Simondon and enaction: the articulation of life, subjectivity, and technics

The enactive approach is historically rooted in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the dialectical, intentional, and affective relationship between the living organism and its environment. In Merleau-Ponty, the affective and pre-reflexive human body experiences objects through “body schema” and “motor intentionality.” Through action, the living human being defines a world, giving sense to his co-emerging environment. This is the core idea of enaction.

For Merleau-Ponty, human behavior is not to be taken as separate from its social and technological mediations. In The Structure of Behavior (1942), he writes that the psychic “[integrates]” the vital. “The normal man, that is, integrated” (Merleau-Ponty, 1942/1963, p. 180), emerges through the integration of his vital behavior within the sphere of his human and technological manipulations:

Human work inaugurates a third dialectic. For, between man and the physico-chemical stimuli, it projects “use-objects”(Gebrauchobjekts)—clothing, tables, gardens—and “cultural objects”—books, musical instruments, language—which constitute the proper milieu of man and bring about the emergence of new cycles of behavior. Just as it seemed to us to be impossible to reduce the pair: vital situation-instinctive reaction, to the pair: stimulus-reflex, just so it will doubtless be necessary to recognize the originality of the pair: perceived situation-work. (Merleau-Ponty, 1942/1963, p. 162)

Meaning is an aspect of the affective relation between a given organism and its environment. To give meaning to objects in the world consists in perceiving them as actualizing potentialities, affective, intentional, and environmental. In the case of human behavior, technological and instrumental devices provide the subject with specific possibilities of action. These devices embody affective values and engage the subject in situations which he perceives as meaningful wholes:

The workbench, the scissors, and the pieces of leather are presented to the subject as poles of action; they define, through their combined value, a particular situation that remains open, that calls for a certain mode of resolution, a certain labor. The body is but one element in the system of the subject and his world, and the task obtains the necessary movements from him through a sort of distant attraction, just as the phenomenal forces at work in my visual field obtain from me, without any calculation, the motor reactions that will establish between those forces the optimum equilibrium. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, pp. 108–109)

The same applies to imagination when technologically or instrumentally mediated. Imaginative processes involve affective and kinematic intentional structures embodied in our manipulative relation with instrumental devices. The organist, for instance, imagines through his instrument, which offers him specific intentional, imaginative, and expressive horizons:

During the rehearsal—just as during the performance—the stops, the pedals, and the keyboards are only presented to him as powers of such and such emotional or musical value, and their position as those places through which this value appears in the world. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, pp. 146–147)

The instrumentalist never just moves his physical body or refers to it objectively. Rather, he is affectively and pre-objectively conscious of what his instrument requires and “obtains” from him. The instrument polarizes both his gestures and the musical and motor intentionality constitutive of his musical imagination. The “melodic character” of the musician’s motions (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 107) and its direction and coherence, all lie in the way his body is emotionally affected by his instrument.

Like Merleau-Ponty, proponents of enaction emphasize the affective basis of embodiment as key to a non-representational type of intentionality underlying perceptive, imaginative, and manipulative processes (Bower & Gallagher, 2013; Gallagher, 2014; Gallagher & Bower, 2017; Hutto, 2007). Hutto (2007) suggests the existence of a pre-linguistic “kinematic imagination” involved in instrumental manipulation and crafting (p. 76). Gallagher’s affordance-based conception of imagination also shares Merleau-Ponty’s intuition about the intentional, affective, and, in some cases, manipulative relation between the subject and his cultural environment. In Gallagher’s (2017) definition, imagination can involve the manipulation of toys, props, artifacts, instruments, and so on:

Imagining involves a variety of different practices—some of them actively embodied, some of them involving the manipulation of bits of the environment, some of them sitting still and picturing something by manipulating concepts or thoughts or images (re-enacted perceptions)—which in any case may still involve affective and kinaesthetic aspects of embodiment. (p. 195)

Affectivity makes the subject an open and situated system—a perceptive, imaginative, and manipulative system connected to its cultural environment.

