Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film 9780748670239

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BERGSON AND THE ART OF IMMANENCE

B ERG S O N A N D THE A RT O F IMM A N EN C E Painting, Photography, Film Edited by John Mullarkey and Charlotte de Mille

© editorial matter and organisation John Mullarkey and Charlotte de Mille, 2013 © the chapters their several authors, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 7022 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 7023 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 7024 6 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Art’s Philosophy – Bergson and Immanence Charlotte de Mille and John Mullarkey

vii ix 1

Part I: Bergson, Art, History   1. Bergson, History and Ontology Craig Lundy   2. Art History, Immanently Charlotte de Mille   3. Art History, Less Its Conditions of Possibility: Following Bergson’s ‘Le Possible et le réel’ Adi Efal   4. Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc. Eric Alliez   5. Bergson Before Deleuze: How to Read Informel Painting Sarah Wilson   6. Revolutionary Immanence: Bergson Among the Anarchists Mark Antliff

17 32

47 63 80 94

Part II: Unconditional Practice   7. The Matter of the Image: Notes on Practice-Philosophy Felicity Colman  8. Pasearse: Duration and the Act of Photographing Stella Baraklianou   9. Duration and Rhetorical Movement James Day

115 131 148

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Contents

10. A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation: Towards a Bergsonian Production of Subjectivity Simon O’Sullivan

165

Part III: Immanence of the Visible 11. Painting the Invisible: Time, Matter and the Image in Bergson and Michel Henry 189 Brendan Prendeville 12. ‘For We Will Have Shown it Nothing’: Bergson as Non206 Philosopher (of) Art John Mullarkey 13. The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics: Reading Diffractively 232 Iris van der Tuin 247 14. Hyperaesthesia and the Virtual Howard Caygill

Afterword: An Art Historical Return to Bergson Jae Emerling

260

Index 272

List of Illustrations

Figure 2.1

Figure 5.1

Figure 5.2 Figure 9.1

Figure 9.2

Figure 10.1 Figure 10.2 Figure 10.3 Figure 10.4 Figure 10.5 Figure 10.6

Figure 10.7 Figure 11.1

Duncan Grant, Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, 1914, © Tate, London 2013; estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2013. 33 Alfred Manessier, L’Elan, 1956, Photo Xavier Grandsart. Courtesy Galerie Applicat-Prazan, Paris © Adagp, Paris 2013. 83 Giulio-Carlo Argan, cover for Fautrier, Matière et mémoire, 1960. 84 James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl 1862, © Harris Whittemore Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington. 149 Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, oil on canvas, 1863, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. 150 Bergson’s plane of matter (with ‘I’ at centre). 170 The line of matter and the line of memory. 170 Bergson’s cone of memory (from ‘On the Survival of Images’, Matter and Memory). 170 Bergson’s cone of memory with ‘levels’ (from ‘On the Survival of Images’, Matter and Memory). 176 ‘Shining Points’/fractal ecology in cone. 176 Cone of the mystic: 1. Static religion (habit/ritual) 2. Dynamic religion (introspection/intuition) 3. The mystic. 176 Return path/circuit of the mystic/militant. 181 Rembrandt, Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Wife of Jacob Trip, c. 1661, London, National Gallery. Reproduction © The National Gallery; courtesy of the National Gallery Picture Library. 201 vii

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List of Illustrations

Figure 12.1 ‘M. Bergson a Promis de Venir’, Robe de dîner de Worth, Plate 30 from Gazette du Bon Ton, Vol. 1, No. 3, Mars 1914, Bernard Boutet de Monvel; courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

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Notes on Contributors

Eric Alliez (b. 1957) is Professor at University of Paris 8 and at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University. His books include Diagram 3000 [Words] (2012), The Guattari Effect (ed., with Andrew Goffey, 2011), Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Consensus: Of Relational Aesthetics (2010), L’ŒilCerveau (2007), La Pensée-Matisse (with Jean Claude Bonne, 2005), Gilles Deleuze. Une vie philosophique (ed., 1998), De l’impossibilité de la phénoménologie (1995), La Signature du monde (1993), and Les Temps capitaux (preface by G. Deleuze, 2 vols, 1991). Forthcoming: Défaire l’image. De l’art contemporain. He has been the general editor of the Œuvres de Gabriel Tarde (Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond / Seuil [13 volumes published]) and a founding member of the journal Multitudes, for which he managed the section concerned with Contemporary Art until June 2009. Mark Antliff is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. He is the author of numerous studies of European modernism, including Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (1993), Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (2007), and Cubism and Culture (2001) and A Cubism Reader 1906–1914 (2008), both co-authored with Patricia Leighten. In 2010 he co-curated the exhibition ‘The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–1918’, with venues at the Nasher Museum of Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Tate Britain. He is currently Marta Sutton Weeks Senior Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center for 2012–13. Stella Baraklianou is a photographic artist and lecturer in photography at the School of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Huddersfield, UK. As a practitioner her work explores themes of memory and subjectivity, through still-life and landscape photography. ix

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Notes on Contributors

Her main themes are memory, duration, and immanence, explored through the work of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, as well as trace/index and time in photography, explored through the works of Roland Barthes. Her work has been exhibited in the UK (‘XS’ at FA Projects, London 2004) and abroad, including her native Greece (‘The Space of Time’, PhotoBiennale of Thessaloniki, Museum of Photography, Thessaloniki, 2008). She is currently working on a monograph of recent photographic works, with a text contribution from John Mullarkey, under the title Orientation. Howard Caygill is Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University. He is the author of Levinas and The Political (2002), Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998), A Kant Dictionary (1995) and Art of Judgment (1989). Felicity Colman is Director of Studies in the Media Department, Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. She works on visual philosophy, with a focus on feminist and experimental work. She is the author of Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts (2011) and the editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009). James Day is a PhD student at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Adi Efal is currently a Gerda Henkel post-doctoral researcher at the Thomas institute of the University of Cologne, working on a project construing a conceptual history of habitus. She has taught at the Universities of Tel-Aviv and Haifa, as well as in the Bezalel academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and the Midrasha school of art at the BeitBerl College. Her research and publications concern the relationship between art-historiography and the history of philosophy. Jae Emerling is an associate professor of modern and contemporary art in the College of Arts and Architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He received his PhD in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the intersection between art and continental philosophy, particularly the photographic image and issues of time, memory and history. He is the author of Theory for Art History (2005) and Photography: History and Theory (2012). His work has also appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, CAA Reviews, Journal of Art Historiography, and X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly.



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Craig Lundy is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Transformation Research, University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the author of History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity (2012) and various papers on European philosophy. Charlotte de Mille’s research concerns the intersections of painting, music, and philosophy. She is the editor of Music and Modernism (2011), and a contributor to Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (2012); Rival Sisters, Art and Music at the Birth of Modernism (forthcoming 2014), and Modernist Games: Cézanne and The Cardplayers. She curates a music series for the Courtauld Gallery. She is Chair of the RMA Music and Visual Arts Group and Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex. John Mullarkey is Professor of Film and Television at Kingston University. He is the author of Bergson and Philosophy (1999), PostContinental Philosophy: An Outline (2006), Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (2010), and is the editor of The New Bergson (1999), Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (2007), and co-editor of Henri Bergson: Key Writings (2002), Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (2012), as well as The Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy (2013). Simon O’Sullivan is Senior Lecturer in Art History/Visual Culture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has published two monographs, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (2005) and On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite–Infinite Relation (2012), and is the editor, with Stephen Zepke, of both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (2010). He also makes art, with David Burrows, under the name Plastique Fantastique. Brendan Prendeville is an art historian, whose published research concerns painting and phenomenology, with reference to aspects of realism and themes of embodiment. Iris van der Tuin is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Philosophy of Science at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has edited Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture (2009) with Rosemarie Buikema and wrote New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (2012) with Rick Dolphijn. Her work on new feminist materialism has

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appeared in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Australian Feminist Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, and Women’s Studies International Forum. Sarah Wilson is an art historian and curator whose interests extend from postwar and Cold War Europe and the USSR to contemporary global art. She was educated at the University of Oxford (English Literature) and at The Courtauld where she took her MA and PhD degrees. In 1997 she was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government for services to French art and culture. In 2008 she was a presidential candidate for the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She is the author of The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (2010) and Matisse (2009, English and Spanish editions).

Introduction: Art’s Philosophy – Bergson and Immanence CHARLOTTE DE MILLE AND JOHN MULLARKEY In an interview made for the opening of her installation, Nowhere Less Now, Lindsay Seers tells her interlocutor that the work was motivated by a very Bergsonian problem: ‘I start with a question – where does the past exist? But the starting point is from a notion of the philosopher Henri Bergson’s intuition as practice, to make art ontological.’ To make art ontological – to give it Being.1 We might, nonetheless, partly reverse Seer’s formulation of this Bergsonian intuition: alongside making an ontology for art, why not also give Being its ‘perception’ (aisthesis)? After all, for Bergson, metaphysics – that is, an immanent, non-Platonist metaphysics – is a kind of art of the people, offering enhanced perceptions ‘more continual and more accessible to the majority’.2 The being of the world is not to be found in a transcendent realm discovered beyond the senses through the (exceptional) power of philosophical intellect (nous): reality is only in this world, and is re-discovered immanently by extending our perceptual faculties by means of art or philosophy (understood as a generic art, an art for the generality, for everyone and every faculty).3 Moreover, the world that is thus rediscovered is not one but manifold, an excess of realities, or ‘images’, co-existing at the same ‘space’ but in different temporalities (or ‘durées’): multiple presents with different, multiple, pasts. Seer’s work in Nowhere Less Now, with its proclamation of the equality of images (‘everything is images, and all images are equal’),4 is no less excessive than Bergson’s universe – which begins and ends, as Matter and Memory (1896) tell us, ‘in the presence of images’.5 The essays collected in Bergson and the Art of Immanence each testify in different ways to this multiplicity of realities and their respective perceptual images, as revealed through photography, film, painting, or philosophy. In very specific modes, each examines how a sensuous, mutable thinking – what Bergson calls ‘penser en durée’ – can be discovered in both the recent history of art and in contemporary art practice.6 1

2

Bergson and the Art of Immanence

Bergson has been variously described as a poet-philosopher and an aesthetic philosopher, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. As Maurice Blanchot noted as far back as 1949: ‘Bergson . . . was imbued with an extreme distrust of words and an extreme confidence in poetry’, whilst Paul Valery charged him with having ‘questioned as a professor and replied as . . . a poet’.7 Yet Bergson would never have accepted any dissociation between art and the reality philosophy discovers, so that it is perfectly true that each of his books was ‘conceived at once as a scientific work and as a work of art’.8 Hence, the point is not only that Bergson philosophised about art and artistic perception (which he certainly did across a number of texts), but also that he approached philosophy in general and structured his own philosophy in particular as a form of art, that is, with a view to it acting on our powers of perception. Philosophy acts to make us see the world differently, to attend to it in new ways such that ‘art and philosophy can also conceive . . . a new attention to life’.9 In this introduction to Bergson and the Art of Immanence, we outline some of the ways in which this immanent philosophy (of) art enacts poetic forms of perception through reforming our sense of duration, affectivity, the body, memory and intuition, and with reference to the collection’s specific chapters on painting, photography and cinema. How does ‘immanence’ – the concept of ‘existing or remaining within’ the sensuous world, or being and acting ‘within the physical world’ – function within a philosophy of time and creativity such as Bergson’s, and in relation to these visual arts? It is twenty years since Mark Antliff’s renowned 1993 study Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde appeared, reminding art historians once and for all that Bergson had an extraordinarily significant impact on his younger contemporaries within the avant-garde, particularly in France and Italy: Henri Matisse, Albert Gleizses and Jean Metzinger, Marcel Duchamp and his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon, the Futurists, and the Francophile-Scots artist John Duncan Fergusson and his circle around the Rhythm journal. So definitive and wide in intellectual scope is Inventing Bergson that, until very recently, few art historians have ventured into the field for themselves beyond either an informed direction to Antliff’s work, or a bland expression of Bergson’s influence as part of a general circuit of changing ideas at the turn of the last century. Antliff himself returned to the subject in ‘The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse’ for The New Bergson (1999), and, more recently, in ‘Bergson on Art and Creativity’ for Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (2012). From other scholars, Federico



Introduction

3

Luisetti’s article ‘Reflections on Duchamp: Bergson Readymade’ from 2008 is a notable exception to this lacklustre engagement, as is Todd Cronan’s book-length study Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism.10 The reasons for this rather undistinguished reception of Bergson’s ideas within art history are plural. To begin with, too often Bergson’s ideas have been conflated with those of Gilles Deleuze (Bergson’s most famous heir), whose more focused engagement with art and art history is thereby used as a proxy for Bergsonism. The ideas Deleuze imported from Bergson – multiplicity, the virtual, vitalism, immanence, the ontology of images, the method of problems, the emphases on becoming, creativity and fabulation, the critiques of negativity and possibility, of Kant and Plato, etc. – are most often passed off as Bergsonian without acknowledging both the specificity of Deleuze’s re-rendering (in his work on painting, music, cinema and literature), and thereby also the need to attend to what Bergson did differently with these original concepts. Some of this more nuanced attention has already begun in art studies – Laura Cull’s Theatres of Immanence (2012) for instance, or, in this collection, Howard Caygill’s work on hyperaesthesia, which acknowledges the greater value of actual perception for Bergson (as opposed to its downgraded status in Deleuze vis-à-vis the virtual).11 More needs to be done, however, especially given Deleuze’s much more transcendentalist approach (pace his critique of Kant) which compares less well with Bergson’s more empiricist stance. Secondly, Bergson’s work tends to pose a challenge to art history. He never published a separate treatise on art or aesthetics, as he had planned, and, consequently, it has been necessary to extract pertinent material from texts on subjects (time, consciousness, memory, biology and comedy) that, in themselves, though not necessarily so far from art history, remain nevertheless unfamiliar territory for the non-specialist. Alternatively, we can look to surviving lecture notes and letters from students lucky enough to be present at one of Bergson’s lectures on art. However, not only are these sources indirect, they also fail, more often than not, to address specific works of art in a way that art historians would be comfortable with.12 However, we would like to suggest that the challenge for art history is not so much a practical one of accessibility (to Bergson’s thinking) so much as one concerning the methodologies and expectations of art history itself. To accept the processes of creativity as part of historical activity is to make a definite shift away from the focus on the ‘finished’ art object as it is served up to us by artists, museums and galleries. Until we accept Bergson as a philosopher of history in the manner that Craig Lundy, following Bergson’s near c­ ontemporaries

4

Bergson and the Art of Immanence

Arnold Toynbee and Charles Péguy, has outlined in this volume (‘Bergson, History and Ontology’), Bergsonian emphases on change and movement have little to say to the archived and conserved art object itself, while it lies dormant awaiting critical interest. Change, time and memory are, of course, inherent to the survival of works of art through generations, and are useful methods of approach for reenacting the social systems of value, patronage and exchange through which objects move. All the same, these are matters of reception as much as they are questions of aesthetics. On the contrary, an abiding interest of this volume will be to think creativity as a site for the productive writing of a history of art that is open to potentiality, processuality and provisonality as embedded in the art objects we consider. When Roger Fry, writing with a thorough knowledge of Bergson, described the application of paint as a ‘gesture of the artist’s feeling’, he turned aesthetics towards the body, towards physical sensation and emotional affect as the modes of experience that the arts addressed.13 Just as the concept of universal vision had been destroyed by scientific knowledge of the individuality of sight, so was art no longer accepted as primarily visual. The turn has been discussed at great length in art historical texts: Jonathan Crary on Suspensions of Perception (1999); Richard Shiff, Yve-Alain Bois and Crary on sensation in Cézanne; Leo Steinberg, Alistair Wright and Bois on the instability of Matisse’s canvases. But Crary contrasts Cézanne’s ‘broken’ perception with the ‘pure’ ideal of Matter and Memory, which is read by Crary as part of a larger programme of synthesis, a desire to unify subjectivity as the continuation of the past in the present.14 And, despite the Bergsonism of Matisse’s ‘Notes of a Painter’ (1908), identified by Jack Flam and substantiated by Mathew Stewart Prichard’s record of the artist’s thorough understanding of Bergson, his philosophy is strangely absent from these studies.15 In terms of theories of art (history), there has been a recent reprisal of the concept of affect, particularly in AngloAmerican scholarship, most demonstrably in The Affect Theory Reader (2010). But here too, Bergson is seldom referenced. The ‘turn’ (to an experiential, sensation-based understanding of art addressing multiple senses and memory), however, has a powerful resonance with the very idea of ‘turning’ which is so crucial to Bergsonian intuition. As Mullarkey suggests here in his chapter on Bergson and ‘non-standard’ philosophy, ‘For We Will Have Shown it Nothing’, Bergson’s ‘reversal’ of thought extrapolated in ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’ asks precisely that we should turn away from conventional systems of thinking. (Re-)turning to this in the light of recent debates in postmodern history might open some probing questions for



Introduction

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Bergson studies, as well as for these debates themselves. For instance, in the introduction to his Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity, Keith Jenkins writes that ‘however irreducible, stubborn, painful, comic or tragic the past may have been, it only reaches us through fictional devices which invest it with a range of highly selective and hierarchical readings’.16 This selectivity is present irrespective of whether these are presented as ‘upper case’ analyses of past occurrences or ‘lower case’ academic history that studies events, both significant and mundane, with equal attention (the emphases on conventionally marginalised and obscured histories notwithstanding). In place of this ‘moribund condition’ of history, Jenkins advocates ‘working intellectual potentialities . . . to construct new imaginaries of radical emancipation’.17 His terms are provocative, and interestingly so in the context of Bergsonism, a philosophy of potentialities that gives substantial weight to images, virtual and actual, in relation to consciousness, recollection, perception and bodily sensation. Where the image is a productive site for creativity in Bergson’s thought, so too do Jenkins’s radical ‘imaginaries’ acknowledge the creativity of historical discourse. In this light, Bergsonian intuition, the rejection of habits of thought – his ‘reversal’ in Mullarkey’s terms – has an uncanny resonance for both non-standard and postmodern studies, as, in fact, their progenitor. Yet, whereas Jenkins’s argument is unapologetically a-historical, Bergson did not regard it necessary to distinguish between creativity and history. Rather, he restores creativity to history through duration and memory, offering another way into the paradoxical double bind of art history as a discipline that historicises presentness: In reality there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being . . . To perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history.18

The historical moments we select for consideration may be regarded as snapshots of significance, momentary arrests in the continuing stream of time, much like the fleeting moments of intuitive insight acquired through the effort of thinking in duration. In these terms, history itself survives, whatever claims may be made today for its relativity or indecision. History, like art, remains an engaging way to communicate particular experiences and perceptions of the world, a site in which disparate peoples (human and non-human), times, objects and events can be brought into (temporary) co-existence, thereby remaining relevant for so long as humanity retains a curiosity in life.

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Concurrent with questions concerning the survival of history, there has been another turn in which some art historians have reconsidered the agency of the art object. T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006), offers close and highly personal readings of Nicholas Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c. 1648) and Landscape with a Calm (1650–51) as he encountered them on repeated visits during a period of six months. Clark’s focus is on what escapes us in looking, how art resists its translation into a verbal medium, and what, ultimately, this leaves us with as art historians. To discuss the sovereignty of the art object is in some way to bestow upon it a power or existence separate to its maker or viewers. W. J. T. Mitchell has taken this way of regarding works of art in a more dramatic direction. His What do Pictures Want? (2005) seeks in various ways to vitalise or animate the art object, working against a ‘tendency of criticism itself to pose as an iconoclastic practice, a labor of demystification and pedagogical exposure of false images’.19 In its place, Mitchell asks us to acknowledge that ‘we cannot ignore that human beings (including myself) insist on talking and behaving as if they did believe’ that pictures – images – want power, independence, a voice as authoritative and active as the spoken word or written text, however much we might distrust this possibility with every fibre of our rational, academic, and professional selves.20 To put it in Bergsonian terms, for intuition, images are equal to us; but for (our) intellect, they must be subordinated to their referents, that is, to what we want images to be ‘about’, what we want them to represent – a mere means for our ends. Rather than allow the picture its own immanent being, our thoughts (or representations) must transcend it. Only intuition can reverse this attitude and actually perceive the picture or image as a material part of the Real and so in a new, vital manner: an end without means. This new attitude, a non-standard-rationality, is the ‘CAUTIUS’ or warning that Georges Didi-Huberman, mining Erwin Panofsky, has identified as the great risk for art historians: ‘If the image is what makes us imagine, and if the (sensible) imagination is an obstacle to (intelligible) knowledge, how can one know an image?’21 Didi-Huberman’s suggestion for the future of the discipline is laid out in Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (1990). In order to ‘effect a true critique’, he asks, is it not necessary ‘to engage in an archeology, of the kind that Lacan undertook with Freud, Foucault with Binswanger, Deleuze with Bergson, and Derrida with Husserl? So it is to the rhythms of an archeology of a history of art that the critique of iconology should proceed.’22 In the case of Confronting Images, it is an archaeology of Panofsky



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that concerns Didi-Huberman, as Panofsky had himself engaged in an archaeology with his teacher Aby Warburg. Although not its first aim, Bergson and the Art of Immanence should go some way to recuperating Bergson within this lineage of art history, which stems ultimately (in art history as opposed to philosophy), from Bergson’s contemporary Alois Riegl (1858–1905). Riegl’s notorious kunstwollen has recently been described by Saul Ostraw as an ‘immanent artistic drive’,23 and it is certainly true that Riegl’s work prioritised an introspective turn not only in art itself, but in his attempt to place human subjectivity (including, in contemporary terms, ‘affect’) within an objective and rational framework. This collection, then, brings Bergsonian immanence and art historical practice together for the first time. Bringing together aestheticians, art critics, art historians and philosophers, the volume offers a variety of perspectives and methodological approaches to argue for a new field of exchange between art and theory. The collection draws aesthetics closer to the history of art. It situates a trajectory of thinking, interpretation and inspiration that comes out of Bergsonian immanence, both directly through a reassessment of Bergson’s philosophy of history and through artists and thinkers who turned consciously to Bergson (as exemplified by the subjects of Antliff’s and Wilson’s chapters); and more indirectly through acknowledging the potential of the concept of immanence as a method of critical interpretation. Since the earliest interest of artists in Bergson, intuition has been fundamental. As Antliff has extrapolated, Matisse’s portraiture relied on exactly this, the artist remarking that ‘I can never tell what a work will reveal to me.’24 Surely this observation is, at least to some extent, an acknowledgement of the animated escapes or escapades of images outlined above. Re-thinking the so-called ‘ineffable’ qualities of the image, or that which evades discourse, we do not argue for art to be contextualised within philosophy, for philosophy to ‘speak for’ art (be it in the tried and trusted manner of, say, Hegelian aesthetics, or of any other kind). Rather, this collection shows how there are different kinds of discourse, of showing, demonstrating, suggesting and thinking that obviate the need for any ‘speaking for’ at all. A new practice of artphilosophy and philosophy-art where nothing represents anything else, but everything gestures towards, or allows the many kinds of singular immanence to ‘speak for themselves’ (without that old adage only licensing mute genius).25 ‘What assemblage of curves already known can ever be equivalent to the pencil-stroke of a great artist? . . . are not the original lines drawn by the artist themselves already the fixation and, as it were, congealment of a movement?’26

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Bergson’s questions in Creative Evolution are used in support of the intuitive method of creativity, whereby ‘we seize from within, we live at every instant, a creation of form . . . a creation of matter’.27 He adds, however, that ‘in order that our consciousness shall coincide with something of its principle, it must detach itself from the already-made and attach itself to the being-made. It needs that, turning back on itself and twisting on itself, the faculty of seeing should be made to be one with the act of willing.’28 Bergson argues for reality to be understood as tendency.29 Such a conception of reality en faisant also counters much of the over-determinism within some critical methods current within the history of art. Using the image of an expanding universe, Bergson acknowledges that the reality of tendency and movement ‘suggests to us the idea of a thing unmaking itself’, rather than one that works towards fixture. For the exploding solar system, ‘the idea of a thing unmaking itself . . . is one of the essential characters of materiality’. It follows, Bergson contends, that ‘the process by which this thing makes itself is directed in a contrary way to that of physical processes, and that it is therefore, by its very definition, immaterial’.30 The inversion of our conventional understanding of making and materiality may be just one more Bergsonian turn – immateriality is not an opposite state to matter, but matter-in-the-making, it is a process. As such, its implications for a discipline founded on the materiality of art objects is surely worthy of further consideration. It asks art historians to reconceive materiality and representation, and, moreover, to address the immateriality of art history itself as a weak shadow of the objects on which it rests. At the same time, perhaps, it offers a way to write around the intangible, immaterial or more-than-material aspects of art objects – qualities that are often obscured, in spite of the work of Clark, Mitchell, and DidiHuberman. A re-turn to materiality in immanence allows for these aspects to be made visible in their becoming: In this image of a creative action which unmakes itself we have already a more exact representation of matter. In vital activity we see, then, that which subsists of the direct movement in the inverted movement, a reality which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself.31

Immanent practice suggests the possibility of unmaking in the act of making. It offers a method to turn the object, and to turn past modes of art historical and art critical writing, to re-make or re-conceive both objects and writing closer together. Art history may not need resuscitating, but Bergson and the Art of Immanence should question our ways of doing art history. Part I of the collection, ‘Bergson, Art, History’, brings together a



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range of historical research ranging from Craig Lundy’s exegesis of a general Bergsonian historiography in ‘Bergson, History and Ontology’ (that shows how an ontology of historical creativity plays a critical role in all of Bergson’s philosophical investigations), through ‘Art History, Immanently’ – Charlotte de Mille’s use of Duncan Grant’s ‘Abstract Kinetic Scroll’ as a way into seeing whether an immanent art history can be written – to Mark Antliff’s ‘Revolutionary Immanence: Bergson Among the Anarchists’, which considers the impact of Bergson on anarchist theory and an emerging, anarchist aesthetics of the early twentieth century. Also in this section, Adi Efal, in ‘Art History, Less its Conditions of Possibility: Following Bergson’s ‘Le Possible et le réel’, analyses some of the epistemological consequences of applying Bergson’s anti-Kantian critique of possibility (as a retrospective artefact of real becoming) to art historical inquiries. Bergson argues that no authentic generation can be understood as a result of ‘conditions of possibility’, a finding that has very significant implications for historical disciplines that deal with poietic acts, such as the history of art. Eric Alliez’s ‘Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc.’, looks at the Bergsonian paradigm of immanence within the field of art, taken through its first historic inscription in Matisse and Fauvism. Here, the very notion of the aesthetic finds itself radically problematised, while also crystallising the most detailed aspects of Bergson’s thought (his critique of Form), and its absolute outside, with specific reference to Matisse and Oiticica. Sarah Wilson completes the section with ‘Bergson Before Deleuze: How to Read Informel Painting’ which pursues a Bergsonian reading of Art informel that shows how Bergson must be inscribed into the history of this 1950s movement. The second Part, ‘Unconditional Art’, has four chapters on various art practices, film-making, photography, painting and drawing. In ‘The Matter of the Image: Notes on Practice-Philosophy’ Felicity Colman tests Bergson’s theory of the immanent behaviour of cinematographic forms against the collaborative film work of American artists’ Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt. Smithson was well aware of Bergson’s work, and aspects of the conceptualisation of entropy and duration that Bergson discusses in Creative Evolution are investigated in Smithson’s solo works. Colman also looks more widely at methodological questions surrounding the use of a Bergsonian cinematographic consciousness in relation to the visual arts. Stella Baraklianou’s ‘Pasearse: Duration and the Act of Photographing’ considers the temporality of the photographic frame and the need to situate it within the photographic act. This ‘opening up’ of the time of the frame leads her to consider the meaning of pasearse (‘to take oneself walking’) – a ­self-reflexive active

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verb that exposes a temporality wherein immanence and being coincide: a relational event combining stillness and movement when practising photography. In ‘Duration and Rhetorical Movement’, James Day examines the relations between the time of writing and art historical time by linking Bergsonian duration with rhetorical devices from the postmodern historical novel, in particular Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra. Fuentes’ work provides modes of writing for art historians to describe heterotopic relations such as between Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. I. and Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. Given that the times present in these paintings are unstable, writing can alter them and render their histories constantly and creatively evolving. The final chapter in this section is Simon O’Sullivan’s ‘A Diagram of the FiniteInfinite Relation: Towards a Bergsonian Production of Subjectivity’, which revolves around a diagram – the celebrated cone of memory from Bergson’s Matter and Memory. The chapter looks at this drawing as a form of thinking that leads to a commentary on the mystic in Bergson’s The Two Sources of Religion and Morality, the mystic being the one who actualises the pure past (seen in the cone of memory) in the production of a specifically different kind of subjectivity. The third and final section of the book turns to the ‘Immanence of the Visible’, beginning with Brendan Prendeville’s ‘Painting the Invisible: Time, Matter and the Image in Bergson and Michel Henry’. This chapter examines parallels between the thought of Bergson and that of the radically unorthodox phenomenologist Michel Henry, especially in the light of the latter’s work on Kandinsky’s Voir l’invisible, and finds Bergson’s theory of attention consonant with Henry’s apprehension of life as pathos. John Mullarkey’s ‘ “For We Will Have Shown it Nothing”: Bergson as Non-Philosopher (of) Art’, makes another parallel, this time between François Laruelle’s ‘non-standard philosophy’ and Bergson’s immanent metaphysics of art. In very complementary ways, they both radicalise the relations between philosophy and art, Bergson seeing philosophy as a kind of general art, Laruelle making each of the arts (non-standardly) philosophical. They both ‘de-philosophise philosophy’ in the sense of making philosophy strange through what Bergson calls ‘penser en durée’, ‘the immanent thinking-in-time that makes philosophy a generic art and the arts specific, new, philosophies’. With ‘The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics: Reading Diffractively’, Iris van der Tuin sees Bergson’s intuitive metaphysics as ‘untimely’ because it practises the very untimeliness of thought, and thereby must not be classified or periodised. Exploring this strategy further, van der Tuin then reads Bergson ‘diffractively’ through the work of the philosopher-physicist Karen Barad in order to demonstrate the benefits of such



Introduction

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temporally non-linear interpretation. The final chapter in this section is Howard Caygill’s ‘Hyperaesthesia and the Virtual’, which traces the theme of hyperaesthesia and its correlates throughout Bergson’s work, arguing for a reading of his contributions to psychic research in the context of his theory of perception. The chapter also shows that the experience of expanded perception was central to Bergson’s expansive understanding of inherent human powers and their development. Jae Emerling’s afterword to the collection, ‘An Art Historical Return to Bergson’, explores a whole set of returns to Bergson, both with and contra Deleuze, arguing in particular for art historians to look more closely at the creative and transformative ‘Copernican turn’ Bergson’s work presents ‘for any study of the relation between images and time’. His apt resolution to our enterprise asks for a ‘becoming-Bergsonian’, after Deleuze’s image of him. If anything, however, the preceding chapters in this volume have shown how Bergson has, anachronistically no doubt, outgrown the Deleuzian mould in which he has so often been set: there are too many Bergsons in the philosophy of Bergson to match one model, and each of them is as artful and creative as the next, each an exemplar of the thinking in duration his work strived to perform in its own writing. We wish to express our gratitude to a number of others whose efforts helped make this collection possible. Firstly, we thank Hager Weslati for her excellent work in translating Eric Alliez’s chapter ‘Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc.’. Our appreciation must also go to Carol MacDonald, philosophy editor at Edinburgh University Press, for commissioning the volume and for all her help during the editing process. The copy-editor at Edinburgh, Tim Clark, improved upon the work in great measure. Lastly, we would like to thank Stella Baraklianou for permission to use the image, Orientation For Auguste Choisy, for the cover of Bergson and the Art of Immanence. NOTES   1. Lindsay Seers’s Nowhere Less Now was an Artangel commission that ran 8 September–21 October 2012 at The Tin Tabernacle in London. The interview with Aesthetica Magazine can be found at http://www.aesthetica magazine.com/blog/lindsay-seers-nowhere-less-now-london (accessed 25 January 2013).  2. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 157.   3. For more on ‘philosophy as generic art’ in Bergson, see John Mullarkey’s essay below.

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  4. Ole Hagen, Nowhere Less Now (London: Artangle, 2012), p. 8.   5. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 17.  6. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 34.   7. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Bergson and Symbolism’, translated by Joel A. Hunt, in Yale French Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1949), pp. 63–6: p. 64.  8. Bernard Gilson, L’Individualité dans la philosophie de Bergson (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin), p. 64.  9. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 157. 10. S. E. Gontarski, Laci Mattison and Paul Ardoin, eds,  Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (New York: Continuum, 2012); F. Luisetti, ‘Reflections on Duchamp: Bergson Readymade’, in Diacritics, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2008), pp. 77–93; Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 11. See Laura Cull, Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012); see also John Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010), pp. 97–100. 12. Some short fragments have been published in Henri Bergson, Mélanges (Paris: PUF, 1972). Others, such as the transcripts from Bergson’s Collège de France lectures 1910–11 (possibly by Henri Gouhier), survive at the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, Paris. 13. Roger Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, in Vision and Design (London: Pelican, 1937), p. 36. 14. In particular: Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2001), pp. 323–8; Richard Shiff, ‘He Painted’, in Nancy Ireson and Barnaby Wright, eds, Cézanne’s Card Players (London: The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2009); Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Cézanne: Words and Deeds’, in October, no. 84 (1998), pp. 31–44; Yve-Alain Bois, ‘On Matisse: The Blinding: For Leo Steinberg’, in October, no. 68 (1994), pp. 60–121; Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Alastair Wright, ‘Arche-textures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History’, in October, no. 84 (1998), pp. 44–63. 15. Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, revd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); for Prichard see Mark Antliff, ‘The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse’, in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 184–208. 16. Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 2. 17. Ibid., p. 3.



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18. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 207–8. 19. W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 8. 20. Ibid., p. 11. 21. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), pp. xvi–xvii. 22. Ibid., p. xx. 23. Saul Ostraw, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Woodfield, Framing Formalism, Riegl’s work (Amsterdam: G+B International, 2001), p. 7. 24. Antliff, ‘The Rhythms of Duration’, p. 199. 25. In African Art As Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, trans. Chike Jeffers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press Seagull Books, 2011), Souleymane Bachir Diagne uses Bergsonian intuition to argue that African art is philosophy, where Bergsonian themes compare favourably to the vitalism of African beliefs expressed in the continent’s art and literature. 26. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 252–3. 27. Ibid., p. 253. 28. Ibid., p. 250. 29. In ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’, Bergson proposes that ‘reality is mobility. Not things made but things in the making, not self-maintaining states, but only changing states exist. All reality, therefore, is tendency’ (The Creative Mind, p. 188). 30. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 258. 31. Ibid., p. 261.

1. Bergson, History and Ontology CRAIG LUNDY

Since the revival of Bergson studies, a key aspect of his work has remained largely dormant amongst scholars: his philosophy of history. In this chapter, I will address this under-explored area of investigation by making some suggestions as to what Bergsonian philosophy might have to offer our understanding of history. This task will be guided throughout by a concern for the ontological nature of history. Although Bergson’s thoughts on history are often considered to be restricted to his Two Sources of Morality and Religion, I will demonstrate how Bergson develops and deploys an ontology of history and an historical ontology in his earlier texts that arguably play a significant role within his broader thinking. In so doing, Bergsonian philosophy will be shown to advance strategies for escaping the traditional and dominant conceptions of history as representational, causal-linear and teleological – strategies that are subsequently expanded upon and modified by Bergsonian thinkers such as Charles Péguy, Arnold Toynbee and Gilles Deleuze. BERGSON AND HISTORY? Before embarking upon an exploration of Bergson and history, it must be noted that at present there is no consensus on whether it is feasible, let alone of value, to extract a philosophy of history from Bergson’s thought or make use of his concepts for understanding the nature of history. There is a Bergsonian philosophy of time of course, but as for a Bergsonian philosophy of history, there is some scepticism within the Bergsonian community as to whether it exists or even could. As one eminent Bergsonian puts it, the suggestion that ‘the resources of the ontological past . . . are open to the historian’ is ‘highly provocative’ and ‘needs to be adequately demonstrated and argued for’.1 For 17

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someone such as myself with an interest in the nature of history, this statement is rather perplexing. While it is true that Bergson never explicitly set out a fully formed philosophy of history under that title, the relevance of issues such as time, free will, memory and evolution to the field of history and its theorisation is both evident and long standing. To demonstrate, using the least obvious example on this list: philosophers of science and history would agree that particular notions of history are of great importance to evolutionary theories. Indeed, it is not uncommon for commentators on complexity theory to single out the historical character of Darwinian (and neo-Darwinian) evolutionary theory for criticism.2 For such individuals, an exploration of the philosophy of history inherent in and advanced by Bergson’s alternative account of evolution would therefore be of some value, or at the very least be an investigation whose pursuit does not require a great deal of justification. The issues of relevance I listed above are, of course, the principal problems to which Bergson devoted his first three books. If there is an historical book in Bergson’s oeuvre, however, it is more common to nominate his final work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, for nowhere else in Bergson’s writings will you find a fuller expression of his philosophy with respect to the events and people in history. Although this observation is true, it is also somewhat constrictive as to what counts as a philosophy of history and what might be of interest to one. If one’s interest is in the nature of history, and more specifically its ontology, then it would be remiss to limit one’s purview to the Two Sources, given that Bergson’s ontological armoury is well and truly formulated by that stage. Charles Péguy would certainly agree. As an attendee of Bergson’s Collège de France lectures, Péguy was a keen student and advocate of Bergson’s philosophy. He was also attuned to the significance of Bergson’s ideas for influencing our understanding of history. In a number of essays, including most notably Clio (the essay, titled after the muse of history, that will inspire Deleuze’s theory of the event), Péguy explicitly employs several Bergsonian notions, such as duration and the cone of memory, for the purposes of advancing a theory of history that was in direct contrast to the dominant model of his day, best exemplified by historians such as Ernest Lavisse, Charles Seignobos and Charles-Victor Langlois. As Camille Creyghton has further pointed out, Péguy’s Bergsonian thoughts on history date back to a 1901 essay titled ‘Proceedings of Congress’, which recounts a fictional meeting of four characters that debate the complexities of historiography and memory. While it might be argued that Péguy fails to set out in these



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essays a completely developed Bergsonian philosophy of history, it is difficult to disagree that he at least saw the promise in pursuing one. As Creyghton puts it: ‘At first glance, Bergson’s philosophy [of Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory] has nothing to do with historiography . . . However, his ideas about time and memory are estimated by Péguy to be of so much importance that in his eyes they are essential for anyone who wants to reflect on the conditions of the possibility of writing history.’3 Nor was Péguy the only thinker of history who saw the potential for a Bergsonian philosophy of history. In an exceptionally erudite study, Christian Kerslake reveals how the once-revered English historian Arnold Toynbee was significantly influenced by Bergson’s philosophy. As Kerslake notes, Toynbee’s Bergsonism was no small matter, but in fact the inspiration for his monumental history of civilisations: ‘it was Bergsonian philosophy that provided Toynbee with his primary justification for a turn to a global, synoptic view of human history, where the rise and fall of civilizations became a further level of differentiation in the ongoing cosmological and evolutionary differentiations that constitute Bergson’s élan vital’.4 If there was sufficient cause for Péguy and Toynbee to mine Bergsonian thought for insights into the nature and recording of history, it would be due to not only the clear relevance of issues such as time, memory and evolution to history, but also because Bergson himself occasionally refers to history when describing his central concepts. I will discuss some of these examples below, and in so doing call into question the belief that ‘questions of history and of historical memory and duration are to a large extent significantly absent from Bergson’s oeuvre’.5 But for the moment I would simply point out the following: while it is possible that Bergson’s references to history when describing his key concepts are of no relevance to the philosophy of history, surely it is this claim that requires adequate demonstration and not the contrary. It is also, to a certain extent, a moot point, for the prospect that the resources of Bergson’s philosophy are closed to thinkers of history most definitely did not stop philosophers and historians such as Péguy and Toynbee from acting as if they were fair game. The debate over whether Bergson himself explicitly advanced a coherent and fully formed philosophy of history is therefore somewhat irrelevant, if one’s interest is to explore the usefulness of Bergsonian philosophy for aiding our understanding of the nature of history. And yet it must be acknowledged that virtually nothing has been written in this area (in a direct and sustained manner) since the revival of Bergson studies in the English-speaking world. This fact was indeed

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revealed by the editors at Radical Philosophy to be part of their motivation for publishing an essay by Max Horkheimer on Bergson.6 In my view, it is not entirely necessary to turn to critical theory in order to engage in a discussion of Bergson’s philosophy and history; surely we owe it to Bergson to first make a genuine effort at extracting and/ or developing a Bergsonian philosophy of history on its own terms before we criticise it (or its lack) from the perspective of critical theory, historical materialism, hermeneutics or anything else. In this spirit, the remainder of this chapter will make some preliminary remarks on what a Bergsonian philosophy of history might look like, and in so doing demonstrate both the possibility and the promise of pursuing one. VIRTUAL HISTORY For the past several decades, it is arguably Bergson’s concepts of the actual and the virtual that have garnered the greatest amount of attention, especially for those interested in ontology. This is largely due to a contemporary fascination with all-things-virtual, and in particular the concept of the virtual as it is found in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Within the Deleuzian inspired literature on the virtual, as John Mullarkey has noted, there has been a tendency to characterise the virtual and its affiliated terms (such as difference and the molecular) as ‘good’, while the actual and its affiliated terms (such as identity and molarity) are somehow ‘bad’.7 Two more terms could be added to this list: ‘history’ and ‘becoming’. As Deleuze remarks in an interview with Antonio Negri: What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualised in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history. History isn’t experimental, it’s just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history.8

Such references to history and becoming in Deleuze’s work affirm both his ambivalence towards history and his casting of history on the side of the actual. History, to elaborate, is the factual record of what actually happened in the past; it chronologically strings together actualities that represent (capture) a virtual and productive force of becoming (creation). The ‘stuff’ of history, furthermore, is that which has been ‘actualised’ – becomings, Ideas or Events that have ‘fallen into history’.9 On the levels of both method and metaphysics, therefore, history is one with the actual.10 Mullarkey’s provocative response to this virtualist tendency is to give the ‘actualist’ approach of Bergson its proper dues. But whilst I share much sympathy with this agenda, the suggestion that



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I would like to make in this chapter is rather more limited: could it not be that history is or can be virtual? To test this out, let us first delve a little further into what Deleuze means by the virtual when he affiliates it with becoming in contrast to history. The virtual, as it is commonly recited by Deleuzians, is distinct from the Aristotelian conception of the possible, for it is no less real than the actual.11 The virtual therefore pertains to a different kind of reality. As Deleuze would describe it in his pre-Guattari work, this kind of reality is intensive and incorporeal, as opposed to extensive states-ofaffairs and corporeal bodies. Put differently, this reality is the reality of becoming as opposed to being. A useful illustration of this dualistic set-up can be taken from The Logic of Sense. Deleuze begins this text by considering a Platonic dualism – not that of model and copy, Idea and matter/body or intelligible and sensible, but rather the distinction between copies and simulacra. If ‘being’ is the matter of copies, those limited and measured expressions of an Idea, then ‘pure becoming’ is the matter of the simulacra, that which ‘eludes the action of the Idea’ and ‘contests both model and copy at once’.12 What both model and copy share are their susceptibility to measurement – it is in part by measuring the resemblance between them that the latter is determined to be a more or less good copy of the former. A pure becoming, however, evades such measurement by referring to an ongoing movement that is irreducible to specific extensive qualities/quantities: ‘ “hotter” never stops where it is but is always going a point further, and the same applies to “colder”, whereas definite quality is something that has stopped going on and is fixed’.13 That becoming refuses to conform to the dictates of being is unsurprising. But what is particularly intriguing in this discussion is that such becomings, according to Deleuze, flee their fixation in opposite directions at the same time. Deleuze draws inspiration for this theory from the literary work of Lewis Carroll, and in particular the story of Alice in Wonderland. As Deleuze notes in the case of Alice, she becomes larger and smaller at the same time, becoming larger than she was and smaller than she will be: This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and pull in both directions at once: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa.14

We thus arrive at the following dualism. On the one hand there is the living present. This living present ‘is the temporal extension which

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accompanies the act, expresses and measures the action of the agent and the passion of the patient’.15 This present, in other words, pertains to corporeal bodies and their states of affairs. In so far as such bodies can be collected into a unity, there is in turn a cosmic present, called Chronos, which ‘embraces the entire universe’.16 For Chronos, ‘only bodies exist in space, and only the present exists in time’.17 But simultaneous with this reading of time is another – Aion – which corresponds to the incorporeal nature of events rather than the substantive corporeality of bodies: the infinitive verb rather than the adjective. As such, this alternative time always eludes the present, constantly splitting it into the already past and eternally yet to come. This temporal dualism of Aion and Chronos, it must be acknowledged, is primarily derived from Deleuze’s reading of the Stoics and owes little to Deleuze’s Bergsonism. In fact, The Logic of Sense makes scant mention of the virtual. Looking ahead, however, Deleuze will more overtly amalgamate his reading of the actual/virtual dualism with the philosophical schema from The Logic of Sense. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze (with Guattari) will reprise the distinction between the event and states of affairs. But as we find here, the event is not only immaterial and incorporeal, it is also virtual: ‘From virtuals we descend to actual states of affairs, and from states of affairs we ascend to virtuals.’18 As with the Aionic becoming of Alice, there will always be a part of the event that ‘eludes its own actualization in everything that happens’, and as such ‘exists between two instants’.19 But for Deleuze, this between or ‘meanwhile’ is a ‘dead time’ where nothing takes place: ‘an infinite awaiting that is already infinitely past, awaiting and reserve’.20 Deleuze’s promotion of a virtual ‘dead time’ hardly strikes us as Bergsonian – Bergson may not have been a traditional vitalist, but it would be difficult to deny that he conceptualises time as something eminently vital. We should therefore not be surprised to find that even though Deleuze’s analysis implicitly relies upon Bergson’s notions of the virtual and heterogeneous multiplicity, Deleuze nevertheless criticises Bergson in this very same passage for maintaining that there is always time between two instants.21 Noting this divergence, however, indicates to us an alternative way of approaching the ontological status of history. Let us then return to Bergson, to see what his own use of the actual/virtual schema has to tell us about history. When Bergson first developed his actual/virtual dualism, he specifically used it to describe a past that no longer exists as the present but which nevertheless continues to coexist with it in some capacity:



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Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states. For this purpose it need not be entirely absorbed in the passing sensation or idea; for then, on the contrary, it would no longer endure. Nor need it forget its former states: it is enough that, in recalling these states, it does not set them alongside its actual state as one point alongside another, but forms both the past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another.22

Although this passage is principally about duration (an issue which I will get on to in a moment), what demands our attention here is the manner in which Bergson draws a distinction between a present/actual state and a past/virtual state, both of which together combine to form a coexisting organic whole. The word ‘virtual’, it must be admitted, does not appear in this passage, but by Matter and Memory its implication will be confirmed. As Bergson will say in this text: Essentially virtual, [the past] cannot be known as something past unless we follow and adopt the movement by which it expands into a present image, thus emerging from obscurity into the light of day. In vain do we seek its trace in anything actual and already realized: we might as well look for darkness beneath the light.23

Thus for Bergson the past is essentially virtual. Accordingly, the virtual does not exactly correspond to simultaneous becomings (Aion) in contrast to actual successive history (Chronos), as a Deleuzian reading might suggest. On the contrary, the movement from the virtual to the actual might be thought of as the movement of history itself, vis-à-vis the present actuality towards which it is surging. When so put, history is not in conflict with the virtual or restricted to the realm of actuality. For in so far as the virtual past plays an indispensable role in determining the nature of the present and of reality, history is a part of the process by which reality is produced, rather than an effect of it. In response to this analysis, it may be objected that I have conflated history with the past. There are of course differences between the two, and I would by no means wish to suggest that they are synonymous (despite their numerous affinities). But in lieu of setting out (let alone resolving) the differences and similarities between history and the past, it is perhaps adequate to note for the time being that Bergson himself occasionally refers to them in tandem: What are we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived from our birth – nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions? Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original

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bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act. Our past, then, as a whole, is made manifest to us in its impulse; it is felt in the form of tendency, although a small part of it only is known in the form of idea.24

As we can see from this discussion and others like it,25 our past is, in a certain respect, our history – the history of where we have been. ‘History’, broadly speaking, is of course a notion that incorporates much more than just the temporal category of the past, but the relevant point here is that when Bergson speaks about the past in such passages, what he has in mind is clearly compatible with the term history, or at least a certain understanding of that term. This is arguably to be expected, given that Bergson is at pains in all of his studies to demonstrate how the past is something lived, as opposed to a mere temporal category, and something that survives in the present.26 It would also explain why several of Bergson’s temporal illustrations do not simply refer to abstract relations between the past, present and future, but instead appeal to historical examples, by which I mean examples that describe the relation between our contemporary reality and its history.27 Nevertheless, one may still insist that while for Bergson the past is virtual, history proper is the actual record and/or manifestation of this productive process. To ascertain the accuracy of this interpretation, and consequently the legitimacy of conceptualising history as virtual and vital, it will therefore be necessary to consider more than just those passages in which Bergson refers to the virtual, given their relative scarcity within his writings.28 Let us then consider a far more frequent and fundamental notion of Bergsonian ontology: duration. As I will show, Bergson’s description and development of this notion also explicitly refers to history, in turn indicating why thinkers of history such as Péguy and Toynbee might have been so interested in Bergson’s philosophy. DURATIONAL HISTORY Bergson’s description of an unfolding melody is one of his earliest, and perhaps most compelling, illustrations of duration. As each successive note in a melody is sounded, the listener hears much more than just that individual note. What he or she hears is an entire progression, which is to say that the character of each emerging note in a melody is contoured in part by its interconnections (‘mutual penetration’) with previous notes and the whole it is a part of – namely, the trajectory of the melodic progression. In this manner, two notes that might be identical in actuality will be different in reality due to their differing relations to



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a virtual progression. When a new note emerges in a melody, it does not so much ‘replace’ the previous note as form a continuity with it. This continuity is duration. Although it is common to represent (‘symbolise’) this continuity as a set of discrete moments lined up in a row (a chronological timeline), Bergson points out that in reality we do not experience time as discrete instants, but rather as an interpenetrating succession, what he refers to as ‘a continuous or qualitative multiplicity’. Duration for Bergson is thus a heterogeneous multiplicity that must continuously change in kind if time is to be allowed to pass – to endure.29 In his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (translated as Time and Free Will) this notion of duration will be employed by Bergson to solve Zeno’s paradox. As we find there, Achilles will never be able to overtake the tortoise in a footrace unless the duration of Achilles and the duration of his slower rival are respected as singular heterogeneities or continuous (as opposed to discrete) multiplicities.30 Moving forward, however, Bergson will make use of this very same idea to describe the evolution of life. As he will assert in Creative Evolution, the evolution of life forms ‘a single indivisible history’.31 This invocation of the word ‘history’ is telling, for the history that he is talking about is not some chronological spatialisation of a durational movement. Rather, the indivisible trajectory that Bergson is referring to is history itself. As such, history does not come after the durational movement of evolution, for it is duration, or perhaps more exactly, a part of it. Bergson’s reference to history in this manner is no mere one-off. Nor does it only occur at inconsequential moments. In fact, we can find this use of history in one of the most beloved passages of Bergson’s entire oeuvre: Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that their history, past, present, and future, might be instantaneously unfurled like a fan, this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own. If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not that mathematical time which would apply equally well to the entire history of the material world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived.32

As we can see here, history need not be thought of as an isolated system, where past, present and future are spread out instantaneously in space, for Bergson offers us another way of thinking about history, in which

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‘this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own’. It is this kind history that thinkers such as Toynbee, Péguy and myself are so keen to explore. In articulating his various civilisations, Toynbee’s histories attempt to elicit the singular duration of each civilisation (and their relation to the élan vital). These civilisations are naturally in contact/confluence with one another, and significantly so, like Achilles and the tortoise. But they can each nonetheless be said to exude their own métier or singular combination of reality – what Deleuze and Guattari might call a cross-section of chaos or plane of immanence.33 As for Péguy, when he insists upon the need to place oneself within the depths of an historical event, it is precisely for the purposes of ‘intuiting’ the durational rhythm of that historical event.34 As I previously remarked, these examples of Bergsonian history are by no means the only possible applications, and it is debatable as to how accurate or fully developed they are. Their existence, however, points to the possibility of extracting an alternative conception of history that is closely associated with the notion of duration and its affiliated terms. From an historical theory point of view, it is hardly surprising that one might turn to Bergson when seeking a form of history that escapes the confines of determinism and representationalism. This is because Bergson’s philosophy affords us one of the most prominent critiques of historicism in the history of Western philosophy. In his critique of evolutionary theory, Bergson takes to task two varieties of historicism: radical mechanism and radical finalism. In radical mechanism, reality is subjected to an a priori systematisation that is causal-linear and fixed. The essence of mechanical explanation is therefore ‘to regard the future and the past as calculable functions of the present, and thus to claim that all is given’.35 Radical finalism, on the other hand, is teleological, in so far as its movement is guided by a predetermined endpoint. In Bergson’s words: This doctrine of teleology, in its extreme form, as we find it in Leibniz for example, implies that things and beings merely realize a programme previously arranged. But if there is nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation in the universe, time is useless again. As in the mechanistic hypothesis, here again it is supposed that all is given. Finalism thus understood is only inverted mechanism. It springs from the same postulate, with this sole difference, that in the movement of our finite intellects along successive things, whose successiveness is reduced to a mere appearance, it holds in front of us the light with which it claims to guide us, instead of putting it behind.36

As it happens, it is of precisely this kind of teleological historicism that Deleuze and Guattari will accuse Hegel and Heidegger.37 The alterna-



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tive, they will go on to argue, is found in the notion of ‘becoming’ and the multiplicity of fusion (of which duration is said to be the pre-eminent example).38 But as we have seen, this heterogeneous multiplicity need not be opposed to history. On the contrary, history might instead be durational, and duration part historical. Such an association of history with the concept of duration is certainly contestable, especially if one takes The Two Sources of Morality and Religion as a starting point. Indeed, it could even be claimed that Bergson’s duration is in fact ahistorical.39 To do so, however, requires a disregard for the references to history that I have detailed and the broader philosophy of history operating through Bergson’s work. It furthermore implies a convenient but somewhat questionable portrayal of Bergson’s texts prior to the Two Sources as being works of speculative metaphysics detached from contemporary reality.40 As a result, if one wishes to ‘historicise Bergson’s durée’, one arguably need not go beyond Bergson, but simply return to his formative texts. There one will find a form of history that is not wedded to the act of spatial representation, but is rather an integral element in the continual emergence of duration. CONCLUSION In his renowned essay on ‘The Possible and the Real’, Bergson conjectures that the possible does not predate the real, but on the contrary is retrospectively cast by the real into the past. As he puts it: ‘Backwards over the course of time, a constant remodelling of the past by the present, of the cause by the effect, is being carried out.’41 When history is characterised as the act of representing something in the past from the perspective of the present, it is naturally fitting to affiliate it with this form of the possible. In such cases, history tells us what was possible. It may also explain or justify what is, and as a result serve the purposes of the present. Ultimately, however, this form of history could be said to coincide with the power of capture and manipulation (pouvoir), as opposed to productivity and creativity (puissance). Consequently, it is little wonder that this form of history is condemned by Deleuze as constrictive and contrasted with what he would call becoming. As I have demonstrated in this chapter, however, this is not all that history can be or become in the philosophy of Bergson. For as we know from Deleuze, aside from this conception of the possible, an entirely different category of reality can be extracted from Bergson’s thought – the virtual. And far from being opposed to history, the virtual fundamentally involves history. Indeed, as the present emerges, what is

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‘made manifest to us in its impulse’ and ‘felt in the form of tendency’ is nothing other than the ‘condensation of our history’ – or more specifically, our virtual history.42 Furthermore, both genuine movement and creativity rely upon this continuity that history forms with the present: as the arc of duration is drawn from the virtual past to the actual present, what it forms is ‘a single indivisible history’43 – a history that ‘unfolds itself gradually’.44 Of course, much more remains to be said on the main features of Bergson’s philosophy of history and its great relevance to art history, in particular its bearing on creativity. In this chapter, I have touched on two concepts – the virtual and duration – that might be productively explored within the context of history and ontology. However, as the work of Péguy and Toynbee demonstrates, other Bergsonian notions such as intuition and the élan vital would almost certainly form a part of the broader picture. To the extent that philosophers of history share a desire with contemporary Bergsonians to better understand the process of creativity, the relation of the present to what has come before, and to combat conventional theories of determinism and teleology, it would seem apparent that there is much to be gained from further pursuing this line of thought, for the benefit of both Bergsonian and historical scholarship. NOTES  1. Keith Ansell Pearson, ‘Review of Jay Lampert’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2007.03.06, available at http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25233-deleuze-and-guattari-s-philos​ ophy-of-history (accessed 25 March 2013).   2. As an example, see Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity (Phoenix: Orion Books, 1994), pp. 78–83, 104–5, 128–34 and 141.  3. Camille Creyghton, ‘  “History, Memory of Humanity”. Bergson’s Influence on the Conception of History and Memory in Charles Péguy’, The Workshop Centre for Historical Research, §9, available at http://arch. revues.org/3593 (accessed 24 September 2012).  4. Christian Kerslake, ‘Becoming Against History: Toynbee, Deleuze and Vitalist Historiography’, Parrhesia, No. 4 (2008), p. 19.  5. Ansell Pearson, ‘Review of Jay Lampert’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History’. In supporting this assertion, Ansell Pearson notes that Matter and Memory ‘is primarily a contribution to the philosophy of mind’. Again, this is most certainly true. But it is strange that Ansell Pearson would take this as evidence that the text has nothing to say about the nature of history. For example, Ansell Pearson would presumably be



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willing to admit that the text has a great deal to contribute to the philosophy of time, yet the philosophy of time is not synonymous with the philosophy of mind. I do not mean to suggest that Matter and Memory has as much to say about history as it does mind or time, I merely wish to point out that Ansell Pearson does not offer any convincing reasons as to why Matter and Memory would be closed to the historian or philosopher of history.   6. See the editors’ note at the beginning of Max Horkheimer, ‘On Bergson’s Metaphysics of Time’, Radical Philosophy, No. 131 (May/June 2005), p. 9.  7. See John Mullarkey, ‘Forget the Virtual: Bergson, Actualism, and the Refraction of Reality’, Continental Philosophy Review, No. 37 (2004), pp. 470–2.  8. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1974–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 170.  9. For a leading proponent of this Deleuzian theory, see Jay Lampert, Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History (London and New York: Continuum, 2006). 10. It should be noted that I have argued at length on how it is possible to extract an alternative philosophy of history from Deleuze’s work beyond this image of history as one with the actual. For this analysis in full, see Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 11. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), pp. 208 and 211. 12. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Continuum, 1990), p. 2 13. Plato, ‘Philebus’, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, trans. R. Hackforth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), §24d. 14. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 1. 15. Ibid., p. 4. 16. Ibid., p. 4. 17. See ibid., pp. 4 and 162. 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 160. 19. Ibid., pp. 156 and 158. 20. Ibid., p. 158. As Deleuze and Guattari go on to say: ‘In every event there are many heterogeneous, always simultaneous components, since each of them is a meanwhile, all within the meanwhile that makes them communicate through zones of indiscernibility, of undecidability: they are variations, modulations, intermezzi, singularities of a new infinite order. Each component of the event is actualised or effectuated in an instant, and the event in the time that passes between these instants; but nothing happens within the virtuality that has only meanwhiles as components and an event

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as composite becoming. Nothing happens there, but everything becomes, so that the event has the privilege of beginning again when time is past.’ 21. Ibid., p. 157. 22. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola: Dover, 2001), p. 100. 23. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (Mineola: Dover, 2004), p. 173. 24. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola: Dover, 1998), p. 5. 25. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Mineola: Dover, 2007), pp. 127–8. 26. See ibid., pp. 125–9 and 151. 27. See, for instance, Bergson’s discussion of Romanticism and earlier classical writers on p. 12 of The Creative Mind. 28. Bergson, it should be noted, rarely refers to the term ‘virtual’ and does not promote it as one of his major concepts. 29. See Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 100–5. 30. Ibid., pp. 113–14. 31. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 37. 32. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 33. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 42–3. 34. For more on this see Lundy, History and Becoming, pp. 25–7. 35. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 39. 36. Ibid., p. 39. 37. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 94–5. 38. Ibid., p. 127. 39. See Claire Blencowe, ‘Destroying Duration: The Critical Situation of Bergsonism in Benjamin’s Analysis of Modern Experience’, Theory Culture Society, Vol. 25, No. 139 (2008), p. 140. 40. See ibid. In her attempt to ‘destroy duration’, Blencowe relies heavily upon a reading of duration drawn from the Two Sources of Morality and Religion, with minimal consideration of this concept as it appears in Bergson’s previous texts. In addition, and closely related to this, Blencowe draws a distinction between the Two Sources and Bergson’s earlier ‘metaphysical’ works, based on her reading of Walter Benjamin. As she says: ‘What Benjamin calls into question is not so much Bergson’s metaphysics as his application of them to human experience. Indeed, Benjamin’s critique can best be understood as a response to the sociobiological Two Sources of Morality and Religion’ (ibid., p. 152). To suggest, however, that Bergson’s philosophy prior to the Two Sources has nothing to say about ‘human experience’ or the ‘sociobiological’ is highly dubious. What are Bergson’s first two books if not investigations into human experience? And what is Creative Evolution if not a development of duration beyond the psychological context into the sociobiological realm of life, construed in all its diversity? Granted, the Two Sources is a distinct text that more



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fully discusses the sociohistorical. But this does not itself make Bergson’s prior philosophy ahistorical or devoid of concern for human experience or the sociobiological. 41. Bergson, The Creative Mind, pp. 84–5. 42. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 5. 43. Ibid., p. 37. 44. Ibid., pp. 9–10.

2. Art History, Immanently CHARLOTTE DE MILLE

Immanent art history cannot be written. Art history concerns selected, condensed particularities, the material objects on which the discipline is founded. Immanence denotes forces and events on a plane that Deleuze in his final essay called simply ‘a life’. Art history is inherently dialectical; recognised and developed by its originators, problematic to their successors. For the last four decades, the socially and culturally motivated ‘new’ art history has archived ‘lives’ for its subjects, often deferring to critical writing that enables it to map its subjects within networks or cultural fields. Such art history has often been hooked into a sequence of theoretical -isms: Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, staking a claim in an increasingly broad range of media, nibbling at other disciplines, whilst attempting to define itself amid them. More recently, these disciplinary practices have undergone review through a return to subjective histories activated by attention to the temporal unfolding of the art object, led by T. J. Clark’s meditation The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing and W. J. T. Mitchell’s provocative What do Pictures Want?1 Immanence offers virtuality and multiplicity, the possibility of deferring definite meaning even whilst that meaning is being written. The difficulty in immanent writing is that the moment it is on the page – my cursor directing black across a white (‘empty’) surface – it is too late. I fix the content in black figures that cannot be erased or re-shuffled once they have gone to print. But can (the non-verbal art of) painting any more easily suggest the possibility of its making without narrating it? Can we? Re-iterating David Hume’s study of relations, Deleuze asks: ‘why, according to civil law, does the ground win out over the surface, but paint over the canvas, whereas paper wins out over writing?’2 In each case, material dominates meaning. In these terms painterly abstraction restores meaning to material by rectifying the surface-ground imbalance of representation. 32



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Figure 2.1  Duncan Grant, Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, Gouache and watercolour on paper on canvas, 27.9 x 45.02 cm, 1914, © Tate, London 2013; estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2013.

This chapter addresses the question of what the material might show through an analysis of the first known attempt at mechanised painting, Duncan Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Collage with Sound, 1914, often known as Abstract Kinetic Scroll (Figure 2.1). Grant’s piece as it was conceived addresses central questions concerning the nature of perception at the advent of early cinema, the possibility and extent of temporality in painting, and the role of perspective in directing the viewers’ attention. These three concerns formed the ground-breaking debates of 1911–14 in European painting, and can in this instance be traced to the critical framework of Roger Fry and Henri Bergson. Grant’s Scroll is provocative for the way it masters and animates these themes, rehearsing the Bergsonian challenge to cinema whilst offering support to Deleuze’s criticism of it. Thinking of the Scroll in this way has forced me to re-assess my methodology, to work creatively with its components to visualise the effects Grant wanted to achieve. The chapter traces the process of this analysis, offering the pitfalls into which it was so easy to fall, along with their benefits. It assesses the methodological scope of the virtual and the multiple: appropriate enough for a work that until the last three years of the artist’s life remained an incomplete ideal. GRANT IN PARIS Ever nonchalant and self-deprecating, Duncan Grant was a self-styled painter. Despite his close friendships with Roger Fry and Clive and Vanessa Bell he kept himself consciously apart from published and publishable theoretical discussion. No review seems to have elicited a response from him, defensive or otherwise, and it was an exceeding rarity for him to write at all.3 When, in 1919, André Derain complimented his work, his response in a letter to Vanessa Bell was frustratingly elusive. ‘With my gifts I ought to attack “des [sic] grandes problèmes,”  ’ he recorded, concluding lamely, ‘but I don’t really understand what he means.’4 Through an introduction from Simon Bussy, Grant studied at Jacques Emile Blanche’s La Palette from January 1906 to Autumn 1907. Blanche was hardly avant-garde,

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the bulk of his output being f­ashionable portraiture, and indeed he was to paint Bergson himself in 1908.5 Despite Grant’s study at La Palette, it is known that throughout his time there the majority of his close links were to an insular British artistic community including William Forrestier, Constance Lloyd, Helen and Boris Anrep, Henry Lamb and Dorelia John. Outside the confines of art school however his acquaintances ranged more widely, and his memoir mentions morning coffee with Wyndham Lewis at Le Café de Dome.6 Grant was also on friendly terms with Gwen John, who through Rodin was certainly more integrated into French art circles. In 1909, Bussy introduced Grant to Matisse, signalling the start of his assimilation into the Parisian avantgarde. In 1913, he was again in Paris working for Jacques Copeau to produce set designs for a production of Twelfth Night. According to Frances Spalding, it was at this time that Grant met Bertrand Russell’s niece Karen Costelloe whilst she was completing her thesis on Bergson.7 Costelloe invited him to a ‘tea party that included Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Charles Vildrac, Mme Bergson and her two daughters. Karin . . . warned Duncan in advance that one of Bergson’s daughters was deaf.’8 Spalding hardly makes the party sound enticing, and a social gathering may not be an auspicious environment for sustained intellectual debate. But whatever Grant may or may not have assimilated from this exposure, he could not remain oblivious to the pervading furore that Bergson’s work instigated amongst the avant-garde, and he was certainly ready to develop his work according to Fry’s formal aesthetic. BERGSONIAN PERCEPTION AND IMMANENT ART According to Gilles Deleuze, representation in Bergsonian thought is ‘divided into two directions that differ in kind, into two pure presences that do not allow themselves to be represented: that of perception which puts us at once into matter and that of memory which puts us at once into the mind’.9 Bergson described pure or virtual perception in Matter and Memory as ‘the lowest degree of mind – mind without memory – [it] is really part of matter’.10 Whilst every perception is stored in memory, there is a disjunction between image and experience: ‘to picture is not to remember’.11 As Bergson put it, ‘an image may be without being perceived; it may be present without being represented; and the distance between these two terms, presence and representation, seems just to measure the interval between matter itself and our conscious perception of matter’.12 It is in this gap that ‘pure’ perception functions, and, utilising this mode of consciousness, that



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modernist art flourished. As the selective nature of everyday pragmatic perception is arrested we are ‘actually placed outside ourselves; we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition’.13 Without the continuity of our personal durations, the flashes of intuition in this ‘pure’ perception appear dissociative, spatial ‘presences’, where the processual temporality of consciousness is indefinitely halted. But, although our consciousness may be expanded by this exterior perspective, still we only gain a contracted image. Bergson writes that ‘representation is there, but always virtual . . . To obtain this conversion from the virtual to the actual, it would be necessary to . . . obscure some of its aspects . . . so that the remainder, instead of being encased in its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture.’14 Representation is selective, decontextualising its object. A picture is the result when a ‘thing should detach itself’ from its environment.15 This would suggest that in Bergson’s aesthetic, painting can only serve to draw our attention to the limitations of human perception. A painting cannot give more than the reduction of its parts. How, then, is it so commonly acknowledged that art operates in culture to reflect upon and shape experience, to reconnect us with our environment, and to open up a fuller image of life? Rather than regarding the static painting as a detachment from duration and as an actualisation of thought, we should regard it as a re-affirmation of immanent possibility. Grant’s mastery in Abstract Kinetic Scroll was to test these assumptions by animating the canvas. The Scroll is not a static enframed – or encased – picture vulnerable to passers by, but a dancing, moving stream of images that unfolds for those viewers sufficiently intrigued to study it. The aperture through which he intended it to be viewed might be regarded as another framing device, yet, crucially, it places the viewer where the artist wants him or her to be, at the mercy of the Scroll, not vice versa. By this small device, Grant instigates a radical shift in gallery experience, challenging his viewers to reflect upon the nature of looking at a work of art, and from where in the gallery one looks at it. The Scroll’s materiality is an immediate intervention against our dulled, overly categorical and representative perception, where, contrary to expectation, representation is not what is offered on the Scroll’s surface, but is rather our perception itself, orchestrated by the process of looking.16 The effect is to place us ‘at once into matter’, to awaken an attentive and fully participatory perception able to recognise pure presence. The Scroll functions as both thing and picture, demanding multi-perceptual assimilation to engage with the intangible limits of representation and identification.

