Kami Export - John Mullarkey, Charlotte de Mille (Eds.) - Bergson and The Art of Immanence - Painting, Photography, Filmpdf
Kami Export - John Mullarkey, Charlotte de Mille (Eds.) - Bergson and The Art of Immanence - Painting, Photography, Filmpdf
Kami Export - John Mullarkey, Charlotte de Mille (Eds.) - Bergson and The Art of Immanence - Painting, Photography, Filmpdf
OF IMMANENCE
BERGSON AND
THE ART OF
I M M A NE N C E
Painting, Photography, Film
Edited by John Mullarkey and Charlotte de Mille
© editorial matter and organisation John Mullarkey and
Charlotte de Mille, 2013
© the chapters their several authors, 2013
www.euppublishing.com
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
Index 272
List of Illustrations
vii
viii List of Illustrations
ix
x Notes on Contributors
1
2 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
NOTES
1. Lindsay Seers’s Nowhere Less Now was an Artangel commission that ran
8 September–21 October 2012 at The Tin Tabernacle in London. The
interview with Aesthetica Magazine can be found at http://www.aesthetica
magazine.com/blog/lindsay-seers-nowhere-less-now-london (accessed 25
January 2013).
2. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics,
trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p.
157.
3. For more on ‘philosophy as generic art’ in Bergson, see John Mullarkey’s
essay below.
12 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
Since the revival of Bergson studies, a key aspect of his work has
remained largely dormant amongst scholars: his philosophy of history.
In this chapter, I will address this under-explored area of investigation
by making some suggestions as to what Bergsonian philosophy might
have to offer our understanding of history. This task will be guided
throughout by a concern for the ontological nature of history. Although
Bergson’s thoughts on history are often considered to be restricted to
his Two Sources of Morality and Religion, I will demonstrate how
Bergson develops and deploys an ontology of history and an historical
ontology in his earlier texts that arguably play a significant role within
his broader thinking. In so doing, Bergsonian philosophy will be
shown to advance strategies for escaping the traditional and dominant
conceptions of history as representational, causal-linear and teleologi-
cal – strategies that are subsequently expanded upon and modified by
Bergsonian thinkers such as Charles Péguy, Arnold Toynbee and Gilles
Deleuze.
17
18 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
VIRTUAL HISTORY
For the past several decades, it is arguably Bergson’s concepts of the
actual and the virtual that have garnered the greatest amount of atten-
tion, especially for those interested in ontology. This is largely due to
a contemporary fascination with all-things-virtual, and in particular
the concept of the virtual as it is found in the philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze. Within the Deleuzian inspired literature on the virtual, as
John Mullarkey has noted, there has been a tendency to characterise
the virtual and its affiliated terms (such as difference and the molecular)
as ‘good’, while the actual and its affiliated terms (such as identity and
molarity) are somehow ‘bad’.7 Two more terms could be added to this
list: ‘history’ and ‘becoming’. As Deleuze remarks in an interview with
Antonio Negri:
What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualised in particular cir-
cumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history. History
isn’t experimental, it’s just the set of more or less negative preconditions that
make it possible to experiment with something beyond history.8
I would like to make in this chapter is rather more limited: could it not
be that history is or can be virtual?
To test this out, let us first delve a little further into what Deleuze
means by the virtual when he affiliates it with becoming in contrast to
history. The virtual, as it is commonly recited by Deleuzians, is distinct
from the Aristotelian conception of the possible, for it is no less real
than the actual.11 The virtual therefore pertains to a different kind of
reality. As Deleuze would describe it in his pre-Guattari work, this kind
of reality is intensive and incorporeal, as opposed to extensive states-of-
affairs and corporeal bodies. Put differently, this reality is the reality of
becoming as opposed to being.
