Continental Philosophy Review (2004) 37: 469493 DOI: 10.

1007/s11007-005-7097-z

c Springer 2005

Forget the virtual: Bergson, actualism, and the refraction of reality

JOHN MULLARKEY
Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, Scotland, UK (E-mail: j.mullarkey@dundee.ac.uk)

Abstract. In this essay I critique a particular reading of Bergson that places an excessive weight on the concept of the virtual. Driven by the popularity of Deleuzes use of the virtual, this image of Bergson (seen especially through his text of 1896, Matter and Memory, where the idea is introduced) generates an imbalance that fails to recognise the importance of concepts of actuality, like space or psychology, in his other works. In fact, I argue that the virtual is not the key concept for Bergsonism and that there is a good deal of evidence in Bergsons other writings, especially those connected with his actualist notion of refraction, to think of him as a perspectivist philosopher. Moreover, it will be seen that Virtualism resides within an economy of reection that is subsumed within the broader paradigm of Actualist refraction. Taking these optical metaphors seriously, the virtual becomes a perspectival image seen from an actual position, or rather, an interacting set of actual positions. This interaction is termed virtualization, denoting the substitution of a substantive conception with a processual one. In the rst two parts of the essay, I direct my remarks more towards Deleuzian readings of the actual rather than Deleuze himself (Deleuze is so open about the biases he brings to his reading of Bergson as to be beyond criticism). In the second two sections, I pursue a philosophical argument for the probity of a non-Virtualist position as such within philosophy, based upon the concept of refraction. This is done not only because it is important that we remain open to other readings of Bergson that are not so heavily mediated in one direction, but also in view of the power of refraction as a new concept for reconciling actual modes such as molar identity, the present, and extension, with their virtual opposites.

Introduction In what follows, I discuss what is rapidly becoming an unchallenged -ism in Continental thought, that of the Deleuzian virtual.1 Not that one must be against -isms per se in philosophy, for they are often productive and galvanising inuences on the generation of philosophical concepts. Recent works such as Keith Ansell Pearsons Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, Manuel DeLandas Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, and Brian Massumis Parables for the Virtual have gone a long way in making sense of this concept of immanent, intensive, difference.2 Indeed, Virtualism has become a key term not just for Deleuze-studies but also within the current agenda for Continental thought in its relationship to science, to Humanism (and the so-called post-human), and to aesthetics (of the visual arts and

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new media in particular). Nonetheless, for every forceful thought, a corrective movement is often needed to stem any exaggeration, and of late it appears that the argument for the virtual has become somewhat Manichaean (the virtual, difference, and multiplicity, being good; the actual, continuity, and identity being bad) and, with that, tending to the kind of dogmatic transcendentalism that Deleuzians usually hope to avoid. The brakes I am going to apply to this movement concern its source, for the virtual, in as much as it is deemed to be foundational, is built upon a misinterpretation. Naturally, it is Deleuzes ontological use of the virtual that has animated a great deal of interest in Virtualism, his idea that the virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.3 But this is where a philosophical controversy lies, for it is grounded in a contentious interpretation of Bergson (who rst employed the terms virtual and actual philosophically in his Matter and Memory of 1896).4 For the most part, the virtual is given its ascendancy at the expense of the actual, the former alone being real. Here is how Michael Hardt sums up the situation between the two: Deleuze asserts that it is essential that we conceive of the Bergsonian emanation of being, differentiation, as a relationship between the virtual and the actual, rather than as a relationship between the possible and the real. After setting up these two couples (virtual-actual and possible-real), Deleuze proceeds to note that the transcendental term of each couple relates positively to the immanent term of the opposite couple. The possible is never real, even though it may be actual; however, while the virtual may not be actual, it is nonetheless real.5 The actual is normally aligned in these readings with the merely possible, the molar, the spatial, the phenomenological, and the psychological, while the virtual alone has privileged access to reality, that is, to ontology. Keith Ansell Pearson, for example, sees a fundamental advance in Bergsons shift from psychology to ontology in his analysis of virtual memory in Matter and Memory.6 Sometimes, what can appear to be an equitable treatment of the actual and the virtual more often than not prepares a one-sided prioritisation by implication. Hence, Ansell Pearson is careful when writing of the actualization of the virtual to note that the virtual is only real in so far as it is actualized.7 This commendable accent on the movement of actualization only partially conceals the fact that the actual forms thus created are ontologically dependent on a ground that is not their own. They emerge (according to a principle of differentiation) from the virtual. Likewise, James Williams begins impartially enough, arguing, after Deleuze, for the reciprocal determination between the virtual and the actual and for the inseparability of the two concepts,

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before returning to a general thrust that remains anti-Actualist, actual objects being disassociated from the processes that bring us about such that our maxim should be leave all actual things behind (forget everything).8 A contrario, I hope to show that in Bergsons work the virtual is best regarded as a psychological concept derived from actual processes and that, if anything should be forgotten, it is the virtual. Though some early texts like Matter and Memory can lead one to think of the virtual as an absolute for all Bergsons work, later texts, especially in the period between 1910 and 1922, take a more Actualist approach pointing in a direction beyond the virtual (understood as the pure difference ontologically subtending our actual world).9 Looking at these later texts, it is possible to see a Leibnizian dimension in Bergsons thought emerge whereby the virtual is grounded by a play of actualities: the virtual for Bergson becomes a well-founded perspectival and psychological phenomenon an emergent product formed through the interplay between a multiplicity of actual entities (including spatial and temporal continuities and discontinuities, identities and differences, quantities and qualities). Being well-founded here means that the virtual, while a function of the actual and an emergent product, has real effects on the actual rather than being merely epiphenomenal, which is certainly more value than Deleuze offers the actual, given his view, according to Ansell Pearson, that phenomenology must be epiphenomenology.10 There is more to this debate, however, than a squabble within Bergsonstudies, for its ramications have broad philosophical interest. In general philosophical terms, Actualism follows the view that there are no (hidden) forces, no potencies, potentials, ground or substrate to the real, no possibles awaiting actualization, no ontological hinterworld, no absolute unconscious, no realm of anomalous identity, no pure Being (be it as such, ambiguous or Wild). And also that there is no virtual. But what does this mean? In the specic Deleuzian context tackled here, the virtual is congured as what conditions the actual, as what allows it to pass, as what enables it to actualise itself. Against this, Actualism proposes that the actual is always already actualised somewhere, to some point of view. It is a form of ontological antireductionism a saving of the appearances, only at every level and not just as regards how things appear to us. Ill also argue that a psychological reading of the virtual does not then oppose it to the ontological realm (or rather the metaphysical realm a distinction Ill explain later), as some Deleuzians would have it, for the Bergsonian psyche is itself cosmological rather than anthropological. Indeed, while Bergsonism is a philosophy of consciousness, this consciousness or psyche is a synonym for movement, in particular, a specic model of movement that Bergson describes as refractive. Ultimately, Ill argue by contrast that the virtual is best

