How to Dig Bergson. Seven Steps.

1 By Marc Djaballah

Lots of really smart people have talked up Bergson, and I think they were onto to something. But they tend to be pretty allusive, and this is unfortunate. Its counterproductive and unnecessary. I say: theres no reason to be cagey about the specifics of this rightly storied relevance. With untiring simplicity, exemplary precision, and often hallucinatory perspicuity, his texts formulate a series of problems whose consequences are as disturbing to accepted-wisdom mindsets as they are to mainstream philosophical presuppositions. suggest seven ways to see this. I will

Step 1. Forget the unfathomable cost of the activity youre engaged in. But first, think, for a moment, of the magnitude of our privilege and wealth of resources of all kinds. Focus on the incalculable sacrifice that must have been made, that must be made right now, in order for us to be able to do what we are doing here. In order to have the leisure and the capacity for philosophical reflection, and the like. Our wealth as a cultureas cultureis booty: the condensed spoils weve pillaged from countless generations of enslaved. The sheer pain, the terror, and the loss areor should besickening. Hold this fact in front of you, let yourself feel it momentarily. Now forget it.

Presented at Philopolis Montreal 2010, on March 21st.

Step 2. Reconsider the idea that what we are conscious of now is present. As a result of its conceptual structure, attentive experience is a form of memory: we become conscious of the world only as forgotten, by remembering it. We do so, more specifically, in the mode of recognition: by representing specifics of what is present, and as such unconscious, amnesic. In other words, the reality of which we are aware is by its very nature no longer present. We perceive in the future anterior tense, by remembering something as that was already there and is, by virtue of the logic of this act, no longer present but represented. By coming into focus in this way, these concrete representations of material elements that were in our presence pass, they are in the past. Consequently, becoming conscious attentively, having a present, should be thought of as a moment or a duration, a temporal structure. Every present moment we recognize is unique, by its duration, its qualitative depth. It has its own texture, a tonality made of the past, and determined by the act of remembering, in the interval between presence and representation. Think of the field of visual perception in front of each of us right now. The things we see consciously and attend to appear to us as they do as the result of our activity of recognition in which we pick out and immobilize typical features of the living movement that is present, not-yet-conscious reality. In other words, we remember them. The set of features that affect us as something specific does so as a fact, an artefact, an event in our mnemonic activity. It is a reality that, as a matter of structure, has already past. The present in conscious experience is a memory. Since the realities of which we become conscious have the status of memories, there is always a determinate interval between being affected by something and becoming conscious of it. The quality, the structure of this intervalthe duration or the history of the presentis what distinguishes one moment from another. This implies that our tendency to think of the present as

a mobile point without qualities is terribly mistaken. The abstract, quantitative sense of the present that punctuates like points on a line has nothing to do with the present we experience, which is strictly qualitative. This present cant be instantaneous: it has a particular duration, as a movement of heterogeneous qualities that we experience as something or other lasting. The difference between these two corresponds to the difference between the reality that we experience from the inside, and that of the spatial reality we can observe and measure from the outside, without participating in it. Which brings me to...

Step 3. Accept the mystery. Swallow, and digest as much of it as possible. The confidence that we could arrive at a comprehensive picture of reality, one about which we could have foundational certainty, is based on the weak ontological supposition that we are essentially self-standing subjects populating a fundamentally objective world. Such a construal is grossly inapt as a description of the character of our perceptual experience. Shortly, I will try to show that we are better conceived as forms of activity, and our conscious experience the immaterialisable excess of this activity. Consider meanwhile that the reality of which we can become conscious is, at any given moment, framed, anchored, and constituted by the activities in which we are engaged. More specifically, when thinking about something consciously, we are always thinking of ourselves thinking about something. This implies two degrees of distance between our conscious reality, and the reality we are conscious of. Correlatively, the idea of being unconscious is deeply ambivalent: while we have little choice but to consider unconscious the activity that physiological observation from a 3rd person point of view indicates we are constantly doing without awareness, we also cannot help distinguishing in any