This said, two interlinked questions arise. How is it possible, first, for cultural objects to display affective, intentional, and expressive values? According to Merleau-Ponty, the organ displays affordances—in other words, possibilities of action and expressive values. But where do these values and affordances come from? How to understand the articulation between the very structure of the object, on the one hand, and its values, on the other? Subsequently, a second line of questioning bears upon how the subject is capable of perceiving these values. How is it possible that the subject identifies particular uses in the technological or instrumental devices she manipulates? Specifically, how are we to understand, according to Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/2012) famous formula, that “the world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject that is nothing but a project of the world” (p. 454)—in this case, of a technological and instrumental world? For the postulate according to which technological objects have a meaning is not self-explanatory. It remains necessary to account for it, without assuming that the subject already knows from the start how to use her technological surroundings.

It is not enough to say that technology assists living organisms, enhances their capacities, or provides new intentional, affective, and imaginative horizons and new expressive rules. Moreover, rather than just postulate like Merleau-Ponty the dialectical relation between the subject and its technological world, we need to explain it, in the light of its genetic, essential relation to life and technologies. This is precisely the nature of Simondon’s endeavor, and exactly what the enactive approach has recently made it a priority to achieve. For this reason, it is unsurprising that proponents of enaction have founded their reflection about technics either on Simondon’s work or on philosophical works related to Simondon’s theory of individuation and technique (Ingold, 2013; Stiegler, 1994/1998, 1996/2009). In a precursor paper, Havelange et al. (2003) combine the enactive outlook with ideas of Simondon’s and Bernard Stiegler’s, one of Simondon’s main philosophical heirs. They claim that the apparatus by which structural coupling between organisms and their environment is accomplished includes various kinds of technologies. Technologies mediate the concomitant bringing forth of the organism and its world. On a similar note, Poulsgaard (2019) explicitly draws from Stiegler’s phenomenology of technics and Simondon’s conception of individuation, as well as from Lambros Malafouris (2013, 2014, 2015) who is a serious reader of Stiegler. Assuming that “an enactive view of mind allows for a better understanding of digital practice by advancing a dynamic, transactional, and affective framework for the analysis of computational design” (p. 1), Poulsgaard regards computational tools and artifacts as essential to cognitive and creative processes. Martinez and Villanueva elaborate on Tim Ingold’s concept of “correspondence,” which Ingold (2013) expressly forged in the light of Simondon’s “transduction.” They highlight the idea that a type of intentionality, embodied and displayed in the affordances of materials and artifacts, is socially constituted and shared. “Artifactual intentionality” refers to the way technological norms of action, embodied in artifacts, individually and collectively shape creative agents’ action-perception patterns.

The idea these developments have in common, central to Simondon’s perspective, is that instead of taking the subject’s ability to perceive the meaning of technological objects for granted, one must explain it in terms of a prior and historical genesis of technological affordances in the manipulative and inventive relation between the living being and its technological environment.

I shall now elaborate on this and see how Simondon might enrich the enactive approach to the articulation between life, subjectivity, and technology. Simondon was a student of Merleau-Ponty. They share a common philosophical tradition and a common thematic horizon. Building on Merleau-Ponty’s stance on cultural integration, in a very enactive fashion, Simondon understands subjectivity as a vital and adaptive phenomenon, ultimately extended into a social and technical environment. More than a mere transformation of the environment, adaptation refers in Simondon to the co-emergence of the individual and its environment. In order to adapt, the individual does not impose onto the environment the law of its own intrinsic, pregiven, and static tendencies. The so-called “transductive” (instead of hylomorphic) scheme through which Simondon conceptualizes the dialectical and adaptive relation between the living organism and its environment means that both organisms and the environment co-emerge in a common process of individuation. Transduction refers to (1) structural amplification (individuation as a process of structuration and amplification), (2) relational co-emerging of non-pregiven terms, and (3) the quantic or inventive nature of individuating operations. Transduction characterizes the process of individuation as drawing on a preindividual state, consisting in the mutual structuration of heterogeneous domains of reality and leading to a qualitative (potentially adaptive) change in the systematics of reality. The enactive principle of co-emergence, according to which mutually constraining domains dialectically emerge and shape each other as part of a dynamic individuating process, certainly resonates with Simondon’s concept. The individual and the milieu mutually shape each other; adaptation engages organisms’ ability to change and to invent the internal and external conditions of their viability.

