The imagination is defined here as a contractile power: like a sensitive plate, it retains one case when the other appears. It contracts cases, elements, agitations or homogeneous instants and grounds these in an internal qualitative impression endowed with a certain weight. When A appears, we expect B with a force corresponding to the qualitative impression of all the contracted ABs. This is by no means a memory, nor indeed an operation of the understanding: contraction is not a matter of reflection. Properly speaking, it forms a synthesis of time. [...] In any case, this synthesis must be given a name: passive synthesis. [...]

The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation, and whether we can learn, form behaviour and form ourselves other than through contemplation.

Habit draws something new from repetition -- namely, difference (in the first instance understood as generality). In essence, habit is contraction. [...] [C]ontraction [...] refers to the fusion of successive tick-tocks [i.e., AB] in a contemplative soul. Passive synthesis is of [this] kind: it constitutes our habit of living, our expectation that 'it' will continue, that one of the two elements will appear after the other, thereby assuring the perpetuation of our case. [...]

-- from Difference & Repetition, Gilles Deleuze, p. 70-1, 73-4.

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[P]erceptual syntheses refer back to organic syntheses which are like the sensibility of the senses; they refer back to a primary sensibility that we are. We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air [...]. Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations. [...]

What we call wheat is a contraction of earth and humidity, and this contraction is both a contemplation and the auto-satisfaction of that contemplation. By its existence alone, the lily of the field sings the glory of the heavens, the goddesses and gods -- in other words, the elements that it contemplates in contracting. [...]

Moreover, in order to integrate actions within a more complex action, the primary actions must in turn play the role of elements of repetition within a 'case', but always in relation to a contemplative soul adjacent to the subject of the compound action. Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of our 'self' only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says 'me'. These contemplative souls must be assigned even to the rat in the labyrinth and to each muscle of the rat. Given that contemplation never appears at any moment during the action -- since it is always hidden, and since it 'does' nothing [...] -- it is easy to forget it and to interpret the entire process of excitation and reaction without any reference to repetition [...].

-- from Difference & Repetition, Gilles Deleuze, p. 73, 75-6.

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