given experience between the sense in which we are consciousness of something in attending to it, and that in which we were already latently conscious prior to giving it attention. Our conscious experiences--the momentary, qualitatively-charged interruptions of our awarenessare, therefore, riddles: closed (conscious, determinate and explicit) activities within open (unconscious, indeterminate and implicit) activities. These interrupting enigmas, occasions to expand a quantitative individual with determinate qualitative depth and density, happen by acts of conceptual appropriation: we recognise only that of which we are capable, interested, and in a position to pay attention. Notice that we dont perceive things that can be moving or immobile, but interruptions of movement. We tend to think of our lives as though we they were like movies, except real: quasiinstantaneous snap-shots set into artificially homogeneous movement. In fact, however, in life, perception happens by our momentary suspensions of heterogeneous movement, which are as such inaccessible. This is why it is helpful to think of the activity of grasping reality in terms of the capacity to formulate and reformulate enigmatic problems, rather than solving them. The idea of arriving at a definitive understanding of the way things are, either specifically or in general, is based on the illusion that reality exists prior to and independently of our perceptive and intellectual activities. This becomes apparent when one suspends the supposition that space and time are equally real. The spatio-temporality of perceptual reality is a complex idea, in so far as space and time respectively answer to different sets of demands and have entirely different structures. The spatial dimension of the world we perceive is homogeneous and thoroughly quantitative; it finds its source and reason for being in first order material needs: weve come to experience the world spatially as an expedient for survival. Measurable and neutral, the space we consider to be the receptacle of the objective world

consists of a single plane punctuated by dimensionless, uniform fixed points. The temporal dimension of reality is something entirely other, irreducibly qualitative and heterogeneous, it is the sensible form of our conscious experience, the source of which is the useless memory in excess of our first order needs. Experienced time, unlike space, is schematic and dynamic. In relation to time, space is onto-genetically late, and it flattens real experience rather than constituting its depth. This is not always apparent primarily because, in a context in which efficiency, facility, and the like are valued absolutely, weve become tremendously adept at spatializing time. Something similar can be said about the relation between qualitative and quantitative reality. We become conscious of whatever reality we are conscious of as sensible individuality as quality, rather than quantity. Numerical order abstracts from the qualitative specificity of the items it counts. In conscious experience, what we become conscious of is qualitatively indexed, irreducibly particular as the doubly funnelled point of a contact with its determinate negation, with what isnt conscious at the moment. We are affected first in the way we respond to as an unconscious reflex, and then conceptually as a conscious reflection. At times of heightened consciousness, the two diverge, and we become aware at a third degree of the fact that our intellectual awareness, the level at which we are able to be conceptually coherent, is out of touch with the way we are responding intuitively.

Step 4. Let yourself enchant the world. Some of our most basic, generally tacit assumptions about what we are doing at any given point are connected to our sense of being located inside our bodies, which are for their part located in the world, outside ourselves.

However, it is possible to enhance perception by learning to dispossess our body enough to take stock of our co-possession of not only our body, but the rest of the matter presently affecting us. To do so, begin by considering that becoming conscious requires qualitative distinction, contrast. Nothing we experience is entirely pure. Homogeneity is an abstraction. This is emblematic of the fact that reality is active: the determination of a practice sustained by both giving and receiving, remembering and materialising. Consider that, like up and down, inside and outside are internal dyads, codeterminate opposites. As infants, for example, we have to learn to distinguish and take possession of our bodies, to locate ourselves as conscious individuals inside our bodies. While this can be thought of as an objective didactic exercise, it is indicative that it is something that must be learned. The functioning of perceptual experience cannot be understood, however, on the basis of this kind of clear-cut separation between our bodies and the rest of the material world. In order to recognise a reality as something a particular, whether it belongs to our body or not, we have to be able to pick out its distinctive characteristic, we have to exercise a conceptual or comprehensive capacity that allows us to distinguish it qualitatively. In order to see or feel something, we must take possession of it, we occupy it in much the same way as we occupy our bodies. The sense of being inside ourselves as opposed to the external world comes in relatively late, and its cultural interests are based on survival and expedience. However, the notion that we are really situated inside our bodies is incoherent. We think of ourselves as perceivers, as agents of the activity that generates a perceived world, and our bodies belong to this world. How could we be the result of our own activity? Scrutiny of a perceptual field verifies this. With minimal effort, we can come to withhold the habit of separating our bodies sharply from its environment, and to appreciate the fact that we are in everything we see and feel every bit as much as we are inside our bodies.