A useful illustration of this dualistic set-up can be taken from The
Logic of Sense. Deleuze begins this text by considering a Platonic
dualism – not that of model and copy, Idea and matter/body or intel-
ligible and sensible, but rather the distinction between copies and
simulacra. If ‘being’ is the matter of copies, those limited and measured
expressions of an Idea, then ‘pure becoming’ is the matter of the simula-
cra, that which ‘eludes the action of the Idea’ and ‘contests both model
and copy at once’.12 What both model and copy share are their sus-
ceptibility to measurement – it is in part by measuring the resemblance
between them that the latter is determined to be a more or less good
copy of the former. A pure becoming, however, evades such measure-
ment by referring to an ongoing movement that is irreducible to specific
extensive qualities/quantities: ‘ “hotter” never stops where it is but is
always going a point further, and the same applies to “colder”, whereas
definite quality is something that has stopped going on and is fixed’.13
That becoming refuses to conform to the dictates of being is unsurpris-
ing. But what is particularly intriguing in this discussion is that such
becomings, according to Deleuze, flee their fixation in opposite direc-
tions at the same time. Deleuze draws inspiration for this theory from
the literary work of Lewis Carroll, and in particular the story of Alice in
Wonderland. As Deleuze notes in the case of Alice, she becomes larger
and smaller at the same time, becoming larger than she was and smaller
than she will be:
We thus arrive at the following dualism. On the one hand there is the
living present. This living present ‘is the temporal extension which
22 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
accompanies the act, expresses and measures the action of the agent
and the passion of the patient’.15 This present, in other words, pertains
to corporeal bodies and their states of affairs. In so far as such bodies
can be collected into a unity, there is in turn a cosmic present, called
Chronos, which ‘embraces the entire universe’.16 For Chronos, ‘only
bodies exist in space, and only the present exists in time’.17 But simulta-
neous with this reading of time is another – Aion – which corresponds
to the incorporeal nature of events rather than the substantive corpore-
ality of bodies: the infinitive verb rather than the adjective. As such, this
alternative time always eludes the present, constantly splitting it into
the already past and eternally yet to come.
This temporal dualism of Aion and Chronos, it must be acknowl-
edged, is primarily derived from Deleuze’s reading of the Stoics and
owes little to Deleuze’s Bergsonism. In fact, The Logic of Sense makes
scant mention of the virtual. Looking ahead, however, Deleuze will
more overtly amalgamate his reading of the actual/virtual dualism
with the philosophical schema from The Logic of Sense. In What
Is Philosophy?, Deleuze (with Guattari) will reprise the distinction
between the event and states of affairs. But as we find here, the event
is not only immaterial and incorporeal, it is also virtual: ‘From virtu-
als we descend to actual states of affairs, and from states of affairs we
ascend to virtuals.’18 As with the Aionic becoming of Alice, there will
always be a part of the event that ‘eludes its own actualization in every-
thing that happens’, and as such ‘exists between two instants’.19 But for
Deleuze, this between or ‘meanwhile’ is a ‘dead time’ where nothing
takes place: ‘an infinite awaiting that is already infinitely past, awaiting
and reserve’.20
Deleuze’s promotion of a virtual ‘dead time’ hardly strikes us as
Bergsonian – Bergson may not have been a traditional vitalist, but it
would be difficult to deny that he conceptualises time as something
eminently vital. We should therefore not be surprised to find that even
though Deleuze’s analysis implicitly relies upon Bergson’s notions
of the virtual and heterogeneous multiplicity, Deleuze nevertheless
criticises Bergson in this very same passage for maintaining that there is
always time between two instants.21 Noting this divergence, however,
indicates to us an alternative way of approaching the ontological status
of history. Let us then return to Bergson, to see what his own use of the
actual/virtual schema has to tell us about history.
When Bergson first developed his actual/virtual dualism, he specifi-
cally used it to describe a past that no longer exists as the present but
which nevertheless continues to coexist with it in some capacity:
Bergson, History and Ontology 23
Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states
assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its
present state from its former states. For this purpose it need not be entirely
absorbed in the passing sensation or idea; for then, on the contrary, it would
no longer endure. Nor need it forget its former states: it is enough that, in
recalling these states, it does not set them alongside its actual state as one
point alongside another, but forms both the past and the present states into
an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so
to speak, into one another.22
Although this passage is principally about duration (an issue which I
will get on to in a moment), what demands our attention here is the
manner in which Bergson draws a distinction between a present/actual
state and a past/virtual state, both of which together combine to form a
coexisting organic whole. The word ‘virtual’, it must be admitted, does
not appear in this passage, but by Matter and Memory its implication
will be confirmed. As Bergson will say in this text:
Essentially virtual, [the past] cannot be known as something past unless we
follow and adopt the movement by which it expands into a present image,
thus emerging from obscurity into the light of day. In vain do we seek its
trace in anything actual and already realized: we might as well look for
darkness beneath the light.23
Thus for Bergson the past is essentially virtual. Accordingly, the virtual
does not exactly correspond to simultaneous becomings (Aion) in
contrast to actual successive history (Chronos), as a Deleuzian reading
might suggest. On the contrary, the movement from the virtual to the
actual might be thought of as the movement of history itself, vis-à-vis
the present actuality towards which it is surging. When so put, history
is not in conflict with the virtual or restricted to the realm of actuality.