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EMBODYING EXPERIENCE: BERGSON AND FRY In the final chapter of Creative Evolution Bergson distinguishes between the picture (like a jigsaw) that ‘is already created’, which ‘requires only a work of recomposing and rearranging’ and the work of art which brings to light ‘that unforeseeable nothing’ at its heart.17 Perception is a ‘perpetual oscillation’ between repeated movements and ‘elementary changes’ which are grasped as entirely new.18 These movements and changes are the site of creativity and élan in the work, animated as the viewer’s perception traces these paths in the act of looking. Attentive looking is actively embodied, attentive to life in art. As Iris van de Tuin acknowledges in her chapter in the present volume, Bergson followed Théodule Ribot in Matter and Memory ‘to define attention as an adaption of the body rather than of the mind’.19 By the time of writing Creative Evolution life itself was characterised in Bergson’s thought as the potentiality of pure matter prior to its assumption of recognisable form.20 Life is perpetual becoming. We can imagine that Roger Fry’s background in the natural sciences would have predisposed him to the biological and physiological premises of Creative Evolution. Although this has been contested ground, there is extensive evidence of Fry’s thorough knowledge of Bergson’s work.21 His initial interest in a perceptual and physiological basis for art, however, commenced with his fellowship dissertation ‘Some Problems of Phenomenology and its Application to Greek Art’ of 1891.22 In this text, Fry analysed the ‘impressions made on us by external objects in their entirety’ that could be regarded as common to all without any ‘abnormal idiosyncrasy’.23 It is clear that during the writing of his fellowship dissertation Fry had been travelling to France, for his painterly elements are as much described in relation to contemporary work in Paris, which presented the ‘atmospheric luminosity of the whole’, as they were by the Greek painting of his title.24 His analysis of ‘tone-perspective’ as the ‘alteration of tone-relations through distance’ in particular, gives us a tantalising glimpse of his response to pointillism, and has resonance for the marbling in Grant’s Scroll.25 The transitional work in the development of Fry’s aesthetic was the posthumously published essay ‘The Philosophy of Impressionism’ (1894). Referencing William James’ Principles of Psychology of 1891 together with modern ‘process . . . metaphysics’, ‘The Philosophy of Impressionism’ provided the considered empirical observation that ‘Some Problems’ lacked. In the later essay, Impressionism was characterised in durational terms as the ‘momentary group of sensations in the perceptual flux, existing in necessary relations to its surroundings



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and an inseparable part of them’.26 The visionary freedom that this new mode of seeing opened up was an inspiration. The practically orientated man ‘does not know how little he sees of things’, Fry wrote, ‘. . . how fluctuating, evanescent and fantastic are the actual visual impressions of objects, how they melt and glide into each other’.27 Comparably with Bergson’s Time and Free Will, he negated positivist science as a reaction of the mind which actively ‘prevent[s] the mind from making the step from sensations to things’.28 It was these sensations that occupied Fry in ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, his mature statement on aesthetic perception and value, and one that I have argued elsewhere has a demonstrable connection to Bergsonian thought. Reprising the argument of ‘Some Problems’, Fry contended that the artist ‘uses natural forms, which in themselves are calculated to move our emotions, and he presents these in such a manner that the forms themselves generate in us emotional states, based upon the fundamental necessities of our physical and physiological nature’.29 Aesthetic experience is programmed biologically, bodily. In a manner very like the final chapter of Creative Evolution, Fry regarded the work of art ‘as perception of a process of motion and balance’ of formal elements that manifest the ‘vital rhythm’ of the artwork, ‘through which the artist’s subconscious feelings reveal themselves to us’.30 Far from lines or shapes, Fry’s ‘formalism’ is first and foremost pitched in terms of movement and gesture, the process therefore of divining the form(s) of the artwork in the act of its creation and re-creation in the sensations of the beholder. Fry’s ‘Essay’ is perhaps best known for his designation of ‘emotional elements of design’, often regarded as dubious by art historians for their psychological rather than empirical foundation. These emotional elements return us to the body and not to the mind, as Fry makes clear. These are ‘primary physical needs’, he writes. The first element, ‘rhythm of line’, is proposed as a ‘record of a gesture . . . ­modified by the artist’s feeling’; mass, second of the elements, is described as the ‘power of resisting movement, and communicating its own movement to other bodies’.31 The movement of painting corresponds to a movement perception that is embodied. Conforming in its movement to Fry’s use of rhythm and mass, Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Scroll defines itself and its process of production through its mechanism. The artist’s ‘gesture’ is perpetuated, literally brought to the surface and recreated by the rise and fall of the passing rectangles. Quite obviously, it ‘communicates its movement’ to the viewer, whose own path through the gallery would be arrested for the duration of the Scroll’s sequence. Our own perceptual process is emphasised by the shifting object which demands that we follow that

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object’s duration with close attention. This is clearly not the realm of pragmatic life, but rather the ‘equivalent’ that Fry characterised as the Post Impressionist grail. Simon Watney has argued that in ‘exploring a purely pictorial territory of formal transformations’, Grant explored ‘movement within the pictorial space’.32 The work is ‘less a painting which moves, than an analysis of movement itself’.33 Conservatively, Watney concedes that whilst ‘unwise to attempt to place Grant’s work from this period in relation to any single intellectual influence’, Grant’s interests in the Scroll ‘undoubtedly stand within the large framework of contemporary Bergsonian thought’.34 Richard Shone’s description of the Scroll moving testifies to the sensory and perceptual effect that the work had as it was originally conceived: it gave the ‘impression of extraordinary harmony, of clear, subtle colour, with the restless calligraphy of contrasting, sometimes sharply, sometimes discreetly flowing, with each section of unerringly placed rectangles as they rise and fall in progression’.35 By creating a moving work, Grant found an easy way to convey the instability of flux and potentiality through actual change. TEMPORALITY IN PAINTING AND THE CINEMATIC CHALLENGE In certain Chinese paintings the length is so great that we only look at it in successive segments. As we unroll it at one end and roll it up at the other we traverse wide stretches of a country, tracing perhaps, all the vicissitudes of a river from its source to the sea, and yet, when this is well done, we have received a very keen impression of pictorial unity. Such a successive unity is of course familiar to us in literature and music, and it plays its part in the graphic arts. It depends upon the forms being presented to us in such a sequence that each successive element is felt to have a fundamental and harmonious relation to that which preceded it. I suggest that in looking at drawings our sense of pictorial unity is largely of this nature; we feel, if the drawing be a good one, that each modulation of the line as our eye passes along it gives order and variety to our sensations.36

It is clear from a letter from Vanessa Bell that Grant not only considered the Scroll to be inspired by the Far East, but that his central concern was to channel his viewer’s perception. This description marries well with Fry’s characterisation of Chinese scrolls in ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’ as being ‘perceptual’ not ‘emotional’. As Grant worked on the Scroll, Vanessa described ‘a long painting which is meant to be rolled up in the manner of those Chinese paintings and seen by degrees’, continuing, ‘it is entirely abstract’.37 It should not be surprising that the Scroll should sit in this context for it was topical in pre-war London. Fry’s great friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson had traveled extensively in China and



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wrote a book that parodied Western preconceptions of China through masquerading as a series of Letters from John Chinaman (1901). This was followed in 1911 by the influential publication The Flight of the Dragon: An Essay on the Theories and Practices of Art in China and Japan, Based on Original Sources, by the Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, poet Laurence Binyon.38 The example of Chinese painting, and scrolls in particular, offered a particular means through which to address temporality in painting, unsettling the spatial preconceptions of Western viewers. It is no accident that Grant adopted the example, however the Scroll is no straightforward appropriation, mechanised as it is, as a material form of cinema. According to Deleuze, the cinematic properties of Chinese painting fascinated early film-makers, Sergei Eisenstein among them. Consequently Deleuze’s own writing on the painting of China and Japan is coloured with description similar to his discussion of film: Chinese and Japanese painting invoke two fundamental principles: on the one hand the primordial void and the breath of life which permeates all things in One, unites them in a whole, and transforms them according to the movement of a great circle or an organic spiral; on the other hand the median void and the skeleton, the articulation, the joints, the wrinkle or broken stroke which moves from one being to another by taking them at the summit of their presence, following a line of the universe. In the one case it is the union which counts, diastole and systole, but in the other it is rather the separation into autonomous events, all of which are decisive. In the one case the presence of things is in their ‘appearing’, but in the other presence itself lies in a ‘disappearing’ . . . All the art of execution is in fragmentary notations and interruptions, although the aim is to achieve a total result.39

Grant’s scroll enacts this appearing and disappearing, following the lines that both Fry and Deleuze emphasise as key to temporal art. But do we regard Grant’s Scroll as a whole, or as an animation of fragments? Grant subtly varied his technique. The collage introduced for the rectangles of the opening seven sections gives way first to a mixture of collage and paint, then for the last four sections paint alone, presumably effecting a recession or visual weakening towards the work’s close. The visual rhythm slows, allowing the viewer to wind down from acute attention to reflection. Or rather, we imagine it would, were the Scroll’s animation to be realised. As I have said, the work remains latent and full of potential rather than one anyone can visit and experience, because even when on display, it is now shown stretched out as a strip, static and pinned behind glass as a painting. I first shifted my analysis of the Scroll as a result of searching for a way to convey its radicalism in a lecture theatre. I needed to ‘perform’ the work as near as it was intended to be.

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However, the imperfect cut that I produced for this experiment merely highlighted the difficulties of recreating Grant’s vision. In seventeen sections, the scroll’s ground alternates between rich marbling and stark calligraphic brush marks where the paint has not been washed to leach into the marble effect. Using a muted palette of six colours (smoke blue, sage green, forest green, russet, ochre, black), Grant has both collaged and painted rectangles to produce layered contrasts, which in movement, leap back and forth upon the plane in rhythmic pulsation.40 The scroll was to be wound on two spools, moving from right to left (after Chinese scrolls, and the direction of the cuts I made), and was to be viewed through an eleven by fourteen inch aperture. In the Tate Gallery’s 1974 film realisation, the scroll took four minutes eighteen seconds to unwind, the length of a performance of the slow movement of J. S. Bach’s First Brandenburg Concerto which Grant had chosen for the piece. Unfortunately the Tate film is currently unavailable, but in any event, and bizarrely (given their close attention to timing), the film is silent – so it is itself an incomplete realisation of Grant’s idea. The series of stills that I took were therefore the closest we could get to Grant’s work. But playing this sort of game has enormous pitfalls. For a start, I ‘contracted’ and ‘dilated’ the work, which, as Bergson reminds us, is ‘to modify both the psychical evolution that fills it and the invention which is its goal’.41 Second, I chose to cut each slide to the leading edge of each new shape – justifiable perhaps for better marking the Scroll’s dynamism – but ignoring its seventeen sections. Third, I showed, as my accompanying illustration to this chapter does, the scroll entire with its ragged bare canvas borders. Our vision is not restricted to the dimensions of Grant’s aperture; indeed recreating the individual, private looking the aperture implies was impossible in a communal lecture theatre. Lastly, without becoming an expert in Photoshop or QuickTime, I could not replace the moving of the scroll by a series of slides. There is no continuity here, but a sequence of fragments. In short, the slides I made rehearsed the difficulties of the cinematographic method vigorously discussed by Bergson at the end of Creative Evolution. Throwing ‘instantaneous views on the screen . . . reconstitutes the mobility . . . with immobility set beside immobility’.42 According to his understanding of the working of human knowledge, ‘instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things’, the slides required that ‘we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality . . . Our activity goes from an arrangement to a rearrangement, each time no doubt giving the kaleidoscope a new shake, but not interesting itself in the shake, and seeing only the new picture.’43 The effect



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is that the ‘movement slips through the interval, because every attempt to reconstitute change out of states implies the absurd proposition, that movement is made of immobilities’.44 Returning to Deleuze, the slides exhibited his criticism of Hume’s empiricism as ‘a world of exteriority, a world in which thought itself exists in a fundamental relationship with the Outside, a world in which terms are veritable atoms and relations veritable external passages; a world in which the conjunction “and” dethrones the interiority of the verb “is”; a harlequin world of multicoloured patterns and non-totalizable fragments’.45 This may be labouring the point, but it is worthwhile given Fry’s (and Grant’s) knowledge of Bergson. Grant’s work is not blindly cinematographic. So what might we learn from my poor reconstruction? Viewed as a series of stills rather than sliding seamlessly one to the next, the movement of the Scroll through my slides appeared vertical not horizontal, effected in space not time. By choosing to cut to each new shape, the size of the slides was uneven, causing them to contract and expand; they breathed as a lung, reflecting the systolic/diastolic working of heartbeat.46 The cuts could not correspond to the even proportions of a film strip and Grant’s medium ensures that we do not view these ‘photogrammes’ as negatives vitalised by light but consider the materiality (physical solidity) of paint and canvas. By unfolding the materiality of his surface, Grant forces our attention on it and it alone. He puts his method, tools, proposition, on full view, concealing nothing, but giving little away. To this extent, the scroll responds to many of Deleuze’s contentions about painting. I could describe it as an ‘overflight’ or ‘line of flight’ that functions in the interval between possibility and actualisation. On an artistic plane of composition, the scroll renders a ‘block of sensations, a compound of percepts and affects’ where the absence of form marks ‘becoming-other’.47 Deleuze and Guattari divide the technical and material qualities of the artwork from its aesthetic affect. Yet, as they concede and Ronald Bogue has clarified, the distinction is false, for both are integrated in the expressivity of matter. This seems to be just Grant’s concern. Moreover, the movement of the scroll actualises – emphasises – the rhythm of painting; designs repeat, returning like a musical leitmotif through a score. Rhythm (as movement) gives an in-between of two planes,48 and in Grant’s work, an in-between of two media. What would the scroll express, put to music? Splitting our perception into simultaneously visual and aural fields, the affect is perhaps, to adopt another metaphor from A Thousand Plateaus, of ‘milieu, each defined by a component, slid[ing] in relation to one another, over one

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another’.49 The refrain orders, contains and escapes. Grant seems to be contracting and extending time: is it such a leap from the so-called seventeen sections of the scroll to the eighteen-frames per second of the cinema of his day? Is it accidental that the movement of Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto could just fit within the time of one side of an early gramophone recording if carefully wound (three minutes forty)? The work implies that one second is simultaneously one and multiple, that three minutes forty can be over in a flash. Grant demands that we inhabit his work, following, to return to the thought of his day, Bergson’s demand in that final chapter of Creative Evolution: In order to advance with the moving reality, you must replace yourself within it. Install yourself within change, and you will grasp at once both change itself and the successive states in which it might at any instant be immobilized . . . A perpetuity of mobility is possible only if it is backed by an eternity of immutability, which it unwinds in a chain without beginning or end.50

My imperfect jigsaw of images regarded from without cannot create the internalised movement either of Grant’s aspiration for this radical work or the premises of immanence. As art historians we are ever translating a visual art into a written one. This transposition of one art to another – akin to Grant’s adaptation of Bach’s concerto – leaves open possibility, a multiplicity of potential interpretations any one of which might be condensed onto the page.51 It is all too easy for art history to adopt the cinematographic method, one that views its objects from without as scientific specimens for the study of humanity and society.52 In this guise it can never conjure ‘life’; at best it will always be ‘art’, or a weak reflection of art. We look at life indirectly, we turn with distant perceptions to arrange lived experience in their light. We repeat successes and mistakes, and record them in perpetuity. Just as Bergson, according to Deleuze, was blind to the proximity of the cinematographical image to the movementimage of duration outlined in Matter and Memory (including the movement of consciousness bound in any perception), so do we often forget creativity in the pursuit of history.53 Immanent scholarship reverses the direction of this methodology to work in a gap of incompleteness. In the words of A Thousand Plateaus, where ‘history is a memory that fixes time in discrete points; becoming unfixes those points and generates free floating lines’.54 It is not my intention to abdicate responsibility to historical understanding, to the knowledge that history alone can unlock. But history itself is becoming, subtly altering even in the smallest fraction of time, as my cursor flashes its perpetual question, what next? Rather than the habit of ‘homogeneous and independent Time’ with which we tend to regard history, could we not consider a history



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more attuned to the heterogeneous flow of consciousness that Bergson identified? Would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? . . . Now bring back consciousness, and with it the exigencies of life: at long, very long intervals, and by as many leaps over enormous periods of the inner history of things, quasi-instantaneous views will be taken, views which this time are bound to be pictorial, and of which the more vivid colours will condense an infinity of repetitions and changes.55

How to mobilise historical writing as an ‘inner history of things’? As writers of history we could do worse than look to Bergson’s novelist whose ‘infinite permeation of a thousand different impressions . . . have already ceased to exist the instant they are named’. The novelist, as any writer, may be chained to the homogeneous time of the site of his writing, but by careful arrangement – what we could perceive as an act of resistance – it is possible nevertheless to capture the ‘extraordinary and illogical’, to render ‘outward expression to something of that contradiction, that interpenetration, which is the very essence of the elements expressed’. The novelist brings us ‘back into our own presence’,56 just as the good historian should in their history bring us back to its own time in our time. Historical writing of this kind would follow the poetical philosophy-art of Bergson’s method, an immanentist resuscitation of the past to make it new. NOTES  1. W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).   2. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Hume’, in Pure Immanence, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 51.  3. A rare exception was a review of the painter Simon Bussy for The Spectator in 1908, where he described the ‘sustained and essential impression’ of Bussy’s work. See Simon Watney, English Post-Impressionism (London: Studio Vista, 1980), p. 87. Bussy married Dorothy Strachey, thereby entering the fringes of Bloomsbury himself.  4. Duncan Grant to Vanessa Bell, in Simon Watney, The Art of Duncan Grant (London: John Murray, 1990), p. 57.   5. Blanche was to record in his autobiography that although out of touch prior to this sitting, he and Bergson had been at school together. One might infer from this that he maintained a general interest in his one-time colleague, though it is unlikely that he ever subjected Bergson’s thought to thorough consideration. Having said this, Christopher Green has argued

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for the prevalence of Bergsonian thought amongst Blanche’s colleagues such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau c. 1900. See J-E. Blanche, Portraits of a Lifetime, the Late Victorian Era, the Edwardian Pageant 1870–1914, trans. W. Clements (London: J. M. Dent, 1937), pp. 244–5; Christopher Green, Art in France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 33.   6. D. Grant, ‘Memoir of Paris, Part II’, 4, King’s College Archives, Cambridge University, c. 1907, CHA/3/3.  7. Karen Costelloe had recently published ‘What Bergson Means by Interpenetration’, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XVIII, 1912–13. This paper and its context are discussed in my thesis Bergson in Britain 1890–1914, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2008.   8. Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography (London: Pimlico, 1998), pp. 114, 156.  9. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 26. Deleuze’s emphases. I have discussed the significance of Bergsonian memory for another key work of pre-war Bloomsbury, Vanessa Bell’s Studland Beach. Charlotte de Mille, ‘ “Sudden gleams of (f)light”: Intuition as Method?’, Art History, Vol. 34 (2011), pp. 370–86. 10. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (Mineola: Dover, 1991), p. 297. 11. Ibid., p. 173. 12. Ibid., p. 27. 13. Ibid., p. 84. See also p. 59; p. 25. 14. Ibid., p. 28; also p. 309. 15. Ibid., p. 28. 16. On the specific interest in the materiality of paint in pre-war British painting, see David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England 1848–1918 (Manchester and New York: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), pp. 215–17. 17. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 340–1. 18. Ibid., p. 317. 19. Iris van der Tuin, ‘The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics: Reading Diffractively’, below p. 232. 20. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 301. For a more nuanced reading of Bergson’s occasional references to a third element, see John Mullarkey, ‘The Ambiguous Origin of Matter’, in Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 80–2. 21. In particular through his friendship with Matthew Stewart Prichard. I have discussed this extensively in Charlotte de Mille, Bergson in Britain 1890–1914, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2008, pp. 134–236. 22. Roger Fry, ‘Some Problems of Phenomenology and its Application to Greek Art’, fellowship dissertation at King’s College, Cambridge, KCA (1891), REF 1/13. In the first section, ‘Phenomenology’, Fry considered



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‘tone and colour perspective’, ‘colour’ and ‘colour mixture.’ Part two covered ‘perspectives’, ‘tone’, ‘irradiation and the quality of edges’, and, again, ‘colour’. 23. Ibid., pp. 1–2. 24. Ibid., p. 30. 25. Ibid., p. 5. 26. Roger Fry, ‘The Philosophy of Impressionism’ (1894), in Christopher Reed, ed., A Roger Fry Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 16. 27. Ibid., p. 19. 28. Ibid., p. 14. We cannot be sure that Fry had come across Time and Free Will in 1894, but it is clear he was reading voraciously. Time and Free Will and An Introduction to Metaphysics are listed in their French editions in notebooks that include other publications from 1903–9. It is of course possible that Fry continued to use these notebooks over a number of years; therefore 1909 is the latest date at which Fry came across Bergson, and it may well have been earlier. KCA REF 5/1. 29. Roger Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’ (1909), in Vision and Design (London: Pelican, 1937), pp. 39–40. 30. Roger Fry, Last Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. 33. 31. Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, p. 36. 32. Watney, English Post-Impressionism, p. 98. Watney finds Grant’s use of music to be an unsuccessful addition rather than a true synthesis, comparing the work unfavourably with the more balanced cross-disciplinarity of Sonia Delaunay and Blaise Cendrar’s La Prose du Transsiberien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, 1913. 33. Ibid., p. 97. 34. Ibid. 35. Richard Shone, ‘Duncan Grant’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 117, No. 864 (1975), p. 186. 36. Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, p. 36. 37. Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, autumn 1914, in Guy Frances, Simon ShawMiller and Michael Turner, eds, Eye Music, Kandinsky, Klee and all that Jazz, ex. cat. (Chichester: Pallant House Gallery, 2007), p. 126. 38. See Michelle Ying-Ling Huang, The Reception of Chinese Painting in Britain circa 1880–1920, with Special Reference to Laurence Binyon (1869–1943), PhD Dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2010; Michelle Ying-Ling Huang, ‘Laurence Binyon and the Admonitions Scroll’, Orientations, Vol. 41, No. 5 (2010), pp. 53–7. 39. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London and New York: Continuum, 198), pp. 191–2. 40. It is tempting to compare this to Deleuze’s ‘montage’ as ‘composition, the assemblage of movement-images as constituting an indirect image of time.’ Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 31.

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41. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 340. 42. Ibid., p. 305. 43. Ibid., p. 306. 44. Ibid., p. 308. 45. Deleuze, ‘Hume’, p. 38. 46. Deleuze, Cinema 1, pp. 191–2. 47. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 154, 164; Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 164. 48. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 363. 49. Ibid., p. 345. 50. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 308, 325. 51. Ibid., pp. 320–31. ‘The generative idea of a poem is developed in thousands of imaginations which are materialized in phrases that spread themselves out in words. And the more we descend from the motionless idea, wound on itself, to the words that unwind it, the more room is left for contingency and choice . . . But our mind, by successive bounds, leaps from the words to the images, from the images to the original idea, and so gets back, from the perception of words—accidents called up by accidents—to the conception of the Idea that posits its own being.’ 52. Compare Deleuze’s definition of his work on cinema as ‘taxonomy’, Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. xix. 53. Bergson’s ‘movement-image’ cannot be separated from the cinematographic: physical movement is integral to consciousness. Ibid., p. xix. 54. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 363, in Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, p. 37. 55. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 275–7. 56. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. Francis Pogson (Mineola: Dover, 2001), pp. 133–4.

3. Art History, Less Its Conditions of Possibility: Following Bergson’s ‘Le Possible et le réel’ ADI EFAL

1

In thinking about the applicability of Bergsonian epistemology to art historical inquiries, one immediately faces a methodical problem: the very use of the term ‘art historical inquiries’ is very much a gross generalisation, and therefore does not comply with the Bergsonian demand for precision in philosophy. Nevertheless, it is the basic view of this chapter that Henri Bergson’s nominalism should not be automatically viewed as an anti-rationalism. It does seem that one of the capacities of Bergson’s philosophy has to do with a revision of the ‘rationalist’ tradition itself, in face of the nominalist challenge. I would like to begin, therefore, by suggesting a rather structural working-definition: The term ‘art historical inquiries’ refers to any experiment in possessing, through some mode of inscription, things produced in the (recent or ancient) past, entailing some relation, either primary or consequential, intended or unintended, with a quality of beauty.2 We will concentrate here on supporting the claim that Bergson´s philosophy might supply art historical inquiries with the means of a partial disentanglement from both their neo-Kantian and their historicist inclinations. ART HISTORY’S NEO-KANTIAN STRAIT-JACKET Neo-Kantianism and its mutations have shaped many of the historical sciences as we know them today. Initiated in Marburg by Hermann Cohen around the middle of the nineteenth century, neo-Kantianism developed into one the most influential schools in institutional German philosophy by the end of that century. Salient thinkers affiliated with neo-Kantianism included Wilhelm Windelband, Paul Natorp, Heinrich Rickert, Bruno Bauch, Georg Simmel Ernst Troeltsch and Ernst Cassirer.3 Broadly speaking, neo-Kantianism applied Kant’s 47

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c­ritico-transcendental philosophy to the fields of culture, history and epistemology, an endeavour within which the Kantian notion of ‘conditions of possible experience’ (Bedingungen der möglicher Erfahrung) played a decisive role.4 The conception of the conditions of possible experience established the transcendental dictum of Kantian philosophy, determining that reality (Wirklichkeit) is constituted by the universal preliminary possibilities of experience, based on the twelve Categories identified by Kant and the two pure forms of sensual intuition: space and time.5 As is widely known, the conditions of possible experience in Kant were described by him as having a ‘transcendental’ status.6 Kant contributed to the history of the concept of the ‘transcendental’ by re-locating its usage: If in scholastic philosophy the transcendental refers to ‘being’, ‘thing’, ‘something’ or ‘God’, in Kant, the transcendental was transferred to human experience, construed upon the dynamics of analogy, of comparison and repetition.7 A philosophy worthy of being called critical, according to Kant, would be one that abstains from going beyond the examination of experience from within its transcendental conditions of possibility. The ‘thing in itself’ (‘Ding an sich’) was kept by Kant outside the limits of the critical inquiry of the transcendental realm. Moreover, the notion of reality itself was accorded a problematic status, considered as inherent to ‘subjective’ experience and its transcendental capacities, and therefore as having no sovereign existence apart from these. Most neo-Kantians adopted these basic Kantian determinations, while developing an application of the transcendental approach to the fields of culture, the arts and the sciences. The principles governing the latter were then comprehended as a continuous extension of the transcendental capacities of the human subject. As Mark Cheetham and Karen Lang have demonstrated,8 Kantianism has been a permanent lodger in art historical inquiries, as it has been in the other historical sciences. Neo-Kantian elements appear in the writings of nineteenth and twentieth-century art historians as they labour to construct a transcendental platform to discuss the a priori conditions of possibility of both art and its apprehension. We must differentiate here between the ancient tradition of art theory, which distilled general rules of artistic production, and the Kantian critical mapping of the schemes of apprehension of artistic events, understood as subjective experiences. The neo-Kantian watermark in the history of art is its tendency to pose aesthetic experience (Erfahrung) as the definitive ground of the historical research of works of art. An example of an explicitly neo-Kantian form of art history would be Johannes Eichner’s 1914 work The Problem of the Given in the



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History of Art (Das Problem des Gegebenen in der Kunstgeschichte), in which one can find a definition of the ‘critical concept of the art-historical object’ (Der kritische Begriff des kunsthistorischen Objekts), as construed by art historical practice and dependent on an ‘optical image’ (‘optisches Bild’), namely, a representation which is apprehended by an observer.9 Eichner specifies that ‘The praxis of art historical work shows that there can be no talk about immediate donation of the material of historical artistic production.’10 The neo-Kantian occupation with uncovering a priori categories in the specific domain of the history of art appeared in what is considered as the formalist school, notably in Heinrich Wölfflin’s synthetic a priori stylistic categories.11 One of the richest examples of a Kantian-oriented art history is to be found in Erwin Panofsky’s early engagements with Kantian epistemology,12 as well as in the 1922 doctoral dissertation of his student, Edgar Wind, which offered a systematic neo-Kantian reconstruction of the transcendental conditions of possibility of art historical inquiry.13 Later in the twentieth century, Kant’s critical dictum continued to be a major influence, but this time as an interpretative tool pertaining to modern art; for example in Clement Greenberg’s formulations of modernist art as exhibiting a Kantian approach of self-criticism;14 in Michael Fried’s absorptive ideal, in which modern painting is defined by its internal autonomous conditions of possibility,15 or in Thierry De Duve’s Kantian interpretation of Duchamp and contemporary art.16 As Bergson himself acknowledged, there is nothing inherently false about trying to conceive of a set of rules ordering a certain domain of production and its research; this is a basic requirement of any rational inquiry, and of the human pragmatic mind in general. Nevertheless, it is claims for the a priori, transcendental status of such rules that may and should be called into question. As applied to art history, the neo-Kantian approach tends to reduce the reality of the artwork to the constellation of its transcendental possibilities. This approach is inherently non-realist, and an art history that would take upon itself the task of tackling the ‘thingly’ reality of artworks should attempt to furnish methodological principles that will enable it to escape the Kantian ‘strait-jacket’. One of the ways in which the neo-Kantians themselves approached the complicated task of applying categorical definitions to the historical or cultural sciences involved employing the notion of ‘cultural values’ or ‘values’ (Werte) in general.17 Values in neo-Kantianism are somewhat flexible sets of organising regulative ideas of the social organism, which the researcher can discern a posteriori, but which are ­nevertheless

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­considered as a priori with respect to the cultural activity at the particular historical moment of its performance. This solution, therefore, leans on the assumption of these values ‘being-there’, directing the development of social activity before its actualisation and serving as its principles; such values, therefore, are culture’s transcendental truth. The neo-Kantians insisted on the efficiency of using the concept of value in order to solve the problem of historical relativism, which threatens to dispossess historical inquiries of their scientific validity. Abandoning the search for an a priori set of categories, or quasi a priori collections of values, does not necessarily mean that one has to yield to a relativist practice of interpretation and subjective viewpoints. How can one still aspire to think a work of art as a real thing, after recognising the shackles Kantian rationality has placed upon us? Such was one of the many challenges Henri Bergson took up in his philosophy, and here we examine whether and how far it might be applicable to the history of art. BERGSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHICAL GENRE The approach taken to Bergson’s work in this chapter might be characterised as philologically sensitive, in the sense that it seeks to locate Bergson in a specifically French metaphysical tradition, demarcated by a trail of terms and problems over roughly 300 years, from Descartes to the twenty-first century. Following the work of historians of philosophy such as Émile Bréhier, Dominique Janicaud, Pierre Montebello, Francois Azouvi and Frédéric Worms,18 it is suggested here that Bergson is best understood not merely as the vitalist philosopher of unexpected creation and the powers of sentimental memory or imaginary virtualism, but rather as a thinker working within a relatively compact metaphysical framework encompassing issues of empiricism, realism19 and dualism, which to some extent precede the Kantian ‘revolution’ in the history of philosophy. In this sense, the questions Bergson addresses can be understood as pertaining to the repertoire of a rather classical metaphysical tradition. Bergson was not only the contemporary of Nietzsche and Freud, but also the inheritor of a set of problems issuing from Montaigne and Descartes, and continuing through eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophers such as Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier and Émile Boutroux.20 Indeed, in 1915 Bergson produced his own ‘compte rendu’ of this tradition, in an essay titled ‘La philosophie Française’.21 This lineage was characterised as ‘spiritualist’,22 but was notably a spiritualism intimately imbued with empiricist tendencies. An important moment in this tradition was the



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genesis of the ‘positivist’ school of Auguste Comte,23 which continued to serve as a constant reference point. Throughout his writings, Bergson refers to empiricist and positivist thinkers, considering his own philosophy to have its roots in both schools.24 Bergson examined what was left of the notion of reality after the limits of Kantian transcendentalism were generally recognised. Bergson’s text ‘Le Possible et le réel’, in which he defended the reality of the work of art against the notion of its historical ‘conditions of possibility’, should also be understood as emerging from this background. Bergson’s adversarial position (as one early scholar called it) vis-à-vis the Kantian revolution seeks to rethink the relations between reality and the conditions of possibility of experience.25 Bergson refused to accept the a priori, transcendental status of the conditions of possibility, and therefore his epistemology demanded a redefinition of the concept of reality. Kantianism was a major influence in the French intellectual discourse of Bergson’s time: in the second half of the nineteenth century, Charles Renouvier was structuring a ‘neo-critical’ philosophy;26 Jules Lachelier, to whom Bergson’s first thesis of 1888 is dedicated,27 was integrating Kantian insights into spiritualist metaphysics;28 and a little later Léon Brunschvicg was to develop a universalist philosophy of judgmental reason.29 In his above mentioned Latin thesis, Bergson dealt extensively with Kant’s conception of space vis-à-vis the Aristotelian conception of place. Bergson’s work can plausibly be seen as positioned in the terrain opened up by this thesis, extending between (an Aristotelian) realism and (a Kantian) transcendentalism, at the centre of which stands the concept of intuiton (‘Anschauung’ in German, or νοῦς, in Aristotle’s terms). In the thought of Aristotle, intuition is understood as the most elementary, simple and replete kind of apprehension; nevertheless, while for the Platonist school intuition referred to an a priori form (εἶδος) serving as a prototype, for Aristotle it was more the reality of the first and simple principles which is given in intuition. As part of his ‘Copernican revolution’, Kant located intuition at the very basis of human sensual perception, consisting of the two a priori forms of time and space. In a way, Bergson effected a re-binding of the Kantian notion of intuition with its Aristotelian roots: though he retained a Kantian understanding of intuition as composed of spatial and temporal parameters, he rejected any conception of the a priori nature of either. In Bergson’s metaphysics, neither time nor space are a priori platforms; instead, they are woven into the concept of duration, which could be described as a curve or a turned movement. In ‘Le Possible et le réel’, a relatively late essay initially given as lecture in 1920, Bergson stated that things are

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not in space, rather space is in things, space is extracted from things.30 Things, therefore, are prior to space; and spatiality, though always constructed by reason as a coherent grid, is nevertheless the a posteriori result of a movement of thought into the interiority of things and not upon the supposed platform of their possibility.31 What does this movement into the thing consist of? It is carried out, mostly, by the joining, in a rather plastic manner, of the intensities of memory. And this adherence, which is a movement of placement in things, is duration. When we endure in thought, i.e. when we intuit, we engage in the past via the various surfaces and figures of memory.32 I find it appropriate to call this movement ‘espassément’, to note this spatial work within the reality of the past. THE POSSIBLE, THE POTENT AND THE REAL In ‘Le Possible et le reel’, as in his earlier thesis, Bergson works in the philosophical space opened up between Kant and Aristotle, examining the assumed a priority of possibility to actuality. Bergson’s basic argument is that we have to reverse our understanding here: it is not that possibility is prior to actuality, but rather that what is real precedes and determines its own possibility:33 ‘c’est le réel qui se fait possible, et non pas le possible qui devient réel’; or ‘Le possible est donc le mirage du présent dans le passé.’34 As a retroactive construction, conditions of possibility fail to provide us with real statements regarding either the thing’s production or its precise, unique outlines; instead, they merely express our utilitarian demands from the observed thing. As is well known, it is the method of intuition that, according to Bergson, supplies the approach whereby we may distinguish the precise ‘shape’ of the thing. Indeed, as Charlotte de Mille demonstrated,35 arriving at a ‘sustained methodology of intuition’ from within the framework of the history of art, is a deeply complex task, which perhaps, as de Mille suggests, might be better conceived as an ideal to be constantly re-realised, rather than as a schematic formula to be implemented. Bergson’s argument here has an Aristotelian character, relating to the connection between energeia (ἐνέργεια, or ‘actuality’) and dunamis (δύναμις, or ‘potentiality’). His point can be phrased, in Aristotelian terms, thus: energia (or that which is actual and realised) is prior to dunamis (or that which is potential);36 and the relation between the two, according to Aristotle, is achieved only in an analogical manner, by the establishment of a similarity between the two. This perspective is also expressed in Aristotle’s statement that the genre (γένος, resulting of series of generations) precedes the form (εἷδος, or the ‘essential’



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form).37 For Bergson, reality, in the sense of that which is realised, projects behind itself a shadow, into the past. This creates the illusion, says Bergson, that the structure of that same reality was already there, as the condition of possibility for the movement of realisation. This illusion, analogically projecting backwards our present interests into our pasts, deforms and shapes the reality of the past.38 The possible is the real’s own shadow; it is a part of the (virtual) past of a concrete reality, carried by the latter and to be found in the immediate encounter with the thing in question.39 When we imagine the past merely as that which enables the experience of a certain artwork, we give it a status of a possible; but when we think of the past as an elastic reality generative of things, upon which our projections are laid, a past reality which is not exhausted by its description as possible, then we endow the past with the status of a ‘virtual’ potentiality, i.e. an intensive infinite reservoir of realities that the particular work, under a particular consideration, shapes. In this sense, it is possible to view Bergson, as well as his predecessors Biran and especially Ravaisson, as thinkers of potency (puissance), as distinguished from possibility. If for Aristotle δύναμις is considered as carrying substantial capacity, and therefore as no less real than actuality (ἐνέργεια), for Bergson the possible, the scheme projected into the past, is conceived first and foremost as an image. This does not mean that it is bad or corrupt, only that it is the product of things rather than their cause. Moreover, like any other element of reality, even the retroactively projected scheme of the real can become productive and generative, in so far as one allows it to, with the help of intuition. It was actually one of Bergson’s young critical readers, none other than Emmanuel Levinas, who considered the ‘shadow of reality’ as strictly idolatrous.40 The notion of possibility is presented by Bergson as one of the many images the mind creates, trying to complete reality, which is described at one place in ‘Le Possible et le réel’ as an elastic balloon with no final, ‘absolute’ shape.41 Conditions of possibility are for Bergson imaginary products of the utilitarian mind, trying to complete what reality leaves open. Instead of looking for these, Bergson offers the method of intuition, which, the present chapter suggests, could be viewed as a movement of intensification of the reality of the past by which spirit, disentangling and working through its accepted habits, re-locates itself in the past in a manner which changes the reality of both itself and its past. Bergson returns to this assertion: ‘philosopher consiste précisément à se placer, par un effort d’intuition, à l’inté­ rieur de cette réalité concrète sur laquelle la Critique vient prendre du dehors les deux vues opposées,

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thèse et antithèse’.42 Sometimes this movement into the past happens involuntarily, and sometimes, as historians, or, surprisingly, as artists, we engage in it voluntarily. ‘Durating’, on this understanding, would consist of re-agitating the womb of the past, disturbing its quiet sleep in archives, museums, libraries and introductory books; in this way the image of the past can be transfigured into δύναμις. The burden of the past can then be turned into a condensed potency, or intensified capacity. Reality, and not only artistic reality, according to this Bergsonian reading, is inherently, continuously poietic, i.e. productive or ‘creative’. Poiesis demands neither to be predicted nor explained, but it does beg for adherence. This adherence is a practice, an ethos,43 which calls for an examination of the way in which a thing erupts into, as well as survives throughout, ages, variations, repetitions and other ‘habits’ of interpretation, reading, translation and transfiguration. DURATION AND DETENTION Within this framework, and perhaps differently from the standard interpretation of Bergson, duration could be thought of in terms of delay, hindrance, setback, foreclosure, interception, postponement, prevention, retardation, suspension, blockage or deferment. In ‘Le possible et le réel’, Bergson defines duration simply as hesitation.44 To use Fernand Braudel’s terminology,45 duration is always a ‘longue durée’; it is always too long. Duration results from the fact that what is immediately given to consciousness is first and foremost its past.46 That could mean that any thought is historical, as any thought is essentially memory. Even though all of the above can affect our conception of history in general, it pertains in a stronger manner to disciplines that examine poietic processes, such as the history of art. It suggests that poietic acts cannot be submitted to a reversible historical rationality of conditions of possibility. It is not that one cannot use notions of Zeitgeist, milieu or organising values to draw out the context of a work – one can indeed do that, and one has actually no other way in which to start an inquiry; but we have to bear in mind that this will not enable us to think precisely according to the measure and the figure of the thing. In contrast, a Bergsonian-oriented history of poietic deeds would entail going back on our accepted dogmas and thought-habits, re-thinking, re-shaping, re-sculpting them in a new cone converging upon the particular thing we are inquiring into. In that sense, a Bergsonian history will delay our approach to the thing; it will oblige us to go through the entire ‘univocity’ of history and re-shape it from within the thing under discussion. A Bergsonian method will thus stimulate the past, especially



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the poietic past, to behave as potency. This will produce duration, i.e. a delay or curve in the application of our classificatory schemes to the conception of the thing. In a somewhat Cartesian manner,47 ‘durating’ would mean suspending any hasty judgement regarding the classification of the thing in question. HISTORICISM AND ESPASSÉMENT We’ve been trying to tackle the intricate and complicated relationship between Bergson’s philosophy and the Kantian approach to the making of history, by re-activating Aristotelian strategies which were incubating within the French tradition. In closing, we shall turn briefly to the problem of historicism, which has been to some extent a sub-division of the neo-Kantian school: the historicists tried to define the special characteristics of the science of history, distinguishing it from other, mainly natural or exact, sciences.48 This distinction could not be maintained in a Bergsonian frame of mind: a science is a science, whatever the supposed domain from which its object arrives. Jean Hyppolite even stated that ‘C’est une “histoire naturelle” et non une histoire de l’humanité qu’a écrite Bergson en philosophie.’49 History for Bergson is first and foremost the history of life, i.e. of nature. At least two of the German historicists, Ernst Troeltsch and Georg Simmel, both adhering in some manner to the neo-Kantian school, were aware of Bergson’s philosophy.50 Nevertheless, neither Troeltsch nor Simmel pinned-down Bergson’s suggestions, precisely because both were working within a late neo-Kantain framework of antimonies hovering between actual singularity and the general conditions of experience, or values. The basic historicist structure of antimonies consists of a split between, on the one hand, the ever-changing, temporal modus of cultural events, and, on the other hand, the latter’s organising values, functioning as conditions of possibility.51 This historicist structural antinomy, suspended between a search for the details contained in a cultural work and the need to use encompassing values as meaning-suppliers, is an obvious and persistent habitus of art historical education and writing. The historicist approach endeavours to define the organising values of history, which in most classical versions of historicism comply with models of cultural evolution, universal history, and even theological schemes.52 Bergson, without naming historicism explicitly, nevertheless worked tirelessly to collapse this antinomy of the singular and the universal, typical of historicism. For Bergson, by contrast, sets of values themselves cooperate in the generative movement of thought, not because everything is subjective or relative to circumstances and

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agents, but rather because reality is a continuous divergence, demanding thought to be constantly alert and always prepared for self-shaping in retrospect. PRODUCTION AND GENERATION IN THE HISTORY OF ART It is as if the Bergsonian dictum is – ‘produce!’ As an artist, as a scientist, as a philosopher, as a moral-agent, or as a historian. As scholars, we are invited to assume responsibility towards reality’s generative, poietic dynamics and join the figural curve of things. Indeed, this elementary figural curve of thought, extractable from Bergson’s philosophy, may be regarded as an early genetic seed of the Deleuzian elaborations of the ‘figural’ and its serpentine capacities that Sjoerd van Tuinen has recently developed into a full-blown theory of ‘manner’ in artistic deeds, capturing the intensive, deeply intricate flux of matter, with its infinite possibilities and possible worlds inflected through and by created bodies.53 If the Deleuzian serpentine figure, as van Tuinen characterises it,54 entails sensations of ‘swooing, drunkenness, dizziness and vertigo’, then the Bergsonian method suggests a sensation of absorptive vigilance: In order to follow the curve of things, one has to be prepared to think at any moment, accepting that any use of classificatory terms necessarily re-organises the same system of classifications. Being ready to think means being ready to doubt; being ready to doubt means being ready to make mistakes and to acknowledge them. Any category we would use in order to talk about a picture would be necessarily, to some extent, a mistake. Categories, like any spatial construction, are necessary mistakes, without which no thought will be possible. Nevertheless, according to Bergsonian epistemology, a mistake is in itself a generative act: mistakes actually produce duration, waiting and hesitation. But a series of mistakes could also tailor a thing, draw its figure, follow its curve, and achieve, as Bergson recommends, precision.55 Being imprecise means, says Bergson, including a thing in an overly broad, pre-existing genre; achieving precision and access to reality, on the other hand, entails creating a distance between accepted concepts, revealing gaps and scissions where we usually see contiguity and continuity, so that we may form concepts that will be ‘cette fois taillés à l’exacte mesure de l’objet’.56 Under the perspective outlined here, then, duration could be understood as a production of space, to paraphrase Henri Lefebvre.57 If Giambattista Vico determined that what man has made he can also know,58 then Bergson added that everything man makes he can also un-make, and this un-making is what we



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call intuition, which, Bergson says, brings us ‘en contact direct avec la réalité’.59 This may produce a thought of indivisible change; otherwise put, a thought of a curve, whose basic shape is determined by the manner in which our most distance past adheres to our present.60 Our memory, according to Bergson, is responsible for the automatic conservation of the past, without there being any special need of effort on our behalf.61 The past is preserved in any of our acts, in the very re-enactment of our habits. But an ‘intellectual effort’, as Bergson says in an 1902 essay of the same name,62 is produced when a movement is initiated between various profound layers of the past. An intellectual effort neither entails neglecting any system of classification (since rational architectonics participate in any thought procedure),63 nor does it call for a free-play of contextualisation or interpretation. Rather, an intellectual effort is a directed, distinct movement, in which one endeavours to distinguish a terrain within the reality of the past. This corresponds almost entirely with Aristotle’s notion of recollection (ἀναμνήσεις) as distinguished from memory (μνήμη): recollection happens when one seeks to locate in one’s past some mental movement which is not automatically approachable.64 In conclusion then, we can ask what a Bergsonian truth-procedure65 might look like in relation to the historical interrogation of artworks. Such an inquiry would have to involve a re-organisation of intuition, i.e. a re-shaping of space and time, so that both will better enable a tailoring of the thing under consideration. A Bergsonian historical procedure would consist of an espassément of history, performed from within the domain of the work discussed. Any research ‘into’ a poietic thing would thus demand a particular transfiguration of an entire cone of history, guided by the work in question. Here there is a possibility of understanding the iconological method (stemming from Panofsky’s primary Kantian tendencies, rooted in the work of Aby Warburg) as capable of being adapted to a Bergsonian method, in so far as iconology follows and restores trails of schemes and figures in order to locate better, or indeed to make an espassément of, a certain work or works.66 Giulio-Carlo Argan has rightly and poignantly pointed in this direction, when describing Panofsky’s ‘Process of traditions’ as ‘tortuous, fortuitous, full of uncertainty, past echoes and unexpected turns . . . it has no constant direction . . . but we are not saying that it does not have its own order’.67 Henri Focillon’s encompassing dynamic world of forms and Georges Kubler’s Shape of Time also exhibit qualities that are concordant with Bergsonian principles.68 At one point in his little book, Kubler describes exactly how, from within the web of

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habits, a durational history of things is made possible: ‘Now and in the past, most of the time the majority of people live by borrowed ideas and upon traditional accumulations, yet at every moment the fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to replace the old, while from time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling into new shapes and figures.’69 A Bergsonian-iconological art history would not be satisfied with the practice of a rigid iconographical and/ or formalistic decoding, but would rather search out trails of duration and transformation of figures in history, which suggests that it might be closer to a philological practice. This history could be conceived of neither as a hermeneutic deciphering of a work nor as a phenomenological description of its appearance. A historical thing would be, then, first and foremost, a poietic thing: produced as well as producing its own shadow into the past. As Henri Focillon suggested in a draft from 1940, it could well be that works of art are the sole genuine historical facts.70 A Bergsonian history of art would then involve a searching for the figures of things, and could be considered as a history of reality tout-court. NOTES   1. I am thankful to the Fritz Thyssen foundation, which supported my work in 2010–12, and to the Gerda Henkel foundation, supporting my work in 2012–13, thereby enabling the writing of this essay.   2. Adi Efal, ‘Philology and the History of Art’, in Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Thijs Weststeijn, eds, The Making of the Humanities Volume II: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), pp. 263–99.   3. Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).   4. Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Berlin: Ferd. Dümmerls Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1885 [1871]).  5. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003 [1781]), pp. 97–127, 153–75 [B33–73, 102–29].   6. Francesco Valerio Tommasi, Philosophia Transcendentalis: La questione antepredicativa e l’analogia tra la Scolastica e Kant (Florence: Leo Olschki, 2008).  7. Kant, Kritik, pp. 274–313 [B218–65].  8. Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art and History: Moments of Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Karen Ann Lang, Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 41–87.



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 9. Johannes Eichner, Das Problem der Gegebenen in der Kunstgeschichte (Halle A. S.: Max Niemeyer, 1914), p. 44 ff. 10. Ibid., p. 10 (unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine): ‘Die Praxis der kunstgeschichtlichen Arbeit zeigt jedoch, daß von einer unmittelbaren Gegebenheit des Materials von historischen Kunstschöpfungen keine Rede sein kann.’ 11. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwickelung in der neueren Kunst (München: Bruckmann, 1915). 12. Erwin Panofsky, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verhezen (Berlin: B. Hessling, 1964). 13. Edgar Wind, Ästhetischer und Kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand. Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Pablo Schneider (Hamburg: Philo Fine Art, 2011 [1922]). 14. Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in Forum Lectures (Washington, DC: Voice of America, 1960). 15. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1980). 16. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 17. Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Überwindung. Fünf Vortrage (Berlin: Pan Verlag Rolf Heise, 1924). 18. Émile Bréhier, Transformation de la philosophie française (Paris: Flammarion, 1950); Dominique Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique: une généalogie du spiritualisme français (Paris: J. Vrin, 1997 [1969]); Pierre Montebello, L’autre métaphysique: essai sur la philosophie de la nature, Ravaisson, Tarde, Nietzsche et Bergson (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2003); François Azouvi, La Gloire de Bergson: Essai sur le magistère philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 2007); Frédéric Worms, La philosophie en France au XXe siècle. Moments (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). 19. Georges Mourélos, Bergson et les niveaux de réalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964). 20. Jean Beaufret, Notes sur la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle, De Maine de Biran à Bergson (Paris: Vrin, c.1984); Jean-Philibert Damiron, Les philosophes français du XIXe siècle (Paris: CNRS, 2007 [1834]). 21. Henri Bergson, ‘La Philosophie française (La Revue de Paris, 15 mai 1915, pp. 236–56)’ in Bergson, Écrits philosophiques, ed. Frédéric Worms (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), pp. 452–79  ; available at http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/bergson_henri/la_philo_francaise/ Bergson_philo_francaise.pdf (accessed 26 March 2013). 22. Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique; Jacques Chevalier, Histoire de la pensée, Vol. IV (Paris: Flammarion, 1966), pp. 411–91. 23. Bergson, ‘Philosophie française’, p. 10. 24. Henri Bergson, Oeuvres, ed. Andrés Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), p. 1333.

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25. Madeleine Barthélemy-Madaule, Bergson adversaire de Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966). 26. Charles Bernard Renouvier, Essais de critique générale (Paris: Ladrange, 1854–64); Émile Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie, Vol. II.4 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966–68), pp. 843–53. 27. Bergson, Écrits, pp. 67–123. 28. Bergson, ‘Philosophie française’, p. 13; Bréhier, Histoire, pp. 873–6; Beaufret, Notes, pp. 29–46. 29. Bréhier, Histoire, pp. 953–4; Worms, Philosophie, pp. 31–64. 30. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1336. 31. François Heidsieck, Henri Bergson et la notion de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961). 32. Miklos Vetö, ‘Le passé selon Bergson’, Archives de Philosophie, Vol. 68 (2005), pp. 5–31. 33. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1344. 34. Ibid., pp. 1340–1. 35. Charlotte de Mille, ‘ “Sudden gleams of (f)light”: Intuition as Method?’, Art History, Vol. 34 (2011), p. 384. 36. Aristotle, The Metaphysics, Books I–IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 454–5 [1049b5ff.]; R. M. Dancy, ‘Aristotle and the Priority of Actuality’, in Simo Knuuttila, ed., Reforging the Great Chain of Being: Studies in the History of Modal Theories (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing, 1981), pp. 73–115; Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1387. 37. Aristotle, Categories and De interpretatione, trans. J. L. Ackrill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 100–3 [14b35–15a5]). 38. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1339. 39. Ibid., p. 1264. 40. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘La réalité et son ombre’, Les Temps modernes, Vol. 38 (1948), pp. 771–89. 41. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1335: ‘La réalité est croissance globale et indivisée, invention graduelle, durée; tel, un ballon élastique qui se dilaterait peu à peu en prenant à tout instant des formes inattendues.’ 42. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1430. 43. See Alain Badiou, L’éthique. Essai sur la conscience du mal (Paris: Nous, 2003 [1993]). 44. Bergson, Oeuvres, pp. 1332–3: ‘Ainsi, l’être vivant dure essentiellement; il dure, justement parce qu’il élabore sans cesse du nouveau et parce qu’il n’y a pas d’élaboration sans recherche, pas de recherche sans tâtonnement. Le temps est cette hésitation même, ou il n’est rien du tout . . . le temps est ce qui empêche que tout soit donné tout d’un coup. Il retarde, ou plutôt il est retardement.’ 45. Fernand Braudel, ‘Histoire et science sociales: La longue durée’, in Annales: Economies. Sociétés. Civilisations, Vol. 4 (1958), pp. 13–14, 725–53.



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46. Bergson, Oeuvres, pp. 1–157. 47. Ferdinand Alquié, Leçons sur Descartes (Paris: La table ronde, 2005 [1955]), p. 66. 48. See Raymond Aron, Essai sur la théorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine. La philosophie critique de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1969 [1938]); Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 49. Jean Hyppolite, ‘Vie et philosophie de l’histoire chez Bergson’, in Actas del Primer Congreso Nacional de Filosofia, Vol. 2 (1949), pp. 915–21. 50. Georg Simmel, ‘Henri Bergson’, Güldenkammer 4 (9 June 1914), pp. 511–25; Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme, Vol. 1 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1922), pp. 632–49. 51. See Frederick Beiser, ‘Historicism and Neo-Kantianism’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 39 (2008), pp. 554–64. 52. H. Ganse Little Jr., ‘Ernst Troeltsch and the Scope of Historicism’, in The Journal of Religion, 46/3 (July 1966), pp. 343–64. 53. Sjoerd van Tuinen, ‘Michelangelo, Leibniz and the Serpentine Figure’, Deleuze Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2011), pp. 63–72. 54. Ibid., p. 70. 55. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1270: ‘Car l’imprécision est d’ordinaire l’inclusion d’une chose dans un genre trop vaste, choses et genres correspondant d’ailleurs à des mots qui préexistaient. Mais si l’on commence par écarter les concepts déjà faits, si l’on se donne une vision directe du réel, si l’on subdivise alors cette réalité en tenant compte de ses articulations, les concepts nouveaux qu’on devra bien former pour s’exprimer cette fois taillés à l’exacte mesure de l’objet.’ 56. Ibid. 57. Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1974). 58. James C. Morrison, ‘Vico’s Principle of Verum is Factum and the Problem of Historicism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1978), pp. 579–95. 59. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1270. 60. Ibid., p. 1387. 61. Ibid.: ‘Le passé se conserve de lui-même, automatiquement.’ 62. Bergson, Oeuvres, pp. 930–58. 63. Heidsieck, Bergson et l’espace, p. 57. 64. Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, trans. David Bloch (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007). 65. See Badiou, L’éthique. 66. To the best of my knowledge, Panofsky did not explicitly refer to Bergson’s writings in his works, and in his letters (ed. Dieter Wuttke, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001–11) Bergson is mentioned very little. However, there is evidence that Panofsky was familiar with Bergson’s work and his notion of duration. Warburg was already familiar with Bergson’s philosophy and

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dedicated a small section of his ‘notice-boxes’ (to be found in the Warburg institute, London, WIA III.2.1. ZK/ 51/ 5) to it, classified under the general rubric of ‘pragmatic philosophy’ (Philosophie pragmatisch). It seems that Warburg was less interested in Bergson’s concept of duration and more in the general cultural controversy revolving around Bergson’s work just before the First World War. I have been exploring these Bergsonian capacities of the iconological tradition in several recent talks and forthcoming publications. 67. Giulio-Carlo Argan, ‘Ideology and Iconology’, trans. Rebecca West, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1975), pp. 297–305: pp. 298–9. 68. Henri Focillon, Vie des formes suivi de éloge de la main (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981 [1934]); George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). 69. Kubler, Shape of Time, pp. 17–18. 70. Mathias Waschek, ed., Relire Focillon (Paris: Louvre et Ensb-a, 1996), pp. 172–3; Andrei Molotiu, ‘Focillon’s Bergsonian Rhetoric and the Possibility of Deconstruction’, In-visible Culture, Vol. 3 (2000), available at http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/molotiu.htm (accessed 26 March 2013).

4. Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc. ERIC ALLIEZ Translated by Hager Weslati

I will venture to put forward – in the form of a short-circuit – this unique proposition: there is no immanence other than that which always constructs on a plane that is never bequeathed and whose plurality depends strictly on the displacement of problems in function of forces susceptible to radicalising its expression in the present imperative. The projection of a ‘Bergsonian paradigm of immanence’ in the field of art, taken at its very first historic inscription (in Matisse, in Fauvism), is such a small exception to this that it is the very notion of the aesthetic that finds itself radically problematised in a Critique and a Clinique of Art. Or rather, to phrase it in a sharper manner: the aesthetic is problematised in a clinical Critique of the Art-Form that refers less to a ‘new Bergsonism’ and more to a Bergson Oltre Bergson, whose alterity would crystallise the most intimate within his thought (his critique of Form) with its absolute outside (in the form of a Clinique of Art placed outside himself). This, I will develop abruptly, with one shot, in ‘Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc.’. Matisse – how can we approach what appears to me as the untimely singularity of Matisse? We approach it through the radicality and daring of his break with the Art-Form, to the extent that the latter is both inscribed and made in a history, and as a history which is that of the (continuous) evolution or the (discontinuous) succession of the diverse forms of Art (in as much as this history is defined by Form), and where modernist formalism posits itself as its ultimate finality (painting returning to its essence in the optic of a pure pictorial flatness). It is said that Fauvism (1905–7) would meet its ‘pictorial’ as well as its ‘spatial’ limit with the question of form. Fauvism is also posited as historically dated, in the sense that it was overtaken by the visual syntax of Cubism (itself set up as art’s principle of modernisation, leading towards modernist abstraction). But Fauvism had constituted 63

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in advance its refusal of the idea of a finalised history, and the very idea of (art) History. There follows a new, non dialectical-historical idea of the temporality of and in art, an operation into which Matisse will carry on delving, in terms of a becoming that produces, that shows, nothing other than itself in the events it embodies. So that with Fauvism it is becoming that gives matter to art – and that exposes itself as such – by freeing the Outside (the multiplicity of forces and their multiplication in an original plastic conjunction) from the form of interiority that enclosed each art within an Art-Form exterior to others, and prevented their de-compartmentalisation. While modern art – at least since the middle of the nineteenth century – aspired to lift the barriers between the ‘fine’ and ‘low’ arts, to associate painting, architecture and the decorative arts of everyday life, Matisse was perhaps the first to understand that the becoming-life of art could not be realised without a true becoming-other of painting, the expansion (or rather, the intensive extension) that goes through an architectural becoming; in other words, an extension affecting architecture itself with a plastic becoming so that their connection results in an environment where a new and vital experience becomes possible, supporting, carrying art beyond ‘itself’. It is from the interior of painting, and within its very processuality, that Matisse develops an experience of becoming that makes his painting (tableau) radiate beyond its frame and would lead painting outside itself. Matisse will demonstrate, as no one else before, the plastic reality of time and the temporality of the event in art – with a gesture that, in each of his works, should be barely considered as an image of a ‘given/giving’ (ideally engaging some sort of teleological essence of art). Rather, it is a gesture that dismisses the ideal of the image itself in favour of a ‘consciousness of the forces that (one) employs’ when one moves, ‘pushed by an idea that (one) only truly knows to the extent that it develops itself in the process of the painting’.1 Its contingent necessity is a function of the impossibility of a difference/différance, from conception to its most tangible realisation. Or again: in the absence of a ‘break between thought and the creative act’,2 no conception is worthwhile unless it can (rise to the) surface in full immanence, through a continuous becoming in which the principle of construction can only be perceived with what it constructs. It must be emphasised that this processual materialism is the antipode of the post-romantic exasperation to which some have sought to reduce Fauvism. The evocation of an exemplary work – Interior with Aubergines – will allow us to show that this processual becoming, which Matisse consid-



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ered ‘decorative’ (in a sense that was his own), broke with not only the image-form and the painting-form of painting but also with its very pictoriality. The truly radioactive decorativeness of Matisse’s painting made virtually possible, and even called for, a new alliance with architecture that he would later put to work pragmatically with The Dance (at the Barnes Foundation, 1931–33). It is there that Matisse will come into contact with John Dewey, who was himself associated with this Foundation right from the start – Dewey’s treatise on Democracy and Education (1916) having exerted a continuous influence, as also under the heading of Art as Experience (1931–34). As we know, it is a matter of intensifying, while soliciting, ‘the ordinary forces and conditions of experience which we do not usually regard as aesthetic’; ‘of restoring continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute [the] experience’ of the ‘living creature’.3 Following William James – in his point of strongest convergence and divergence with the Bergsonism of the élan vital – experience is for Dewey basically ‘activity’, understood thereby as a mixture of action and reception, stability and struggle, disconnections and connections, and in which the ‘intensest life’ implies experience as art in an expansive movement that ‘enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world . . . in a new experience of life’.4 And it is in this anti-formalist context that the reference to Matisse, constantly associated by Dewey with the challenge launched by art to philosophy, takes its entirely post-Bergsonian sense.5 This is what I would like to show now, coming back to Interior with Aubergines.6 Interior with Aubergines presents itself as an explosive and discontinuous multiplication of stacked or nested planes that are quasi-rectangular, but often slanted and covered in swirling or lightly suspended motifs. The abrupt jumps in scale and colour oppositions are indifferent to any coherent image effect, responding to purely constructive, ‘decorative’ concerns alone. The play of colours is effectively valued only for the tensions that the colours establish between themselves, and not for the pictorial valorisation of their intrinsic chromatic or mimetic qualities. The dark red splashes and violet stripes of the three aubergines stand out on the red tablecloth with big light yellow and ochre leaf designs. This tablecloth, decentred by its reflection in a slanted mirror, contrasts with the green of a folding screen, on which oversized light mauve swirls break out. Big dark mauve buds with five petals stand out from a large, dark brown and reddish brown ground. And so on. The eminently decorative plastic and chromatic weave ­­(de)­constitutes

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the ‘objects’ – none of which is painted for its own sake – into arabesques, various stripes and rectangles, grids, pleated surfaces and scattered patches. It does so in such a way that the possible decorative ‘motifs’, of which the objects might be the supports, are completely denaturalised (properly ‘demotivated’) by their internal decorative reassembling. There is nothing phenomenological or descriptive about the multiplication of heterogeneous objects at incommensurable scales, rather, it serves essentially as a vector for the general putting into tension of planes and coloured elements. On the wall, an empty frame lets one see the tapestry with its dark mauve buds on the ground, and encloses another empty frame. This assemblage designates mural decoration as being the real (or desired) object of painting, while the coloured patches that sketch out a ‘landscape’ inside a window frame give it the look of a flat tapestry in the room – and does so all the more for having the same colours. This assemblage indicates a concern with positioning the interior and the exterior on the same continuous plane. The flatness that holds this multi-coloured patchwork together, and that works the whole of the field overtly or covertly, integrates the effects of relief or of depth, in force. This all-over expansion, is, at one and the same time, both centrifugal and decentred (or de-focalised); it is ‘interior’ to the painting while it also radiates all-around it, since the painting’s edges, which slice randomly into the figures and deep into the tapestry ground, do not hold it back. Interior with Aubergines carries out an un-framing of any view or staging whatsoever of an ‘interior’. For Matisse, this rupture with painting’s interiority will have been a prerequisite and a condition for moving away from easel painting towards what he will call ‘architectural painting’ (referring to The Dance at the Barnes Foundation). This painting presents itself as indicative of a kind of defenestration of the Painting-Form, which it deterritorialises by making the Painting-Form pass from the aesthetic to the aisthesic. Here, perception makes itself the deterritorialised agent of the colours-forces that are put into play and into tension within an ‘interior’ that does not describe or narrate anything, that does not take form because it captures and ex-poses the becoming-intense of a multiplicity comprising heterogeneous terms – the relations of which compose a being of sensation – without either reducing or formalising the elements in tension. Its duration is no longer extensive (i.e. a distribution of objects narrating a whole life within an interior). It is entirely, and intensively, processual: a diagrammatisation of all the forces that make the Painting-Form explode. If the painting does not by any means ‘structure’ itself into an image, neither can it be reduced to a pure ‘hedonist’ play of colours for



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colours’ sake, and even less – were that possible – to a purely ‘formal’ abstraction: rather (figurative and/or abstract) form is that which slips away and, in its place, we have colours-forces in a constant vital confrontation, colours-forces that push beneath forms and beyond the painting, in the manner of tensors. The generalised tensitivity of space, which is thereby open to the entire expressive matter of duration as well as to its plastic condition of real experience, results from its appropriation by the processuality of a vital energetics that replaces the aesthetics of forms composed (fixed) in space: the closed, reserved space of Art: ‘the beauty parlor of civilization’ – according to the lapidary formula of John Dewey, Matisse’s veritable intercessor in the United States.7 As Matisse writes: ‘With me, colour is a force. My paintings are composed of four or five colours that undergo mutual shocks, eliciting sensations of energy.’8 Farewell to the image, goodbye ‘mise-en-scène’, down with purism, long live the energetic ‘mechanics of the painting’ that dislocates it within its Form in order to constitute a sensational block of forces.9 The break with the Painting-Form of Painting and with its forms of historicity was only possible for Matisse because of the discovery with which he associated Fauvism – the discovery that painting involved the construction of colours in relations of forces where their expressive power is intrinsically vital/vitalist, and not ‘purely’ pictorial. In his quest for colour’s deepest expressivity, Matisse understood and experienced that its nature must be energetic: ‘It is then the principles which “resurface”, which take on life, which give us life. Paintings, which are [all too often] refinements, subtle gradations, mixes devoid of energy, [must] invoke beautiful blues, reds, yellows, matters that move the sensual ground of men. That is fauvism’s point of departure: the courage of recovering the purity of means.’10 Recovering the purity of means has nothing to do with any purism whatsoever; on the contrary, it means making a vital principle resurface, thereby ‘purifying’ colours from any (purely) formal artistic finality, in order to give them over to their vitalist ontological power and engage them in a bio-aesthetic (or aisthesic).11 This ‘resurfacing’ of the vital ground (irreducible to a hedonism), this becoming-sensible that carries with it an unprecedented ‘expressionism’, is indissociable from its production as (chromatic) surface in an energetic constructivism for which it is the differences in quantity of colours that underlie their quality – in accordance with a principle repeatedly affirmed by Matisse. The differences in quantity that produce the vital quality of all the coloured surfaces in relation to one another are inseparably intensive (they depend on the degrees of saturation of the colours) and extensive

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(tied to their spatial properties: quantities of surface, form, orientation, mutual positions, and so on). Proceeding thus – through both ‘physically’ non-formed but tensively determined materials (and not through formed substances pertaining to the order of representation), as well as ‘semiotically’ informal functions constitutive of a-signifying ‘powersigns’12 (force-signs instead of figurative or abstract form-signs that in themselves signify) – the ‘motor-diagram’13 of forces tends to produce at the very level of sensation (for which quality is nothing other than contracted quantity), the identity, ‘Expression = Construction’, to the extent that content and expression attain their highest degree of relativity, becoming the functives of a single function as well as the materials of a single matter (becoming is the becoming-indiscernible of content and expression). That is the very principle of this fauvist chaosmosis, which, following Deleuze and Guattari, we can characterise – in a radical after Bergson that we will have to define more precisely – as a ‘creative involution’ or a constructive/constructivist involution; that is, as a ‘dissolution of form’ that does not ‘turn into a regression into the undifferentiated’14 because it is exercised in the process of assembling the heterogeneities put into play by the composition of an ‘abstract machine’.15 To the extent that an assemblage is all the closer to the ‘living abstract machine’, it opens and multiplies connections and traces a plane of consistency with its quantifiers of intensity and ‘consolidation’.16 Each ‘work’ will show itself within the heterogenesis of an inthe-making that makes it ‘stand alone’ through its intensive variations qua consistent multiplicity. Alongside Derain and Vlaminck, Matisse confirmed the vitalist difference of Fauvism in a chromatic dynamiting of forms where nothing other than ‘the vital-based parallelism’ of lines and colours remained,17 This was so much so that ‘the canvas became a crucible where living things are made’18 and propelled the outrageous Salle VII (referred to as the ‘cage of wild beasts’) to the rank of ‘life centre’ at the 1905 Autumn Salon.19 At almost the very same time, in his highly acclaimed 1904–5 lectures at the Collège de France, Bergson was introducing conceptions which will feed into Creative Evolution (1907). Besides the study of the interaction between the methods of ‘intuition’ and ‘construction’ and the analysis of the notion of ‘force’ (based on a critical commentary on Herbert Spencer’s First Principles), what came to the surface in a more pronounced way in those lectures is precisely what was at stake in Creative Evolution, namely life in its relation to will and to the question of freedom.20 The treatise on Bergsonian method, which was meant to ‘permit a glimpse, on some essential points, of the possibility of its application’,21 was a sequel to Matter and Memory (1896), where



