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Week 2:
January 12: Ontology, Emergence, Matter, and Images
Henri Bergson, from Matter and Memory, , ch. Intro., I, III, IV
Gilles Deleuze, from Bergsonism, "Memory as Virtual Coexistence," 1966 [pdf]
Keith Ansell-Pearson, from Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life, 2002, "Virtual Image: Bergson on Matter and Perception" [pdf]
January 12: Ontology, Emergence, Matter, and Images
Henri Bergson, from Matter and Memory, , ch. Intro., I, III, IV
Gilles Deleuze, from Bergsonism, "Memory as Virtual Coexistence," 1966 [pdf]
Keith Ansell-Pearson, from Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life, 2002, "Virtual Image: Bergson on Matter and Perception" [pdf]
posted by Jamie Skye Bianco at
10:16 AM
6 Comments:
Reading Bergson, I find myself writing "MH" in the margins, thinking back again and again to Heidegger's ontological hermeneutics in Division I of _Being and Time_. It could be that I am trying to lay a familiar framework over a difficult text and a new set of terms, but I think connections are there.
Bergson writes:
"Why insist, in spite of appearances, that I should go from my conscious self to my body, then from my body to other bodies, whereas in fact I place myself at once in the material world in general, and then gradually cut out within it the center of action which I shall come to call my body and to distinguish it from all others?" (47-48)
All this bears some resemblance to Heidegger's idea of Dasein (human being) as "thrown being-in-the-world." We are always already in a world--our consciousness does not precede it--and this world we are in comes to determine the ways we interpret our sense of our own being. This interpretive sense does not derive from Husserl's intentionality, from the Idea or from a set of ideal forms intellectually represented and applied to the world (as the Cartesian tradition Bergson critiques would hold), but is embodied in our barely explicable everyday practices. Bergson gestures toward this when he suggests that self and sense are "cut" from the material world, rather than apprehended by a given individual consciousness or self that perceives.
Bergson connects practices--apparent in our everyday comportment and informed by particular orientations toward being--with memory, which determines all of our immediate perceptions. "With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details of our past experience" (33). Memory is the psychological function that enables us to maintain our daily world.
Anyway, more could be said here. I'm still sorting out Bergson's jargon.
Yes- I think the Heidegger follows nicely, having been patient enough to read about 50 pages of Being and Time this summer. But yeah, it seems a good connection.
I haven't moved on to the other reading yet- I just put down Bergson a couple minutes ago and want to do this while it's fresh in my mind. Maybe I'll be going over things the other authors will and that'll be redundant, but didn't Jamie ask us to do it this way? right?
My primary concern with this text was the issue of centrality posed by the body. I think, if I took the time, I could argue that the centrality of the body was essential for the union created between matter and spirit, but for right now, I just want to poke at centrality itself and see what happens. My vague understanding of the history of metaphysics is that secondary qualities have had to retreat from the world, to the body, to the brain, and now perhaps in their respective sensory regions in the brain. Each retreat seems an attempt to save the center by localizing it within a smaller and smaller area. Here, Bergson is clearly impressed by recent advances in science (nevermind the circular reasoning he does around this issue) makes frequent excursions into discussions of antiquated sciences (the “centripetal forces” of the nervous system, what?) that pretty much say “okay, secondary qualities aren’t in the world, but, I don’t know how, they start in the brain and then, I don’t know how, are translated into affections” (my terminology is off there, but you get the picture).
So taking science/philosophy into the modern day, centrality is backed into a corner, and, with nowhere to retreat, is abandoned. I can’t go too much into detail, but consciousness arises out of processes taking place between dynamic groups of brain cells – in no particular part of the brain – changing and interacting with each other for no fixed duration. Specifically, there is no central region, not even a particular cell, to serve as center. The chain Bergson refers to is, then, necessarily, a discontinuous, collaborative project (bricolage might be the word here). People are calling this emergence, and I think I’m on track because that’s one of the words in the title of next week’s class.
This throws a wrench in the necessary “unity of the soul” Bergson was talking about—the result being predictable once again because I’m getting this idea from Deleuze who is already assigned this week – that idea being schizophrenia: the self as fragmented, discontinuous, etc. etc. Bergson’s chain, which is, essentially, narrative distinguishes between quality, is limited by choices, and moves indirectly through memories, ordered without necessary causation. This functions analogous to what Deleuze calls code, while matter (measured by quantity, unlimited and direct (necessarily ordered)) is understood through Deleuze’s axiomatic: effectively science. If mind is territorialized, it is so only through the centrality Bergson assumes the brain to have. If there are multiple, simultaneous points at which memory intersects matter, then the hierarchy (think of the cone diagram) falls apart. Yet how could this be if only one action can be taken at a time? The answer seems to rest in narrative. The event, understood as information (in Benjamin’s terms), has only one intersection between mind and matter—that is, a single interpretation, but understood as part of a narrative, as story, which Bergson insists upon doing, opens up the event to multiple interpretations—multiple intersections. Deconstruction confirms this as well.
So—the point I want to make is that the date of first publication was 1896 (somewhere around there) and so that makes sense in a philology kind of way. hurray.
Post-Bergson, Pre-Outside Readings: Initial Response
Like Chris, I've been frustrated with Bergson's circular thinking, and with the fact that he seems to spend more time criticizing other schools of thought than advancing his own argument. That said, I was immediately impressed by his interdisciplinary approach (the synthesis of ideas from the natural sciences, physics, metaphysics, philosophy, etc. is pretty amazing). I was also struck by what a visual thinker Bergson is--in addition to his diagrams, I found myself constantly attempting to draw (re-create, remediate?) his ideas in the margins of the text.