For in so far as the virtual past plays an indispensable role in deter-
mining the nature of the present and of reality, history is a part of the
process by which reality is produced, rather than an effect of it.
In response to this analysis, it may be objected that I have conflated
history with the past. There are of course differences between the two,
and I would by no means wish to suggest that they are synonymous
(despite their numerous affinities). But in lieu of setting out (let alone
resolving) the differences and similarities between history and the past,
it is perhaps adequate to note for the time being that Bergson himself
occasionally refers to them in tandem:
What are we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the
history that we have lived from our birth – nay, even before our birth, since
we bring with us prenatal dispositions? Doubtless we think with only a
small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original
24 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act. Our past, then, as a whole, is
made manifest to us in its impulse; it is felt in the form of tendency, although
a small part of it only is known in the form of idea.24
As we can see from this discussion and others like it,25 our past is,
in a certain respect, our history – the history of where we have been.
‘History’, broadly speaking, is of course a notion that incorporates
much more than just the temporal category of the past, but the relevant
point here is that when Bergson speaks about the past in such passages,
what he has in mind is clearly compatible with the term history, or
at least a certain understanding of that term. This is arguably to be
expected, given that Bergson is at pains in all of his studies to demon-
strate how the past is something lived, as opposed to a mere temporal
category, and something that survives in the present.26 It would also
explain why several of Bergson’s temporal illustrations do not simply
refer to abstract relations between the past, present and future, but
instead appeal to historical examples, by which I mean examples that
describe the relation between our contemporary reality and its history.27
Nevertheless, one may still insist that while for Bergson the past
is virtual, history proper is the actual record and/or manifestation of
this productive process. To ascertain the accuracy of this interpreta-
tion, and consequently the legitimacy of conceptualising history as
virtual and vital, it will therefore be necessary to consider more than
just those passages in which Bergson refers to the virtual, given their
relative scarcity within his writings.28 Let us then consider a far more
frequent and fundamental notion of Bergsonian ontology: duration. As
I will show, Bergson’s description and development of this notion also
explicitly refers to history, in turn indicating why thinkers of history
such as Péguy and Toynbee might have been so interested in Bergson’s
philosophy.
DURATIONAL HISTORY
Bergson’s description of an unfolding melody is one of his earliest, and
perhaps most compelling, illustrations of duration. As each successive
note in a melody is sounded, the listener hears much more than just that
individual note. What he or she hears is an entire progression, which
is to say that the character of each emerging note in a melody is con-
toured in part by its interconnections (‘mutual penetration’) with previ-
ous notes and the whole it is a part of – namely, the trajectory of the
melodic progression. In this manner, two notes that might be identical
in actuality will be different in reality due to their differing relations to
Bergson, History and Ontology 25
Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that their history,
past, present, and future, might be instantaneously unfurled like a fan, this
history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a duration
like our own. If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly,
wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the
time I have to wait is not that mathematical time which would apply equally
well to the entire history of the material world, even if that history were
spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience, that
is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot pro-
tract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something
lived.32
CONCLUSION
In his renowned essay on ‘The Possible and the Real’, Bergson conjec-
tures that the possible does not predate the real, but on the contrary is
retrospectively cast by the real into the past. As he puts it: ‘Backwards
over the course of time, a constant remodelling of the past by the
present, of the cause by the effect, is being carried out.’41 When history
is characterised as the act of representing something in the past from the
perspective of the present, it is naturally fitting to affiliate it with this
form of the possible. In such cases, history tells us what was possible.
It may also explain or justify what is, and as a result serve the purposes
of the present. Ultimately, however, this form of history could be said
to coincide with the power of capture and manipulation (pouvoir), as
opposed to productivity and creativity (puissance). Consequently, it
is little wonder that this form of history is condemned by Deleuze as
constrictive and contrasted with what he would call becoming.
