written several academic articles, book chapters and texts for artists’ catalogues. Her publications include the books Le travail des images (The Work of Images) together with Jacques Rancière (Les presses du réel, 2019), La performatividad de las imágenes (The Performativity of Images, Metales Pesados, 2020), Imaginación material (Material Imagination, Metales Pesados, 2022), Imágenes que resisten. La genealogía como método crítico (Images That Resist. Genealogy as a Critical Method, La Virreina, 2023) and Indisciplinas de la mirada (Kikuyo, 2025).