cones

Talk about Bergsonian...

Daniel Johnston, singer/songwriter/artist

Digital History

I thought I'd share this: 

An Active Commons

Bergson's body-as-present and spirit-as-past distinction (one of time as opposed to the Cartesian spatial separation of body and spirit) hits its full stride, I believe, with the idea of an active spirit -- a spirit that like Bergson's looked-for perception is complete and unlike Bergson's metaphysicist predecessors' spirit is different than matter by degree rather than kind, and is therefore able to act upon matter/be acted upon by matter. The active spirit is also different than Bergson's earlier exploration of "the past as essentially that which acts no longer" and the present as "that which is acting" (74 in my 2007 Cosimo edition). If spirit is active the past is active as well, and as the past in our unconscious is active it means the unconscious is no longer powerless. That which is repressed (the whole of the image, for example) returns to affect bodies, consciousness, the present, etc., and, even in another sense of the word, affects themselves. I'm not sure how much I'm departing from Bergson here, but in thinking about the goals in the last two pages of chapter four -- changing the future by changing the past, that is, to create something new by using memory to imagine the past, and insert new possibilities into it, rather than repeating it -- the active spirit seems central. Repeating the past is connected to not remembering the past, and in this lack of memory the past and the present are actually conflated (temporally and spatially). Similarly, in psychology the unconscious is powerful when one is unaware of its power. Becoming aware of it changes power relations, as does becoming aware of the past through memory. The past and spirit become distinct only temporally, and as such are just as active as the present and matter. Bergson's distinction, then, is a very useful way to think about causality. It is actually similar in some ways to Derrida's theory of causality, "spectrality," that is, how the immaterial, repressed, spectral, etc., cause us to act. 

On refuting materialism by leaving to matter the qualities usually stripped from it, Bergson writes, "This, indeed, is the attitude of common sense with regard to matter, and for this reason common sense believes in spirit. It seems to us that philosophy should here adopt the attitude of common sense, although correcting it in one respect" (80). Apart from Bergson's correction and intention here, common sense, if I'm not mistaken, was thought by medieval philosophers to be part of a set of "internal senses" apart from the five "external" senses. It was what connected disjunctions of the different senses, and it survived as a concept of a common judgment on which we can all rely. It is also class-based: in thinking that philosophy should act more like common sense, the "we" in my "we can all rely" becomes the common wo/man, the multitude, etc., those who, for Bergson, believe in spirit. Going further, think of "the commons" as opposed to the traditional bourgeois conception of philosophers retained from the Ancient Greeks. Think of a knowledge commons that in our present is no longer just traditional but digital: where land was once the sole conception of property intellect has taken its place, that is, the fuzzy concept of "intellectual property" that corporations are now so worried about just as the bourgeoisie once worried about land.

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...

Images and Language

I hadn't thought about Bakhtin as I was reading Bergson, but I think Dahliani's instinct to put the two theorists in conversation might help me understand Bergson a little better. For example, Bakhtin is concerned with the utterance as an act toward another speaking subject. Bergson sees perception as a possible action of the body on others. In a way, then, Bergson is suggesting a social dialogic relationship between beings in the world that could be compared to Bakhtin. THe body is an image like all matter in the world. It impacts itself as well as other images/matter/bodies. Like Bakhtin then, Bergson breaks the traditional Aristotelian chain of cause and effect. Rather, bodies/matter/images in teh world impact each other and themselves reflexively and non-linearly. For both Bakhtin and Bergson, interiority and exteriority are non-issues. Dialogism is within bodies and between bodies. Of course, and I'll rant about this at the end of this post, Bakhtin is concerned with langange and Bergson is concerned primarily with materiality and motor perception. What is the relationship between language and image for Bergson? What is his understanding of language in the first place?

I'm trying to connect these thoughts to digital media and, to do so, I'm making the assumption that images are texts broadly conceived-language, pictures, things that can be read, selected, perceived. I'm thinking of the spectator (what is the term for the internet surfer?) as an active being, an image like that of the web pages, impacting, contributing, changing the web as she herself is changed in the process, following hyperlinks based on Bergson's theories of selection in the process of perception. We select, apparently, certain images, certain hyperlinks for example, from the subjective realm of the spirit which is constructed of memories, which are constructed from previous actions of selective perception(???) (235).