As I have demonstrated in this chapter, however, this is not all that
history can be or become in the philosophy of Bergson. For as we
know from Deleuze, aside from this conception of the possible, an
entirely different category of reality can be extracted from Bergson’s
thought – the virtual. And far from being opposed to history, the virtual
fundamentally involves history. Indeed, as the present emerges, what is
28 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
NOTES
1. Keith Ansell Pearson, ‘Review of Jay Lampert’s Deleuze and Guattari’s
Philosophy of History’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2007.03.06,
available at http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25233-deleuze-and-guattari-s-philos
ophy-of-history (accessed 25 March 2013).
2. As an example, see Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed its Spots:
The Evolution of Complexity (Phoenix: Orion Books, 1994), pp. 78–83,
104–5, 128–34 and 141.
3. Camille Creyghton, ‘ “History, Memory of Humanity”. Bergson’s
Influence on the Conception of History and Memory in Charles Péguy’,
The Workshop Centre for Historical Research, §9, available at http://arch.
revues.org/3593 (accessed 24 September 2012).
4. Christian Kerslake, ‘Becoming Against History: Toynbee, Deleuze and
Vitalist Historiography’, Parrhesia, No. 4 (2008), p. 19.
5. Ansell Pearson, ‘Review of Jay Lampert’s Deleuze and Guattari’s
Philosophy of History’. In supporting this assertion, Ansell Pearson notes
that Matter and Memory ‘is primarily a contribution to the philosophy
of mind’. Again, this is most certainly true. But it is strange that Ansell
Pearson would take this as evidence that the text has nothing to say about
the nature of history. For example, Ansell Pearson would presumably be
Bergson, History and Ontology 29
willing to admit that the text has a great deal to contribute to the phi-
losophy of time, yet the philosophy of time is not synonymous with the
philosophy of mind. I do not mean to suggest that Matter and Memory
has as much to say about history as it does mind or time, I merely wish to
point out that Ansell Pearson does not offer any convincing reasons as to
why Matter and Memory would be closed to the historian or philosopher
of history.
6. See the editors’ note at the beginning of Max Horkheimer, ‘On Bergson’s
Metaphysics of Time’, Radical Philosophy, No. 131 (May/June 2005),
p. 9.
7. See John Mullarkey, ‘Forget the Virtual: Bergson, Actualism, and the
Refraction of Reality’, Continental Philosophy Review, No. 37 (2004),
pp. 470–2.
8. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1974–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 170.
9. For a leading proponent of this Deleuzian theory, see Jay Lampert,
Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History (London and New York:
Continuum, 2006).
10. It should be noted that I have argued at length on how it is possible to
extract an alternative philosophy of history from Deleuze’s work beyond
this image of history as one with the actual. For this analysis in full, see
Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
11. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London:
Athlone Press, 1994), pp. 208 and 211.
12. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans.
Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Continuum, 1990), p. 2
13. Plato, ‘Philebus’, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and
H. Cairns, trans. R. Hackforth (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1961), §24d.
14. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 1.
15. Ibid., p. 4.
16. Ibid., p. 4.
17. See ibid., pp. 4 and 162.
18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham
Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 160.
19. Ibid., pp. 156 and 158.
20. Ibid., p. 158. As Deleuze and Guattari go on to say: ‘In every event there
are many heterogeneous, always simultaneous components, since each of
them is a meanwhile, all within the meanwhile that makes them commu-
nicate through zones of indiscernibility, of undecidability: they are varia-
tions, modulations, intermezzi, singularities of a new infinite order. Each
component of the event is actualised or effectuated in an instant, and the
event in the time that passes between these instants; but nothing happens
within the virtuality that has only meanwhiles as components and an event
30 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
fully discusses the sociohistorical. But this does not itself make Bergson’s
prior philosophy ahistorical or devoid of concern for human experience or
the sociobiological.
41. Bergson, The Creative Mind, pp. 84–5.
42. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 5.
43. Ibid., p. 37.
44. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
2. Art History, Immanently
CHARLOTTE DE MILLE
32
Art History, Immanently 33
Figure 2.1 Duncan Grant, Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound,
Gouache and watercolour on paper on canvas, 27.9 x 45.02 cm, 1914,
© Tate, London 2013; estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2013.