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Bergson had already developed a ‘metaphysics of matter’ ‘advancing through concrete extension, [to reveal] modifications, perturbations, changes of tension or energy, and nothing else’.22 A method of immanence is set against any ‘division of matter into independent bodies with absolutely determined contours’.23 Worth mentioning in this respect is Louis Vauxcelles’ insult to Matisse: ‘you profess that painting . . . must resolutely move away from the object. No, and a thousand fold no! All the great masters from de Greco to Manet and from Poussin to Cezanne and Van Gogh, your teachers, wanted to represent the object.’24 Bergson departs from a ‘pure experience, which is neither subjective, nor objective’,25 which implies the idea of duration, and then becomes in Creative Evolution a continuous creation of novelty. As such, he prefers to depart again from this sensation of becoming which he never ceased to endorse. Subsequently, he would say that this notion is no longer that of ‘our very small organised bodies (organised precisely with immediate action as its objective)’, but of ‘our very large inorganic bodies’ (‘the site of our potential and theoretically possible actions’).26 By allowing himself to be guided by an intuition leading ‘to the very interior of life’,27 towards the same activity struck in different directions by material and spiritual energy, Bergson regenerates in depth the conscience d’être of the vitalist movement. (At stake, differences in tension foregrounded by the univocity of being as moving and living continuity: ‘life and consciousness, probably terms which are coextensive to one another in our universe’;28 ‘life, that is to say consciousness launched into matter’, says Bergson in Creative Evolution).29 Driven towards creativity as ‘vital impulse’ (l’élan vital) of difference to the extent that it passes into act,30 ‘life in depth [la vie en profondeur] . . . designates what art makes us feel some of the time and what philosophy (the true one!) should make us feel at all times’.31 Indeed, is it not this very ‘intention of life, the simple movement that runs through lines, linking them to one another, endowing them with meaning . . . that the artist aims to grasp by placing himself within the object through a kind of sympathy, lowering, by an effort of intuition, the barrier that space interposes between him and the model?’32 This Bergsonian formula could, word for word, be assigned to Matisse. Reciprocally, Matisse’s formula and, specifically, its movement – ‘first form, then life; here form no longer matters’ – responds literally and intimately to the movement of Bergsonian thought that recommends a passage from intelligence with ‘a stable view (on the real) that we call a form’, to the intuition of life’s ‘fluid continuity’, for which ‘there is no form, since form pertains to motionlessness while reality is variation’. Thus, regarding living beings, we should say, ‘the very permanence of their form is nothing

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but the outline or drawing [dessin] of a movement’.33 It is this movement that Matisse deploys in an energetic leap that liberates him from the ‘historical’ limits of Bergsonism with respect to art (not to mention its resonance with a ‘fin de siècle’ aesthetics that brought together impressionist mobility and symbolist ideality). As for Bergson himself (who praised and appreciated in particular the work of Rembrandt,34 Corot and Turner,35 proclaimed that he considered Jacques-Emile Blanche to be the greatest painter alive,36 ignored the Cubists, and disapproved of ‘revolutionary forms in art’),37 one can say that his ‘technical’ conception, fluctuating between mechanism and finalism, of the ‘requirements of the matter on which (the artist) operates’ and what would not pertain to ‘creation itself’38 (despite being an integral part of its means . . .), prevented him from the practical elevation of aesthetic intuition to the plane of philosophical intuition. For him, the fixation of artistic-individual forms, that is to say their actualisation, signals the interruption (= fall) of the generative action of the forces prompted by the ‘vital impulse’.39 Never does the ‘created’ equal the vital exigency of creation, the vitality from whence it proceeds, ‘before it is strewn in images’.40 However, ‘art is about images’ and painting retains precisely its exemplarity from that which it re-animates: in addition to the inner perception of the artist, the function of imitation elevated to its ‘highest ambition’ and detached from the ‘needs of practical life’.41 This is where, as an after-effect, we can revisit the ‘Nietzschean’ affirmation of Fauvism that will overturn the terms of the problem while offering, in return to the idea of the Great Noon, an alternative force to the antagonism of romanticism and classicism.42 The imaginative-imitative necessity is displaced by demarcating itself from the ‘idealist’ dimension of the Bergsonian metaphysical horizon grafted onto ‘a certain immateriality of life’,43 in such a way that the creative force (re)invents plastic art as its most material transformation in the constituent processuality of construction. The fact remains that even though Bergson was still hampered by this necessity, and could only find a definitive way out of it in music (the most immaterial and least manufactured, the most dynamic and least imitative, the most ‘temporal’ and ‘disinterested’ of all arts),44 he nevertheless considered artistic creation a becoming where ‘sympathy’ with matter (the lowest degree) intersects with ‘intuition in duration’ at its highest requirement. To illustrate this, before these listeners and readers – who enjoyed the fact that he brought ‘the philosopher’s words closer to the painters’ works in such a way that the philosopher himself would not probably concede in his aesthetics’ – the following formula from the Creative Evolution may be useful:45



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The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the nature of the artist, by the colors spread out on the palette; but, even with the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would have been to produce it before it was produced – an absurd hypothesis which is its own refutation.46

Matisse will not put it differently: ‘a work of art that is to be created’, he says, ‘is never done in advance, contrary to Puvis de Chavannes’s claim that one can never enough see entirely beforehand the painting one desires to make. There is no break between thought and the creative act.’47 Such is the primary reason for Fauvism’s overcoming of the Painting-Form qua a critique en acte of the Form-Art (identified with an art of Form severed from Life) when related to its materialprocedural conditions of ‘production’ through a discharge constructed out of the vital energy inherent to the chromatic means. Driven by what I call Matisse-Thought, it partakes in a Nietzschean Bergsonism (the Nietzschean wasp and the Bergsonian orchid), enhancing the expansion of the force-signs of art in life and vice versa.48 This vitalist de-formation of Art that Nietzsche called aesthetic physiology (Physiologie der Ästhetik),49 is what now needs to be determined by force as being at the origin of the Bergsonian idea that every vitally experienced feeling takes, in its free impulse, an aesthetic character.50 Here, ‘the aesthetic character’ will find itself radicalised in its difference with regard to the ‘normal perception’ and propelled beyond ‘aesthetic enclosure’51 by the indefinite ‘widening’ of its object. This movement takes place within the horizon of an inextricably linked problematising, differentiating and processually temporalising perspective where the sub specie durationis power of the ‘in-the-making’ (se faisant) is affirmed in its opposition to the theatre of the ‘ready-made’ (tout fait): sub specie theatri.52 The full development of this idea will have to be, in truth, related to the American experience of Matisse at the beginning of the 1930s, with The Dance of the Barnes Foundation, and in its greatest effect of resonance with Dewey’s 1934 book-manifesto Art as Experience.53 The Dewey-Matisse encounter thus displaces and intensifies on the plane of art the convergence of Bergsonism, Nietzscheanism and pragmatism produced by Creative Evolution, whose publication was warmly welcomed by William James.54 One can thus say that it takes over, on a more experiential plane, from this ‘work’, of which no trace can be found anywhere else, and where Bergson proclaims in May 1912 – in an interview with the American journalist Herman Bernstein – that his artistic engagement was to ‘address ethics and aesthetics and the

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principles of morals and art’. What is to be made, therefore, of another text by Dewey on ethics, which he found ‘very interesting, very original and quite new’?55 There one can find, modified by the ‘thought of a painter’ (that would otherwise not be able to develop itself ‘outside its means’),56 the Bergsonian conception of duration as cut off from the mediation of homogeneous space to recover movement – and the movement of the work of art in the making – a rhythmic extension, living and throbbing with all our sensations. Matisse immediately recognised the resonance of this idea in his own work as shown in the most openly Bergsonian passages of ‘Notes of a Painter’, published in 1908, where Matisse revisits, almost word for word, the terms of the philosopher’s demonstration: that one needs to distance oneself ‘from the literal representation of movement’ and from its rendering ‘by means of an instantaneity’ in order to ‘awaken the idea of duration’.57 Matisse perfectly understood this idea of duration in terms of an imperative to forge a new relation between tension and extension in so far as ‘all sensations partake in extension’, in concrete extension.58 And oh how much this imperative, formulated in its philosophical rigour or intuitively apprehended, resonated with the painter who wanted to ‘reach that state of condensed sensations which makes the painting what it is!’59 The outcome is, indeed, immediate for Matisse: ‘an artist, who wants to transpose a composition from one canvas to a larger one, must conceive it anew in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just square it up onto the larger canvas.’ This idea overlaps with the argument put forward in this article that this very practical position depends on how ‘drawing [but also painting] must have an expansive force which gives life to the things that surround it’.60 If we leave the Matissean reference aside and proceed to relays of a totally different order, we can still note (with a trans-historical confirmation of our argument at stake) that the Bergsonian intuition of a constitutive duration will, at a later stage, be directly mobilised at the end of the 1950s by Hélio Oiticica, in his exploration of what he first called ‘colour-time’ (côr-tempo). Conceived as an overcoming/displacement of the plane, and of the aesthetic plane of the Art-Form in the movement leading from the inside out (de dentro para fora), this idea of colour-time is metaphysically identified with duration itself.61 ‘When a colour is no longer submitted to the rectangle, nor to any representation of this rectangle’, explains Oiticica, ‘it tends to “embody” itself [se corporificar, following his own neologism]; it becomes temporal, it creates its own structure, and the work then becomes the “body of colour”.’ With the ‘inclusion of time in the structural genesis of the



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work’, the spectator no longer participates ‘in contemplation . . . but is prompted to act in order to reach a pluri-dimensional perception of the work’.62 It is in this manner that time, qua ‘active element’ and as ‘duration’, becomes ‘the primordial factor of the work’, while ‘the viewer in front of the work discovers his vital time as he engages in a univocal relation with the time of the work’. He thus enters into a ‘vivência’ of colour whose ‘polarities’ will be experienced by the viewer, or the spectactor, as with Matisse, in a way that is less ‘contemplative’ or ‘organic’ than ‘cosmic’. It is important to note in this respect that ‘vivência’ – and, to our knowledge, Oiticica first introduced this term in this very Bergsonian context – will be distinguished by Oiticica from vitalism in its immediate meaning at the very moment when the constitutive relational-differential character of colour (colour as power relations) was being analysed in terms of ‘signification’ in the guise of what we called earlier ‘force-signs’. Oiticica’s distinction arises because form-sign is that which is excluded from colour, and because space will function through colour ‘totally integrated with the sign’, no longer depending on ‘form’ or ‘optic phenomena’, to be temporalised in the expression of construction.63 Is there still any room to doubt that the ‘temporal vitality’ (vitalidade temporal) advanced by Oiticica should remind us that it is as ‘vehicle of all kinds of vivência’ that colour is ‘signification’?64 And that this temporal vitality is endowed with an inextricably energetic and metaphysical value in the very precise sense where Bergson, at the end of his ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, defines the latter by an ‘integral experience’?65 This integral experience translates vivência in the most accurate way possible, while the metaphysics of the vital impulse that animates it may also, in a limited sense, be identified with a liberation of art propelled by the vitalist constructivism that characterises Oiticia’s ‘neo-concretism’.66 ‘Metaphysics is art itself’, Oiticica writes, in a manuscript dated December 1959 – the very same year of the manifesto of all breaks (Manifesto neoconcreto)67 that will dictate all other ensuing breaks from the perspective of the ‘non-object’ of art (with its strong Matissean resonances): there is a break of meaning when it is no longer from the outside towards the inside, but from the inside out,68 within an architecturalisation of colour inextricable from the ‘direct participation of the spectator’.69 Seen from this Brazilian angle, once more, it turns out that perhaps there is no worthy ‘Bergsonism’ other than the one that takes us beyond Bergson, albeit, the Bergsonian lesson remains absolutely Matissean.

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NOTES  1. H. Matisse, ‘Notes d’un peintre sur son dessin’, in Le Point, No. 21 (1939), reprinted in Écrits et propos sur l’art, texts, notes and index edited by Dominique Fourcade, new revised and corrected edition (Paris: Hermann, 1972), p. 163.   2. H. Matisse, comment cited by A. Verdet, Prestiges de Matisse (Paris: EPA, 1952), p. 47, n. 11. It is necessary to have a vision of the global state at each moment: ‘Everything must be envisaged correlatively when the work is in progress’ (Notes de Sarah Stein [Paris: EPA, 1908], p. 71). ‘I never know in advance what I will do’ (comment from 1942 addressed to J. and H. Dauberville, cited in Verdet, Prestiges de Matisse, p. 47, n. 11).   3. J. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), pp. 4, 3.   4. Ibid., p. 104.   5. ‘The Challenge to Philosophy’ is the title of Chapter 12 of Dewey’s Art as Experience.  6. H. Matisse, Interior with Aubergines (1911), 212 x 246 cm, Musée de Grenoble.  7. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 344. This whole book reads like a fantastic homage to Matisse.   8. This is the statement, from around 1942, made by the ever ‘fauve’ Matisse to Pierre Courthion. Cited in Pierre Courthion, ‘Avec Matisse et Bonnard’, in D’une palette a l’autre. Memoires d’un critique d’art (Geneva: La Baconniere Arts, 2004), p. 173.   9. The expression ‘mechanics of painting’ is signed Matisse. 10. H. Matisse, ‘Propos rapportés par Tériade’ (extracts from ‘Constance du fauvisme’), in Minotaure, Vol. 2, No. 9 (1936), p. 128 (emphasis added). 11. While, to our knowledge, the expression ‘bio-aesthetic’ appears only once in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (see A Thousand Plateaus [London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], p. 575, n. 34), it is a notion whose determining importance is everywhere felt, to the extent that it involves a becoming-life of art which amounts to a politics of sensation. Not without a polemical intention with regard to the dominance of the Duchampian paradigm, we can say that this is the becoming-life of modern-contemporary art borne by Matisse, whose operation we have constructed under the heading of Matisse-Thought. 12. We borrow this idea from Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), pp. 43ff., and pp. 224–53. 13. ‘To obey the intentions of [Matisse’s] painting, I must subject myself to the “motor diagram” that its form produces in my brain’, Matthew Stewart Prichard, letter to Frances Burton-Smith, June 1914, cited in Henri Matisse 1904–1917, exhibition catalogue (25 February–21 June 1993), (Paris: Ed. Du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993); ‘Anthologie’ by D. Fourcade and E. de Chassey, in ibid., p. 499. 14. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 270. Involution, the motor



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of becoming, is just as opposed to the idea of regression as it is to those of ‘filiative evolution’ or of development, which presuppose the continuity of forms; see ibid., pp. 238ff. 15. Ibid., p. 256. Starting from the idea that in a semiotic system (or at the level of the semiotic functioning of a system), expression and content ‘are in reciprocal presupposition . . . because they are two faces of the same assemblage’, Deleuze and Guattari call ‘abstract machine’ ‘something that is even deeper’ than this double face, to wit the plan(e) of the work whose assemblage is made of relations between all the forces (which are vital forces in Matisse) and where consequently there is no longer any formal distinction between the (forming) plan(e) of expression and the (formed) plan(e) of content. This single and underlying plane of immanence or consistency of all the forces is therefore more abstract, more radically deterritorialised than the formalist abstraction that bears only on the elimination of content. The machine is no less real for being abstract, as it participates in the (ontological) reality of the vital forces of which it is the assemblage. It can also be called deterritorialising to the extent that it presides over the reciprocal deterritorialisation of content and expression by investing them with its energy. Every movement of deterritorialisation in effect comes down to ‘crossing a threshold’ to attain ‘liberated zones of intensity where contents separate themselves from their forms’. 16. Ibid., pp. 513, 507. 17. André Derain wrote in a letter to Vlaminck at the end of 1901 (dated 24 September [1901?]): ‘I believe that lines, colors have very powerful relations in their parallelism with the vital foundation to make possible a look into their reciprocal and infinite existence . . .’ (Letter 6 in A. Derain, Letters to Vlaminck, text presented and edited by Ph. Dagen (Paris: Flammarion, 1944), p. 52 (emphasis added). 18. Attributed to Derain by Geroges Duthuit, ‘Le Fauvisme’, Les Cahiers d’art, 1929–31, reproduced in ID, Représentation et présence. Premiers écrits et travaux 1923–1952 (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), p. 213. 19. Michel Puy, ‘Les Fauves’, in La Phalange (15 November 1905); re-edited in Pour ou contre le fauvism, texts by painters, writers and journalists collected and edited by Philippe Dagen (Paris: Ed. D’art Somogy, 1994), p. 148. 20. The lecture on ‘Modern philosophy’ is titled ‘Evolution of the Question of Freedom’. We will use the version of the lecture in Henri Bergson Mélanges (Paris: PUF, 1972), pp. 648–9. 21. Henri Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice, in Henri Bergson, Oeuvres, Edition du centenaire (Paris: PUF, 1970), p. 493. There is no doubt that this is not entirely unconnected to the immediate success of the book which ‘surpassed considerably the narrow circle of philosophers and conquered the mainstream press and the wider public’, as reported by Albert Thibaudet in Le Bergsonisme in 1923, cited by François Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson, Essai sur le magistere philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 2007),

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p. 136. ‘As early as 1907–1908’, he adds, ‘Creative Evolution became prominent outside the academic circles’ (p. 141). 22. Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire, in Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 337 (Unless otherwise indicated, the italics are Bergson’s in all the cited texts.) ‘Matter thus resolves itself into numberless tremblings, all linked by an uninterrupted continuity, all interdependent, and running in every direction like so many shudders’ (p. 343). 23. Ibid., p. 332. 24. Louis Vauxcelles, ‘Le Salon d’Automne’, Gil Blas (30 September 1905), reedited in Pour ou contre le fauvism, pp. 108–9 (emphasis added). 25. Henri Bergson, ‘Letter to William James’ (20 July 1905), in Bergson, Mélanges, p. 660. 26. As defined by Bergson in Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932), in Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1195. 27. It was in the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ published in 1903 in the Revue de metaphsyique et de morale that Bergson introduced the term intuition. As François Azouvi notes, ‘few of his texts would have such a resonance and in such diverse milieu’ (La gloire de Bergson, p. 102). 28. Bergson in an open letter to Leon Brunschvicg dated 26 February 1903 (in Bergson, Mélanges, p. 585). 29. Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice, p. 649. 30. This is Deleuze’s definitive formula in the article from 1956 entitled ‘Bergson, 1859–1941’: ‘Elan vital is difference inasmuch as it passes to the act.’ Reprinted in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 28. 31. Bergson’s letter to L. Dauriac, 19 March 1913 (in Bergson, Mélanges, p. 990). 32. Bergson, Oeuvres, p . 645 (emphasis added). 33. Bergson, Oeuvres, pp. 645, 750, 604 (emphasis added). 34. See Maurice Verne, ‘Un jour de pluie chez M. Bergson’, L’intransigeant (26 November 1911). 35. Both are mentioned in ‘the perception of change’, see Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant, in Oeuvres, p. 1371. 36. See Isaac Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson (Neuchatel-Paris: Delachaux & Niestle, 1942), p. 88. 37. Villanova, ‘Celui qui ignore les cubistes’, L’Eclair (29 June 1913). 38. Bergson will elaborate on this theme in the 1920s in ‘The Possible and the Real’. See Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1134. Bergson will confess later that he didn’t spend as much time as he wished on aesthetic questions, even admitting, with resounding laughter, that ‘if I come back a second time on earth, I will certainly address those questions’; see Isaac Benrubi, ‘Un Entretien avec Bergson’, 19 December 1934, in Essais et témoignages (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1941), p. 368. 39. ‘It is true that this aesthetic intuition, as indeed exterior perception, only affects the individual’ (Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 645). It is the prerogative of



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the ‘mystic’ to extract the creation of human, too human, limits of the world by making them coincide with life’s over-abundance of the creative principle elevated to the plane of the universal; see Bergson, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932). 40. Letter to Harold Höffding, 15 March 1915 (in Bergson, Mélanges, p. 1148). In this letter, Bergson refutes the idea, wrongly attributed to him, of the identification of philosophy and art, and he does so by stressing the fact that ‘after having been engaged in the same direction as artistic intuition, philosophical intuition, on the other hand, goes much further than its artistic counterpart. It grasps the “vital” before it scatters around in images whereas art remains concerned with and confined in images’. 41. But projecting a complete detachment, which would be too much to ask of nature, because ‘were this detachment complete, the soul no longer cleave to action by any of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world has never yet seen’. See Henri Bergson, Le Rire, in Oeuvres, p. 461. It is also worth looking at ‘the perception of change’ here (Oeuvres, p. 1371): ‘the function of the artist is best revealed with clarity in that art form which concerns itself mainly with imitation, and I mean by this painting’. Because ‘the loftiest ambition of art . . . consists in revealing to us nature itself’ (Le Rire, in Oeuvres, p. 461). 42. We have established the historical origins of this argument in Jean-Claude Bonne and Eric Alliez, La Pensée-Matisse (Paris: Le Passage Eds, 2005), pp. 50–6. 43. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 462. The same argument can be made about Bergsonian intuition as such – entirely founded on the reality of inner life that one needs to start by disentangling it from the ‘material’ necessities of our practical life in order to recover its metaphysical meaning. 44. This did not escape the notice of Albert Thibaudet: ‘If Mr. Bergson formulated [his aesthetics] one day it would probably be an aesthetics of a musician’ (Thibaudet, Le bergsonisme [Paris: Gallimard, 1923], Vol. II, p. 59). 45. Among whom were Georges Duthuit, from whom we are borrowing this citation (in ‘Le Fauvisme’, p. 222), and to follow ‘the Fauves in their own manner. . .’. 46. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 500. 47. A response to a question raised by Verdet, in Prestiges de Matisse, p. 47, n. 11. This is a permanent feature of Matisse’s reflection on his work. Thus, for instance, he writes in his ‘Notes sur les dessins de la série Thèmes et variations’ (1942): ‘The road I am on, has nothing predictable about it, I am driven and not the driver. I always proceed from one point marked on my model to another point, that I alone always see independently from all other points towards which my brush is subsequently directed. Isn’t it the case that I am only guided by an inner impulse that I am translating as it takes shape rather than by the outside that my eyes stare at . . . while inventing my path to get there. Such an interesting path, indeed,

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isn’t it the most interesting course of action?’ (Prestiges de Matisse, p. 164). 48. Bergson wrote, limiting the realised possibility to philosophy (to his philosophy): ‘But one can conceive of a research orientated in the same sense as art, and that would take as its object, life in general’ (Oeuvres, p. 645). We can also see here that ‘imposing this affinity (Bergson-Nietzsche) as obvious, is truly one of the direct effects of Creative Evolution’ (Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson, p. 173). 49. The ‘remarkably unexplored obscure domain . . . of the Aesthetic Physiology’ appears in On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, § 8. We will note that Julius Meier-Graefe, in his article on ‘Matisse and the End of Impressionism’ (1923), relates ‘pictorial elements’ of the Bonheur de vivre (1906) to simple ‘physiological stimuli’ which attested to the loss of the aesthetic / historical sense of tradition, a loss linked to the ‘perception proper to the great modern city’ (cited by Alastair Wright, ‘Arche-tectures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History’, October, No. 84 [1998], p. 60). 50. See Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, in Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 15. 51. Mark Antliff produced from it the first approach on a strictly Bergsonian stance in his article ‘The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse’, in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 184–208. 52. Bergson employs this expression in Le Rire, in Oeuvres, p. 437. 53. There was at first a series of ten lectures given at Harvard in 1930–31 by Dewey, part of ‘a lectureship . . . founded in Memory of William James’, as the philosopher wrote in the Preface. 54. See William James’s letter to Bergson, 13 June 1907, in Bergson, Mélanges, pp. 725–6: ‘Your book is marvelous . . . and . . . your theories require an immediate attention.’ On the public and discussed character of the kinship between Bergsonism and pragmatism see also Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson, pp. 147–9. This went so far as for some to assert ‘the clearly transatlantic origin’ of Bergsonism (Gaston Rageot, in 1905). 55. Herman Bernstein, With Master Minds (New York: Universal Series Publishing, 1913), pp. 96–7. A little before this reference to Dewey (whose work was long followed by Bergson: see the 1902 lecture on ‘Intellectual Effort’), Bergson indulges in a vibrant homage to William James, who had just passed away: ‘one of the great men, of all countries and all times’ (p. 94). More generally on the reception of Bergson in the States, see Philippe Soulez and Frederic Worms, Bergson Biographie (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), pp. 132–9. 56. See Henri Matisse, Notes d’un peintre (Paris: EPA, 1908), p. 42. 57. Ibid., pp. 45–6. If we go by a claim made in 1944, Matisse has never ceased to read Bergson: ‘I spent the whole day reading Bergson, something which I have always done imperfectly at home, attracted by the drawings and paintings around me’ (Matisse, Letter to Camoin, September 1944). 



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58. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 350. 59. Matisse, Notes d’un peintre, p. 43. 60. Ibid. 61. One can thus read, in a manuscript dating from December 1959, a wholly Bergsonian development: ‘Duration (inner time) now appears . . . from the Inside out “because”  the artist temporalizes . . . space’ – otherwise ‘we should once again arrive at rationalized matter’. Catalogue, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), p. 190. See also the important article by Mari Carmen Ramirez, ‘The Embodiment of Colour: “From the Inside Out” ’, in the same catalogue, pp. 27–73. 62. Oiticica manuscript, dated 5 October 1960, in Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour, p. 202. 63. See the two manuscripts dated 7 and 13 August 1961, in Catalogue, Hélio Oiticica (Paris: Musée du Jeu de Paume, 1992), pp. 55–6. 64. Apart from the reference in note 63, all citations are extracts from H. Oiticica, ‘Color, Time and Structure’, 21 November 1960, in the catalogue Hélio Oiticica: Body of Colour, pp. 205–7. 65. Henri Bergson, ‘Introduction à la métaphysique’, in Oeuvres, p. 1432. 66. In a ‘Testimonial April 1962’ a propos of his Nuclei et Pénétrables, Oiticica evokes ‘a new constructivism, albeit one that owes nothing to Constructivism itself’. Nor was there here, he adds, ‘anything to do with Post-Mondrian Concrete Painting’ (it is the group of Paulists who are his target here), since it is about how ‘to be to Mondrian what Mondrian was to Cubism’. See Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour, p. 260. 67. See Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour, p. 190. At the start of paragraph B, one reads: ‘Metaphysical color (color-time) is essentially active from the inside out; it is temporal par excellence. This new sense of color does not possess the usual relationships of color that existed in painting of the past. It is radical in the broadest sense.’ 68. Hence what is affirmed in Manifesto neoconcreto (March 1959). 69. ‘Testimonial April 1962’, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour, p. 260. The liberation of painting in space is assimilated to an ‘architecture of painting’ (‘I am seeking an architecture of painting’) that can understand itself only in so far as it is an ‘architecturalisation of colour’ (as Ramirez writes in ‘The Embodiment of Colour’, p. 53).

5. Bergson Before Deleuze: How to Read Informel Painting SARAH WILSON

Gilles Deleuze ‘rediscovered’ Bergson, according to some of the ‘New Bergsonists’. Yet, far from there being a lapse in terms of Bergson’s impact, he was named ‘philosopher of the age’ by the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1939, and maintained a vital presence in France in the 1940s, not only in philosophical and Catholic circles. His thought was key to the understanding of the turn in painting known as the informel and the related movement known as lyrical abstraction.1 Created in Occupied France at the moment of Bergson’s death, a multifarious body of work, initially full of spirituality and anguish, expressed a new attitude to painterly matter, time, space and duration. It was based upon the encounter of matter and memory: Bergson’s Matière et mémoire (1896) was referred to explicitly, and continued to be quoted as a gloss on painting through to the 1960s. The specifics of the informel, its production and its perception, including non-verbalised feelings and affects as well as explicit Bergsonian triggers, become lost in translation when seen as a European-wide small-scale riposte to the painting of Jackson Pollock and the American Abstract Expressionists. In the 1990s a new orthodoxy issuing from America saw a European informel generated from Georges Bataille’s definition of the informe – a verbal and conceptual slippage – embodied in Rosalind Krauss’s exhibition, L’Informe: Mode d’emploi (Formless, A User’s Guide), of 1996. European art was instrumentalised, while the formal origins of an art whose lineage was entirely hostile to Surrealism were obfuscated. The impact of war, Occupation and the context of Bergson’s death had no place in this story.2 Henri Bergson died in 1941, aged eighty-one. Nobly, he had renounced all previous honours and awards bestowed upon him, rather than accept exemption from the anti-Semitic laws imposed by the Vichy government. As an expression of solidarity with so many friends, 80



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colleagues and respected intellectuals, he refused to engage with any public procedures of conversion, despite his increasing engagement with Catholicism. After queuing to register formally as an israélite (despite the laws of matrilineal descent ­– his father was Polish-Jewish, his mother from Yorkshire), he caught the pneumonia that would kill him. Tributes were immediate: from Paul Valéry’s address to the Académie Française, to the recollections of Raissa Maritain from New York; significant assessments of Bergson’s life-achievements and philosophical contribution were published – and republished – in 1942 and 1943, albeit with a strongly Catholic slant. Bergson’s complete works were published by Albert Skira in Geneva in 1945–6.3 National celebrations and a public homage at his tomb took place in 1947.4 The peridiodical, Études Bergsonniennes, continued to study and to re-evalutate Bergson’s heritage throughout the years 1948–56. In post-deportation ­and post-épuration Paris, it was remarked that at a time of Catholic dominance of the University, the École Polytechnique and the École Normale Supérieure, religion had become interesting; Bergson was not only highly topical himself, but was absorbed through Charles Péguy, Georges Duhamel, Marcel Proust and the wartime philosopher-hero Gaston Bachelard.5 Evidently, this is the period of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism which came to dominate alternative Catholic existentialist narratives; but from Sartre’s metaphors of impregnated matter and imagination onwards, the tension with a Bergsonian heritage was omnipresent.6 During the French Occupation, the so-called ‘Young Painters of the French Tradition’ specifically combined a bleu-blanc-rouge abstraction with an overt Catholicism and explicit references to, for example, the windows of Chartres cathedral.7 This spiritual reaction to a time of humiliation, duress – and surely knowledge of mass deportation – was also reflected in contemporary music, from Olivier Messaien’s Quartet for the End of Time (premiered in a German Stalag in 1941) to Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem of 1947. Painters such as Jean Bazaine, the theoretician of the group, have been challenged for using ‘abstract art as a veil’ (Michele Cone) – in fact a charge of covert Vichyism related to their affiliations to the movement Jeune France. I find this reading unsympathetic in terms of the constraints of the times.8 The artists’ combination of a Cubist armature and Fauvist colour, increasingly dissolving forms and coloured light echoing an Impressionist heritage, together with Catholic references, made it highly popular in the 1940s and 1950s, and the group was dominant as well in terms of its international promotion outside France by official bodies.9 Anticipating a culture of reconstruction, titles such as Charles Lapicque’s Saint ­Catherine-de-Fierbois

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(1940) referred not only to a saint but resonated with a sense of place, medieval architecture and narratives within a structure of religious beliefs – despite a rigorous abstraction of the image. This art movement is arguably poised on the brink of rediscovery: there was a splendid showing of Manessier, for example, at the FIAC, Paris’s international art fair, in 2012.10 Initially, the paintings of Lapicque, Alfred Manessier and Bazaine, with their clandestine patriotism, were more or less inscribed within perpendicular frameworks: compare Bazaine’s Mass for the Armed Man (1944), Manessier’s The Grande Trappe Monstery (1944), Pilgrims at Emmaeus (1944) (both notably figurative), or his great blue abstract hymn, Salve Regina (1945). But as soon as the works lost their rectilinearity, and the axis became diagonal or spiral-based, the sense of la durée contained in their poetic references, signified by titles, becomes easier to read, as we become optically disorientated, participants in the flux. While Marcel Proust, deeply read in Bergson, had been a family friend since Bazaine’s childhood, Gustave Rodrigues, author of Bergsonisme et Moralité,11 had been his teacher. In the mid 1940s, Bazaine chose the metaphor of the diver to signify his plunge into la durée: The artist, he said, must ‘dive, head down, eyes shut, into the deepest, most sincere, most truthful part of himself whatever the consequences of this attitude’ (see Tree and Diver, 1949).12 The diver becomes a visual metaphor for interiorisation, a dissolution of categories, of elements, earth, space, water – a gesture against the intellectual, a heralding of the intuitive. In 1949, a critic, ‘J. G. M’ (Jean-Guichard Meili), spoke of the painter’s paradoxical desire to petrify a ‘universe always decaying within durée’, when only the ‘glory of light and necessity of rhythm’ are emitted from canvases with titles such as Easter Morning or Sea Breeze.13 With a nod to Paul Klee in 1948, Manessier’s works became abstract, more ‘musical’ with black ‘notations’ rather than compositional grids, and with titles such as The Saint Matthew Passion (1948) (referring to Bach’s oratorio). The flavour of Bergson enters through ideas of impregnation, resonance and memory, including recollections of joyful singing, of orchestral textures and sonorities. Time and space combine in Espace matinale (Morning space – with a hint of matins), Landscape for Easter Day (1949), or even Study for Games in the Snow (1951), where the eye searches – using memory as well as perception – to make sense out of abstract shapes: red or orange triangles might be the hoods of running children, a white globe might be a snowball, following Bergson’s contention in Matter and Memory that ‘space is no more without us than within us’.14 This is why the ‘lyrical abstrac-



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Figure 5.1  Alfred Manessier, L’Elan, 1956, Photo Xavier Grandsart Courtesy Galerie Applicat-Prazan, Paris © Adagp, Paris 2013.

tion’ (abstraction lyrique) of this group of painters was often known as paysagisme abstrait or abstract landscape painting. The painting as flux transcends its own borders and frame; it is here that the sense of a bergsonisme becomes most explicit. The Source (1956), would imply both the origin of a spring and a metaphor; L’Elan (1956) (Figure 5.1), with its vital energy counters the downward swirl of Dawn Over the Garrigue of the same year, with intimations of a perspective where water itself has sculpted dry rock and scrubland. Swirls (Les remous, 1958) is not specific as to what the paint itself might refer (though black against colour always retains a memory of stained glass and of Georges Rouault). A companion piece, Mounting Moissac (La montée de Moissac) holds in its matter not just a memory of landscape, but the emotions and expectations of a pilgrimage to the romanesque abbey, in the footsteps of countless believers.15 Jean Fautrier (Figure 5.2), whose work is totally unlike that of the Young Painters of the French Tradition, is an entirely exceptional artist who makes the link between the 1920s and the 1960s – as claimed by his exhibition of 1957, ‘Thirty Years of Informel Painting’.16 In 1960, the year of Fautrier’s triumph at the Venice Biennale, the celebrated Italian critic Giulio-Carlo Argan wrote an extensive article called ‘From Bergson to Fautrier’, subsequently published as a book Fautrier: Matière et mémoire (Milan 1960).17 He notes that Fautrier’s earliest informel works (misty evocations of landscape) were created in Paris in the 1920s when Bergson’s influence was at its apogee. Their lineage – unbeknownst to Argan – also relates to the artist’s training in London under Sickert, his discovery of late Turner (confirmed by

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Figure 5.2  Giulio-Carlo Argan, cover for Fautrier, Matière et mémoire, 1960.



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his personal experience of Alpine landscapes) – and above all the fluid and all-encompassing experience of Monet’s Nymphéas paintings with Rodin sculptures in the newly opened Musée de l’Orangerie. Paul Valéry’s often republished text, ‘Degas, Danse, Dessin’, is also a clue to an evolution which embraced a Bergsonian fluidity in Paris, completely escaping Cubism/Dada/Surrealism debates.18 Early work had been shown during the Occupation at the Parisian Galerie René Drouin: Fautrier Œuvres (1915–1943) with a text by Jean Paulhan. This ended with darker canvases, where Rembrandt haunts Turner, and still lives intimate tragic slaughter. The poetry of Francis Ponge, Fautrier’s most eloquent commentator, author of Le parti pris des choses, published by Gallimard in 1942, was steeped in Bergson, explicitly so in his preface, ‘Matière et mémoire’, for Jean Dubuffet’s lithograph series, shown in 1945 at the Galerie André.19 Ponge’s accompanying text of February 1945 treated the lithographic stone itself as intermediary or witness, a keeper of secrets, plutôt comme témoin, intermédiare ou depositaire. Inscriptions were made in time as well as memory, for the lithographic stone has a past of palimpsests which can rise to the surface. Dubuffet’s ferocious images: Bird Eaters, Telephonist: Telephone Torture, Typist; Coffee Grinder use a fauxethnographic, caricatural viewpoint infused with a Célinian disgust and satire. They operated precisely as a critique of humanism at this sullied period  where ‘Bergson’ as reference was indeed overdetermined. For, despite the integrity of Emmanuel Mounier’s personnalisme embodied in his review Esprit, bien-pensant Catholicism (with the complicity of Vichy’s pomp and circumstance) offered spiritual structures and a conscience-salving practice in a world where the Vatican never denounced the deportation of the Jews, and where in Paris itself, the French populace preferred to ignore the actions of its own citizens and police, within the new, collaborationist order and its aftermath.20 Thenceforward, however (among a certain elite), the catchphrase matière et mémoire became, as I have argued, a useful net for the elusive art informel, suggesting not only intuition, but a temporal way of experiencing a picture, very different from Bergsonian interpretations of Cubism and Futurism. Key words such as durée, mouvance, mouvement abounded in critical vocabulary. Turning back to Fautrier’s drawings, prior to the application of matière as paint, the multiple contours and rubbed shadings of his female nudes offered multiple and potential images: ‘A drawing by Fautrier is a body in movement. Each drawing proposes a being, offers a crowd of images which our life perceives in space and time: we’re speaking with Fautrier about a new dimension.’21 The now-celebrated Hostage series was shown at the Galerie René

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Drouin just after the war, during the bloody period of vengeance killing and the épuration purge of collaborators. Their reception, in particular André Malraux’s notion of the heads inscribed with ‘hieroglyphs of pain’, has been extensively discussed.22 Fautrier’s colours, powders and crystals, applied almost cosmetically, created layers and patinas laid over rough, impastoed surfaces, worked on the flat. An idea of time became ‘inextricable from the implications of matière, a matière whose rough surface created variable colours in its shadowed regions, whose accretions had their own geological history, containing the history of Fautrier’s creative and imaginative experience’.23 A time-based reading of the Hostages fills their mutilated surfaces with horror: after the victim’s agonising apprehension of imminent death, the works we perceive re-enact and commemorate that very moment, ‘the reappropriation of matter by matter, pregnant with the moment of Fautier’s own témoigage’ – for the artist had been a firsthand witness of reprisal shootings and Nazi atrocities in the Vallée au Loups, where the series was generated.24 Fautrier’s conception of time and emotion was intimately related to the paintings’ rapid execution and small scale: ‘According to him, today one can no longer charge a large-scale work with emotional significance. Our apprehensive era has no place of emotions of a longue durée . . .’25 This is Fautrier’s friend, the writer and editor Jean Paulhan (author of L’art informel, un éloge, 1962) writing in 1964. How was Bergson still topical as an interpretative scheme through which to perceive and to ‘think’ Fautrier in the early 1960s ? Giulio-Carlo Argan’s Matière et mémoire quotes no editions, presupposing a complete familiarity with Bergson – in French and to hand: ‘Relations between philosophical and artistic attitudes may be the result of direct, indirect and quite often reciprocal influences, such as the convergence of two distinct research developments on the same problem’ he says at the outset. ‘The extensive interpretation of Bergson’s thought in contemporary criticism, and particularly in Merleau-Ponty, is able to include and explain pertinent facts in modern painting – and I have in mind above all Fautrier.’ Argan refers to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception with its philosophy of the embodied, perceiving cogito, moving in a real world of time and space, as embodied in Fautrier’s otherness, his antipathy towards dualism.26 The artist is positioned at the outset and in the conclusion ‘against’ the rectilinear, conceptual world of Piet Mondrian, who ‘reduces consciousness . . . to mere perception’.27 Addressing the question of Fautrier’s hautes pâtes (his ‘pastes’ whipped up with a palette-knife), Argan insists upon the ‘stratified appearance’ of his matter, considered ‘avant la dissociation que l’idéalisme et le



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réalisme ont opérée entre son existence et son apparence’. He continues: ‘But precisely because this matter is a matter of image – and has the extension, depth, duration and history of an image – it is too, in the Bergsonian concept, memory: it is the datum of that perception – which may well be l’ensemble d’images, but related to l’action possible d’une certain image déterminée, mon corps.’28 ‘Here is a page of Bergson’, he says, which could well be recalled to describe, step by step, the pictorial process of Fautrier, intended as an écoulement de sa propre personne à travers le temps, as the work, the tangible product of un moi qui dure . . .: Quand je me promène sur ma personne, supposée inactive, le regard intérieure de ma conscience, j’aperçoit d’abord, ainsi qu’une croûte solidifée à la surface, toutes les perceptions qui arrive du monde materiel . . .

The extensive quotation in French that follows this excursus, given as ‘(Introduction à la métaphysique. V La Pensée et le mouvant, pp. 182–3)’, takes one again to Merleau-Ponty, confirming ‘It is because of this concrete presence of the ego as a body in the perception that the matter of Fautrier’s painting . . . reveals a complete scale of states of consciousness.’ Again from La Pensée et le mouvant, he quotes ‘nous ne percevons pratiquement que le passé, le présent pur étant l’insaissisable progrès du passé rongeant l’avenir’.29 Sensual colour images, striated, impasted, clouded, scribbled or blotted (the works on paper), embody and supplement Argan’s purposefully complex text, whose extensive use of French quotation within the English and German translations, in itself points to a now-disappeared European intelligentsia. Aut-Aut, the substantial philosophical periodical in which ‘Da Bergson a Fautrier’ was first published, took its title from Søren Kierkegaard’s Either-Or; Kierkegaard in the contemporary offered a religious, existentialist alternative for Italians of a Catholic disposition hostile to a Sartreantype atheism.30 Bergson, too, offered a paradigm of being where the past and the sacred coexisted with the present. Moralistic, Argan ends with tropes of absolution or damnation . . . Fautrier ‘accepts, ready to endure it to the bitter end, the confused darkness of the real’.31 Fautrier won the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale in 1960; Manessier’s fourteen paintings on the theme of the Passion and Resurrection won the Grand Prix in 1962. Robert Rauschenberg’s shock prize of 1964 would be a message to Europe as well as the jury. Pop art would be the damnation of the informel, its religious or humanist aura, its metaphysics, its philosophical claims, its detachment from the real world, capitalism, from la dolce vita. Bergson’s centenary exhibition was held in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1959.  Only in 1960 was Bergson introduced into the

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philosophy curriculum for the final year in French schools; hence, the urgency and relevance for a new generation of young readers of Gilles Deleuze’s compendia and critical studies.32 Yet, as I have demonstrated here, there was no real hiatus in terms of reading and appreciating Bergson, a living presence until 1941 whose influence permeated artistic circles until the 1960s: philosophers such as Jean Wahl, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and poets such as Ponge (a significant influence for Jacques Derrida), conveyed his thought.33 Teachers and thinkers, who had originally attended Bergson’s lectures, or moved in circles of those who had attended, were faithful to Bergson and his message, in a context where the painters of lyrical abstraction and the informel looked compellingly modern. * * * Deleuze wrote his first text on Bergson in 1956 initially for MerleauPonty.34 He would go on to define three great moments in philosophy, linked to Hegel, Husserl and, not Bergson, but Sartre.35 His writing on artist Gérard Fromanger, the white canvas/screen and the ‘image in the dark’ relates to his work on cinema; passages that are reprised, curiously in his work on Francis Bacon of 1981.36 He describes the passage from informel artists Fautrier and Dubuffet to the Hungarian painter Simon Hantaï, not in conjunction with work on Bergson, but in Le Pli, Leibniz et le baroque (1988, The Fold, 1993). Here he traces a concept of the baroque within a modernist lineage, extending from Mallarmé through to Pierre Boulez’s Pli selon Pli (‘Fold according to Fold’, 1959–62); Fautrier and Dubuffet are also ‘modern Baroque painters’ . . . theirs is an ‘informal’ where form is ‘folded, as existing only as “mental landscape” in the soul or the mind’.37 Was Deleuze’s acquaintance with the ‘mental landscape’ of these artists a product of his bergsonisme? Is his ‘fold’ in fact as close to Bergson’s Matière et mémoire as it is to the baroque? In contrast, for Deleuze, the painter Simon Hantaï’s work embodies ‘the Unfold’. Hantaï represents the generation of artists who take up the baton from Matisse (the favourite subject for Bergsonian art historians) and the young or not so young ‘Painters of Tradition’ like Manessier.38 He worked with folds – on the ground, tying his canvas, painting it (on the tie-dye principle), then unfolding, opening up massive surfaces, on a scale that extends to huge, all-over environments.39 And though Deleuze does not explore these issues, Hantaï’s art is both essentially Catholic (see the beautiful blue Mariale series of 1960–62) and deeply concerned with memory: the memory of his mother’s apron always in his folded canvas, fused with the memory of emigration.40 The folded works are



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like a metonym of the brain, their ‘unfolds’ like starry bursts of light (Georges Didi-Huberman coined the word étoilement) – alternatively bursts of blankness or pain.41 Deleuze uses a still Bergson-impregnated language to speak of Hantaï: ‘Tantôt faire vibrer la couleur dans les replis de la matière, tantôt faire vibrer la lumière dans les plis d’une surface materielle.’ This passage is followed in Deleuze épars, the tribute to Deleuze produced ten years after his death, with Hantaï’s Pli (1981), a ‘painting in three states – difference and repetition’.42 Deleuze épars ends mysteriously, explosively, with an unknown, undated manuscript of Deleuze’s lecture ‘Bergson’s Theory of Multiplicities’. It is presented as a graphisme, a snapshot of the pensée-Deleuze, where the classic opposition between quantitative and qualitative oppositions, extensiveintensive, virtual-actual becomes a trace of the speed of the philosopher’s thought, as he creates concepts. The manuscript is studded with the sign ‘X’ for multiplicités, a Bergsonian-Deleuzian starburst on paper, a counterpoint and complement to the manner of Hantaï.43 NOTES  1. The term informel and its usage by critic Michel Tapié from 1950–51 had certain connotations specific to artists in his orbit. Translating it as ‘informal’ and extending the term to the ‘Young Painters of the French tradition’ before 1949 was inaccurate in my MA thesis ‘Informal painting in France, 1939–1949’, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1979, a source for this article. However, the term was used increasingly loosely: see Enrico Crispolti, L’Informale, storia e poetica, subtitled Abstract-Expressionism, Abstraction-Lyrique, Action-Painting, Art Autre, Art Brut, Automatismo, Gesto, Informale, New-Dada, Nuclearisme, Spazialismo, Tachisme (Assisi/Rome: Beniamino Carucci Editore, 1971).  2. Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, eds, L’Informe: Mode d’emploi (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996); Formless, A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), described (with no knowledge of the French informe) as ‘this puritanical American project’ by Richard Williams, ‘Informe and Anti-Form’, in Andrew Hussey, ed., The Beast at Heaven’s Gate, Georges Bataille and the Art of Transgression (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 153.  3. See Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’étranger (March–August, 1941), reprised as Études Bergsoniennes, Hommage à Henri Bergson 1859–1941 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942). This lists Bergson’s complete works in print: fifty-two editions of L’Évolution créatrice, thirty-two editions of Matière et mémoire and seven current critical studies. See also Albert Béguin and Pierre Thévenaz, Hommage à Bergson, Essais et témoignages recueills (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, August 1943), published under the auspices of Les Cahiers du Rhône. The

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Gazette de Lausanne (9 September 1941) published his widow’s letter to Emmanuel Mounier, who confirmed that a priest arrived unable to baptise him or adminster the last rites, and that he had no religious funeral (pp. 11–12). Tributes included those from Charles Péguy, Paul Valéry and Jean Wahl. See also Bergson, Oeuvres complètes (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1945–6).  4. For the national celebrations and the homage at his tomb with the President of the Republic and Minister of Education see, Henri Bergson, Exposition centenair (Paris: Bilbiothèque Nationale, 1959), nos. 123–5.  5. See J. B. Duroschi, ‘De la nouvelle situation faite au Parti intellectuel’, Cahiers de notre Jeunesse, Vol. 21 (1945); Gaston Bachelard, La dialectique de la durée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), and Marie Cariou, Bergson et Bachelard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995).   6. See Sarah Wilson, ‘Paris Post War, In Search of the Absolute’, in Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism (London: Tate Gallery, 1992), pp. 25–52; and Florence Caeymaex, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson: les phénoménologies existentielles et leur héritage bergsonien (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005).   7. Jean Bazaine, ‘Peinture bleu, blanc, rouge’, Comoedia (30 January 1943); Bazaine’s interest in Bergson brought him into contact with the Catholic milieu around the review Esprit. See Jean Tardieu, Jean-Claude Schneider and Viveca Bosson, Bazaine (Paris: Maeght, 1975), p. 36.  8. Michele C. Cone, ‘Abstract Art as a Veil: Tricolor Painting in Vichy France’, Art Bulletin, Vol. 78 (1992); see also Laurence Bertand-Dorléac’s Art of the Defeat, 1940–1944 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), Chapter 4, ‘The Red and the Blue’, pp. 276–93; and Natalie Adamson, Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the Ecole de Paris, 1944–1964 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).   9. Alfred Manessier, for example, exhibited in Brussels in 1945, in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, 1948–9, and by 1959, when he showed at ‘Documenta 2’ in Kassel, his works had been sent to São Paolo, South Africa, Pittsburgh and New York. 10. ‘Alfred Manessier. Tours, Favellas et autres Oeuvres monumentales’, Applicat-Prazan, Paris, FIAC, 18–21 October, 2012, available at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW8ZCq_JwZM (accessed 27 March 2013). 11. Gustave Rodrigues, Bergsonisme et Moralité (Paris: Chiron, 1922). 12. ‘La morale de l’artiste, c’est de plonger, tête baissée, les yeux fermés, au plus profond, au plus sincère, au plus vrai del lui-même, quelles que soient les conséquences de cette attitude’, Jean Bazaine in Georges Charbonnier, Le monologue du peintre (Paris: Julliard, 1959), Vol. 1, p. 98. 13. ‘gloire d’un lumière et nécessité d’un rythme . . . pétrifier un univers ­toujours périssant dans la durée’, J. G. M. (Jean-Guichard Meili), ‘Jean Bazaine, le peintre et le temps’, L’Esprit (January–March, 1950), pp. 138–9. 14. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (Mineola: Dover, 2004), p. 288.



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15. The series of paintings to which I refer are illustrated more or less sequentially in the founding monograph, J. P. Hodin’s Manessier (Bath: Adams and Dart, 1972) (Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes for the French version). 16. Pierre Restany, Fautrier, 30 années de figuration informelle suivi d’un historique de René Drouin (Paris: Galerie Rive Droite, 1957); ‘Fautrier – 30 Jahre informelle Malerei’, Galerie 22, Dusseldorf, 1958. Yves Peyre, Fautrier, ou les outrages de l’impossible (Paris: Éditions du Regard, 1990), is the most substantial picture book including early work. 17. G-C. Argan, ‘Da Bergson a Fautrier’, in Aut-Aut, revista di filosofia e di cultura, Vol. 55 (1960), pp. 10–23 (over 400 pages involving existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, etc.); Argan, Fautrier: ‘Matière et mémoire’ (Milan: Apollinaire, 1960) in Italian, French, English, German. 18. Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin (Paris: Ambroise Vollard, 1936); further discussion in Wilson, ‘Jean Fautrier, Violence and Dissolution, Dialogues of the informel’, forthcoming. 19. Jean Dubuffet, Matière et mémoire, ou les lithographies à l’école (Matter and memory or Lithographs at School), text by Francis Ponge (Paris: Fernand Mourlot, 1944). 20. See W. D. Halls: ‘French Christians and the German Occupation’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Patrick Marsh, eds, Collaboration in France, Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation, 1940–1944 (Oxford, New York, Munich: Berg Publications, 1988); and Michael Kelly, Pioneer of the Catholic Revival: The Ideas and Influence of Emmanuel Mounier (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979) (the extensive bibliography continues in French to today). 21. ‘Un dessin chez Fautrier c’est un corps en mouvement. Chaque dessin propose un être, donne une foule d’images que notre vie perçoit dans l’espace et le temps  : l’on parle à propos de Fautrier d’une nouvelle dimension’, Daniel Wallard, ‘Fautrier, trois dessins’, Poésie 44, Vol. 17 (December 1943–February 1944), p. 29. 22. André Malraux, ‘Les Otages’, preface, Fautrier exhibition (Paris: Galerie René Drouin, 1945). 23. Sarah Wilson, ‘Informal Painting 1939–49’, MA thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 1979, p. 18. 24. Fautrier (illegitimate and Jewish on his father’s side) fled to the sanatorium created in Chateaubriand’s villa in the Vallée au Loups, where he overheard Nazi reprisal killings outside the boundary walls of the jardin à l’anglaise. By day he painted. See Palma Bucarelli, Jean Fautrier, pittura e materia (Milan, 1960) (unfootnoted). 25. ‘Selon lui, on ne peut plus de nos jours charger de signification émotive une oeuvre de grande étendue. Notre époque trépidante ne laisse pas place aux émotions de longue durée’, Jean Paulhan in ‘Franges pour un Dossier Fautrier’, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1964, n.p. 26. Argan quotes Merleau-Ponty’s ‘comment on the Bergsonian vision of a “cosmological consciousness” ’, as regards Fautrier’s ‘curving’ universe,

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‘éloignée de l’être et de son être propre, et en même temps unis à eux par l’épaisseur du monde’ (M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception, p. 344)’, in Argan, Fautrier: Matière et mémoire, p. 40. 27. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 28. Ibid., p. 2. 29. Ibid., pp. 40, 44. 30. See Aut-Aut, Vol. 55. 31. Argan, Fautrier: Matière et mémoire, p. 47. 32. See François Chatelet, La philosophie des professseurs, 10/18 (Paris: Grasset, 1970), Chapter 3, specifying six courses on L’Évolution créatrice, 14 March–9 May 1960. 33. See Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), with its passages on Fautrier. 34. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Bergson, 1859–1941’, in M. Merleau-Ponty, ed., Les Philosophes célèbres (Paris: Mazenod, 1956), pp. 292–9; Deleuze, ‘La conception de la difference chez Bergson’, in Études bergsoniennes, IV, pp. 77–112 (also in L’Ile Déserte, 2002); Bergson, Mémoire et Vie, texts selected by Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957, 1963); Gilles Deleuze, Le bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966). 35. Jeannette Colombel, ‘Deleuze-Sartre: pistes’, in A. Bernold and R. Pinhas, eds, Deleuze, épars, Paris: Hermann, 2005 (partially reproduced in Sartre ou le parti de vivre, Paris: Grasset, 1981), pp. 39–40. 36. For Deleuze and Fromanger, see Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), Chapter 4, pp. 137–42. 37. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Fold’, trans. Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies, Vol. 80 (1991), p. 243. 38. Why Matisse rather than the Futurists? I would disagree with Mark Antliff that ‘Matisse should be seen as the most prominent artist among a cross-section of Parisian modernists who looked to Bergsonian theory to justify their aesthetic innovations’ (emphasis added). See ‘The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse’, in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 186. See also Lorenz Dittmann, Matisse begegnet Bergson. Reflexionen zu Kunst und Philosophie (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2008). 39. See Hantaï, MNAM, Centre Georges Pompidou, 2013. 40. See Hélène Cixous, Le Tablier de Simon Hantaï – Anagrammes (Paris: Galilée, 2005), p. 49. 41. Georges Didi‐Huberman, L’Étoilement: conversation avec Hantaï (Paris: Minuit, 1998); see also ‘Les replis de Simon Hantaï’, Déplier, déplacer, découvrir: la peinture en actes, 1960–1999 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: LAM, 2012), p. 46. 42. Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988), pp.



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50–1; Deleuze, épars, p. 112, with three illustrations by Hantaï (Pli, 1981), pp. 113–15. ‘Here, setting the color in the coils of matter to vibrate, there setting the light in the folds of an immaterial surface to vibrate’ (Deleuze, ‘The Fold’, pp. 243–4). 43. Deleuze, ‘Theorie des multiplicités chez Bergson’, in Deleuze, épars, pp. 227 ff (an eleven-page lecture manuscript in facsimile).

6. Revolutionary Immanence: Bergson Among the Anarchists MARK ANTLIFF

In 1913 a public battle occurred among prominent figures in the anarchist movement over the merits of Henri Bergson. This heated exchange pitted the defenders of anarchist-communism – led by the prominent Russian anarchist and scientist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) and his ally Jean Grave, editor of Les Temps Nouveaux (1895–1921) – against a group of anarchist individualists headed by André Colomer (1886– 1931), co-founder of the journal L’Action d’art (1913). At the time, Kropotkin was an international celebrity among the European intelligentsia, whereas Colomer was a self-styled philosopher, poet, theatrical performer and rising star in the anarchist firmament.1 This schism also implicated prominent avant-gardists like the Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac who drew on Kroptokin and Grave’s scientific metaphors in proclaiming the anarchist import of his artistic technique,2 and a younger generation of symbolists and Futurists who participated in the Action d’art project and shared Colomer’s enthusiasm for Bergson’s metaphysics.3 Kropotkin and Colomer’s contentious struggle to define anarchism’s epistemological foundations surprisingly dovetailed with another heated debate over Colomer’s decision to publically defend the illegal activities of a group of bank robbers known as the ‘Bonnot Gang’, whose notoriety reached a crescendo during a well-publicised trial that lasted from February to April 1913.4 From February to December of that year, Colomer proclaimed his allegiance to Bonnot in the pages of L’Action d’art in a series provocatively titled ‘From Bergson to Bonnot’ and ‘From Bergson to Banditism’. Colomer’s campaign was based on a synthesis of Bergson’s thought with that of Max Stirner, whose book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844) was foundational for the anarchist individualist movement.5 Thus when L’Action d’art announced the creation of a bookstore at its headquarters in the heart of the Latin 94



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quarter (25 rue Tournefort), Stirner’s manifesto, translated as l’Unique et sa propriété in 1899, was advertised alongside Bergson’s Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896) and Laughter (1900) under the heading ‘Philosophy-Aesthetics-Combat’.6 This interrelated defence of Bergson, Stirner and Bonnot led Kropotkin and Grave to orchestrate the ouster of Colomer and his group from the official congress of the Fédération Communisteanarchiste held in Paris in August 1913; that dismissal was then followed by Kropotkin’s publication in the October edition of Les Temps Nouveaux of a critique of Bergson’s philosophy, titled ‘The Crusade Against Science of M. Bergson’.7 Kropotkin allied Bergson’s popularity to a revolt on the part of the bourgeoisie and their clerical allies against the rise of scientific materialism and its logical outcome, worker emancipation. Kropotkin then argued that recent discoveries in the sciences overturning previous assumptions did not warrant a wholesale refutation of the scientific method of inductive thinking, as Bergson asserted in Creative Evolution.8 According to Kropotkin, Bergson’s alternative method of intuition was no method at all, but a caricature of inductive reasoning based on mere ‘analogies’ and ‘metaphors’ with no real basis in scientific facts. He then accused Bergson of catering to a gullible public by making ‘elegantly fantastical assertions’ in support of a priori assumptions derived from ‘the fiat of Genesis’.9 In so doing he rejected Bergson’s claim that intuitive thinking could serve as a salutary method in the sciences, as evidenced by historical precedents such as the development of infinitesimal calculus.10 Kropotkin’s unapologetic defence of conventional scientific methods reiterated a position he encapsulated in his book Modern Science and Anarchism (1912). There Kropotkin argued that the only truly viable form of anarchism embraced ‘the scientific inductive-deductive method’, and parted ‘forever with metaphysics’ including that of ‘the Hegelian’ Max Stirner and his followers.11 Thus, Kropotkin’s attack on both Stirner and Bergson was part of a calculated campaign to warn anarchists of the folly of metaphysics. In examining this epistemological debate I will first consider how it is that Colomer judged Bergson’s thought to be so compatible with that of Max Stirner. As we shall see, that synthesis had its basis in Stirner’s theory of radical nominalism and his related condemnation of Cartesian rationalism, scientific discourse and what he called ‘fixed ideas’ as pernicious abstractions, constructed by vested interests to divert us from an ‘egoist’ focus on the cultivation of our own personalities, free of all societal constraint. These abstractions in Stirner’s view posited an artificial division between mind and body to fabricate an ethereal realm of ‘pure spirit’ composed of general ideas and concepts divorced from the

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temporal world of our corporeal being. Stirner identified this nominal or ‘egoist’ self as the ‘unique one’, calling on us to behave solely in response to our embodied interests; but he also argued for the potential existence of a ‘union of egoists’ conjoined in a contingent alliance by virtue of their self-interest. Colomer reconfigured Stirner’s thesis by aligning his condemnation of abstractions with Bergson’s critique of the intellect and exalting intuition as the means by which an anarchist perceived and developed his or her nominalist self, the ‘unique one’ which was synonymous with individual duration. Colomer also claimed that intuition facilitated the establishment of the ‘union of egoists’ called for by Stirner and, most importantly, that in plumbing the depths of personality through intuition the egoist was able to augment and cultivate the creative élan coursing through his or her very being. Stirner’s egoist self is here made synonymous with Bergson’s conception of personality – it is ever changing, qualitatively distinct, and described by Colomer in terms of Bergson’s own metaphors for duration including references to rhythm, melody, harmony and colour. The latter metaphors are classified as beautiful by virtue of their qualitative character, thus to cultivate the self was to engage in an act of artistic creation. This is what Colomer meant by an ‘action d’art’ – our very lives were considered by him to be works of art. To understand the full complexity of this anarchist notion of artistic immanence, we can begin by examining Stirner’s L’Unique et sa propriété (translated into English as The Ego and its Own).12 THE UNIQUE Stirner’s book is divided into two sections, the first part, ‘Man’, focuses on the ideological means through which individuals are coerced by social forces to deny their own self-interest; the second part, ‘I’, seeks to define ‘owness’, the condition of freedom from such pernicious influences. Throughout the book, Stirner repeatedly defines the self as embodied, as motivated by irrational sensations of physical desire, and as a temporal being undergoing constant change, both physical and psychological. This ‘egoist’ self is described as ‘the unique one’, a particular being unlike any other.13 Thus our ego is a ‘corporeal ego’ and self-realisation can only be achieved when the individual ‘has fallen in love with his corporeal self and takes a pleasure in himself as a living flesh-and-blood person’. Likewise, the unique one’s actions and demeanour should be wholly concerned with ‘a personal and egoistic interest, an interest not only of our spirit, for instance, but of total satisfaction . . . a selfish interest’.14 In the closing paragraph of his



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manifesto, Stirner describes the ego as undergoing a continuous process of willed, creative destruction: ‘I am the owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which he is born . . . If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: All things are nothing to me.’15 Thus Stirner rejects any notion of an ‘absolute ego’ and instead exalts ‘the transitory ego’, ‘the self-dissolving ego, the never-being ego, the – finite ego’.16 FROM PAGAN GODS TO THE GOD OF REASON – A HISTORY OF ABSTRACTION The enemy of this heterogeneous self is any institution or belief system, whether religious or secular, that directs the individual away from their own embodied interests and desires. This process of individual selfdelusion occurs when we swear allegiance to abstract ideas and concepts declared to be eternal truths that transcend the material world. This false consciousness generates a perverse bifurcation between the material world and an otherworldly realm of ‘pure spirit’, indicative, on the human scale, of an imagined separation of mind from body.17 Among ancient civilisations, such abstractions took the form of spectral Gods, soon to be reduced under Christianity to a single ‘God’; but following the rise of Cartesianism in the seventeenth century human faith in an absolute, eternal ‘pure spirit’ metamorphosed into a fetishised veneration of rationalism. ‘Only by the more modern philosophy since Descartes’, writes Stirner, ‘has a serious effort been made to bring Christianity to complete efficacy, by exalting the “scientific consciousness” to be the only true and valid one. Hence it begins with absolute doubt, dubitare, [with] turning away from everything that “mind,” “thought,” does not legitimate . . . Only the rational is, only mind is!’18 Such ‘pure disembodied abstraction’ is declared a ‘genuine Christian principle’ by Stirner, but Cartesianism is deemed even more radical for having been given no figural form in the human imagination.19 This notion of ‘pure spirit’ takes myriad forms: in addition to Cartesianism and concepts of the ‘Sacred’, other such transcendental ‘essences’ include ‘Morality’, the ‘State’, the rule of ‘Law’, ‘Justice’, ‘Essence’, ‘Man’, ‘Humanity’, the ‘Citizen’ and the ‘Fatherland’.20 All are characterised as ‘fixed ideas’, mere words,21 divorced from the temporal flow of our embodied individual existence. He argues that such ideas are invariably deployed by vested interests to encourage us to subordinate our self-interest to those abstract principles outlined

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above.22 ‘God, immortality . . . humanity are drilled into us from childhood as thoughts and feelings which move our inner being more or less strongly . . . ruling us without our knowing it’ – thus they ‘are always not aroused, but imparted, feelings’.23 Morality, for instance, is ‘nothing else than loyalty [to] fulfillment of the law’ and the State judicial system imposes ‘monogamy’ and other restrictions on sexual freedom as ‘a dogma of faith’ with the result that ‘every Prussian carries his gendarme in his breast’.24 The internalisation of such morality precipitates a draining away of the life force: Stirner cites the example of a young girl whose awakening sexuality is rigourously quelled by her Christian conscience;25 but it even undermines our creative self-expression, for to act morally is to respond to ‘habit’, the ‘mores of one’s country’. ‘Innovation’, by contrast, ‘is the deadly enemy of habit, of the old, of permanence’, thus behaviour departing from social norms is to be censored.26 This selfregulation reaches an extreme in the case of the citizen soldier, called to offer his very life in the service of another collective abstraction, that of the ‘Nation’. The ‘egoist’ by contrast is one who ‘instead of living to an idea, that is, a spiritual thing, and sacrificing to it his personal advantage, serves the latter’.27 Stirner also instructs us to ignore concepts of good and evil and related notions of ‘illegality’ as moral categories inhibiting ‘self-ownership’ and the freedom to respond ‘to the full energy of the will’.28 On this basis, the individual should be free, not only to engage in ‘unwedded cohabitation’, but also in a full blown ‘insurrection’ against the State.29 READING BERGSON THROUGH STIRNER Clearly, Stirner’s pronouncements on the ‘unique’, ‘disembodied abstraction’, ‘fixed ideas’ and ‘habit’, as opposed to ‘innovation’ and creativity, had a strong resonance with Bergson’s metaphysics. In the broadest sense, Stirner’s method is not unlike that of Bergson in as much as he engages in an introspective meditation on the nature of our individual being, grounding the self in the temporal flux of sensate experience, and thereby privileging heterogeneity over the homogeneous; embodied consciousness over disembodied abstractions; willed empathy over Cartesian rationality; and temporal change over concepts devoid of temporality. Bergson’s notion of duration – the bedrock of his metaphysics – has all these characteristics. Stirner then identifies modes of thinking that alienate us from ourselves, and it is in this regard that he also anticipates Bergson by critiquing reductive rationalism and related scientific methods for misrepresenting our