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understood as a psychological activity of virtualizing derived from the actual, or rather, from a multiplicity of refractive actualities. Hence, along with the demotion of the virtual goes its supposed process of actualization and in their place come actualities and the processes of their virtualization. Admittedly, it could be suggested that all that is really involved here is a name-change: like some inverted colour spectrum argument, we might simply swap the terms virtual and actual in all that Bergson or Deleuze write on the topic and end up with the same philosophical results. But the stakes are larger than that, I believe, simply because the language of virtual and actual are linked to cognate terms that cannot be so easily swapped, while also being rooted in metaphysical thoughts with different emphases. One real consequence of this for Deleuze-studies would be a loosening up of Deleuzes own various dualisms: of the molar and the molecular, of Chronos and Aion, of the extensive and the intensive, of psychology and ontology, of consciousness and unconsciousness, of the movement-image and the time-image. Read through a reoriented schema of virtualizing and the actual, molarity, for instance, is not excluded from becoming (and, with that, reality): it too is a tendency, a movement, and so is real for any thought such as Bergsons that sees processes operating at every level, molar and molecular. Every moment can be an Event, can be creative from some perspective, for there is no qualitative distinction between false and genuine becoming.11 Consequently, there is no need for the Deleuzian prioritisation of Aion (time as pure eternal return), for we can survive with the innite series of Chronos (time as actual succession), embedding each other. We dont need a pure and empty form of time12 or eternity to contain other times: time is always full.13 This redemption of the molar and the actual will also serve to rehabilitate Phenomenology, in some shades at least, for Deleuzian thought. A naturalistic (or cosmological) phenomenology, as pursued, for instance, in the recent work of Renaud Barbaras on Merleau-Ponty, is quite compatible with the naturalistic metaphysics followed by Deleuze (once the emphasis on the virtual is tempered).14 A naturalistic metaphysics will appear impossible to many, but far from being mutually exclusive, Bergsonian metaphysics and naturalism are actually convergent in the manner in which they reform their philosophical terms of reference, namely, immanence (for naturalism) and transcendence (for metaphysics). Being part of a redeemed picture of nature, Bergsonian metaphysics (like its Deleuzian descendant) is founded on the multiplicity and singularity of beings rather than on a transcendental ontology of Being (understood as the science of being qua being). This contrast accords with the Wolfan picture of ontology and metaphysics that denes ontology as that which deals with possible things (whatever can be thought without contradiction), and meta-

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physics as that which deals with actual things.15 In Bergsonism, however, the possible does not transcend the real but comes after it and is immanent to it: in a creative evolution there is perpetual creation of possibility and not only of reality.16 This production of the possible within the real is what we saw Hardt allude to earlier. The possible is radically remade by the real all the time, and so ontology must come after metaphysics when the latter is understood as the promotion of a non-reductive naturalism, a metaphysics that comes after a radicalised vision of the empirical, that is, after anomalous experience.17 In this respect, Bergson both remains faithful to and goes beyond the history of metaphysical thought by mobilising, multiplying, and materialising any absolutes within it, by placing them sub specie durationis.18 We might also call this a metaphysics without Being, for it is equally true that Bergsons critique of Nothingness actually counters Being as well and consequently, as Jacques Maritain charged, strikes a blow at all ontology.19

The anti-virtual zek describes Deleuze as the philosopher of the Virtual.20 The Slavoj Zi denition of the virtual most pertinent to Deleuzes ontology is in terms of Bergsonian dur ee and virtual memory. This virtual or pure memory is characterised in Matter and Memory as the persistence of the past, as the ongoing existence of the past after its passing, and out of which new presents emerge.21 Whereas a recollection actualises the past, pure memory is this past. Yet this position is difcult to countenance without also negating the reality of time as genuine novelty (a characterisation much more in tune with his rst seminal work, Time and Free Will), given that actual, new presents seem to be ontologically pregured within the virtual. As A.R. Lacey has argued, the persistence of the effects of the past, or the persistence of my past as a recollection, may well make sense, but not the survival of the past: pure memories do not exist now as entities they exist (timeless present) in the past, but they have causal effects now, in so far as they generate memory images, which are present phenomena.22 There will, of course, be the traditional retorts that ask what conditions this movement of time, where lies its potential, where is it synthesised, or how is it constituted. For instance, how is the past made from the present, how is it made to pass? The implication is that the survival of the past is required in order to make the present pass. But if dur ee is fundamental change, then it needs no support, be it physical (in substance) or ontological (in the virtual). Actuality is a creativity neither ex nihilo nor ex potentia: it is its own ground. The passage of time (or movement) comes from itself at

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every level, and, as such, is unthinkable in itself. Bergson argues that we may be able to feel it in an effort of sympathetic intuition, but all attempts to think it or reect upon it end in mediations that necessarily distort (or refract) it. To pretend to think it through what we call the virtual is philosophically confused (while also being unavoidable for reasons Ill explore later). In fact, the Deleuzian theory of the virtual, of the persistence of the past, is wholly compatible with its antecedents in Bergsonian vitalism, when the latter is predicated on actual becoming and affect, and the former is read through a virtual ontology. That is to say, that the actual and the virtual are, if not actually identical, at least virtually so. Im making painful play here on the word virtual, alas, but this is necessary. Bergson was always very careful in his choice of terminology,23 and we must not forget the sense of the virtual as an optical image that only approximates the real. I hope to demonstrate that the virtual exists only virtually within a virtual ontology, and by that I mean that it is a performative concept, it is produced from our point of view as an image (another vital term for Bergson): one can virtualize without anything existing other than what we call and see as the virtual through refraction. Refraction is the process whereby the path of light waves is distorted as they move from one medium to another. In Bergsons hands this metaphor does a huge amount of work, for it is the media themselves, as processes, as mediations, that he is most interested in, not the light (if that is understood as a persisting substance). Refraction doesnt happen to light, it is all there is to light, all there is to both its appearance and its so-called reality. It enjoys no internal virtual/actual structure. But we are moving too fast. Returning to Deleuze, there are, of course, differences between actual perspectives, between our mundane and our extreme experiences, between the perception of a neurotic and the enlarged perception of a schizophrenic (or artist or mystic), between, in other words, a transcendental, shocking or radical empiricism and routine perception.24 And again, of course, it is the difference between these types of perception ones that are in-depth, richer, transgressive, or liminal, and ones that remain on the surface, narrow, or predictable that leads us to think of the virtual as an actual fringe around our actual (and often spatialized) experience. But thinking of the virtual in this substantive manner is incorrect (at least for Bergsonians), for his later works reveal it as a well-founded artefact derived from and performed within our optical situation, that is, a situation of multiple, stratied actualities with multiple interfering perspectives on each other. It is not that there is one type of actual perception with the virtual existing beyond and around it (as a reservoir of difference), but rather that there are numerous different forms of actualities that virtualize their mutual differences such that a lowest common denominator is abstracted or spatialized termed disparagingly the actual

