Imagination and Invention

Description

A radical rethinking of the theory and the experience of mental images Here, in English translation for the first time, is Gilbert Simondon’s fundamental reconception of the mental image and the theory of imagination and invention. Drawing on a vast range of mid-twentieth-century theoretical resources—from experimental psychology, cybernetics, and ethology to the phenomenological reflections of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—Imagination and Invention provides a comprehensive account of the mental image and adds a vital new dimension to the theory of psychical individuation in Simondon’s earlier, highly influential work. Simondon traces the development of the mental image through four phases: first a bundle of motor anticipations, the image becomes a cognitive system that mediates the organism’s relation to its milieu, then a symbolic and abstract integration of motor and affective experience to, finally, invention, a solution to a problem of life that requires the externalization of the mental image and the creation of a technical object. An image cannot be understood from the perspective of one phase alone, he argues, but only within the trajectory of its progressive metamorphosis. Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Preface: A Theory of the Image in Light of the Notion of Invention, a Theory of Invention in Light of the Notion of the Image Preamble Introduction Part I: The Motor Content of Images: The Image Prior to the Experience of the Object Part II: The Cognitive Content of Images: Image and Perception Part III: The Affective-Emotional Content of Images: The a posteriori Image, or Symbol Part IV: Invention Conclusion Notes Bibliography