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individual being and the world around us by robbing both of their temporality. For Colomer, a creative reading of Stirner’s egoism through the lens of Bergson’s metaphysics proved especially compelling as a justification for anarchist-individualism. To gain insight into that synthesis we can turn to Bergson’s writings on the opposition between intuition and analysis, as well as the role of what Bergson called ‘fixed’ or ‘abstract ideas’ in distorting and obscuring our understanding of our own inner duration. Having begun his Introduction to Metaphysics by distinguishing between ‘two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing’, Bergson concludes that the attainment of absolute knowledge of an object from within can only be achieved by means of ‘an intuition, whilst everything else falls within the province of analysis’. Intuition is a form of willed ‘sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it’; analysis, on the other hand, ‘is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is elements common to it and other objects’.30 Analysis ignores an object’s particularity, what Bergson refers to as its uniqueness – the defining characteristic of duration; furthermore, this comparative method leads to the fabrication of imperfect ‘symbols’ as substitutes for intuitive insight. Methods of analysis are especially insidious by virtue of their denial of duration, whether in the guise of ‘the flow of my own conscious life’ or the inner life of living beings surrounding us.31 Recourse to analysis is ‘the ordinary function of positive science’, since it works exclusively with ‘symbols’ and is used by ‘even the most concrete of natural sciences, those concerned with life’. These natural sciences ‘confine themselves to the visible forms of living beings, their organs and anatomical elements’, and in making ‘comparisons between these forms, they reduce the more complex to the more simple.’32 Creative Evolution considered the role of such thinking with reference to biology, but Bergson’s earlier books specifically focused on human psychology. In Time and Free Will Bergson charted this paradigm with reference to the scientific theory of psycho-physics, which sought to subject our qualitative sensations, including those of colour, to quantitative measurement.33 Matter and Memory in turn critiqued the related theory of ‘associationism’ for parsing the durational flow of memory images into a series of discrete ‘ready-made things, given cut and dry in the course of our mental life’ that are then combined by virtue of a ‘mysterious attraction’ like a ‘psychical atom’.34 In short, analysis and the scientific method it generates translate living duration into symbols devoid of durational properties. Concepts exact a similar process of abstraction, ignoring what is

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particular and unique and instead focusing on ‘abstract, general, or simple ideas’. In the Introduction to Metaphysics Bergson eschews such abstractions by representing duration solely in terms of concrete images such as ‘the unrolling of a coil’ or a ‘myriad tinted spectrum’, claiming that such diverse images, by virtue of the ‘convergence of their action’ in our imagination, may ‘direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized’.35 Concepts by contrast point consciousness away from the willed effort of intuition and towards habitual forms of analysis. When examined closely, a concept ‘retains only the part of the object that is common to it and others, and expresses, still more than the image does, a comparison between the object and others which resemble it’.36 Thus, while ‘abstract ideas can render service to analysis, that is, to scientific study of the object in its relation to other objects’ they are ‘incapable of replacing intuition, that is, the metaphysical investigation of what is essential and unique in the object’.37 Bergson calls on us to ‘invert the habitual direction of  the work of thought’ – that is, our predilection to think in terms of ‘fixed concepts’ – in favour of intuition, in order to develop forms of representation ‘capable of following reality in all its sinuosities and of adopting the very movement of the inward life of things’.38 In Laughter, Bergson traced the genealogy of such habitual thinking to the pragmatic function of our intellect and of language in facilitating our everyday activity. In our ordinary perceptual experience, we do not grasp ‘the individuality of things’ but only ‘the utilitarian side’ which allows us quickly to ‘respond to them by appropriate reactions’. This selective attention facilitates the hasty classification of objects into homogeneous categories and linguistic signs, with the result that we routinely ‘confine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them’.39 In Creative Evolution Bergson would go further, claiming that ‘it is the essence of science to handle signs’, and that, though these signs ‘undoubtedly differ from those of language by their greater precision and higher efficacy; they are none the less tied down in the general condition of the sign, which is to denote a fixed aspect of reality under an arrested form’.40 ANDRÉ COLOMER’S CREATIVE REVOLUTION For Colomer, Bergson’s metaphysics amounted to an apologia for Stirner’s politicised nominalism. What Stirner called ‘the unique’ coincided with what Bergson described as the durational nature of our ‘inmost’ self, our personality in all its particularity. Following Stirner, Colomer endorsed the idea of a self-devouring subjectivity, which he related to Bergson’s critique of the notion of an underlying subject



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as opposed to an enduring subject. Bergson succinctly summarised his thesis as follows: ‘there are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change: change has no need of a support. There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves: movement does not imply a mobile.’41 Colomer also synthesised Stirner’s critique of the cultural function of habit in restricting individual self-expression with Bergson’s condemnation of habit as the enemy of intuition. He then identified intuition as the means by which an egoist could tap into his own inner duration. Intuition enabled the individual to resist the pernicious effects of analysis, and its offspring, fixed abstractions, were condemned by both Bergson and Stirner for denying temporality and particularity. Colomer also followed Bergson in claiming that these abstractions, like science, had a ‘practical role’ with no other purpose ‘than to serve our action’ with regard to our ‘use of matter’.42 Science therefore was ‘a marvelous instrument’ allowing us to grasp the material world to meet our ‘external necessities’, but it was ill suited to grasp individual duration. Drawing on Bergson’s description in Matter and Memory of our body as a centre of action among an aggregate of images,43 Colomer compared our life ‘to a circle whose destiny is represented by the circumference’ so as to reiterate the philosopher’s claim that the intellect was incapable of inverting habitual thinking to grasp the creative freedom that defined our individualism.44 Where Colomer parted ways with Bergson in favour of Stirner was in his singular focus on individual duration and his denial of any notion of a transindividual élan vital, as theorised in Creative Evolution and Bergson’s recent lecture on the ‘Soul and the Body’ delivered in Paris in April 1912 to the Christian Association ‘Foi et Vie’.45 In his first installment in the ‘Bergson to Bonnot’ series, Colomer condemned Bergson’s Catholic followers for interpreting the élan vital as a justification for ‘religious belief’, and identified Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, rather than Creative Evolution, as the principal sources for his ‘heroic individualism’. Having noted Bergson’s critique in Time and Free Will of ‘the English school of Associationism’ that ‘reduced human will to an absolute mechanism’ and subjected our sensations ‘to measurement, to calculus’, Colomer pointedly claimed that, with Bergson, ‘freedom does not exist, as metaphysicians believe, in the possibility of an absolute without any motivation, like a miracle’, but is instead nascent to our corporeal self, ‘perceivable by the individual alone – in a harmonious plenitude flowing from his being’.46 Colomer also differed from Bergson by following Stirner in claiming that science, rationality and fixed absolutes were ideological weapons designed to suppress the unfettered freedom of the egoist. Thus

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Colomer cast science as an oppressive tool in the hands of sociologists and governmental officials who, thanks to Bergson’s critique, could no longer ‘undertake to legislate on our thoughts and our acts’.47 Colomer also intervened in the ‘cultural wars’ over the ideological import of Bergson’s metaphysics.48 Speaking of Bergson’s new-found popularity among Christians and French nationalists, Colomer argued that they distorted Bergson’s philosophy by ‘separating intuition from individualism’ in order to claim that intuition made us one with an élan vital defined in terms of disembodied absolutes. Such abstractions took the form of a God in the eyes of Bergson’s Catholic followers or a patriotic esprit de corps in the minds of ultra-nationalists (he cites Maurice Barrès, and Agathon, author of the nationalist polemic Les Jeunes Gens d’aujourd’hui). By associating intuition with collective ‘values’, such as ‘order, discipline, social solidarity’ and ‘patriotic spirit’, these groups effectively converted that faculty into ‘a sort moral policeman’. One is reminded of Stirner’s dismissal of ‘the fatherland’ and ‘God’ as spurious abstractions, and his related assertion that Christian morality, enshrined in the judicial system, operates as a ‘gendarme’ within the breast of each citizen. Colomer closes his diatribe with a spirited assertion of his rebellious individualism, arguing that one can display forms of ‘courage’ other than those of ‘the soldier’, fight a battle ‘other than that of the citizen’, and possess ‘energy’ other than that of ‘the unanimous heart of the nation’.49 Soldier, citizen, nation – these were all homogenising abstractions antithetical to intuitive insight and creative self-expression. THE SELF AS A WORK OF ART Having marshalled Bergson and Stirner to banish abstractions, Colomer’s next task was to clarify the relation of Bergsonian duration to Stirner’s concept of the unique, and the special status of art and artists within that matrix. Bergson, in describing duration, invariably cast it in terms of musical metaphors, a practice repeated by Colomer. In Time and Free Will Bergson compared duration to ‘the notes of a tune, melting so to speak, into one another’ to constitute ‘a musical phrase’ which is ‘constantly altered in its totality by the addition of some new note’. Our consciousness, therefore, is composed of a multiplicity of ‘qualitative’ sensations whose unity resembles ‘that of a phrase in a melody’.50 In Laughter, Bergson describes the artist as one uniquely able to plumb the depths of duration to grasp ‘our inner life’s unbroken melody’ and with it ‘the individuality of things or of beings’. Artists sought to evoke ‘certain rhythms of life’ through their



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chosen medium, whether it be a ‘rhythmic arrangement of words’ in the case of poets and writers, or an ‘original harmony of forms and colours’ in the visual arts.51 Melodic harmony and rhythmic form were an artist’s means of creating what Bergson later referred to as modes of representation capable ‘of adopting the very movement of the inner life of things’.52 In Matter and Memory Bergson extended his vision of durational rhythm beyond the individual, asserting that ‘it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension and relaxation of different kinds of consciousness’.53 In Creative Evolution he incorporated a theory of human creativity into the equation – a manoeuvre that had special import for Colomer. Bergson argued that the universe was composed of durational activity, animated by a vital impulse manifest in terms of lesser or greater degrees of freedom. Vibratory molecular matter was lowest on the scale of free activity since its actions were almost wholly predetermined and reactive, and as such pure matter is perfectly adapted to scientific analysis. Living organisms, on the other hand, possessed varying degrees of freedom ranging from rooted forms of plant life, to mobile creatures governed by instinct (an unreflective form of activity), to humankind whose actions are not only instinctual and pragmatic (intellectual) but on rare occasions the product of intuition. Intuition, or willed empathy, serves to define artistic expression in Bergson’s narrative, but intuition can also be cultivated through individual effort to address other aspects of human endeavour. Any human activity that is not an expression of this free will, whether the product of coercion or habit, does nothing to forward our own creative trajectory. By contrast, intuition not only allows us to grasp the creative force or élan vital within and without us, it also gives birth to actions that contribute to its ongoing development. Thus, creative expression is synonymous with self-expression and it is the most advanced instance of a life force permeating the cosmos.54 ‘Each personality’, states Bergson, ‘is a creative force; and there is every appearance that the role of each person is to create, just as if a great Artist had produced as his work other artists.’55 While Colomer endorsed Bergson’s description of duration and his exaltation of humanity’s creative capacities, he stopped short of embracing Bergson’s vision of a ‘great Artist’ akin to a cosmic élan vital, preferring instead to circumscribe this vital – and artistic – impulse within the parameters of Stirner’s nominalism. Intuition reportedly enabled the egoist to discover his or her uniqueness, and in so doing revolutionise consciousness by augmenting an individual’s creative capacities. This cultivation of the self amounted to a form of artistic creation, for

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such intuitive self-consciousness gave birth to sensations of intensity, rhythm, harmony and a vitalist joie de vivre. An artistic sensibility, as the most unique and individual of our faculties, is described by Colomer as integral to duration itself and thus able to translate these sensations into forms of self-representation saturated with these same durational qualities. According to Colomer, ‘it is precisely because the sensation of the beautiful is the least fixed, the least rational, the least regulated, the most changeable of human emotions that I choose it as the basis of my philosophy, as the principle of my action.’ Following Stirner, Colomer dismissed moral and ethical criteria for behaviour as abstractions, but unlike the former, aesthetic discernment ‘does not risk creating a Law for humankind, a common Law, an immutable Law; it can only accord with my individual law – that is my harmony, the feeling of accord in my emotions. It is the rhythm of my life, the synthesis of my being.’ The ‘beautiful’, we are told, ‘is the synthesis of the élans of a personality in search of its harmony’ and as such it not only expresses individual ‘freedom’ but the life force itself, an individual’s ‘joie de vivre’.56 A UNION OF EGOISTS Colomer also deployed this Bergsonian paradigm to critique the anarchist-communism of Grave and Kropotkin. In ‘Art, Anarchy and the Christian Soul’ Colomer mocked Grave and his colleagues for making their anarchism synonymous with Christianity. ‘Christianism taught human fraternity, altruism’, wrote Colomer; ‘anarchist-communists today’ reportedly endorsed ‘this humanitarian and altruistic ideal, this belief in a universal concord and in an egalitarian fraternity to which the individual must devote himself’. Colomer dismisses such universals as ‘idols more tyrannical than those of Divinity and Royalty’, for ‘Anarchy must be individual or it does not exist’.57 This stinging rebuke was later expanded by Colomer into a Bergsonian critique of communist notions of collectivity and of the communitarian groups Grave and his colleagues wished to generate. Colomer claimed that anarchist-communists called on individuals to subordinate their egos to an abstract conception, whether in the guise of a utopian vision or the a priori set of moral principles outlined above.58 Their concept of a union premised on communist ideals thus constituted an a priori frame, a set of rigid precepts to which individuals must adapt if they are to gain membership in the group. Such ‘Causes’ or ‘theories’ are ‘only empty frames’ and those who would subordinate themselves to such abstractions are not true anarchists, for they have ‘never fathomed the reason for their anarchism’, namely the cultivation of their ‘personal-



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ity’. ‘Communist colonies’ therefore constitute ‘hybrid ensembles of inharmonious elements’, a random gathering of individuals lacking in empathy and thus predisposed for conflict.59 Form and content – the communist ideal and the individuals who bring about its realisation – are therefore bifurcated in the anarchist-communist imagination. Colomer’s polemic brings to mind Bergson’s critique of the intellect’s propensity to fabricate such empty frames in order to foster our pragmatic activity. ‘The intellectual faculty’, states Bergson, focuses solely on ‘relations’ rather than on ‘things’, and as such ‘possesses naturally only an external and empty knowledge, but it has thereby the advantage of supplying a frame in which an infinity of objects may find room in turn’.60 This radical division of abstract form from material content is something Bergson seeks to overcome by means of intuition, a faculty of willed empathy that enables us not only to grasp inner duration, but to develop pliable forms of representation moulded to this durational content. Thus intuitive knowledge produces representational forms that are integral to the content they wish to represent; as such they are akin to the vital order of living organisms. For Colomer, such vital order has its ideological corollary in Stirner’s ‘union of egoists’, characterised as an anarchist band such as the Bonnot Gang. ‘The band’, in contrast to the ‘empty frame’ governing the anarchist-communist collective, ‘is not a fixed form’, ‘it is not an Entity’ nor ‘a Cause’, for it cannot exist apart from the individuals who make it up. ‘The band has nothing apriori about it. It is formed by the force itself of the individualities who compose it. It can transform itself or dissolve following this same force.’ Rather than ask individuals to suppress their unique personalities in the service of an abstraction, Colomer defines his collective as a hetereogenous grouping that nurtures qualitative difference rather than homogeneity. Instead this ‘community of temperaments’ arises spontaneously by virtue of an ‘intuitive sympathy which draws these individuals towards each other’. What serves to unite them is a sense of ‘harmony’ manifest as friendship and shared enthusiasm which in turn maximises their own self-realisation.61 Thus, discerning one’s own inner harmony can lead naturally to a sense of harmony with others, and aesthetics, rather than morality or an abstract cause, are the basis for this contingent union. Colomer further aestheticised his conception by describing this union of egoists as ‘a community blazing with colours of various hues’, echoing Bergson’s own use of colour as a metaphor for duration.62 To Colomer’s mind, intuition is synonymous with aesthetic discernment, and it is integral to our creative self-fashioning. ‘Intuition is a synthetic force which is personal to us, it is an individual axis of vision

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which forms a particular being, it is an original force of sensation, of emotion, of consciousness’; further, ‘it is only comparable to a musical symphony whose total value, total meaning, resides in the ensemble, independent of each note which composes it’. Thus, ‘art is the child of intuition’, for a work of art ‘is nothing other than the free expression of an individuality that does not recognise any law other than that of its individual harmony’. As an ‘anarchist of art action’, Colomer states that his goal is to ‘reveal to anarchist-individualists that they can discover through art, with their intuition alone, the harmonious unity of their action, their individual well being’.63 Colomer’s theory of art put a premium on ‘joie de vivre’,64 a celebration of sensory embodiment as an emotive register of an intuitive state of mind, while exalting all cultural manifestations of novelty, intensity, rhythm and harmony as fundamentally anarchist by virtue of their durational and life-affirming properties. When Colomer looked to historical precedents for this point of view he lauded Greek poets and writers in the thrall of Dionysus, as well as the Romantics, advocates of Naturism and free love, and proponents of high lyricism in poetry. ‘In Athens’, wrote Colomer, ‘the artists and poets were professors of life, professors of joy. They made Art for Life.’ Contemporary, artists, poets and writers should follow these precedents by exalting ‘this joy of being under the sun, this intoxication of feeling, of thought, of harmonious play in accordance with nature’.65 Others among the Action d’art collective shared Colomer’s views – for instance, in August 1913, Colomer’s colleague René Dessambre gave a lecture on ‘The Pictorial Work of Delacroix’ to a group of French poets knowns as the Paroxystes, whose leader was the Bergsonian and Futurist-oriented poet Nicholas Beauduin.66 Beauduin’s doctrine of paroxysm celebrated the ‘perpetual dynamism’ and ‘creative violence’ of the contemporary age as the vitalist source for his ‘direct lyricism’ – an attractive doctrine for Colomer and his allies.67 In speaking to the group, Dessambre described Delacroix as ‘the great creator of images, of powerful symphonies, orchestrations of tones’ who, through ‘the intensity’ of his ‘visions of life’ was able to convey his ‘joie de vivre’.68 In his own writings on c­ ontemporary art, Colomer praised the most novel artists of his own generation, exemplified to his mind by the free verse praxis of Symbolists such as Stephane Mallarmé; Oscar Wilde, whom the Action d’art collective celebrated for his defence of individualism, amoral aestheticism and sexual freedom; and members of the Futurist movement, most prominently Action d’art contributor Gino Severini.69 Severini drew on Neo-Impressionist technique as the foundation for his aesthetic, but he rejected the psycho-physical underpinnings, moral precepts and anarchist-­communist



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metaphors that informed Signac’s theory of complementary contrasts. Instead, Severini endorsed Bergson’s interpretation of colour as a qualitative metaphor for duration, and utilised Neo-Impressionist technique to express what he referred to as his ‘intuitive’ sensation of the erotic energy of young female dancers who populated the cabarets and dance halls of Montmartre.70 Such hedonism proved compatible with Colomer’s doctrine of Bergsonian joie de vivre, which accounts in part for Severini’s participation in plans to launch a ‘Théâtre d’Action d’art’ by contributing stage sets and costume designs to the project. The Action d’art group described the theatre as ‘a field of action wherein there can be accomplished beautiful gestures, realised harmonies’ in the service of ‘lyrical’ and ‘heroic’ individualism; presumably Severini’s aesthetic sensibility furthered their aims.71 CONCLUSION: ART FOR INSURRECTION’S SAKE In sum, by synthesising Stirner and Bergson, Colomer identified aesthetics as the primary vehicle for his anarchist insurgency. Simultaneously, he utilised Bergson to dismiss the scientific and rational underpinnings of Kropotkin and Grave’s anarchist-communism, and attacked the ethical basis of their doctrine as yet another ‘abstraction’ antithetical to intuitive consciousness. This latter manoeuvre had dire implications for Neo-Impressionists like Signac who based their art theory on the conflation of aesthetics, rationality and morality.72 Moreover, Colomer’s merger of intuitive consciousness with Stirner’s ‘union of egoists’ contradicted Bergson’s own attempt, beginning in 1912, to circumscribe intuition within the parameters of parliamentary democracy. Thus Colomer takes his place alongside fellow anarchists Dora Marsden and Georges Sorel as a radical who precipitated an epismological shift within leftist circles from an advocacy of scientific materialism to a volontarist theory of insurrection, opposed to any conception of the nation state, including Bergson’s own emerging notion of an open and evolving society, governed by democratic precepts.73 NOTES  1. Biographical studies of Kropotkin include George Woodcock, Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990); and Martin Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); on Colomer see Jean Maitron, Dictionnaire biographie du movement ouvrier française, Vol. 23 (Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 1964–1997), pp. 102–4; Chapter 5 of Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics

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and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Richard Sonn, Sex, Violence and the Avant-Garde: Anarchism in Interwar France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 198–204.  2. On the Neo-Impressionists’ debt to Kropotkin and Grave and their use of metaphors drawn from chemical science and cell biology in declaring anarchist-communism integral to their aesthetic technique, see Robyn Roslak, ‘The Politics of Aesthetic Harmony: Neo-Impressionism, Science, and Anarchism’, The Art Bulletin (September 1991), pp. 381–90; and Chapter 1 of Robyn Roslak, Neo-impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-desiècle France: Painting, Politics and Landscape (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2007).  3. See Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 154–5; and Mark Antliff, ‘Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism: The Aestheticism of the Action d’art Group, 1906–1920’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1998), pp. 99–120.  4. On the exploits of the Bonnot Gang and their ties with the anarchistindividualist milieu, see Richard Parry, The Bonnot Gang (London: Rebel Press, 1987).  5. The first article in the series (15 February 1913) had the masthead ‘De Bergson à Bonnot: Aux Sources de l’Héroisme Individualiste’; subsequent articles appeared under the masthead ‘De Bergson au Banditisme: Aux Sources de l’Héroisme Individualiste’ (1 March to 25 December 1913). The articles were titled as follows: ‘M Bergson et les Jeunes Gens d’Aujourd’hui’ (1 March 1913), p. 1; ‘L’Art, l’anarchie, et l’ame Chrétienne’ (15 April 1913), pp. 1–2; ‘La Science et l’Intuition: Leurs rôles dans l’individualisme’ (10 May 1913), p. 3; ‘Ma Liberté c’est ma beauté’ (10 June 1913), p. 1; ‘Illusions sociales et delusions scientist’ (25 August 1913), p. 2; ‘L’Illusions individualisèe’ (10 September 1913), p. 1; ‘Soyons des Hommes Nouveaux’ (25 September 1913), p. 1; ‘Quel est nôtre Héroisme?’ (25 October 1913), p. 1; ‘La Bande’ (10 November 1913), p. 2; and ‘L’Individualiste héroique et l’art quotidienne’ (25 December 1913), p. 1.   6. ‘Librarie d’Action d’art’, in L’Action d’art (25 July 1913), p. 4.  7. Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 142–3; Peter Kropotkin, ‘La Croisade contre la Science de M. Bergson’, Les Temps Nouveaux (15 October 1913), pp. 2–4.  8. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), authorised translation by Arthur Mitchell, 1911 (New York: Henry Holt, 1931), pp. 211–16.   9. Kropotkin, ‘La Croisade contre la Science de M. Bergson’, p. 3. 10. Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), translated by T. E. Hulme, 1911, Introduction by John Mullarkey (New York: PalgraveMacMillan, 2007), pp. 41–2. 11. Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism and Modern Science (London: Freedom Press, 1912), pp. 38–9; 50; 69–70; 92–3. 12. Max Stirner, The Ego and its Own, translation by Steven Byington, 1907



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(London: Rebel Press, 1993). For an analysis of Stirner’s philosophy see John Clark, Max Stirner’s Egoism (London: Freedom Press, 1976). 13. Stirner, The Ego and its Own, pp. 362–6. 14. Ibid., pp. 13, 363. 15. Ibid., p. 366. 16. Ibid., p. 182. 17. Ibid., p. 31. 18. Ibid., p. 85. 19. Ibid., pp. 21, 38, 85. 20. Ibid., pp. 26, 29, 32, 44, 46–8. 21. Ibid., p. 184. 22. Ibid., pp. 43, 61. 23. Ibid., p. 65. 24. Ibid., pp. 46, 52–3. 25. Ibid., p. 62. 26. Ibid., p. 66. 27. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 28. Ibid., pp. 51–5. 29. Ibid., pp. 54–5; 316. 30. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 5. 31. Ibid., p. 10. 32. Ibid., p. 6. 33. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (1889), authorised translation by F. L. Pogson, 1910 (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), pp. 60–72. John Mullarkey has perceptively analysed this aspect of Bergson’s argument in his book Bergson and Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), pp. 22–4. 34. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), authorised translation by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, 1911 (New York: Humanities Press, 1978), pp. 214–15. 35. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 10. 36. Ibid., p. 11. 37. Ibid., p. 12. 38. Ibid., pp. 40–1. 39. Henri Bergson, Laughter (1900), in Wylie Sypher, ed., Comedy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 158–60. 40. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 329. 41. Henri Bergson, ‘The Perception of Change’ (1912), in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 173; on the centrality of this concept to Bergson’s philosophical method, see Garrett Barden, ‘Method in Philosophy’, in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), pp. 32–40. 42. Colomer, ‘La Science et l’Intuition’, p. 3. 43. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 1–69. 44. Colomer, ‘La Science et l’Intuition’, p. 3.

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45. Henri Bergson, ‘The Soul and the Body’ (1912), in Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (New York: Henry Holt, 1920). 46. Colomer, ‘M Bergson et les Jeunes Gens d’Aujourd’hui’, p. 1. 47. Ibid. 48. For an overview of those culture wars, see Antliff, Inventing Bergson; and R. C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988). 49. Colomer, ‘M Bergson et les Jeunes Gens d’Aujourd’hui’, p. 1. 50. Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 100, 106, 111. 51. Bergson, Laughter, pp. 158–62. 52. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 40. 53. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 275. 54. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 6, 23. 55. Henri Bergson, ‘The Problem of Personality’ (1914), in Henri Bergson, Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), p. 1071. 56. Colomer, ‘Ma Liberté c’est ma beauté’, p. 1. 57. Colomer, ‘L’Art, l’anarchie, et l’ame Chrétienne’, pp. 1–2. 58. Colomer, ‘Illusions sociales et delusions scientist’, p. 2. 59. Colomer, ‘La Bande’, p. 2. 60. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 149–50. 61. Colomer, ‘La Bande’, p. 2. 62. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 268–9; Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 9, 37. 63. Colomer, ‘La Science et l’Intuition’, p. 3. 64. See references to the Bergsonian and Stirner-inspired import of ‘joie de vivre’ in Colomer, ‘L’Art, l’anarchie, et l’ame Chrétienne’, pp. 1–2, and ‘L’Illusions individualisèe’, p. 1. For Bergson’s discussion of the qualitative and transformative import of joy, and its relation to aesthetic feeling, see Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 10–15. 65. Colomer, ‘L’Art, l’anarchie, et l’ame Chrétienne’, pp. 1–2. 66. ‘Les Conférences de René Dessambre sur Delacroix’, in L’Action d’art (10 September 1913), p. 4. 67. On Beauduin’s art theory, see Cyrena N. Pondrom, The Road From Paris: French Influence on English Poetry 1900–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 280–1. 68. ‘Les Conférences de René Dessambre sur Delacroix’, p. 4. 69. For an analysis of this aspect of the Action d’art project, see Antliff, ‘Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism’. 70. See my discussion of Severini in Inventing Bergson, pp. 154–5, 164–6; for an analysis of Severini’s dance-hall subjects as they relate to his own selffashioning, see Zoë Marie Jones, ‘A Transnational Bohemia: Dandyism and the Dance in the Futurist Art of Gino Severini, 1906–1914’, PhD Dissertation, Duke University, 2011. 71. André Colomer, ‘Les Poètes joues par les Poètes’, L’Action d’art (25 December 1913), p. 1. On the Action d’art group’s founding of a ‘Théâtre



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d’Action d’art’ in April 1913, and the later involvement of the Futurist painters Severini and Ugo Giannattasio in that project, see Antliff, ‘Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism’, pp. 115–16. 72. Signac claimed that Neo-Impressionist painting possessed a ‘general harmony and a moral harmony’, by virtue of its ‘rational composition’. See Paul Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au neo-impressionisme (1889), ed. Françoise Cachin (Paris: Hermann, 1964), p. 104; cited in Roslak, ‘The Politics of Aesthetic Harmony’, p. 382. 73. See Mark Antliff, ‘Bad Anarchism: Aestheticized Mythmaking and the Legacy of Georges Sorel Among the European Left’, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, No. 2 (2011), pp. 155–87; and Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). Bergson codified his defence of democracy in Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), but his views had their genesis in his writings before and during the First World War. For a succinct overview of Bergson’s correlation of democracy with intuitive consciousness see Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy, pp. 97–103; for an analysis of his early writings on the subject, see Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 104–5.

7. The Matter of the Image: Notes on Practice-Philosophy FELICITY COLMAN

‘Just walk in a straight line’, says the male voice in the opening of the film titled Swamp.1 But the body holding the camera cannot comply with these instructions, and the creation of the art form is left for the camera to determine, frame by frame, as it records the process of the camera-body movement. As the body moves within the landscape of soft golden grassed tracks, a pale blue high skyline and browntopped flax-coloured reed stems are forced out of view and the lineforms created are crossed, barriers to movement that are anything but straight. Perceptual conflict arises from these seemingly benign images. What is it that we are seeing? What are these images? As we explore in this chapter, the processes that created them are controlled actions, productive of images that record and make forms, by the direction of their practice. Swamp is the title of a six-minute colour film with sound, made by American artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in 1970–71. Smithson is the directing voice, and Holt is the camera operator. Filmed on location in reed- and grass-filled land in Bergen County, New Jersey, USA, the film’s resonating energy comes from its movement. Shot on 16mm film, transferred to video, the images have the faded cool-toned appearance of those technological processes. Holt is filming through the wind-up Bolex camera, with Smithson’s voice giving the directions. The images are given a topological history by the performance of the voice of the artist, overlaying the sound images as they emerge, frame by frame. Boots, straps, equipment, and grasses, reed stems, dirt, mud, grind and crunch as jerky footsteps connect camera and place, moving through the reed, directed by the voices of Holt and Smithson. Looking through the Bolex viewfinder, Holt has camera vision.2 The camera vision has an unsteady gait and uneven pace. ‘Just walk in a straight line’, he says. ‘I think I am!’ she emphatically responds. The sound 115

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images connect the practice of this form of processually determined art with the history of recent film work. ‘It’s OK’, says Smithson, ‘you’re on fairly solid ground.’ This is a false claim as the Bergen County swamplands are unstable ground full of industrial waste.3 The direction controls the actions of the camera, restrictive of the form of image creation. What is the process of deciding to ‘walk in a straight line’, as the male voice directs in the opening of Swamp? We can imagine this command in terms of the categories of its era of art production: dematerialised, earth, or conceptual art. But the question that interests me here is not ‘what is the art historical classification of this art?’ nor ‘what is the meaning of this artwork?’ nor ‘how do I feel when viewing this artwork?’ Instead, what this chapter explores is the practice of art making – this is the question of process. In terms of a philosophy of art, this is not so much an issue of production as it is a return to the matter of visualisation. This is a process that involves the construction of the image, as well as the production of visibility. Throughout recorded human registration of the visual and their invention of different visual schematic and creative responses to their worlds, different perceptual models work to create and stabilise forms of reality. Images and the matter of images are given form through social and political contracts that enforce extensive histories. We can separate the components of creativity into categories of form, genre and medium. However these labels still do not account for the processes of practice, which include the artist’s aims, methods, timescales, materials, contextual histories, ideas and research. Holt and Smithson’s work refines the terms of art grammar. The labels of ‘modernist’, ‘conceptual’, ‘earth’, ‘political’, or ‘postmodern’ art do not provide much more than a surface appraisal of the style and form of an art practice, and situate it within a linear disciplinary historiography. When considering practice, philosophical notions such as ‘creativity’, ‘art’, and ‘thought’ are outside of process. These notions describe an image, a concept, an object and a subjective response to materials and things. When describing the creation of forms, the basis of process lies in the materiality of things and their potential for manipulation or refiguring through other technological means, and the laws of matter they are subject to. Nancy Holt’s practice concerns itself with the situation of the human scale of the experience of time and place, rendered through the processes of observation.4 Robert Smithson’s practice is similarly concerned with the practice of perception, but with a greater emphasis on the epistemic conditions of the perception of change of energy forms.5 Smithson explores the manipulation of



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perception and of image forms. He is critical of art theory, history and philosophical positions that, in explaining images and forms, apply notions that are outside of the processes of practice that he and other artists of his generation pursue. Smithson has written a number of pieces that offer a commentary on the ethos of 1960s practice.6 In a typical manifesto-style piece published in Artforum in June 1966, titled ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, he constructs a defence of artists’ work against definitions that do not account for their practice.7 Smithson describes the practice of his close friend Robert Morris in terms of its attention to a negative energy, the entropic state that he and others were investigating. That the 1960s were an era of change in art practices, due as much to shifts in political and social cultures as to changes in industrial and personal use of new technologies, is by now well established, with the reactive aesthetic positions taken by those such as Smithson, Donald Judd, Mary Miss, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin also accounted for.8 But the details of Holt and Smithson’s collaborative practice remain only partially documented. How can we describe this practice more fully? Together, Holt and Smithson started utilising video and film as a medium at the end of the 1960s. Separately and collaboratively, they make art outside the art gallery, placing and making work at various sites and ‘non-sites’, as Smithson refers to them. Their photographic and film-based works highlight some of the key issues of process-based art, and appear to expand on the situation and perception of ‘art forms’ enabled by the ready-made compositional work of earlier years. The critic P. Adams Sitney described American independent avant-garde cinematic interests in terms of a reflexivity, but also in terms of the 1960s interest in ruins and rituals, as seen in the work of film-makers such as Yvonne Rainer (Rainer being Morris’s partner in the 1960s).9 Holt and Smithson were in pursuit of a different type of idea in their investigation of modes of cognitive perception within art practice and different modes of epistemological framing. In another of their video works, East Coast, West Coast, a staged interview sarcastically mocks the entire art world as a fabricated arrogance.10 Holt, playing a New York gallerist, chides Smithson, playing a hippy west coast creative – ‘You don’t even know you’re a system of your own making’ – while he affects a bemused expression. Of course, the opposite is true, and this work acts out some of the sentiments Smithson expresses in his essay ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, which contains further ideas concerning Holt and Smithson’s critique of art gallery politics as part of their intention to create images that render different systems, through processes that perform a devolution of all kinds of historiographies.

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‘Entropy and the New Monuments’ is an essay on the position of many of Smithson’s art peers of the 1960s. The ‘monuments’ are a testimony to the future obsolescence of art forms and images. Early on, Smithson notes: ‘the artists have provided a visible analog for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which extrapolates the range of entropy by telling us energy is more easily lost than obtained, and that in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness.’11 The essay then refers to a number of provocative philosophical positions taken by artists including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Paul Thek, theorists such as Roland Barthes and Marshal McLuhan, writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, and philosophers such as Henri Bergson. Smithson argues that in his peers’ work there is nothing new being created, thus rejecting the modernist sense of progression towards the fulfilment of a retrospectively immanent meaning of a form or image. Describing the nature of his fellow artists’ practices, Smithson uses a citation from Bergson’s Creative Evolution: ‘The history of philosophy is there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the ready-made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity of making to measure.’12 Smithson’s polemic is intended to prove that all things tend towards an entropic state, and that contemporary artworks demonstrate this in their investigation into ‘falseness’, which Smithson argues is ‘inextricably a part of entropy’.13 Placing Bergson’s words at the service of his argument, Smithson notes that pre-figured systems miss the point of artworks that are, as he says, ‘puns on the Bergsonian idea of “creative evolution” with its ideas of “ready made categories” ’.14 In Creative Evolution Bergson argues that it is the progression of differentiation that animates life.15 In defining his position, Smithson’s observations about entropy run counter to Bergson’s notion of evolution’s increasing specialisation of forms, where ‘sameness’ is the entropic future of life. While Smithson’s critique of intellectual categorisation follows a similar line to Bergson’s anti-Platonism, Smithson appears blind (in this essay at least) to the problematic of ‘psychological interpretation’ that Bergson raises.16 We can observe that in terms of a practice – whether the medium is film, language or sculpture – the practitioner’s concept of themselves as a self, or their constituted subjectivity, gives a direction to the forms of specialisation that both Bergson and Smithson seek to highlight, albeit each using different methods. Subjectivity provides the energy that intervenes in and frames the processes of intention – through selection, recognition and naming of methods, for example; whether in terms of ‘progress’ or ‘entropy’, de/composition,



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or in/activity of a form or material. This subject may be what Bergson refers to as the ‘intellectual form of our thought’;17 this is the process of practice itself, the processes that drive humans towards investigation and naming, or to apathy and ignorance of things. Before going further into the description of the role of subjectivity in practice, and its determination of the forms of art, first let us step back, with Bergson, into the very mattering of the image – the composition and decomposition of things, framed as art practice. How are images created? Drawing upon the work of artists and philosophers who describe the cognition of thought, and the notion of mind, provides us with language and concepts with which to articulate the cognitive apprehension of image creation. But can a description of the processes involved be robust? Is there a philosophy of practice that enables thought, once articulated, to re-engage with the duration and rhythm of the actions that coalesce and present as an act; so named as image? How does the image of an art practice come into being? The matter of art is a different consideration to the materials of art. Matter propels determination and value of the content, while materials are the technological platforms that enable forms for matter. Connected, matter and materiality form images that we recognise and classify as objects, and are thus politically directed as objects by the ‘we’ of recognition and animation of matter. When connected to gendered, racial, or other economic identifiers, ‘our’ discussion of practice philosophy moves into forms of political being. In description, a schematisation occurs and becomes a fixed-act, a fixed account of the history of that form. In its description, and in its utility, the image is subject to a process of biopoliticisation and historicising stasis. Bergson defines matter as l’ensemble des images, ‘all the images’.18 Now this definition and Bergson’s subsequent detailing of the image of matter – its selection, recognition, survival and perception – provides us with a plausible and logical argument that we can apply to the creation of moving images. Yet, as we attempt to describe the creative processes of the image, the surfaces and depths of Bergson’s inquiry into forms of creation – the creative singularity of thought – are tested. Bergson’s description of the image in Matter and Memory offers an account of the ways that images are perceived, recognised and remembered. Bergson’s descriptions are able to realise differences of the extensive and intensive; differences of spatial and durational kinds; differences of qualitative and quantitative measures, and differences in virtual and actualised images. The processual nature of the image means that it is always in movement, in a continuum of images, relational to the perceptual body whose needs are generative of other images. This a­ ttention

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to the ­ontology of the image is Bergson’s gift to the philosophy of image. According to Bergson, qualitative accounts of the image must attend to the ways in which matter is augmented by habitual perceptual practices. In keeping with his method of addressing the duality of an issue (looking at both poles of its possible mattering), Bergson diagrammatises the production of qualitative duration. Bergson offers a useful account of the modes of the mattered image, but in providing a schematised, qualitative rendering of the process, his method has limitations in relation to the discussion and development of a philosophy of practice that Smithson identifies. I want to address this point a little further before moving onto Holt and Smithson’s practice, in order to tease out those aspects of a Bergsonian image-matter that are significant for any philosophy concerned with sensory reception. In Matter and Memory, Bergson diagrammatises the terms of image production. All the images are provided with a mapping of forms of thought production. We can describe this as the schema for a philosophy of matter. But the mattered image is not its whole picture, and for a philosophy of practice, Bergson’s diagrams themselves perform an imposition of structure upon the very matter that Bergson himself is at pains to refigure. Bergson’s diagrams map out five forms of mattered images: 1. forms of perception as a closed circuit;19 2. the materialisation of a memory-image;20 3. the illusory nature of co-extensive spatialised consciousness;21 4. bodily-memory;22 and 5. the mental life of the mind affected by matter.23 These diagrams describe Bergson’s philosophy of matter, where the living image is the image that is created through a vectorial image, which Bergson argues is ‘my body’.24 The dualisms that Bergson describes are processes of the thought of matter, but are not necessarily innate to the image. Bergson’s address of the technological platform of image creation limits the capacity of the argument for the mattered image. If we assume a Bergsonian position with regard to the technologically determined topography of the twentieth century, then we find that the images produced in that century take a certain position and provide a certain imagination of the world. This image is contingent upon a subjectivity’s needs: ‘those moments that interest us’, ‘our perceptions give us the plan of our eventual action on things much more than that of things themselves’.25 But is this ever the final image? The image in process, the actioning of matter by the camera, is different from the diagrammatic final cut. Reading through Bergson, we can observe that, when connected, different bodies of matter will respond in different ways, over different durations. The mode of technological platform – or medium (analogue or digital) – will determine the action. Action



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is contingent upon its medium. The making of matter proceeds with predication, such as we can observe with the gendered laws of image production and manipulation, where the coding of ‘woman’, ‘man’ and ‘child’ still demand complicity within the economics of a pornographically driven marketplace. Bergson’s cinematographic consciousness offers an economy of affective intensities for thinking about the forms generated by the perceptual, epistemic and temporal techniques of art practices. In his two-volume study on philosophy of cinema, Gilles Deleuze argues that specific film (and media) forms not only confirm Bergson’s thesis but have also contributed to its evolution, through the cinematographically generated creation of new ‘organic life’ forms which have made a new ‘regime of the image’ and continue to create, mutate and destroy ‘images of thought’.26 All of these points, however, are representative of a mapped out position, whether one of subjectivity, the political, or of a creative form. Bergson’s laws do enable a position of cinematographic vitalism to be read in the images of film. What we can add to this discourse, however, is a critique of Bergson’s addressing of praxis, which is how matter is actioned. The diagrammatic needs to be refigured in order to animate methods of practice. Forms of reality are what emerge through durational figures of perception, offered by moving media such as film, art screenings, and digitised information platforms such as mobile media. While we can say that ‘reality’ is diagrammatised by the technological platform by which it has been mediated, what are the critical processes that are at work manipulating and shaping the direction of the given reality? If by process we mean the crafting of matter, then the modes of that crafting provide some access to the resulting forms. The only way to keep images alive is to place them continually in action with other images. Animating images that belong to other systems of thinking, Holt and Smithson engorge the idea of ‘art’, continuing the work of previous art practitioners who incorporate their vernacular as well as other systems into the form of their mattered images. A paradigmatic shift occurs throughout the 1960s, one in which the notion of discreet systems and materials is stretched and the disciplinary fields of art exploded. The matter of art becomes one of daily actions to be played out. The matter comes before the image, and object. For a film such as Swamp, the sound is the product of actioned matter, and produces a directed ­receptor-orienting affect. This art makes its practice implicit by performing the process of image construction, describing the representation of a mattering of an image, within a durational context. While Bergson’s diagrams account for modes of philosophical

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thought, their use for mapping the creative practices that produce images and variations of forms of images is limited. Against the diagrammatic Bergson, artists test creative processes that are generative of image forms. Most artists are not searching for definitions of thought processes that will describe, step by step, how they arrived at their image; rather, they are concerned purely with image and form. The creation of forms of art follows from an intention, an interface with the medium – which I refer to as the technological platform – and a measure of artistic intuition. Matter is connected to all the images, animating material, producing images. In addition to the Bergsonian vector body, we can add the technological body, the machinic body. The vectorising body, for example the camera-body, provides a registration within a vectorial field of a temporal action. For the image, this may be the point of connection with other images, creating a virtual image, an invisible yet palpable image. Bergson’s diagrams embody a philosophical turn away from the ‘false’ Platonisms performed by philosophical allusions to representation.27 Diagrams offer a modality for the expression of the duration and performance of a mode of subjectivity.28 For example, Simon O’Sullivan’s engagement with the Bergsonian diagram of bodily memory performs a mattering of a body in process, rendering the strictures of the matter of subjectivity within what Bergson describes as ‘the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back . . . [this is] the seat . . . of the sensori-motor phenomena’.29 However, one of the problems of the critical energy of Bergson’s diagrams, and of his metaphors of techno-facilitation that express the multiple dimensions of temporality, are the restrictions and limitations placed upon the concept in question, as O’Sullivan suggests. In rendering qualitative points of matter as diagrammatic images, mapped onto what can be understood as a mathematical vectorial field, the diagram, like languages of all kinds, produces an already determined, quantitative plane. In other words, in mapping the effects and the affects of the action of matter, the diagram performs a construction of another symbolic plane, one that may or may not be adequate for the practices it seeks to describe. Paul Harris reflects that the problem with Bergson’s quest for articulation of a dynamic notion through a static language is a general problem, but one that especially poses difficulties for Bergson’s work on duration where, in his expression of concepts and in order to situate duration, he must ‘transpose a virtual concept into an actualised symbolic entity’.30 While the contained sensorial matter has an opening towards the infinitely expanding upward facing cone it rests upon a point of a determined subjectivity. However, Bergson does address this



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problem. While his concern is the development of life from matter, his attention to the perceptual structuring of that matter provides a way to critique the political forms that ‘we’ describe in the affects and intensities resonating from the mattered image. The error of the diagram is precisely its singularity, its requirement of subjective intentionality for devising and interpretation, and its capacity to corral the infinite of matter into its enclosures. The diagram can demonstrate a range of paradigmatic notions, making sense and making nonsense of planes of knowledge. The implications of matter, and of all images in terms of their utility (technological, biological, political) are shaped by the aesthetic forms that position and/or realise them – by whatever sensorially recognisable mode (aural, ocular, carnal, mental, olfactory, psychological). With Bergson, we may test out the visual – for example, the art form or the filmic image – where matter is indeed shaped and given form by our creative design and politically designated desires. The diagram can assist in the articulation and representation of the after-affects of actions, but in its stasis it will map out these moments of the now and the infinitely possible as unique events. Bergson’s own philosophical method and contribution to the language of analysis is not in question here. As Deleuze, Grosz, Guerlac, Lawlor, Lefebvre and White, Mullarkey, Olkowski, Worms and others have argued, Bergson’s philosophy has a relevance and usefulness as an account of and stimulus to the thought of some of the core issues for life, such as speculation on death, accounts of experiences of duration, matter, and change – as articulated within philosophy.31 ‘Diagrammatic Bergson’ connects his philosophy in a transversal move across to the practice of ‘creative Bergson’. The two need to be approached with a regard to the modernist and gendered philosophies of Bergson’s contextual milieu, where the evolutionary recourse to paradigms of ‘nature’ is overtaken by the paradigms of technology, as later addressed in Heidegger’s ‘question’.32 Bergson turns the image from a stable entity into a fluid form, arguing that the real consists of transitional forms.33 It is the transition into a progressive form that Smithson argues against in his practice, where the determination of a form cannot be stable, and where one must begin to examine closely the surface illusions produced by the apparatus of practice (writing, filming, walking, talking), before any notions about what the form is can be ascribed. Conversely, Bergson’s model of cinematographic evolution is generated in an era deeply entrenched in the modernist philosophical positions that were excited by technological changes. Both Smithson and Bergson apply masculinist positions to their appreciation of forms, as befitting their respective eras of patriarchal power bases.34

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In the decomposition and recomposition of systems, the matter of the self is also collapsed and altered. If we take the matter of actioned ‘subjectivity’, for example, we see that it is given and expressed in recognisable forms and images, and through exchanges that recollect previous encounters. In collaborative works such as those of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson or Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer, practice proceeds through various means, testing out each plane of interface, with the materials, the modes and the research driving the work. It would be naive to imagine that an equilibrium and equity of working method could ever be achieved, or would be desirable, as processes of creation arrive in relation to the virtual body of work. This is work not yet and perhaps never realised in form, but in thought it holds an aim: an intention to create, test and find is what binds as a potential form. By collaboration, we refer to the practice of the interactivities of the living, the dead and the spectral, as well as the non-organic and organic. Collaboration over a concept proceeds in ways that are not always mappable, unless the intention has a commercial goal and seeks some resolution of its image and form. If we describe creativity not as a continuum of change through reactive transformation (which lends itself to a practice of re-creation of forms), but as a mode of ‘creative evolution’, as Bergson proposes, then Smithson’s critique of the art world is correct. The desire that creativity produces is directed by the psychological or subjective intentionality as made by capitalism. This creativity is just another product of practices of desire. Although the subjective self or ego may be a contributing factor, a practice, whether it aims to produce a philosophy or an artwork, must operate before and in conjunction with the modes of the capital market. Desire for image creation involves a different practice than one in pursuit of the creation of a commercial subjectivity (although the two often connect). However, rendered as diagrammatic, desire can only ever be a clichéd practice. Discussion of practice involves thalamic, cognitive and corporal activity. Naming and classifying creative practice involves other issues, concerning technology, constructed subjectivity, and the commercial intention of the practitioner. Within every practice the production of an affective and immanent plane of intensity, expressed in form, is possible. In investigating and testing an idea through a specific technological platform, each discipline must first move through its process of testing and creation. Making forms, making sounds, making words. Making new grammars of creation, the artist moves towards what we recognise as an aesthetic realisation of the idea through its platform. Across all the different techniques



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of creating and thinking about ideas, materials, or modalities, from the most amateur and unskilled to the most technically precise, forms of differentiation occur. But what may begin as a confrontational or reactionary practice, whether in art or in philosophy, can only be realised as aesthetically accommodating for the audience that recognises the differentiation of knowledge forms and abstractions of ontology; this much has twentieth-century art history and philosophical practice taught us. Holt situates the significance of Swamp in the process of making the film rather than in the final piece.35 This work is never complete, as its process of making is on a continuum with its image as an organisation of perception. In this sense of the intention of the artist then, Deleuze’s post-Bergsonian perception-image as a need prescribed image, does not hold up.36 In Bergson’s terms, duration is a cinematographic illusion, consisting of ‘those moments that interest us’.37 We do not see only what we need to see in the images of Swamp, because the framing forces us to see only what the artist is seeing. This forced vision is what intrigues us about the art image, just as the philosophical concept presents a strange or different interest. What we cannot envisage is the complete sensorial-image that the camera-body is experiencing as it films. The camera frame is pushed forward into the reeds and closes out the skyline to a close-up inside the world of the thick clumps of tall flaxcoloured reeds. The camera goes into the smooth net of stalks against their black earth background. Inside the reed beds, orientation is given by the sounds of the body-camera. ‘So much of it is out of focus’, says Holt; to which Smithson replies, ‘Well, just keep going in. Don’t worry about the focus.’ The intention of Swamp – its artistry we might say – seems obvious: questioning perception, the woman with the movie camera, the disused landscape, the limitations of perception. None of these ideas are novel, and the emphasis on the falseness of the idea of anything new is one of the cornerstones of Smithson’s practice philosophy. In terms of the history of art, Swamp has not made it to the canonical grade. It is seldom discussed. It is a film that stands as a screen test for the films to come in each artist’s oeuvres. It is a film of process evaluation, of images of entropic forms and, as such, it provides good scope for testing out the applicability of Bergson’s philosophy of creative process as a component of cinematographic evolution. What was it that the artist intended? What is the subject of this artwork? No one exactly knows, not even the artist. They might have in mind an idea of what they are doing, but the action involved in the production of movements that lead to the formation of matter into recognisable forms and images is never absolutely achieved. Why this

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form and not that? If we want to try and quantify movement, then we should acknowledge what measurement systems are being used. Creation is different from intention. The determination of creativity is a fraught measurement. The factors of artistry, commerce and strategy combine for different modes of creation. Does this artwork come about through inspiration, intuition or economics? For viewers versed in twenty-first-century mobile digital imagery, the images styled in this film are not unfamiliar. But Swamp is not a random or accidental few moments recorded while walking. Its sound images are the result of the artists’ use of their technology of choice, and they are a deliberate analogue recording in a chosen location. Usually exhibited in an art gallery, although viewable online, the viewer must be patient, watch, and wait for the film work to play out. Holt has made a number of films on the site, a place that she has been visiting since childhood, sometimes daily.38 She does not say much about the images, only ever empirically describing her interest in the ‘psychology of the place’.39 But this is leading us to a cognitive definition of the philosophy of art process. Let us return to the resonance of the image in order to explore its practice process from another position. We learn more about the place of Swamp from Holt’s images and Smithson’s directions than from her words. It is inadequate to describe this film as a ‘creative’ practice. What counts as creativity can only ever be subjective. Instead, let us focus on the technology and the epistemological practices at play here. In pushing the camera-body, the artist is marking out a limit. This limit is recognisable; fed by its own rhetoric. This is the epistemological mode of disciplinary work. This type of practice is undeniably deterministic. Each practice is fed by the variation enabled by the body of the creative platform – the organic and the machinic, and the connected bodies that draw on all available resources. Yet, there are processes within the practice that we can single out for being generative of what we recognise as processual elements that combine to form the mattered images. These include: 1. A component process and its repetition. A repeated phrasing/ framing of matter (whether image, sound, word, colour) will build, through its edited rhythm, a form that has its own durational life, and its own shape. The rhythm of repetition will determine the peaks and troughs; the edges; the length. The sound-imaged repetition may continue to overlay other images, as carried forth in other image-bodies. 2. The shape. It will often not take the shape of a cone. It is inevitably



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bound to an entropic process of decay which will dissolve its initial form. 3. Other image-bodies. These generate images; the camera, and organic bodies. The first, the camera, presents a machinic-image, no less attentive than the organic body. Definitions of images in terms of paradigms of aggregated meanings rely upon other authorisations, or normative values that are external to the matter of the image. Art in the hands of Holt and Smithson undergoes a cinematographic devolution of the processual kind that involves a formation and deformation of things. In pursuit of an abstraction of a physical site, and looking to dissolve material elements that have just determined elements of the ‘sight’ perception of a site, the subject of their work remains, as one can say of Bergson, themselves. However, as objects, their artworks activate interventions into physical forms, carving out, so that it might be seen, a practice of cinematographic technique. Their work situates the material conditions of a place through a little bit of its physical, geomorphic history. While we can describe Holt and Smithson’s dialogical films as heterotopic models that demonstrate typical 1960s art and film-making praxes, what a Bergsonian perspective on this work as a mattered image offers is the sight of another history of twentieth-century art practice. Art is like comedy. It is a rearrangement of an ordering of a life that can override, be subsumed, and/or change life by its paradigmatic creation. The fact that certain artworks are collected, highlighted, distributed and valued over others, means that our perception has already been trained, narrowed and refined to appreciate those images and forms and ideas within our purview. When we decide to respond to this rearrangement with thought, then another practice emerges. Response is not always about thinking. We might call our purview bias our ‘aesthetic’, but the categories of aesthetics are entirely secondary to the work. We might call our response a philosophy, and give it labels. Labelled practice is indicative of certain modes of analysis that fit with other paradigms: modernism, phenomenology, post-feminism. The philosopher, the writer, the musician and the artist each draw from and attempt to create a repertoire of their practice. Our purview is a politicised attention to life that pushes the definition of practices concerned with art forms and art ideas. Attention to those practices of art and those practices of philosophy of art that are pushing the paradigms provide examples of where the standard definitions of change are inadequate for the process. Whether or not some one or other thing

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is modernist or postmodernist tells us little other than the standard practice definitions. To consider any practice necessarily involves a consideration of process. This is the technics of practice, the idea enlivened by the technology of whichever medium platform it uses. Ka-Pow! Collision of a notion and a technique = form. The art is in the process. We describe the end product, sometimes the finished work, in other terms, using iconography, imagery, visual and or audio descriptors. But the practice of art is located in the duration and mode of the action. Art is in the execution of different types of movement. Philosophies of art have their own practice. Like the artist, the writer may arrange their processes of practice to be visible; in lingering, they may form the base of their text. The performance of practice engages other modes of practice that feed further process. If I speak these words and find no response, does that mean that my process is too opaque a rearrangement, or too implausible as a work in process? The error of Philosophy is to remain fixed upon a solution to the problematic. A major work is different to the processual work, but the differences need to be noted. A processual work is one that names its practice and performs a certain generosity in its detailing of its processes. Philosophy is obsessed, like artistry, with perceptual modes. The questions of ‘I know; I think; I am’ of one generational practice are replaced with the ‘How do I think? How do I see? How do I know?’ of another. In the twentieth century, militarist events and rapid shifts in technologies of differentiation have led to a devolutionary position, and in that redirection, in its details, we can find no utopian solution to problems of perceptual bias, other than through an attention to the processes of life, which is itself a political activity. How does this work? We can characterise some of the modes of creation offered by the artist – in this case, in the form of a short film titled Swamp. The only way to keep matter alive is to continually place it in action with other matter. NOTES   1. Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Swamp, 16mm, 6 mins (1971), available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYPWcdty7DE and http:// www.robertsmithson.com/films/txt/swamp.html (accessed 28 March 2013).   2. Holt uses a Bolex H-16 M-5 16mm Camera (made in 1967) with a macro lens that uses 100-foot rolls of film, which give two-and-a-half-minutes of film time.  3. Robert Sullivan, The Meadowlands (1998) (New York: Anchor, 1999), pp. 13–20.



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  4. Nancy Holt, ‘Selected Artist’s Writings’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, Alena J. Williams, Curator, Berkeley (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 83–4.  5. Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 10–23. See, for example, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), available at http://www. robertsmithson.com/films/txt/spiral.html (accessed 28 March 2013).  6. Smithson, The Collected Writings.   7. Ibid., pp. 10–23.   8. See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, Vol. 8 (1979), pp. 30–44.   9. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000 [1974] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 30, 415. 10. East Coast, West Coast, dir. Holt and Smithson; dop. Peter Campus (1969), available at Video Data Bank, Chicago, http://www.vdb.org/titles/ east-coast-west-coast (accessed 28 March 2013). 11. Smithson, The Collected Writings, p. 10. 12. Ibid., p. 19; Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (Mineola: Dover 1989), p. 48. 13. Smithson, The Collected Writings, p. 18; on entropy and Smithson see Felicity Colman, ‘Affective Entropy: Art as Differential Form’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2006), pp. 169–78. 14. Smithson, The Collected Writings, p. 19. 15. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 51. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 49. 18. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 22, translation modified. 19. Ibid., p. 105. 20. Ibid., p. 132. 21. Ibid., p. 143. 22. Ibid., p. 152. 23. Ibid., p. 162. 24. Ibid., p. 20 (original emphasis); see Henri Bergson, Oeuvres, Edition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), p. 172. 25. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 188. 26. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 27. Len Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 45. 28. See Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).

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29. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 152; Simon O’Sullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012). 30. Paul Harris, ‘Diagramming Duration: Bergsonian Multiplicity and Chaos Theory’, Intermédialités: histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques, No. 3 (2004), pp. 97–117: p. 98. 31. See Deleuze, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2; Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism; Alexandre Lefebvre and Melanie White, eds, Bergson, Politics, and Religion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999); Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Frédéric Worms, ‘Is Life the Double Source of Ethics? Bergson’s Ethical Philosophy between Immanence and Transcendence’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2004), pp. 82–8. 32. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977). 33. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 302. 34. See Nell Tenhaaf, ‘Of Monitors and Men and Other Unsolved Feminist Mysteries: Video Technology and the Feminine’ (1992), in Hilary Robinson, ed., Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968–2000 (Malden, Oxford, Melbourne: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), pp. 377–87. 35. See Nancy Holt, ‘Nancy Holt introduces Swamp at EAI on Wednesday, November 15, 2006’, at Electronic Arts Intermix (2006), 535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor New York, available at http://www.eai.org/titleVideo​ Intro.htm?id=11675 (accessed 29 April 2013). 36. See Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 71. 37. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 288. 38. See Holt, ‘Selected Artist’s Writings’, p. 248. 39. Ibid., p. 251.

8. Pasearse: Duration and the Act of Photographing STELLA BARAKLIANOU

The logic of expression seems to be one of duplication. Spinoza is too careful a grammarian to allow us to miss the linguistic origins of ‘expression.’ Attributes are, as we have seen, names: verbs, rather than adjectives. Each attribute is a verb, a primary infinitive proposition, an expression with a distinct sense; but all attributes designate substance as one and the same thing. The traditional distinction between the sense expressed and the object designated (and expressing itself in this sense) thus finds in Spinozism direct application.1

Pasearse is a self-reflexive verb that could be translated as to ‘take oneself for a walk’. Walking as an artistic and intellectual practice has had a substantial trajectory within the history of painting and photography: from the early artists of the picturesque movement to the more contemporary ones, including the urban walks of the Situationists’ or those of the Land Art movement. For artists such as Richard Long and Robert Smithson, walking is central to the development of tactics, methods and practices that are confronted with the complexity of physical as well as mental activity. A verb lies at the heart of this; a practice made of walking. Even a line can go for a walk, as Paul Klee demonstrated, interlocking the semantic notions of active, medial and passive.2 The photograph as a form of artistic expression contains not only the imprint or index of a recorded reality, but reflects the process of obtaining this image. This process, linked to time, is what makes the photograph unique compared to painting or sculpture, but not dissimilar to film. Whilst working on a series of images of trees in the landscape, I became interested in exploring the notion of photographic time as a quality beyond a dichotomy of before or after but rather as a reflexive state whereby landscape, photographer and camera all form and inform the very act of photographing. With the common denominator being 131

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defined through walking, the emphasis is placed on the fluid and instantaneous, the porous and limitless. Borrowing from philosophy but also from film and photography theory, the aim is to describe the act from the creative and practical stance. Whilst the disjunction between the photograph as object to be viewed and the photographer as subject remains, there appears to be a moment wherein the field of subjectivity between who operates what, becomes, for a short instant, ambiguous. In this short interval, when taking the image, the shutter release acts as a break from within the apparatus. Agamben’s notion of immanence, through his reading of Deleuze, is important in that it allows for an understanding of immanence as potentiality. The notion of the photographic act is a singular act of recording an image, framing a perspective from a multitude of possibilities. By situating this act in a state of transference, through a state of walking, the various coordinates of physical movement, potential framings, and the activity of the camera shutter or the technical intervention are all open to the field of immanence. The border demarcated between decision making and creative idea are subject to the transference of bodily movements towards the camera that will then capture or store this image. Following the trajectory in Deleuze’s Immanence: A Life . . . Agamben articulates immanence beyond the transcendental or the idea of transcendental subjectivity. As a movement of the infinite the photographic act can also be articulated further within the trajectory of phenomenology and that of the transcendental field.3 To show oneself as walking: in the archaic Ladino dialect of the Spanish Sephardi Jews, to ‘stroll’ or to ‘take a walk’, is expressed by the verb pasearse. With no literal translation readily available even in modern day Spanish (an equivalent would be pasear or dar un paseo), the term presents an action in which agent and patient are inextricably linked. The importance of this verb survived thanks to a passage in Spinoza’s Opera Posthuma.4 Returning to his mother tongue of the expelled Sephardi Jews, Spinoza establishes the use of the transitive-intransitive verb. In tracing the Jewish etymological roots of Spinoza’s term, Agamben is interested in establishing the Judeo-Christian tradition above the Greek logos. As such, the Judeo-Christian word speaks of a life in a state of suspension, which cannot literally be attributed to any subject alone. The associations of photography, particularly as an artistic practice, with phenomenology and the field of the transcendental have been addressed not only in photography but also film theory. Situating the act of photographing from the practitioners’ perspective is about



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exploring bodily perceptions alongside the mechanical or ontological displacement operated by the shutter release of the camera. In the series I used instant (polaroid) film and digital still images to produce separate images of trees and explore the notion of time in the photograph. The paradoxical nature of the photograph lies in a unique instant-moment of capturing time. Throughout Camera Lucida Roland Barthes demonstrates his fascination with the paradoxical time of the noeme, or of the ‘that-has-been’, through a deeply personal (especially in part two) and evocative account.5 Time is understood as that a-syntagmatic structure whereby past and present coexist in a future anterior. The ‘existential link’6 between material reality or the index (one that corresponds point by point to nature) and the issue of uncertainty with regards to situating this reality in time, or any time for that matter, is what calls for the use of the future anterior. The photograph slips away from the field of language and signification to one of phenomenology. Laura Mulvey further elaborates by assimilating this imperfect tense of time with the function of the shutter release: it separates the continuity assumed between the subjects’ existence and that of the image. ‘Just as the photograph’s relation to time goes beyond equivalence in the grammar of tense, so the autonomy of the camera eye goes beyond the grammar of person. The human factor is displaced.’7 Instead of asking of something, of the photograph, what it is, in terms of subject-matter or representation, the question is placed on the grounds of a relational process: through what does one thing belong to something else? For Agamben, it is essentially through this question of via (dia ti) that Deleuze’s notion of immanence can be understood. Central to the Stoics’ definition of immanence and substance was the image of walking: ‘who walks, the body moved by the hegemonic part of the soul or the hegemonic part itself?’8 So the resemblance, rather than correspond, point by point, to nature (index) can also operate as a site of transference, as an inter-moment, lacking hierarchy yet contaminated from the inside by all signs that should point to or represent real life.9 The self-reflexive active verb allows for an understanding of temporality where immanence and being collide. The scene that is given back to the photographer through the apparatus allows her an understanding of what could potentially become an image from a myriad possibility of other images. The question of duration becomes an actualisation of the image associated from within her body’s perceptions and enveloped through her actions in movement. Because the camera in itself, as a device, is already equipped with the technical ability of capturing time,

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the photographic act as a conscious decision becomes subject to the conditions of the apparatus itself. This temporality constitutes the event of the photographic act as a time that allows one-self to ‘view viewing’.10 The time from within (technical or mechanical, non-human time) of the camera conditions the flow or stop of images in a multitude of potentialities. The conscious decisions of the photographer are at the same time subject to the conditions of the mechanical recordings of the device. Opening up the field of immanence and inserting the photographic act allows for a bypassing of the linear understanding of a time of before or after, corresponding to the recorded event. Rather, it is the now, a constant present tense, that is open to potentiality. PHOTOGRAPHING Now it is early morning. I am in an olive grove, surrounded by trees. The sun sends its rays clear and strong tracing the landscape in front of me in rhythmic patterns. The delicate green-grey leaves of the tree withhold and refract light. Light and shade; light as it dances into the green of the plant; shade as the veins of the leaves on a close-up go darker and the green thickens. Light contracted in the shade, with-held in the nests of the branches; light stretching and reaching even through the tiniest leaf, seeking to burst onto the other side, dancing in unorthodox reflected patterns. In some places already it is so strikingly bright, almost completely white. ‘To photograph is to affect.’11 The words pierce me like rays of light pierce photographic film. What if I want to open up the moment, this one and unique photographic instant that envelops the very act of affection. Now. Keep moving. In order to perform this act, of photographing, a creative force, a power imbued with desire (puissance) drives me. It is in and through this movement that the creative force remains open and re-defines itself, just as I constantly redefine my walk. Viewpoints and angles are shifting, through internal and external rhythms. There is no fixed or vantage point, only the desire to photograph. Within this act the camera extends my physical action and inserts itself into the folds of vertigo and immanence. The activity of the camera shutter becomes at one and the same instant a passive recording that is constituted through exposure of the film to light. Passive and active coincide within the darkened space of the camera, yet the act of photographing is not over; it has only started. More light, less light. I grew impatient with my own medium. To photograph was not enough. This feeling grew and grew until it



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reached the tips of the hands and led them to perform this act. The destructive part of cutting and tearing through the film becomes a set of another potentiality; the two sides of the film are further exposed to the surrounding environment. The photographic body begins its own existence, cuts away from me. Separated, entering the realm of impersonal, it has the potential of bearing resemblance to a reality. In the field where time and light are composed and re-composed, the photograph has no identity; it only resembles. The photographic frame in its active-reflexive state allows this: hovering in a state of transference passive and active forces take place at the same time. It contains the ability to perform both the act of pointing back to the subjectivity of the photographer whilst taking up a true form of resemblance from reality or the world. Spinoza had written extensively on both the active-reflexive verbs and passive-active verbs in his Hebrew Grammar (Compendium grammatices linguae hebraeae): ‘We express what an object experiences from oneself (Hithpael).’12 With his use of the reflexive-active verb, such as pasearse, Spinoza constitutes the immanence of being as the infinite movement of potentiality and actuality as they coincide. The action of walking, as a ‘walking of one-self’ enters a zone of vertigo or immanence, where subject and object, transitive and intransitive, lose meaning.13 Immanence. Again. I read immanence. But what is immanence? Is there a possibility that there is another space, and how do we articulate that? What is the role of the trees in all of this? In this movement or action of the self, that is immanent only from within, it is impossible to designate the subject (self or individual being) against the object. In a movement that implies continuous variations, the self is affected and driven by a force of existence to enter into a relationship with the object.14 In this relationship potentiality and actuality enter a zone of indistinctness, not, however, becoming inoperative but allowing for the state of transference to emerge. What an object experiences from oneself allows for the paradoxical nature of the photographic frame: in its temporality, it allows for time to be experienced in itself and further, to be expressed as such. In this sense, the temporality of the photograph does not claim to be autonomous, but opens itself to the potentiality of showing time explicating, forming correlates to a life, albeit a life suspended. Life and being in Spinoza’s work come together as the eternal movement of mind and body as they coincide. There is no hierarchy in the causality between mind and body, between the actions (affectsemotions) and the passions leading to affection. For ‘the body cannot

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­ etermine the mind to thinking, and the mind cannot determine the d body to motion, to rest, or to anything else (if there is anything else)’ (Ethics III, P2).15 It is exactly this taking up of a movement or action at the same time that inserts the self into nature, rather than constituting it as an external subject. The fissure of transference occurs as a reflexiveactive temporality inserted between living and doing: the moment, when the body and mind are affected, becoming, resembling nature. ‘Nothing happens in Nature which can be attributed to any defect in it, for Nature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere one and the same . . . So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, namely, through the universal laws and rules of Nature.’16 And the biggest surprise is that ‘no one yet has determined what the body can do’.17 Spinoza’s ethology of the body does not privilege the idea of a certain body over others: what is created is the relational state of bodies as they encounter other bodies. A body can be a tree, it can be a living organism, it can again, in its relational state, be a mind or an idea and, of course, a photograph. The ‘unknown of the body’18 further points to an unconscious of the body in the sense that we know what happens to it only through its perceptions and affections. This experience, however, is not a privilege of the intellect alone. There are parts of the body and mind that intermingle, come into existence and turn towards other bodies, and this is a relational movement. For Spinoza, it is nature that points to the cause of mutual immanence. ‘The cause remains in itself in order to produce.’19 Experience of the landscape is immanent to itself, and not to an individualised subject. The act of photographing remains immanent to itself and this is a movement made of light and time. Photographing is the being with, being through and within that I am after. Out in the open, then. As Michel Serres says, ‘I am no longer talking about myths or about rites . . . they are all about light, about opening, about explication and getting-out-in-the-open.’20 Out, in the open, then, to let light speak. FOLDING LIGHT AND TIME Infinite light. The movement of light held in my hands. Light is an impalpable set of relations: wavelengths of light, an incessant multiplicity of bonds, to which folding and expanding are one and the same thing.21 A photographer works in the dark; but her works belong to the nature of light. Time folded and unfolded; time and time again. Where do I situate myself in the picture? I want to throw myself into the present moment and linger in it through the reds, yellows and browns.