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or the perception of the present or simply presence whilst those differences are consigned to a halo surrounding that single actuality and called the virtual or the memory of the past. To provide a less exotic analogy in terms of visibility and invisibility,25 Virtualism thinks of the invisible as the ontological ground of the visible, while Actualism thinks of the invisible as a psychological artefact of vision. For Actualism, things are always visible in and to themselves (and their nearest neighbours) and only invisible to certain points of view. Indeed, we make things invisible simply because we must occupy a certain point of view. The Wittgensteinian phrase nothing is hidden is usually taken to relate epistemology to ontology, but, psychologically, it means that everything has its own perspective (on it) and so what is hidden must be due to the position of that perspective and what is revealed must be due to a movement beyond that point of view (a position Ive described as metaphysics understood as radical empiricism).26 Everything is public, but there are different forms of public (not all of them human, to say the least), some of which are hidden from each other due to virtualization. Being public does not entail being democratic (the idea that every public enjoys the same visibility). Actualism is always about the multiple: multiple publics, multiple perspectives, and multiple presents. If the rst discovery of Bergsonism in Time and Free Will is that there is no single present, no simultaneity (time endures in multiple forms), then there is no single past either: there is simply what each of us calls our past from the perspective of a (changing, that is, multiple) present: a mutating wake perpetually recreated behind us.27 Now this core tenet of Bergsonism that there is no simple present and so no such thing as simple presence is most often taken by Virtualists as a licence to crown the virtual as absolutely sovereign, even though Bergsons deconstruction of presence is rendered through a multiplication of presents rather than their dissolution in the past. In much of Bergsons work, from Time and Free Will in 1889 to The Perception of Change in 1911 (where these issues are directly addressed),28 it is dur ee as a whole, as a continuity of change and a multiplicity of rhythms, that constitutes novelty, not one dimension of time, the past (or the past in general), in isolation from the others (as though they did not really exist, singly or multiply). There is, admittedly, one chapter of one book by Bergson that does privilege the past, Chapter Three of Matter and Memory, a text that Deleuze uses for his own Virtualist ends (and the one that is endlessly referenced by Deleuzians). But even in respect to Matter and Memory, it is a distortion of the text to forget that Bergsons use of the virtual past is overtly psychological rather than ontological. The difference between Bergsons writings is illuminating in this regard. As Jean Wahl once remarked:

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Many difculties arise from the confrontation between the theory of Time and Free Will and the theory of pure memory in Matter and Memory, where a new dimension, in depth, of the past appears. Words like action and life successively take on different aspects, often opposed.29 The language of Time and Free Will fosters images of continual transformation, of multiple succession, whereas Matter and Memory promotes an imagery of depth and conservation. Yet both provide accounts of dur ee, the one multiple, the other singular. Those familiar with Alain Badious interpretation of Deleuze and the various refutations that interpretation has received may sense a little d ej` a vu here. For in this controversy concerning Bergsonian dur ee there is a foreshadowing of the same debate over the nature of the virtual between the commentators on Deleuze: some, like Badiou, see it as a neo-Platonic One, others as what precisely gives Deleuzian thought its force as a philosophy of difference that overturns Platonism. I will not enter that discussion here, though I feel lessons may be learnt from looking at the contrast between Badious Actualism and that of Bergson.30 When writing for or against the power of the past one must be aware that most Virtualists use the Bergsonian term the past in general, which has important distinguishing features.31 One recent Virtualist essay, by Stephen Crocker, accounts for them as follows. It commences its analysis with an unattering depiction of Husserls theory of time-consciousness: On this view, [Husserls] there is only a difference in degree between present and past. The past is a past present, which means that it is of the same nature and kind as the current present. Its pastness, however, is still understood as a lack of presence. In order for the past to present itself in memory, it must still borrow its life-blood from the new present in relation to which it (the former one) is past. Whatever relation is constructed among presents is derived from the properties of the present, which remains the general element of time. With the concept of Past in General, Bergson elevates the Past to the status of the universal, general element of time of which the different presents are now particular expressions. The Past in General is not a tense, but rather an enabling condition that allows relations of empirical and diachronic resemblance to form among presents. [. . .] Passing, or the past as such is instead the general element, or whole in which different moments of diachronic and empirical time can form.32 If this analysis is meant to strike a contrast between Husserl and Bergson, then it misses its mark, not necessarily in terms of its account of Husserlian protension and retension (which I wont comment on here), so much as

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its assumption that any hypothetical Bergsonian present would have general properties of presence. Bergson has already deconstructed (singular) presence without removing the idea of a (plural) present tout court. Indeed, if we try to make sense of the persistence of the past or virtual by invoking it as the past in general (as Crocker does), the very same move can be played with the plurality of Bergsonian presents or actualities. In one piece of correspondence with Georges Lechalas in 1897, Bergson draws a specic parallel between the vast eld of unconscious memories from which our recollections are chosen, and a similar perceptual eld surrounding our actual perceptions.33 He then contrasts this eld with our normal perception that distinguishes objects, agreeing with his correspondent that it probably consists instead of things in general.34 The similarity between this things in general and the past in general is obvious, but it also allows Bergson to retain a dimension of the present without supposing any particular presence as metaphysically unique or normative.35 A present actuality, qua perspective, is a force, an affect, that virtualizes other presents and actualities. Its own presence is unthinkable but immediately felt just as it mediates others and is mediated by others: this mediation, this refractive movement, this differential, simply is this felt presence. Contrary to this lenience towards and recognition of the (multiplicity of the) present or actual advocated here, most often Virtualists like Crocker take the present as a monological straw man for their arguments in favour of the virtual past. Even Leonard Lawlor, one of the most careful readers of Bergson, writes that Bergsonian perception . . .is identical to a consciousness enlarged beyond the present and thus it is not really a perception of matter but a memory of matter.36 Beyond the present. But where is that, if Bergson has already so muddied the waters of presence as to make the location of the past or memory equally untenable? Presence has been exploded by Bergson, but only within its own immanent terms by differing with itself. And the location of this difference is within the actual, as Ill explain in the section below on refraction.

From the virtual to virtualization Before we examine refraction, let me say that Im not being sceptical towards pastness per se, or rather, what stands behind that word: Bergson clearly writes too much as a dualist to allow us to read him as a simple monist of the actual. There is indeed something that we call and see as the past that guarantees both the novelty of the changing present and the reality of our past. This something and my memory are genuinely correlated, they co-vary. Hence the radical temporal duality we get in the essay Memory of the Present

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and False Recognition, for instance, where time splits in two as it unfolds, creating simultaneously the changing present and its underlying memory of that present its past. Yet I would argue that other writings of Bergson indicate that this something we call the underlying past, while undoubtedly real, is inherently unknown to us in itself, that is, it cannot be conceptualised or symbolised without distortion. We may give it various names dur ee or a multiplicity of presents but it remains radically different, that is, always lying beyond our best epistemological categories. Beyond a covariance of change, that is, a doubling of movement, we are given no other reason to support our descriptions as normative. We are only given actual movements: everything else of the other actuality, in its own actuality, is partially hidden and different to us (though not to itself and those closest to it). Consequently, there is no reason to think that we might know this difference any better by calling it virtual, unless that is intended only as a label for our own ignorance, which, alas, it rarely is, being unpacked by writers like Delanda and Massumi as highly knowable through science, art, and sociology. When we do try to conceive another actuality, we always mould it upon our own actuality: we virtualize our actuality and project it onto the other actuality of this something. This something underlying what we call our past, memory, or the virtual, surely exists: it is deduced in a Kantian fashion in Memory of the Present and False Recognition, just as it is empirically discovered in the mind-brain correlations of neurological research, such that this other actuality may even be that of what I call or see as the states of my brain (no simple subject is being assumed here). But to name it or describe it thus is to virtualize, to project our actuality onto something and call it the past, the brain, the unconscious, the virtual, and so on. Not that this is normally avoidable nor what should always be avoided: such discrimination the positing of the virtual is a biological necessity of life and the basis of our own continuous identity according to Bergsons theory lan vital. Virtualizing is just the ip-side of this act of self-creation: of the e that is, what strings along (or condenses or dominates or synthesises) the various presents we call one individuals own breadth of experience, simply is this virtualization. This principle of individuation is what Bergson describes as a refractive power, which must be explained as an unavoidable form of mediation, or a seeing as. As such, there is also an ethical dimension to this Actualism: given the tendency of refraction to reduce difference to identity, the actual can be seen as not only different from but also other to us. There is an internal, affective, dimension to actuality because all reality is alive and sentient for Bergson, only not like us.37 Bergson does his best to naturalise the ethical relation as non-anthropocentric yet fundamentally biological.38 We usually think of the