This chapter addresses the question of what the material might show
through an analysis of the first known attempt at mechanised paint-
ing, Duncan Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Collage with Sound, 1914, often
known as Abstract Kinetic Scroll (Figure 2.1). Grant’s piece as it was
conceived addresses central questions concerning the nature of percep-
tion at the advent of early cinema, the possibility and extent of tempo-
rality in painting, and the role of perspective in directing the viewers’
attention. These three concerns formed the ground-breaking debates
of 1911–14 in European painting, and can in this instance be traced
to the critical framework of Roger Fry and Henri Bergson. Grant’s
Scroll is provocative for the way it masters and animates these themes,
rehearsing the Bergsonian challenge to cinema whilst offering support
to Deleuze’s criticism of it. Thinking of the Scroll in this way has forced
me to re-assess my methodology, to work creatively with its compo-
nents to visualise the effects Grant wanted to achieve. The chapter
traces the process of this analysis, offering the pitfalls into which it was
so easy to fall, along with their benefits. It assesses the methodological
scope of the virtual and the multiple: appropriate enough for a work
that until the last three years of the artist’s life remained an incomplete
ideal.
GRANT IN PARIS
Ever nonchalant and self-deprecating, Duncan Grant was a self-styled
painter. Despite his close friendships with Roger Fry and Clive and
Vanessa Bell he kept himself consciously apart from published and
publishable theoretical discussion. No review seems to have elicited
a response from him, defensive or otherwise, and it was an exceed-
ing rarity for him to write at all.3 When, in 1919, André Derain
complimented his work, his response in a letter to Vanessa Bell
was frustratingly elusive. ‘With my gifts I ought to attack “des [sic]
grandes problèmes,” ’ he recorded, concluding lamely, ‘but I don’t
really understand what he means.’4 Through an introduction from
Simon Bussy, Grant studied at Jacques Emile Blanche’s La Palette
from January 1906 to Autumn 1907. Blanche was hardly avant-garde,
34 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
and an inseparable part of them’.26 The visionary freedom that this new
mode of seeing opened up was an inspiration. The practically orientated
man ‘does not know how little he sees of things’, Fry wrote, ‘. . . how
fluctuating, evanescent and fantastic are the actual visual impressions
of objects, how they melt and glide into each other’.27 Comparably with
Bergson’s Time and Free Will, he negated positivist science as a reaction
of the mind which actively ‘prevent[s] the mind from making the step
from sensations to things’.28
It was these sensations that occupied Fry in ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’,
his mature statement on aesthetic perception and value, and one that
I have argued elsewhere has a demonstrable connection to Bergsonian
thought. Reprising the argument of ‘Some Problems’, Fry contended
that the artist ‘uses natural forms, which in themselves are calculated
to move our emotions, and he presents these in such a manner that
the forms themselves generate in us emotional states, based upon the
fundamental necessities of our physical and physiological nature’.29
Aesthetic experience is programmed biologically, bodily. In a manner
very like the final chapter of Creative Evolution, Fry regarded the work
of art ‘as perception of a process of motion and balance’ of formal
elements that manifest the ‘vital rhythm’ of the artwork, ‘through
which the artist’s subconscious feelings reveal themselves to us’.30 Far
from lines or shapes, Fry’s ‘formalism’ is first and foremost pitched in
terms of movement and gesture, the process therefore of divining the
form(s) of the artwork in the act of its creation and re-creation in the
sensations of the beholder. Fry’s ‘Essay’ is perhaps best known for
his designation of ‘emotional elements of design’, often regarded as
dubious by art historians for their psychological rather than empirical
foundation. These emotional elements return us to the body and not
to the mind, as Fry makes clear. These are ‘primary physical needs’, he
writes. The first element, ‘rhythm of line’, is proposed as a ‘record of
a gesture . . . modified by the artist’s feeling’; mass, second of the ele-
ments, is described as the ‘power of resisting movement, and communi-
cating its own movement to other bodies’.31 The movement of painting
corresponds to a movement perception that is embodied.
