Powers of Time: Versions of Bergson by David Lapoujade trans. Andrew Goffey (Univocal, 2018)

Publisher’s webpage: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/powers-of-time

David Lapoujade falls within a camp of neo-rationalist philosophers imploring Deleuze’s work from a pragmatist vantage. For instance, alongside Lapoujade, Alessandro Sarti and Giovanni Citti’s research on “Differential Heterogenesis” (2017) has re-assesed Deleuze’s work on mathematics to examine tools of technological and digital production, formalizing a Deleuzian mathematical framework with which to deal with multiplicity via heterogenous differential operators, hereby attempting to overcome the technical limitations that burden mathematical physics—i.e. how homogenous operators function within a given phase space. Differential heterogensis aims to enumerate a mathematical description for the emergence and creation of forms with conditions that are not a priori given within a set; similarly, Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence and Spirit (2018) maps a kind of computational transcendental, whereby rationalist insights also allow us to consider the differentiation of the a priori through active construction. This “mathematical turn” amongst contemporary Deleuzians interested in “overflowing becomings” has widespread implications: in biology, it points us towards phylogenetic evolutionary pathways (Varela and Maturana, 1992); in semiotics, it directs us towards the morphogenesis of being (Petitot, 2004); in political life, it illuminates the emergence of insurrectional flows and proletarianization (Stiegler, 2019); for new media theory and software studies, this provides us with a point of entry to examine newfound incomputable infinities, such as in the case of the Halting probability problem (Parisi, 2013).

However, in surveying this contemporary camp of “differential Deleuzians,” who insist on a more rigorous affordance of multiplicity, there is often times a covert and unheard philosopher of mystic repose silently strumming in the background: Henri Bergson, the thinker of disequilibrium and perturbation. Avoiding the catchments of simply reverting to the Bergson of “time-mind,” whom we are most familiar with from Deleuze’s taxonomy of the movement-image (1986), Lapoujade scours the entirety of Bergson’s oeuvre, ballasting erudite syntheses of multiplicity while problematizing the Bergson that infects Deleuzian ontological memory.

Beginning with an exacting in-depth analysis of Time and Freewill (1919) and Matter and Memory (1990), Lapoujade’s rigorous account challenges Deleuze’s confirmation of Bergsonism as situated in memory alone. As such, Lapoujade does not restore an ordinary reading of Bergson through secondary citations but invigorates a theoretical fulcrum that may prove utmost promising to media-studies, given the field’s newfound orientation towards Deleuzian discrete heterogeneity, perceptual-feedback machines and problems of the a priori un-computable.

Lapoujade evokes Bergson’s Matter and Memory so as to explicate perception via two primary modes of memory: “contraction-memory” and “recollection-memory.” The former, “contraction-memory,” consists in the “incalculable multitude of remembered elements” (1990: 150) and is nested in remembrance’s coalescing with the present. The “contractive” element in “contraction-memory” refers to an ineluctable spectra, with the tightening and tensing of memory conjuring the autonomic transit of instinct and arousal. Thus, “contraction-memory” demonstrates Bergson’s account of synthesis as explained by “innumerable vibrations of matter” (2018: 12) that condense into a perceptual reality, the optique through which we perceive of the present as a synthesis of the past. Intensive, ontological and psychologically levelled contraction-memory involves actualization and the becoming-image, or a pooling of independent and atomic moments to facilitate an endured demonstrative present (the “perception-memory”). The function of “contraction-memory” is to qualify material movement, “contracting” the innumerable vibrations of matter into qualities with solidifying memory into a sensible “continuous flow” of images. It is Bergson’s markedly instinctual characterization of movement, which directly leads into optical refraction, that Deleuze will retain in his description of virtuality and cinema.

“Recollection-memory,” on the other hand, is of an explicitly episodic or event-directed nature. “The reserve […] of the whole of our past life,” recollection-memory is the circuit through which the “present receives its signification” (12). Recollection-memory is opposed to habitus, or the implicit and non-representational (“motor-memory”). Bergson’s “recollection-memory” frees sense from the spatialities of language; thus, Bergson’s theory of “recollection-memory” must be “read in parallel as a theory of sense and signification” (54).

