Zooming and Two Immanences

Starting from criticism of concept of “zooming” (understood as and economical way of saving effort with the goal of determining non-evident facts and essences on the base of a map), the author interrogates the relation between zooming as a doubtful epistemological procedure and philosophical concepts with their economy. Bruno Latour presents a clear-cut instance of criticism of zooming: the latter is declared to be a visual effect, a user interface that covers the real working of knowledge up. But the analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s definition of philosophical concept reveals that questioning of zooming implies the tradition of transcendental criticism and, henceforth, the opposition between transcendence and immanence which can be read now as an economic one.

What if immanence were founded on the imperative of a fair effort, on the ban of any shortcut, and on the impossibility of mastering anything that is not present at hand? Nevertheless, this kind of anti-economical immanence can’t be articulated coherently, it needs, as Deleuze proved, an instance of “overflight” implying that immanence can hardly be articulated in an “immanent” way. Henceforth, there are two sorts of immanences, but both are not free from a dogmatic remnant. If it is the case, zooming plays a role of a mediator, relating immanence to itself, and so transcendence can be just a metaphor of immanence. At the end of the day, a minimal transcendence of a concept does not mean it is framed as a transcendental instance, so zooming is still a productive moment of any mapping.