Furthermore, and where the originality of Simondon lies, he explains this adaptive process in terms of “imagination” and “images.” In Simondon, images are pre-reflexive motor structures and spontaneities, patterns of action through which organisms virtually explore their future behavior and grasp the meaning of their perceptive worlds. Like Merleau-Ponty (Nature and Logos, 1957–1958/1995, pp. 248–376), Simondon (1965–1966/2008) refers to ethologist Konrad Lorenz’s notion of “imprinting” or Prägung (pp. 33, 93–94, 97), which is a mode of acquisition. Both Merleau-Ponty and Simondon consider it essential for the understanding of the articulation between animality and humanity—or, as Merleau-Ponty (1964) says (after French anthropologist Levi-Strauss) in The Visible and the Invisible, between the “savage mind” and the “cultivated being” (pp. 175–176, 213). As is seen with Lorenz’s geese, imprints are acquired patterns of relationship between instinctive behavior and external stimuli. Organisms acquire irreversible instinctive patterns of action-perception that define their worlds in terms of possibilities of action and affective values. A gosling learns the “image of ‘being a parent’” (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008, p. 94), for instance, in terms of a relational scheme with its gaggle that requires specific environmental answer signals—which ethologists may learn in order to study animals from within their natural environment.

As Merleau-Ponty highlights, these instinctive tendencies or action-perception structures “are not actions directed toward a goal, not even toward a distant goal of which the animal is aware. Instinct is a primordial activity ‘without object’, objektlos, which is not primitively the position of an end” (Merleau-Ponty, 1957–1958/1995, p. 190). Strictly speaking, instinctive tendencies engage living organisms even in the absence of their referential object. Simondon expands this aspect of Lorenz’s theory to imagination in general. It becomes a tool to conceptualize the biological basis of imagination as anticipation, as well as the empirical evidence that images, understood as motor tendencies and structures of expectation, constantly underlie perception and action:

Lorenz and Tinbergen showed that hereditary coordinations are not necessarily reactions to real objects or situations; if the motivation is strong, a weak external stimulation is sufficient, and if the motivation is very high, there is no need of any stimulation in order for the instinctive program to take place. Finally, after triggering by a stimulus, the instinctive action continues to run in virtue of a completely endogenous order. This action just lacks the taxic elements that adapt it to the real object when it is present […].

These discoveries are important for research on the origin of movement images because they show that the organism possesses a reserve of complex behavior patterns able to be activated endogenously, when motivations are sufficient; thus, there is a true biological basis of the imaginary, prior to the experience of the object. (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008, p. 33)¹

Simondon’s images are pre-reflexive and primitively embodied; they refer to the action-perception patterns whereby organisms affectively engage in perception and action. More precisely, Simondon identifies three different categories of images operating in a cyclic relation: the a priori, the a praesenti, and the a posteriori. “Embryos of motor and perceptive activity,” motor images play freely, independently, and prior to the restrictive perception of objects. At this stage, the first stage of what Simondon (1965–1966/2008) calls the cycle of images, “pre-perceptive” (a priori) images provide pre-adaptive “patterns of response to (environmental) stimulations” (p. 19). At the second stage, that of perceptive and motor experience, these pre-adaptive motor images stabilize according to the environment. They “become a mode of reception of the information coming from the milieu” (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008). Pre-perceptive images individualize in perception and become “intra-perceptive” (images a praesenti). At the third stage (a posteriori), images become memories or “symbol” (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008). They allow the insertion of mental activity both in the world and in the past, as well as the reference to past lived experiences and situations that no longer exist. Through the affective, emotive, and cognitive resonance of experience, images organize “according to a systematic mode of association, evocation and communication” (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008). As such, images become “trans-perceptive,” in the sense that they acquire an evocative power irreducible to the context of their particular emergence. They help stabilize, decontextualize, and communicate a given experience.

Consequently, to take action in the world is always to anticipate both the act of perceiving (sensory-motor spontaneities involved in the act of perceiving) and the perceived object (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008, p. 16), by means of sensory and motor images richer and freer than perception and action. Essentially imaginative in themselves, perception and action fit in between interiority and exteriority, between endogenous motor and pre-perceptive tendencies and spontaneities, on the one hand, and information coming from the outside world, on the other. More than a mere irrealizing function as opposed to the realizing function of perception, and in no way disconnected from action, imagination is, in Simondon’s perspective, the insertion point of the individual in the world and of the world in the individual. Through “intra-perceptive” images, namely images present at the core of perception and action, imagination is a power of realization, actualizing affective and environmental potentialities:

Imagination as anticipation is no longer a function that emancipates itself from reality and develops in the unreal or the fictive: it initiates an effective activity of realization […]. The modality of the imaginary is that of potential; it becomes that of unreality only if the individual is deprived of his access to the conditions of realization. (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008, p. 56)

However, realization comes with its own challenges:

What situation does invention correspond to? To a problem, that is, to the interruption, because of an obstacle, of a discontinuity playing the role of a dam, of a continuous accomplishing of an operative project. (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008, p. 139)

Invention corresponds to the fourth stage of the cycle. The affective and imaginative resonance of perceptive experience results in a progressive “saturation”—to wit, a kind of internal incompatibility. Invention, moreover, consists in the discovery of the synergic conditions of affective and imaginative compatibility:

When the subject is separated once again from the object, the image, enriched by cognitive input and integrating the affective-emotive resonance of experience, becomes symbol. From the universe of internally organized symbols, reaching a point of saturation, may result invention, which is the implementation of a more powerful dimensional system, able to integrate more complete images according to the mode of synergic compatibility. (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008, p. 3)

Action is said to be “intrinsically incompatible” when there is tension between the sensory-motor subsets and “operative modes” that constitute it. Consider, for instance, the conflict that may occur between finger technique and the organist’s own hands. Contemplate the simple necessity to turn the pages of the score while both his hands are playing—something which is impossible to do. Conversely, the incompatibility is “extrinsic” when the individual’s behavior is ill adapted to adverse surroundings, for instance, when a rockfall completely impedes one’s journey. Invention appears, then, as the discovery of the more efficient and adaptive ways for restoring the continuity of action. In the organist’s case, finger technique is an adaptive invented process. It individualizes the operative modes and schemes, and restores the continuity of action, the fluidity, precision, and efficiency of the series of instrumental and musical gestures. As for the rockfall, invention may consist, for example, in making a detour, in associating many people to clear the road or in crafting a hydraulic winch with which, despite her limited muscular power, the individual may be able to move the rocks out of her way. In all cases, invention refers to a qualitative change in the operative system, restoring the compatibility between the constitutive operative (sensory-motor) subsets of action as well as between action and the environment:

Invention is the appearance of the extrinsic compatibility between the milieu and the organism and of the intrinsic compatibility between the subsets of action. Detour, instrument crafting, collective association are different ways to restore the intrinsic and extrinsic compatibility. (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008, pp. 139–140)

From this angle, meaning is the imaginative discovery of new operative modes and of compatibility. It is imaginative in the first sense that imagination is the operating mode through which organisms relate to themselves and to the world. Action-perception is imaginative, just like its cognitive and affective resonance. And it is imaginative in the second sense that it is inventive. Indeed, restoring compatibility involves the discovery of new operative structures that are not deducible from previous operative structures:

Solutions appear as continuity restitutions allowing the progressivity of operative modes, according to a progression previously invisible in the structure of the given reality. (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008, p. 139)

Meaning—understood as in-formation—consists both in this qualitative change in the individual-environment system, whereby the adaptive conditions of compatibility are restored, and in its affective and cognitive resonance. It is worth noting, however, that in Simondon technique is not, as is the case, for instance, in Stiegler, a primary condition of subjective individuation and signification. Technical objects complement the biological and social resources of individuation. Technique is in life; life remains the only and proper space for subjectivity:

If we consider the created object as a mediator of the relation between living beings and their milieu, it is less difficult to find the link between invention in animal species and in man; indeed, the use of instruments is quite rare in animals. But there is no requirement to consider the construction and manufacturing of instruments as the principal opportunity of invention; the instrument and the tool are nothing but a relay in the creation of objects, one more mediation between the created object and organisms that create it. (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008, p. 188)

Individual relate to their milieu in a process of imaginative and inventive individuation, and the invention and manipulation of technological devices are part and parcel of the processes of individuating and signification. If we take musical meaning, finger technique, understood as an adaptive individualization of the operative modes constitutive of the organist’s instrumental and musical performance, denotes the inventive and technical conditions as well as the ontological structure of musical value and meaning. Coming back to the second question I broached in section 1.1, how are we to understand that the subject perceives values and affordances in technical objects? How is it, to quote Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012), that the organist is able to perceive stops, pedals, and keyboards as “powers of such and such emotional or musical value” and “their position as those places through which this value appears in the world” (pp. 146–147)? In Simondon’s perspective, this ability results from both a manipulative and an imaginative genetic process. Musical values denote the affective and cognitive resonance of invention understood as the imaginative discovery of (1) intrinsic compatibility between the organist’s operative modes and (2) extrinsic compatibility between the organist, the instrument, and acoustics. In this sense, the crafting and behavior of the instrument ontologically belong to the musical image and value. The organist perceives the affordances and expressive values of the organ for the reason that he invented them a process of invention which lies at the core of musical practice.

