A year before this course on Imagination and Invention (1965-1966), Gilbert Simondon had reached several conclusions in his course on perception. One will be of vital importance as splicing and starting point of the analysis of the mental image: the motor precedes sensuousness, ie there driving trends that operate without need for further awareness or encounter the object. On the other hand, and it is the beginning of this course, you can think of the existence of the image without an imagining consciousness or a decision-reflective consciousness.
Bergson near then, and far from Sartre, Simondon will present a cycle of mental image in four phases, the above motor trends, pre-perceptual images; the images that arise in the encounter between the organism and the environment in perceptual-motor reality and its encounter with the object; and the reality of recollection-images that emerge on, after the meeting with the object symbol. The cycle culminates in the saturation of the symbolic reality that flows into the creative invention. And this whole cycle begins again to another level. Continuity then between imagination and invention, but then also between nature and art, and even more profound and fundamental as continuity all phases of the image announce an expansion outside the individual, amplifying unaproyección, which culminated in the accumulation of compatibilizantes inventions, involves the incorporation of realities primarily non-human to a world that makes sense for man.
A world created, ragtag but where not everything anyway, where there are external and superficial layers, those that fill our needs manifestation, other reproductive -medias- layers of what exists, where reigns the defense swashbuckling ways objects with-sacred, where nothing is gained and nothing lost, and then (and this is worth more to Simondon) a instrínseca, essential, layer dependent other, core overflowing both the given as its execution, delivering a solution always above problem solved operates as amplification, and autocorrelation reveals the structural and functional object, autocorrelation in the sense that the object meets their own implicit forms.