The Intention in Invention: A Philosophy of Technical Imagination

To reflect on imagination today is not to revisit an exhausted theme, but to re-engage a philosophical question that continues to unsettle inherited epistemologies and ontologies. Our article focuses on one specific regime of imagination: the relation between imagination and technology, approached through the lens of invention. As we explore the particular regime of technical imagination, we aim to overcome the idea that invention should be treated as a purely productive process, a functional response to needs, materials or economic constraints. Because this renders technical imagination only legible within the parameters of technological solutionism or innovation-as-commodity, we rather argue that invention, as a technical activity, mobilizes a specific form of imagination; one that requires a rethinking of technicity itself. We therefore examine how technical imagination engages with the virtuality and potentiality of matter, as it schematizes possibilities and projects relations before they are actualized. In doing so, our main hypothesis is the need to explore the temporal structure of imagination through the concept of technical intention. We argue that in the process of invention, the very operativity of technical imagination rests on intention. Our hypothesis is that technical intention is the active operativity of imagination within the process of invention, and from what emerges the actualization of a concrete technical individual. Within this gesture, the investigation of imagination plays a central role as a vector of ontogenetic individuation, that calls for a form of responsibility adequate to the transformations it sets into motion, grounded in an awareness that invention is never neutral, but always intervenes in the becoming of reality and consequently in the shaping of our societies. It is in this sense that invention must be understood as inherently grounded in technical imagination, and that both of them reclaims their aesthetic, ethical and political stakes.