I shall come back to this later. Let me just answer here the other question I raised in section 1.1. How to account for the articulation between the structure of the object (in this case, the organ) and its intrinsic values? The pianist may not be an instrument maker. However, any advanced pianist vividly pictures himself bending over his piano, adjusting every single hammer so that it strikes the keys cleanly, setting every tuning pin just so. Musicians spend hours tuning their instruments. The oboist or the saxophonist, for instance, understand the way their instruments work and carefully adjust their reeds in order to get a specific kind of reactivity and color of sound. The musician is able to individualize his instrument in order to make its operative structure the concrete realization of specific expressive and musical values. How to account for this?

Simondon’s theory of technical invention provides an explanation. In Simondon’s outlook, technological inventions result from the imaginative play of “technical schemes.” Distinct from symbol images, technical schemes are body schema individualizations. They refer to an imaginative integration into one’s own body schema of a given object’s operative modes. In other words, understanding how a technological object works amounts to embodying it, by transposing its operative modes onto our own operations:

A concrete image of movement always involves to some extent a reference to the subject’s body schema. Having a concrete intuition of an object’s movement, amounts to some extent to putting oneself in its place and situation, as if our body was this object. (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008, p. 41)

Schematism in Simondon refers to the imaginative process through which we become the objects of our experience. We grasp their essential nature by means of an imaginative and pre-reflexive kind of analogy. Thus,

a child who plays is not only a driver and a rider, but also a car and a horse; the body schema extends to the inner animation of the everyday objects immediately related to behavior. The motor intuition, in the form of behavior anticipation, realizes an implicit animism. (Simondon, 1965–1966/2008, p. 42)

Without hastily assimilating both views, we can point out that Simondon’s understanding of imagination strikingly resonates here with Gallagher’s (2017) enactive conception of imagination as pretense:

In the case of children’s pretend play, it’s not that the child first imagines X, and then playacts it out: rather, the imagination is accomplished in the playacting. Ryle’s example: the child can pretend to be a bear. In this case the child “roars, he pads around the floor, he gnashes his teeth, and he pretends to sleep in what he pretends is a cave” (1949, 243) […] the imagining just is the playacting. It’s literally enacting something in bodily movement that may include the use of props. ( p. 193)

For his part, Simondon extends this body schema reference to the imaginative process of technological invention and transformation. He takes the invented technological object to be the realization or concretization of an inventive technological thought, which he defines as an embodied-imaginative schematic play restoring the intrinsic compatibility of technological operative modes schematically and bodily integrated. Schematism even allows us to anticipate the future unity of technological objects and to organize the present accordingly:

The unity of the future associated milieu, in which the causal relations will take place allowing the functioning of the object, is enacted, played in the same way a role can be played in the absence of the true character, by the schemas of creative imagination. The dynamism of thought is the same as that of technical objects; the mental schemas react to each other during invention (he uses the word for “invention,” but does he mean “imagination”?) as the various dynamisms of the technical object will react to each other in material functioning. (Simondon, 1958, p. 71; Simondon’s emphasis)

For instance, the oboist adjusts her reeds in order to get a specific behavior from them. She embodies the operative structure of her instrument, transforms it, and finds technical ways to establish the continuity between the structure of her instrument, the acoustics, and the breadth of her musicality. The acoustics of the hall, of the church, and of the classroom are all dissimilar. The instrumentalist takes these differences into account. In such a situation, the concrete genesis or individualization of her instrument is simultaneously the genesis or individualization of expressive powers and values.

Simondon (1958) calls the schematic identity between the operative modes of the subject and of the object “isodynamic”:

Man, an interpreter of machines, is also the one who, by means of his schemes, established the rigid forms allowing the machine to function. The machine is a human gesture, displayed, fixed, made stereotypy and power of recommencement.