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ethical Other as the other human, the other person, but Bergsons writings give us cause to think of that relation rstly in terms of ones own body in every one of its physical and psychological dimensions.39 Between oneself and an other, there is always an activity, a power-relation of dominance and domination (to use Leibnizian terms). In other words, to call a physical state my body, or to call a conscious state my memory, is already an act of appropriation and dominance, or as Ill call it, a virtualizing of the other in the likeness or image of oneself. Crucial to Bergsons theory of life is the exploitation of bodies unlike ones own but which one makes ones own, that is, ones bodys parts. In 1922 he wrote that all the categories of perception. . . correspond, on the whole, to the choice of a certain order of size for condensation. This peculiar passage, from The Creative Mind, continues as follows: the world in which we live, with the actions and reactions of its parts upon each other, is what it is by virtue of a certain choice in the scale of size, a choice which is itself determined by our power of acting. Nothing would prevent other worlds, corresponding to another choice, from existing with it, in the same place and the same time. . ..40 Just as Bergson multiplies the present in different rhythms of dur ee, now the full consequence of this is embraced where our world is regarded as potentially multiple: any one world is the sum or level of existence we choose to condense or contain in an act of perception. And this act of condensation is an act of perception, of refraction, of seeing as. Bergson adds that, through this act of containment, an indeterminate realm is transformed in our gaze into a determinate one: one might ask. . . if it is not precisely to pour matter into this determinism. . . that our perception stops at a certain particular degree of condensation of elementary events. In a more general sense, the activity of the living being leans upon and is measured by the necessity supporting things, by a condensation of their duration.41 Let me repeat that last line: the activity of the living being leans upon and is measured by the necessity supporting things, by a condensation of their duration. This is not simply a question of the predator exploiting its prey, that, in order to live, one must nourish ourselves with others. Bergsons point is more general still, with each plane of living reality having to treat other planes of existence as relatively inert in order to support their own vitality. The actuality of other planes of life is diminished. We consume, both literally (as food) and guratively (as identity), our own material embodiment. Consumption is the rst level of virtualization, a transformation of an other into the image of ones

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self. To say, my body, is to distinguish and appropriate at the same time. The world of the living is thus one that must enclose (as my body) and exclude (as non-living) at the most basic level. What is called matter would be the most excluded, but the living matter of our biological constitution cannot be far behind amongst these hierarchical acts of Leibnizian domination. Fundamentally, ones own actuality is determined by a stand taken over matter, to be precise, the matter of ones own body. And this is a biological necessity: Our needs are, then, so many searchlights which, directed upon the continuity of sensible qualities, single out in it distinct bodies. They cannot satisfy themselves except upon the condition that they carve out, within this continuity, a body which is to be their own and then delimit other bodies with which the rst can enter into relation, as if with persons. To establish these special relations among portions thus carved out from sensible reality is just what we call living.42 But Bergson is no moralist. This dominance of others, this consuming of others (and consequently of oneself by others), is a necessary aspect of creative evolution: with it lie all the creative forces of contraction and relaxation, of repression and release, where otherwise there would only be static actualities or frozen images. That is why I am arguing that virtual images can be well-founded phenomena rather than illusions. When they are generated by a powerful act of virtualization, when there is a strong correlation or covariance, then they are well-founded. It is tempting to say real covariance here, but there are only ever stronger or weaker ones, co-varying movements which dovetail toward a virtual identity without ever reaching it. Such strong or bodily co-variances are never known in their own actuality, but they can be felt in the free act of what Bergson calls the whole of the self,43 in those aforementioned liminal and anomolous (but in no way supersensory) experiences of the mystic and the artist, for example. So what I may be taking away with one Kantian hand the possibility of knowing the actuality of another without virtualizing our actuality onto that other (what we might also call a Levinasian corrective against the totalising tendencies of Deleuzianism) Im happy to give back with a Bergsonian hand. One might characterize this approach, with the language of Time and Free Will, as the interval between one extreme that erases the otherness of our constituent parts with the phrase, my memory, and another that discharges it through exaggeration within an alien material void summed up in the modern parlance of an anonymous brain.44 Perhaps only philosophy can occupy this interval, or perhaps philosophy is this interval. Let me expand on this point by taking the Cognitivist approach to mind as an alternative example. The Cognitive paradigm would be another such virtual representation: according to Bergson, all we ever get in neurological data

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are co-variances (between brain states and mental states such as memories).45 The cognitive nature of these co-variances are simply an interpretation of the data, one more virtualization: that is, the brain is seen as a virtual store of (my) representations with their cognitive form merely dormant or potential. The brain in itself, in its own actuality, however, remains beyond our representation. All we have are isomorphic changes: we have no access to what it is like to be a brain state (to adapt Thomas Nagels well-known point). Our representations are in the brain, but only virtually, Bergson says, as an optical artefact or retrospective image.46 Cognitivists project our cognitive functions onto the covariant processes of the brain and virtualize them as both causal and quasi-cognitive. Cognitive localisation, therefore, is a virtualizing interpretation of covariance. But it would be no less an act of virtualization to say that the mental states are in themselves non-cognitive, or that they are virtual forces, or that they belong to a plane of immanence, or that they are my memories, and so on. Hence, this covariance of the brain with, for instance, our own cognitive functions, is not to say that there really is or is not cognition amongst ones parts actualities (often dubbed the virtual), but rather that whatever those actualities consist in (which we can never know though perhaps we can feel them), is covariant with our own actuality. And it is this felt covariance that furnishes us with what Deleuze calls an enlarged perception and what Bergson calls a widened or expanded perception.47 It is not a case of the elements of a broader perception being actualised from virtuality (they are always actual in and for themselves and so have no need for any more existence),48 but rather the covariance of the actualities of the parts with that of the whole that allows the former to enlarge the latter in the form of a resonating action (to maintain the optical and electromagnetic metaphor to which both the images of the virtual and refraction belong).