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More light; less light. One has to know when to stop. I control the light. I am in charge of the moment. I take the image and alter it at will. Yet the image runs back to me; breaking away, it slides, tosses, crumbles, reacts, breathes air and absorbs light. To photograph is an event presenting itself from within the body (via the body’s perceptions and affects) and in which one does not know, strange as it is hovering somewhere between movement and stillness, if the event is going to happen.22 Thus, what I look for is not the separation of being in this participatory process, because from the maker’s point of view, taking and making the image are at one and the same time inseparably linked. Therefore, photographing ascribes the particulars of the chance encounter, framing the one possibility amongst others. The impact of an event lies in how it emerges; trapped in its suspended state, the photograph may correlate point by point to the tree it represents, but it doesn’t stop the tree from appearing in different states. Immanence; not as something completely new that emerges, but rather as a state of transference that demarcates the boundaries between frame and potentiality. Now it is late afternoon. The sun still shines brightly, but is starting its descent slowly into the horizon, as if to remind me that it wants to linger on throughout an August day. The shadows are very long, the branches of trees stretch out like fingers of a hand loaded with numerous jewellery. Underneath my feet the earth feels soft but dry and dusty. The small road is a hastily laid out dual carriageway, dug out from the earth between the fields. The smell of sea-salt still follows me and this makes me aware that I am now coming away from the sea and heading for the plain. I stop at a peach tree beside the road to rub away the mosquitoes that are finding their way onto my skin, despite the salt and dust. All around me are vineyards and small olive groves. But I am headed for the one that is further up the slope, a little further off from the main road. The cicadas have gone to sleep now, no more loud noises. I am making the walk swiftly. Up the slope, now following the path, I turn into the grove. Now a bird flutters past – I disturbed it when I leant on the peach tree. Looking up, the horizon has not cleared. It has been a fairly hot day. My gaze suddenly points down, I see my feet, now quite dirty. The grove is open without any fencing or means of enclosure from the main road. The soil of the grove is well looked after. The farmer is careful to cultivate it so that no weeds or parasites grow around the olive trees. I duck to avoid the branches. Olive trees don’t grow much higher than a little above eight metres. A number of small leaves brush my arm; I

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can feel their smooth side but their rough side tickles me. I reach out and absent-mindedly tear out a couple of these deep green-grey leaves to have in my hand. Now, having passed the first trees in the carefully aligned rows, I am in the grove and I see in front of me, slanted in the slope, all the rows forming vertical and horizontal lines. Apart from the rustle of the leaves, and some far away mixed noises, nothing. I find a space under one of the trees; I kneel down to scratch the skin previously attacked by the mosquitoes. Slight ruffle of the trees in the summer breeze. I look upwards through the branches. The leaves come together and part again in a condensed moment that only a photograph would be able to capture through its distinct successions. One layer, over the other, and another one again, keep going until it forms a solid image. A movement implies jumps from one place to the other; movement implies traversing a known space; what about traversing the places in the mind where memories meet, come together as a whole and then part again, anticipating the metaphorical play in the movement of the leaves? I can be just as lost in this perfectly aligned grove of olive trees, as I can be safe in the winding paths of my thoughts. What is the condition for the beginning of the work of art? Can I shape the creative act? Is it a matter of simple elements that combine or is it a complex chain of chemical reactions that release the desire? The single instant of a present opening up and folding back on itself was born out of a practice (or exercise) during the act of photographing and walking amongst these olive trees. AFFECT – AFFECTION As Deleuze notes, the terms ‘affectio’ and ‘affectus’ have posed significant difficulty in readings of Spinoza’s Ethics, partly because they seem to have both been translated as ‘affection’.23 This is a crucial distinction; as Deleuze points out – when a philosopher employs two different words he has reason to do so. It is even more important because it is through this distinction that we can understand that an idea can be an affect without yet having any representation or attribute attached to it. So the distinction between the two interchangeable terms becomes crucial in understanding the affirmative and non-reductionist elements of an idea. Consciousness of the self is a transitive passage or mode of existence. According to the degrees of affection encountered, each affect changes the cause or attribute arisen to the self. Because of movement, affections occur as a stratification of contractions at varying degrees from lesser to greater passions. The illusion of a final cause to which the intellect



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aims, or the illusion of finality, is the basis for the misunderstanding of the relational method.24 If the being only takes itself as the first body, it explains effects as causes, arising from and belonging to the individual. Consciousness needs a cause, but this cause can only arise from desire. ‘A mode’s essence is a power; to it corresponds a certain capacity of the mode to be affected. But because the mode is a part of Nature, this capacity is always exercised either in affections produced by external things (those affections called passive) or in affections explained by its own essence (called active).’25 Instead of positing cause as emanative in a participatory relation, according to the Neo-Platonists,26 Spinoza’s contribution is that cause remains at all times immanent: hence, bodies can come into contact and produce whilst at the same time remaining in themselves. What we are seeking is the internal principle of participation, affect alone that becomes adequate in its movement in order to produce. The specific definition of a figure (circle) can be replaced by its genetic definition of, let’s say, any line of which one end is fixed and the other end movable.27 In the scheme of the photographic, this entails an understanding of resemblance to reality through contact; the point that corresponds to the emanation of the real thus (index) remains. Michel Serres describes the impact of a moving end (or point) further: ‘Point, line, space – nothing is clearer and more luminous. The point of singularity, the line of definition, the space where forces or fluxes move, are born and move on. The point yields – the line vibrates.’28 Contact implies, to a certain degree, the relational method via a set of actions of stratification, permuting variations that run from lesser to greater degree, and, inversely, from greater to lesser degree. The figure of a circle with its movable end describes this movement: it can be stretched and adjusted horizontally or vertically. It can also form a spiral, going upwards or downwards. In this line of continuous variation, it is affection that implies the action or move from the (inadequate) idea towards a mode of existence. The object that pulls me with its force already enters me into a relationship with it, thus constituting another totality. What stands between in its perceptive qualities is the intellect, but the intellect in its immanence.29 At the heart of this lies the power of acting or conatus, if we understand affection as power (puissance) and affect together. But affection also implies a mixture of two bodies and, further, that bodies are subjected to infinite relations of chance, movement and rest.

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ESSENCE (ACT) OF POWER Now, in the olive grove, it is almost seven in the summer evening. I am in front of the tree I have chosen to photograph. I look through my camera’s viewfinder, but nothing is clear. I move closer, so close to the tree that this movement allows the leaves and branches to brush onto me and against the camera. This contact allows me to aim for a frame that is neither calculated nor ideally measured by points of distance. I am working more with senses than with distancing myself from the element. Perception? Nature? Where am I situated amongst all this? ‘An image is, in the strictest sense, an imprint, a trace or physical impression, an affection of the body itself, the effect of some body on the soft and fluid parts of our own body.’30 However latent or inadequate in itself my idea of the tree is, it has in this capacity the potential (as it remains within its own cause) to explicate and affirm itself into an active proposition. In the field of immanence, photographing is an action brought together as a mode of existence, through the affections produced by both external and internal essences. The power of acting (or force of existing) is what allows for the right proportions of contributing affections to manifest accordingly. The act of photographing is one of the identity of power (puissance) and essence, where desire heightens the mode-attribute and enters the substance relation. As an affirmative act, the inexpressible of the transcendental field (object-tree) should not then be grasped negatively (tree purely as sign). Through the affirmative act, remaining in the plane of immanence, the intellect composes a relational value, both passive and active at the same time, just as the positive and negative parts of the photograph collide on the film to give the image its representation. The principle of imitation here points back to the thing itself – not to my rendering or representation of it. Immanently, the photograph remains on the ground of a participatory act, of photographing, of giving back the expression of time, and not any time, but one constituted through duration. DURÉE In the open plane of the field, the practice of walking is a ‘via’ (Agamben’s dia ti as noted earlier) that is formed not only of the conditions of seeing, looking, taking or making; it is more importantly located on a ground of experienced time and place. Reflected back through the lens of the camera, the active state becomes a passive recording, an improbable, imperfect state: ‘the image captured and fixed on the photographic plate is like the image fleetingly recorded on the retina of the eye. The



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referent is not an object but a sensation.’31 Furthermore, the subject’s continued existence, along with anything that she may have thought or felt about the sensation, becomes superfluous, unnecessary, the instant the shutter is released; the image separates itself irrevocably from those simultaneous thoughts to assume a ‘separate unthinking existence’.32 What is at stake is a movement or action of the self, but this time, linked to memory. This memory acts as the force demonstrating contact, and it too, as in Spinoza’s pasearse, is a movement in time when both active and passive coincide. For Bergson, like Spinoza, movement is the relationship of consciousness to action.33 Entering this zone of indistinction is like entering into the planes of durée, of Bergson’s time of a stratified system of temporal rhythms. Durée does not constitute the difference of states between past and present. This is the ground of the experienced time and place; time is not understood as a passage of linear sequences (thus, it is not spatial localisation). This experienced time is change, perpetually, anew. Therefore, it is a fissure of place and space, within the planes of durée. Time is thus made of various plurals of the present. A paradoxical state of being, because, just as in the photographic act, there is no need for a pre-existence of the past. The photographic apparatus already gives this a self-sufficient, self-constituted time of a perpetual present enfolding the past. Entering this zone of immanence is like entering the ‘thickness of a duration where our memories are forged’.34 This notion of time has also been described by Michel Serres and Yve Lomax as entering into the ‘baker’s folds’.35 Entering into the thickness of the folds, time becomes stretched, condensed yet malleable, palpable and shot through with light. Bergson’s Matter and Memory appeared in 1896 as a response to the crisis that had arisen in psychology (and extensively, between realism and idealism): namely, that the mental image, as psychic reality, could not be opposed to the external world. In addition to the classic nominations of the virtual and the actual, the idea of the ‘image’ is central to Bergson’s argument.36 Bergson’s ‘image’, like Spinoza’s ‘affect’, inserts the being right into matter, right into nature. The uniqueness of the body ‘image’ is that it is constituted as a ‘centre of indetermination’.37 As with Spinoza’s definition of the body, we will always be surprised about what the body can do, because we can only know it from within (its affections) and from without (its perceptions).38 The body is endowed with a certain ‘enframing’ capability essentially because there is no such thing as inside/outside, subject/object. As Marie Cariou notes, Bergson’s ‘image’ does not necessarily correlate with the mirror metaphor; the body, my body, thus constitutes a privileged image

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amongst others.39 This seems to be echoed in Hansen’s reading, when he proposes to reconfigure perception as a subtraction or diminution from the wider aggregate of images. ‘From the frame, back to the body’.40 The image, immanently, cannot be accorded the autonomy that Deleuze assigns to it in his study of the cinema.41 The frame, the cut, the shutter release are in all actuality a mere potentiality; remaining immanently it cannot assume any type of concrete image (time-image). ‘Following its digitization, the image can no longer be understood as a fixed and objective viewpoint on “reality” – whether it be theorized as frame, window or mirror’, the image seems to be defined precisely through a complete fluidity and lack of reference (with the digital image in the extreme case).42 It is here that a closer understanding of the process involved in creating images can be highlighted, as opposed to the viewing or experiencing of the image at a later stage. If instead we place the importance on the ‘operative character’ of the ‘image’ then we can start opening up the photographic frame to what I would like to call a space of transference. Bodies enter into relations and compose and decompose each other. It is the progressive levels of stratification of perceptions and affections via movement that are central to the notion of the body as image amongst other images. Perception is therefore merely a contraction (not a deduction) from the various multiple rhythms of duration. It is not a stop; it is merely a possibility amongst other possibilities that the body, through its action, has chosen in relation to other bodies, to other matter. Inserted between matter and memory, and supporting the idea of a constant creative present, is the movement of the body in the present: ‘This image [my body] occupies the centre; by it all others are conditioned; at each of its movements everything changes, as though by a turn of a kaleidoscope . . . the effect is always in proportion to the cause.’43 The body works as a filter giving back representations via its constant movement, because it has this creative capacity. Creative memory, therefore, does not substitute the body in its sensori-motor aspects of ‘enframing’.44 Rather, we want to endow the creative capacity of memory for the body at that moment when virtual and actual coincide. Just as in the incessant movements of the kaleidoscope, every effect will be proportionate to the cause, where each tiny fragment mingles and refracts with the particles surrounding it. What perhaps privileges the self against other bodies, subjects, objects, is its willingness to enter into relations seeking the illusion of finality. This illusion can only be regulated by a temporality of immanence: remaining in



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itself in order to produce. This temporality is a heterogeneous accumulation of condensations, each withholding an enormous multiplicity of vibrations, appearing all at once.45 In its actuality it is forever open to its own potentialities. The past always coincides with the present because it is in the present. The actualisation of the virtual harbours temporal rhythms that are nested within each other, contracting and pulsating as incessant circles or variations of the present. It is the photographic frame that creates the illusion of arrest or a stop in the indivisible notion of a fluid time (durée). Bergson’s concept of durée is the condition par excellence of ‘the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present’.46 This is the temporality of the photographic frame: time turns back, folds in on itself, whilst incessantly open to its further potentiality of immanence. It allows an opening up to an active-reflexive state of being. In the time of pasearse the infinite movement of living-being becomes one with the act of photographing. The photograph at one and the same time constitutes my act by showing the act of walking, and through this act, turning the walk (via duration) back onto itself, in a self-reflexive manner. The act of photographing therefore asserts immanence and frees expression from the emanative cause. ‘Being as pasearse’.47 DURATION AS TRANSFERENCE To merge, to melt, to bring all possible divisions into one. Now the yellow brushes with the orange, slightly dissolves into it. Now the edge of the shadow is blurred, mixed with the contaminated colours. Contaminated inside of the film the chemicals are quick to adapt. Two different forces melt into one. Now the heat rises through my fingers piercing the film. My heart beats faster; extending the pulse that reaches the tips of my fingers. Seeking to dive into the image, the movement of my hands breaks the frame. I cut; my small scissors lashing out everywhere around the places where the image is still securely fastened. I cut; I am surprised at what my own hands can do. Guided by the cuts, the fingers reach the sliced edges; the act is now blind; the fingers seek an opening to reach the image. Now; a little bit more before the chemicals will join forever. The sticky substance gives way. I pull; the two pieces of film are detached from each other. To go back to the act of photographing, via the enframing ability of the body. There is only the constant movement of the body as it addresses (its own) image. Thus the virtual (pure memory) actualises in a set of sensations (perceptions and affects) and movements (matter or materiality of the body), that appear to be unified, yet they, too, are

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further refracted and are just a mere set of potentialities of the virtual. It is the illusion of a stop or arrest that the photographic act plays out. The passage from infinite to finite, then, is an occurrence described via a feeling or passion that ceases to become exclusively affective as it progressively attaches itself, through action or actualisation, to a heightened state of experience. Photographing is transference of a state rather than of a thing. Not permanence, but perhaps change anew, otherwise there would be no notion of durée. It is merely the illusion of arrest or of a stop that gives a body its potential action. Because the action of the body will be towards sensations and affects, so again towards the indivisible: abstract space is divisible, the act of a body in space is indivisible. Duration is indivisible and the only possibility of rest is a contraction towards a heightened degree of affect. Photographing becomes the activation of infinite degrees of passive forces of the imagination as they begin to form a separate and third entity: the photograph. Separated but not autonomous; the demarcation of the frame remains only as permeable border, limitless entity. ‘The index, an incontrovertible fact, a material trace that can be left without human intervention, is a property of the camera machine and the chemical impact of light on film.’48 The collapse of the boundaries occurs precisely because the mechanical action of the shutter release sets forth the process of potentially creating an image that should resemble reality. FRAME AS TRANSFERENCE The photographs’ temporality belongs to a time of pasearse. This temporality arises from within: active and passive at the same time. Something, though, has to exist in order to be photographed; it cannot simply be a vision arising from pure imagination. The ‘emanation of the real’ appears as inherent from within, obeying its own mode of existence. As Roland Barthes clearly states in Camera Lucida, ‘the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations that ultimately touch me, who am here.’49 Following a path via the lens and converging onto a light-receptive sensitive surface, an image of the tree is recorded. At the same time, this tree is now expressing, via successive extensions, an event of my personal and unrepeatable unique memory, endowed to me through my movement. The passage from idea to image is translated via the p ­ assive-active recording of the camera shutter. Passive and active coincide, opening up their infinite possibilities to the conditions of durée and immanence. It is at this very moment or instant of the shutter release that the illusion of



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a stop or arrest is being actualised: it will, however, continue to vibrate and perpetually move towards the virtual. For this immobility of a unique moment is an illusion; if the frame remains open, it also remains open to its possibility of perpetual recreation. Movement conditions the states of perception or contraction, and the photograph acts as the filter that potentially will break or disturb the fluidity of the passage of time. A ‘substance’, it merely acts in its transitive state as a filter that contracts and releases affects interchangeably. The photograph becomes the body of an open state of transference: aiming towards a final cause, it necessarily fails to adhere to the intellect’s illusion of finality. The one, the unity, the frame comes back to me and wants more. Before the image freezes in its temporal fragment of the frame, I cut. Cutting in, through and around the square my little scissors seek to break, enter, and withhold just a little bit more time. The unity and the infinity of the one pulsates and vibrates; opens up the moment into essences, chemicals, micro-particles. The landscape in its finitude of infinities of air, dust, heat and immaterial light all rush to meet this moment and attach to it. Now, in this same instant, the tree breathes. At various intervals of a given time, it jostles and jumps and reverberates in a virtual mode of a time that folds back again onto itself. Opening up and awaiting in its temporality the infinite mode of pasearse. Colliding, brushing against the tiny frame of the photograph, one single branch of the tree has been moved, displaced, given more light, let out in the open to breathe. Now the moment comes to an end, I must close the image again. Something is leaving me or has left me to greet the image. In mixing up, messing up, the image I leave something of myself in the frame. After tension, a relaxation point. The hands that worked so swiftly now slow down their movement. There is still movement; subtle and gentle. Now the destructive force coming to an end wants to recompose the image. Positive and negative are glued together again; now is the contact point again. Here more heat goes to the film. Here the caress and touch want to give it its last shape and form. The colours run; for a little while still; soon they will stop. Frozen by the lack of air, they will be suspended in pending movements; others here others there. NOTES  1. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990), pp. 104–5.  2. Paul Klee, ‘Taking a Line for a Walk’, in S. Maghani, A. Piper and

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J. Simons, eds, Images: A Reader (London and Los Angeles: Sage, 2006), pp. 16–21.  3. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Absolute Immanence’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 220–39; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 77.   4. Agamben, ‘Absolute Immanence’, pp. 34–5.  5. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 77.  6. Laura Mulvey, ‘The Index and the Uncanny: Life and Death in the Photograph’, in Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), pp. 54–66.   7. Ibid., p. 63.   8. Agamben, ‘Absolute Immanence’, p. 235.   9. See ibid., p. 233. 10. See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils’, Diacritics, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1983), pp. 2–20; Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Desiring Production’, in G. Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 3–24. 11. Yve Lomax, Writing the Image: An Adventure with Art and Theory (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000), p. 79. 12. Baruch Spinoza, Hebrew Grammar, ed. M. J. Bloom (London: Vision Press, 1962), p. 102. 13. Agamben, ‘Absolute Immanence’, pp. 234–5. 14. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Lecture transcripts on Spinoza’s concept of Affect’ (1978), Cours Vincennes, ed. E. Deleuze and J. Deleuze, available at http:// www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html (accessed 22 January 2012); Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, pp. 146–7. 15. Benedict Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader. The Ethics and Other Works, ed. E. Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 155. 16. Ibid., p. 153. 17. Ibid., p. 155. 18. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 19. 19. Ibid., p. 91. 20. Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations, trans. F. McCarren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 79–81. 21. Ibid., p. 77. 22. Yve Lomax, Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 5–7. 23. Deleuze, ‘Lecture transcripts on Spinoza’s concept of Affect’, n.p. 24. See Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 20. 25. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, p. 93. 26. Ibid., pp. 171–8. 27. See Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 47.



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28. Serres, Rome, p. 191. 29. See Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, pp. 146–7. 30. Ibid., p. 147. 31. Ann Banfield, ‘L’imparfait de l’objectif: the imperfect of the object glass’, Camera Obscura, Vol. 24 (1990), pp. 65–87. 32. Ibid. 33. On the importance of movement as central to Bergson’s theory, see John Mullarkey, ‘Introduction’, The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); and also Marie Cariou, ‘Bergson: The Keyboards of Forgetting’, ibid., pp. 99–117. 34. Cariou, ‘Bergson: The Keyboards of Forgetting’, p. 102. 35. Serres, Rome, p. 81; Lomax, Sounding the Event. 36. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 37. Ibid., p. 36. 38. Ibid., p. 17. 39. Cariou, ‘Bergson: The Keyboards of Forgetting’. 40. Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 1–16. 41. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986). 42. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 7. 43. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 25. 44. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 12. 45. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 70. 46. Cariou, ‘Bergson: The Keyboards of Forgetting’. 47. Agamben, ‘Absolute Immanence’, pp. 234–5. 48. Mulvey, ‘The Index and the Uncanny’, p. 63. 49. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 80.

9. Duration and Rhetorical Movement JAMES DAY

The two paintings we see in reproduction are James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862) (Figure 9.1) and Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1862) (Figure 9.2), but they are qualitatively multiple and the crowd writing this chapter sees many of them. The paintings share a history as successful scandals at the 1863 Paris refusals’ salon, after the academy had denied them wall space in the official salon. In their own time, these paintings were dissident works through their disruption of representative normalcy and their ambiguous, defiant gaze; however, their time is not their own. Both paintings contain past and future art objects and writings, which surge through their canvases. Art history has identified many of these works, and its writing can be seen to be transformative. More has been written about Luncheon on the Grass than about The White Girl, though art historical writing has elaborated art history’s influence in both paintings. For example in Luncheon on the Grass there is Giorgione/Titian’s Pastoral Concert (c. 1508), Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael’s Judgement of Paris (ca. 1515–16), Antoine Watteau’s Tranquil Love (1718), Pablo Picasso’s The Young Ladies of Avignon (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) (1907); and in The White Girl Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s White Duck (1753), Watteau’s Pierrot (Le Grand Gilles) (1717–19), Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Immaculate Conception of the Escorial (1678). The revisionary art historical project is perhaps more obvious in Luncheon on the Grass but is equally at work in The White Girl. Art historical identification is not supplementary but integral to the work because it realises possibility. The histories of these precedent and antecedent works can be thought of as transforming Luncheon on the Grass and The White Girl, which work retroactively upon them. To what extent, then, can art historical writing be seen as altered by and altering the history which these two paintings share in 1863? Michael Fried ger148



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Figure 9.1  James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862), oil on canvas, 213 x 107.9 cm, Harris Whittemore Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington.

manely refers to ‘the generation of 1863’ and this year is always being generated, by 1678, 1996, 1907, 1753 as recently as 2012.1 As John House writes in the exhibition catalogue, Inspiring Impressionism, artists such as Whistler ‘were part of a wholesale reassessment of

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Figure 9.2  Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, oil on canvas, 1863, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski.

the history of painting that challenged academic values’ and that the relation of this past to their own work was not external influence but ‘creative adaptation and transformation’.2 The realisation of a virtual possibility through writing and its differing speeds suggests a rhetorical surface with movements through liquid flows and solid definition. The writing of art history is not simply outside the finished painting. What ways of writing can describe a dialogue with a past which is very much already part of art history? Many months have passed since the initial paper from which this chapter is drawn was written while on a trip to Bujumbura. Quite by coincidence I have returned to Burundi at the same time as editing and extending the paper for publication. Over the course of the intervening months, subsequent reading has transformed that first paper’s potential. This mixture of past possibility and the present realisation are characterised as much by accident and constraint as the actual succeeding possibility. Such concentration and expansion of this first paper was one of its constitutive aspects, however, as part of an analysis of Bergson’s philosophy of duration and rhetorical movement. The continuity and loss between writing one paper and the other is not



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detrimental then, but rather beneficial. In other words, the passages between past and present in the process of writing can be accelerated, rather than improving writing in a linear progression. Indeed, Bergson often reflects upon language and his activity as a writer as part of the elucidation of his thought, suggesting that discursive autobiographical commentary reflecting bodily distraction are important, constitutive aspects of the knowledge produced by writing. ‘Whilst I am writing these lines, the hour strikes on a neighbouring clock, but my inattentive ear does not perceive it until several strokes have made themselves heard.’3 Writers as different as Jorge Luis Borges and Gilles Deleuze have recognised that Henri Bergson’s philosophy radically rethinks temporality. As it is described in Creative Evolution’s opening chapter, Bergsonian duration describes the past’s presence and the process of becoming in which past and present gnaw into the future.4 The flow of duration suggests historical mixture more than linear progression, and implicit in this is a critique of the linear succession of words across the page. While Bergson’s concept of duration might be useful for art historians writing on heterochronous art objects (such as The White Girl and Luncheon on the Grass), because it suggests possible historical mixture realised in a present action, it questions whether language can successfully describe that duration itself. Despite the metaphorical, liquid quality of Bergson’s writing, the philosopher denies that language can represent duration and claims that it is partly responsible for philosophy’s confusion.5 Writing can thus be associated with the failure of mechanical laughter, as it cannot adapt with vital movement. Bergson’s essay on laughter includes long analyses of dramatic writing, and words’ immobility in comparison with life’s ceaseless creativity.6 The knowledge art historians have produced about The White Girl and Luncheon on the Grass, however, can also be used to think about Bergson’s critique of writing’s inadequacy to capture the smooth flow of duration. Philosophy does not precede art history, rather their mixture suggests different speeds of becoming between the past and present. The process of these movements is the object of an analysis of duration, and must be produced within and be creative of these movements.7 Such seems to be Bergson’s argument in Creative Evolution and his philosophy is more suggestive for immanent critique than its use as an isolated theoretical lens, equally transparent from object to object. Philosophical, literary and artistic practice can be combined in mutual, snowballing critique. When read plainly, some of Bergson’s thought distrusts the language which his argument dextrously manipulates, although this seems reductive to Bergson’s various attitudes to language. What Bergson’s work

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seems to suggest is an experimental approach to writing that seeks to find prose rhythms that perform the expansion of the past into the present and concentrate virtuality in actuality. One way in which Luncheon on the Grass and The White Girl realise an art historical memory is through visual quotation. Art historians trace these quotations to their sources, which are themselves the joining together of several disparate sources. The paintings are not original objects but compounds of several historical works, and dating them is complex. As Carol Armstrong argues, Luncheon on the Grass is just such a quotational mix, and this can be seen in the way it is painted: If we return once more to the list, we can see how Manet piles on his art-­ historical quotations and mixes up his manners. First there is the ‘from Florence . . . toward Venice,’ ‘from Venice . . . toward Florence’ of the Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, with their quotations ‘after’ Raimondi/Raphael, Giorgione/Titian, and Titian, and their mix of harsh contrast, hard contours and different kinds of painterliness.8

What would it mean to mix up quotations in this manner in the work of art history, in combinations of literary styles? Both artists’ work is characterised by mixtures of different times that actually anticipate the work of art historians: according to David Fraser Jenkins, Whistler was in fact a practical art historian.9 Denys Sutton calls Whistler an ‘exile in his own time’ and is one of many art historians who argue that Whistler’s work is anomalous with artistic production in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century.10 Whistler’s work becomes an exodus from contemporary determination in favour of a nomadic, alien existence. The White Girl’s alloy of Pre-Raphaelitism and Realism can be seen as an early example of the hybrid, precarious quality of his painting. The recent Manet retrospective at the Musée d’Orsay suggests that Manet’s painting is of all times and not the original work of a modernist avant-garde, and similarly the fluidity of Whistler’s painting was noticed in the nineteenth century by critics such as J. K. Huysmans.11 The actual paintings have a shifting identity and chronology with different passages from the past to the present, and some of their possibilities can be realised through art historical writing. As well as a Whistler-Bergson there is also a Bergson-Whistler. Arguments for non-linear causality are made by both Jean Clay and Svetlana Alpers about the precursors and antecedents to Manet’s work, suggesting further that historical mixture and durational flow are common to both Whistler and Manet.12 The question of precedent is displaced in the work of art, art history and philosophy through the flow of the past into the present. Although there is not necessarily an intellectual genealogy from Manet to Fuentes, a flux and reflux can be described from an



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early avant-garde painting to a postmodern neo-baroque novel. In part, the potential concentration of the past in the present and the realisation of past possibility in a future work confounds the expectations of such a genealogy, because the solid march of time in fact proves to be the intersection of different movements. The regimented march of the soldier is a complex crossing of productive forces which make its linear reconstruction by the cinematograph a pallid, false representation.13 A fluid rhetorical surface produced through the movement of writing in combination with the figural definition of art historical identity and chronology seems implicit in the work of art history, however, this rhetorical surface is frequently sacrificed to art history’s realist expectations. These expectations include the purity of the authorial voice and the strict division of writing subject from written object. As we write in many different voices, separating them often seems a delirious task. Rather than expressing historical continuity through chronological succession, Bergsonian duration suggests historical mixing and anachronistic assemblages, such as art history identifies in Luncheon on the Grass or The White Girl. The melting and solidifying of memory and its realisation through movements from past to present suggest that art historical writing is active and creative rather than passive and documentary. Combining Fuentes’ Terra Nostra and Bergson’s philosophy of duration with Luncheon on the Grass and The White Girl can equally be seen as such a mixture, which must also include the writing of this chapter. Rather than containing the sum of its parts animated in a single movement, as in Bergson’s model of the cinematograph, art historical writing is characterised by the intersection of varying movements through the material of its language. Duration is not the inevitable, discontinuous progress of the ticking clock, retaining more or less passively the entirety of the past. As Bergson describes it, the continuity of the past in the present does not eliminate death by writing out historical loss and contention because of the universal coverage of memory. The singular historical experience in Bergson’s thought only results as a concentration of multiple possibilities, made actual by an intellect with the capacity to remember. Transition between the virtual and actual, past and present, is characteristic of durational flow, and suggests real historical encounters between past and present in the intellect realising a remembered possibility. What Bergson teaches in terms of writing is a shift towards a more dynamic, rhythmic understanding of language and that writing must come out of itself, meaning both immanent production and opening onto an other. This double nature is part of the creative potential of art historical writing, which is always written in parallel with a material object. In Luncheon on the Grass and

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The White Girl there is an art historical memory that contains several potential objects which art history can make more or less real, demonstrating the discipline’s creative and transformative potential. Bergson’s analogy of the sugar dissolving in a glass of water develops two mutually dependent movements, the one within the relatively closed system of the glass containing sugar and water and the other, open, unpredictable system including the impatience of the waiting subject and the dissolving process within the glass.14 Duration is never static, it is defined by movement. Writing can be seen to have its own duration, with an elastic relationship between purity and hybridity. Its referent is potentially transformed by the movement of writing, especially in so far as this writing contains different planes of possibility and actuality. The process of writing, therefore, becomes very important, as part of writing’s creative evolution. Equally, the mode of critique cannot be analytic and static, but accelerates or slows the speeds of writing, painting and thinking through its material manifestation. Such a mode of criticism might more adequately demonstrate the relationship between possibility and realisation that makes up each work, and would necessarily reflect upon the human, historical, linguistic processes through which it is actualised. Indeed the work of art history can be considered an evolution of this process. This work is not exhausted, but energetic. The task of immaterial representation is false then, in so far as it tries to fix or capture a subject in process. Alternative, experimental practices of writing seem to be called for. In Quoting Caravaggio, Mieke Bal argues for more anachronistic art history and suggests transformations in art writing as a result.15 In doing so, Bal follows Michael Ann Holly’s argument in her book Past Looking, in which the chapter ‘Writing Leonardo Backwards’ is particularly suggestive for more experimental writing processes in art history.16 Holly’s argument suggests the critical aspects of the art objects that art history writes about, as she demonstrates that Leonardo’s work limits the free play of writing. More recently she argues that art history is a melancholic science, writing around an unrecoverable object.17 Melancholic writing’s circumlocutory movements, in which language expresses its inadequacy to represent its referent, are suggestive for writing animated with a life of its own.18 Rather than a melancholic emphasis on unrecoverable loss, the linguistic encounters of moving along a rhetorical surface linked with the time of writing can also be seen as a creative process of historical discovery, recovery, creation. In the history of Luncheon on the Grass and The White Girl these movements are ways of realising different, shifting presences. In other words virtual possibilities are realised through the actual movement of



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the past in the present, through the play between rhetorical movement and figural definition. According to Bergson, words dupe the understanding into mechanical, intellectual illusion. Individual, isolated words often have multiple and metonymic definitions, suggesting that duration can be produced through duplication: ‘But as we look closely, we shall see that the explanation is merely verbal, that we are again the dupes of words, and that the trick of the solution consists in taking the term “adaptation” in two entirely different senses at the same time.’19 Linguistic accident (such as the homony between ‘past’ and ‘passed’, or the many definitions of the word ‘present’) might be multiplied to create a shifting rhetorical surface made from the material components of language. Stylistic performance would become just as significant as grasping a referent external to the text, with devices such as visual punning and anagram combining with argumentative exposition. Along with the time of writing, the sediment of different uses and abuses of words concentrates itself in the contemporary written word. The words we are writing are, therefore, not our own, but intertextual hybrids. Equally, the contemporaneity of writing is actually a mixture of different times. The notion of duration in writing thus works against the expressive, intentional subject grounded within a locatable historical or contemporary context. Instead, it works towards an historical mixture realised in the present writing’s movement across the page: ‘But, of the road which was going to be travelled, the human mind could have nothing to say, for the road has been created pari passu with the act of travelling over it, being nothing but the direction of this act itself.’20 Bergson’s work suggests that writing can produce its criticism immanently, although it can not attain the smoothness of duration. The entropic, individuated words move in inverse relation with their creative, common potential in which their reality can be said to make itself in a reality that is unmaking itself. The way of writing comes out of the process of writing, ‘the act of writing, then, unfolds in a scene that is neither determined nor indeterminate, but which, not quite in Bergson’s sense, moves’.21 There are material limits to the immanent production of writing, but the mobile rhetorical surface created by writing can work together with discontinuous, delimiting representational language. Whether Bergson’s imaginative prose offers a way out from the linguistic dead ends his works identify can be seen as an open question. In the essay on laughter he suggests that words’ rhythmical arrangement can create a self-organised life, expressive of the virtual possibility of discontinuous language.22 This rhythmical arrangement is connected with the inert and material aspects of words, which prevent language

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from expressing pure duration. The potentially elastic relationship between the crescendo of rhythmic language and the descending stability of conventional meaning suggests that more experimental writing practices might be used precisely and responsibly in art history. Bergson’s writing itself raises questions about time’s ineluctable passage and the possibility of writing alternatively to conventional, consequential time. It suggests a concentrated language in which past, present and future coincide in creative, unforeseeable movements. Certainly, Bergson is no mere writer because his language does not efface itself behind philosophical argument; in other words, writing and its movements are part of Bergson’s critique of temporally static metaphysics. If Bergson’s writing has literary qualities, they are beneficial rather than detrimental to his philosophical argument, in particular because his work suggests the immanent production of philosophy through writing. Attempts to draw together Bergsonism and deconstruction, such as Paul Douglass’ essay ‘Deleuze’s Bergson’, suggest just this.23 For Bergson, the cuts between words deny it the smoothness of durational flow. This denial, however, emphasises these words’ materiality over embodied processes of writing and rhetorical flow. In Matter and Memory Bergson expresses his frustration with discontinuous, concrete language’s inability to communicate thought’s movement: In truth, there is here only a question of degree: every language, whether elaborated or crude, leaves many more things to be understood than it is able to express. Essentially discontinuous, since it proceeds by juxtaposing words, speech can only indicate by a few guideposts placed here and there the chief stages of the movement of thought . . . For images can never be anything but things, and thought is a movement.24

In an essay explaining the differences between Symbolist art and Bergson’s thought, Maurice Blanchot suggests that Bergson is ‘uneasily vigilant when confronted by words, which are in a constant process of crystallization and are weighed down by our intellectual and practical habit’.25 This process of crystallisation can also be seen as the anachronistic encounter of different word uses in a single text. The weight of habit is thus the teeming potential of a word and is therefore energising and not enervating. Co-existential presents and pasts, processes of continual creation, and a body which inhabits and is inhabited by time, cannot be written down, according to Bergson, because writing down seems to imply a pinning down, a dissecting process isolating individual elements and arresting duration’s current. Later in Matter and Memory Bergson proposes his famous cone diagram as a description of memory’s relationship with the present. This diagram can be seen as an analogy of the relationship between the fluid process of writing and the reality



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of dry ink in the nip of the nib. The pen, with multiple histories accumulated within it, moves incessantly forwards, at each point in contact with the page, tracing its histories in concentrated, concrete words. Bergson explicitly analogises language when introducing his diagram: ‘It is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and upon which I act – the seat, in a word, of the sensori-motor phenomena.’26 Bergson’s scepticism regarding language as a stick-in-themud, immobilising durational movement, might be elided by reading his passages, a word he emphasises, as a description of a movement of writing, a movement which contains, acts and is acted upon by the past’s entirety, although the habitual or concrete words actualise only the most useful memories, but also a language which never crystallises, which, like the hyphen in Bergson’s sentence, is in transformational process between the concrete (the word hyphen) and movements through connecting links and places of passage (the character hyphen). Bergson develops his hyphen further in Creative Evolution, clarifying a movement in which the past intertwines with the present: ‘Evolution implies a real persistence of the past in the present, a duration which is, as it were, a hyphen, a connecting link.’27 The hyphen might be seen as duration’s grammatical marker, joining the space between words. The hyphen is horizontal whereas the authorial voice is vertical (at least in the English), suggesting the importance of movement through figural definition. John Mullarkey writes suggestively that, ‘In mimicking the processes of reality, the metaphorical imagery Bergson employs can be partly real itself, because every reality is a type of process or style of movement. As Gilles Deleuze would say, metaphor equals metamorphosis.’28 Not only might Bergson’s metaphors be ‘partly real’, reality might be partly metamorphoric. Language has its movements through material limits in the metamorphic process of writing, which suggest a linguistic agency different to the intentional expression through a transparent medium that characterises most art historical writing, including the greater part of this chapter. Intentional, expressive agency is formed through the movement of becoming from the virtual to the actual in the material object, which can be seen as an alternating flow between resistant text and liquid thought. Art historical writing on Luncheon on the Grass and The White Girl might realise possible histories, but it is affected by the objects whose histories it writes. The art object’s potentially disruptive presence in writing is an important caveat against what some see as the irresponsible play of postmodernism. Luncheon on the Grass and The White Girl can be seen as paintings which view writing through the intensity of the passage between possibility and

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art historical reality. The cone’s contact with the page or painting suggests a leap into the past that demonstrates the inadequacy of an active/passive agency when writing on a text or picture.29 When this leap fails, it results in peals of laughter. The surging of the past object into the present text affects writing’s metamorphic and metaphorical limits through its material resistance. Equally the act of writing is acted upon by written acts, hence the inhibition of rhetorical flow by material figure. Mullarkey goes on to suggest that Bergson’s metaphorical description of duration is actually precise because it instantiates what it expresses, further suggesting the immanent expression of duration in writing through the duration of language itself.30 The material limitations on free play are produced in play; when these limits are stressed the text cries a complaint. Linguistic play is reflexive about the way it instantiates its expression through puns, anagrams, catachresis, misspellings, etc. Such writing is often repressed in art history however. For art history to be scientific then, it must write in so called literary ways which reflect upon language’s discontinuities and creation of flows. Jorge Luis Borges famously suggested that we cannot read the same Zeno, Han Yu, Kierkegaard or Browning after we have read Kafka, thereby arguing that the present alters the past.31 This chapter can claim Bergson as an unacknowledged precursor. Bergson in his ‘Introduction 1’, subtitled ‘Retrograde Movement of the True Growth of Truth’, in the collection of essays translated into English in 1946 as The Creative Mind, reminds us that romanticism alters classical literature, thereby retroactively creating its prefiguration and explanation of itself by its precursors. Borges writes similarly to his near namesake Bergson, who in this introduction works through his previous body of work, at times nearly reproducing sentences from earlier works, modified by his thought’s subsequent development, putting just this retroactive explanation into play throughout his previous texts: These sides, it would seem, belong only in retrospect to a former present, that is to say to the past, and they possessed no more reality in that present, when it was a present, than the symphonies of future musicians have reality in our own actual present. To take a simple example, nothing prevents us today from associating the romanticism of the nineteenth century with what was already romantic in the classical writers. But the romantic aspect of classicism is only brought about by the retroactive effect of romanticism once it has appeared. If there had not been a Rousseau, a Chateaubriand, a Vigny, a Victor Hugo, not only should we never have perceived, but also there would never have existed, any romanticism in the earlier classical writers, for this romanticism of theirs only materialises by lifting out of their work a certain aspect, and this slice [découpure], with its particular form, no more existed in classical literature before romanticism appeared on the scene



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than there exists, in the cloud floating by, the amusing design that the artist perceives in shaping to his fancy the amorphous mass. Romanticism worked retroactively on classicism as the artist’s design worked on the cloud. Retroactively it created its own prefiguration in the past and an explanation of itself by its predecessors.32

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’, by Browning, foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation the identity or plurality of the individuals involved is unimportant. The early Kafka of ‘Betrachtung’ is less a precursor of the Kafka of sombre myths and atrocious institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.33 In Bergson’s ‘Introduction II’ to The Creative Mind, Creative Evolution’s ‘continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances’ becomes ‘the uninterrupted prolongation of the past into the present which is already blending into the future’, in a sentence that earlier makes the distinction between juxtaposition and succession also made in Matter and Memory.34 The short ‘Introduction I’ recycles Bergsonian figures such as the cinematograph and the glass of sugared water (both from Creative Evolution), and prefigures the discussion of the colour orange in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. The past’s presence is affirmative and potentially disruptive in Bergson’s text, something Borges’ essay proposes when he suggests that Kafka’s writing ‘will modify the future’, complicating the idea that this is an innocent introduction. Both Borges’ and Bergson’s essays articulate a paradox in many art historical writings about Whistler and Manet, which write originally about a past they claim faithfully to represent despite the paintings’ variously coinciding histories. In an essay that moves brilliantly through Borges’ written body, Carlos Fuentes puns: He gasped, and urged me to profit from my chance, our chance: second chance for our terrible history, an opportunity to refashion time by admitting its polycultural sources. Oh, what a chance this Borgia or Borja, or

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George Burke, or Boy George or whatever, was not content with our modernity or with our past or with the promise of our future, unless it included all the wealth of our cultural present, including the present of all our pasts: our modernity is all that we have been, all of it. This is our second history, and Burgos, or Borja, or Berkeley has written its introduction.35

Bergson might easily be let slip in the middle of this punning action (Jorge Luis Borges’ essay collection Other Inquisitions indexes Bergson with his middle name, Henri Louis Bergson), as this chapter moves into a brief analysis of a passage from Terra Nostra in order to see how Fuentes’s fictional rewriting might describe the movements Bergson impossibly desires from language. Raymond Williams describes Terra Nostra as the centrepiece in Fuentes’s voluminous fictional cycle. As we are told by Emir Rodríguez-Monegal, its historical setting was generated from Alberto Gironella’s parodic repainting of Velázquez.36 Brian McHale claims Terra Nostra as an anthology of postmodern literary devices: characters’ identities merge, appear in several historical times; historical characters are synthesised and turn up anachronistically; past, present and future spiral into unstable relationships.37 Terra Nostra is too amorphous to reduce its differing temporal structures synoptically, but it is possible to suggest that the movement of Fuentes’ writing silently describes the history Bergson denied to language. In a passage that mixes memory and reality with painting and writing, painter-priest Brother Julián reportedly promises to tell the chronicler’s story to pass time while he finishes painting: Feverish and ill, he wrote through the night; reduced to a tiny space in the depths of the prow in the reserve brigantine, he heard the groaning of the ship’s skeleton, with utmost difficulty he held the inkwell upon one knee and the paper upon the other; the motion of the little stub of candle swinging back and forth before his eyes made him seasick, but he persisted in his wakeful task.38

Sentences that twist through many clauses are typical in Terra Nostra. While Brother Julián’s telling of the chronicler’s story is narrated, the friar is finishing a painting and the chronicler, squatting in a galley ship, is silently writing a story, which is later revealed to be Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Fuentes draws attention repeatedly to the movement of the chronicler’s pen, emphasising its embodied process as the chronicler mutters another’s advisory words. Intertwining voices with shifting identities speaking from various times are not only inscribed in the narration’s spiralling sentences but also in the movement of the painter’s brush and chronicler’s pen which are rapidly trying to close off their narratives. Text and paint blend throughout Terra Nostra as when, in the same chapter, Julián removes heretical papers from the chronicler’s



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cubicle, which the painting from Orvieto (which in Fuentes work can be linked with the Signorelli murals through which Freud describes parapraxis in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life) had earlier related to a bewildered El Señor.39 Terra Nostra’s language is metamorphic and condenses histories into its creative words. The chronicler writing the Metamorphosis, which is ‘an exemplary novel that had everything and nothing to do with what he was thinking’, founds the novel on everything which can be said with words but also on nothing, the silence behind words, their metamorphic movement, which continues with the written words, like both Friar Julián’s brush and the chronicler’s pen.40 Like Bergson, Fuentes writes passages between the imaginary and the real and is committed to non-linear temporalities. While Bergson regards language sceptically, however, Fuentes’s language continually moves across his pages, not only describing but creating its histories. Rather than a stable historical referent, Bergson’s analysis of writing suggests a dynamic, rhythmic approach to reading. A way that is not only static and replicable, but also flowing and creative. That is to say, it is intuitive and intellectual, with fluid transition between intellect and intuition. Art historical writing, however, tends to be intellectual and individual rather than intuitive and common, although through the movement of writing intuition and common sense might be generated. The way this road is created is through travelling over it, suggesting that the argument towards more literary experimentation in art history is most coherent through operative writing. As Bergson’s analysis of language’s discontinuity suggests, an authoritative art historical text cannot describe the mixed temporality and differing speeds of becoming because it is falsely successive and successful, because language is effaced and its movements crystallised into static definition. Bergson’s writing suggests negatively and Fuentes’s affirmatively that rhetorical movement can silently describe histories by foregrounding a transformative language that does not stop at an objective meaning. While writing about Bergsonian duration and then Terra Nostra’s spiralling language, the description of the unstable and shared histories in The White Girl and Luncheon on the Grass might have endured and rendered duration, and the few words mentioned at the beginning – complicating the idea that this is an innocent ­introduction – can be changed and are changing this resource to recourse – repeatedly to the movement of the chronicler’s pen – whether wither it is only after the reputable laughter tabled had withered ‘the women had stopped stifling their merriment with their handkerchiefs, and the men, completely unrestrained, were holding their sides and roaring with laughter’41 which met Whistler-Manet that we can find unstable what

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Manet-Whistler meant? Michael Fried suggests Luncheon on the Grass as Manet’s most famous example of old master quotation, summoning all painting’s resources – of writing alternatively to conventional, consequential time, suggesting a concentrated language in which past, present and future coincide – and linking histories altogether all to gather different.42 Whistler’s White Girl while white wilting in writing was saw touched up several times during her rude, erudite history, including a remarkable, marred reworking of a photographic reproduction, and revises her his story in co-existence with the art historical coincidences that form from her haunting, hunting, daunting presence.43 What, many years later latter the letter, was Whistler jawing about – aware that the past’s presence is affirmative and potentially disruptive – and how could he deface his first, who was only the first and whose history already lay read – not simply outside the finished painting – this first time a long time after her deflowering, verging on the virgin? A white – endured, and that the few words – in Whistler is neither carte blanche nor a dead duck, in what way is Whistler’s white his? Where do Whistler and Manet with identities teeming with art history meet? Of the tandem histories – silently writing a story, which is later revealed – written here I worry we are only getting a jammed copy. Have we ever noticed that – to pass time while he finishes painting – the two paintings we see in reproduction – appear in several historical times – are James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White, No 1. – White Girl (1862) – teeming with art history meeting – and Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1862) – co-existential presents and pasts, processes of continual creation and a body which inhabits and is inhabited by time – which share histories as successful scandals at the 1863 Paris refusals’ salon? NOTES   1. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).   2. John House, ‘Painting Without a Subject?’, in Ann Dumas, ed., Inspiring Impressionism: The Impressionists and the Art of the Past (Denver: exh. cat. Denver Art Museum, 2008), p. 206.   3. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1910), p. 127.   4. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), p. 3.  5. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 13.   6. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1913).



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  7. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 200.  8. Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 17.  9. David Fraser Jenkins, ‘Nocturnes, Characters, and Sunlit Beaches – Whistler, Sargent and Steer’, in Whistler, Sargent, and Steer: Impressionists in London from the Tate Collections (Nashville, Tennessee: exh. cat. Frist Centre for the Visual Arts, 2003), pp. 17–18. 10. Denys Sutton, Nocturne: The Art of James McNeill Whistler (London: Country Life Limited, 1963), p. 15. 11. Philippe Sollers, with Stéphane Guégan, ‘The Manet Revival’, in Manet: The Man who Invented Modernity (Paris: exh. cat. Gallimard and Musée d’Orsay, 2011), pp. 107–13 and J. K. Huysmans, ‘Whistler’, in L’Art Moderne/Certains (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1975), p. 324. 12. See Jean Clay, ‘Ointments, Makeup, Pollen’, trans. John Shepley, October, Vol. 27 (1983), pp. 3–44, and Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velásquez and Others (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 13. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 194–5. 14. See ibid., pp. 6–7 and p. 216. 15. Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. ‘Art Writing’, pp. 126–7. 16. Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 17. Michael Ann Holly, ‘Interventions: The Melancholy Art’, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 89, No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 7–17. 18. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 19. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 37 20. Ibid., p. 33. 21. Joseph N. Riddel, ‘Modern Times: Stein, Bergson, and the Ellipses of “American” Writing’, in Frederick Berwick and Paul Douglass, eds, The Crisis in Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 350. 22. Bergson, Laughter, p. 156. 23. See Paul Douglass, ‘Deleuze’s Bergson: Bergson Redux’, in Berwick and Douglass, The Crisis in Modernism, pp. 368–88. 24. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 125. 25. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Bergson and Symbolism’, trans. Joel A. Hunt, Yale French Studies, No. 4 (1949), pp. 63–6. 26. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 151–2. 27. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 15. 28. John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 153.

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29. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 56–7. 30. Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy, p. 153. 31. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms, in Other Inquisitions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), pp. 106–8. 32. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 24–5 (first and third emphases mine). 33. Borges, ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, p. 108 (emphasis added). 34. Bergson, ‘Introduction II, The Stating of Problems’, in The Creative Mind, p. 35. 35. Carlos Fuentes, ‘Borges in Action’, in Myself with Others: Selected Essays (London: André Deutsch, 1988), pp. 140–59. 36. See Raymond Williams, The Writings of Carlos Fuentes (Austin: University of Texas Press 1996); and Manuel Durán, ‘Carlos Fuentes as an Art Critic’, in Robert Brody and Charles Rossman, eds, Carlos Fuentes: A Critical View (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 193–9. 37. Brian McHale, Postmodern Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 16. 38. Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra, trans. Margaret Sayers Pedan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 233. 39. See Williams, The Writings of Carlos Fuentes, pp. 96, 97, 125; and Sigmund Freud, ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VI, ed. and trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1960). 40. Fuentes, Terra Nostra, p. 235. 41. Émile Zola, The Masterpiece, trans. Thomas Walton, revised by Roger Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 136. 42. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, pp. 150, 152, 175. 43. Glasgow University Library Special Collections, Whistler PH4/4. See also Nigel Thorp, ‘Studies in Black and White: Whistler’s Photographs in Glasgow University Library’, in Studies in the History of Art, Volume 19: James McNeill Whistler – A Reexamination (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1987), p. 92.

10. A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation: Towards a Bergsonian Production of Subjectivity1 SIMON O’SULLIVAN . . . there is in matter something more than, but not something different from, that which is actually given. Undoubtedly, conscious perception does not compass the whole of matter, since it consists, in as far as it is conscious, in the separation, or the ‘discernment’ of that which, in matter, interests our various needs. But between this perception of matter and matter itself there is but a difference of degree and not of kind.2

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS: MATTER AND MEMORY Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory amounts to a revolution in thought, a radical ‘switch’ in how we understand ourselves, and especially our relation to the past (understood as that which is ‘outside’ our present experience). For Bergson, we are not composed of a body and of a mind inhered within the latter. Indeed, we are not a vessel or a container for our memories (Bergson’s thesis is a critique of interiority in this sense), but more like a point or probe that is moving through matter and which is itself part of the very matter through which it moves. In order to negotiate this strange landscape, with its challenges to common (or Cartesian) sense, two principles are useful. The first, as Bergson himself suggests in his Foreword, is that we remember that all mental life, ultimately, is determined by action. An absolutely speculative function of the mind, divorced from experience and action, does not, for Bergson, exist (although, as we shall see, this does not prohibit a kind of speculation understood as intuition). The second principle, that in some sense follows from this, is that the past has not ceased to be, but has merely ceased to be useful as regards this action. It is in this sense, again as we shall see, that the past is co-extensive with the present. It survives in a pure, albeit unconscious, state. In what follows I will be especially concerned with the status of, and 165

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possibility of accessing, this pure past, which might also be understood as a kind of ontological ground of our individual being. It is my contention, following Bergson, and especially Deleuze’s reading of him, that this past might be a resource of sorts in the production of a specifically different kind of subjectivity. Another way of saying this is that in what follows I am interested in the possibility of breaking habit, since the latter, in its extreme form, staples us to the present and stymies access to this realm of potentiality (indeed, typical subjectivity is a habit, constituted as it is by a bundle of repeated reactions). Bergson’s particular philosophical method allows for a form of ‘travel’ beyond our habitual, or all too human, configuration. It involves the dividing of composites – in this case matter (objectivity) and memory (subjectivity) – along lines that differ in kind, following these lines beyond the particular composites to the extremes before returning, armed with a kind of superior knowledge of what, precisely, constitutes the mixtures. Habitually, we do not ‘see’ these divergent lines because we are condemned, in Deleuze’s terms, ‘to live among badly analyzed composites, and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves’.3 We are subject to certain illusions about who and what we are, and about the world in which we find ourselves – caught within representation as it were. Bergson’s intuitive method hence involves a kind of thinking, or more precisely, intuiting, of a larger reality ‘beyond’ this confused state of affairs, beyond our particular ‘human’ mode of organisation and our specific form of intelligence that is derived from utility. Following Spinoza – who will appear a few more times in the account I give of Bergson below – we might add that this intuition is also a kind of knowledge of that which lies ‘beyond’ our own very particular (that is, human) spatio-temporal coordinates. It is in this sense that, despite Bergson’s idea of the utilitarian nature of thought, or, more precisely, of intelligence, philosophy itself is an attempt at a kind of speculation – an intuitive speculation as it were – beyond Kant’s conditions of possible experience (in Bergson’s terms, simply habit) towards the conditions of ‘real experience’. This is what Deleuze calls ‘transcendental empiricism’: ‘To open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior to our own), to go beyond the human condition: This is the meaning of philosophy.’4 This work of speculative intuition might also lead to a pragmatics of experimentation in so far as attempting to ‘think’ beyond the confused mixture that we are opens up the possibilities for constituting ourselves differently. Indeed, if capitalism controls the matrices of emergence, or simply determines what is possible (what we can buy, what there is



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‘to do’, and so forth), then Bergson allows a kind of thinking outside these parameters. In understanding the mechanisms of actualisation of the virtual – I will go further into these terms in a moment – it becomes possible to think of, and perform, different actualisations. In an echo of Spinoza there is then an implicit ethics here, since Bergson’s philosophy addresses the question of what our bodies, understood as actualising machines, are capable.5 My commentary, which attends specifically to Chapter 3 of Matter and Memory, ‘On the Survival of Images’, coheres around one diagram – taken, initially, from Bergson’s book – that will be built up in the following two sections of this chapter. The final part of the chapter extends this diagram through a brief commentary on another of Bergson’s major works, The Two Sources of Religion and Morality. Here, I am especially interested in the mystic as the one who accesses/ actualises this pure past/virtuality, and ‘utilises’ it in the production of a specifically different kind of subjectivity. THE PLANE OF MATTER For Bergson the past has not ceased to exist, but has merely ceased to be useful in the present. As Bergson remarks: ‘My present is that which interests me, which lives for me, and in a word, that which summons me to action; in contrast my past is essentially powerless.’6 In fact, this present, in which we are situated, always occupies a certain duration, the actual present moment itself being an unattainable mathematical point. My present is precisely a ‘perception of the immediate past and a determination of the immediate future’.7 It is in this sense that we are determined by our pasts, but are also specifically future-orientated beings. It is also this orientation that determines our particular world, our consciousness being nothing other than the awareness of this immediate past, and especially of this impending future. Another way of saying this is that ‘my present consists in the consciousness I have of my body’, which, ‘having extension in space’, ‘experiences sensations and at the same time executes movements’.8 My body, in this sense, is simply a ‘centre of action’, or locus of stimulus and reaction: ‘Situated between the matter which influences it and that on which it has influence, my body is a center of action, the place where the impressions received choose intelligently the path they will follow to transform themselves into movements accomplished.’9 I will return to this question of intelligence below, but we might note here the similarities that this sensori-motor schema has with Spinoza’s first kind of knowledge: both name our general condition of being

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in, and reacting to, the world. In both accounts we are, simply put, extended bodies amongst other extended bodies on a plane of matter. Indeed, this sensori-motor schema – as Bergson calls it – constitutes our experience of material reality.10 Again, the similarities with Spinoza, and especially with Deleuze’s reading of the latter, are remarkable, for what Bergson is saying here is that our capacities to affect, and be affected by, the world constitute our world in so far as it is a world of matter. Our body, understood as this ‘system of sensation and movements’, occupies the very centre of this material world since the latter is necessarily arranged around it. The body, in Bergson’s terms, is then a ‘special image’, situated amongst other images, that constitutes a ‘section of the universal becoming’ of reality itself.11 ‘It is . . . the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things upon which I act – the seat, in a word, of the sensori-motor phenomena.’12 This ‘sectioning’ of reality is determined by perception, and the interests of the organism that determine the latter. The body might then be thought as a kind of hole in the universe: that which does not interest me, and thus that which is un-sensed, passes through me and carries on in that network of contact and communication in which all things participate. It is ‘I’ that disrupts this contact and communication of the universe. ‘I’ am the interruption. ‘I’, as a centre of action, am a partial obstacle in the endless becoming of the universe. It is also in this sense that the universe is bigger than any consciousness we, or any other organism, might have of it. Indeed, we are like a series of shutters closed against different aspects of this universe. This is not, however, to posit an unbridgeable gap between my own world and a universe ‘beyond’, for my own world is capable of being expanded (or indeed narrowed).13 In passing we might note here Bergson’s sidestepping of the Cartesian trap that posits an ‘I’ and then a world. For Bergson – and it is this that gives his writings their speculative character – it is always the world, or universe, that comes first and then the ‘I’ as a subtraction from it. The plane of matter that we perceive, or indeed can perceive (given our particular psycho-physical structure as it is), might then be doubled by another plane that contains all that has no interest for us as we are. A kind of spectral (and dark) double to our own universe. The plane is infinite in character in both cases. ‘Our’ plane of matter – our world as it were – carries on indefinitely: there are always further objects behind the present ones. We might call this first plane the system of objects. It constitutes our ‘natural’ world, but also our manufactured one: a



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plane of capitalism in so far as it is the plane of bodies and markets, of commodities, shopping and other ‘possibilities’ of life. It contains, in a word, that which has interest for me as a human organism, but also as a subject of capitalism. Since we have a body, or bodily functions, we have an existence in this world and on this plane. The other plane – the double – is also infinite in character in so far as it ‘contains’ an infinite field of not-yet-actualised virtualities (things that are unperceived – unsensed – by me). It is then the interests of the organism that dictate the arrangement of its world, since ‘the objects which surround us represent, in varying degrees, an action which we can accomplish upon things or which we must experience from them’.14 And it is this spatial organisation that also determines a particular temporality. As Bergson remarks: The date of fulfillment of this possible action is indicated by the greater or lesser remoteness of the corresponding object, so that distance in space measures the proximity of a threat or of a promise in time. Thus space furnishes us at once with the diagram of our near future, and, as this future must recede indefinitely, space which symbolizes it has for its property to remain, in its immobility, indefinitely open. Hence the immediate horizon given to our perception appears to us to be necessarily surrounded by a wider circle, existing though unperceived, this circle itself implying yet another outside it and so on, ad infinitum.15

We might diagram this plane of matter, with an ‘I’ at the centre and the circles of the future arranged concentrically around the latter as in Figure 10.1. But this plane, and its spectral double, is not everything, for things also exist that do not have an interest for me and thus that do not produce sensations (which is to say are not in my consciousness), but that are also not, as it were, on the plane of matter at all. The past is precisely this: inextensive and powerless, it still exists albeit in an unconscious state. As Bergson remarks: ‘We must make up our minds to it: sensation is, in its essence, extended and localized; it is a source of movement. Pure memory, being inextensive and powerless, does not in any degree share the nature of sensation.’16 This past might become useful and thus conscious, but when it does so it ceases to belong to this realm of the past and becomes present sensation. The actualisation of a virtual memory – recollection – is precisely this becoming-present of the past. Just as we do not doubt the existence of objects that we do not perceive, as long as they are objects that have been perceived or are at some point capable of being perceived (such objects being merely outside of our immediate concern), likewise Bergson suggests that our past exists – or subsists – even though it is

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Figure 10.1  Bergson’s plane of matter (with ‘I’ at centre).

Figure 10.2  The line of matter and the line of memory.

Figure 10.3  Bergson’s cone of memory (from ‘On the Survival of Images’, Matter and Memory).

not fully present to consciousness at that time. Again, the past has not ceased to exist in this sense but has only ceased to be of interest to us. In passing we might posit the existence of a further spectral double to this past that is unconscious, a spectral past that contains the pasts of other consciousnesses – pasts that are not mine, and that perhaps are not even human. I will return to this towards the end of my chapter, but we might note here, again, that it is intuition, and not intelligence, that allows access to these other non-human durations. Just as in Deleuze’s Spinozist definition of a tick (with its small world determined by just three affects), or, indeed, in Leibniz’s definition of a monad, any given world is constituted against a dark background, the ‘immensity of the forest’ that holds no interest for the organism in ques-



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tion. This dark background is not simply composed of those objects that are yet to be perceived, but is composed of that matter which holds no interest whatsoever, at least to the particular organism as it is at that moment of perception. Once more, however, the crucial point is that this ‘larger world’ is not inaccessible, not barred from experience, but is indeed a given in experience. It is the background, or simply ground, from which the body/organism, and its particular perception, is a subtraction.17 Following Bergson’s own diagram, we can then draw this image of matter and memory on two axes that can be superimposed on our earlier diagram of the plane of matter that is itself constituted by ever wider circles of those objects that interest us (capitalism) – an infinitely receding horizon that constitutes our future – superimposed on the dark background of that which holds no interest (Figure 10.2). In Figure 10.2 line AB represents objects in space, whilst line CI represents objects in memory (objects which no longer interest us). As complex bodies – or subjects – we exist at the point of intersection between these two lines, this point being the ‘only one actually given to consciousness’.18 These lines are then drawn against the two dark backgrounds mentioned above: of that which has no interest for me in the future, but also of that which has no interest for me in the past. In fact, these two backgrounds are one and the same: the powerless past and the future in which I have no interest constitute the virtual worlds that surround my actuality. We are active on the plane of matter, which is to say, following Spinoza once more, we are not just the passive receivers of shocks. Nevertheless, it is an activity that is still premised on passive affects, and especially on fears and desires, threats and promises, themselves determined by pleasure and pain. We might say then, again following Spinoza, that it is still the realm of the first kind of knowledge in so far as in it – on the plane of matter – we are still subject to the world. Indeed, memory itself, as it is called forth by a present action, might also be thought of as part of the first kind of knowledge since it only becomes effective on the plane of matter when it operates to aid an already determined action on that plane (I will return to this process of recollection in a moment). This is habit, and, at an extreme, it determines our character, understood as a kind of extreme compression of all our past habitual reactions. Looking once more at Figure 10.2 the point here is that it is only those memories that are useful that become conscious. So, as for the infinitely receding circles of the plane of matter, so too there are receding circles for the past. Indeed, ‘the adherence of this memory to our present condition is exactly comparable to the

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adherence of unperceived objects to those objects which we perceive; and the unconscious plays in each case a similar part’.19 THE CONE OF MEMORY It is as if then there are two memories, different but connected. The first, ‘fixed in the organism, is nothing else but the complete set of intelligently constructed mechanisms which ensure the appropriate response to the various possible demands’.20 This is a memory stored in the body as habit. A memory whose proper terrain of action is the plane of matter or system of objects. This is the realm of reactivity, of typical responses in which we follow, blindly as it were, our desires and turn away from our fears. It is an animal realm of sorts, or, at least, a realm determined by a pleasure principle. The second is ‘true memory’, which, ‘coextensive with consciousness’, ‘retains and ranges along side of each other all our states in the order in which they occur, leaving to each fact its place and, consequently, marking its date, truly moving in the past and not, like the first, in an ever renewed present’.21 This is a memory that is more neutral, and ultimately, apersonal. We might even say inhuman in that it is not selective or connected to the needs of the organism as the latter exists on the plane of matter. It is less memory as such than a general ‘pastness’. Ultimately, it is also a species-memory, or even a kind of cosmic memory of the universe in that it extends far beyond the individual (and it is in this sense that both ‘my’ cone of memory, and that of any life beyond me – the double I mentioned above – are one and the same). The individual is nothing more than a local stoppage within this pure past, which we might also call, following Deleuze-Bergson, the virtual. In many ways it is more appropriate no longer to think of this as the past at all – and the plane of matter as the future – but simply to think about these two realms in terms of what is useful and what is not. After all, notions like past, present and future constitute, for Bergson, particularly confused illusions about the world and our own situation within it. This virtual realm might then be understood as a realm of infinite potentiality, whereas the plane of matter – the actual – is very much the terrain of our finitude, tied as it is to the specific interests of the organism. Indeed, following Spinoza’s understanding, death only occurs on the plane of matter. The realm of the pure past, on the other hand, precisely, survives. Part of our own incorporeal reality partakes of this realm, or, again following Spinoza, part of ourselves has an existence under a species of eternity. We are not just the finite organism (we are somehow ‘part’ of this virtual) – although in another sense this



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is precisely all we are (a habitual set of mechanisms). The connecting link between these two distinct kinds of memory is simply our body that exists on the plane of matter but which, in the very act of perception, calls up images from memory. Thus we have Bergson’s celebrated cone of memory (Figure 10.3), where this true memory hangs, ‘like a gyre’, over the plane of matter – anchored by a body on that very plane, but with its base extending far into the virtual realm. Here are Bergson’s comments on his diagram: If I represent by a cone SAB, the totality of the recollections accumulated in my memory, the base AB, situated in the past, remains motionless, while the summit S, which indicates at all times my present, moves forward unceasingly, and unceasingly also touches the moving plane P of my actual representation of the universe. At S, the image of the body is concentrated, and, since it belongs to the plane P, this image does but receive and restore actions emanating from all the images of which the plane is composed.22

The cone then, fixed to the plane of matter by the sensori-motor schema but extending far into the past, is specifically dynamic involving two kinds of memory that are nevertheless connected. The first, ‘bodily memory’, or habit, is the apex of the cone, ever moving, inserted by the second, ‘true memory’, in the ‘shifting plane of experience’.23 Each kind of memory lends the other its support: For, that a recollection should appear in consciousness, it is necessary that it should descend from the heights of pure memory down to the precise point where action is taking place. In other words, it is from the present that the appeal to which memory responds comes, and it is from the sensori-motor elements of present action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life.24

For Bergson it is the ‘constancy of this agreement’ between these two movements, between the apex and the base, that characterises what he calls a ‘well balanced mind’, or a ‘man nicely adapted to life’.25 A lived life involves the coming and going, the oscillation, between these two states.26 There are two extreme positions that help define this process. First, the ‘man of impulse’ who lives predominantly on the plane of matter and for whom memory’s role is solely the exigencies of immediate action: ‘To live only in the present, to respond to stimulus by the immediate reaction which prolongs it, is the mark of the lower animals: the man who proceeds in this way is a man of impulse.’27 Following Spinoza once more, this would be an individual consigned to live solely in the first kind of knowledge. A purely reactive mode of being. Second, there is the dreamer: ‘But he who lives in the past for the mere pleasure of living there, and in whom recollections emerge into the

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light of consciousness without any advantage for the present situation is hardly better fitted for action: here we have no man of impulse but a dreamer.’28 In passing we might note here Nietzsche’s comments in The Gay Science about those who remain spectators of life rather than active creators.29 As Bergson remarks: ‘Between these two extremes lives the happy disposition of memory docile enough to follow with precision all the outlines of the present situation, but energetic enough to resist all other appeal. Good sense, or practical sense, is probably nothing but this.’30 Nevertheless, good sense might also be understood as a kind of limiting common sense that adapts to things the way they already are. Again, this would be the ‘use’ of memory to serve the present and any action determined by the plane of matter as it is already constituted. To a certain extent this is the production of an efficient and functional being (within capitalism as it were). It is in this sense that it might be ‘useful’ to think about those cases when memory actualises the pure past, but not necessarily for any utility. In fact, Bergson goes on to write about such cases, and specifically the dream state mention above: ‘But, if almost the whole of our past is hidden from us because it is inhibited by the necessities of present action, it will find strength to cross the threshold of consciousness in all cases where we renounce the interests of effective action to replace ourselves, so to speak, in the life of dreams.’31 This is the temporary suspension of the sensori-motor schema that allows the past to be actualised, not in the service of the present but in and as itself. Following my comments above we might say that this is the actualisation of the virtual in and of itself, outside of the immediate interests and concerns of the organism. We might turn again to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science here, this time to his more positive definition of idleness – or ‘leisure and otium’ – as being the progenitor of genuine creative thought.32 Walter Benjamin also says something similar in his own aphoristic style: ‘Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.’33 Here non-productivity – hesitation, stillness – is in and of itself creative. In fact, this hesitation of the sensori-motor schema – situated at point S between the actual and virtual – is also that which is constitutive of us as humans beyond habit as it were. The gap between stimulus and response is produced, almost as side effect, by our brain-body assemblage (or, simply, our nervous system), which in its complexity, instantiates a temporal gap in so far as any reaction to a given stimulus has the ‘choice’ of a variety of pathways in response. A moment of indeterminacy is introduced into the system. A ‘stopping of the world’



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we might say, that constitutes our difference from the ‘lower animals’ and brings about a certain freedom of action (in so far as we are no longer tied to immediate reactivity). This is not a difference set in stone, for it might be the case that such a hesitation can be produced in other ‘higher animals’ and certainly that it might be produced in life forms to come, or in AI for that matter. In any case this gap, which can be further opened up by slowness or stillness (or indeed other ‘strategies’ of non-communication), might in itself allow a certain freedom from the call of the plane of matter with its attendant temporality (as we have seen, the plane of matter, or system of objects, implies a certain temporality – of past, present, future – and of time that passes between these). Again, this is the actualisation of an involuntary memory, via a gap in experience, that has no utility for the present.34 In an echo of Spinoza, this gap is then a passageway of sorts ‘out’ of the plane of matter that determines a certain reality. It is an access point, or portal, to the infinite as that which is within time, but also outside it. In passing we might note that the content of this Bergsonian cone can also be understood in Lacanian terms as the Real in so far as it ‘contains’ everything not part of the sensori-motor schema (habit), which here can be understood – in its most expanded sense – as the realm of the symbolic (language, as it is typically employed, consisting of a certain adaptation, however complex this might be, to the concerns of the plane of matter). In Badiou’s terms we might understand the ‘content’ of the cone as ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ in that it ‘contains’ everything not counted in the situation/world as it is (within ‘consistent multiplicity’, located on the plane of matter and within the system of already counted objects). It also explains why certain elements of the past are counted – simply that they ‘aid’ the present situation. Here history is always a history of a given ‘present’, counted by and for that ‘present’. We might note the importance of circumnavigating this particular ‘history of the present’ and of excavating a different history, what we might call a ‘present of history’.35 Indeed, the present in this latter sense is produced, in part, by the reactivation of past present moments. 36 We return to Figure 10.3 and add, following Bergson, more detail to obtain Figure 10.4. And, once more, Bergson’s comments: between the sensori-motor mechanisms figured by the point S and the totality of the memories disposed in AB there is room . . . for a thousand repetitions of our psychical life, figured as many sections A9B9, A0B0, etc., of the same cone. We tend to scatter ourselves over AB in the measure that

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Figure 10.4  Bergson’s cone of memory with ‘levels’ (from ‘On the Survival of Images’, Matter and Memory).