[…]

Between the man who invents and the working machine there exists a relation of isodynamism. […] To invent amounts to making one’s own thought work just as a machine can work, neither according to causality, too fragmentary, nor according to finality, too unitary, but according to the dynamism of lived functioning, accessed because produced, accompanied in its genesis. (p. 138)

“Technical mentality” (Simondon, 2006), that is, the imaginative possession and manipulation of technical schemes, originates in the schematization of technical and non-technical operative modes and relational dynamisms, grasped in the texture of physical, biological, human, and non-human reality. Technological knowledge concerns not only the object itself but also its functional and operative systematics, and its constitutive dynamic and operative relations. More precisely, the “historical” scheme refers to the stable scheme of an individualized object, for instance, the scheme of a particular ball check valve. The “lineal” scheme refers to what is common to the technical lineage of non-return valves (ball check valve, flapper valve). The “pure” scheme expresses the general working principle of valves, whether mechanical (non-return valves) or biological (heart, arterial valves). The artificial heart represents a case of schematic equivalence, of schematic transposability, from the biological to the mechanical domains.

Understandably, Havelange et al. (2003) explicitly emphasized the profound resonance between Simondon and the enactive approach. Both Simondon’s transduction and the enactive approach aim at describing the conjoint bringing forth of meaning and a material and technological world, of a whole and indivisible subjective-objective system. Simondon provides a theory of technical invention that helps to elucidate both the genesis of affordances and values, and the ability of the subject to perceive them. By doing so, he enables the enactive approach to explain the possibility of the coupling between organisms and their technical environment. However, as John Stewart (2010, p. 2) underlines, the most important similarity between Simondon’s ideas and the theory of enaction lies in the way they apprehend and thematize life. Furthermore, in Simondon’s perspective, imagination is the very transductive and biological process through which living organisms and the world co-emerge. Imagination, at least when technologically mediated, is the embodied schematic process whereby subjectivity and the technological world co-emerge, in the merging and meaningful relation between interiority and exteriority. Meaning denotes both (1) the imaginative and active discovery of an individual-world systematics through which the individual and the environment reveal themselves as constitutive, merging and emerging parts of each other—invention as transduction and adaptation; and (2) the affective and collectively shared (transindividual) resonance of this discovery. Technical objects, additionally, whether invented or manipulated, are nothing but mediations crucially involved in this process of “sense-making,” that is, in Simondonian terms, of “signification” as creative individuation and affective valuation.

Here, we find some kinship with Merleau-Ponty’s insights about the integration of the vital to the human order or reality. Simondon’s theory of imagination, invention, and technologies actually seems an attempt to pick up the problem of cultural integration where Merleau-Ponty left it. “The normal man,”Merleau-Ponty (1942/1963) says, is “integrated” (p. 180): he emerges through the integration of his vital behavior into the sphere of his human and technological manipulations. We definitely need “to recognize the originality of the pair: perceived situation-work” by differentiating it from the pair “vital situation-instinctive reaction” (Merleau-Ponty, 1942/1963, p. 162). But Merleau-Ponty is not as such a philosopher of technics. He postulates the non-conditional but determining articulation of life and subjectivity with technologies, but does not explain it as Simondon does, in terms, for instance, of a technological genesis of human subjectivity.