What's interesting here is Bergson's conception of space. He talks of "distance" as a crucial factor in the urgency of the action of our perception. The closer we are to the matter we perceive, the more the "possible action tends to transform itself into real action, the call for action becoming more urgent in the measure or proportion that the distance diminishes" (233). What is distance in cyberspace? I was really confused about Bergson's distinction in the valuation of space versus time but can't help but assume this question has something to do with the relationship between Bergson and digital media. Maybe?

In all of this talk about images, what is language? Dahliani's question about the social constructionism of Comp studies strikes me as imperative. There's a lot of talk in comp about the ethics of teaching certain discursive conventions because we subscribe to a socio-linguistic theory of language as constitutive of the self (Gee's idea discourse as "identity kits" for example). In Bergson, the image of the body can impact itself self-reflexively. Is it purely motor? Arent' our memories, Bergson's nebulous realm of the spirit, actually largely composed of language? Is language an image? If so, how can it possibly be a "difference in degree not in kind" (i paraphrase his constant use of this phrase) from material bodies?

On a final, unrelated note: in the introduction, Bergson says that images are somewhere in between the representation and the thing. But the rest of the book seems to equate images with representation, even using the words interchangeably. Yet,in a shocking moment, the page of which escapes me at the moment, Bergson declares that images exist without being perceived. The tree falls in the forest, in other words, no matter who's there to see it. The observor perceives the image based on a intricate system of selection based onmemory and motor perception. If they're looking for a tree to fall based on memory or shocked into seeing the tree fall based on physical sound waves, for example, the image of the tree comes in contact with the image of the body. But--and this is, I know, a fundemental premise of Bergson, so I might just be quite confused--how can something an image without being perceived/represented by an active being? Is it because it has the POTENTIAL to be perceived by the active being? Wha...?

Blindness and Phantom Limbs

It seems to me that Bergson's focus on memory/image/perception is hugely centered around the visual sense (regarding audio/tactile senses as secondary) and that he hesitates to address issues of blindness and phantom limbs (although he does mention both, and that more research needs to be performed in these areas). 

While I was reading, blindness occurred to me foremost because I used to work with the blind at a radio reading service.  Bergson, addressing blindness, says:

Sever the optic nerve of the animal: the vibrations issuing from the luminous point can no longer be transmitted to the brain and thence to the motor nerves…visual perception has therefore become impotent, and this very impotence is unconsciouness. (44)

I wonder what he means be this, since surely, as he seems to state later, those who are blind (from birth or not) are surely not impotent/unconscious, but rely on alternate senses which often attempt to compensate for the visual sense. What would Bergson consider a perception in someone who has been blind from birth? He talks a little about this on page 43 as well, as those blind from birth having never formed a single visual image, when I believe it is more often the case that the blind possess an interior visual world separate from ours, one which can be entirely discerned by a heightened sense of touch. 

I also found the small section on the erroneous localizations of those who have lost limbs to be interesting (page 59), which reminded me of the recent studies done on mirror treatment in amputees (article linked).  In this case the memory of both pain and the once-presence of the limb cannot reconcile themselves.  Mirror treatment relies on a visual illusion (and it must be visual) in order not so much to re-train the mind in realizing the actuality of the missing limb as to trick it into believing that the limb still exists. 

Memory and Identity

As a visual person, I found myself creating images in an attempt to make sense of the theories posited by Bergson in lieu of writing notes in the margins. Similarly, I found myself doing much the same thing with the Delueze article in response to Bergson. I think I was most struck and interested by the section of the Deleuze article which he further explains Bergson's idea of "attention to life." I took this to mean the moment in which the past merges with the present in an attempt to find a "moment of contact" or to form a recollection. Once this contact has been made "recollection images" are then formed. It is at this point that the two moments connect creating some sort of harmony and are "pushed to their limit." The fourth movement involves the actual movement of the body in response. I think what I found to be most interesting about this chain of events is how instantaneously all of these events occur. Deleuze goes on to explain that even one faulty moment in the process would blur the recollection.