Actualist refraction What this essay is attempting, then, is an Actualist genesis of the (Bergsonian) virtual.49 Following this line will remind us again that Bergsonism is a philosophy of the interval more than the extreme. There are, of course, lan various extremes in Bergsons work pure memory, dynamic religion, e vital and so on but they are ideal limits, beings that have an as if existence, virtual in the originally optical sense of the term, perspectival images. Similarly, the ubiquitous phrase in Bergsons texts, as if (comme si), must be taken seriously in all of its perspectivist meaning. We have also called

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it seeing as, and though this colours Bergsons ontological commitment to these limits, they are not reduced to nothing or pure error either, for, as creations of processes, within a process philosophy they possess reality.50 We must remember that the virtual, being well-founded, has real effects on the actual. Thus I hope to save the appearances on all sides, extending to every existent what Matter and Memory says of matter, namely that it is precisely that which it appears to be, though also noting that appearances are multiple and appear to a multitude.51 Nevertheless, what has more (or stronger) reality is the interval, the concrete, the actual. The tension and knife-edge balance maintained in the interval, in the mixture, is not a mere relation between static substances: rather, the relation is what is most real about processes themselves it is at the very heart of Bergsons substance abuse (to coin a new name for his process thinking). We must recall that Bergson says he does not deny substances outright, but rather that he wishes to redene substances as processes, or as processes of processes.52 And the relation, the as and the of here, is perspectival, a contraction or refraction of the other.53 And so it is crucial that the virtual is understood as a metaphor in all of its optical resonance, as well as its ontological connotation as what approximates the real without being real. And this will entail a further excursion into a whole eld of Bergsonian optics, where the metaphors of light and vision must be taken seriously, as they have been throughout this essay.54 Despite appearances to the contrary that Bergsonism has no time for vision, for perspective, or for the medium that purportedly spreads the disease of ocularity, space in fact, these elements from the dark side of Bergsonian thought are embraced as necessary counterpoints to temporality and all things durational.55 They are not illusions or errors. As my earlier work on Bergson tried to explain, spatiality, matter, and quantity are not dismissed as philosophical enemies but are part and parcel of the philosophy of duration, being necessary bedfellows of novelty, qualitative multiplicity and heterogeneous difference.56 In Bergson, there is a well-thought out theory of mediation that must unfold alongside the better known philosophy of radical novelty in order that the lan are ever pure, but contain two may exist at all: neither duration nor the e contradictions and exist in perpetual tension with their internal other. They are not opposites within a dualism but interfering tendencies in a system of dualization processes that come to appear to be products, in a movement towards and away from illusion, with pure illusion and pure truth being only virtual.57 Mind really can become spatialized, and matter really can become mentalized (that is precisely what a living body is) because spatialization and mentalization are processes, the tela of which (pure space and pure spirit) are, again, only virtual. Indeed, matter itself may simply be an inverse movement to mind, or as Bergson famously said, physics is reversed psychology, or

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more simply, psychics inverted.58 So whether one is talking about material or mental movement may well be a question of orientation, of a perspective that simultaneously demobilises what it sees, by installing matter or mind as static and virtual absolutes. It is the movement that is real, irrespective of the names we give it. These interfering tendencies are seen most keenly in the optical notion of refraction a term which appears throughout Bergsons work, nearly as often, in fact, as the virtual itself (when it is not used as a synonym for the illusory possible, which is mostly within the pages of Matter and Memory).59 Within this optical context, the virtual operates inside an economy of reection rather than refraction: virtual images are images that are formed in a location (whether in a plane mirror or otherwise) where light does not actually reach; it only appears to an observer as if the light were coming from this position. Virtuality concerns reection and the mirroring of the unreal as real. It belongs to a bivalent dialectic of appearance and reality. (It is not without some irony for the Deleuzian reading that the origins of the virtual as an image are representationalist and so, by its own lights, transcendental.) By contrast, the system of refraction never leaves the actual it simply distorts it. Refraction, or the bending of the path of light waves, is accompanied by a change in their speed and wavelength: it does not create a mirror image of the real it transforms it. Where reection involves a change only in the direction of light waves when they bounce off a barrier to form a replica of the original image, their refraction involves even more change as they pass from one medium to another. The image is neither copied nor destroyed but transformed. Given that refraction can be read as a form mediation, the optical nature of refraction must be a purely local dimension of this process: sound too can be refracted and refraction is really a metaphor for a theory of mediation in general.60 But there are, in fact, four types of refraction in Bergsons theory, moving from natural through differential and then integral modes before going back to a natural mode again. These four types are generated by the basic duality in Bergsonism that is sometimes given through the vocabulary of repetition and difference (ontology), space and time (physics), or perception and memory (psychology): the rst of these feeds the Deleuzian reading of Bergson (which emphasises the virtual as ontology). Space and time, though, give us the most optical gures of refraction that create a fourfold typology that accommodates the virtual to the actual by showing how the virtual is a well-founded perspectival phenomenon of the actual. That analysis of space and time is rst found in the last chapter of Time and Free Will where the forms of refraction are set out in terms of our consciousness of the spatial world and how that conscious dur ee mediates itself through space.

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The climax of Time and Free Will, in trying to explain the reason why contemporary consciousness nds itself increasingly spatialized, gives the process its name: refraction. By what mechanism, Bergson asks, does consciousness let itself be thus reduced through space? His solution lies in our own scientic and reductive vision of nature as a whole: we have reduced ourselves in the act of reducing nature. Bergson thinks of our age of spatial reductionism as but the latest stage of a process having its origin in primal modes of thought. In other words, refraction is a process that carries on and has carried on before on multiple levels. Primitively, we see a kinship between our material selves (our bodies) and the physical world that we inhabit and thus we naturally tend to animate this world with our own intentions. Our primordial predisposition is to hylozoism, a type of unreective Leibnizianism, or, in religious terms, animatism (the view that nature as a whole is animated by a living force).61 This is a primordial condition of consciousness simply because perceptual consciousness itself is a realised contradiction a refraction of self and other.62 But after a modern physical science has evolved to divest both matter and then non-human nature as a whole of all such animation (which Bergson sees as the Cartesian moment par excellence), there still remains that earlier material relation between the human and the non-human, from which it follows that the reductive gaze of science will inevitably turn back on us and de-animate our own humanity. By a kind of refraction, as he puts it, men become machines through making nature mindless and men natural.63 Let us look at the four types of refraction at work in more detail. In the rst, natural refraction, nature is already refracted by being seen as like ourselves.64 But this unity is never perfect, because, at its origin, unity for Bergson is always dynamic, always only virtually unitary and consequently prone to dualization, to break-up. Hence, under this internal pressure, nature is de-animated in what we could call now a second differential refraction. Nature alone is refracted through the medium of space, that is, what was seen (by natural refraction) as its shared vitality with us, is refracted through the medium of natures own tendency to repetition in space.65 Hence, a dissociation or dichotomy is installed between self and world, as the world is seen as what is represented and the self is seen as what represents. But again, this refraction is never perfect either, and is indeed dissipated by a third integral refraction between the newly spatialized world and our enduring self just as that very duration of ours is partly spatialized at the same time.66 But the new unity formed of self and world can never be completed (these are always ongoing processes rather than static products) and cannot remain stable. It must itself mutate through a further, fourth type of refraction that refracts the previous refraction in the next turn of the frenzied spiral: a unity of a

