The Germ of Invention: The Image-System in Simondon

Gilbert Simondon, for his part, when he analyzes the dynamic that leads to invention by way of imagination, also envisages a form of anticipation that resides exclusively in the living. The word Simondon prefers to describe this process is image, the primary nature of anticipation. This is an image understood as a domain, enriched by the past and which will be enriched by experience, and which is a subjective affair while retaining a certain objectivity, a form of autonomy:

The mental image is like a relatively independent subset within the living subject; at its birth, the image is a bundle of motor tendencies, a long-term anticipation of the experience of the object; in the course of the interaction between the organism and the milieu, it becomes a system for receiving incident signals and allows perceptual-motor activity to be exercised in a progressive mode. Finally, when the subject is once again separated from the object, the image, enriched by cognitive contributions and integrating the affective-emotional resonance of experience, becomes symbol¹.

These remarks, with which Simondon has technical invention in view, apply word for word to our intuitions about what sets off and motivates artistic creative processes, and lead us to think that every idea, before becoming intelligible thanks to language, constitutes itself as an image, although what is at stake here is a broadened apprehension of the notion of image, one that goes beyond the field of the visible. However, for Simondon, the process too quickly becomes predominantly symbolic:

From the internally organized universe of symbols, tending toward saturation, invention may arise, which is the bringing into play of a more powerful dimensional system, capable of integrating more complete images according to the mode of synergistic compatibility².

Whereas, when the creative process is purely artistic, one would have to think of a dynamic that remains anchored in the sensible, dominated by affective contact with matter and the changing forms that emerge from it. Another question also arises: how to translate onto the artistic plane what Simondon means by “invention” at the technical level. Would we be referring to the (“invented”) work or to the gesture (which invents) on which it depends? This question can remain open, given the close bond to be grasped between the work and the gesture in this framework.

Moreover, confirming some of the intuitions that have appeared in the course of this research, Simondon sees the principle at work in technical invention as echoing the one that manifests itself over a much longer temporality:

According to this theory of the cycle of the image, reproductive imagination and invention are neither separate realities nor opposed terms, but successive phases of a single process of genesis, comparable in its unfolding to the other processes of genesis that the living world presents to us (phylogenesis and ontogenesis)³.

Simondon thus explicitly mentions the temporality of the evolution of the species (phylogenesis) and that of the evolution of the individual (ontogenesis) as capable of accommodating one and the same principle, comparable to that of invention, just as this research sees the evolution of the species and that of the individual in a play of resonances with the much more local dynamic of artistic creative processes.

We take particular interest in Simondon’s vision of the genesis of technical invention, which seems to us to shed light, by way of a broadened conception of the notion of image, on the nature of artistic intention. This is, however, an image understood in a broadened sense, for it must be able, depending on the case, to designate a symbol, a perception or a desire⁴. This image establishes itself, Simondon tells us, as a reception system, ready to receive the signals of experience; it also stands, to put it in our own words, as a vector, for it already signals directions to be taken, valid at least at the beginning of the creative process.

1. Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et invention, op. cit., p. 3.↩︎

2. Ibid.↩︎

3. Ibid.↩︎

4. Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et invention, op. cit., p. 4.↩︎