As much as he emphasizes the visual (at times this text reads like a map, a kind of geography of the body/spirit), Bergson seems to totally reject spatialization. For instance, he is completely opposed to the idea of the brain as a storehouse. Instead, he promotes a networked approach where sensori-motor information circulates through our bodies and interacts in a highly complex, web-like way. This got me thinking about what Matter and Memory has to do with the digital...
So this leads me to a few half-baked (ok, probably more like quarter-baked) ideas/questions:
-the computer = Bergson's conception of the brain: computer enables or delays communications but adds nothing new to what it receives; only pulls up information when user has the need to retrieve information (reflects the utilitarian character of perception)
-memory as a process that is detached from cerebral events: when we get lost in our memories, we detach ourselves from the present; is this what happens in cyberspace? how is time measured in digital environments ("realtime" vs. what? "faketime"? nontime?)?
-is interacting with digital media another version of pure perception?: assuming that we have trained our senses so that we can intuitively navigate digital environments, aren't we theoretically placed outside of ourselves (or at least our brains) in a way? Do we, at times, touch the (virtual) reality of the digital object out of an immediate intuition (habit)? Or are cognitive processes always involved?
Anyway, these are just a few of the MANY ideas I'm still grappling with. Hopefully I'll have more insight in the next post.
Like Steph, while reading Bergson I was trying to make connections to digital media, in the way that it can work like a brain and also how our brain engages with it. One thing that I can't seem to wrap my head around is how to define perception in the digital, virtual world vs. perception of the external world as Bergson characterizes it. Is the process of perception different if we are taking in an image of an image? Do we register things we perceive in digital worlds as though we have actually seen them in person, or does our brain understand it's perceiving an "image of the whole," that is already an image selected for us to perceive?
I also like Steph's comparison of the computer with Bergson's idea of the brain. His description of memories that "form a chain" and become more important to us that the external world definitely applies to virtual worlds. In Bergson's view, does cyberspace work for us like a memory? Is it collective human memory? Does having a computer somehow ease our desire to know where our memories are stored? By having photos, information about ourselves, and a record of past events online, we can prove that our memories are not faulty, see evidence before us to support them, and see all of this stored in a way that we can (sort of) understand.
Bergson's discussion of the present also made me think about how we use the instantaneous nature of the internet to try to perceive the present, through live news feeds (like 9/11 coverage), liveblogging, chatting, etc. (though of course we can only really perceive the immediate past, as Bergson argues).
These are just some ideas I had as I was reading...it's been helpful for me to try to relate this material to digital media.
My first reaction to Bergson was that I found his work extremely difficult to read. I'm not a critical theory person and my knowledge of the discipline is lacking at absolute best. But then, like Maura and Steph, I began to try and relate Bergson's posturing to technology and digital media. I would agree with Steph that Bergson wouldn't exactly be in line with the theory that brains are the same as hard drives, but I do feel that one could make the argument that mind and memory, in Bergson's view, function in a similar way to cloud computing. For those who aren’t familiar with it, cloud computing is the new buzz term for storing information over complex architecture systems that are separated from each other, such as the various websites/apps on the internet like Gmail and BitTorrent. The information is stored in different locations just like how Steph argues that, “[Bergson] promotes a networked approach where sensori-motor information circulates through our bodies and interacts in a highly complex, web-like way.” I’m not sure exactly what can be gained from pushing this association but I think it’s an interesting one that could prove valuable down the line.
Another issue I wanted to touch upon is Bergson’s perception and memory and how they interact with virtual reality. As other posters have summed up, Bergson believes that perception is a purer reality than memory which merely alienates us from the present. What I’d be interested in discussing is how this viewpoint is altered when applied to someone playing some type of virtual reality game. These contraptions aren’t very popular anymore, but if you ever visited video arcades in the late nineties then you’ll remember the bulky chairs, the strap on helmets, and the ugly polygon worlds ala The Lawnmower Man that you could inhabit for five minutes for every dollar spent. Would Bergson think that our perceptions of a virtual world were as pure as our perceptions of “true” reality? And what about our memories of said virtual worlds, would they therefore be even more detached from the present than our memories of pure reality? If anyone has any thoughts on any of this I’d love to hear them. I’m still trying to sort this all out.
I’d like to add to this by bringing in the Deleuze article from this week’s readings. I was struck by Chris’s mention of schizophrenia: “the self as fragmented, discontinuous, etc. etc.” This echoed Deleuze’s words on memory loss for me (page 68-9 of the article). And as the article asks, what actually disappears in these cases since memory is more virtual than tangible. To translate this to a digital sense, when we delete emails, what are we actually deleting? When someone removes information from their website or myspace, what has disappeared and where does it go? If we are able to think of the connections of the internet in terms of our brain’s memory, than I think this parallel question is worth asking.
On a different note, while reading the supplementary articles, I considered this point. (I hate briging up “what if” situations, but I find myself doing just that here.) Can people have the same memory of a different past? For example, when you speak with someone who went to the same school as you, and you ask, “Remember the dinning hall,” you and that person conjure up the same memory even though the pasts you experienced were very different. Other examples I thought of were engagements (most people experience the same sensations of this moment even though the time, place, etc. varies) and disasters (e.g. 9/11). Everyone remembers where they were when the towers feel even though we were all living different pasts. Perhaps this has something to do with the notion of narrative that Chris broached. I’m not sure if this fits into our conversation on the virtual, but I found it curious.
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