One way to think of consciousness in this register is as a two-way mirror that reflects the usable past in front of us as its materialisation. We are, in our conscious individuality, each time the excess product of the exercise of a capacity, the surplus of use of a tool. In this context, it makes little sense to consider oneself as the inner, spiritual reality as which we must learn to think of ourselves in order to exist in everyday society. A more coherent way to think of the structure of individual conscious experience is as an illuminated strip, an aura produced by an excess of memory, as the manifestation of useless memory, memory that is not materialised. I put it to you that, in this respect, the reflex effects that we observe in the least conscious of forms of life differ only in degree from the defining disposition of consciousness. perceptual activity that cannot be used. I can elaborate in terms of the problem of dualism of mind and matter, which remains, I believe, as live and relevant as it was three hundred and fifty years ago. Despite the unfair advantage of its institutional expediency, naturalism seems unable snuff-off the conviction that the reality of conscious experience is irreducible to a quantitative description of its material properties. Proponents of dualism have not always served the interests of their cause, however. According to a perspicacious reformulation of this problem that has been waiting more than a century to be properly appreciated, the immaterial side of the dualism, mind or spirit, is specified as memory. I would like to focus on the modality of the relation between memory as mind and matter. Typically the difficulty in this register has been to describe the material world in its determinateness without thereby dissolving the indeterminacy characteristic of spiritedness, and required for freedom. The supposition that the two are realities of entirely different and independent orders is not problematic for the mind side, which in principle could coexist As individual conscious experience, we are neither inside nor outside our bodies, but the part of our

with another type of reality. The difficulty is to satisfactorily capture the impermeable regularity of the material world in a way that admits a reality of an irreducibly different dispensation. The preponderant response to this obstacle in academics is, increasingly, to skirt the problem by accepting a form of naturalism. There is, however, a way to formulate the problem of dualism coherently without attenuating the level of determinacy of matter that emerges from the specification of memory as the concrete form of mind. Rather than conceiving of mind, coextensive with consciousness, as level of reality that exists independently of the reality of the material world, one can think of the two as poles and correlative descriptions of a reversible movement, life. Whereas memory would be the description of living movement as indeterminate, as form of activity, that is, as capacity, or possibility, matter would be its description as determined, as the actualised product of the exercise of memory. By remembering something consciously, which is the general form of all acts of recognition, of representation, we effect a determinate materialisation. Indeed, there is astonishing philosophical insight in the Biblically-based entreaty to swallow the insuperable fact that every act of appropriating reality, requesting consciousness and memory, effects a materialisation as ontologically relevant as any act of artistic creation, technical production, or ethical transgression (You shall not covet...). Conversely, when we forget something, when we put it out of mind, we spiritualize it, we integrate it into a capacity, into something we can do. The dualism characteristic of real experience would, then, consist of its heterogeneity of movement, always mixing various degrees of determinacy and indeterminacy, of activity happening and activity happened. On this understanding, consciousness is not coextensive with mind, but the funnelled residue of memory not needed in any given act of materialisation. In this respect, conscious experience can be considered the fortuitous remainder of our materialising efforts to survive relative to our needs.

We become conscious of whatever we become conscious of as a result of having too much matter, more than we need to sustain our bodies.

Step 5. Move from me to we Lets try to pry ourselves away from the obsessive confusion of the singular identity of each of our bodies with the plural identity of our conscious experience. The dynamics of the relation between matter and memory exclude the notion that we are essentially individuals who have the ability to come into interaction with other individuals. It makes more sense, instead, to think of the individuality of our conscious experience as something like the mobile point of a cone that funnels indeterminate memory, our temporal depth (capacities), into the material world as determinate perceived reality. This point at the surface has no existence, however, independently of the depth in which it is rooted, which is by hypothesis not individual. We are conscious of ourselves as memory and save its material frame; memory is as such not of the order of individuality. Like the sense that we are situated inside our material bodies, the sense that ones memory belongs to oneself as an individual does not withstand critical scrutiny when considered aside from first order material needs. Step 6. Hesitation as freedom. The bulk of our ethical intuitions and mechanisms of social distinction are based on the ideals of decisiveness, resoluteness, and rational deliberation. And yet, if there is a non-mechanical dimension to our activity, it cannot be in its exercise, but in the capacity to withhold the decision of whether or not to act, of which capacity to use. This momentary indeterminacy is familiar to us as the experience of hesitation. Far from being a mark of weakness, ineptitude, or inattentiveness, the capacity to hesitate is our most distinctive feature, and our only freedom. Hesitation expresses a possibility of unpredictable novelty, of

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instinctive creation, and self-understanding. Thus opportunity to tarry in the face of a difficulty can be considered a privilege and a special occasion.

Step 7. Remember step 1, respond, repeat. 2

After thoughts:

--You cant ever do the same thing twice. This is connected to fact that demagogic moralising notwithstanding, dependence even addiction is a condition of possibility of having control before being a sign of having lost it. --Resist the idea that nothing comes before something.