Accordingly, I raised the question of how to understand and explain Merleau-Ponty’s view according to which the subject is a project of a technological world, in the sense that, using Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/2012) metaphor, technological devices “obtain” a specific behavior from the subject (pp. 108–109). For, as I said, the difficulty here is to grasp what it is for technological objects to mean something. Moreover, we need to account for it without assuming that the subject already knows from the start how to use technological devices. A Simondonian answer would be that knowing how to use an already invented object like an organ, a book, a hammer, or a chair, as well as its affective value for the subject—in a word, the “meaning” of technological objects and, with it, strictly speaking, the emergence of a human subjectivity—results from a technologically mediated and imaginative process of individuation. Uses and values are not given from the start, out there in the objective world as if objects possessed and displayed their own meaning independently from organisms, neither are they to be found “in the subject,” as if subjectivity and meaning existed before individuation, manipulation, and invention, as a priori conditions and independently from external mediations. Undoubtedly the object has its intrinsic, socially constituted and shared normativity, calls for a specific behavior, and shapes the subject’s intentional structures (Martinez & Villanueva, 2018; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012). Simondon himself thematizes the idea that technical normativity is irreducible to vital normativity. Following his teacher George Canguilhem (1943/2009, 1952/1993), one of France’s most important philosophers of biology in the 20th century, Simondon defines vital normativity as a living being’s ability to forge new values and norms, according to which it defines its own milieu. Yet, he says, technical normativity displays specific values, possibly inconsistent with human and vital values. I shall not, however, dwell on this here. Let me just underline with Simondon that uses and values are invented in a process of technical appropriation. Creativity, as Simondon (1976/2005) defines it in Invention in Technics (p. 336), also consists in “replacing usual uses with virtual and unusual functions.” We creatively appropriate objects, give them new functions to the extent that, faced with new situations, we virtually, imaginatively, explore new ways to use them. In other words, there are no pregiven uses or affordances displayed in objects. Uses, values, and affordances are invented; they result from an imaginative and creative process. Similarly, learning how to use given objects consists not only in using them and passively waiting for them to shape our intentional structures. Rather, we learn how to use them by progressively and transductively (1) discovering the operative modes through which we establish, by their means, the intrinsic and extrinsic compatibility—adaptation as invention and sense-making—and (2) individualizing them. The meaning of an object, for instance, the affective and expressive value of a given cello, lies in the way we continuously learn to manipulate it in a process of imaginative and inventive individuation. The organist or the cellist does not find in themselves, nor in the organ or in the cello, any pregiven and static values or expressive possibilities, corresponding to their pregiven musical and expressive images. Rather, they progressively and transductively invent their musical images. They individualize their instrument, collaboratively with the instrument maker or not, and their own behavior along with it. And this process of individualization, both of the instrument and of the instrumentalist, is also the individualization of expressive values. The cellist and the cello (as a physical and technically made object as well as a set of affective, imaginative, and expressive values) co-emerge in a process of imaginative individuation. Moreover, the ontological chiasm between mind and matter, between the flesh of the cellist and that of the cello, is the final step of an imaginative and inventive process that only technological or instrumental devices can mediate. Ultimately the cellist and the cello are entangled to such a point, affectively, viscerally, and operatively (technically), that stealing or breaking the cello amounts to stealing or breaking part of the cellist’s soul, part of her world.

Another way to put this is to say that there is a technological and also imaginative and inventive genesis of uses, values, and objects, that is, of meaning as both a subjective and objective, imaginative, and inventive ongoing individuating process. This is exactly what Poulsgaard, combining Simondon’s conception of individuation with enaction,² describes regarding computational design and fabrication in the field of architecture. According to Poulsgaard (2019), Simondon’s perspective suggests that creativity arises “within the complex interplay of forces in a given ecology reaching across material and informational domains.” Simondon is key to conceiving the extension of mind, to thinking how architectural imagination is shaped by cognitive ecologies, that is, computational tools and digital platforms for computational design and fabrication that are material and informational (see also Hutchins, 1995, 2010, 2014; Poulsgaard and Clausen, 2017). Similarly, Maestri and Antoniadis (2015) describe in enactive terms the dynamic and mutually shaping relations between musical notation design (computer music representation and interactive scores), composition, musical expression, and instrument-making.

The strength and originality of Simondon’s theory of imagination is that it helps us understand this technological genesis and meaningful relation between the subject and its objective world as fundamentally rooted in life. Simondon is deeply compatible in this regard with enaction, while opening up stimulating avenues to achieve what Merleau-Ponty and enaction did not properly accomplish, namely to apprehend the articulation of life, subjectivity, and technologies. Moreover, it is not because Simondon thematizes technics that he loses sight of the foundational character of life. On the contrary, thematizing technics is, essentially, thematizing life. Technologies are imagination (invention, schematism), and imagination ultimately is vital individuation. Imagination itself is the very process through which living organisms realize their own normativity, namely create their own norms and values, and extend into their chosen worlds. Technologies are nothing else but life, vital and human motion fixed in the realm of material and informational operative processes. Technical normativity continues vital normativity. Technology does not merely enhance the capacities of organisms. Rather, it embodies their imaginative and active powers. It is in this sense that Havelange, Lenay, and Stewart think of external representations and technique as ways for organisms to relate to themselves and to achieve their own cognitive functions, such as memory and creativity.