Nonetheless, both “contraction-memory” and “recollection-memory” do not adequately describe the élan vital that Bergson’s metaphysical system provides as a figure for time, the metaphysical precept that is intimated through Bergson’s work. In Bergsonism (1988), Deleuze traipses between these two accounts—”that of perception which puts us at once into matter and that of memory which puts us at once into the mind” (26). Deleuze defines coexistence as a point of virtuality, the precise point at which “contraction-memory fits in with recollection-memory and, in a way, takes over from it” (60). However, where Deleuze introduces difference and repetition into this virtual coexistence, so as to locate duration, Lapoujade’s tertiary account of “spirit-memory” rearranges Bergson’s literature with a unique trajectory. While by no means a “new materialist,” Lapoujade inscribes within “spirit-memory” a consequence of memory that eludes mental prehension and introduces post-humanist possibility. It is not the matter of memory of the present (contraction), or of memory of the past (recollection), but, instead, “the memory of what we are and what we have never stopped being, even if we have no knowledge of it” (2018: 12), that Lapoujade describes as the operational enclosure between pure virtuality and what Bergson calls “spiritual.”

As the axis of potentiality, Lapoujade likens the “spirit-memory” to “something that has been present, that has been sensed, but that has not been acted, something that thus keeps itself in reserve, a little like plants accumulate energy that will later be of use to animals” (13). According to Lapoujade, this “spirit-memory” is the nexus of emotion, although, once again, the reader should be privy not to conflate this account with “affect” as sensation—the etymology of “emotion” (emovere: “out” + “move”) suggests virtual movement, which is why Bergson privileges “emotion” over “affect.” This is the religious strike of ascesis charging Bergson, for whom “pure duration” is proper to temporal affects (the passage of time) and not a reductionist-materialist account. Through “pure becoming” we can be liberated: “spirit-memory” is a marker that the future has a sense and that it can be engendered on the basis of emotion alone.

In Deleuze’s literature, Bergon’s account of “emotion” is displaced by “affect,” which configures the central logic of Deleuze’s “aesthetics of representation.” Deleuze’s aesthetics develops an image of thought that attempts to overcome the binary separation between matter and spirit, or mind and body. In Deleuze’s thesis on cinema, for instance, moving images are not “images of movement” but, instead “movement-images” grasped as blocks of sensation that free images from their plot-bound stasis as apparatuses of signification, radically opening up the moving image’s operational capacity. Working towards a form of perceptual organization that redirects itself towards thought, there is a marked trajectory in Deleuze that finds its inception in Difference and Repetition (1968) but continues most prominently in the schizoanalysis of Anti-Oedipus (1972). Deleuze’s project, throughout, attempts to construct an “image of thought” that inverts the methodology of psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism and poststructuralism by proposing that any pure “critique of representation” gives anterior priority to virtual representation over the singularities that representation, itself, appropriates. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that:

“[t]he succession of present presents is only the manifestation of something more profound…all levels and degrees coexist and present themselves for our choice on the basis of a past which was never present […] Each chooses his pitch or his tone, perhaps even his lyrics, but the tune remains the same” (1994: 83).

Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of Deleuze’s “absolute” representational system is that the Real can only be accessed through the subject that has access to it—Deleuze’s is a “correlationist” philosophy of becoming (5). Despite not formally referencing Bergson’s work on psychic states, Deleuze’s relativist account of foundational time formalizes Bergson’s intuition as pure reflection. Lapoujade remarks that Bergson’s perspectivism has nothing relativistic about it, however, because it allows for absolute knowledge to be attained (82). Nonetheless, contrary to Meillassoux—for whom mathematics is an empty sign and critical central nexus with which to approach the Real—Bergson’s reality is intuitive: “it is in itself in us, to the extent that we are precisely a part of the universe and no longer a subject that is external to the objects we conceive of” (83). Unlike Deleuze, Lapoujade’s Bergson demonstrates that the mind isn’t simply spirit but, additionally, life and matter; the spirit is defined above all as a force, vibrating and in movement with the composure of the universe. Whereas mechanism, finalism and evolutionism have fixed points of view on the evolution of the species, Lapoujade endeavors Bergson to rejoin consciousness with the internal élan vital of evolutionary movement. Pure movement is the soul, spirit and consciousness of phenomena (82).

Overdetermining the creation of virtual images as the reification of memory, Deleuze explains the “production of the new” in Bergson by insisting upon the past, “present its entirety at each moment of our life” (9), as the retrieval and unfolding of new senses. According to Deleuze’s account of Bergsonism, the past affords itself through thought, revealing itself through virtual images that affect the sense vis-à-vis displacement, such that the past reveals different aspects of itself through memory. Affirming Bergson’s identification of images and matter with temporal flow, Deleuze offers the moving image as the actualization of identification.

Deleuze’s philosophical vantage is not to explain virtuality in terms of anything exterior to itself, but, instead, to produce and classify concepts that grasp immanence as aconceptual materiality through a continuous manifold. Following Albert Lautman’s philosophy of mathematics, Deleuze develops a differential account of genesis of the individual into an anti-Hegelian dialectic, whereby difference substitutes the role of contradictions, producing history through a plane of distributed differences (or singularities), which constitute the condition for the actualization of non-contradictory heterogenous realities. These multiplicitous realities cannot be reduced to an identity or universal unity:

“[t]he logical schemas (the ideas at work in theories) are not anterior to their realisation within a theory; what is lacking, in what we call […] the extra-mathematical intuition of the urgency of a logical problem, is a matter to grapple with so that the idea of possible relations can give birth to a schema of veritable relations” (Lautman, 1977: 142).