This made me then think about instances in which these events do not occur in the way that Deleuze explicates. Both Deleuze and Bergson mention schizophrenia in addition to other conditions. This made me think of a lit. course I took where we discussed the idea of memory loss and the loss of identity. I know I am jumping around a bit here, but I see a connection between the two. In relating memory to this idea of identity, Dennis Sumara states that “identity never really exists in ways expressed by commonsense discourses but, instead, occurs when memory intersects with projected contexts. I can never really pin down my identity ‘in this moment’ since ‘this moment’ is being used to interpret a relationship between the remembered past and the predicted future. That, of course, is why losing one's memory inhibits relationality and dramatically erodes one's own experience of identity” (52). As I was reading, I continued to think about this connection.

The Continuity of Matter

My comments got a little long, so I figured I'd create a new post.

Like those who have already posted, I found the text difficult and am still trying to make sense of it (and haven’t yet read the outside essays). Rather than work out its overarching ideas, I have focused on particular points that interest me.

One point that intrigued me is Bergson’s analysis of the continuity of matter in chapter IV. He establishes as a rule that “All division of matter into independent bodies with absolutely determined outlines is an artificial division” (196). Yet we, as living humans, experience an “irresistible tendency to set up a material universe that is discontinuous, composed of bodies which have clearly defined outlines and change their place, that is, their relation with each other” (197). We assign boundaries to matter so as to divide it into distinct objects that we can comprehend and use to meet our needs (for example, nourishment), yet there are actually no such boundaries. In fact, according to Bergson, “very simple experiments show that there is never true contact between two neighboring bodies, and besides, solidity is far from being an absolutely defined state of matter” (199). Matter is continuous, but “the habits and necessities of practical life” encourage us to imagine matter to be discontinuous (199). Here I found it useful to recall some (slightly fuzzy) lessons from chemistry and biology. An endnote referenced in chapter IV mentions Van der Waals, which reminded me of the intermolecular forces named after him (Van der Waals forces). These also include, for instance, hydrogen bonds (slight attractions between hydrogen and oxygen, nitrogen, or fluorine responsible for the cohesion of water molecules, among other things) and are slight attractions—not actual contact—between atoms and/or molecules. A result of intermolecular forces is cohesion, enabling us to see an object—whether solid or liquid—where, as Bergson reminds us, there actually is no object. Rather than empty space, however, there exist between molecules or atoms forces--what Bergson describes as “threads” (200). He writes,

[W]e see force and matter drawing nearer together the more deeply the physicist has penetrated into their effects. We see force more and more materialized, the atom more and more idealized, the two terms converging toward a common limit and the universe thus recovering its continuity. We may still speak of atoms; the atom may even retain its individuality for our mind which isolates it, but the solidity and inertia of the atom dissolve either into movements or into lines of force whose reciprocal solidarity brings back to us universal continuity. (200)

Atoms themselves are not so solid, however, as they are made mostly of empty space (a small nucleus surrounded by electrons constantly moving in individual orbits).

How might this notion of matter as continuous be complicated in a digital environment? Do we create, for our own human needs, these same boundaries or outlines in a digital environment, in “cyberspace”? I feel like I don’t really “see” cyberspace, but I know there is something out there connecting all the disparate websites on the Internet. What counts as matter on the Internet? I probably consider a website to be a “thing,” but it’s not an object I can hold and it doesn’t have mass, like ordinary matter. And when I think about the Internet, I’m usually not thinking about its physical infrastructure--servers and whatnot.

Something else I've been thinking about while reading: I've had an impulse to take the easy way out and defer to “what science says” in considering some of Bergson’s thought experiments about perception and the nervous system. Advancements in neuroscience over the past 100 years might shed light on some of the conditions Bergson is examining. Though Bergson draws upon science—his work is interdisciplinary, as Steph noted—Matter and Memory is chiefly philosophical, as I am continually reminding myself. But I guess I wonder how our responses to philosophy change with advancements in science. While science hasn’t resolved certain big questions—the existence of God, free will, for example—it has sorted out some other questions, including perhaps those involving the brain. I’m not very literate in neuroscience, but I wonder how recent discoveries might complicate Bergson’s work.

Thanks for the opening words

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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]

Welcome

Week One:

January 5: Questioning Digitality and Digital Futures


Introduction

Casaleggio Associati, "Prometeus, the New Media Revolution," 2007
See video in links.

Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," 1945

Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript to the Societies of Control," 1990

Nicholas Negroponte, "On Digital Growth and Form," 1997