Conforming in its movement to Fry’s use of rhythm and mass,
Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Scroll defines itself and its process of pro-
duction through its mechanism. The artist’s ‘gesture’ is perpetuated,
literally brought to the surface and recreated by the rise and fall of the
passing rectangles. Quite obviously, it ‘communicates its movement’ to
the viewer, whose own path through the gallery would be arrested for
the duration of the Scroll’s sequence. Our own perceptual process is
emphasised by the shifting object which demands that we follow that
38 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
object’s duration with close attention. This is clearly not the realm of
pragmatic life, but rather the ‘equivalent’ that Fry characterised as the
Post Impressionist grail. Simon Watney has argued that in ‘exploring
a purely pictorial territory of formal transformations’, Grant explored
‘movement within the pictorial space’.32 The work is ‘less a painting
which moves, than an analysis of movement itself’.33 Conservatively,
Watney concedes that whilst ‘unwise to attempt to place Grant’s work
from this period in relation to any single intellectual influence’, Grant’s
interests in the Scroll ‘undoubtedly stand within the large framework
of contemporary Bergsonian thought’.34 Richard Shone’s description
of the Scroll moving testifies to the sensory and perceptual effect that
the work had as it was originally conceived: it gave the ‘impression of
extraordinary harmony, of clear, subtle colour, with the restless callig-
raphy of contrasting, sometimes sharply, sometimes discreetly flowing,
with each section of unerringly placed rectangles as they rise and fall in
progression’.35 By creating a moving work, Grant found an easy way
to convey the instability of flux and potentiality through actual change.
It is clear from a letter from Vanessa Bell that Grant not only considered
the Scroll to be inspired by the Far East, but that his central concern
was to channel his viewer’s perception. This description marries well
with Fry’s characterisation of Chinese scrolls in ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’
as being ‘perceptual’ not ‘emotional’. As Grant worked on the Scroll,
Vanessa described ‘a long painting which is meant to be rolled up in the
manner of those Chinese paintings and seen by degrees’, continuing, ‘it
is entirely abstract’.37 It should not be surprising that the Scroll should
sit in this context for it was topical in pre-war London. Fry’s great friend
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson had traveled extensively in China and
Art History, Immanently 39
However, the imperfect cut that I produced for this experiment merely
highlighted the difficulties of recreating Grant’s vision. In seventeen
sections, the scroll’s ground alternates between rich marbling and stark
calligraphic brush marks where the paint has not been washed to leach
into the marble effect. Using a muted palette of six colours (smoke
blue, sage green, forest green, russet, ochre, black), Grant has both
collaged and painted rectangles to produce layered contrasts, which in
movement, leap back and forth upon the plane in rhythmic pulsation.40
The scroll was to be wound on two spools, moving from right to left
(after Chinese scrolls, and the direction of the cuts I made), and was
to be viewed through an eleven by fourteen inch aperture. In the Tate
Gallery’s 1974 film realisation, the scroll took four minutes eighteen
seconds to unwind, the length of a performance of the slow movement
of J. S. Bach’s First Brandenburg Concerto which Grant had chosen for
the piece. Unfortunately the Tate film is currently unavailable, but in
any event, and bizarrely (given their close attention to timing), the film
is silent – so it is itself an incomplete realisation of Grant’s idea.
The series of stills that I took were therefore the closest we could get
to Grant’s work. But playing this sort of game has enormous pitfalls.
For a start, I ‘contracted’ and ‘dilated’ the work, which, as Bergson
reminds us, is ‘to modify both the psychical evolution that fills it and
the invention which is its goal’.41 Second, I chose to cut each slide to the
leading edge of each new shape – justifiable perhaps for better marking
the Scroll’s dynamism – but ignoring its seventeen sections. Third, I
showed, as my accompanying illustration to this chapter does, the scroll
entire with its ragged bare canvas borders. Our vision is not restricted
to the dimensions of Grant’s aperture; indeed recreating the individual,
private looking the aperture implies was impossible in a communal
lecture theatre. Lastly, without becoming an expert in Photoshop or
QuickTime, I could not replace the moving of the scroll by a series of
slides. There is no continuity here, but a sequence of fragments.