Rather than through Bergson, it is through Nietzsche that Deleuze attributes virtual images and, by extension, cinematic images and media artifacts, with the molarization of chaos, the second facet of Deleuze’s account of attentive freedom that is almost always glossed over in film and media studies. Deleuze’s tacit assumption is that Bergson has nothing to say of the radical possibility of the memory’s “becoming-artifact,” a process that technical objects are endowed.[1] As Lapoujade demonstrates, however, images, no matter how deeply enclosed within our memory, are neither inert nor indifferent—“they are almost attentive” (1920: 98).

According to Lapoujade, at the heart of Bergson’s project is perception and recognition, meaning that the simultaneous relay of understanding and interpretation provides us with a critical apparatus with which to parse phenomenological accounts of machine intelligence without lapsing into mere functionalism. As Lapoujade remarks, “memory is mind” and Bergson’s texts are as “devoted to recognition” as they are to the “ideality of sense” (54).

In Creative Evolution (2007), Bergson notes that “[t]he movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course” (260). Thus, “[m]an is this delay itself, an arrhythmia” (85) inextricably losing its sense of the Real to the benefit of symbols. Consequently, we grasp music independently of its melody, grasp life independent of the created forms that it traverses and grasp emotions independently of their emotional content; it is not mathematics-as-contingency but the sensorimotor montages afforded by memory. As Gertrud Koch aptly remarks, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in media studies, as we now recognize that machines are not simply extensions of organs or the central nervous system (as in the genealogy of technics-as-externalization, which runs from Ernst Kapp through Arnold Gehlen and Marshall McLuhan) but, instead, agents in a field of techniques and part of a network of relations (7: 2019). As the new rationalist vantage of Deleuzians have demonstrated, empirically-guided description of sociation demonstrates that, within this network, technologies and computation can be rendered confrontational, continuous and discrete. One of the primary functionalist arguments in philosophy of mind situates the human as an agential optical machine, affixed within environmental feedback; this position is now only strengthened by media studies’ changing attitudes. Through Lapoujade’s rendering of Bergson, however, there is a kind of vital humanism that can be recovered, extended via “spirit-memory” and directed towards the Real, which we are both denied epistemic access to and indistinguishably bound with.

References

Bergson, H. (1919) Time and Freewill (trans. F. L. Pogson). London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.

Bergson, H. (1990) Matter and Memory (trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer). New York: Zone.

Bergson, H. (2007) Creative Evolution (trans. A. Mitchell). New York: Dover.

Deleuze G. (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Deleuze, G. (1988) Bergsonism (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam). New York: Zone.

Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition (trans. Paul Patton) London: Athlone.

Humberto, M. and Francisco J. Varela (1992) The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Boulder: Shambhala Publishing.

Koch, G. with B. Stiegler and T. Pringle (2019) “Animation of the Technical and the Quest for Beauty” in Machine, Lüneberg: Meson Press: 17-39.

Lapoujade D. (2018) Powers of Time: Versions of Bergson, Minneapolis: Univocal.

Lautman, A. (1977) Essai sur l’unité des mathématiques et divers écrits, Paris: UGE.

Parisi, L. (2013) Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space, Cambridge: MIT Pres.

Petitot, J. and Manjali F. (2004) Morphogenesis of Meaning, New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Sarti A. and Giovanna C. (2017) “Differential heterogenesis and the emergence of semiotic function” https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/62e0/a247268cada4451d49fe42ef5ae1fed438ed.pdf

Stiegler, B. The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism, London: Polity Press.

 

Notes

[1] In order to overcome this problem, Stiegler preserves “Bergsonian dynamics” as an index of idealist moral philosophy that can combat transhumanism’s impulse for transdividuation, co-extension and libidinal maximization. Following Husserlian phenomenology, Stiegler speaks of “primary retention” (mental images), “secondary retention” (memory) and “tertiary retention” (media mnemonics). However, Lapoujade illuminates that Stiegler’s system lacks adequate description for pure unbounded virtuality unencumbered by temporal finitude; “spirit-memory” introduces a singular description for temporality, which may prove useful for extra-perceptual and post-actuarial problems introduced by discrete/continuous computation in today’s media studies.

 

Reviewed by
Ekin Erkan
Columbia University
Email: ee2447@columbia.edu