Figure 10.5  ‘Shining Points’/fractal ecology in cone.

Figure 10.6  Cone of the mystic: 1. Static religion (habit/ritual) 2. Dynamic religion (introspection/intuition) 3. The mystic.

we detach ourselves from our sensory and motor state to live in the life of dreams; we tend to concentrate ourselves in S in the measure that we attach ourselves more firmly to the present reality, responding by motor reaction to sensory stimulation.37

The realm of memory is then fractal in nature. Depending on the level ‘accessed’, less or more detail comes into focus, or, in Bergson’s terms: ‘So a nebulous mass, seen through more and more powerful telescopes reveals itself into an ever greater number of stars.’38 Indeed, as I briefly intimated above, on the ‘highest’ level all recollections are shared. This



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is also the most dispersed level, where every memory – every virtuality – has its own place complete in every detail. The content of the cone is a veritable universe of galaxies, each a complex constellation of different durations. Depending on its location towards the summit or the base this repetition is smaller or larger, but, in each case, is a ‘complete representation of the past’.39 The lowest point of the cone, point S, ‘corresponds to the greatest possible simplification of our mental life’.40 At AB, on the other hand, we ‘go from the psychical state which is merely “acted,” to that which is exclusively “dreamed” ’.41 Here, in a ‘consciousness detached from action’ there is no particular reason why any given memory will actualise itself – no reason that we would ‘dwell upon one part of the past rather than another’.42 ‘Everything happens, then, as though our recollections were repeated an infinite number of times in these many possible reductions of our past life.’43 We have here an explanation of the different ‘tones’ of mental life – slices through the cone – a whole temporal mapping as yet unexplored. Just as there are relations of similarity, that is to say, ‘different planes, infinite in number’ of memory,44 so there are relations of contiguity on these planes: The nearer we come to action, for instance, the more contiguity tends to approximate to similarity and to be distinguished from a mere relation of chronological succession . . . On the contrary, the more we detach ourselves from action, real or possible, the more association by contiguity tends merely to reproduce the consecutive images of our past life.45

In this sense there is a whole complex ecology of memories – or what Deleuze calls ‘regions of being’ – inhabiting each plane,46 with ‘always some dominant memories, shining points round which others form a vague nebulosity. These shining points are multiplied in the degree to which our memory expands.’47 We might note again that we have here a different theory of history (indeed, we could imagine Bergson writing a philosophy of history using the cone as diagram). At different degrees of detail different moments/ events will be foregrounded and take on relevance and importance. We also have something stranger with the idea that there might be different ‘personal’ histories – composed of intensive states – ‘contained’ within the cone. Is this not Klossowski’s Nietzsche, who in the eternal return passes through different intensive states – precisely as an oscillation between base and apex – that he ‘identifies’ as different historical characters? This also has some bearing on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of subjectivity as processual (and the subject itself as a residuum) as it appears in Anti-Oedipus.48

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We might then draw this complex ecological subjectivity, and the plane of matter on to which it is pinned, as in Figure 10.5. THE MYSTIC It is only at its topmost point that the cone fits into matter; as soon as we leave the apex, we enter into a new realm. What is it? Let us call it the spirit, or again, if you will, let us refer to the soul, but in that case bear in mind that we are remoulding language and getting the word to encompass a series of experiences instead of an arbitrary definition. This experimental searching will suggest the possibility and even probability of the survival of the soul . . . Let us betake ourselves to the higher plane: we shall find an experience of another type: mystic intuition. And this is presumably a participation in the divine essence.49

The plane of matter, or what I have also been calling the system of objects, is also the realm of ‘static religion’ as it is laid out in Bergson’s The Two Sources of Religion and Morality. Here habit includes intelligence and the myth-making function as modes of utilitarian adaptation to the world. Indeed, just as instinct meets its terminal point in insects and the hive, so intelligence is also a terminal point that finds its ends in man. But Bergson’s ‘vital impulse’, in man at least, finds ways of extending itself beyond this intelligence. Indeed, it is from the plane of matter – and through the especially complex organisms that inhabit it – that the journey of life continues. This is precisely intuition in Bergson’s sense, an intuition that operates contra intelligence and that allows an access to that which lies ‘beyond’ the plane of matter, rediscovering, as Deleuze puts it ‘all the levels, all the degrees of expansion (détente) and contraction that coexist in the virtual Whole’.50 Indeed, the ‘creative emotion’ of The Two Sources is ‘precisely a cosmic Memory, that actualizes all the levels at the same time, that liberates man from the plane (plan) or the level that is proper to him, in order to make him a creator, adequate to the whole movement of creation’.51 Again, it is a certain hesitancy that allows for this journey. The gap between stimulus and response is here an ‘interval’ that is opened up within the habits/rituals and intelligence of society (a specifically disinterested interval as it were). Just as the body, at a certain degree of complexity, allows for this hesitancy, so the myth-making function itself (or, static religion) puts the conditions in place for a further gap – again, a ‘stopping of the world’ – and a concomitant movement ‘beyond’ itself. This is Bergson’s definition of ‘dynamic religion’. Deleuze notes that ‘This liberation, this embodiment of cosmic memory in creative emotions, undoubtedly only takes place in privileged souls.’52 Indeed, it is the mystic that embodies the latter, and, in



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a direct echoing of Spinoza, the experience of such a mystical persona, or personified intensive state, is characterised by joy. To quote Bergson: It would be content to feel itself pervaded, though retaining its own personality, by a being immeasurably mightier than itself, just as iron is pervaded by the fire which makes it glow. Its attachment to life would henceforth be its inseparability from this principle, joy in joy, love of that which is all love. In addition it would give itself to society, but to a society comprising all humanity, love is the love of the principle underlying it.53

In a further echo of Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, this mystical experience is then also seen as divine: ‘In our eyes, the ultimate end of mysticism is the establishment of a contact, consequently of a partial coincidence, with the creative effort which life itself manifests. This effort is of God, if it is not God himself.’54 Indeed, for Bergson, mystical experience is God – or the ‘creative effort’ – acting through an individual soul. This then is the movement of intuition beyond intelligence. The latter stymies the former, but also puts the conditions in place for its activation. The cone of the mystic might then be drawn as in Figure 10.6. CONCLUDING REMARKS: CAPITALISM AND THE ATTENTION TO LIFE The above might lead one to believe that contemplation is the final moment of the élan vital and, as such, that inaction is the privileged mode of a different production of subjectivity. Certainly, capitalism encourages and extracts surplus from an endless productivity, and, in this sense, a certain slackening in the sensori-motor schema (and concomitant dreaming) works to upset a utilitarian outlook, to counter-act the dominant injunction to live at a certain speed of life (the ‘always-being-switched-on’, or, more generally, the regulative speed of the market) and to resist the world of commodities that accompanies the latter.55 With no movement beyond the plane of matter there is no freedom from this capitalism as it were, at least, no freedom from the present plane of purely utilitarian interest. This then is to suggest a strange kind of agency in which non-agency is key. A production of subjectivity in which production, at least of one kind, is refused, or simply halted. It is to privilege an involuntary memory that does not come to the service of the plane of matter but allows a circumnavigation of the concerns of this terrain. It is a call to slow down, to hesitate, to open and occupy what Deleuze calls ‘vacuoles of non-communication’.56 Ultimately, it is a kind of super-productivity that arises from non-productivity; the sidestepping of given subjectivity – that is already determined by the plane of matter – and a surrender-

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ing of a kind to that which lies ‘outside’ the subject-as-is.57 Bergson suggests in The Two Sources that this intensive state is also produced by wine, drugs, hashish, ‘protoxide of nitrogen’, indeed any Dionysian mechanism that disables the intelligence (the latter, again, being that which stymies access to the divine).58 On the other hand, to dream is to remain passive. This passivity is the second peril that arises from too great a detachment from life. It lacks the activity – or participation – that the plane of matter gives life. One might think here of the Situationist thesis on the Spectacle understood as not just the world of commodities, advertising and so forth, but also the way these inculcate a position of being a spectator of one’s own life. We might also return here to Bergson’s thesis in Matter and Memory and note what he says about a certain ‘attention to life’ that is determined by action: Our body, with the sensations it receives on the one hand and the movements which it is capable of executing on the other hand, is then, that which fixes our mind, and gives it ballast and poise . . . these sensations and these movements condition what we might term our attention to life, and that is why everything depends on their cohesion in the normal work of the mind, as in a pyramid which should stand on its apex.59

Following Bergson then, and despite what I have said above about a common sense that is limiting, we might say that although the gap and the passage to the virtual is crucial, on its own this is not enough. It must, in fact, be translated back into action on that plane from which it departed. This is the case for an individual who returns from memory to action, but also for the mystic who returns from cosmic-memory to action: there is an exceptional, deep-rooted mental healthiness, which is readily recognizable. It is expressed in the bent for action, the faculty of adapting and re-adapting oneself to circumstances, in firmness combined with suppleness, in the prophetic discernment of what is possible and what is not, in the spirit of simplicity which triumphs over complications, in a word, supreme good sense. Is not this exactly what we find in . . . mystics?60

Indeed, for Bergson mystics are characterised less by contemplation than by a ‘superabundant activity’.61 They are filled with the ‘superabundance of life’ and thus have a ‘boundless impetus’ for action.62 Crucially however, this is not, it seems to me, the recollection of a past in the service of a predetermined action – that is habit. Rather, it is precisely the opposite of this: the return circuit is used as a means for freeing up a habitual repetition which has lost some of this circularity and mobility. In passing we might suggest that it is the latter – a kind of freezing of actual-virtual circuits – which, it seems to me, characterises capitalism’s terrain of operation to the extent that this extends



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Figure 10.7  Return path/circuit of the mystic/militant.

‘into’ the virtual (the much heralded immaterial turn of capitalism, etc.). This travel, it seems to me, is precisely from the finite to the infinite, but involves a return back to the finite (following my brief mention of Klossowski’s Nietzsche above might we not also name this circuit the eternal return?). In more prosaic terms we have here the beginnings of an ethico-political account of memory: the actualisation of past events in the present in order to counteract that present. A kind of calling to, or re-calling of, the past. The past operates here as resource against the present, at least to the degree that such a present is limited to a logic of the possible – determined by a perspective of what, precisely, already constitutes the plane of matter. We might also think here of Badiou’s militant who has a fidelity to an event that might have happened in the past but that is actualised in the present in order to transform the latter. The militant ‘lives’ history in this sense. Again, following Badiou, we might suggest that the two circuits – of the mystic and militant – are similar, each accessing that which is beyond the plane of matter/the situation or world as it is in order to return and transform that very plane ‘using’ whatever has been learnt on the ‘journey’ (Figure 10.7). In each case it is action – or the attention to life – that determines the circuit, although this action must be understood as one that is undetermined by habit. It is, in fact, the possibility of a different future action that directs the circuit of the mystic and the militant and that in itself implies and produces a different world (in passing, we might also say that it is this return to the plane of matter that constitutes the realm of politics in general in so far as the latter is concerned with the former).

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It is a human – at point S – that is then both the possibility of this journey and that which prevents it. It is what we do on the plane of matter – again, at point S – that determines whether we can exit this plane, as well as the consequences of this exiting (and of our subsequent return). In terms of thinking through the consequences of our exit it might be worthwhile bringing Badiou and his concepts of fidelity to bear on the above diagram.63 In terms of the possibilities of the exit itself, is it the case, for example, that certain arrangements of matter might work as a platform for the journey? Certain specific practices for example? Indeed, what is the role of preparation in this diagram? Lack of space prevents me addressing these important questions here, but one such answer might be found by bringing Bergson’s cone into conjunction with both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Michel Foucault’s ‘Technologies of the Self’.64 Indeed, it seems to me that ultimately it is only through this kind of synthetic programme – of bringing heterogeneous philosophical, psychoanalytical and other materials into productive encounter – that we begin to truly draw the contours of an effective production of subjectivity in and against today’s reductive and homogenising neoliberal landscape. In conclusion we might then say that the Bergsonian cone is now ready to be spliced on to other diagrams, other kinds of thought. If this non-philosophical practice is not exactly what Bergson himself does in his own writings (although intuition contra intelligence might be said to call for procedures such as this) it is, it seems to me, precisely what the art of immanence – at least in one of its instantiations – necessarily entails. NOTES  1. A version of this essay was published as the section ‘Bergson’s plane of matter and the cone of memory’ in Chapter 1, ‘From Joy to the Gap: the Accessing of the Infinite by the Finite (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson)’, of my monograph On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the FiniteInfinite Relation (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), pp. 38–57.   2. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 71.   3. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 28.  4. Ibid.   5. Has capitalism now colonised this virtual? My own take on this is that certain technologies, for example the mapping of the human genome, do indeed partake of a kind of future-within-the-present, but that in fact this is a logic of the possible, tied as it is to a certain linear temporality and to already existing knowledges and procedures.



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 6. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 137.   7. Ibid., p. 138.  8. Ibid.  9. Ibid. 10. Or, as Bergson puts it: ‘ in that continuity of becoming which is reality itself, the present moment is constituted by the quasi-instantaneous section effected by our perception in the flowing mass, and this section is precisely that which we call the material world’ (ibid., p. 139). 11. Ibid., p. 151. 12. Ibid., pp. 151–2. 13. And in this specific sense Bergson’s philosophy operates as a precursor to the claims made by ‘Speculative Realism’ about being able to access – or think – the ‘great outdoors’ of pre-Critical philosophy in so far as it refuses the Kantian phenomena-noumena gap that itself determines what Quentin Meillassoux has famously dubbed ‘correlationism’ (Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. R. Brassier [London: Continuum, 2008], p. 7). Importantly, here it is not science – or, indeed the matheme – that allows this radically a-subjective ‘thinking’, but the organism itself in so far as the latter is, as it were, already a part of the ‘great outdoors’ (what else could it be?). For further discussion of Meillassoux in relation to the production of subjectivity see the section ‘Quentin Meillassoux and the correlation’ in the Conclusion, ‘Composite Diagram and Relations of Adjacency’, to O’Sullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity, pp. 205–10. 14. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 144. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., p. 140. 17. One need only think of cinema, as indeed Deleuze himself famously does, or indeed other new technologies that open up these virtual worlds by altering the spatial and temporal registers of human perception (cinema, in this sense, continues the task of philosophy – or ‘transcendental empiricism’ – ultimately moving towards an imaging of the pure past itself in the time-image). 18. Ibid., p. 143. 19. Ibid., p. 145. 20. Ibid., p. 151. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., p. 152. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., pp. 152–3. 25. Ibid., p. 153. 26. I attend to this particular oscillation, and the intensive states – or singular personae – that are ‘produced’ by it, in the section ‘Desiring-machines and the body without organs’ of Chapter 5, ‘Desiring-Machines, Chaoids, Probe-heads: Towards a Speculative Production of Subjectivity (Deleuze

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and Guattari)’, of O’Sullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity, pp. 169–82. See especially the diagram on p. 174. 27. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 153. 28. Ibid. 29. For Nietzsche the contemplative life might be counterpoised (in a dovetailing also, as we shall see, with Bergson’s thesis on the mystic) with a more active participation in life that follows from it. Here one is not merely a spectator of life, however attentive, nor, in fact, simply an actor in the drama of life, but rather the author of this drama: ‘As the poet, he certainly possesses vis contemplativa and a retrospective view of his work; but at the same time and above all vis creative, which the man of action lacks, whatever universal belief may say’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. J. Nauckhoff [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], p. 171). Nietzsche continues: ‘It is we, the thinking-sensing ones, who really and continually make something that is not yet there: the whole perpetually growing world of valuations, colours, weights, perspectives, scales, affirmations and negations’ (ibid.). 30. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 153. 31. Ibid., p. 156. 32. Amongst other things The Gay Science offers a powerful diagnosis and critique of the speed of contemporary life – and of its profit-driven character. To quote Nietzsche: ‘already one is ashamed of keeping still; long reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages – or lives like someone who might always “miss out on something” ’ (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 183). It is here that Nietzsche opposes this ‘life in the hunt for profit’ with a life of leisure, or, we might say, simply of slowness that is counter to the regulative speeds of the market (ibid.). 33. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov’, in Illuminations, trans. H. Zorn, ed. H. Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 90. 34. It is the summoning up of an incorporeal universe. Guattari will say something similar about Duchamp’s readymades, specifically the Bottlerack, and the universes of reference opened up by this trigger point, in his essay ‘Ritornellos and Existential Affects’: ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Bottlerack functions as the trigger for a constellation of referential universes engaging both intimate reminiscences (the cellar of the house, a certain winter, the rays of light upon spider’s webs, adolescent solitude) and connotations of a cultural or economic order – the time when bottles were still washed with the aid of a bottle wash . . .’ (Félix Guattari, ‘Ritornellos and Existential Affects’, trans. J. Schiesari and G. Van Den Abbeele, in The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996], p. 164). For a compelling discussion of Guattari’s take on the readymade – understood as an ‘expressive mechanism capable of creating a people yet to come’ – see Stephen Zepke, ‘The Readymade: Art as the Refrain of Life’,



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in S. O’Sullivan and S. Zepke, eds, Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 39. 35. Deleuze writes about this first – and typical – idea of history in his essay ‘Control and Becoming’: ‘What history grasps in an event is the way its actualized in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history. History isn’t experimental, its just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history . . . Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts only the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to “become”, that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Untimely’ (Gilles Deleuze, ‘Control and Becoming’, in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. M. Joughin [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995], pp. 170–1. 36. We might go further than this and suggest that if the plane of matter constitutes our ‘reality’ and those aspects from the cone that are actualised are our ‘history’ then the actualisation of other aspects of the cone (or, indeed, other aspects of the plane of matter) that were hitherto ‘invisible’ might be thought of as a ‘fictioning’. It seems to me that this is fertile territory for thinking art practice, but also a militant subjectivity that is intent on living a life not already proscribed by dominant narratives of ‘reality’. 37. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 162–3. 38. Ibid., p. 166. 39. Ibid., p. 168. 40. Ibid., p. 166. 41. Ibid., p. 167. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., p. 169. Bergson gives us the example here of hearing a word spoken in another language. It might summon up the memory of an individual that once spoke that word, in which case the memory is located closer to the base. It might also however make one think of the language itself, in which case the memory is located towards the summit, which is to say is more ‘disposed towards immediate response’ (ibid.). 44. Ibid., p. 170. 45. Ibid., p. 171. 46. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 61. 47. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 171. 48. Again, this is the subject matter of part of Chapter 5 of O’Sullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity. 49. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. A. Audra and C. Brereton with W. Horstall-Carter (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1935), p. 264. 50. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 106. 51. Ibid., p. 111. 52. Ibid. 53. Bergson, The Two Sources, p. 212.

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54. Ibid., p. 220. 55. It might be countered that the ‘creativity’ produced through ‘dreaming’ is precisely that element that contemporary capitalism is most eager to both generate and exploit, but crucially, I would argue, it is only a certain kind of creativity, one that can be instrumentalised, that is encouraged. Can this difference be sustained, or does cognitive capitalism, in fact, describe a general exploitation of the human faculty for dreaming/creativity, or actualising the virtual in new ways? The question here would be whether pinning capitalism to the world of the sensori-motor schema runs into difficulty in relation to cognitive capitalism, which exploits the intense aspects of production – affect and creativity. My argument, following Bergson-Deleuze, would be that it is not the virtual that is here being colonised, but simply the possible, or, we might say – at a stretch – a specific set of virtualities, or even a certain actual-virtual circuit (I want to thank Stephen Zepke for discussions related to this particular note). 56. Deleuze, ‘Control and Becoming’, p. 175. 57. This question of strategy – of how we might, as it were, invite the outside in – is compellingly addressed in Reza Negarestani’s thesis of ‘schizostrategy’: ‘To become open or to experience the chemistry of openness is not possible through “opening yourself” (a desire associated with boundary, capacity and survival economy which covers both you and your environment); but it can be affirmed by entrapping yourself within a strategic alignment with the outside, becoming a lure for its exterior forces. Radical openness can be invoked by becoming more of a target for the outside’ (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials [Melbourne: re.press, 2008], p. 199). I explore this further in the section ‘Reza Negarestani and affordance’ in the Conclusion, ‘Composite Diagram and Relations of Adjacency’, to O’Sullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity, pp. 210–12. 58. Bergson, The Two Sources, p. 218. 59. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 173 60. Bergson, The Two Sources, p. 228. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., p. 232. 63. This is something I attempt in Chapter 4, ‘The Strange Temporality of the Subject: Life In-between the Infinite and the Finite (Deleuze contra Badiou)’, of O’Sullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity, pp. 125–68. See especially the diagram on p. 161. 64. And this is precisely the concern of Chapter 2, ‘The Care of the Self versus the Ethics of Desire: Two Diagrams of the Production of Subjectivity (and of the Subject’s Relation to Truth) (Foucault versus Lacan)’, of O’Sullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity, pp. 59–88. See especially the diagram on p. 79.

11. Painting the Invisible: Time, Matter and the Image in Bergson and Michel Henry BRENDAN PRENDEVILLE

There are intriguing parallels between the thought of Bergson and that of the radically unorthodox phenomenologist Michel Henry, although the latter, so far as I can tell, made little or no reference to the former and identified wholly – if also dissentingly – with phenomenology.1 Bergson’s philosophy in any case has much in common with phenomenology, through shared origins in nineteenthcentury psychology; Bergson, like William James and Franz Brentano, conducted a p ­ hilosophical enquiry into psychic life, in contrast to the scientistic experimentalism of the psycho-physicians.2 In France, Bergson’s thought left traces in the work of both Sartre and MerleauPonty. Henry, a philosopher of a later generation, began his work when phenomenology, rather than Bergsonian philosophy, was the prevailing and rising current of thought in France, and his entire effort, from the outset of his career to his death, consisted in radically interrogating and revising this inheritance, principally with reference to Husserl and Heidegger. His great contribution consisted in developing a phenomenology of affectivity and immanence, and it was this that brought him, without his apparent intention, into a certain proximity with Bergson. I want to examine this unacknowledged affinity – while taking note of significant underlying differences – with reference to certain shared or comparable motifs. Central among these is a critique of representation that is set out in different but partly congruent terms in the thought of both philosophers, though Henry alone calls into question the representation of the visible in art. It is here that Henry’s book on Kandinsky comes into play, and I have evoked its challenging title, Seeing the Invisible (Voir l’invisible), in my own.3 Bergson himself does not make play with the idea of invisibility, nor is he especially concerned with the visible as such, normally deploying instead the concept of perception in general. Unlike Henry, and in still 189

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greater contrast with Merleau-Ponty, Bergson made scant reference to painting. While the remarks he did make are significant, I intend to show that, more than what he actually said about painting, it is rather his concept of the durational nature of consciousness that is illuminating both for the way we see paintings and for the act of pictorial representation. For indeed – perhaps surprisingly – representational painting (in the Western, post-renaissance tradition) has particular relevance for Bergson, and in this there is a marked contrast with Henry. Among his remarks on art, some observations Bergson makes at various points in lectures published in The Creative Mind (La Pensée et le mouvant) find particular relevance here.4 At the end of ‘The Possible and the Real’, he claims that philosophy can bring to all ‘certain of the satisfactions which art at rare intervals procures for the privileged’, by letting us apprehend, beyond our perception of immediate need, the ‘ever-recurring novelty, the moving originality of things’. We will thereby ‘feel we are participating, creators of ourselves, in the great work of creation which is the origin of all things and which goes on before our eyes’.5 He takes up the same theme in his lecture ‘The Perception of Change’, addressing the question, ‘how can one ask the eyes of the body, or those of the mind, to see more than they see?’; it is possible, he proposes, by virtue of attending to what art shows us, in particular, that art which gives the most important place to imitation, I mean painting . . . A Corot, a Turner . . . have seen in nature many an aspect that we did not notice . . . If we reflect deeply upon what we feel as we look at a Turner or a Corot, we shall find that, if we accept them and admire them, it is because we had already perceived something of what they show us. But we had perceived without seeing.6

Merleau-Ponty, as it happens, made a strikingly similar observation (albeit in support of a different analysis) with respect to Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, where we are made aware of the projecting hand of Captain Frans Banning Cocq by the shadow it casts on the pale tunic of his lieutenant: ‘Everyone with eyes has at one time or other witnessed this play of shadows, or something like it, and has been made to see a space and the things included therein. But it works in us without us; it hides itself in making the object visible.’7 None of the foregoing would have satisfied Michel Henry, for whom invisibility meant something more radical than the constitutionally overlooked or subsumed complexity of the visible, or indeed anything having to do with the perceptual relationship as such. Of essential importance in this respect are two related sets of problems, which occupied Bergson quite as much as Henry (and Merleau-Ponty for that



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matter, indeed phenomenologists in general), concerning, respectively, objectivity and awareness; these problems also have a close bearing on the theme of invisibility, and on painting. Bergson and Henry, in their different ways, each developed a concerted critique of the idea of an objective, external reality, as espoused by science and by common sense. Both philosophers, accordingly, had an essential concern with subjectivity, where the latter was not to be counterposed to anything external. If we consider the visible as the dimension most readily associated with objectivity, then it seems paradoxical that the philosophers should have enlisted painting for their cause – albeit only tangentially in Bergson’s case. Unlike Merleau-Ponty, for whom ‘the visible’ came to denote, with its ‘lining of the invisible’, the world construed as an intersubjective complex, neither Bergson’s nor Henry’s models of subjectivity were designed for the reciprocal embrace of a (visuo-spatial) world. Indeed, Henry states typically that ‘our body cannot be in the world save on the condition of not at all being of it’.8 Bergson, contending with our ingrained tendency to spatialise the temporality of the vécu (lived experience), proposes that we should consider the body not, in accordance with habits of speech, as a kind of container, but rather as ‘a section of the universal becoming’.9 The objectivity we confer on our own bodies as much as on other things is particularly attributable to the sense of sight, since ‘the eye has developed the habit of separating, in the visual field, the relatively invariable figures which are then supposed to change place without changing form’.10 Bergson’s central intuition – to use a favoured term – is that the universe is inherently dynamic, that duration, la durée, is its essence, that matter is itself durational, the universe comprising ‘images’ at once transmitting and receiving, so to speak, from all to all, in a continuous vibration. Space, with its distinct objects, is the mere artefact and the servant of our needs. We are at the apex of an evolutionary process whereby there emerged from the mass of determinate vibrations constituting the universe ‘centres of indetermination’ capable of selecting from among all available information only that which interested them. ‘They allow to pass through them, so to speak, those external influences to which they are indifferent.’11 Perception is a means to action, not an instrument of knowledge; to serve our ends, we ‘throw beneath the continuity of sensible qualities, that is to say beneath concrete extensity, a network, of which the meshes may be altered to any shape whatever and become as small as we please’.12 Artists, according to Bergson, are defined by their exemption from this perceptual utilitarianism; they are those ‘whose senses or whose consciousness are less adherent to life. Nature has forgotten to attach their faculty of perceiving to their

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faculty of acting. When they look at a thing, they see it for itself, and not for themselves’.13 There are disputable aspects to this statement, but for the moment it is worth noting that it inherently favours visual art, and this despite Bergson’s having recognised the particular affinity music must have for a theory of duration: ‘Let us listen to a melody, allowing ourselves to be lulled by it: do we not have a clear perception of a movement that is not attached to a mobile [object], of a change without anything changing?’14 He even adds that, if we have a tendency to break the continuity into ‘a juxtaposition of distinct notes’, this is partly because ‘our auditory perception has acquired the habit of absorbing visual images’.15 It would appear that Bergson singles out (representational) painting because it might be seen to override or undo the work of objectification on its own ground, so to speak. Conversely, we might think in this context of the quasi-phenomenological concept of the ‘tournant’ of experience he formulated in Matter and Memory: there, he proposes a project to ‘seek experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience’.16 Might we see a Corot or a Turner – or any painter comparably representing the flux of the visible – as situating themselves precisely at such a tournant? I will leave this question in suspense temporarily, and turn to Henry who, unlike Bergson, devoted an entire book to painting. There, through an exposition and analysis of the ideas (far more than the work) of Kandinsky, he arrives at the conclusion that all paintings are fundamentally abstract (though as we shall see, he perhaps actually means all ‘true’ paintings, since he also holds that not even all abstract paintings are really abstract, in the sense he intends). The closest he comes to approximating Bergson’s remarks on painting is in the following passage: Painting is a counter-perception. What this means is that this chain of referential significations by which the ordinary reality of the world is constituted – this continual movement of going beyond the sensible appearances to a monotonous and stereotypical background of practical objects – is sharply interrupted by the artist’s regard. By setting aside this practical background, colours and forms cease to depict the object and to be lost in it. They themselves have and are seen to have their own value; they become pure pictorial forms.17

Taking this passage in isolation, I find myself tempted at first to interpret it along Bergsonian lines, as follows: a painter depicting, say, the corner of a room with an open window (I am thinking of Adolph Menzel’s The Balcony Room, of 1845),18 will attend to features of texture and of the play of light that a person going across the room to close the window



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will simply disregard. Unlike Bergson, however, Henry acknowledges the qualities specific to painting, and while he is right to do so, I hesitate over his assertion that depicted objects necessarily simply become pure pictorial forms: in cases where the painting is plainly intended to approximate appearance in some degree (Vermeer, say, or Chardin, or Courbet – or Menzel), the thing represented is not superseded by the depictive surface, but held in an alliance with it.19 Yet it is immediately obvious that, however valid my observation in itself, I have misconstrued Henry’s statement, for he does not – he cannot – have any kind of representation remotely in mind. ‘Painting is a counter-perception’, i.e. it is nothing at all like a Bergsonian emancipation of perception from the constraints of action. The ‘sensible appearances’ he has in mind are not, say, the curtain blown by the wind, the sunlight on the wall, but the shape made by the curtain, the colour of the light; and he means, not that the erstwhile utilitarian objects become pictorial forms – painted marks – in which they reappear transfigured, but rather that they are replaced altogether by purely pictorial elements. The recognisable elements in Kandinsky’s early paintings – onion domes, flying horses – are clearly not representational in the sense of depicting the visible, but are visionary elements identifiable wholly with the colour and shape wherein they arise. Not only is Kandinsky quite evidently free of realist or naturalist traits, but equally, for Henry, he has nothing to do with the kinds of abstraction or near-abstraction predominant in early twentieth-century modernism, all of which, ranging from Cubism to Constructivism, ‘never cease to relate to the visible as their sole object. They seek only to grasp the object’s true nature and ultimately to grasp the true nature of visibility, whether it is sensible light (Impressionism) or transcendental (Mondrian, Malevich).’20 When Henry claims that ‘all painting is abstract’ what he principally has in mind are paintings which expressly turn away from the world and towards what he considers the only reality, namely life itself, as lived and felt; he finds abstraction thus understood in earlier Christian art, and in the work and ideas of Kandinsky.21 The challenge that Henry sets himself, and pursues through a close reading of Kandinsky’s theories, is to show how it is possible that painting might belong essentially to the invisible. At one point, making reference to the Monet painting of haystacks which so inspired Kandinsky,22 he evokes the Impressionist dissolution of the depicted object, in terms suggestive of Bergson. The painter, he writes, overrides the limits of the given object to configure ‘a bedazzlement where reality breaks down into pure bursts of blinding light, slips into the unknown, loses all consistency, and ultimately disappears’. Kandinsky, he continues,

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associated the lesson he learnt from Monet’s haystacks ‘with the one he learnt from Niels Bohr: physical reality has no substance and in some way no reality; quanta of energy move in leaps without crossing through it’.23 Yet in what immediately follows, it becomes clear that he has evoked this quasi-Bergsonian vision only in order to deny its relevance for understanding abstract painting; or, in order to outbid it by postulating, beyond the mere disintegration of the visible, a more radical invisibility. Abstract painting, he argues, did not grow out of ‘a crisis of objectivity that is more or less analogous on the aesthetic plane to what it was in the scientific domain, and in particular the physics of the period. It does not come from a reworking of perceptual representation, either . . .’ ‘Abstract’, he insists, bears no relation whatever to the world, but rather ‘refers to the life that is embraced in the night of its radical subjectivity, where there is no light or world.’24 The question at once arises, how can ‘pure pictorial forms’ themselves be considered as other than objective, in the sense of being there before our eyes? Henry’s answer to such a question – whose importance he of course recognises – entails reliance upon Kandinsky’s definition of the purely pictorial, in his theory of elements. The elements in question, according to Henry’s summation, are ‘the pure components of all paintings: colour and graphic forms. Kandinsky’s thesis is that every element is double: both external and internal.’ This is not dualism, for ‘the element is not double; it is one and the same element . . . divided in such a way as to be both the external appearance of colour . . . and internally a specific affective tonality.’25 It is a single reality with two aspects: ‘this tonality on the one side and this colour or design on the other’.26 There is thus a relation of strict dependence between the sensible and the felt, the latter – the affective tonality in its ‘internal revelation’ – constituting ‘the true reality and being’ of the former.27 Henry distils his account of Kandinsky’s theory of expression from the painter’s Point and Line to Plane,28 published in the Bauhaus years; but the principle is established already in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, where Kandinsky writes: ‘Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is a piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.’29 Bergson, as it happens, employs a similar metaphor in Matter and Memory, where he writes that each organ of sense ‘is like an immense keyboard, on which the external object executes at once its harmony of a thousand notes, thus calling forth . . . a great multitude of elementary sensations corresponding to all the points of the sensory centre that are concerned’. Even were object or sense organ to be suppressed, ‘the same strings are there, ready to vibrate in the same way’.30 The context is of course



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different, since Bergson is concerned here neither with art nor with affective response, but is seeking to account for auditory images and psychic deafness; the point to emphasise in any case is that the metaphor as Bergson employs it is tied to perception, whereas with Henry/ Kandinsky it is not. Similarly, time-consciousness, in Henry’s account of it, has no commerce with what he terms the ek-stasis, external reality. It might seem at first sight that aspects of his critique of Husserl’s theory of internal time-consciousness betray affinities with Bergson: he faults Husserl for reducing impressional self-givenness to ‘a pure ideality in the intentional presentation of the now’;31 in thus criticising ‘the Husserlian conception of the phenomenological flow as a continuum of homogenous parts’,32 he appears to echo Bergson’s critique of spatialised, homogenous time. However, Henry’s identification of lived time with auto-affection and, thereby, life itself, is not reconcilable with la durée, which Bergson conceives as being universally pervasive as well as proper to consciousness. Henry’s rejection of all conceptions of externality would probably have extended to Bergson’s ‘images’ (the constituents of the universe), and he would not have countenanced the latter’s ideas concerning differing ‘tensions’ of duration, tied as these are, theoretically, to the work of perception. This returns us to Bergson and durational consciousness, since he can offer, with respect to painting, as Henry seemingly does not or cannot, a model for understanding attention as action. Henry’s Kandinskian theory is very good for telling me how I respond to particular kinds of paintings, namely, those having a quality of revelatory immediacy; attention in such cases is quasi-devotional, as when a bell sounds in a religious service: attend! Yet painting may also, surely, draw us in more gradually, and the work that goes on within attention may be complex. Introspection will not necessarily help here: my reflective act will simply supplant the spontaneous one, and I cannot necessarily reliably recall or reconstruct what went on in my act of looking – precisely to the degree that the act itself was sufficiently rapt and absorbed. We need a theory, therefore, and one lies to hand in Bergson’s highly developed and differentiated model of attention. That the act of attending to painting is durational – necessarily so, precisely in being an action – and that paintings may structurally reflect or embody this durée, has long been acknowledged: art historians and philosophers, from Bergson’s near-contemporary Alois Riegl to Michael Fried, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Podro, Richard Wollheim, Wolfgang Kemp and others, nearer the present, have developed concepts defining what Wollheim termed ‘pictorial seeing’.33 None, so far as I know, make

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reference to Bergson, whose impact on the actual practice of art, in the early twentieth century, is, on the other hand, well known. Of the artists affected by Bergson’s writing, Matisse appears to have been the first to have reflected on the phenomenology of attention, and on the bearing that Bergson’s concepts in this connection might have on the creative process.34 Unlike the Futurists, Matisse did not make the elementary mistake of seeking to represent temporal change; he understood that duration inhered in the attentive acts of painter and viewer respectively, with reference to an inescapably static object. There is a point in Matter and Memory where Bergson, employing terms which Matisse will come to use in turn in ‘Notes of a Painter’, describes the artistic distillation of movement into static form, just as Matisse himself will. He first imagines matter divorced from consciousness and its ‘particular rhythm of duration’, in order then mentally to bring it back and observe the effects: at long, very long intervals, and by as many leaps over the inner history of things, quasi-instantaneous views will be taken, views which . . . are bound to be pictorial, and of which the more vivid colours will condense an infinity of elementary repetitions and changes. In just the same way, the multitudinous successive positions of a runner are contracted into a single symbolic attitude, which our eyes perceive, which art reproduces, and which becomes for us all the image of a man running.35

I observed earlier that we might take issue with Bergson’s statement that artists have a general exemption from ordinary, utilitarian perception, and that this explains their ability to represent those complexities of the visible we habitually overlook. In making this claim, Bergson fails to take account of the act of painting, its material constraints and the conventions that ground it, and in the passage just quoted he again implicitly portrays the act of visual representation as if it were a matter of directly transposing from perception to the picture surface or the sculptor’s material. Matisse, unsurprisingly, made no such mistake, instead using some of Bergson’s terms and even a similar example to define, not the unreflective workings of our perception, but the deliberate constructive processes of the artist. (These are in accord, however, with Bergson’s concept of reflective or attentive perception, which I will touch on later). In observing the model, Matisse writes in ‘Notes of a Painter’, the painter selects and refines so as to attain ‘that state of condensation of sensations which makes a painting’.36 The underlying principle was long-established, even academic, and like Bergson Matisse evokes Greek antiquity (Bergson’s allusion is brief and generic, but I assume the image he vaguely has in mind is Greek, perhaps from vase decoration): to illustrate the principle that to render the continuity



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of movement one must use deliberate artifice, the painter observes that in Greek sculpture ‘a man hurling a discus will be caught at the moment in which he gathers his strength. Or at least, if he is shown in the most strained and precarious position implied by his action, the sculptor will have epitomised and condensed it [l’aura résumée dans un raccourci] so that equilibrium is re-established, thereby suggesting the idea of duration [la durée].’37 Matisse’s concluding point is critical: ‘Movement is in itself unstable and is not suited to something durable like a statue, unless the artist is aware of the entire action of which he represents only a moment.’38 Here he acknowledges, as Bergson does not, the artist’s essential problem with respect to the evocation of movement: the painted or sculpted object is inherently immobile. Like Velàzquez or Vermeer before him, Matisse realised that it is the very stillness of the medium that needs to be not merely respected but affirmed, in rendering the continuity of la durée. Admittedly, the latter part of his sentence, concerning the summation of an entire action, restates an academic precept concerning history painting and the depiction of a climactic moment; the first part, however, contains a new insight, more largely implied in the assonance between duration and the durable: between l’idée de la durée and quelque chose de durable.39 The implied principle is that the unchanging stillness of the work may come to embody the continuity of movement and change. If this was indeed a new insight, it was one long implicit in postrenaissance tradition, with respect to the representation of the visible. While the renaissance ideal of mimetic perfection might be realised with clarity and consistency in the depiction of buildings and piazzas, mobile phenomena presented a different problem. It took a Leonardo to tackle so intractable a subject as flowing and turbulent water – that archetype of temporality – and the solution he arrived at takes us to a very familiar tournant of experience, in which we cannot avoid surprising ourselves in the moment of our perceiving. In a famous sheet of drawings in the Windsor Castle collection showing studies of water passing an obstacle and falling into a pool, Leonardo’s pen converts the complexities of fluid motion into distinct, rhythmically curving lines.40 In spatialising the stream, he renders it into coiling strands, like plaited hair. He was thus the first to depict a perceptual object universal in human experience: as I watch the flowing or changing thing, it assumes an almost solid form in which its continuity lies, as it were, suspended. This could stand as epitomising what Bergson writes of as ‘the dawn of human experience’, wherein fluxuous immediacy separates into graspable objects.41 ‘The change is everywhere, but inward [en profondeur]; we

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localize it here and there, but outwardly [en surface]; thus we constitute bodies which are both stable as to their qualities and mobile as to their positions, a mere change of place summing up in itself, to our eyes, the universal transformation.’42 Painters, however, reversed this process, by creating visual objects that opened en profondeur into durational change, in their engagement of the viewer’s attention. Like Leonardo, they noticed that certain kinds of phenomena particularly lent themselves to such treatment, namely those in which the object constituted in perception retains the traces of continuity: milk pouring from a jug, for example, in Vermeer, or a wheel in motion, in Velàzquez.43 These are quasi-objects in that they may not be picked up or grasped as implements, and they do not undergo any change of position, for change passes through them. Bergson might aptly have reflected on painting, since the project of representing the visible demanded of painters that they set in play precisely that tension between the spatial and the durational, the objective and the vécu, that he reflected on himself, most concertedly in Matter and Memory. Furthermore, the painter’s task of causing paint to become image epitomised as perhaps no other art could the interpenetration of spirit and matter. One object in particular involved painters in attending to the tournant of experience, and so at once recording and undoing those perceptually stabilising processes Bergson was to describe; that object was the human individual, the portrait subject. Bergson – to recall – proposed that we take the human body to be less a spatially distinct entity than ‘a section of the universal becoming’;44 how might a painter set about representing such an entity? We might, of course, think at once of Boccioni, or perhaps of a Cubist portrait, yet it is in more evidently representational portraiture that we may find painters confronting a problem that the Cubists and Futurists bypassed, namely, that of the duality of the other, as both a subject and an objective presence. I see the other both as a physical entity, whose features I may readily distinguish from those of any other individual, and also as an agent, another subject. Hence, when I recognise even a slight acquaintance at a distance in a crowd, comportment and action may be at least as important factors as physiognomy, and these we may think of as durational. Accordingly, painters, from the time of the renaissance, balanced two aspects of portraiture: the rendering, respectively, of likeness and of comportment (or, as is often said, of character, or personality, or living presence). While the former might be attained straightforwardly, if with difficulty, the latter – the durational aspect of embodiment, as ‘a section of the universal becoming’ – clearly might not. Painters



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therefore evolved conventions to suggest that which might not be represented directly. From the fifteenth century at least, in European painting, portraitists made it a standard practice to present their subjects with the shoulders turned slightly into the depth of the picture, the head turned more fully forwards, and the eyes still more, to suggest the act of noticing and acknowledging the viewer. It should be added that this practice had already arisen in an earlier era of naturalistic representation, as is evidenced by the Fayum mummy portraits of Roman Egypt, where the rendering of the dead person as a living presence was of essential importance. What is true of them holds for portraiture more generally, in so far as it is in the nature of a memorial, and if we consider therefore its manifold and contrasting connotations of lastingness, momentariness, mortality and life, we find a subject in which Bergson and painting perfectly intersect: the tournant of experience – awareness of the other – is the mortal moment held within the portrait, and also reflected by it. Mark Antliff, writing on Matisse’s Bergsonism, quotes the painter’s comments on just such a concentrated apprehension of the other, in the last in a series of drawings of Mabel Warren, made one day in 1913: ‘there is a vitality in it . . . there’s movement in the eyes; it is very difficult to achieve that in a drawing . . . She is a flowing stream . . .’45 It is not surprising to find that Michel Henry, in his sustained reflection on life as pathos, found comparable qualities in portraiture – or in one portrait, at least. One of his few positive references to representational painting concerns an officer in a painting of a militia company by Frans Hals ‘who turns slowly toward us’. Henry continues, ‘one must back up several steps to the place where these large brushstrokes will change immediately’ into a feature or a face, or ‘into the eye of Life that looks at us through time’.46 This is almost a Bergsonian motif: there is movement, change and time, in association with life. As an account of painting, it is unusual for Henry in making a positive – if brief – ­reference to a material property, the ‘large brushstrokes’ whose sole virtue however is that they will change into an expressive feature. Yet the acknowledgement of change in this context is significant in itself, for nowhere else does Henry take account of the durational in painting, entailing as it does an act of attention. Attention requires an object and involves perception, and Henry’s phenomenology of immanence sets itself against that. The durational passage here is accordingly brief, and Henry’s description moves towards a revelatory moment – although the word ‘slowly’ impedes that movement. For a model of painting unfolding in attention, we may look to Bergson, even though painting is not his concern when, in Matter and

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Memory, he formulates his definition of ‘reflective perception’ as ‘a circuit in which all the elements, including the perceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an electric circuit, so that no disturbance starting from the object can stop on its way and remain in the depth of the mind: it must always find its way back to the object from where it proceeds’.47 Here Bergson produces the first of his diagrams in Matter and Memory: circuits, like successive rings, arise from the object into consciousness, passing from perception to memory and then returning, to project beyond the object corresponding virtual circuits, ‘creating anew not only the object perceived but also the ever widening systems with which it may be bound up’.48 If the painted portrait at once embodies and reflects the act of attention, it may equally, in both its material and its figural complexity, invite successive soundings rather in accordance with Bergson’s schema. The extent to which this might be so will depend on the degree to which the painter has, so to speak, withheld that which we must find. This would be quite the opposite, therefore, of Henry’s norm of revelatory immediacy. At the same time, it need not imply manipulation, direction to a pre-arranged end. The portrait conventions to which I referred could be used in so mechanical a way, and often were, but with a painter such as Rembrandt, whose work stands at the apex of oil-painting portraiture, we are on different ground. In his portrait of Margaretha de Geer, a late work, in the London National Gallery (see Figure 11.1), he rejects the customary turning pose – which he used in the companion portrait of the woman’s husband, Jacob Trip – in favour of a frontal presentation. It is a large, three-quarter length portrait, with the evidently aged woman seated in a large chair; her left hand, resting on the arm of the chair, is nearest the viewer; the right, holding a cloth or handkerchief, is further back, held against the body; her head, therefore, looks steadily back from slightly further still, at a certain remove. Here, clearly, it is not a case of suggesting motion, or staging an imagined moment of encounter with the viewer. Nor is Rembrandt concerned with signs of comportment, as with the prototype for such renditions, Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione,49 or the self-portrait he himself based on the latter.50 Raphael’s Castiglione turns to the viewer with mild assurance, his soft and refined garments in entire accord with his courtly bearing. The turning pose lends itself to such a social self-presentation. By contrast, Margaretha de Geer’s steady presence conveys no sense of an assumed or sustained attitude. The very signs of age denote reality, as against the social mask. We recognise that she is of high social standing from the quality of her dress and the hint of monumental stonework in the background. Yet these indications of



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Figure 11.1  Rembrandt, Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Wife of Jacob Trip, c. 1661, oil on canvas, 130.5 x 97.5 cm; London, National Gallery. Reproduction © The National Gallery; courtesy of the National Gallery Picture Library.

wealth and position are visually subordinate, and Rembrandt has rendered them in broad terms, as the vague dark setting for the hands and face, which are framed by white cuffs and a ruff, and it is here that his work with the brush is at its most concentrated. His strokes and touches of paint necessarily become most intricate, his colour most varied, in face and hands, but his work in the

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immediately attendant areas is also deliberative, and shows significant divergences. While rendering the cuffs and – particularly – the ruff with extreme particularity, he applies paint in an undisguised jumble of brushstrokes to depict the cloth his sitter grasps. This is both appropriate to the object and is also an index of (the painter’s) manual activity. In this still figure, it is almost the only sign of movement. Yet her very stillness may be the condition for our apprehending a temporality that we cannot see. Any painted object, say a jug in a still life, may as it were contain time. In a reverse of the process whereby – according to Bergson – we break up the continuity of duration into distinct objects in accordance with our needs, the painter offers us an object-for-attention whose very stillness before our gaze imbues it with the sense of ­duration – as if it reflected back to us the continuity of our regard. We give back what need takes away. Yet one quality in the object is not thereby eliminated: its thereness, its otherness, the essential properties of the ek-stasis that Henry made a subject of dispute. The marks of age on the woman’s face, presented with such stark frontality and held as if for display between the paired geometries of the circular ruff and the severe black headdress, appear as if for our detached scrutiny. Light casts the head’s shadow on the ruff just as it might that of a vase on a tablecloth. The cheeks sink, the skull protrudes. Rembrandt renders face and ruff with equal attention to their material objectivity. The soft contours of the shadow and the darkening of the ruff’s lower compartments show us that it is made of fine material, and holds its form by virtue of the careful stitching of its cellular structure. It is not stiff but flexible, as we may tell from the slight curve. There is an immediate and one might say cruel contrast with the aged flesh of the face, where Rembrandt’s brush breaks flecks of orange-red into paler hues with traces of blue: a structure breaking down. From this, however, above barely parted lips, dark eyes look out. Their darkness is accentuated rather than qualified by the slightest of highlights at the upper edge of her right eye. We arrive at Rembrandt’s discovery, an object that is not one, that moves without change of place, is visible but acts invisibly. Where, in other portraits, eyes turn to us as if in the moment of encounter, here the only action is inward, a duration of mortal depth. It is like Poe’s purloined letter, hidden in the open, lying in wait as we move through the painting’s gradients until it takes us by surprise. Bergson’s model of attentive perception here finds a most appropriate subject, consonant too with Henry’s apprehension of life as pathos.



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NOTES   1. Recent studies of Henry in English include John Mullarkey, ‘Henry and the Affects of Actual Immanence’, in John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 48–82; Dan Zahavi, ‘Subjectivity and Immanence in Michel Henry’, in A. Grøn, I. Damgaard, S. Overgaard, eds, Subjectivity and Transcendence (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), pp. 133–47; Jeffrey Hanson and Michael R. Kelly, eds, Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought (London: Continuum, 2012).  2. See E. G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950), pp. 351–83, 600–11.   3. Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, trans. Scott Davidson (London: Continuum, 2009), translation of Voir l’invisible (1988).  4. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Dover, 2007). For discussions of Bergson with reference to painting, see Joyce Medina, Cézanne and Modernism: the Poetics of Painting (New York: SUNY Press, 1995); and Mark Antliff, ‘The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse’, in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 184–208.  5. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 86.   6. Ibid., p. 112.   7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, trans. Carleton Dallery, ed. James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 167.  8. Michel Henry, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps. Essai sur l’ontologie biranienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), p. 264.   9. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 151. I do not, of course, mean to imply that Merleau-Ponty considered the body as a container, for he clearly did not, though it is the case that the problem of expunging the subject-object dialectic from his thought occupied him in his last writings. 10. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 122. 11. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 36; translation modified. 12. Ibid., p. 210. 13. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 114. 14. Ibid., p. 123. 15. Ibid. 16. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 184. 17. Henry, Seeing the Invisible, p. 28. 18. Menzel, Das Balkonzimmer, 1845, Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie. 19. This is a long-standing topic in criticism; for a discussion of the relevant issues, see Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London: Thames &

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Hudson, 1987), pp. 43–100: Chapter II, ‘What the Spectator Sees’, and Michael Podro, Depiction (London: Yale University Press, 1998). 20. Henry, Seeing the Invisible, pp. 14–15. 21. Ibid., pp. 126–32. 22. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Painting in Particular [1912], trans. Michael Sadleir, revised by F. Goffing, M. Harrison and F. Ostertag (New York: George Wittenborn, 1947), p. 45. 23. Henry, Seeing the Invisible, p. 15. 24. Ibid., p. 16. 25. Ibid., p. 35. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 36. 28. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane: Contribution to the Analysis of the Pictorial Elements (1926), trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay (New York: Guggenheim, 1947). 29. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 45. 30. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 128–9. Charlotte de Mille makes this connection in her introduction to Charlotte de Mille, ed., Music and Modernism (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), p. 3. 31. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 26. 32. Ibid., p. 32. 33. See for example, Alois Riegl, The Group Portrait of Holland (1902), intro. Wolfgang Kemp, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999); Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Image and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1988); Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (London: Penguin, 1989); Podro, Depiction; Wollheim, Painting as an Art. 34. Henri Matisse, ‘Notes of a Painter’ (1908), trans. Jack D. Flam, in Matisse on Art, ed., trans. Jack D. Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 32–40. 35. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 208–9. 36. Matisse, ‘Notes of a Painter’, p. 36. 37. Ibid., p. 37; the French is quoted from the text in Henri Matisse, Écrits et propos sur l’art, ed. Dominique Fourcade (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 45–6. 38. Ibid. 39. Matisse, ‘Notes of a Painter’, p. 46. 40. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Water Passing Obstacles and Falling Into a Pool, pen and ink drawing, c. 1508–9, Windsor. Reproduced in Leonardo da Vinci (London, Hayward Gallery, exhibition catalogue, 1989), p. 129. 41. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 185. 42. Ibid., p. 209.



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43. Jan Vermeer, The Milkmaid, c. 1658, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; Diego Velàzquez, The Fable of Arachne (‘The Spinners’), 1656, Madrid, Prado. 44. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 151. 45. Matisse, quoted by Matthew Stewart Prichard in a letter to Mabel Warren, sent on 7 November 1913, the day after the drawing session. Mark Antliff quotes the passages in his essay ‘The Rhythms of Duration’, in Mullarkey, The New Bergson, p. 199. 46. Michel Henry, Barbarism, trans. Scott Davidson (London: Continuum, 2012), p. 31. 47. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 104. 48. Ibid., p. 105. 49. Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, c. 1514–15, Paris, Louvre. 50. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait at the Age of 34, 1640, London, National Gallery.

12. ‘For We Will Have Shown it Nothing’: Bergson as Non-Philosopher (of) Art JOHN MULLARKEY The habitual labor of thought is easy and can be prolonged at will. Intuition is arduous and cannot last . . . and intuition, like all thought, finally becomes lodged in concepts such as duration, qualitative or heterogeneous multiplicity, unconsciousness – even differentiation.1 Thus a multiplicity of different systems will arise, as many systems as there are external viewpoints on the reality one is examining, or as there are larger circles in which to enclose it. The simple concepts, therefore, not only have the disadvantage of dividing the concrete unity of the object into so many symbolical expressions; they also divide philosophy into distinct schools, each of which takes its seat, chooses its counters, and begins with the others a game that will never end.2 Philosophy is an affair of movements and becomings, of lines and vectors, of reversals and displacements – it mostly uses transcendence, which comes (in a circular although broken manner) from experience toward the ground, from being toward Being, from Being toward the Affair of thought.3 My problem is that of the re-orientation of thought.4

Towards the end of Henri Bergson’s 1911 lectures on ‘The Perception of Change’, a peculiar moment is reached when philosophy is forwarded as a kind of popular art, only one that is not for the masses so much as one that could be performed by everyone, generating altered perceptions ‘more continual and more accessible to the majority’. This general art allows a democracy of vision irrespective of artistic aptitude: ‘all things acquire depth – more than depth, something like a fourth dimension which permits anterior perceptions to remain bound up with present perceptions, and the immediate future itself to become partly outlined in the present’.5 In this chapter, I would like to continue certain themes from our introduction to this volume concerning the status of immanent art as a form of thought, this time with an additional reference to the work of François Laruelle. I will, moreover, look at Laruelle and Bergson’s conceptions of the image in photography and film respec206



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tively in order to discuss how a philosophy of the image might be less a kind of alternative picture (to replace the false pictures of film and photography proffered by other philosophers), and more about a kind of ‘re-orientation’ or reverse ‘attitude’, wherein a certain redirection of both body and mind would suggest a new way of seeing both philosophy and these arts as equally disposed to thought on an immanent plane. Whereas Laruelle calls for a democracy of thought against what he sees as the reductive decisions of monomaniacal philosophies (each philosophy forwarded as exclusively correct, with a uniquely truthful portrait of reality), I think it is possible to see Bergson’s warning in our first epigraph against even his own ideas becoming hypostatised in singular concepts, and so as a call for new definitions of thought, and the ongoing need for a democracy of images. In his ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’, some time after the discussion of philosophical games in the second epigraph above, Bergson writes: ‘either there is no philosophy possible . . . or else philosophy consists in placing oneself within the object itself by an effort of intuition’.6 The object – even when the object is a philosophy – has its own unique image that ‘an empiricism worthy of the name’ only discovers through huge effort.7 Philosophy becomes the search for unique intuitions that are subsequently expressed indirectly through images and then abstracted and extracted in ‘different concepts’. If knowing something normally implies the need for recognition through what Bergson calls ‘ready-made concepts’, then it must be contrasted with intuitive thought, which is expressed through the creation of new concepts and images that participate in the movement of their unique object.8 It is not that this creative philosophy, qua metaphysics, is applied to another object or discipline, however, but that every object or discipline has its own metaphysical core, that is, its own moment as a becoming, as a movement, when one might say that it itself philosophises. The imposition of concepts on objects is condemned by Bergson as relativist and exterior knowledge. This is because, be they one or multiple, ready-made concepts do not belong to the Real. In contrast, intuition is knowledge from the object, the object’s knowledge – that is suggested or directed to others only by what we will see described as the ‘convergent action’ of multiple images – a suggestion that prompts a quite different ‘action or attitude’. It is a becoming that the expressed philosophy re-creates to match the ‘object’. In truth, therefore, perhaps there is no one such thing as ‘metaphysics’, but rather as many different kinds of metaphysics as there are objects in becoming. The subjectmatter of philosophy is the matter itself becoming (philosophical). Normally, one thinks of ‘non-philosophies’ such as history, art, or

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science becoming philosophical when there is a subject that thinks about them (their conceptual foundations, presuppositions, objectives, etc.), that is, when philosophers apply their concepts to them. Bergson regards this as a retrospective rationalisation and a reversal of the true order of things. Before any conceptual expression by the subject, before the expression of traditional (‘symbolic’) philosophy in other words, there is the becoming of the subject-matter itself, and this is the moment of philosophical intuition. Philosophy is immanent to the thing, in the thing’s own transformations. Bergson’s own work in psychology, biology and physics are case-studies of how the objects of even these harder sciences are transformative when followed closely, that is, intuitively. This is even more true of art, understood by Bergson as a philosophy of ‘life in general’, a philosophy ‘turned in the same direction as art’ – as Creative Evolution puts it: That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved by the existence in man of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception. Our eye perceives the features of the living being, merely as assembled, not as mutually organized. The intention of life, the simple movement that runs through the lines, that binds them together and gives them significance, escapes it. This intention is just what the artist tries to regain, in placing himself back within the object by a kind of sympathy, in breaking down, by an effort of intuition, the barrier that space puts up between him and his model. It is true that this aesthetic intuition, like external perception, only attains the individual. But we can conceive an inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would take life in general for its object . . .9

This ‘life in general’ is not an abstraction, but the movement and change of life in all its plurality and integrality – a democratised life.10 And cinematic art, I will argue, is (or at least could be) an equally transformative, continuous creation, as seen through the various methods it can utilise when juxtaposing and superimposing moving images, making them coexist in a democratic space and time. The alternative to the conceptual ‘ready-mades’ – metaphysical intuition – approaches a non-standard philosophy in Laruelle’s sense of the phrase, and encourages us to explore the role of the image, specifically the art of images (cinema in particular) as a Bergsonian non-philosophical practice. BEYOND A GAME: THE CIRCLES OF GIVEN PHILOSOPHY For Laruelle and his concept of ‘non-standard philosophy’, normal philosophical practice always mixes reality with a pre-decided interpre-



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tative schema – be it substance and accident, subject and object, difference and repetition, and so on. This marks out any resultant world-view as entirely relative to its starting-point. As such, standard philosophical practice remains ‘curtailed, repetitive, and superbly sterile’, and is committed to the ‘Greco-unitary’ closure and enclosure of this prior decision (or, as the saying goes, ‘everything is over by the first page’). For Laruelle, the transcendent form of philosophy leaves no room for thought outside of itself, no matter its variety – phenomenology, Deleuzianism, structuralism, etc. By that very fact it cannot explain any rival positions as anything but illusion or error (or improper, sloppy, thought). Nor can it justify the grounds of such illusions, errors, or sloppiness, without begging the question as to what good and proper philosophy might be (assuming that such properties exist at all in one form alone). At some or other stage it must eventually resort to being dogmatic, overtly or covertly, about its basic terms (even in so far as how it defines ‘simplicity’, ‘clarity’, ‘rigour’, ‘truth’, ‘error’, and so on). However, such philosophies are always incomplete in as much as they are dogmatic. Indeed, these dogmas are their assertoric point of emergence. Laruelle calls this emergence a ‘decision’, an attempted cut-off (decaedere – de- ‘off’ + caedere ‘cut’) from the Real. As he puts it: ‘to philosophise on X is to withdraw from X; to take an essential distance from the term for which we will posit other terms’.11 As we saw above, Bergson, like Laruelle, can be seen as a critic of the circularity of (intellectualist) philosophical systems and the ever larger circles in which they ‘enclose’ reality. For Bergson, the inflexibility of ‘ready-made concepts’ carry within them a ‘practical question’ which can only be answered with a ‘yes or a no’ – any nuance, the complex ‘shape’ of the Real, is lost.12 All that ever follows thereafter is unending dialectic and the various oppositions of philosophy: phenomenon and noumenon, mind and body, being and appearance, and so on. The bivalency of ready-made logic is merely the necessary response to the narrowness of the question: what is missed entirely between the two is the polyvalency of the Real that does not allow for such rigid antitheses. In Creative Evolution, Bergson makes clear his view that ‘every other method of philosophy’ – apart from his own of metaphysical intuition – involves a ‘vicious circle’.13 ‘Pure intellectualism’ can never extend philosophy into ‘something different’, into something that is not already given and defined: ‘it is of the essence of reasoning to shut us up in the circle of the given’. It is noteworthy here to observe that where Laruelle sees standard philosophy as decisionistic, Bergson sees it as definitional: a circular game of names whereby whatever system of definitions is employed

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at the outset (‘body’ means x, ‘mind’ mean y, and so on) ensures the desired outcome by sheer dint of reproducing the terms of the problem with near-synonyms in the supposed solution.14 Bergson thinks of this perpetual self-fulfillment as a definitional matter. All the reductionist philosophies, both naturalist and anti-naturalist – be they based on physics, biology, or cognition; or culture, language, or spirit – are impossible to believe because they are irrefutable on their own terms, their absoluteness being based on the unassailable purity of a conventionally given name. With that unalloyed purity comes a certain sterility, as Bergson writes: It makes little difference to me if one says ‘everything is mechanism’ or ‘Everything is will’: in either case everything is identical. In both cases, ‘mechanism’ and ‘will’ become synonyms of each other. Therein lies the initial vice of philosophical systems. They think they are telling us something about the absolute by giving it a name . . . But the more you increase the extension of the term, the more you diminish comprehension of it. If you include matter within its extension, you empty its comprehension of the positive characteristics by which spontaneity stands out against mechanism and liberty against necessity. When finally the word arrives at the point where it designates everything that exists, it means no more than existence. What advantage is there then in saying that the world is will, instead of simply saying that it is?15

Clearly, Bergson’s approach to definition comes close to Laruelle’s critique of decisionism here, but what do these philosophers offer in place of either definition or decision? How do they make their (‘nonstandard’) philosophies any different? After all, can we not read their own methodologies as simply more philosophy, more definitions and decisions? What is the difference between ‘everything is will’ (‘Schopenhauer’) and ‘everything is becoming’ (‘Bergson’)? To answer this, we need to look more closely at the optical and imagistic significance of Bergsonian ‘definition’ (as in ‘high’ and ‘low’ definition for instance), as well as what Laruelle means by decision as a kind of orientation, a withdrawal. It will become clear that such orientations also have things in common with Bergson’s idea of metaphysical intuition as a change of attitude, a ‘thinking backwards’ that is as much corporeal as it is incorporeal. What they offer is not one more picture of the world (‘everything = x’) for acceptance or rejection, but what we will describe as a ‘behavioural’ means of reviewing what such pictures entail and how they can mutate. To begin with the optics of the image means to look at definitions and clarities in terms of the materiality and logic of these images. Think only of the opening of Matter and Memory: instead of the lexical defini-



