Why transduction?

Some reflections on the notion

The level of the primary modes of thought (technical, religious and aesthetic) is characterized by only occasional use of communication and expression; certainly aesthetic thought is susceptible to being communicated, and techniques, religions themselves, to some extent can be learned, transmitted, taught. However, these primitive forms of thought are mainly transmitted through direct experience, that needs a starting position of the subject: the objects they create, their manifestations, may be evident; but the thought patterns, impressions and rules that these same thoughts establish and nurture do not directly belong to the order of expression; you can learn a poem, contemplate a painting, but this does not teach poetry or painting: the essence of thought is not transmitted by the expression, because different types of thinking are mediations between man and the world, and not meetings between subjects: they do not imply a modification of an intersubjective system. (Simondon, 2008: 218)

Immersed for years in the practice of painting and teaching, I encounter great difficulties in finding the right way to think about the processes of creation and its transmission. I feel most categories and general systems of approach, analysis, description, and communication are not valid for a material and symbolic practice which resists being formalized as a method. In this mood, the idea of transduction provides some hope for a match between practice and its representation.

In biology, genetics or electronics, transduction refers to the transformation of one type of signal or energy into another of a different nature. In the way I have used the term, it relates to a mode of translation, transmission, or better, of propagating a structure, according to an analogical relational system. If you take the analogy as an equality of relationships and not as a relation of equality (things do not repeat; it only reproduces how they relate to each other), transduction would mean that a particular style of association moves from one domain to another. A certain way of doing things changes its means but remains as a manner of shaping things. In changing from one field to another, it might happen that style grows and develops in a still unknown way in the original domain. André Lothe comes to mind here, who in his teachings sprang transductively from his painting and attained a significant level of development. However, I believe he did not attain a similar degree of development as a painter; so that his painting almost appears not to correspond with his teaching, one being no more than a propagation of the other which, for whatever reason, he didn't manage to develop in a similar way. I think this is precisely the discrepancy between the idea of transduction and the premises of structuralism: the idea of a propagation that exceeds that of analogy. So, transduction has to be understood as an analogous expansion. As I've used it, it refers to the fact of respecting and valuing your own pictorial style as a teaching style. I even suggest you can extract everything you need for teaching from it.

The concept as I have used it comes from Simondon's work L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (L'individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information)(1964), in its Spanish edition, La individuación a la luz de las nociones de forma e información (2009). All translations are mine.

For Simondon, being is not substance but becoming. His endeavour is thus to consider being as a process, before the existence of specific individuals. It is, therefore, to build an ontogenesis [1] instead of an ontology. According to him, thinking about ontogenesis cannot be done via traditional logic, which always operates with concepts and relationships between concepts that only apply to already individuated terms. Instead, it must in itself be thinking in an individuation process, "march of the spirit" that accompanies, by analogy, that which needs to be considered.

Transduction is, in this sense, a form of description of the individual, be it of any kind, in its process of being formed. It is an analogical sort of thinking, which develops at the same time with what is thought out and is thus a superb approach to anything that is moving. For example, the processes of creation. You can apply transduction, he says, to

all cases where an individuation performs [...] The possibility of using an analogical transduction to think about any domain of reality indicates that this domain is effectively the seat of a transductive structure. Transduction corresponds to the existence of relationships that arise when the pre-individual is being individuated, expresses individuation and allows us to think about it; it is, therefore, a metaphysical and logical notion; it applies to ontogenesis, and it is the ontogenesis itself. (Simondon, 2009: 40).

The problem is how to think, how to get to know what is in the process of becoming individual without making the mistake of using methods that may be suitable for the already formed individual, but not to that which is becoming. About this difficulty, which in my case involves practical experience in art and the need to think about it as a teacher, Simondon says something that intuitively sounds very familiar:

only the individuation of thinking can, while it consummates itself, accompany the individuation of beings different than those being thought about. [...] The knowledge we might have of individuation is a parallel operation to the operation which is trying to know. We cannot, in a usual sense, know individuation; we can only individuate, individuate ourselves and individuate within ourselves; therefore, outside knowledge itself, this uptake is an analogy between two operations, which is a mode of communication. The subject captures individuation of the real outside the subject through the analogous individuation of knowledge in the subject itself, but when individuation occurs in non-subjects, this is through the individuation of knowledge, not through knowledge itself. Beings can be known through knowledge of the subject, but the individuation of beings can only be seized by the individuation of knowledge of the subject (Simondon, 2009: 44).

This is a valid tool for thought, which in the area of creative processes presents obvious advantages over the logical procedures of deduction and induction. This is because it somehow allows the division between thinking and thought to be overcome, by being proposed as a continuation of "being in its genesis" as a consummation of "the genesis of thought while the genesis of the object is fulfilled" (Simondon, 2009: 40).

Transduction is limited to the scope you are thinking about and does not need to find alternatives in other fields, but it can extract appropriate solutions from the tensions of the domain that it is applied to. In this regard, it proceeds like the "supersaturated solution [which] is crystallized through its own potential and according to the chemical species it contains, not through some external input form" (Simondon, 2009: 41).

It also represents an operation in which no information is lost. It contemplates all variables and retains them in the final solution:

"There is no impoverishment in the information contained in the terms: transduction is characterized by the fact that the result of this process is a particular network including all the initial conditions. The resulting system is made up of the concrete, and it comprehends all of the concrete. The transductive order retains all the concrete and is characterized by the conservation of information, whereas induction requires a loss of information." (Simondon, 2009: 41)

I think artistic practice is a complicated process in motion, in continuous evolution and, in that sense, only workable, logically unknowable. However, to some extent, it may be accessible in a transductive manner, so that it could replace logical knowledge. The creative process is thus accompanied by a different process that does not break it down and does not explain it, but by analogy, it is this re-experience as repetition, and it encourages communication.

From this point of view, transduction can be a suitable approach for teaching and academic art research. This text, which combines the diary form, theoretical reflections, images of references and personal artistic work, seeks to think about a particular becoming without any distance from the becoming itself. I do not try to capture the movement of a practice objectively and to tell the truth of what happens, but to merge thought and action and not stand as a subject-author who describes the evolution from outside of it. That is, I seek to reconstruct and, above all, to try to repeat here, by other means, the exact nature of the artistic act: a materially creative act and psychologically or personally self-creating act. Therefore, just as in the studio, I begin where intuition tells me and let process drift until it allows me to finish in the discovery of the object itself. It is the effort to adopt a method, neither inductive nor deductive, but precisely transductive. The essence of this approach would not leave anything out of the research process. It would be possible to work with all types of data and connections between them, taking into account even the missing information. I would thus radically assume my lack of neutrality, would evolve and discover both the research topic itself and the proper way to approach it. In the end, it would be a creative attempt at reflection and communication which exceeds the expectations of material practice and potentially targets a different audience. Resorting to unusual means, I try to translate a particular artistic methodology analogically.

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