Simondon Looking in Bachelard's Mirror: from Poetics to the Technique of Imagination

Abstract

After delivering his lectures on perception during the academic year 1964–65, Gilbert Simondon felt the need to expand his reflections in a course that would address the relationships between imagination and invention. The connection between these two courses, and therefore the starting point for the analysis of the mental image, would be that motricity precedes sensoriality. In other words, there are motor tendencies at work even before perception or encounter with the object exists. All of this leads Simondon to posit that the existence of the image can be conceived without the need for an imagining consciousness or reflexive self-awareness. In this regard, Simondon approached the poetics of Gaston Bachelard – a fundamental influence for him – and the paths opened by Gabriel Tarde and Henri Bergson, while distancing himself from Jean-Paul Sartre. Simondon presents a cycle of the mental image in four phases: the aforementioned motor tendencies, pre-perceptive images; images that arise in the encounter between the organism and the environment, in the perceptual-motor reality and its encounter with the object; and the reality of memory-images that emerge in symbols, following the encounter with the object. The cycle culminates in the saturation of symbolic reality that leads to creative invention, implying that this entire cycle begins anew at another level. There is continuity, then, between imagination and invention, but also between nature and technique. Furthermore, there is a deeper, more fundamental continuity, as all phases of the image cycle herald an expansion beyond the individual, in an amplifying projection that, culminating in the accumulation of harmonizing inventions, involves the incorporation of primarily non-human realities into a world that makes sense for human beings. It is a world of created objects, diverse yet distant from relativism and subjectivism, where there are external and superficial layers that fulfill our needs for manifestation, intermediate layers that reproduce the existing, championing the defense of consecrated forms where nothing is gained or lost, and finally (and this is more pertinent for Simondon), an intrinsic, essential layer on which the others depend – a core that overflows both the given and its formalization, always providing a superior solution to the problem at hand through amplification. This reveals the structural and functional self-correlation of the object, self-correlation in the sense that the object reunites with its own implicit forms. This article, therefore, addresses Simondon’s thoughts on imagination and invention considering Bachelard’s writings and paying special attention to how his conception of imagination aligns with his ideas on individuation and technique, and how this thinking decisively influenced other contemporary French thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Bernard Stiegler.