Historicizing Bergson

What makes Bergson so difficult, and subsequently so rewarding, is his radical interdisciplinarity. We can't forget that while he was writing this the scientific field was completely different. It's particularly hard,for me at least, to accurately place Bergson in either philosophy or psychology during his radical critique of perception. Whatever you want to say about psychology current status as a purportedly empirical and experimental science, at the turn of the 20th century it most surely was not either of these. Just as reference: Freud's Interpretation of Dreams wasn't published until 1899, William James' Pragmaticism wasn't until 1907, and B.F. Skinner wasn't even born until 1904. The tenets of what we can call modern, or, or maybe proto-modern, psychology were not available to Bergson when he penned Matter and Memory. Thus, I can't help but approaching Bergson as a Critical Theorist, despite the fact that the genre didn't really exist during his lifetime. It's not surprising though, that the polymath Gilles Deleuze would feel such an obvious affinity towards Bergson whose text oscillates somewhere in between psychology, philosophy, physics, and spiritualism. I think we need to talk about the claims to objectivity and "science" in Bergson. Clearly he is critical of this methodology, but, much like Deleuze and other disciples of Bergson, a lot of his argument, and even his style, smacks of experimental discourse, despite the profoundly anti-materialist conclusion that memory is not composed of matter and inherently virtual, ineffable, and non-observable.

The thing that struck me most about MM was Bergson's refutation of clear notions the division of space and time, which evolves into the distinction between the virtual-real and the actual-real(the focus of my presentation for tomorrow). I'm sorry that I'm not more conversant with Heidegger here, but hopefully Rachael can help explicate Dasein to me and what kind of confluences and divergences Bergonsian time and Heideggerian time would lend to the discussion. To be honest, much of the Bergson's discussion of perception remains opaque to me, but I do think developing an understanding of virtuality for Bergson is a central task to try to place Bergson at the beginning of the class narrative we will be constructing over the course of the semester.

Deleuze, Guattari, and the other thinkers who follow Bergsonian perception, including D&G translator Brian Massumi, seem all to be engaged in a project against interpretation. So I was surprised, though I probably shouldn't have been, that Bergson comes straight out and dismisses not only representation, but hermeneutics in general:

"the phenomenon of perception in which a consciousness. assumed to be shut up in itself and foreign to space, is supposed to translate what occurs in space, becomes a mystery. But let us, on the contrary, banish all preconceived idea of interpreting or measuring, let us place ourselves face-to-face with immediate reality: at last we find that there is no impassable barrier, no essential difference, no real distinction even, between perception and the thing perceived, between quality and movement" (218).

Now I think I get that this is a strike against humanism and a collapsing of matter into movement so that the interrogation of time becomes an overarching theory of Being, but this faith in unimpeded understanding seems strange, almost scientific. Bergson works to strip away endless variable that confound perception by collapsing them and matter into multitudinous assemblages (to use a Deleuzian construct) in order to grasp pure perception. Sounds strangely hermeneutic to me...