"In order to approach the question of long-term iconogenesis, let us first turn to the remarkable posthumous work of Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention, a series of lecture courses he gave at the Sorbonne in 1965 and1 966. “A mental image,” he writes, “is a relatively independent subset within the living being qua subject [être vivant sujet].” It is not therefore a question of images in general; the course limits itself to dealing with an enclave of images contained within a living being. But—and here’s the enlargement that counterbalances the restriction—he attributes a relative independence to this enclave of images. Put another way, we can say that the realm of mental images we contain could very well overflow the container; it could reveal itself to be larger and vaster than the image repository that we ourselves are, we the living (and it’s not for nothing that Simondon voluntarily leaves open the question of knowing whether this “living being” and bearer of images must be human).
And here we reach the decisive turn in Simondon’s argument: this autonomous but also overflowing enclave of “the mental image” (the work of the “reproductive imagination”) does not exist only as a simple collection and storehouse of accumulated images. It obeys its own cyclic rhythms, a “cycle of images” that goes through successive “phases” that constitute “a single process of genesis, comparable in its unfolding to the other genetic processes that the living world shows us (both phylogenesis and ontogenesis).” What Simondon attempts to show is not only how living beings make—or allow to bloom—within themselves those images that traverse and also reciprocally form them but, above all, how these images themselves result from transformations and metamorphoses whose laws are analogues to those of the evolution of living species (phylogenesis) or of individuals (ontogenesis).
To speak of “a mental image” when referring to these mobile and cyclic pictorial formations that blossom and wither within us living beings is to use a vocabulary that may be misleading—all the more because Simondon himself notes that the “mental content of which we can be conscious” results from “cases of an almost exceptional surfacing [affleurement].” Then, using a mycelial metaphor, Simondon further suggests that what’s of importance to iconogenesis over the long term is less “the visible part of the mushroom”—that is, those images that emerge in conscious life—than the “infrastructure that carries them along,” namely the “mycelium,” that ensemble of buried filaments that, without ever appearing aboveground, nonetheless “proliferates.”
If the preamble to Imagination and Invention is placed initially under the sign of the mental image as it exists “within the living being qua subject,” it nevertheless quickly becomes clear that the image in question is also, and above all, that which “refuses to let the subject’s will direct it, and presents itself according to its own forces, living in our consciousness like an intruder disturbing the order of a household.” Iconogenesis obeys its own laws while passing through the subject, and parasitizing it.
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The image’s status, he says, is that of a “quasi-organism,” a virus or a guest parasite, “inhabiting the subject and developing within it.”
—Peter Szendy, For An Ecology of Images