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higher-order natural refraction already on the road to a further, higher-order differential refraction.67 In terms of movement, there is only ever integration and differentiation, only ever movement towards and away from unity, and never static, consummated unities (for the unities are themselves of uniting or disuniting tendencies, that is, meta-movements). There are numerous examples of mutually refractive media in Bergsons work: space and time refract each other, free will and mechanism refract each other, open and closed morality refract each other, static and dynamic religion refract each other. There are no purities outside of theory in the actual world such purities are only virtual. Underlying all of these disparate vocabularies is the one process of refraction working in the four modes of natural, differential, integral, and back to natural. Refraction as such, then, is not tied to any particular content it is seen in the psychological, social, physical, and metaphysical realms: it is relational rather than substantive. In each case, however, its mode of operation is of a psychological order, which for Bergson means a model of movement. Moreover, refraction is always two-way, creating a hybrid of any two media in virtue of the basic metaphysical hybrid that lies at the heart of the Bergsonian conception of reality as a heterogeneous continuity. These couples can all be said to be mutually refractive, of course, only because we are talking here about seeing as, otherwise it might seem impossible that space might mix itself with consciousness (even though Bergson does often talk of Nature itself operating as if it too sees aspects).68 Signicantly, though, for Bergson the medium truly is the message: when talking of refraction, he only mentions the interaction between two coinciding media rather than any third variable (a ray of light), travelling from one medium to another: there is no ray of light (no message or substance), but only and ever different media interacting refractively, that is, refracting each other side by side.69 Moreover, the appearance of any one medium itself as a substance is virtual, too. Media are best understood as mediations, as movements mediating each other in intersecting trajectories that consequently transform each other. A recurring feature of refraction is its fourfold structure, moving from a natural (or relatively initial) mode, through differential and integral modes, before returning back to a re-congured natural starting point. This fourfold is found again and again in Bergsons work, from the four forms of genera in The Creative Mind (vital, inert, human, and intellectual), the four congurations of imagery in Matter and Memory (monist, dualist, pluralist, and back to monist), or the four forms of religious fabulation in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (animatist, animist, theist, and pantheist).70 In each instance, the internal relations of the four are based on refraction. Amongst genera, for instance, vital genera are formed from the natural refraction of self and nature; inert genera are formed from the differential refraction of

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nature and mechanism; and human genera are formed from the integral refraction of vital and inert genera.71 Alternatively, in the imagology of Matter and Memory, it begins by asserting a monism of undifferentiated images, but follows this with an immediate movement of dualization. From the moment that we try to think of the set of all images, the moment of perspective or latent idealism in other words (which, in another of Bergsons texts is deemed inescapable),72 we see reality refract in a dichotomous manner: the set of all images differentiate into images which are for us and images in themselves. This dualism is played out and explored in greater depth in the middle two chapters, but it is in the fourth chapter that the split between ones own life and mind, and the lifeless, mindless state of other images is undone by integration (the third form of refraction): they are not now simply images seen from the outside, but are living beings, forces, vortices, vitalities. Hence, this pluralism actually uncovers a new monism of images, one that is animated by a pluralism of internal as well as external being: not just the seen images of the rst chapter, but felt images, affective images. Refraction may sound like a Hegelian dialectic (or at least a stereotype of it), but the methodology is wholly different: it is genealogical rather than teleological, it is dissociative rather than associative (or synthetic), and it is differential rather than negative. In fact, its Bergsonian source is actually mathematical, to wit, the innitesimal calculus, whose differentiation and integration Bergson took as paradigmatic for his own metaphysical method.73 A more appropriate analogy is with Michel Foucaults epistemology, for each type of refraction can also be seen as a different metaphysic or episteme relating reality to its appearances, things to words. In natural refraction, we have a primitive episteme that fuses the human and the natural. The subsequent classical metaphysic creates a gap or dichotomy through differential refraction between man and world: nature is now seen as the mechanical against which human freedom stands out.74 A virtualizing of natures actuality. The third metaphysic of integral refraction exposes this discrimination. Nature and the human are reunited as humanity, the representer or mediator, is itself mediated (refracted through its own link with nature). Representation or seeing as itself, as a medium, is represented and so becomes naturalised along with the representer. Modernism. Mediation itself is integrally refracted through the medium of perspectives, that is, through refraction as such, or, as Marshall McLuhan would say, the content of the new medium is the old medium. Though reduced in value now we are all just images, mere machines, only natural and so on this devaluation may be transvalued later as the reunication is seen anew as positive. This change in attitude could well be called Bergsonism itself.

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But its other name is postmodernism. The post-modern episteme would welcome the collapse of any ordered and reductive science so as to allow for a chaotic regime of signs to appear: not a new epistemic relationship between word and thing, but, at a meta-level, a new, anarchistic ethic built on the realisation that our own felt awareness of that relationship does not stand outside of it as a science, but is one effect and affect created from within it. Not a science but a pathos.75 The shift from Modernism to Postmodernism, then, would be less one of known content than of felt value, for we must remember that differential and integral refraction are forms of reduction, that is, both regard (in every sense, cognitive and normative) mediation as a deation in value, only the latter is indiscriminate in what it reduces by refraction. The promise of Bergsonism as a form of postmodernism, as a fourth refraction, is that it sees our new unity with nature as inherently valuable not merely natural but brilliantly natural: an ecstatic naturalism, inationary rather than deationary.

Conclusion One way to capture the two dominant approaches to time in contemporary Continental philosophy is by depicting them as either futurist or pastist. Where (the early) Heidegger demotes the present in favour of the future, Deleuze attacks it from its ank of the past. In both cases, though, any depth that might be thought to belong to other broader presents, to thick presents, is stolen for the future or past. But this inability to see the present otherwise than as unique, ideal and impossible, is itself the sign of a virtualizing, in this case wrought by the innitely narrow present of a reective intellect interfering with the broader presents on which it reects, such that it can only see (but not feel) one type of presence everywhere (its own) and all else becomes future or past virtual images of itself. The innite speed of reective intellect just is, and is the only, pure present that exists: the phenomena or virtual images it creates accurately reect only one reality its own. Intellect cannot recognise the actuality of other presents because this would necessitate an enlarged perception. But reective intellect is intrinsically narrow.76 And so reection is, in truth, a special instance of refraction. It sees otherness only by impoverishing it through the medium of itself, which is to say, by a species of refraction. As a mirror of nature it conceals the transformations it performs behind the mask of its one (unconscious) achievement: the true representation of the intellect. That is why the broader, plurality of presents Bergson writes of can only be felt through a physical effort of intuition: they cannot be thought or reected without distortion.77 In a universe composed entirely of images, reection is generated by refraction, that is, transcendental representation

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itself is derived from an immanent, physical process: the transformation of light. There is no need to move outside these optical processes to the silver tain in the mirror, for example in order to subvert reection, for light subverts, or rather, converts itself in the very process of illumination.78 Philosophers, artists, and writers have long held a fascination for mirrors, for their power to reveal and conceal. It is noteworthy, then, that it is refraction that is responsible for the formation of our perceptual images through the lenses of the eye, not reection or mirroring. Certainly, it is refraction that is fundamental for Bergson, for ours is a refractory planet.79 Life as such is refractive too it distorts, it mediates, it virtualizes the actuality of others (at the most brutal level, by simply eating them). That is why there is no necessary shame in it: it is just what living organisms do in their own pursuit of life: to virtualize is to attempt to reduce difference to self-identity. It is as philosophers, however, that we can conceptualise in some small way what distortions we create through reection, by occupying the shifting interval between extremes, and by acknowledging the need to open ourselves affectively to the actuality of others. Hence, despite the ubiquity of refraction, Bergson offers us hope in the form of a refraction that is aware of its own distorting effects (the fourth form that refracts itself), and as such partly undoes them: in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion he calls this open morality. How Deleuzians would pursue this openness is a broader question that might be answered on many levels, but we could point initially to the feminist critique of Deleuzes key notion of becoming woman as one attempt to rehabilitate the actual, by pointing out the need to regard fully the molar being of individual women, as political agents or as biological mothers, beyond any indifferent ow of pure atoms of womanhood heading towards imperceptibility.80 This affective openness and acceptance towards an actuality in all its proper need for temporary stasis might well be a form of movement too, a de-virtualization that saves the appearances my mobilising our regard of and for them. Notes
1. I would like to thank the organisers and delegates at the following conferences for the opportunity to air these ideas on a number of occasions: Sebastian Olmo, Maria Lakka and Kostas Koukouzelis at Goldsmiths College for the conference on Lifes (Re-)Emergence: Philosophy, Culture, and Politics in May 2003; Wahida Khandker at Warwick University for the Bergson and Contemporary Thought workshop in June 2003; and Leonard Lawlor at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Italy in July 2003. 2. See Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual (London: Routledge, 2001); Manuel DeLanda Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002); and Brian Massumi Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