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tions of systematic philosophy, be it materialism or idealism, Bergson begins with the ‘presence of images in the vaguest sense of the word’. But this presence of images is not itself vague – it is what can only be expressed with vague words. The ‘definition’ of image, in the optical sense of the term, is different. How might this other definition, as image, work? In Bergson’s ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’ there is another analysis of images, and in particular of their multiplication as a philosophical method. It is no one kind of image, simple or ornate, that interests him here, but the combination, the interference or attunement between many different kinds of images that is crucial. Images must be differentiated in order that the movement of images can be discovered in an ‘integratory’ intuition. The unrolling of a coil, the rolling up of a thread, the myriad-tinted spectrum, the infinitely small elastic body – all of these images of the self (in Bergson’s chosen example) are incomplete. In fact, they are not much better than concepts in terms of their discrete nature. They do, however, have the virtue of being concrete and so more suggestive, and it is the specific becoming of the self that can be suggested through their proliferation: taking ‘images as dissimilar as possible’ and composing them all ‘at once’, we can re-create the movement that animates them. An extended quotation is merited: In this regard, the philosopher’s sole aim should be to start up a certain effort which the utilitarian habits of mind of everyday life tend, in most men, to discourage. Now the image has at least the advantage of keeping us in the concrete. No image will replace the intuition of duration, but many different images, taken from quite different orders of things, will be able, through the convergence of their action, to direct the consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, any one of them will be prevented from usurping the place of the intuition it is instructed to call forth, since it would then be driven out immediately by its rivals. By seeing that in spite of their differences in aspect they all demand of our mind the same kind of attention and, as it were, the same degree of tension, one will gradually accustom the consciousness to a particular and definitely determined disposition, precisely the one it will have to adopt in order to appear unveiled to itself. But even then, consciousness must acquiesce in this effort. For we will have shown it nothing. We shall simply have placed it in the attitude it must take to produce the desired effort and, by itself, to arrive at the intuition.16

Direction, attitude, disposition, convergent action. All of these orientational, behavioural terms will be of increasing significance as we progress through this chapter. For now, what is important is that Bergson argues that the intuitive method does not involve the easy clarity, nor the sterility, of a name. Undoubtedly intuition will appear vague to many philosophers and artists alike, yet this difficult (even at times painful)

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effort of creating a new attitude is the only precise manner in which we can understand it.17 Intuition is precise in virtue of the fact that it instantiates the Real rather than represents it. And the idea of vague, or rather the ‘indefinite’, is central to Bergson’s methodology. Indefinites (or ‘dynamic definitions’) are found throughout his work, even in his own concepts of freedom, intuition, duration, virtual memory and the élan vital, along with his preference for metaphor as a mode of description for these ideas.18 Whereas the Real can be presented directly to us ‘in an intuition’, such an intuition can only be shared with others ‘indirectly by images’, multiple, indefinite, suggestive images.19 Such indefinite and indirect images capture best the processual moment that an immanent philosophy aspires to communicate. One might say that ‘principles of uncertainty’ abound in his work, and belong objectively to the Real as much as they also do to subjective states of knowing.20 NON-STANDARD ORIENTATIONS Laruelle also practises this same ‘weak’ thought of indefinition in his own non-standard philosophy. Where philosophy tends to totalise what counts as thought under a current (or its current) definition, Laruelle will refuse to define it. Any one form of thought entertained (the thought of photography outlined in his Photo-Fiction, A NonStandard Aesthetics, for example) is always hypothetical – a scientific experiment (hypothesis) in what counts as thought and philosophy. As such, thought in general is unconditioned (by philosophy) because it is ‘occasioned’ (as he puts it) by the Real, and non-philosophy is ‘a type of experience or Real which escapes auto-positioning, which is not a circle of the Real and thought, a One which does not unify but which remains in-One, a Real which is immanent (to) itself rather than to a form of thought, to a “logic”, etc.’.21 Yet the ‘it’ here is not a new, superior ‘philosophy of thought’ but simply all the thoughts (of philosophy, but also of the sciences, the arts, politics and so on) re-envisioned as material, as parts of the Real rather than as about the Real. As Laruelle himself puts it: ‘I absolutely do not overturn philosophy; were I claiming to overthrow it, it would be a pointless gesture, a zero-sum game. The entire enterprise would then be contradictory.’22 Laruelle simply reverses the relationship of philosophy to the Real so that philosophy is no longer about the Real, but comes from the Real. Philosophy does not ‘access’ the Real, correctly (truth) or incorrectly (falsity). Such a Real ‘integration’ of thought (to use Bergsonian terminology now as well) could, of course, be taken up as just one more totalising ‘theory of everything’, including philosophy – more of the same ‘game’, zero-sum



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or otherwise. Alternatively, it can be seen as a demonstration that only suggests a re-orientation of belief as to what philosophy is, and even of what belief is, that is, not a propositional attitude but the attitude or ‘posture’ of propositions (from attitudine, ‘fitness, posture’). It should also be noted that the ‘non-’ in Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy is not a negation but an extension of what counts as philosophy, an inclusive amplification of thought. This non-philosophy also claims to be a ‘radical inversion’ of philosophy’s relationship with reality (or ‘the Real’) in as much as it does not merely reverse the relationship between the two but inverts it fundamentally.23 If it is a reversal, then it is a ‘reverse mutation’ that suffers no possible reinversion (to use an image from biology whereby the wild-type phenotype is spontaneously restored and undoes the genetic alterations of the laboratory). In this biological model, what happens in the philosophy lab (all the various mediations and distortions of the Real wrought by philosophy’s decisive quest for mastery, for ultimate authority) mutates – or is reviewed – to be seen no longer as the best picture of reality but as a product or effect of the Real. Again, the relationship is inverted: from the direction of Philosophy to the Real, towards the direction of the Real to Philosophy. Bergson’s own version of this re-orientation can also be understood through the idea we saw earlier of a general aesthetic – the democratic art of philosophy – and its contrast with the ready-mades of analysis: We try to find out up to what point the object to be known is this or that, to what known genus it fits, what kind of action, step or attitude it should suggest to us. These various possible actions and attitudes are so many conceptual directions of our thought, determined once for all . . . To try a concept on an object is to ask of the object what we have to do with it, what it can do for us. To label an object with a concept is to tell in precise terms the kind of action or attitude the object is to suggest to us.24

In contrast to this conceptual ‘attitude’ comes the most famous formulation of intuition in ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’: thinking in duration, or practising philosophy immanently, means ‘to reverse the normal direction of the workings of thought’.25 Other than Laruelle, few philosophers before or since have argued anything so heretical as we find in Bergson’s approach to metaphysics here: a radical reversal of what we think metaphysics (and philosophy) to be and how we think it operates (in an ‘anti-Kantian’ metaphysics of immanence, as Quentin Meillassoux describes Bergson’s method).26 More than this, it leads us to a redirection of where thinking is supposed to take place: thinking changes source and direction, passing from things to concepts, and not from concepts to things. His idea is not that we merely change the

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‘direction’ of our thought about things (whatever that might mean), but that metaphysical thinking somehow belongs to the object too. Such a reversal is not a simple inversion, however, in that it reverses what are themselves the habitual reversals of normal thought and perception, which always throw the ‘possible’ (be it in terms of logical conditions or principles of sufficiency) behind the actual Real and into the past or virtual.27 Bergson believes, therefore, that the reversal called for here is actually a kind of restoration, being the reversal of a prior inversion whereby the order of the possible and the Real was inverted by ‘normal’ intellect that installs possibilities as ontologically prior to reality, when, for Bergson, the possible only emerges after the Real and out of it. No less than having the negation of a negative to make a positive, this reversion of a reversal actually creates more change, a progress over a regress, or a reverse mutation. PHILOSOPHICAL BEHAVIOURS Laruelle’s own most recent experiment in non-standard philosophy – one that belongs to photography – is a case in point. Fighting against the philosophical aesthetics that over-determines photography from without – ‘the Principle of Sufficient Photography or photo-centrism’, as he calls it – Laruelle gestures us towards a philosophy that is photography’s own:28 I call this gesture of creation non-aesthetics or non-standard aesthetics, its standard form being philosophical and photo-fiction being one of its nonstandard objects . . . This project seems absurd. It will no longer be absurd if we accept changing our level of reference for defining the real. Instead of treating the photo and the concept of the photo as two given and describable physical, intellectual objects or representations, we treat them as completely different than given objects closed in on themselves.29

The ‘absurdity’ of his project is what will strike analytical, that is, standard, philosophical thinking:30 it cannot abide not being allowed a transcendence over the (photographic) object, hence, ‘it takes quite an effort to render the photographic act immanent, to interiorize it, and to render it real without external determinism or realism’. And this new ‘effort’ is also a matter of re-orientation and posture: ‘what we must really consider as an indivisible whole is the “photographic posture,” a conjugation of optical, perceptive, and chemical properties that can only be fully understood as those entangled, non-local properties of a generic matrix’.31 Inventing philosophy, for Laruelle as for Bergson, takes tremendous, real effort. To recap where we have got to so far: these philosophical reversals



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in Bergson and Laruelle are not simply new names for the old, and even ‘eternal’ concepts of philosophy, but genuinely new positions as regards what those (or any) concepts are and from where they originate: reversed, re-oriented, or re-directed, as a posture or behaviour that is often achieved only after real effort. And thereby, this behaviour opens up the ‘possibility’, or rather, performs the gesture, that philosophical thoughts are not the privilege of philosophers. They need not belong exclusively to what we currently deem ‘proper philosophy’ (whatever that is supposed to mean at any one moment, which is nearly always different depending on the perspective adopted). They can also belong to other disciplines, experiences, and practices – cinema and photography included – and even to other beings – non-humans included. Returning to Bergson’s own earlier criticism of question-begging intellectualist philosophy, the following renowned passage from Creative Evolution sets out more fully his use of ‘action’ as the best way of breaking through, not only the circularity of ready-made thought, but also a circularity that was attributed to his own methodology: But this method has against it the most inveterate habits of the mind. It at once suggests the idea of a vicious circle. In vain, we shall be told, you claim to go beyond intelligence: how can you do that except by intelligence? All that is clear in your consciousness is intelligence. You are inside your own thought; you cannot get out of it. Say, if you like, that the intellect is capable of progress, that it will see more and more clearly into a greater and greater number of things; but do not speak of engendering it, for it is with your intellect itself that you would have to do the work. The objection presents itself naturally to the mind. But the same reasoning would prove also the impossibility of acquiring any new habit. It is of the essence of reasoning to shut us up in the circle of the given. But action breaks the circle . . . So, in theory, there is a kind of absurdity in trying to know otherwise than by intelligence; but if the risk be frankly accepted, action will perhaps cut the knot that reasoning has tied and will not unloose. Besides, the risk will appear to grow less, the more our point of view is adopted. We have shown that intellect has detached itself from a vastly wider reality, but that there has never been a clean cut between the two; all around conceptual thought there remains an indistinct fringe which recalls its origin . . . So you may speculate as intelligently as you will on the mechanism of intelligence; you will never, by this method, succeed in going beyond it. You may get something more complex, but not something higher nor even something different. You must take things by storm: you must thrust intelligence outside itself by an act of will. So the vicious circle is only apparent. It is, on the contrary, real, we think, in every other method of philosophy.32

Yet Bergsonism does not do without concepts altogether (especially given its close relationship with the sciences that produce so many concepts for it to work with). Rather, an immanent metaphysics mobilises them: ‘concepts are indispensible to it’, Bergson writes,

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for all the other sciences ordinarily work with concepts, and metaphysics cannot get along without the other sciences. But it is strictly itself only when it goes beyond the concept, or at least when it frees itself of the inflexible and ready-made concepts and creates others very different from those we usually handle, I mean flexible, mobile, almost fluid representations.33

Of course, the notion of a ‘ready-made’ has various cultural associations, both ‘high’, in Duchampian aesthetics for instance, and ‘low’, in the ready-made fashions that are contrasted with the unique shapes of haute couture. In some passages of Bergson’s texts, the connection between thought and tailoring is even more evident, the ‘ready-made’ – tout fait – having something of the ‘ready to wear’ – prêt-àporter – about it (see Figure 12.1): according to Bergson, the classic designs of philosophical attire, of fashionable behaviour, need to be undone: Our reason, incorrigibly presumptuous, imagines itself possessed, by right of birth or by right of conquest, innate or acquired, of all the essential elements of the knowledge of truth. Even where it confesses that it does not know the object presented to it, it believes that its ignorance consists only in not knowing which one of its time-honored categories suits the new object. In what drawer, ready to open, shall we put it? In what garment, already cut out, shall we clothe it? Is it this, or that, or the other thing? And ‘this,’ and ‘that,’ and ‘the other thing’ are always something already conceived, already known. The idea that for a new object we might have to create a new concept, perhaps a new method of thinking, is deeply repugnant to us. The history of philosophy is there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the ready-made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity of making to measure.34

Bergson’s ‘promise’ is to replace Plato’s classical metaphysics of immutable and universal ideas with bespoke, tailored concepts – mobilising a haute couture fitted for everyone and everything – rather than one-sizesuits-all. I would like now, therefore, to bring together this mobilisation (invention) of concepts through imagery and convergent action, with Bergson’s call to re-orient or reverse our stance: the reverse of the work of the mind is not intellectualist, but behavioural, and even spatial in attitude. At the most abstract level, this postural aspect will have to engage with Bergson’s ontology of images in Matter and Memory. Furthermore, I want to look at a range of materials from Bergson which suggests that, when it comes to this reversal that would allow us to see photographic or filmic images as new forms of philosophical thought, that is, as objects with their own philosophy, this cannot be shown with extant concepts and so within extant (ready-made) philosophical language: the new forms can only be gestured towards (gerere, ‘bear,



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Figure 12.1  ‘M. Bergson a Promis de Venir’, Robe de dîner de Worth, Plate 30 from Gazette du Bon Ton, Vol. 1, No. 3, Mars 1914, Bernard Boutet de Monvel; courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

wield, perform’), indexed (‘to point’), or suggested (suggerere, ‘bring from below’, from gerere). With Laruelle, we already know the importance of the behavioural dimension to the photography (of) philosophy: he seeks ‘concepts which . . . might appear to you as a sort of mimesis of the photo’, for what he calls ‘photo-fiction’ is not a ‘technological and perceptual

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act of photographing but a theoretical act “miming” the material act but which is irreducible to it’.35 We must remember that the whole of non-standard philosophy is rooted in its non-decisionism: its basis is in a stance or posture, an embodied attitude that reverses philosophy’s withdrawal from the Real. As Laruelle’s Concept of Non-Photography puts it, ‘stance’ means ‘to be rooted in oneself, to be held within one’s own immanence . . . If there is a photographic thinking, it is first and foremost of the order of a test of one’s naive self rather than of the decision.’36 Behaviour as posture or stance – it is a philosophical and photographic behaviourism in this materialist and immanent sense, then: ‘the experimental act of photographing that is its postural model’.37 And what of Bergson? Let us recall the basics of his imagology in Matter and Memory: what we perceive is what interests us (and our bodies) at any moment: To the degree that my horizon widens, the images which surround me seem to be painted upon a more uniform background and become to me more indifferent. The more I narrow this horizon, the more the objects which it circumscribes space themselves out distinctly according to the greater or lesser ease with which my body can touch and move them. They send back [renvoient, ‘return’], then, to my body, as would a mirror, its eventual influence; they take rank in an order corresponding to the growing or decreasing powers of my body. The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them.38

There is a ‘background’ that re-turns to my body only what interests it, so that even ‘distance’ itself takes on an axiological form, representing ‘above all, the measure in which surrounding bodies are insured, in some way, against the immediate action of my body’.39 My body is simply ‘an object’, but one capable of performing a ‘new action’ upon surrounding objects, and this ability to act anew is what marks out its ‘privileged position’ in regard to other, background objects. Hence, to undo what the body instigates, to reverse this ‘narrow’ attitude, is to look again in detail (higher-definition) and in close-up at this background: it requires a reversal of orientation. Indeed, Matter and Memory describes mental attention in bodily, attitudinal terms: ‘stage by stage we shall be led on to define attention as an adaptation of the body rather than of the mind and to see in this attitude of consciousness mainly the consciousness of an attitude’.40 This rich behaviourism of Bergson renders the problem of propositional attitudes (of beliefs) bodily, a matter of physical ‘posture’ (attitudine). Even memory, the most virtual element of Bergson’s thought, is tied to bodily stance: Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach



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ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past in general, then, in a certain region of the past – a work of adjustment, something like the focusing of a camera. But our recollection still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the appropriate attitude.41

If this seems to go too far – especially given Bergson’s purportedly disembodied ‘spiritualist’ tendencies – then the following description of education from the introduction to The Creative Mind may help to confirm this revision of his work. Here he argues that, to understand a text, a student must fall into step with him [the author] by adopting his gestures, his attitudes, his gait, by which I mean learning to read the text aloud with the proper intonation and inflection. The intelligence will later add shades of meaning. Before intellection properly so-called, there is the perception of structure and movement; there is, on the page one reads, punctuation and rhythm. Now it is in indicating this structure and rhythm, in taking into consideration the temporal relations between the various sentences of the paragraph and the various parts of each sentence, in following uninterruptedly the crescendo of thought and feeling to the point musically indicated as the culminating point that the art of diction consists . . . One knows, one understands only what one can in some measure reinvent.42

In the footnote that follows this passage Bergson goes even further in this gestural comprehension of comprehension, arguing that ‘rhythm roughly outlines the meaning of the sentence truly written, that it can give us direct communication with the writer’s thought before study of the words has given them color and shading’. In one lecture at the Collège de France on Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode, he tells us that he took some pages of the text as an example ‘to show how the comings and goings of thought, each in a particular direction, pass from the mind of Descartes to our own solely by the effect of the rhythm as indicated by the punctuation, and especially as brought out by reading it aloud correctly’.43 This footnote then refers the reader to Bergson’s 1912 lecture ‘The Soul and the Body’ where thinking is vectorised in a clearly behaviourist manner, albeit also being internalised as a tendency, ‘nascent’ and ‘performed in the brain’: Consider thinking itself; you will find directions rather than states, and you will see that thinking is essentially a continual and continuous change of inward direction, incessantly tending to translate itself by changes of outward direction, I mean by actions and gestures capable of outlining in space and of expressing metaphorically, as it were, the comings and goings of the mind. Of these movements, sketched out or even simply prepared, we are most often unaware, because we have no interest in knowing them; but we have to notice them when we try to seize hold of our thought in order to

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grasp it all living and make it pass, still living, into the soul of another. The words may then have been well chosen, but they will not convey the whole of what we wish to make them say if we do not succeed by the rhythm, by the punctuation, by the relative lengths of the sentences and part of the sentences, by a particular dancing of the sentence, in making the reader’s mind, continually guided by a series of nascent movements, describe a curve of thought and feeling analogous to that we ourselves described . . . The rhythm speech has here, then, no other object than that of choosing the rhythm of the thought: and what can the rhythm of the thought be but the rhythm of the scarcely conscious nascent movements which accompany it? These movements, by which thought continually tends to externalize itself in actions, are clearly prepared and, as it were, performed in the brain.44

Here we have a kind of micro-behaviourism of the brain as well as the macro-behaviourism of bodies in relation – a combination or superposition that would short-cut the traditional disputes between ‘central state’ materialists and logical behaviourists by rendering behaviour neurological while also upgrading cerebral motor-mechanisms to something more than just mechanical movements. If the brain does ‘control’ behaviour, it is because it too is behaviour.45 SHOW NOTHING, SUGGEST EVERYTHING At this stage in our chapter then, it might be expected that we finally turn to examples from cinema (for Bergson) and photography (for Laruelle) that illustrate our intentions by applying this behavioural, postural approach in these cases. However, I am going to resist that move. This is not only on account of the fact that I have written extensively on the problem of using art – or any other supposedly nonphilosophical entity (in the non-Laruellean sense of that term) – as the material vessel for philosophical thought. That motive for resisting the use of examples has always concerned the need to see individual films, for instance, as philosophical in their own right and through their own medium-specificity, that is, through their indigenous audio-visual resources of editing, composition, camera movement, focus and so on (rather than as a kind of quasi-text that merely ‘paraphrases’ readymade philosophical ideas through the plot and dialogue of films).46 The philosophy of cinema should be its own philosophy and recognisable as philosophy in its own terms – not one borrowed from elsewhere (irrespective of the problems of what then counts as ‘proper’ philosophy that may follow).47 In terms of filmic properties in general, however, I have also written elsewhere on the close-up as a sign of philosophical intention (following Stanley Cavell’s idea that it indicates choice, and so the presence of mind): this could, in fact, be understood as a matter



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of posture, taking a close-up look being a bodily attitude first and foremost, especially in the light of Bergson’s theses concerning attention and the purpose of metaphysical intuition being, contra Plato, to illuminate ‘the detail of the real’.48 The changing definitions of philosophy, therefore, would be a matter of ‘close-ups’ and ‘long shots’, of zooming in or zooming out (Bergson himself having linked recollection to both bodily attitude and ‘the focusing of a camera’).49 Philosophical names would be born in part from their degree of fine visual detail – an optical and attitudinal phenomenon. I have also previously looked at the notion of cinematic background (formed through both composition and focus, especially as used in Japanese horror cinema), as a genuinely idiosyncratic contribution to various philosophical discussions of ‘background’ in philosophy of mind, ontology and even ethics.50 This too could be connected to the idea of the background in Matter and Memory that returns to my body only what interests it.51 Even more explicitly behavioural than that, however, would be to turn to a theorist such as Giorgio Agamben, whose short essay on cinematic gesture, ‘The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema’, discusses a sequence from Orson Welles’s unfinished Don Quixote in terms of gesture: for Agamben, rather than the image, it is gesture that is the fundamental filmic property.52 Yet, this is not the line this chapter will follow even if, in one respect, we will stay true to Agamben’s own line (which itself follows Foucault) that what we call ‘gesture’ is only ‘what remains unexpressed in each expressive act’ and ‘the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such’.53 Indeed, we will conclude here with a discussion of Bergson’s philosophy of comportment, a general-aesthetic philosophy ‘turned in the same direction as art’ but with life in general, that is, all of life, as its object. This will be akin to a (non-representational) democratising philosophy in the Laruellean sense, a generic art that sees others arts, thereby, as philosophies too, albeit focused on more specific objects. And doing this means, as a ‘means’ without an ‘end’ (in Agamben’s sense), that ‘we show nothing’ according to Bergson, but suggest everything. One of Bergson’s most notorious demands for a philosophy is that it should seek a ‘means’ to know the Real ‘without any expression, translation or symbolic representation, metaphysics is that means. Metaphysics, then, is the science which claims to do without symbols.’54 And yet we know that when he describes a metaphysics that would dispense with symbols, it is really a question of what type of symbolism is at stake, fluid or fixed, suggestive or direct, bespoke or ready-made.

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A philosophy-without-symbols (PwS) is really a philosophy-withoutstandard-symbols, therefore, and is practised without fixed representations (be they conceptual, or linguistic in other forms), with suggestive images to begin with. This practice of PwS can be likened to Laruelle’s call, in Photo-Fiction (which similarly has no examples of philosophical photography but merely gestures towards a ‘photography of philosophy’), to ‘under-practice philosophical language’.55 Yet this attempt to ‘under-understand it, is not to lower oneself as an individual, or at minimum, it is to think in a more generic manner without exceptions’.56 He continues: No synthetic portmanteau, but non-localizable indeterminations in the philosophical sense, a language brought to its simplest status and sufficiently disrupted in order for the superior form of expression certain of itself in the concept to be rendered impossible. Philo-fiction is a gushing [jaillissant] and subtractive usage of the means of thinking, of philosophemes-withoutphilosophy, of mathemes-without-mathematics, and from here, all of the dimensions of philosophy rid of their proper all-encompassing finality, an insurrection against the all-too great superior finalities.57

Laruelle’s ultimate message for philosophy is that not everything is ‘philosophisable’, or, in other words, that not everything is reducible to standard philosophy.58 And Bergson’s own message is that not everything is ‘sayable’, that is, symbolisable with ordinary language – some things cannot be shown other than through their own showing – and, if new to it, we can only be directed to that showing at best. An immanent metaphysics like his, then, is a non-standardly-sayable philosophy. If it were ordinarily sayable with ready-made concepts, then it would be reducible to them. If you can say x in perfectly recognisable terms, then x possesses nothing that eludes those terms – and so cannot be new. If, say, the ‘indigenous audio-visual resources’ of any film (editing, composition, camera movement, focus . . .) are sayable with words, then their philosophical bearing is reducible to those words. Whatever it is that we talk about, the very fact that we can refer to it at all shows that at least some aspect of it is sayable, an aspect which can then be taken for all that it is. Hence, Wittgenstein’s remark on the gestural: ‘shrugging of shoulders, head-shakes, nods and so on we call signs first and foremost because they are embedded in the use of our verbal language’.59 To say the unsayable comes on pain of contradiction: what we can’t say, we can’t say. And we can’t whistle it either, at least according to Frank Ramsey’s famous resaying of Wittgenstein’s final remark on ineffability in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But ineffability in toto is something other than this – ostensive gesture – being totally unsayable. In other words, there are different ways of saying/not-saying, rather than



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total ineffability – and even ‘representation’ may only be another kind of gesture.60 Indeed, there are various levels to the Modernist ‘unrepresentability’ thesis: psychological (that it is too painful to represent certain experiences), moral (that one shouldn’t try to represent certain, violent events – out of respect for the victims, to protect the impressionable, and so on), aesthetic (that art flounders in its own inadequacy when faced with such a task of representation), metaphysical (that, literally speaking, a past event of any sort cannot be present again), and epistemological (that one cannot understand an experience simply by witnessing a representation of it, that it is ineffable).61 Here, though, non-representation is intended to multiply and embed representation within immanence, to allow it to belong to the Real rather than stand outside it. For what if x is not ‘directly’ said because it cannot be shown with those words (de-monstratively ‘those’, un-showing ‘those’), but only ‘directed’, or indexed, with images, with words acting as images, being read through what they say rather than about what they say?62 We suggest things, but show nothing. Significantly, Bergson’s philosophy was once described as ‘an analysis against analysis’, and as such it could only suggest rather than demonstrate its truth.63 Accordingly, it is entirely true, as we said in our introduction, that each of his books ‘is conceived at once as a scientific work and as a work of art’.64 Writing in 1965, Paul de Man put the scientific nature of Bergson’s aesthetic in an even clearer light: The poetic image . . . becomes a close verbal approximation to what perception and sensation are actually like, much closer, at any rate, than the purely intellectual representation of reality found in the scientific concept. Poetics thus becomes a vital source for theoretical psychology, rather than a minor part of it.65

The poetic image is not an ornament but an aisthesis, which we see now as a matter of attitude, an imagery that embodies suggestion, at least when it comes to communicating an intuition to another mind. In Laruelle’s terms, it is the ‘so-called “generic” extension of art to aesthetics; the moment when thought in its turn becomes a form of art’. This is ‘an art of thought rather than a thought about art . . .’; ‘not a conceptual art, but a concept modeled by the art, a generic extension of art’.66 Bergson’s fluid representations, in ‘structure and rhythm’, communicate or relay an attitude, an aisthesis rather than a thesis.67 In sum then, we will not speak for the philosophy in cinema (or any art, viewed immanently) by speaking of it directly (representing it and so transcending it). We can only relay an attitude, a suggested reviewing of this art as philosophy, while hopefully not reducing it to ready-made concepts (be they philosophy’s or anyone else’s – including

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even Bergson’s or Laruelle’s). A reverse mutation (reversion to the ‘wild type’) that alters our vision, the one that Laruelle’s Théorie des Identités describes as ‘more than an enlargement of the detail and a variation of the optical field’ but also as a ‘mutation in the conditions themselves of the “optic” of thought’.68 The democratisation of philosophy, at least with respect to the arts, can mean various things. For non-philosophers in art, though, first and foremost it must mean that any art can be philosophy, and equally so. Yet if that idea only entails any art being philosophical ‘with specific reference to philosophy = x’, then even this thesis is also reductive, no matter how broad or plural ‘x’ may be. Being ‘sayable’ or ‘philosophisable’ at all with one or many ready-made concepts brings nothing new with it. If instead, this democratisation means being philosophical ‘through art understood as a reverse mutation of what philosophy is qua gesture/suggestion’ (non-standard philosophy or PwS), then it equally follows that philosophy too = a general aisthesis (through suggestion, gesture, attitude, posture, or image, but always understood as convergent action). Art is philosophy just and only when philosophy is art. Indeed, though Bergson and Laruelle place the emphasis differently – Bergson focusing on philosophy as a generic art, and Laruelle making each of the arts (non-standardly) philosophical – the two processes necessarily complement each other to create a flat, democratic thought.69 If Bergson’s PwS is an ‘art of the people’, such gestural, non-standard philosophy is also an art-form, but one that acts equally on all our faculties and hence all possible art-objects (that is, the world), immanently and at once, so that art’s being-philosophical is equally realised. Such a democracy is achieved through reverse mutation – an ‘underunderstanding’ or PwS – acting on philosophy and art simultaneously. The mutation, therefore, is of both the so-called subject (philosophy) and object (art), being ‘object-oriented’ and ‘subject-oriented’ at once because the mutation re-orients thought-as-an-orientation (what was directed from concepts to things reverses to being directed from things to concepts). There are only directions, orientations, or vectors. Hence, again, there would be no one such thing as ‘metaphysics’, but rather as many different kinds of metaphysics as there are objects in becoming. Philosophy is process, is the event of transformation: when the object mutates, there is the moment of philosophy, the intuition, the reflexivefeeling when the thing-within-us starts to think, as us. The effort of intuition is the effort of the ‘thing’ as well as the so-called ‘thinker’, the ‘object’ and the ‘subject’, re-integrating each other through movement.70 The effort of attention – a tension suggested through gestural thought, or PwS – is philosophy becoming art/thing/object as well as



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vice-versa in mutual mutation. An emergent philosophy that tries to change us and our ways of seeing, but not by showing us anything directly. This (non-standard) philosophy is the most democratic art – the specific arts themselves being philosophical without being spoken for (sayable) or represented. This philosophy – on account of reversemutating (‘integrating’) towards a PwS of gesture, of de-monstration or un-showing showing – merely places or orients (us) towards the attitude needed to make the effort of attention that might then see artas-philosophy. But to show art as existing philosophy, with a recognisable set of extant philosophical terms, would be to reduce it to that one image. The multitude, the plural images, by a ‘convergence’ of their ‘action’ direct, index, or vectorise – but they do not directly show. They direct to show, or direct such that the art might show itself to/with the subject in a new ‘degree’ of attention/tension, a duration that concentrates (with effort) their relation such that what was once two practices exterior to each other, ‘philosophy’ plus ‘art’, are no longer so: their spatial dis-unity becomes a temporal continuity of varying degrees of attention/tension. The images’ convergence point de-monstrates or ‘points’ (ostensive images or gestures) as a means and without an end. They de-philosophise philosophy in the sense of making philosophy strange, reverse mutating it into the Real, integrating it within duration. This would be Bergson’s ‘penser en durée’, the immanent thinking-intime that makes philosophy a generic art and the arts specific, new, philosophies.71 NOTES  1. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, hardback edition, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 35.  2. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 168.   3. François Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 301.  4. Laruelle cited in Robin Mackay, ‘Introduction: Laruelle Undivided’, in François Laruelle, From Decision to Heresy: Experiments in NonStandard Thought, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2012), p. 23.  5. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 157. In ‘The Possible and the Real’, philosophy is also described as what ‘will give each of us, unceasingly, certain of the satisfactions which art at rare intervals procures for the privileged’ (ibid., p. 105). Or, again in a letter to Dauriac, 19 March 1913: ‘life in depth designates what art makes us feel some of the time and what

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­ hilosophy (the true one!) should make us feel at all times’ (Henri Bergson, p Mélanges, ed. André Robinet [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972], p. 990).  6. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 168.  7. Ibid., p. 175, see also, on this image, Bergson’s essay ‘Philosophical Intuition’, ibid., p. 109.  8. Ibid. See also John Mullarkey, ‘The Very Life of Things: Reversing Thought and Thinking Objects in Bergsonian Metaphysics’, Introduction to Henri Bergson: An Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. John Mullarkey (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), pp. ix–xxxii.  9. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 176–7 (emphases added). 10. Bergson connects life in general to movement at ibid., p. 128 and generality to integrality (rather than abstraction) at Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 200. 11. François Laruelle, ‘Is Thinking Democratic? Or, How to Introduce Theory into Democracy’, in John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith, eds, Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 229. 12. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 189. 13. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 204. 14. In Bergson’s Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (trans. F. L. Pogson [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910], p. 170), he argues that the truly free act is performed, or ‘decided’ upon, ‘without any reason, and perhaps even against every reason’ (or as Laruelle would say, with no principle of sufficient reason): ‘the action which has been performed does not then express some superficial idea, almost external to ourselves, distinct and easy to account for: it agrees with the whole of our most intimate feelings, thoughts and aspirations, with that particular conception of life which is the equivalent of all our past experience, in a word, with our personal idea of happiness and of honour.’ Intellectual, deliberative decisions can only be re-constructed retrospectively, after the act. And that act expresses only our character, one to which Bergson’s later work, from Matter and Memory onwards, will give a more and more embodied form. 15. Bergson, The Creative Mind, pp. 48–9. 16. Ibid., pp. 165–6 (emphases added). 17. See ibid., pp. 42–3. 18. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 89, 90, 111–12; The Creative Mind, p. 211; Time and Free Will, p. 172; Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 296. 19. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 168. In Time and Free Will, Bergson links indefinable freedom to art as follows: ‘we are free when our acts spring



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from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work’ (p. 172). 20. Clearly, Laruelle’s Photo-Fiction, A Non-Standard Aesthetics (trans. Drew S. Burke and Anthony Paul Smith [Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012]) utilises ideas from quantum mechanics and its notions of objective probability and uncertainty (see, for instance, p. 14: ‘This plane is not that of an identification within an over-photography, but we would say of a “non-photography” obtained by a process of “superposition” taken from the quantum and which has several similarities with the optical processes of photography.’ And Bergson too eventually realised that some of his ideas had been re-invented by the new physics: ‘sooner or later, I thought, physics will be brought around to the point of seeing in the fixity of the element a form of mobility. When that time came, it is true, science would probably give up looking for an imaged representation of it, the image of a movement being that of a moving point (that is to say, always of a minute solid). In actual fact, the great theoretical discoveries of recent years have led physicists to suppose a kind of fusion between the wave and the particle – between substance and movement, as I should express it’ (Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 72). 21. Laruelle, Principles, p. 32. 22. François Laruelle, ‘Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of Philosophy’, in François Laruelle, The Non-Philosophy Project, ed. Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjevic (New York: Telos Press, 2011), p. 83. 23. François Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy, trans. Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012), p. 199. Laruelle also talks about the ‘degrowth’ of philosophy when referring to such counter-movements (see ‘The Degrowth of Philosophy: Towards a Generic Ecology’, in Laruelle, From Decision to Heresy, pp. 327–49. 24. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 177. 25. Ibid., p. 190. 26. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory’, Collapse, Vol. III (2007), pp. 70–1. 27. Some Deleuzians will not recognise their version of Bergson here, heavily mediated as theirs is through Deleuze’s virtualist philosophy. For the strong evidence that Bergson is more actualist than they think, see John Mullarkey, ‘Forget the Virtual: Bergson, Actualism, and the Refraction of Reality’, Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 37 (2004), pp. 469–93. Howard Caygill’s essay in this volume, ‘Hyperaesthesia and the Virtual’, by placing an emphasis on actual (hyperaesthetic) perception and its creation of the virtual through de-actualisation, can also be seen as an actualist reading of Bergson. 28. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, p. 19.

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29. Ibid., pp. 13–14, my emphasis. 30. The reference to ‘analytical’ here is not meant to be identified exclusively with Anglo-American philosophy, but to a form ubiquitous in all philosophical cultures. 31. Ibid., p. 19. 32. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 192–3 (emphases added). See also: ‘in using the intellect to transcend the intellect, we find ourselves turning in a real circle, that which consists in laboriously rediscovering by metaphysics a unity that we began by positing a priori, a unity that we admitted blindly and unconsciously by the very act of abandoning the whole of experience to science and the whole of reality to the pure understanding’ (Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 208). 33. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 168. 34. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 48. 35. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, pp. 11, 55. 36. François Laruelle, Le Concept de non-photographie/The Concept of NonPhotography (Bilingual Edition), trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth/New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011), p. 12. 37. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, p. 57. See also p. 58: ‘The photographic preparation is positional and technological and therefore must be able to be interpreted in terms of vectors. These take the shape of geometrical, postural, relational, positional variables within the space of the world.’ 38. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 21 (first italics mine). 39. Ibid., pp. 20–1. 40. Ibid., p. 100. 41. Ibid., pp. 133–4 (emphasis added). 42. Bergson, The Creative Mind, pp. 86–7. 43. Ibid., p. 304 n. 14. 44. Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wilson Carr (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), pp. 56–9. 45. Should such an amplification of the neurological be deemed anthropomorphic is a debatable point, given that anthropomorphism can be understood as a reciprocal process, rather than simply a one-way projection (think only of the ‘Chinese Brain’ thought experiment in the philosophy of mind which, in a prefiguring of the internet, likened a vast population of electronically intercommunicating individuals to the interacting neurons of a brain: see Ned Block, ‘Troubles with Functionalism’, Minnesota Studies in The Philosophy of Science, Vol. 9 [1978], pp. 261–325). On two-way or ‘complete’ anthropomorphism, see John Mullarkey, ‘The Tragedy of the Object’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2012), pp. 39–59. 46. See Paisley Livingston, ‘Theses on Cinema as Philosophy’, in Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg, eds, Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006),



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pp. 11–18; and Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (London: Continuum Press, 2011), pp. 90 ff on this. 47. See John Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010). 48. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 380, 384. See Howard Caygill’s essay on Bergson’s concept of ‘hyperaesthesia’ in this volume, to see how far Bergson can take this notion of ‘detail’. 49. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 133–4. 50. See John Mullarkey, ‘Temple Grandin’s Animal Thoughts: On NonHuman Thinking in Pictures, Films, and Diagrams’, in Kristof Nyiri and Andras Benedek, eds, Images in Language: Metaphors and Metamorphoses (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 155–68; and Mullarkey, ‘The Tragedy of the Object’. 51. The notion of background becomes even more crucial in Matter and Memory as it becomes a material analogue for the virtual itself, a ‘series of objects simultaneously set out in space’ behind me, such as when I walk from one room to another (Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 145). 52. See Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema’, in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), pp. 93–4. Agamben’s analyses of cinema indicate a nostalgia for ‘the homeland of gesture’: see Benjamin Noys, ‘Gestural Cinema? Giorgio Agamben on Film’, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 22 (2004), available at http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8–2004/n22noys (accessed 2 April 2013). But they are also a political and ethical call for a future cinema that reconfigures the relationship between image and gesture. For him, the moving image as gesture has the power to liberate the cinematic from the last traces of a static image. See also Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, in Means Without End, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 49–62: p. 53: ‘In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss.’ For an overview of the importance of gesture in early cinema, see Pasi Valiaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema Circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), pp. 25–52. 53. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Author as Gesture’, in Agamben, Profanations, p. 66; Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, p. 58. 54. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 162, translation modified. 55. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, p. 62. Laruelle also wishes to change the ‘syntax’ (‘arrange together’) of any language that would speak about the Real, transforming its syntax into what we might call now a ‘uni-tax’, where we speak and think ‘alongside’ or ‘according to’ the Real. This re-orientation to the Real is also to the One, the ‘uni-versal’ (turned to the One): see John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 140–2. 56. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, p. 62.

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57. Ibid., pp. 62–3. ‘Philo-fiction’ is another name for Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy. Its similarities with Bergson’s theory of fabulation would be well worth a fuller examination. 58. François Laruelle, En Tant Qu’Un (Paris: Aubier, 1991), p. 246. 59. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, 2nd edn, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1981), §651, p. 114. 60. That is, it could be that representing embodiment may well be another kind of embodiment (another kind of showing), and an action of another, other kind, that is, at another level of corporeality (or speed or tension) awaiting incorporation (‘showing’) ‘here and now’ in this placement and its level/speed/tension. Perhaps the performance of a thesis, the en-actment of a thought, is the mutation or movement of ideas at other levels/speeds/ tensions (mutation to another type) and would involve the micro-performances of brain behaviour. Not all so-called ‘performative utterances’ (contradictory or not) are alike. 61. See John Mullarkey, ‘Bergson and the Comedy of Horrors’, in Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and Laci Mattison, eds, Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 243–55. 62. Of course, the ‘de-’ in ‘demonstrate’ is not a negative but simply means ‘from’ in the Latin. The play on words here is Anglophone. 63. V. Delbos, ‘Matière et Mémoire: Revue Critique’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1897), p. 373, quoted in François Heidsieck, Henri Bergson et la notion d’Espace (Paris: Le Circle du Livre, 1957), p. 90. The question of how to analyse without the standard presuppositions of analysis might well be the key problematic that links Bergson’s immanent metaphysics with Laruelle’s non-philosophy. 64. Bernard Gilson, L’Individualité dans la philosophie de Bergson (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J.Vrin), p. 64. 65. Paul de Man, ‘Modern Poetics in France and Germany’, in Paul de Man, Critical Writings 1953–1978, edited with an introduction by Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 154. 66. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, pp. 2, 5. 67. On rhythm in Bergson, especially with reference to the British modernists, see Charlotte de Mille, ‘ “Sudden gleams of (f)light”: Intuition as Method?’, Art History, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2011), pp. 370–86. 68. François Laruelle, Théorie des Identités. Fractalité généralisée et philosophie artificielle (Paris: PUF, 1992), p. 302. In genetics, a reverse or ‘back’ mutation occurs when the wild-type phenotype is restored spontaneously (undoing the genetic alterations of the laboratory); such organisms are called ‘revertants’. Laruelle’s enterprise, to unbound thought from philosophy and so render it ordinary and popular again – which Bergson calls thinking in reverse – can be likened to this biological process, given his own preference (especially in the third phase of non-philosophy) for biological models of thought: see John Mullarkey, Postural Mutations:



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Laruelle and Non-Human Philosophy, forthcoming. Mutations occur through reversal and as reversal. This biological model can also work as an analogue for ‘logical’ recursiveness, or self-reference, especially when it leads to paradox. To undo the paradox, the self-referred-to must mutate, or ramify, into different types. Our own statements in this paragraph are already paradoxical in this fashion: the demand not to reduce ‘to readymade concepts (be they philosophy’s or anyone else’s – including even Bergson’s or Laruelle’s)’, is made in the name of Bergson’s or Laruelle’s ideas. But what type of demand is it, what type of saying or para-saying (para-doxa), and so what type or version of Laruelle and Bergson is being invoked here? 69. The origins of their different emphases stem from the fact that Bergson, remaining a philosopher in name, wants to redeem philosophy within an immanent metaphysics, while Laruelle, as a self-styled outsider, wants to review the historical content of philosophy as only one form of materialised thought. 70. See also Mullarkey, ‘The Very Life of Things’. See also Anne-Françoise Schmid’s work on ‘integrative objects’ (which is also influenced by Laruelle) in Anne-Françoise Schmid, ‘The Science-Thought of Laruelle and its Effects on Epistemology’, in Mullarkey and Smith, eds, Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, pp. 122–42; and Anne-Françoise Schmid, Muriel Mambrini-Doudet and Armand Hatchuel, ‘Une nouvelle logique de l’interdisciplinarité’, Nouvelles Perspectives en Sciences Sociales, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2011), pp. 105–36. 71. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 34.

13. The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics: Reading Diffractively IRIS VAN DER TUIN

Monday morning, the first semester of the academic year. I hear the English table clock in my living room strike 7:30. I put on my glasses, get up, switch on the radio, feed my cat, take a shower. At ten minutes past eight I hit the road in order to take the train to the university. An hour later I am in front of the students, waiting for them to unpack their bags. My thoughts are lingering and I realise that I am wearing my acetate glasses. Why did I wear these and not my other pair? Searching for answers I come to realise that at home, ‘I [was] a conscious automaton, and I [was] so because I [had] everything to gain by being so.’1 I start with my lecture. Henri Bergson in Time and Free Will makes use of the seemingly trivial event of waking up in the morning so as to conceptualise the difference between habitual and free activity. Getting ready for work in automaton-mode does not allow for one’s thoughts to linger. In such a state, the striking of the clock ‘merely stirs up an idea which is, so to speak, solidified on the surface, the idea of rising and attending to my usual occupations’.2 The impression of the clock hour has coupled with a fixed idea, and the consequential act follows the impression ‘without the self interfering with it’.3 This ‘interference’ should be read as virtual and is not actualised when getting up is habitually done. We rarely change our mind in automaton-mode. And in equally seldom cases we can trace back why we have done something the way we did it during the morning chores. Bergson argues that this does not imply the correctness of associationist or determinist philosophies of the self. Both these theories have taken their exemplars from ‘acts, which are very numerous but for the most part insignificant’.4 Associationism and determinism alike make ‘retrograde movements’, and ‘from this results an error which vitiates our conception of the past; from this arises our claim to anticipate the future on every occa232



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sion’.5 Bergson invites us to start from other acts for philosophical purposes. Distinguishing acting freely from automaton-mode, Bergson hints at interference patterns or ‘diffraction’ as a tool to think with. In physical terms, such patterns describe how waves react when they encounter each other or an obstacle. Having said that, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad have introduced diffraction to feminist studies in an attempt to invent a novel methodology of relating to texts; their productive dimension should not be undone (as in a subjective comparison, for example).6 Taking full advantage of diffraction for feminist philosophy, they did not refer to Bergson. In this chapter I will unearth where diffraction appears in the work of Bergson, so as to bring it together with dynamic ontology and feminist epistemology. Furthermore, reading the work of Haraway and Barad through Bergson demonstrates how Bergson’s philosophy can be made productive for feminism, and leads to insights into the work of these more contemporary theorists. Following diffraction and the practice of ‘reading diffractively’, our discussion will hinge on the temporality of dynamic onto-epistemology. I will argue that, while diffraction disrupts the spatialised interpretation of time that Bergson’s oeuvre labours over (in order to realise a conceptualisation of ‘duration’), it can also disrupt any linear reception. The latter breakthrough is advantageous. The contemporary feminist interpretation of Bergson is, at times, unnecessarily narrow. This does a disservice to the movement that is constitutive of Bergson’s philosophy and the critical creativity of feminist thought. DIFFRACTION AND INTERFERENCE PATTERNS IN BERGSON Let me extend Bergson’s example. On Saturday mornings I may allow myself to stay in bed for a while. Eyes closed, no glasses. I hear the bus pass by. I stumble upon a conversation I had last night. I am anxious about the trip to the North that I will have to make later in the weekend. Hearing the clock strike 7 a.m., ‘I might receive this ­impression [with my entire soul] as Plato says; I might let it blend with the confused mass of impressions which fill my mind.’7 On a Saturday, the sound of seven does not hit a solidified coupling with an established idea. But in this situation, hearing the clock strike the familiar hour of 7:30 will ‘disturb . . . my whole consciousness like a stone which falls into the water of a pond’.8 Staying put on Saturday mornings, I experience my deepest self. But the possibility of the habitual morning routine is now interfering because clock time does not determine me to act in this case.

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Bergson affirms ‘that we generally perceive our own self by refraction through space, that our conscious states crystallize into words, and that our living and concrete self thus gets covered with an outer crust of clean-cut psychic states, which are separated from one another and consequently fixed’.9 The actuality of this most common self-perception conceals our conception of the free act as much as it disguises our sense of self. And here we find that each singular Bergsonian dislocation (durational temporality over spatialised time, inner states over language, and process over aggregation) is at work in the now-significant event of getting up freely. It has been argued that one stone falling into the water of a pond does not make an interference pattern.10 The stone produces a single series of waves circling into infinity. Even in this picture, however, diffraction is at work and we can be most certain that, at some point, the pattern of circling waves will be disturbed by a fixed or floating object (a fountain in the middle of the pond, a dead leaf floating on its surface) or it will hit another pattern of waves (generated by the leaf that has just fallen off a tree). Still quivering because of the sound of 7:30, I can now be repeatedly disturbed: by hearing the loud horn of the bus, or by the tender smell of coffee. It is in this way that we can read Bergson’s famous circles of memory as an interference pattern. And indeed, also in Time and Free Will, Bergson alludes to such a pattern when suggesting that a dynamic approach to reality embraces a certain complexity as simple: [Contrary to mechanism] dynamism is not anxious so much to arrange the notions in the most convenient order as to find out their real relationship: often, in fact, the so-called simple notion – that which the believer in mechanism regards as primitive – has been obtained by the blending together of several richer notions which seem to be derived from it, and which have more or less neutralized one another in this very sense of blending, just as darkness may be produced by the interference of two lights.11

It is the latter use of diffraction that informs my reading of the circles of memory, albeit that the example of darkness has become stuck to the determinacy paradigm of classical physics. What is important here is that a dynamic ontology (complexity) does not allow for a retrograde movement to be made because it positions itself before a representation (or a simple notion) has captivated us. We are no longer obliged to believe in the instantaneous truth of the sentence ‘it is dark’. We are to inquire whether two light beams might be out of phase, producing a sense of darkness in their interference. Quantum physics would unpack this notion further; there are deeper oscillations at work not allowing themselves to be captured by such a one-and-one-is-two scenario.



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Bergson opens his discussion of the circles of memory in Matter and Memory by discussing the work of Théodule Ribot. The work of this French psychologist is as useful as it is in need of ‘rewriting’.12 Bergson takes up Ribot’s work in order ‘to define attention as an adaption of the body rather than of the mind’.13 But since Ribot describes attention along the lines of the negative, stating that attention implies ‘an inhibition of movement, an arresting action’,14 Bergson extends attention to the positive, concentrating on the fact that ‘upon this general attitude, more subtle movements will soon graft themselves, . . . all of which combine to retrace the outlines of the object perceived’.15 Positioning himself according to this particular embodied a priori, attention is ‘continued by memories’.16 Attention does not involve a zooming in of the perceiving mind that comes to a standstill, implying the perception of a fully delineated object outside of itself, but a careful attending of the body, working out ‘a solidarity between the mind and its object, . . . a circuit so well closed, that we cannot pass to states of higher concentration without creating, whole and entire, so many new circuits which envelop the first and have nothing in common between them but the perceived object’.17 These circuits include diffractions that have a productive effect: reflective perception is a circuit, in which all the elements, including the perceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an electric circuit, so that no disturbance starting from the object can stop on its way and remain in the depths of the mind: it must always find its way back to the object whence it proceeds.18

Perception, then, is reflective precisely because, though seemingly external, it instantly motivates memory to reflect upon the perception of its image, memory-images of the same kind, or deeper, more distant regions of memory.19 This is a process that stretches out into infinity, since every doubling of the perception evokes new memories, allowing pure memory to grow, that is, to be the storehouse of an ever growing repertoire of images. I must note that the many perceptions that are made habitually, for instance during the morning chores, do not make it to this storehouse. They are not ‘the projection, outside ourselves, of an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object on which it comes to mould itself’.20 This is why I only notice in class that I wear my acetate glasses and not my other pair. In class, and not at home, these glasses produce a stir, which sets the machinery of attentive perception in motion. Bergson’s discussion of the circles of memory continues with a discussion of the memory cone. This discussion makes the distinction between habitual and free actions precise; it affirms that there are two

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interconnected memories. The first (habit) consists of ‘nothing else but the complete set of intelligently constructed mechanisms which ensure the appropriate reply to the various possible demands’, thus, ‘it acts our past experience but does not call up its image’.21 The second (pure memory) is ‘truly moving in the past and not, like the first, in an ever renewed present’.22 The seeming disjunction between the two and the movement that is constitutive of the second can explain why I am so disturbed by the sound of 7:30, the horn of the bus, or the smell of coffee on Saturday morning. Experiencing my deepest self, these unrealised images have a localising effect, whereas this special image which persists in the midst of the others, and which I call my body, constitutes at every moment . . . a section of the universal becoming. It is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things upon which I act – the seat, in a word, of the sensori-motor phenomena.23

The summit S of the inverted cone of memory, which is ‘the image of the body’, coincides with the ever-moving plane P ‘of my actual representation of the universe’.24 There is an unceasing traffic between the summit and the base of the cone (AB), which is ‘the totality of the recollections accumulated in my memory’, also continually in movement.25 This memory cone demonstrates how true memory is the base of habit, too, as ‘it is from the present that comes the appeal to which memory responds, and it is from the sensori-motor elements of present action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life’.26 (See Figure 10.3 in Simon O’Sullivan’s chapter, ‘A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation’, for an illustration of the memory cone.) Again working from an embodied a priori rather than allowing for a retrograde movement to be made, Bergson gives this bidirectional traffic between the two memories priority; ‘within the cone so determined the general idea oscillates continually between the summit S and the base AB’.27 Bergson laments ideas that are not ‘incorporated in the fluid mass of our conscious states’, ideas that ‘float on the surface, like dead leaves on the water of a pond’.28 These are the ready-made social ideas that we are obliged to function with, just like we are sometimes obliged to get up at a certain hour. The discussion of these ideas has an important bearing on diffraction. And indeed, in the case of ‘an idea which is truly ours [that] fills the whole of ourself’,29 ‘we are not in fact dealing here with an idea, but with a movement of ideas, with a struggle or with an interference of ideas with one another’,30 as Bergson continues in the essay ‘Intellectual Effort’ collected in Mind-Energy.



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DIFFRACTION AND DIFFRACTIVE READING IN HARAWAY AND BARAD Haraway was the first to specify the potentials of diffraction for feminist theory and methodology. Her seminal book on feminist and technoscientific practices – Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium – adds diffraction to the toolbox of semiotics (which consists of syntax, semantics and pragmatics) in order to affirm how ‘interference patterns can make a difference in how meanings are made and lived’.31 Taking further advantage of the utopian dimension of her work on ‘cyborgs’ and ‘situated knowledges’, Haraway invents diffraction as a tool for a past-present-future relationality around the theme of difference which is not linear or spatialised, thus approaching the Bergsonian theme of the temporality of free (and bound) acts as well as social (here: powerladen) ideas. Working with the paintings and expository words of Lynn Randolph, Haraway affirms that ‘diffraction is a narrative, graphic, psychological, spiritual, and political technology for making consequential meanings’.32 With this, Haraway comes close to Bergson’s philosophising about self-perception and his dynamic ontology as a whole. According to Randolph, ‘every woman’ is situated on a brink that is constantly on the move. This image of a singular woman, itself made up of ‘multiple selves’ whilst being ‘one body’, travels through time in a state of being marked by ‘the screened memory of a powerful male figure’. This screened memory ‘marks a place where change occurs’. This change is a diffraction ‘occur[ing] at a place at the edge of the future, before the abyss of the unknown’.33 The image of woman as metaphorically material is for once confirmed with the tool of diffraction.34 Qualitatively shifting the feminist critique of the denigrating, sexist gesture of naturalising women by making sure that they are and will remain their bodies only, bodies that have to live up to social images of beauty,35 this body is no longer the body that is successfully administered by patriarchy, where process installs the powerful male figure as a mental origin that oppresses woman through sexist imagery and the woman as a physical origin that gives birth to and arouses men. The body as itself an image incorporates images of patriarchy, reproduction and male lust, of feminism, generativity and female desire as constantly changing ‘with age and psychic transformations’.36 Whereas Bergson does not explicitly start from woman as an image, the body or matter, for him too, is ‘an aggregate of “images” ’ whereby images are at the same time more than representations and less than things.37 Transversing thingification and representationalism, both acts of spatialising time, Bergson defines ‘that which is given’ as ‘the totality

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of the images of the material world, with the totality of their internal elements’.38 These images have an inner working; the workings-onmatter, for instance the patriarchal administering of sexist imagery, are fundamentally deceptive. In the words of Bergson: ‘The reality of matter consists in the totality of its elements and of their actions of every kind. Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible action upon bodies: it results from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or more generally for our functions.’39 What we find here is a dynamic ontology of images that become-with one another. Dorothea Olkowski neatly formulates its working: All [images] function without ever producing a single representation of the material universe. Rather, external images influence the ‘body’ image by transmitting movement to it. The body image responds by bringing about changes in its surrounding images and giving back movement to them, choosing how it returns what it receives.40

This leads us to question: where does the interference pattern come in? The pattern that is so important for both Randolph and the argument of this chapter? Let us first look closely at the philosophy-physics of Barad in order to understand what diffraction can do. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad is explicit about the double role of diffraction. Diffraction is ‘a physical phenomenon that lies at the center of some key discussions in physics and the philosophy of physics’ and ‘also an apt metaphor for describing the methodological approach . . . of reading insights through one another in attending to and responding to the details and specificities of relations of difference  and how they matter’.41 The physical phenomenon features in classical and quantum understandings, implying that the phenomenon is immediately entangled with ‘the shortage of words’42 that characterised the turmoil in physics in Bergson’s time. Additionally, the current intellectual landscape, which features Barad as a prominent player, is likewise on a cusp, searching for alternatives, most pertinently alternatives to what Bergson has called ‘the power of negation’43 or the dialectical stance that ‘leads to contrary philosophies; it demonstrates the thesis as well as the antithesis of antinomies’.44 It appears as important for the philosophy of Bergson to affirm explicitly what Barad hints at with the proposed methodology of reading primary texts closely and through one another: divergences are striking between the schools, that is to say, in short, between the groups of disciples formed around certain of the great masters. But would one find them as clear-cut between the masters themselves? Something here dominates the diversity of systems, something, I repeat, simple and definite like a sounding of which one feels that it has more or less reached the



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bottom of a same ocean, even though it brings each time to the surface very different materials. It is on these materials that disciples normally work: in that is the role of analysis. And the master, in so far as he formulates, develops, translates into abstract ideas what he brings, is already, as it were, his own disciple. But the simple act which has set analysis in motion and which hides behind analysis, emanates from a faculty quite different from that of analysing. This is by very definition intuition.45

Alongside Bergson echoing his circles of memory and the memory cone by affirming the discipleship of the master that works on his or her own thought, bringing this process to the surface is what Barad seems to attempt with the methodology that this chapter picks up on.46 Barad opens her Harawayian account of diffraction by stating that ‘diffraction attends to the relational nature of difference’.47 Difference as a relation, or rather, as a relating, has nothing to do with essences (Being), but it does not shy away from ‘understand[ing] diffraction patterns – as patterns of difference that make a difference – to be the fundamental constituents that make up the world’.48 Diffraction, we can say, is at the very heart of Barad’s ‘onto-epistemology’, which affirms that ontology changes with epistemology (which would be a Kuhnianism), just as much as epistemology is obliged to attend very closely to the windings of reality. Therefore, we have to continue by asking what diffraction is in classical and quantum physics so as to tune diffraction for the precise purposes of the problematic here at hand (which concerns diffraction in Bergson and the divergent trends in the contemporary feminist reception of dynamic ontology). The classical understanding of diffraction pertains to ‘the way waves combine when they overlap and the apparent bending and spreading of waves that occurs when waves encounter an obstruction’.49 Noting that classical physics considers particles (that are in one location at a given time) and waves (that superimpose and are in and out of phase) as two paradigms, it must be concluded that ‘from the perspective of classical physics, diffraction patterns are simply the result of differences in (the relative phase and amplitudes of) overlapping waves’50 and that particles do not produce them. Quantum physics has, with the help of the famous two-slit experiment, been developed on the basis of the research finding that, under certain circumstances, particles, and even single particles, can produce diffraction patterns. This does not cancel out the possibility of particles not producing diffractions or light (classically a wave) behaving like a particle.51 These puzzling empirical results from the 1920s have constituted the wave-particle duality paradox and form the backbone of quantum physics. It is important to note that quantum physics can understand classical physics, but that classical physics has

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nothing to say to quantum physics based on their understandings of position and momentum. In addition, quantum physics embraces the key role of the physical research set-up in all this, which has complementary epistemological and ontological consequences that form the basis of Barad’s onto-epistemology. What we find is that the traditional correspondence theory of truth which stands at the basis of classical physics (that the researcher is positioned outside of her research object and the instrument is but a neutral mediator) is being reworked along the lines of a co-responsive theory that allows for researcher, instrument and researched to be active and entangled agents.52 This is just like Bergson’s affirmation of a solidarity between mind and object, and ‘advocates [for] different types of reality (static and mobile) and so different types of concept to correspond with these realities’.53 Without going into the curious and ambiguously received discussion between Bergson and Albert Einstein about (the philosophy of) physics,54 it is important to be aware of the fact that Bergson produced his works from the brink of classical and quantum physics with Barad’s main interlocutor Niels Bohr, among others, playing a key role in the debate. This debate, as a whole, ‘forced into discussion a number of philosophical questions (concerning causality, indeterminacy, and the limits of knowledge) that Bergson had raised philosophically through the notion of duration since the late 1880s’.55 In addition, we must see that ‘today, if one accepts the analysis of [Isabelle] Stengers and [Ilya] Prigogine, whose collective work comes close to the work of Barad, Bergson’s conception of time has won out in the debate among physicists’.56 So where does the interference pattern come in? Twice in this chapter we have encountered the image of ‘the water of a pond’. First, this image was evoked very positively, as an image of my whole consciousness being disturbed by a certain impression. The positivity, here, stems from what such an image can do: it allows us to reach the faculty of intuition. In the second instance, Bergson wrote in an almost mournful manner about ‘dead leaves on the water of a pond’. This lamentation stems from ideas that block methodological intuition: ideas received in ready-made format cannot but effect the retrograde movement that forms the basis of analysis. The fragment from Time and Free Will that features the dead leaves nevertheless also features diffraction. Let me provide a lengthy quotation from it: the impulsive zeal with which we take sides on certain questions shows how our intellect has its instincts – and what can an instinct of this kind be if not an impetus common to all our ideas, i.e. their very interpenetration? The beliefs to which we most strongly adhere are those of which we should find



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it most difficult to give an account, and the reasons by which we justify them are seldom those which have led us to adopt them . . . they do not take in our minds that common looking form which they will assume as soon as we try to give expression to them in words; and, although they bear the same name in other minds, they are by no means the same thing. The fact is that each of them has the same kind of life as a cell in an organism: everything which affects the general state of the self affects it also. But while the cell occupies a definite point in the organism, an idea which is truly ours fills the whole of ourself. Not all our ideas, however, are thus incorporated in the fluid mass of our conscious states. Many float on the surface, like dead leaves on the water of a pond: the mind, when it thinks them over and over again, finds them ever the same, as if they were external to it.57

This fragment makes use of the differentiation we have already stumbled upon in the discussion of the paradigms of classical and quantum physics. Bergson makes use of the two paradigms and the confusion surrounding them in an attempt to make the life of ideas precise. Associationism, he claims, does not reach the inner life of ideas; by seeing ideas as cells and thus making epistemological use of position (a spatialisation), it is at most able to speak of ideas that affect the deepest self and the deepest self that affects ideas. This thinking is structurally related to what classical physics is capable of. Displacing associationism in his own work, Bergson sees ideas that are truly ours as ‘fill[ing] the whole of ourself’ and as ‘incorporated in the fluid mass of our conscious states’. Working his way around the classical problem of the disjunction between waves and particles, Bergson allows for certain circumstances to be in need of particle images (ready-made concepts, social ideas) and for others to necessitate wave metaphors (fluid concepts, our own ideas). Associationism, like certain ways of life, is an apparatus in the Baradian sense: it is part of the reality with which we are entangled. Exemplars, retrograde movements, intuitive metaphysics, the psychologist, the philosopher are entangled. BERGSON AS UNTIMELY How to pick up on the strengths of diffraction for the feminist reception of Bergson, so as to push Bergson’s thinking in time and feminism’s critical creativity to the limit? This question has a particular relevance in light of the often-affirmed timeliness of Bergson’s metaphysics (for instance, in the suggestion that ‘Bergson is the first contemporary, and our epoch is Bergsonian’58). But doesn’t this ascribe to a progressive linearity that does not comply with Bergson’s thought? In this final section I will develop the claim that diffractive reading provides us with a durational thought and with an apparatus that can help

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us see kindred ties to today’s contradictory feminist reception of Bergson. The contemporary feminist reception of the philosophy of Bergson demonstrates two trends. First, scholars like Olkowski and Elizabeth Grosz read Bergson closely and affirmatively. In Time Travels, in particular, Grosz explains that this way of reading entails ‘a mode of assenting to rather than dissenting from those “primary” texts’.59 Grosz explicates how a critical rendering of texts, a gesture that is an analytical distancing act Bergson has argued, functions ‘as a form of dismissal of texts, rather than as an analysis of the embeddedness of critique in that which it criticizes’.60 Reading closely and affirmatively does not allow for leaving a text unaffected, it requires a text’s readers to engage with the transformation.61 In other words, assenting to philosophical texts does not mean that the texts are solely celebrated. It is a moving away from the tendencies to either critique Bergson or to read his work only celebratorily – the two sides of the same analytical coin. Grosz’s methodology is innovative. In her own affirmative readings of Bergson, however, a disjunction between Bergson and feminism is still found. It is only after Bergson has been discussed in depth that the reading is affirmatively applied to feminist theory and politics. Secondly, there is Rebecca Hill, who, in two recent articles, has commented on the phallocentrism (and Eurocentrism) that, she claims, is constitutive of the philosophy of Bergson. Bergson, in her reading, offers a phallocentric philosophy because ‘his intuition of the enduring self is elaborated within restrictively masculine parameters’.62 First, she sees his work as dualist, whereas the sexist hierarchy that administers all dualism is not addressed. Second, she argues that ‘Bergson’s celebrated monistic integration of the divergent tendencies of life and matter maintains this sexed hierarchy’.63 In doing so, Bergson’s work is said to propose yet another ‘hypermasculine theory of life and corresponding devaluation of matter as feminine’.64 Even though Hill asserts that ‘this is not a binary hierarchy because Bergson’s concepts of life and matter are never actualised as pure activity and pure space’,65 she does claim that ‘we would do better to reconsider the life-matter relation beyond dualism’.66 Most Bergson scholars, including feminist ones, argue that this is what Bergson does, not by repeating dualism, but by having ‘pushed dualism to an extreme’.67 Hill is also critical of the feminist reception of Bergson offered by Grosz and Olkowski. They are said to have affirmed the feminist benefits of Bergson much too fast on the basis of links between Bergson and sexual difference theory, found because Bergson and Luce Irigaray both theorise ‘duration’ and ‘the interval’, the former being non-spatialised



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time and the latter the shifting of a utilitarian relationality between living beings and things.68 Hill asserts that a complicating move is necessary, and she makes use of the work of Irigaray to try to alter Bergson’s presumed phallocentrism, in turn, making Bergson potentially valuable to Irigaray scholarship. Whereas this move sounds diffractive rather than critical, Hill’s conclusions show the text of Bergson left untouched, as she concludes by ascribing a failure to qualitatively shift spatialisation to Bergson69 on the basis of a residual, sexed hierarchy. Obviously, this leads her to conclude that Bergson’s metaphysics is not monistic. What can diffraction do in order to help make up our minds about contemporary feminism and the admittedly disconcerting work of Hill? First, diffractive reading embarks on Grosz’s call for running with the transformation of texts. Going with this flow is Bergsonian, as Bergson has suggested, and, as noted above, ‘it is not enough to determine, by careful analysis, the categories of thought; we must engender them’.70 Hill’s call of phallocentrism, therefore, appears as a stalemated category and does not bring feminist philosophy any further. Hill’s analysis comes out as strangely disconnected from the persistent gendering of an intuitive metaphysics which has been connoted as feminine based on its anti-Cartesianism and supposed spiritualism.71 It cannot be overemphasised that Hill also attacks an older generation of feminist philosophers, which leaves her pretty much empty-handed.72 Second, diffraction comes in as useful as it makes Bergson’s work precise. Bergson makes use of metaphors of ‘reflection’, metaphors that Haraway and Barad have argued convincingly are dualist and not living up to the expectations of Bergson’s own ‘fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its windings and of adopting the very movement of the inner life of things’.73 Whereas Bergson has argued consistently and convincingly against representationalism, ‘reflective perception’ is a suggestive concept for which diffraction has a lot to offer. Bergson’s work, which works on the instantaneity of perception, memory and object, gains by making explicit that it does not suggest ‘hold[ing] the world at a distance’.74 NOTES  1. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson, 3rd edn (London: George Allen, 1913), p. 168.  2. Ibid.  3. Ibid.

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 4. Ibid.  5. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. M. L. Andison (Mineola: Dover, 2007), p. 11.   6. Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).  7. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 168.  8. Ibid.   9. Ibid., p. 167. 10. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp. 80–1. 11. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 141. 12. For the methodology of rewriting, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 13. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (Mineola: Dover, 2004), p. 121. 14. Ibid., p. 122. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 127. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 123. 20. Ibid., p. 124. 21. Ibid., p. 195. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 196. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 197. 27. Ibid., p. 210. 28. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 135. 29. Ibid. 30. Henri Bergson, ‘Intellectual Effort’, in Mind-Energy, trans. H. W. Carr (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), p. 179. 31. Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 14. 32. Ibid., p. 273. 33. In ibid. 34. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1993). 35. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (London: Vintage, 1991). 36. In Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 273. 37. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. vii.



