ABSTRACT
Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding-place, every word also a mask.
To imagine is to begin the process that transforms reality. bell hooks3
Migration is a one way trip. There is no ‘home’ to go back to. Stuart Hall4
The imaginary landscape of an inquiry is not without value, even if it is without rigor. It restores what was earlier called ‘popular culture’, but it does so in order to transform what was represented as the matrix-force of history into a mobile infinity of tactics. It thus keeps before our eyes the structure of a social imagination in which the problem constantly takes different forms and begins anew. It also wards off the effects of an analysis which necessarily grasps these practices only on the margins of a technical apparatus, at the point where they alter or defeat its instruments. It is the study itself which is marginal with respect to the phenomena studied. The landscape that represents these phenomena in an imaginary mode thus has an overall corrective and therapeutic value in resisting their reduction by a lateral examination. It at least assures their presence as ghosts. This return to another scene thus reminds us of the relation between
the experience of these practices and what remains of them in analysis. It is evidence, evidence which can be fantastic and not scientific, of the disproportion between everyday tactics and a strategic elucidation. Of all the things everyone does, how much gets written down? Between the two, the image, the phantom of the expert but mute body, preserves the difference.