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3. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 208. 4. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988). Future references will give the English pagination followed by the original French, in Oeuvres, Andr e Robinet, ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), henceforth, OE. 5. Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (London: UCL Press, 1993), 1617, last italics mine. 6. See Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, 171ff. 7. Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 37, 38. 8. James Williams, Gilles Deleuzes Difference and Repetition: A Critique and Commentary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003), 11, 7, 13. It should be stated that Williams is here writing directly of Deleuzes handling of the actual and the virtual, rather than of his appropriation of the terms from Bergson. As excellent a reading of Deleuze as his work is, Williams interpretation still illustrates the one-sided value given to the virtual despite its more even-handed provenance in Bergsons work. 9. The fuller meaning of Actualism will emerge soon. Connections with discussions in Analytic philosophy of Actualism are only partially motivated (the idea that only actual things and not possibilia exist), given that these are too often linked to quantication (both scientic and logical), presentism (of a simplied kind), and a restrictively dialectical relationship with possibility: see Michael J. Loux, ed., The Possible and the Actual (Ithaca: Cornell, 1979). Alternatively, any relations with Gentiles philosophy of action (also termed Actualism) are wholly in the eye of the beholder. Likewise, the connection between Deleuzian Virtualism and the cybernetic and new media theories of virtual reality is loose at best (given the latters often representationalist foundation): see Slavoj zek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (London and New York: Zi Routledge, 2004), 3. Finally, there may also be connections with Whiteheads notion of actual occasions but this would need extensive further research. 10. See Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 87. The term epiphenomenology alludes to the term epiphenomenonon, and so would reduce the study of appearances from a science of subjective reality to the study of a useless by-product, an illusion. 11. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone, 1983) for the most thoroughgoing expression of this duality. 12. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 276, see also 284. 13. But can one have an actual innity? Is this not just another term for pure Act (God), an unmoved mover? In this vocabulary, we would normally say that movement needs potency and what makes God the unmoved mover is His innite actuality. But, if we follow Bergson, we can see the innite in actual innity as a metaphysical (and moral) concept of creativity and so not opposed to movement: not a God standing outside and transcending the world but the world itself as innite creativity and movement, with no underlying unmoved mover, no God or Aion. The holistic and immanent nature of the divine is clear in Bergson, for like us, he says, the Absolute endures, being nothing less than creativity itself (Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1911), 262, 315 [OE, 706, 747]). Bergson himself calls for a thinking of the innite which, given its creative power, does not oppose itself to actual nite beings and uses the term indenite instead to reconcile the two. See Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical

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14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

Library, 1946), 211 [OE, 1442]. For an argument for the tenability of an innite actual temporal series, see Quentin Smith, The Innite Regress of Temporal Attributions, in L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith, eds., The New Theory of Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 180194. See Renaud Barbaras, Le tournant de lexperience: recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Vrin, 1998) and Le desir et la distance introduction a une phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Vrin, 1999). See Christian Wolff, Philosophia Prima sive Ontologia (1729). Bergson, The Creative Mind, 21, 2324 [OE, 1262, 1265]. See my Creative Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Creativity, in Bergson Now, special issue of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, John Mullarkey and Stephen Linstead, eds., 35/1 (2004): 6881. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 129 [OE, 1365]. See Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, trans. Mabelle L. Andison and J. Gordon Andison (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 316; he uses the phrase strikes a blow at all metaphysics, but it is clear that it is Being and so Ontology that is at issue. zek, Organs without Bodies, 3. Zi This is the denition of the virtual most pertinent in Deleuzes cinema books, especially Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone, 1989) there are others. A.R. Lacey, Bergson (London: Routledge, 1989), 134. As Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron notes, il use fr equemment dimages emprunt ees a ` la geometrie, comme la rotation ou la projection, ou a ` loptique comme la r eexion et la r efraction; et, on ne comprend rien a ` sa pens ee si lon prend ces images en un sens vague et banal, Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 23. See Gilles Deleuze, Boulez, Proust, and Time: Occupying without Counting, trans. Timothy S. Murphy, in Angelaki 3/2 (1998), 6974: 72. We are not here maintaining any strong association between the ontologies of Deleuze and Maurice Merleau-Ponty but are simply using this image for its optical resonance. See Mullarkey, Creative Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Creativity, 6881. See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910). See Bergson, The Creative Mind, pp. 130158 [OE, pp. 13651392]. Jean Wahl, A Tribute to Bergson on the Occasion of the Bergson Centennial in Paris, 1959, translated by Thomas Hanna, in Thomas Hanna, ed., The Bergsonian Heritage (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962), 150154: 152. Edgar Wolff has proposed that Bergsons argument as regards the continuity of mediate and immediate memory actually undercuts his own dualism of memory and perception, and marks as a result the abandonment of his hypothesis of the integral conservation of the past: see La Th eorie de la m emoire chez Bergson, in Archives de Philosophie 20 (1957), 4277: 5571. Prima facie, my position does bear comparison with that of Badiou who has said that I uphold that the forms of the multiple are. . .always actual and that the virtual does not exist (Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 46). But where he takes a Platonist and ontological approach to these actualities (they are mathematical in form), I take an intuitionist and metaphysical approach: they are psychological in content and only take a mathematical (or geometrical)