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38. Ibid., p. 30. 39. Ibid. 40. Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 96. 41. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 71. 42. Bernard Pullmann cited in Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 40. See Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come’, Derrida Today, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2010), p. 252. 43. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 89. 44. Ibid., p. 115. 45. Ibid., p. 168. 46. See Iris Van der Tuin, ‘  “A Different Starting Point, A Different Metaphysics”: Reading Bergson and Barad Diffractively’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2011), pp. 22–42; and Aud Sissel Hoel and Iris van der Tuin, ‘The Ontological Force of Technicity: Reading Cassirer and Simondon Diffractively’, Philosophy & Technology (forthcoming). 47. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 72. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., p. 74. 50. Ibid., p. 80. 51. Ibid., p. 83. 52. See Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Tim Ingold, ‘Toward an Ecology of Materials’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 41 (2012), pp. 427–42. 53. John Mullarkey, ‘Introduction: la philosophy nouvelle, or Change in Philosophy’, in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 11. 54. Many Bergson scholars have affirmed that Einstein remained within the classical understanding of linear time and causal determinacy (see for example Timothy S. Murphy, ‘Beneath Relativity: Bergson and Bohm on Absolute Time’, in Mullarkey, The New Bergson, p. 70; and Guerlac, Thinking in Time, p. 40 n. 83). 55. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, p. 38. 56. Ibid., p. 199. 57. Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 134–5. 58. Richard A. Cohen, ‘Philo, Spinoza, Bergson: The Rise of an Ecological Age’, in Mullarkey, The New Bergson, p. 22. 59. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 3. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., p. 2.

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62. Rebecca Hill, ‘Interval, Sexual Difference: Luce Irigaray and Henri Bergson’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2008), p. 119. 63. Rebecca Hill, ‘Phallocentrism in Bergson: Life and Matter’, Deleuze Studies, Vol. 2 (2008), Supplement, p. 124. 64. Ibid., p. 132. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., p. 133. 67. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 236. 68. Hill, ‘Interval, Sexual Difference’, pp. 120–1, 130, n. 1. 69. Ibid., p. 129. 70. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (Mineola: Dover, 1998), p. 207. 71. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, pp. 13, 22. 72. In the end, Hill seeks her recourse in Manuel DeLanda, whose work is said to be able to highlight that ‘ “inert” [feminine] matter is capable of organising itself and acting in ways that exceed mathematical prediction’ (Hill, ‘Phallocentrism in Bergson’, p. 135). 73. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 160. 74. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 87.

14. Hyperaesthesia and the Virtual HOWARD CAYGILL

. . . we perceive virtually many more things than we perceive actually, and that here again the role of our body is to separate from consciousness all of that which we sense to be of no practical interest, all that which does not lend itself to our action. (Bergson, ‘Fantômes de vivants’)1

Bergson’s conviction that we perceive much more than our consciousness allows us to perceive is central to his understanding of the virtual. This enigmatic part played by the virtual in Bergson’s theory of ­perception receives its compelling quality from the confluence of a philosophical interest in Leibniz’s monadology and its theory of petits perceptions, with a parapsychological inquiry into the phenomenon of ‘hyperaesthesia’ or states of extreme perception. The latter are characterised by a high intensity of perception – mainly but not exclusively visual perception – that becomes manifest in pathological contexts where conciousness and the habits of daily life are suspended. Already at Clermont-Ferrand in the 1880s Bergson’s teaching of Leibniz allowed him to situate the hyperaesthesia he encountered in his experiments with hypnotism within a broader theory of perception which was at the same time confirmed by his experiments.2 Leibniz’s theory of petits perceptions and the experimental encounter with hyperaesthetic states allowed Bergson to frame the argument – altogether at odds with the Cartesian tradition – that conscious perception is above all the outcome of limitation. The conviction that consciousness entailed limitation led Bergson to pursue a theory of expanded perception, framed temporally in terms of durée in Time and Free Will but thereafter consistently in terms of hyperaesthesia and the virtual. The relation between hyperaesthesis and the virtual points to a different understanding of Bergson’s theory of perception than that which has largely prevailed in interpretations of his work. It can, for example, be distinguished from Deleuze’s influential understanding of intuition 247

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as method in Bergsonism, a method that impels ‘us to go beyond the state of experience towards the conditions of experience’.3 According to this view, the determination of a ‘line of articulation’ pushes ‘each line beyond the turn, to the point where it goes beyond our own experience: an extraordinary broadening out that forces us to think a pure perception identical to the whole of matter, a pure memory identical to the whole of the past’.4 Following method as intuition requires us to take from experience ‘a little light which shows us a line of articulation, all that remains is to extend it beyond experience’.5 Contrary to this view of intuition and its method as a forcing, hyperaesthesia shows us that our experience is already always far beyond itself – it has no need to be extended, but rather, for practical purposes, has to be restricted; method consists less in pushing lines to their limits than in relaxing the border controls of consciousness. We do not need to be ‘opened’ to ‘the inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior to our own)’ since the phenomenon of hyperaesthesia shows that we are already within and beyond these durations.6 We do not so much need a method in order to ‘broaden’ experience but rather procedures that will exhibit and break down the conscious restrictions that limit and distract it. In departing from hyperaesthesia, Bergson in effect proposed the actualisation of perception; from this point of view everything is already and always perceived. This point of departure was then qualified by the view that perceptions obstructing action had to be de-actualised or consigned to the virtual. But with these steps the dominant modal categories of possibility and necessity were definitively subordinated to that of the actual. The priority of actuality relegates possibility and necessity from their prominent place among the categories of modality, substituting for them the non-modal virtual. Deleuze’s perceptive reading of Bergson’s exit from modality however limits itself by departing from the question: ‘Why does Bergson challenge the notion of the possible in favour of that of the virtual?’7 His question and his answer ignores the significance of hyperaesthesia and relies instead on a critique of a backward projection from the real to the pseudo actuality of the possible: ‘We give ourselves a real that is ready-made, preformed, pre-existent to itself, and that will pass into existence according to an order of successive limitations. Everything is already completely given: all of the real in the image, in the pseudo-actuality of the possible.’8 Yet with hyperaesthesia everything is actually given and only restricted by consciousness and its modes of selective de-actualisation. While Deleuze recognises that ‘the virtual as virtual has a reality; this reality extended to the whole universe, consists in all the coexisting degrees of



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expansion (détente) and contraction. A gigantic memory, a universal cone in which everything coexists with itself, except for differences of level’9 – he does not follow Bergson in regarding the ‘differences of level’ as the effects of limitation and de-actualisation. He assumes that the virtual has to be actualised, and is indeed actualised according to lines of differentiation ‘some successive, some simultaneous’. Implied in this position is a refusal of Bergson’s monadology: ‘For what coexisted in the virtual ceases to coexist in the actual and is distributed in lines and parts that cannot be summed up, each retaining the whole, except from a certain perspective, a certain view.’10 But what if there is no distribution in the actual, if there are no lines or parts and, furthermore, that a perception of the the whole is always and already available throughout the population of monads. This was the understanding of the virtual elaborated by Bergson, one in whose formulation the discovery and proof of the existence of hyperaesthesia played a vital role. THE DISCOVERY AND PROOF OF HYPERAESTHESIA In the first of his contributions to the genre of the philosophical article in which he excelled – ‘De la simulation inconsciente dans l’état d’hypnotisme’ published in the Revue philosophique November 1886 – Bergson reports on a series of experiments in hypnotism which led him to the discovery of the phenomenon of hyperaesthesia. His narrative begins like a short story by Edgar Allen Poe: ‘It was about two months ago that I heard that an inhabitant of Clermont, M. V . . . had conducted hypnotic experiments on young people of 15–17 years of age in which he had obtained remarkable effects of mental suggestion.’11 Our narrator goes on to describe a most curious and even perverse scene of reading: ‘opening before their eyes a book of which they could glimpse [apercevaient] only the cover, he was able to make them divine or read the number of the page that he was looking at, even words, entire lines’.12 But, Bergson adds, this feat was accompanied by occasional errors of recognition and sequencing. Their curiosity aroused by this mysterious phenomenon, Bergson and his colleague from the faculty of sciences at the Academy of Clermont, a certain M. Robinet, set out with the collaboration of M. V to find an explanation for this prodigy and to refute any claim that it was due to the workings of mental suggestion. The two investigators called in the four young people, hypnotised them and then conducted a series of experiments. One of the subjects, ‘Young L’, who had a history of headaches, proved a particularly interesting case. After hypnotising him, M. Robinet stood with his back to

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a window and, opening a book at random, held it ten centimetres from his eyes before asking Young L the number of the right page. After being asked to move the book some centimetres to the left or right by the subject, it became possible for the page number and text to be read. All four subjects, when asked in their hypnotic trances how they were able to read a number or word, replied ‘I see it’ and passing their hands under the book touched exactly where they were reading. But when asked to show the cover of the book, they once again touched the page, proving that they assumed the book was open before them and the cover in its proper place. Bergson and Robinet were especially struck by the character of the errors made by the experimental subjects. While the error in placing the cover of the book behind what they thought in their hypnotic trance was the open page facing them was cognitive, a matter of inference from the fact of reading, there were also evident specific errors of perception. These were manifest in the reading of sequences, exemplified by the case of the subject P. who often reversed page numbers ‘saying 213 for 312 or 75 for 57 etc.’.13 For Bergson and Robinet it was as if the ­hypnotised subject ‘read everything correctly, but as if read in a mirror where they had perceived symmetrical images of real objects’.14 From this the investigators drew the startling conclusion that the reading took place on the cornea of the hypnotist, playing the role of a convex mirror. Without doubt the reflected image must have been extremely small, given that the numbers or letters must have been hardly 3 millimetres in height. Taking into account the radius of the cornea at 7 to 8 mm, a simple calculation shows that this cornea, working as a convex mirror, would reflect an image of the numbers and letters a little less than 0.1 mm.15

This extraordinary deduction pointed to the existence of hyperaesthesia, or the ability to perceive way beyond the limits of normal perception. Bergson comments that ‘there is nothing implausible about such a hypothesis given the singular hyperaesthesis that one can confirm in the case of hypnotic states . . .’.16 The first step following this insight was to test the theory of mental suggestion by the simple expedient of the hypnotist closing his eyes and concentrating on remembering the page. The subjects could no longer respond with any accuracy, thus refuting the thesis of mental suggestion. Then the experimenters varied the lighting and position of text and cornea in order to control the legibility of the microscopic reflection, with results that corroborated the hypothesis. In many ways the hypothesis of hyperaesthesia was even more remarkable and its consequences more striking than that of mental



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suggestion. Bergson and Robinet then decided to subject Young L to a further experiment. Ideally they would have liked to reduce a page photographically to about 1/33 of its size and to present that to the hypnotised subject. But here the experiment met its technical limits; the amateurs of Clermont-Ferrand did not have at their disposal ‘a photograph of this sort’ but decided to test the ‘remarkable hyperaesthesia’ of Young L with an expedient: ‘We showed him first of all a microscopic photograph, representing the members of an English learned society. This photograph was in the form of a rectangle of which the longer side measured about 2mm; a dozen figures were shown seated or standing around a table.’17 Bergson is referring to a genre of microscopic photography pioneered by J. B. Dancer in 1853 and popular in the latter half of the nineteenth century; the subjects included Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, ‘eminent men’, landmarks and group photographs such as the one in Bergson and Robinet’s possession. It was a genre that ‘remained popular until the 1890s when interest in them waned’.18 Bergson and Robinet put their possession to novel use. Showing it to Young L under hypnosis without the aid of magnification and telling him that its dimensions were those of a normal page, they found him able to describe the microscopic figures in the photograph and even to mime their gestures. Rifling through their collection of microscopic photographs, the investigators landed on a botanical slide of the stained cells of an orchid; on showing it unmagnified to Young L they found that he was able to reproduce the hexagonal cells with a fair degree of accuracy. Bergson was astounded by the results of his experiments, finding the evidence for hyperaesthesia more remarkable than the refutation of ‘mental suggestion’. He concluded that a hypnotised subject ‘unconsciously put to work means of whose existence we hardly suspected, a hyperaesthesia of vision for example or of all the other senses, and that also unconsciously, we ourselves would have suggested this appeal to illicit means when giving him an order incapable of being executed in any other way’.19 It is a striking result in many respects. First of all, it showed the existence of a hyperaesthesia, an ‘illicit means’ surrounding normal perception that became available when consciousness was suspended through hypnosis. As opposed to the conclusions drawn by fellow hypnotist Freud, Bergson did not interpret this as confirming the existence of an unconscious, but rather as showing the limitations applied to virtual perception by consciousness. It is also striking for the use of photography and photographic technology to confirm the experience of hyperaesthesia, but perhaps also to suggest that technology might release the potential of hyperaesthesia, an argument subsequently

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adopted by Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’. It is clear that by the end of the essay Bergson has divined that we see more than our consciousness allows us to see and that our senses are restricted by consciousness to a small area of their virtual operation. His study and teaching of the philosophy of Leibniz, and in particular his theory of perception, allowed him both to entertain the hypothesis of hyperaesthesia and to appreciate its implications. These would be explored further in subsequent work, most fully and explicitly in Matter and Memory, but also in future work on parapsychology and finally towards the end of his life on the question of metaphysics and technology. HYPERAESTHESIA AND ‘ATTENTION TO LIFE’ Why should consciousness set itself to limiting, even disabling perception? Bergson’s first attempt to explain the suppression of hyperaesthesia appears two years after the report on the hypnotism experiments, in his first book Time and Free Will. The celebrated opening claims that ‘We express ourselves necessarily by words and we think most frequently in space. In other words, language demands that we establish between our ideas the same clear and precise distinctions, the same discontinuity as between material objects.’20 The limitations of this understanding of logos as spatialised thought and expression are traced to considerations of utility and practical life. This thought develops the suggestion in the hypnotism report that space is not a condition of perception, specifically of visibility, but its restriction. By proposing that we think durée and a logos oriented towards time, Bergson seeks to free perception from the limitations imposed on it by consciousness. It is not just durée that is limited by spatial thinking but a virtual hyperaesthesia that can be released by challenging spatial with temporal thinking. The opening analysis of the intensity of psychological states is conducted within the horizon of the maximum intensity of hyperaesthesia. Nevertheless, while the intensity of the hyperaesthetic life is inconsistent with the limitations of the practical life, it nevertheless persists as a condition for the distracted life of utility and spatial manipulation. It is when the rule of the latter is challenged that perception and with it life resumes its full intensity. Underlying this view is a distinction between consciousness and attention to life. The distinction is complicated by consciousness being understood as a species of the genus ‘attention to life’, but Bergson worked with a clear distinction between different types of attention appropriate to different understandings of life: the conscious life of



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perception limited in the interests of action, and the joyful life of hyperaesthesia. This is stated in Leibnizian terms in the résumé of Time and Free Will Bergson contributed to a discussion at La Société Française de Philosophie, 3 March 1905. There he observed that ‘One might say, speaking like Leibniz, that we have a confused perception of the entire universe, but that our distinct perception limits itself to those parts of the universe upon which we can exercise a more or less immediate action. Physiological process designates precisely these possible actions.’21 Conscious, distinct perception consists in the selection of those perceptions that accord with action, but this requires an act of deliberate distraction, turning away from or de-actualisation of the confused perception of the entire universe. The latter, however, can be attended to without the brutal simplifications that correspond to the range of possible actions. The one is the practical life of action and manipulation while the other is the sphere of an ‘attention to life’ appropriate to the hyperaesthetic perception of the entire universe and in accord with its primary cosmic function. Hyperaesthesia plays an important role in the analysis of the ‘attention to life’ that is the main concern of Bergson’s second major work Matter and Memory. Its presence is most emphatic in the first chapter on the ‘selection of images’, in the monadological description of the relations between body and the images that make up the universe. Bergson’s reflections on how ‘dimension, form, the colour itself of exterior objects modify themselves according to whether my body approaches or distances itself from them’ seems to assume definite limits to the body’s action on the universe of images.22 Yet this limitation is immediately qualified in the provisional definitions of matter and perception that follow: ‘I call matter, the set of images, and perception of matter, these same images related to the possible action of a certain determined image of my body.’23 The degree of perception or ‘attention to life’ depends on the given image of the body, but this need not necessarily be fixed in terms of the restrictions of the body image assumed in the ‘idealist’ and ‘realist’ positions. Bergson avoids this limited view of the body by approaching the problem of perception, that is to say, the relation of body image to the set of images that make up the universe, from the standpoint of hyperaesthesia. By starting from the standpoint of hyperaesthesia Bergson is able to accomplish a methodological innovation that consists in moving from full to limited perception rather than the other way. That is, he departs from an image of the body capable of perceiving the entire set of images that make up the universe. Bergson sets out from the distinction between being and being-perceived: ‘It is true that an image can be

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without being perceived; it can be present without being represented; and the distance between these two terms, presence and representation, seems precisely to measure the interval between matter itself and our conscious perception.’24 This interval is usually considered from the standpoint of consciousness, a position which assumes that representation adds to presentation: ‘If there is more in the second term than in the first, if, in order to move from presence to representation it is necessary to add something, the distance will remain intractable and the passage from matter to perception will remain enveloped in an impenetrable mystery.’25 If consciousness is considered to be augmentative, as it was from Descartes to Kant and beyond, then the relationship between matter and perception in Bergson’s eyes must remain obscure. However, if we start from hyperaesthesis and the view that conscious perception is subtractive, then it becomes possible to imagine a very different relationship between the set of images that make up the universe and the image of the body. Bergson proposes precisely this inversion of method. If the relation between matter and perception is intractable when we consider representation as additive, this is not the case if we move from ‘the first term to the second by way of diminution, regarding the representation of an image as less than its mere presence; for thus it would suffice that present images would be forced to abandon something of themselves in order that their simple presence might be converted into representation’.26 This conversion consists in a violent simplification, an obscuring of a complex nexus of presence that is perceived virtually in hyperaesthesia. Bergson’s method proposes that consciousness simplifies, cuts and obscures the set of relations between images: To transform its existence pure and simple into representation, it is enough to suppress all at once that which follows, that which precedes, and also that which surrounds, to keep only the external crust, the superficial film. That which distinguishes it, the present image, the objective reality, from a represented image, is the necessity from where it is to act through all of its points on all the points of other images, to transmit the totality of all that which it receives, to oppose to each action a reaction equal and opposed, to be in short nothing other but a path along which passes in every sense the modifications that propagate themselves throughout the universe.27

The hyperaesthetic body is such a ‘present image’ receiving the totality in its full form rather than in representative forms as edited by consciousness. Bergson then draws out the Leibnizian source of his method in Matter and Memory, but not before underlining some of its implications and the view that there is but a difference of degree and not nature



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between presence and representation. If ‘the reality of matter consists in the totality of its elements and of all their actions’ then our representation ‘is the result of the elimination of that which is of no interest to our needs and more generally our functions’.28 Bergson leaves no doubt as to the brutality of the ‘necessary poverty of our conscious perception’, going so far as to insist that, ‘In a sense, one might say that the perception of some unconscious material point in its instantaneity is infinitely more vast and complex than ours, for this point receives and transmits the actions of all the points of the material world while our consciousness rises to only certain parts of certain aspects.’29 The humiliation of consciousness refers to its tendency to reduce to the point of elimination all useless complexity; Bergson is, however, convinced that the phenomenon of hyperaesthesia shows us that in receiving and transmitting the entire universe we can vaunt ourselves as equal to any ‘unconscious material point’. Bergson then arrives at the direct citation of Leibniz and, through the mobilisation of a complex photographic metaphor, achieves the linking of hyperaesthesia and the virtual. He teasingly suggests that many of the problems with which he is engaged issue from the metaphor of the camera, that somehow ‘perception is like a photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point with a special apparatus, namely the organ of perception, and which develops itself subsequently in the cerebral substance by means of I know not what processes of chemical and psychic elaboration’.30 This view, recalling Locke’s closed room criticised by Leibniz in the New Essays on Human Understanding, is unacceptable to Bergson, but he does not respond by entirely rejecting the photographic metaphor. Instead, he universalises it: ‘Why not see that photography, if there is photography, is already taken, already printed, in the interior itself of things and for all points of space?’31 Hyperaesthesia is in this way extended to the atomic structure of the universe, with lines of force emanating from all points and in all directions linking together all the material points. Bergson concludes by aligning this view with Leibniz, these photographic points that receive and transmit the entire universe precisely describing the Leibnizian monad: ‘With monads then? Every monad, as Leibniz maintained, is the mirror of the universe.’32 Then, returning to the already seriously distressed metaphor of photography, not only is every atom a camera in which a photograph of the whole has already, hyperaesthetically been taken, but in these cameras there is no film with which to take or detach the image – the photograph is ‘translucent’. The screen of consciousness serves as a ‘zone of indetermination’ which does not add anything to perception but subtracts what is of utility – ‘real action’

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leaving ‘virtual action’. After further discussion, Bergson arrives at a provisional conclusion regarding perception, one that assumes the primacy of hyperaesthesis: ‘That which you have thus to explain is not how perception arises but how it limits itself, since it should be by rights the image of the whole, and that it reduces in fact to that which interests us.’33 With this reversal of method, regarding consciousness as subtractive rather than augmentative, Bergson is able to open the view to a virtual perception which consciousness devotes itself to restricting. His method becomes one of investigating those moments when the vigilance of consciousness is relaxed and full perception can emerge, as in the case of the hypnotised subjects of Clermont-Ferrand. Evidence for the blanking out or de-actualisation of vast areas of perception by consciousness can be found in the traces of hyperaesthesia that intrude from outside the limits of consciousness at those moments when its vigilance is compromised. One of Bergson’s most sophisticated inquiries into such intrusions is to be found in his Presidential Address to the Society of Psychological Research in London on 28 May 1913. In the various versions of ‘Fantômes de vivant’ Bergson opens his Presidential Address informally, deprecating himself before the honour of being called to the presidency and joking at his and at the expense of his audience interested in mysterious psychological phenomena: ‘I suspect that there has been an effect of “clairvoyance” or of “telepathy”, that you sensed from afar the interest that I took in your investigations, that you perceived me four hundred miles away reading your reports, following your work with an ardent curiosity.’34 Bergson revealingly inserts himself in the ranks of those who explore parapsychological phenomena in the face of the hostility of the learned world and refers to himself as a ‘sub lieutenant’ in the battles of psychic research who spends his life recalling an earlier battle, in this case surely his early research into hyperaesthesia. ‘Fantômes de vivant’ indeed continues and extends the notion of hyperaesthesia and the thought that consciousness does not augment the limits of perception but restricts and limits it. Bergson is prepared to countenance an extreme extension of the limits of visibility, across space and time. He looks at two examples of how a crisis in the habits of practical life reveal a virtual hyperaesthesis. His most telling example is the panoramic view of the past that is evoked in a moment of mortal danger. This is not the spatialisation of time, but the phenomenon of hyperaesthesia assuming its temporal dimension in memory. Bergson begins with the assumption that ‘the past is conserved in its least details and that there is no real forgetting’.35 He continues: ‘Our past is entirely there, continually’, but that we cannot return to it ‘because our purpose



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is to live, to act, and life and action look forward’.36 This total memory returns when the attention to life is weakened for a moment – I do not speak here of voluntary attention, which is momentary and individual, but of a constant attention, common to all of us, imposed by nature and what might be called the ‘attention of the species’ – thus the spirit whose gaze is always forcefully held forwards, relaxes and consequently returns backwards where it finds its history. The panoramic vision of the past is thus due to a sudden disinterestedness of life, born of the sudden conviction that one is at the point of death.37

A new attention to life thus emerges, one not restricted to voluntary action and oriented ahead, but which assumes the complex nexus of past, present and future that constitutes the monad. Bergson continues saying that the same holds for perception as for memory, that hyperaesthesis and hypermnesia are conditions restricted by consciousness in the interests of life. The organs of perception are not translating material into psychic states, but serve rather to mutilate hyperaesthesis in the interest of living; cerebral centres are in short ‘instruments of selection charged to choose in the immense field of our virtual perceptions those which must be actualised’.38 Once again this alignment of hyperaesthesis and the virtual is described with reference to Leibniz: ‘Leibniz said that every monad and consequently, a fortiori, every one of those monads he called spirits, carry within them the conscious or unconscious representation of the totality of the real.’39 While Bergson disingenuously claims to his London audience that he would ‘not go so far’, he does maintain, absolutely consistently, ‘that we perceive virtually many more things than we perceive actually, and that here again the role of our body is to separate from consciousness all of that which we sense to be of no practical interest, all that which does not lend itself to our action’.40 Indeed, in the transcript as opposed to the published version Bergson is more audacious. He uses the notion of a ‘field of consciousness’, phrasing the role of the body as separating ‘from the field of consciousness’, the same field into which ‘certain useless or dream memories’ intrude during ‘moments of inattention to life’ – ambassadors of the virtual into the field of actuality. BERGSON’S LAST WORD At the end of his last work, The Two Sources of Religion and Morality, Bergson returns for a final reflection on the themes of hyperaesthesia, the virtual and parapsychology that had occupied him since the beginning of his philosophical career. This last time, however, he chose to

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frame his thoughts in terms of technology, a factor that had always been present in the guise of photography from the outset of his philosophical and parapsychological investigations. The last of the ‘final remarks’ that conclude The Two Sources of Religion and Morality departs from the ‘talent for invention aided by science’ in order to revisit, for the last time, the theme of the suppression of hyperaesthesia accomplished by consciousness in the interest of action. Once again it is ‘psychic research’ that allows access to the realm of the virtual beyond consciousness, and Bergson seems to ask only that we accept the vast terra incognita that it points to with an open mind. But there is something more in these last lines, something that had always been there. Bergson intimates that the life of action and utility preserved by the ‘attention to life’ of consciousness can be succeeded by a new attention to life appropriate to hyperaesthesis and the virtual, an ‘attention to life’ to which he gives the name ‘joy’. Such an attention to life, one of hyperaesthesia, would free us from the limits of action and survival and would bring the ‘refractory earth’ back in line ‘with the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for making gods’.41 NOTES  1. Henri Bergson, Oeuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), p. 873; all translations my own.  2. For the importance of Leibniz in the courses taught by Bergson at Clermont-Ferrand and his experiments in hypnotism, see Philippe Soulez and Frédéric Worms, Bergson: Biographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), pp. 65, 56.  3. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 27.  4. Ibid.  5. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 27.  6. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 28.   7. Ibid., p. 98.  8. Ibid.   9. Ibid., p. 100. 10. Ibid., p. 101. 11. Henri Bergson, Mélanges, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), p. 333; all translations my own. 12. Ibid. 13. Bergson, Mélanges, p. 335. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 336. 16. Ibid.



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17. Ibid., p. 337. 18. See www.victorianmicroscopeslides.com/slidephot.htm (accessed 7 January 2013). My thanks to an anonymous member of the audience at the Courtauld Institute for drawing my attention to the existence of this genre of photography. 19. Bergson, Mélanges, p. 341. 20. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 3. 21. Bergson, Mélanges, p. 646. 22. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 172. 23. Ibid., p. 173. 24. Ibid., p. 185. 25. Ibid., p. 183. 26. Ibid., p. 185. 27. Ibid., p. 186. 28. Ibid., p. 188. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 189. 32. Ibid., p. 188. In his Cours du College de France of 1904, Bergson refers to Leibniz’s hyperaesthetic monads, this time identifying them with the noeta of Plotinus and seeing in them a challenge to the theory of durée: ‘Suppose that a monad accepts an infinity of views, it would have all the predicates at once, all perceptions. Time would become for it this immobile reality, extended to the second power’ (Bergson, Mélanges, p. 378). Bergson would indeed move towards the identification of hyperaesthesis and hypermnesis threatened in this course. 33. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 190. 34. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 861. 35. Ibid., p. 872. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., p. 873. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., p. 1245.

Afterword: An Art Historical Return to Bergson JAE EMERLING

That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved by the existence . . . of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception.1 What we’re after certainly isn’t any return to Freud or return to Marx. Nor any theory of reading. What we look for in a book is the way it transmits something that resists coding: flows, revolutionary active lines of flight, lines of absolute decoding rather than any intellectual culture.2

‘A Return to Bergson’ is the title of Gilles Deleuze’s famous afterword for the English translation of Bergsonism (1966). Written more than twenty years after the book’s initial publication, the afterword is itself another opening, another invitation to return to Bergson that extends his project today. As Deleuze writes, this renewal or extension is undertaken ‘in relation to the transformations of life and society, in parallel with the transformation of science’.3 These well-known lines express Deleuze’s methodology of ‘return’, his history of philosophy as repetition and masquerade. Hence his singular ‘Bergsonism’ is a method that prioritises concepts inherent in Bergson’s own texts such as multiplicity, the virtual, becoming and immanence; yet they are transformed in Deleuze’s appropriation of them.4 What Deleuze demonstrated was that a return neither recollects some putative origin nor shores up an author-function. Instead, it always involves a radical untimeliness, an event. Any return worth its salt ‘dissipates the temporal identity where we like to look at ourselves to avoid the ruptures of history’.5 Deleuze’s ‘return’ to Bergson allowed him to render new lines of thought that traversed the history of philosophy, offering alternatives to structuralism, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. So what kind of challenge is the call for an art historical return to Bergson? First and foremost, it is a challenge to accept that there has yet to be an art historical methodology that is truly Bergsonian. Undoubtedly the first steps of such a visual, cultural, theoretical 260



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and historiographic ‘return’ to Bergson are to be found within this anthology.6 Nonetheless, it remains evident that to date art historians have disregarded the creative and transformative ‘Copernican turn’ Bergson’s work presents for any study of the relation between images and time. Second, perhaps there are reasons for the blind-eye we have turned to Bergson, who too often appears only in discussions of simultaneity in Italian Futurism or histories of perception. Perhaps it is because critical art historical practice, indelibly coloured by Frankfurt School theory and poststructuralism, has been caught in a double-bind of sorts: it is enthralled with psychoanalytic and Hegelian frameworks, even as it simultaneously tries to extricate itself from these very frameworks.7 Conversations about mnemonic traces, archival practices, social history, the digital apotheosis, artistic survival, and melancholy as a congenital discursive condition all involve psychoanalytic and Hegelian modes. Simply put, they are renewed attempts to deal with the presupposition that ‘art is a thing of the past’. This discursive condition is only worsened by the persistent desire for Kunstwissenschaft, the desire for art history to be a social science: objective, historicist, transcendent, global. These current debates over aesthetics and historiography evince that we have become inattentive to the inseparable epistemic and aesthetic effects of the image itself. As art historians work through their disillusionment with the anti-aesthetics of postmodernism and a related anxiety about a rearticulated formalism, Bergson awaits his untimely return. This return can only transform our critical practices if we reaffirm ‘the enormous influence Bergson has had on French art and culture’ and do not shy away from the complications of Bergsonian aesthetics: we must ‘read Bergson anew as a contemporary’ rather than as a ‘historical curiosity’.8 It is Bergson who haunts art history. So perhaps now, as we consider affect theory, the reappearance of Aby Warburg’s notion of Nachleben (survival), and neuro-aesthetics, art history – one of the professional arts of memory, ‘one of a network of interrelated institutions and professions whose overall function has been to fabricate a historical past that could be placed under systematic observation for use in the present’ – can become Bergsonian.9 So it is to the event of Bergson that we must turn. The event that makes art historical language stutter by adding all of this foreign language and inelegant phrasing to our discursive glossary: time as duration? materiality begetting oblivion? passage as absolutely real phenomenon? memory as an ontological ‘magnetiser’ (a shaping force)? The Janus-face of Bergson: on the one side, the challenge ‘to learn what a non-thinking body [an image, any nonlinguistic element]

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is capable of, its capacities, its positions’; on the other, the compelling, vertiginous reality that images have an existence, a survival, independent of us.10 But even this Janus-face is only a pause before an explosion that traces a multiplicity of lines. Beyond that split-image, a ‘depth of duration’ (épaisseur de durée, Bergson’s great phrase) emboldens us to go beyond existing well-worn narratives and methodologies in order to experiment with higher levels of risk and tension between history and becoming, to encounter images and signs, to become attentive to life.11 To do so we must return to the Bergson who argues that ‘continuity of change, preservation of the past in the present, real duration’ suggest that ‘life, like conscious activity, is invention . . . unceasing creation’.12 What must be emphasised here, as we return to Bergson, is that every return is a revision, a seeing-again (perception) and a transformation (memory as duration). Hence each and every return is a re-creation of Bergson, who will have been our ‘future contemporary’.13 So forego any illusory synthesis between Bergson and Deleuze, Bergson and Benjamin, Bergson and whomever. Just as there is no synthesis of history and life, matter and memory. Instead, ‘there is radical contingency in progress, incommensurability between what goes before and what follows – in short, duration’.14 This incommensurability is in Bergson’s terms a ‘tension’, a ‘rhythm’ or ‘double movement’ wherein unforeseen, aleatory, new creations are produced. ‘Duration means invention’, Bergson remarks, ‘the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new’.15 In what follows then, we ‘survey’ Bergson through a number of contemporary readings, before focusing on Deleuze’s own monstrous, but still faithful, rendering. MEMORIES OF BECOMING-BERGSONIAN An image is a true problem for Bergson. As such it is inseparable from memory and from the past as such. The past as such (a virtual pure past) is never anything like empty, homogeneous time, but is only duration, that is, intensive time as difference. In his great work Matter and Memory (1896) Bergson argues for the ontological status of the past, which necessitates a shift from memory-traces and associative representation towards something more dynamic and fluid: a philosophy with real movement and coexistence between past and present, virtual and actual, infinite and finite. For Bergson, present and past are different in kind rather than degree. This means that the past does not simply follow the present in any discrete linear order; rather, the entirety of the past coexists – ­differently – with each moment of the present. Hence the ‘past can



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never be recomposed with a series of presents since this would be to negate its specific mode of being’.16 Memory and perception are thus simultaneous rather than sequential. We can state with Bergson that the past is rather than was.17 As Deleuze intimates: ‘We are touching on one of the most profound, but perhaps one of the least understood, aspects of Bergsonism: the theory of memory . . . What Bergson calls “pure recollection” has no psychological existence. That is why it is called virtual, inactive, and unconscious.’18 Besides an image of thought that veers away from Freud, Walter Benjamin and others, Bergson’s theory of memory forces a ‘leap into ontology’ that reorients art historical practice. As Deleuze writes: We only grasp the past at the place where it is in itself, and not in ourselves, in our present. There is therefore a ‘past in general’ that is not the particular past of a particular present but that is like an ontological element, a past that is . . . the condition of the ‘passage’ of every particular present . . . According to Bergson, we first put ourselves back into the past in general . . . We really leap into being, into being-in-itself, into the being in itself of the past. It is a case of leaving psychology altogether . . . In any case, the Bergsonian revolution is clear: We do not move from the present to the past, from perception to recollection, but from the past to the present, from recollection to perception.19

The past as such is an ‘unattainable limit’.20 There is no call in Bergson for any idealism or mysticism about this pure past. Nor is there any reason to desire to represent it ‘as it truly was’. For Bergson, the pure past is what allows for the actualisation of each and every particular past (as a former particular present). The pure past is contracted, actualised into a present. Simultaneous with its actualisation, this real movement of contraction-dilation reorganises the coexistent pure past: time as an open whole, as virtual becoming. Time as virtual becoming is the real, immanent mode of what is because it has no other mode than its own actualisation (its continued differing from itself). Thus there is no preceding place that the past is. One does not look or go back in time as if retracing one’s steps. Nor does any ready-made narration in the present assure your encounter with the past as such. On the contrary, the entirety of the past is always enfolded within each and every actualisation (every measurable, extensive, useful succession of time imagined as a one-directional movement from past to future). On time as virtual becoming Ansell Pearson writes: We can posit it realizing itself and becoming what it is – pure otherness and pure difference – without any need to appeal to either a logic of contradiction and negation [Hegelian dialectics] or to an abstract universality or generality . . . Conceived in itself it is the mode of the ‘non-active’ since

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it only acts and comes to be what it is (otherness) in differentiating itself, both ceasing to be itself and retaining something of itself, and it is in this very respect that it can be considered to be ‘the mode of what is.’ Bergson’s challenge to thinking consists in the claim that this is not to move thought in the direction of an abstract metaphysics. Indeed, he insists that the contrary is the case. The virtual is not, then, a general idea, something abstract and empty, but the concept of difference (and of life since it is vital) rendered adequate. The concept of the virtual gives us the time of life.21

This ‘time of life’ is a complex splitting of time: a memory-perception circuit. It helps account for Bergson’s interest in hallucinations, déjà vu, dreams, delirium. These anomalies are intriguing to him because they disclose the splitting of time: the operation of memory as more than a recollection-image, a re-presentation of a former present. The pure past is therefore an ‘unattainable limit’ that is nonetheless operative in every act of recollection-perception, body-image. In addition to these anomalous states, which Bergson refers to as ‘de-tensifying’, meaning a lessening of one’s practical self-interest, we could add our relation to artworks.22 Our attentiveness to images requires a ‘de-tensifying’ mode that allows us to sense the virtual, time as such. An image embodies an opening in time. Becoming attentive to images demands that we experiment with recollection-perception, dilation-contraction, rhythm beyond measure. Attentiveness does not, paradoxically perhaps, mean an intensified focus on an image, but is rather a mode of encounter. A ‘de-tensifying’ of consciousness allows one to become-other, to move beyond habitual being and to open oneself to other durations, worlds other than one’s own. Attentiveness is a mode of becoming that does not ‘cut up the past into separate memories corresponding to present needs and interests’.23 Rather, it allows one to touch and sense an image as a material-force, as the ‘finest thread’ opening us to an outside, to radical alterity, to a life beyond the subject.24 With Bergson we become attentive to images and time: to an ethics of an event. An event is the untimeliness of the image: how and why it embodies an ‘attention to life’.25 An art historical return to Bergson, an art historical ethics of this event, requires that ‘we must no longer speak of life in general as an abstraction’ but rather as ‘a visible current . . . traversing the bodies it has organized one after another’, individuating itself into a myriad of forms ‘without losing anything of its force’.26 For Bergson, life is certainly not the ‘spirit’ of an age, an individual, or a culture. Nor does it avail itself of a symptomology or any indexical, anthropological reading of presence. Nor is it an autotelic life of forms.27 Perhaps it goes without saying, perhaps not:



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art never simply represents any life, whether of an individual, society, or a culture, unless that ‘life’ is understood narrowly in a strictly realist manner. For too long the discipline of art history has maintained an abstract quasi-scientific, quasi-religious system wherein art supposedly reflects, expresses and/or exposes sociocultural, economic, or formal issues. Or else, inversely, it posits artworks as autonomous from social and cultural history. Bergson’s work, however, consistently sets itself against this understanding. Hence ‘there is no solid, first-order brute reality upon which a hierarchy of abstraction can elevate itself’.28 As John Mullarkey explains: ‘Reality, says Bergson, is neither finite nor infinite but “indefinite”: “action on the move”, we recall, “creates its own route . . . and thus baffles all calculation”.’29 Contrary to the false interpretative movements of art historical discourse, which is spatial and abstract in structure, Bergson encourages us to form any and all ‘questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union’ in terms of ‘time rather than space’.30 Begging the question: what is the value of our historicist yet atemporal art history? Bergson emphasises the ‘unstable tension’ between life as duration and any abstract, scientific system such as art history or museology.31 In Creative Evolution he addresses ‘concrete time’ (duration) and ‘abstract time’. Abstract, scientific systems are ‘never in that real, concrete duration in which the past remains bound up with the present’. He adds that in abstract time ‘what will flow on in the interval – that is to say, real time – does not count, and cannot enter into the calculation’.32 Bergson challenges us to experiment with immanence: idealism and realism, monism and pluralism, thought and instability, form and content, discourse and archive, in order to regain ‘real time’, that is, ‘attention to life’.33 In part this means conceiving and performing an art historical methodology capable of encountering the concrete time of duration: life as such and an image. It is important to stress this point: history and life, matter and memory, are immanent but not ahistorical or atemporal. It is only within duration – ‘a hyphen, a connecting link’ – that art historical research becomes-creative, becomes-immanent.34 What we are after is the irreducibility of history and life. Bergson termed this irreducibility a ‘law of dichotomy’, neither the transcendence of one over the other nor the disappearance of either within an artificial, abstract system. Many of Bergson’s terms evince precisely such an insistence on embodiment and immanence: life within and inseparable from a certain particular embodiment, ‘interpenetrating, so that each has to abandon some of its original purity’.35 Far from a call for metaphysical escape or historical evasion, Bergson always calls for immanence, for becoming-creative

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with how we think and imagine the tensions and involutions between materiality and duration. Becoming-creative forces us to rethink our practice because ‘the final effort’ of art historical research is ‘a true work of integration’.36 A passage from Bergson is an opening to an art history to come: To give up certain habits of thinking, and even of perceiving, is far from easy: yet this is but the negative part of the work to be done; and when it is done, when we have placed ourselves at what we have called the turn of experience, when we have profited by the faint light which, illuminating the passage from the immediate to the useful, marks the dawn of our human experience, there still remains to be reconstituted, with the infinitely small elements which we thus perceive of the real curve, the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them.37

FROM BERGSON TO DELEUZE: BECOMING-BERGSONIAN It is this Bergsonian mode of encounter and becoming that art historians have obscured. Our disciplinary desire to officiate and parse the relation between art and life leads to neither one. Curating art objects and articulating historicist determinism has led to only more ‘abuses of history for life’.38 Ready-made narratives and self-satisfied commentary on discourse evince only that nothing is risked, nothing wagered, and therefore nothing gained in relation to our sensitivity or experience of duration. Time and again, we substitute the demands of ontology for the concerns of historiography. We should take Deleuze here as a contemporary Delphic inscription for art historical practice: Each image has two halves: it designates an object, it signifies something different. The objective side is the side of pleasure, of immediate delight, and of [historiographic] practice. Taken this way, we have already sacrificed the ‘truth’ side. We recognize things, but we never come to know them. What the sign signifies we identify with the person or object it designates. We miss our finest encounters, we avoid the imperatives that emanate from them: to the exploration of encounters we have preferred the facility of recognition.39

As art historians our ‘finest encounters’ must be with Bergsonian time itself – ‘a single, universal and impersonal Time’, as Deleuze characterises it.40 And yet far too often we relish in the ‘immediate delight’ of recognition. Encountering images and the ‘imperatives that emanate from them’ – an ethics of becoming within art historical practice – has nothing to do with either the eternal, the primal, or the utopian. Instead, it is an untimely encounter with a material-force, with a deframing power, that ‘acts counter to the past, and therefore on the present, for the benefit, let us hope, of a future – but the future is not



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a historical future, not even an utopian future, it is . . . untimely, not an instant but a becoming’.41 In other words, Deleuze and Guattari describe the untimeliness of an image as an event. To rethink art history, yet again, requires a return to Bergson through Deleuze because his work forces us to think how and why an artwork is what it transmits, that is, a ‘nonsignifying passage’, a deframing power that renders an opening within history. Within this opening, art historians confront a difficult lesson: ‘Life is not your history.’42 Art is and opens us to a ‘vertigo of immanence’, a life that exceeds lived experience without abandoning art as an end-in-itself because ‘thought and art are real, and disturb the reality, morality, and economy of the world’.43 An image of thought, art history is a little two-step that goes awry when it stops counting, when it goes beyond cadence or measure, when it becomes experimentation with events rather than the interpretation of states of things. Experimentation means here something like working with and alongside images, in order to grasp how and why an image ‘maintains a relationship with language in its entirety, but rises up or stretches out in its holes, its gaps, or its silences’.44 It remains to be seen if we can seriously think the coexistence of the past with the present, one of the essential theses of Deleuze’s Bergson. But we mustn’t forget that there are also other Bergsons, and so other theses that we can engage with as both philosophers and art historians. This is surely what this collection of essays has demonstrated so well: the becomings immanent within Bergsonism are multiple and unforeseeable. NOTES  1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998), pp. 176–7.  2. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1974–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 22.  3. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 115. In addition to Bergsonism, see ‘Bergson, 1859–1941’, which was written at the request of Maurice Merleau-Ponty for his Les Philosophes célèbres in 1956, and ‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’ (1956), in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004). Of course, the entirety of Deleuze’s two volumes on cinema as well as his work with Félix Guattari are written under the sign of Bergson; in particular see ‘1730: BecomingIntense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . .’ in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

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trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). This chapter of A Thousand Plateaus has a section entitled ‘Memories of a Bergsonian’ that I allude to below.   4. These concepts are found throughout Bergson’s texts; see especially Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991); and Bergson, Creative Evolution.   5. Michel Foucault cited in Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 351. See also Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).   6. In addition to the essays in this anthology, there have been other recent uses of Bergson’s work in relation to images. See Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Eric Alliez, ‘Undoing the Image (Signposts of a Research Programme)’, in Armen Avanessian and Luke Skrebowski, eds, Aesthetics and Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), pp. 66–85; and John Rajchman, ‘Deleuze’s Time, or How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art’, in D. N. Rodowick, ed., Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 283–306.  7. Much has been made of Walter Benjamin’s criticisms of Bergson in his essay on Charles Baudelaire and in relation to his thoughts on Marcel Proust. These criticisms were shared by Max Horkheimer as evidenced by Benjamin’s correspondence and the context around the writing on the essay on Baudelaire: see Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). However, Benjamin’s admiration for Matter and Memory as well as his treatment of Bergson in his The Arcades Project, particularly in ‘Convolute H: The Collector’, is altogether different. In fact, Benjamin characterises his entire unfinished project in undeniably Bergsonian language as an attempt to grasp ‘the crystal of the total event’: see Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 155–200; and Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), especially ‘Convolutes H and N’. For a nuanced and insightful discussion of Bergson in Benjamin’s work see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); for Benjamin on collecting and temporality see Jae Emerling, ‘An Art History of Means: Arendt-Benjamin’, Journal of Art Historiography, Vol. 1 (2009).



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 8. John Mullarkey, ‘Introduction’, in Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 13, 12.  9. Donald Preziosi, ‘Art History: Making the Visible Legible’, in Donald Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 7. 10. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 189; Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 201. 11. I would like to note that Bergson’s phrase ‘épaisseur de durée’ is used by Deleuze and Guattari in a discussion of modern painting that refers to Hubert Damish as well as Clement Greenberg’s predilection for flatness in painting. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 193–9. The word translated as ‘thickness’ is the French word épaisseur, which is a reference to Bergsonian duration rather than a mere spatial, formalist term. See the original French edition: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), p. 195. 12. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 23. 13. The phrase ‘a future contemporary’ is from Alain Badiou, in a remarkable memorial piece he wrote for Deleuze: Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy (London and New York: Verso, 2009), p. 113. 14. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 29. Bergson’s comment here comes in a footnote wherein he contrasts his understanding of art and life with that found in Gabriel Séailles’s Essai sur le génie dans l’art (1897). 15. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 11. Mullarkey explains that Bergson acknowledged how metaphysics (philosophy) must ‘be perpetually “remodelling” itself on the processes of reality’. In a passage that reinforces our discussion here, he adds: ‘Remember that Bergson advises that his own concepts such as durée and qualitative multiplicity must eventually be superseded . . . it is essential, he says, that we continually create new concepts instead of simply new names for old concepts.’ See John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2000), p. 185. 16. Keith Ansell Pearson, ‘Bergson on Memory’, in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, eds, Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 71. 17. This is, of course, Deleuze’s famous summation (Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 55). 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., pp. 56–7, 63. 20. James Burton, ‘Bergson’s Non-Archival Theory of Memory’, Memory Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2008), p. 329.

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21. Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 7. 22. Burton, ‘Bergson’s Non-Archival Theory of Memory’, p. 329. 23. Ibid. 24. The phrase ‘the finest thread’ is used by Bergson and later by Deleuze; see Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and The Adventure of the Virtual, p. 41. This is the guiding principle of my own work; see Jae Emerling, Photography: History and Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) and Jae Emerling, ‘A Becoming Image: Candida Höfer’s Architecture of Absence’, in Isabelle Wallace and Nora Wendl, eds, Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility? (London: Ashgate, 2013). 25. Mullarkey offers the following: ‘ “Attention to life” is one name Bergson gives to this effort, but it is really “a-tension” which is in question, a holding together of opposites. This is not a voluntary attention, which would be momentary and individual, but a range of mental plasticity that is species-specific, imposed by nature . . . Though this attention is very fatiguing, it is one which, simply by being “more complex” and “delicate” in the precision of its adjustment to reality, is thereby “more positive” . . . a continual active adjustment, always on the brink of losing its balance, always on a knife-edge’ (Bergson and Philosophy, pp. 54–5). 26. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 26. 27. We must reassess Henri Focillon’s interpretation and use of Bergson’s concepts throughout his work, notably in Vie des Formes (1934). See Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1992). 28. Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy, p. 183. 29. Ibid., p. 185. 30. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 71. 31. The phrase ‘unstable tension’ is used by Mullarkey (Bergson and Philosophy, p. 181). 32. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 22. 33. ‘Thought and instability’ refers to the original French title of Bergson’s Creative Mind, which was La Pensée et le mouvant. Mullarkey elaborates on the importance of this phrase, stating that it ‘might have been a better choice of translation, for [it] clearly states the aim of Bergsonism to be a philosophy which “would follow the undulations of the real” ’ and would oppose ‘all “artificial unities” in philosophy that attempt to embrace [any] totality’ (Bergson and Philosophy, p. 179). 34. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 22. 35. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 155. 36. For effect I have altered a line from Bergson that reads: ‘The final effort of philosophical research is a true work of integration’ (Matter and Memory, p. 185). Also, on Bergson’s ‘law of dichotomy’ in relation to ‘integration’, Mullarkey explains that we must come to understand how and why Bergson’s ‘law of dichotomy’ or ‘integration’ has nothing to do



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with Hegelian sublation; rather, it posits that ‘every unity is provisional and practical, being destined to fragment for the simple reason that life . . . is understood as a reciprocal interpenetration of opposed forces held together in an unstable tension . . . constant dichotomisation (without subsequent Hegelian mediation, we must add) is the driving force of reality’ (Bergson and Philosophy, p. 181). 37. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 185. 38. This phrase alludes to Nietzsche’s famous 1874 text on historiography ‘On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life’ (Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben). See Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 57–125. In addition, see Emerling, ‘An Art History of Means: Arendt-Benjamin’. 39. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 27. Deleuze’s conception of semiology upholds this statement: ‘Language has no self-sufficiency . . . it has no significance of its own. It is composed of signs, but signs are inseparable from a whole other element, a nonlinguistic element, which could be called . . . “images.” As Bergson has convincingly shown us, images have an existence independently of us’ (Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 201). 40. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 80. It should be noted that Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergsonian time has been criticised for being more metaphysical in nature than it is for Bergson himself; see Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and The Adventure of the Virtual, and John Mullarkey, ‘Deleuze and Materialism: One or Several Matters?’, in Ian Buchanan, ed., A Deleuzian Century? (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 59–83. 41. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 112. Some attempts to theorise this art encounter have already been undertaken. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning The Ends of A Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), and Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2006). 42. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 15. 43. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 48; Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, ed. Constantine Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 60. 44. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 162.

Index

abstract ideas, 97, 99–100, 239 abstraction, 95–102, 104, 105, 107, 125, 127, 208, 226, 264, 265 in art, 32, 63, 67, 75, 82, 192–4 lyrical, 80–1, 83, 88–9 actual, 20, 23–4, 52–3, 60, 135, 142–3, 152, 154, 171, 234, 257; see also virtual actualisation, 35, 41, 50, 70, 133, 143–4, 167, 169, 174–5, 181, 185, 248, 263 aesthetics, 3–4, 7, 12, 37–8, 45, 58, 67, 70–1, 77, 105, 107, 127, 223, 261 affect, 37, 83, 86, 104, 106, 134–6, 138–42 Agamben, Giorgio, 132–3, 140, 221, 229 anarchism, 94–5, 104, 108, 110–11 animal, 172, 173, 175, 267 Antliff, Mark, 2, 7, 13, 92, 108, 110–11 architecture, 64–5, 79, 270 Argan, Giulio-Carlo, 57, 83, 86 Aristotle, 51–3, 60–1 art history, 1–11, 13, 28, 32–3, 37, 41–5, 47–55, 57–61, 150–2, 154, 158, 161–2, 261, 265–9, 271 immanent, 9, 32 realist expectations of, 153 work of, 152–4 art objects, 3–4, 6, 8, 32, 148, 154, 157 art practices, 9, 39, 116–17, 119, 121, 127–8 associationism, 99, 101, 232, 241 attention, 20, 23, 32–3, 35–6, 41, 117, 127–8, 180–1, 195–6, 199, 235, 252, 257–8, 264, 270 attitude, 6, 207, 210–11, 213, 216, 218–19, 223–5

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 40, 42, 82 background, 51, 170–1, 218, 221, 229 Badiou, Alain, 175, 181–2 Bal, Mieke, 154 Barad, Karen, 233, 238–40, 243–6 Barthes, Roland, 118, 144 Bazaine, Jean, 81, 90 becoming, 3, 8, 20–2, 27–30, 36, 42, 64, 68–70, 75, 136, 151, 185, 206–8, 262–4, 266–7 behaviour, 104, 215–16, 218, 220 Bell, Vanessa, 33, 38, 43, 45 Benjamin, Walter, 30, 174, 252, 262–3, 268 Bergson, Henri, 1, 3–5, 7–13, 17–20, 22, 24–30, 33–4, 36–7, 43–4, 46–7, 50–2, 54–63, 65, 68–73, 75–83, 85, 87–90, 94–6, 98–102, 104, 106, 108–10, 118–23, 125, 129–30, 141, 143, 147, 150–1, 153, 155–64, 166–70, 173–6, 178, 182, 185–6, 189, 193, 196, 198, 202–3, 206, 208, 210, 213, 215–16, 218, 221, 223–6, 228–33, 235, 237–8, 240–8, 254, 258, 260, 262–3, 265, 267–71 cone of memory, 122, 126, 170, 173, 175–9, 182, 185, 236; see also diagrams Deleuze’s Bergson, 22, 156, 163, 172, 267 epistemology, Bergsonian, 47, 56 feminist reception of, 241–2 history, Bergsonian, 26, 54, 58 method, Bergsonian, 9, 54, 56–7, 68, 104 philosophy of history, Bergsonian, 17, 19–20 Bergsonism, 3–5, 65, 70–1, 73, 78, 156, 215, 248, 258, 260, 263, 267, 270

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Index

Blanche, Jacques Emile, 33, 43–4 Blanchot, Maurice, 2, 156 body, 2, 4, 22, 36–7, 115, 135–7, 139–45, 167–9, 172–3, 190–1, 209–10, 218–21, 235–8, 253–4, 257 extended, 168 image, 126–7, 236, 238, 253, 264 memory, 122, 173 organic, 127 Bonnot, Jules, 94–5, 108 Borges, Jorges Luis, 158–9, 164 Browning, Robert, 158–9 camera, 115–16, 120, 122, 125–8, 131–4, 140, 144, 219, 255 Capitalism, 87, 124, 169, 171, 174, 179, 181–2 Caravaggio, M. da, 154 Caygill, Howard, 227, 229 Cézanne, Paul, 4, 12, 69 change, 4, 25, 42, 101, 116–17, 123–4, 127, 141, 144, 192, 197–9, 202, 208, 213–14, 237 cinema, 2–3, 33, 39, 42, 46, 88, 142, 183, 208, 215, 220–1, 223, 229, 267 philosophy of, 121, 220 circuits, 181, 200, 234–5, 239, 264 Clark T.J., 6, 8, 32 close-up, 218, 220–1 Colomer, André, 94–6, 99–107, 109–10 concepts, ready-made, 118, 207, 209, 216, 222–4, 231, 241 conditionality (conditions), 19, 48, 51–5, 65, 96, 138, 140, 143–4, 166, 178–9, 202, 224, 248, 252, 257 conditions of possibility, 9, 47–9, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61 consciousness, 5, 34–5, 42–3, 69, 86–7, 102–3, 138–9, 167–71, 173–4, 190–1, 195–6, 211, 247–8, 251–2, 254–8 continuity, 25, 28, 35, 40, 56, 75, 133, 150, 153, 183, 191–2, 196–8, 202, 262 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 70, 190, 192 Crary, Jonathan, 4 creation see creativity creativity, 2–5, 8, 20, 26–8, 36–7, 42, 69–70, 77, 94, 98, 115–16, 119, 124, 126, 128, 154, 158, 178, 186

273

Creyghton, Camille, 18–19 Cubism, 63, 70, 79, 81, 193, 198 De Mille, Charlotte, 52, 204 Delacroix, Eugène, 106, 110 Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 20–2, 26–7, 32–4, 39, 41–2, 45–6, 74–6, 80, 88–9, 177–9, 260, 262–3, 266–7, 269–70 democracy, 111, 206–7, 224 Derain, André, 33, 75 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 88 Descartes, René, 50, 97, 219, 254 Dewey, John, 65, 67, 71–2, 74, 78 diagrams, 10, 120–4, 156–7, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179, 181–6, 200, 229, 236; see also Bergson, cone of memory Didi-Huberman, Georges, 6–8, 13, 89 diffraction, 233–9, 241, 243 Duchamp, Marcel, 2–3, 49, 74, 184, 216 duration, 5, 23–8, 54–6, 61–2, 72–3, 98–100, 102–5, 122–3, 140–4, 150–1, 153–5, 157–8, 161, 195–7, 261–2, 264–6, 269; see also temporality individual, 96, 101 inner, 99, 101, 105 durée see duration effort, 5, 53, 57, 179, 207–8, 211–12, 214, 224–5, 260, 270 Einstein, Albert, 240, 245 energy, 67, 69, 75, 102, 118 entropy, 9, 118, 129 error, 128, 209 event, 5, 18, 20, 22, 26, 29–30, 32, 40, 64, 134, 137, 185, 260–1, 264, 267 evolution, 18–19, 25, 43, 63, 75, 85, 118, 121, 154, 157 experience, 4, 11, 34, 39, 48, 51, 53, 64–5, 136, 168–9, 171, 178–9, 223, 248, 266 integral, 73 mystical, 179 subjective, 48 turning (‘tournant’) of, 192, 197–9 Fautrier, Jean, 83–8, 91–2 Fauvism, 9, 63–4, 68, 70–1 feminism, 32, 233, 237, 241–3 Flavin, Dan, 117–18

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Focillon, Henri, 57–8 forces, 32, 63–4, 66–8, 70, 75, 139, 248 Foucault, Michel, 6, 182, 221 freedom, 68, 96, 98, 101, 103–4, 175, 179, 212 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 50, 161, 164, 251, 260, 263 Fried, Michael, 49, 148, 162, 195 Fry, Roger, 4, 33–4, 36–9, 41, 44–5 Fuentes, Carlos, 10, 152, 159–61 Futurism, 2, 92, 94, 106, 111, 196, 198 gesture, 4, 7, 37, 64, 214–15, 219, 221–5, 229, 242, 251; see also posture Grant, Duncan, 9, 33–4, 36–42 Greenberg, Clement, 49, 269 Grosz, Elizabeth, 123, 242–3 Guattari, Félix, 22, 68, 74, 184, 267 habit, 5, 42, 53–4, 57–8, 98, 101, 103, 156, 166, 171–5, 178, 180–1, 191–2, 236, 247 Hantaï, Simon, 88–9 Haraway, Donna, 233, 237, 243 harmony, 96, 103–6, 194 Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 26, 88, 95, 261, 263, 271 Heidegger, Martin, 26, 123, 189 Henry, Michel, 10, 189–95, 199, 202–3 Hill, Rebecca, 242–3, 246 historicism, 26, 55, 261, 265 historiography, 9, 18–19, 117, 261, 266 history durational, 58 inner, 43, 196 nature of, 17–19, 28 philosophy of, 3, 17–19, 24, 27, 29, 177 Holt, Nancy, 9, 115, 117, 124–7 Horkheimer, Max, 20, 268 human experience see experience Husserl, Edmund, 6, 88, 189, 195 hyperaesthesia, 3, 11, 229, 247–59 illusion, 53, 138–9, 142, 144–5, 166, 209 imagery, production of, 116, 119–21, 124, 128, 216, 223 images indirect, 45, 212 mattered, 120–1, 123, 126–7 moving, 119, 208

present, 23, 254 sound, 115, 126 suggestive, 212, 222 immanence, 1–3, 7–10, 26, 32, 42, 63–4, 69, 75, 132–6, 139–44, 153, 155–6, 182, 212–13, 265; see also transcendence impossibility see possibility intellect, 6, 69, 96, 100–1, 136, 138–9, 153, 161, 166–7, 170, 178–80, 215, 219, 228, 240; see also thinking intellectual effort see effort intelligence see intellect interference, 211, 232–4, 236–8, 240 intuition, 1, 2, 4–7, 13, 28, 35, 51–3, 57, 68–9, 72, 77, 95–6, 99–103, 105–7, 165–6, 178–9, 206–13, 223–4, 247–8; see also thinking invisibility, 185, 189–91 James, William, 71, 78, 189 Kafka, Franz, 158–60 Kandinsky, Wassily, 10, 192–5 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 47–52, 55, 57–60, 166, 183, 254 Kierkegaard, Søren, 87, 158 Klee, Paul, 82, 131 Kropotkin, Peter, 94–5, 104, 107–8 Lacan, Jacques, 6, 175, 182 Laruelle, François, 10, 206–10, 212–15, 217, 220, 222, 224, 226–7, 229–31 laughter, 77–8, 95, 100, 102, 151, 155, 158, 161 Le Rire see laughter Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 26, 88, 170, 247, 252–5, 257–9 Leonardo Da Vinci, 154, 197–8 life, 35–6, 42–3, 65–9, 71–2, 77–8, 103–4, 127–8, 135, 179–81, 184–5, 199, 241–2, 252, 256–8, 264–7 attention to, 180, 252–3, 258, 264–5 inner, 77, 99, 102–3, 241, 243 mental, 99, 120, 165, 177 ‘life in general’, 78, 208, 221, 226, 264 life of dreams, 174, 176 logic, 181–2, 210, 212, 263 Maine de Biran, 50, 53, 59 Manessier, Alfred, 82, 87–8, 90



Index

Manet, Edouard, 69, 148, 152, 159, 162 materiality see matter materials see matter Matisse, Henri, 2–4, 7, 9, 11–12, 34, 63–75, 77–9, 88, 92, 196–7, 199 matter, 8, 21, 32–4, 41, 68–70, 80, 86–7, 116, 119–28, 141–3, 155–6, 165–8, 237–9, 242, 253–4 perception of, 165, 253 plane of, 168–9, 171–5, 178–82, 185 reality of, 238, 255 Meillassoux, Quentin, 183, 213 memory, 2–5, 10, 18–19, 34, 52, 57, 82–3, 87–8, 141–3, 153, 170–7, 180–2, 185, 234–6, 261–5 cosmic, 172, 178 historical, 19, 152, 154 involuntary, 175, 179 pure, 143, 169, 173, 235–6, 248 virtual, 169, 212 memory cone see Bergson’s cone of memory Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 86–8, 91, 189–91, 203, 267 metaphor, 82–3, 94–6, 105, 107–8, 122, 157, 194–5, 212, 238, 243, 255 metaphysical intuition see intuition metaphysics, 1, 10, 20, 36, 73, 87, 95, 98, 207, 213, 216, 221, 224, 228, 241 Modernism, 127, 193 monads, 170, 249, 255, 257, 259 Mondrian, Piet, 79, 86, 193 Monet, Claude, 85, 193–4 Mounier, Emmanuel, 85, 90 movement, 7–10, 23, 36–42, 52–4, 69–72, 132–45, 150–1, 153–4, 156–7, 160–1, 167–9, 178–80, 196–7, 206–8, 235–6 of thought, 52, 156 retrograde, 232, 234, 236, 240–1 Mullarkey, John, 11, 20, 109, 157, 265 mutation, 224, 230–1 mystic, 10, 77, 167, 178–81, 184 Neo-impressionism, 94, 106–8, 111 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 50, 71, 174, 184–5, 271

275

non-philosophy, 4–5, 10, 207–8, 210, 212–14, 218, 224–5, 227, 230 Oiticica, Hélio, 9, 72–3, 79 Olkowski, Dorothea, 123, 238, 242 ontology, 1, 3, 9, 17–18, 20, 28, 120, 125, 221, 233–4, 237–9, 266 painting, 1–3, 9–10, 32–3, 35, 37–9, 41, 63–7, 69–72, 77–80, 82–3, 86–9, 148, 157–62, 190–6, 198–9 abstract, 192, 194 representational, 190, 199 Panofsky, Erwin, 6–7, 49, 57, 61 Péguy, Charles, 4, 17–19, 24, 26, 28, 81, 90 perception, 1–2, 33–7, 86–7, 116–17, 119–21, 125, 140–3, 167–9, 189–91, 195–6, 198–200, 235, 247–50, 252–7, 261–3; see also sensation body’s, 133, 137 virtual, 34, 251, 256–7 phenomenology, 91, 127, 132–3, 189, 196, 209, 260 philosophy immanent see immanence non-standard see non-philosophy standard, 209, 214, 222 philosophy of art, 116, 127, 224 philosophy of mind, 29, 221, 228 photographic act, 9, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140–1, 143–4, 218 photographing, act of see photographic act photography, 1–2, 9, 131–2, 134, 136, 140, 144, 206–7, 212, 214–15, 217–18, 220, 227, 255, 258–9 physics, 194, 208, 210, 227, 238, 240 classical, 234, 239–41 quantum, 234, 239–41 Plato, 3, 21, 29, 51, 122, 221, 233 Ponge, Francis, 85, 88 possibility, 3, 6, 8–9, 19–20, 41, 48–9, 51–5, 57, 64, 68, 101, 137, 154, 181–2, 214–15 conditions of, 9, 48, 51–2, 54–5, 166 posture, 213–15, 218, 221, 224; see also gesture potentialities, 4–5, 36, 38, 52, 132, 134–5, 137, 142–4, 166 presence, 34–5, 39, 254–5, 264 past’s, 151, 159, 162 see also representation

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process, 3, 8, 23, 28, 33, 35–7, 64, 68, 97, 99, 115–22, 124–8, 151, 154–7, 224 Proust, Marcel, 81–2, 268 Rainer, Yvonne, 117, 124 Randolph, Lynn, 237–8 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), 148, 200 Real, the, 6, 175, 207, 209, 212–14, 218, 221, 223, 225, 229 recollection, 5, 57, 169, 171, 173, 176–7, 180, 218–19, 236, 263 Rembrandt van Rijn, 70, 85, 190, 200–2 re-orientation, 206–7, 213–14, 229 representation, 6, 8, 32, 34–5, 49, 68, 72, 100, 103, 121–3, 140, 189, 223, 237–8, 254–5; see also presence reversal, 1, 4, 5, 6, 42, 52, 54, 202, 206–8, 212–16, 218, 224–5, 230–1, 256; see also turn and return rhythm, 5–6, 26, 37, 41, 82, 96, 103–4, 106, 119, 126, 219–20, 230, 262, 264 Riegl, Alois, 7, 195 Robinet, M., 249–51 romanticism, 30, 70, 158–9 Sartre, Jean Paul, 81, 87–8, 189 Schmid, Anne-Françoise, 231 science, 18, 36, 47–8, 55, 95, 99–101, 183, 191, 208, 212, 215–16, 221, 227–8, 249, 258 self, 24, 77, 88, 96, 98, 103, 118, 135–6, 138, 141–2, 178, 194, 211, 232–4, 241; see also subject sensation, 4, 36–8, 41, 56, 66–9, 72, 74, 101, 104, 106, 141, 143–4, 168–9, 180, 196; see also perception Serres, Michel, 136, 139, 141 Severini, Gino, 106–7, 110 Signac, Paul, 107, 111 Simmel, Georg, 47, 55 Smithson, Robert, 9, 115–18, 123–4, 126–7, 129, 131 soul see self

space, 1, 22, 25, 51–2, 56–7, 67, 79–80, 82, 85–6, 138–9, 141–2, 190–1, 228–9, 252, 255–6 Spinoza, Benedict de, 166, 171–3 Stirner, Max, 95–8, 100–2, 105, 107 subject, 10, 100, 118–22, 124, 132, 135, 141–2, 166–7, 177, 179, 182–3, 197–8, 208–9, 224–5, 264–5; see also self Svetlana Alpers, 152, 195 technology, 123–4, 126, 128, 182, 251–2, 258 temporality, 1, 9–10, 33, 39, 64, 98–9, 101, 122, 133–5, 142–5, 151, 175, 191, 197, 202; see also duration tension, 65–6, 69, 72, 145, 195, 198, 224, 230, 262, 266 thinking, 7, 10–11, 97–8, 119–22, 127, 156, 165–8, 182–3, 206–7, 209, 212–16, 219–20, 222–4, 230, 263–7; see also intellect; intuition Toynbee, Arnold, 19, 24, 26, 28 transcendence, 206, 214, 265 see also immanence transcendental, 48–9, 51, 97, 132, 140, 193 turn and return, 4, 6–8, 11, 32, 37, 41, 52, 57, 80, 116, 136, 142–3, 166, 177, 180–2, 192–3, 197–9, 200, 208, 218, 221, 229, 256–7, 260–2, 264, 266–7; see also reversal of experience, 192, 197–9 Turner, J.M.W., 70, 190, 192 universe, 26, 39, 69, 82, 90, 103, 118, 168, 172–3, 184, 191, 195, 236, 248, 253–5; see also world Valéry, Paul, 2, 81, 85, 90 Velàzquez, Diego, 160, 197–8 Vermeer, Jan, 193, 197–8 virtual, 22–3, 28, 30; see also actual Wahl, Jean, 88, 90 Warburg, Aby, 7, 57, 261 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 10, 149, 152, 159, 161–2 world, 1–2, 5, 41, 44, 65, 77, 85–7, 99, 116, 120, 135, 168–72, 181, 191–4, 210; see also universe