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31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

form through virtualization. In fact, this is the ultimate form of virtualization performed through the innite power of reective intellect to create, by spatialising refraction (our mind has its own natural geometry says Bergson), a mathesis universalis around itself. Badiou sees Actualism as a rejection of intuition understood as a non-conceptual access to the unthinkable (see Peter Hallward, Ethics without Others: A Reply to Critchley on Badious Ethics, in Radical Philosophy, no. 102 (July/August 2000), 2730: 28). But Actualism does not preclude the possibility of affect as a form of non-symbolic knowing. Moreover, to say that everything is actual to some intellectual point of view is not tantamount to saying also that everything is actual to every intellectual point of view, which is Badious position. For this notion see Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wildon Carr (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 134185 [OE, 897930]. Stephen Crocker, The Past is to Time What the Idea is to Thought or, What is General in the Past in General? in Mullarkey and Linstead, Bergson Now, 4253: 47. See Henri Bergson M elanges, Andr e Robinet, ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 412. On this vaster perceptual eld, see Matter and Memory, 144145 [OE, 286 287]. Bergson, M elanges, 413: 411. Bergson, Mind-Energy, 137: 166 [OE, 899, 918]; Bergson, M elanges, 1062. Leonard Lawlor, What Immanence? What Transcendence? The Prioritization of Intuition over Language in Bergson, in Mullarkey and Linstead, Bergson Now, 2441: 27. See Bergson, Mind-Energy, 131 [OE, 811841]. This is seen clearly in 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, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1977) [OE, 9791247]. See my Duplicity in the Flesh: Bergson and Current Philosophy of the Body, in Philosophy Today 38 (Winter 199495): 339355. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 60 [OE, 1301], translation altered. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 303 (hardback edition) [OE, 1301], my emphasis. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 262 [OE, 334]. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 165167 [OE, 109110]. See Bergson, Time and Free Will, 120 [OE, 80]. See Bergson, Matter and Memory, 22 [OE, 174]. Bergson, Mind-Energy, 245250 [OE, 968971]. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 134 [OE, 1370]. This was one of the few telling points Sartre made against Bergsons Matter and Memory: if the virtual is already real, why should it strive to actualize itself? See Jean-Paul Sartre, Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1962), 4651. I follow, rather informally, the Leibniz of the earlier Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) more than of the Monadology (1714) in virtue of the formers more sustained organicism. See Bergson, The Creative Mind, 5657 [OE, 1298]. My language will only appear slippery here if one assumes that seeing as is exclusive to human consciousness and acting as if is a projection onto nature by human consciousness and so, while related, nonetheless categorically different. But, I would argue, rstly, that all seeing as (or refraction), is, like perception, a concentration and a (normal and necessary) distortion, and, secondly, that natures as if activity is of the same form of movement, namely a concentration. Bergson, Matter Memory, 80 [OE, 219].

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52. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 88 [OE, 1328]. 53. As Bergson writes, movement is always a movement of movements (The Creative Mind, 148 [OE, 1383]), and it is the of here, the never ending, ramifying, innite levels of capture (or refraction), that is most signicant. Perhaps the best book on Bergson before Deleuzes Bergsonism was Georges Mourelos Bergson et les niveaux de r ealit e (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), which may well be summarised thus: reality is its levels. 54. I will not have time here to explore the question of imagery and metaphor, but it is important to remark that Bergson uses them as seriously as Deleuze does: they are literal in as much as their own uid meaning follows the uidity of the real: see Bergson, The Creative Mind, 4243 [OE, 1285]. 55. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 56. See John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2000). 57. Bergson calls this illusion-making power fabulation in the second chapter of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Error for Bergson is never total, and fabulation, like so many other illusions for him, is wrong only on account of being partial, that is, being a part-view of the Whole. It cannot be totally wrong because no representation for Bergson can be totally right either, given that the Whole is always evolving: both of these positions (bivalency in other words) assume that representations are images of the totality (that are right or wrong) whereas Bergsons epistemology is mereological, that is, representations are images amongst a reality itself made of images, that is, a Whole which is always growing, and so only ever graspable from an angle, from a perspective, like a snap-shot or image. Truth is a name we give to a particularly strong correlation between covarying images: hence, truth becomes: see Bergson, The Creative Mind, 1129 [OE, 12531270], on the true growth of truth. 58. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 219: 213 [OE, 672, 666]. 59. Thirty one times, in fact, across all his texts (in the original French). At this point some might argue that I am confusing the possible with the virtual, for it is said that Deleuze clearly shows that Bergsons fallacy of retrospection pertains to the possible rather than the virtual. Yet, on the one hand, no such clear water exists in Bergsons texts between the virtual and the possible as it does in Deleuzes reading (the terms are often used interchangeably), and, on the other, Bergson also says that sometimes there is a real basis for this projection of the possible: see my Bergson and Philosophy, 173174. 60. On this see Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), which gives a full-blown Bergsonist account of new media such as digital art. 61. By contrast, animism sees nature as animated by many local forces, spirits, inhabiting particular places or dimensions such as trees, springs, storms, and so on. 62. This is how Matter and Memory later puts it 204 [OE, 339]. 63. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 217 [OE, 142.] 64. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 211215 [OE, 138141]. 65. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 204209 [OE, 134137]. 66. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 215218 [OE, 141143]. 67. Those familiar with Bergsons texts will recognise terminology from Time and Free Will being mixed with that of the Introduction to Metaphysics, from where the vocabulary of differentiation and integration is taken (see The Creative Mind, 191 [OE, 1423]). That this comes from Bergsons methodology is obviated by the fact that it is clearly ontologised in

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68. 69.

70.

71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

79. 80.

The Two Sources of Morality and Religion as the laws of dichotomy and twofold frenzy (from where the rest of my terminology comes: see The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 296ff [OE, 1227ff]). See note 46 above. Bergson sometimes uses the language of endosmosis instead of refraction (see Time and Free Will, 112 [OE, 75]) a liquid of certain concentration moving through a porous membrane into one of a greater concentration with exosmosis working in parallel: a liquid of certain concentration moving through a porous membrane into one of a lesser concentration. This less frequent terminological use might get us past the initial oddity of using the term refraction when not actually making a medium/object distinction, but the latter still makes perfect sense within a process metaphysics. See my Life, Movement, and the Fabulation of the Event, forthcoming in Lifes (re-) Emergence, special section of Theory, Culture, and Society, 2005. For an explanation for the four religious forms in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. See Bergson, The Creative Mind, 5261 [OE, 12941303]. See Bergson, Mind-Energy, 248 [OE, 970]: we are always more or less in idealism: Bergsons point here is as much methodological as it is metaphysical; indeed, from the perspectivist position, we cannot dissociate method from metaphysics. See Bergson, The Creative Mind, 191 [OE, 1423], and Jean Milet, Bergson et le calcul innit esimal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974). Ive used chronological phrases so far, but nothing precludes the possibility of a temporal mixing of these types. Of course, the allusion here is to the four epistemes of Foucaults The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (London: Routledge, 1970), Renaissance, Classical, Modern, and, by implication, Postmodern. This locus in affect distances Bergsonism from Structuralism and Post-structuralism (two other possible analogues) to the degree in which the latter disavow the purity of their scientic, conceptual, basis. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 155157 [OE, 619621] on the innite power, and innite emptiness, of the intellects powers of reection. See Bergson, The Creative Mind, 8788 [OE, 1328]. I wont labour the allusion to Derridas own philosophy of anti-reection (and Rodolphe Gasch es interpretation of it: see his The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). But it is noteworthy that the tain (or tin-foil) that Gasch e says provides the dull surface (6) behind a mirror (and so creates a non-luminant source for reection), functions in precisely the opposite way: the reective power of a mirror actually begins with this tin-foil because it is so reective; in fact, a mirror is made by coating a thin sheet of aluminium or other metal onto the back of glass because the glass is very at (not because glass reects it is transparent). And it is this atness of the glass that, transferred to the metal, makes it even more reective. In order to subvert the power of light, then, we must stay in the realm of light (in refraction): there is no need to transcend light to invoke a material substance, like the tain, or the properties of any other reective surface. I will not spell out the signicance of this extension of the mirror metaphor for Derridas methodology here. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 317 [OE, 1245]. This is the last line of Bergsons last work. See Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 194. And one might ask: from whose point of view do we become imperceptible?