In short, the slides I made rehearsed the difficulties of the cin-
ematographic method vigorously discussed by Bergson at the end of
Creative Evolution. Throwing ‘instantaneous views on the screen . . .
reconstitutes the mobility . . . with immobility set beside immobility’.42
According to his understanding of the working of human knowledge,
‘instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things’, the slides
required that ‘we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose
their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing
reality . . . Our activity goes from an arrangement to a rearrangement,
each time no doubt giving the kaleidoscope a new shake, but not inter-
esting itself in the shake, and seeing only the new picture.’43 The effect
Art History, Immanently 41
is that the ‘movement slips through the interval, because every attempt
to reconstitute change out of states implies the absurd proposition, that
movement is made of immobilities’.44 Returning to Deleuze, the slides
exhibited his criticism of Hume’s empiricism as ‘a world of exteriority,
a world in which thought itself exists in a fundamental relationship
with the Outside, a world in which terms are veritable atoms and rela-
tions veritable external passages; a world in which the conjunction
“and” dethrones the interiority of the verb “is”; a harlequin world of
multicoloured patterns and non-totalizable fragments’.45
This may be labouring the point, but it is worthwhile given Fry’s
(and Grant’s) knowledge of Bergson. Grant’s work is not blindly cin-
ematographic. So what might we learn from my poor reconstruction?
Viewed as a series of stills rather than sliding seamlessly one to the
next, the movement of the Scroll through my slides appeared vertical
not horizontal, effected in space not time. By choosing to cut to each
new shape, the size of the slides was uneven, causing them to contract
and expand; they breathed as a lung, reflecting the systolic/diastolic
working of heartbeat.46 The cuts could not correspond to the even
proportions of a film strip and Grant’s medium ensures that we do not
view these ‘photogrammes’ as negatives vitalised by light but consider
the materiality (physical solidity) of paint and canvas. By unfolding
the materiality of his surface, Grant forces our attention on it and it
alone. He puts his method, tools, proposition, on full view, concealing
nothing, but giving little away.
To this extent, the scroll responds to many of Deleuze’s contentions
about painting. I could describe it as an ‘overflight’ or ‘line of flight’
that functions in the interval between possibility and actualisation. On
an artistic plane of composition, the scroll renders a ‘block of sensa-
tions, a compound of percepts and affects’ where the absence of form
marks ‘becoming-other’.47 Deleuze and Guattari divide the technical
and material qualities of the artwork from its aesthetic affect. Yet, as
they concede and Ronald Bogue has clarified, the distinction is false,
for both are integrated in the expressivity of matter. This seems to be
just Grant’s concern. Moreover, the movement of the scroll actualises
– emphasises – the rhythm of painting; designs repeat, returning like
a musical leitmotif through a score. Rhythm (as movement) gives an
in-between of two planes,48 and in Grant’s work, an in-between of two
media.
What would the scroll express, put to music? Splitting our percep-
tion into simultaneously visual and aural fields, the affect is perhaps, to
adopt another metaphor from A Thousand Plateaus, of ‘milieu, each
defined by a component, slid[ing] in relation to one another, over one
42 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
NOTES
1. W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005).
2. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Hume’, in Pure Immanence, trans. Anne Boyman (New
York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 51.
3. A rare exception was a review of the painter Simon Bussy for The
Spectator in 1908, where he described the ‘sustained and essential impres-
sion’ of Bussy’s work. See Simon Watney, English Post-Impressionism
(London: Studio Vista, 1980), p. 87. Bussy married Dorothy Strachey,
thereby entering the fringes of Bloomsbury himself.
4. Duncan Grant to Vanessa Bell, in Simon Watney, The Art of Duncan
Grant (London: John Murray, 1990), p. 57.
5. Blanche was to record in his autobiography that although out of touch
prior to this sitting, he and Bergson had been at school together. One
might infer from this that he maintained a general interest in his one-time
colleague, though it is unlikely that he ever subjected Bergson’s thought to
thorough consideration. Having said this, Christopher Green has argued
44 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
‘tone and colour perspective’, ‘colour’ and ‘colour mixture.’ Part two
covered ‘perspectives’, ‘tone’, ‘irradiation and the quality of edges’, and,
again, ‘colour’.
23. Ibid., pp. 1–2.
24. Ibid., p. 30.
25. Ibid., p. 5.
26. Roger Fry, ‘The Philosophy of Impressionism’ (1894), in Christopher
Reed, ed., A Roger Fry Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), p. 16.
27. Ibid., p. 19.
28. Ibid., p. 14. We cannot be sure that Fry had come across Time and Free
Will in 1894, but it is clear he was reading voraciously. Time and Free Will
and An Introduction to Metaphysics are listed in their French editions in
notebooks that include other publications from 1903–9. It is of course
possible that Fry continued to use these notebooks over a number of years;
therefore 1909 is the latest date at which Fry came across Bergson, and it
may well have been earlier. KCA REF 5/1.
29. Roger Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’ (1909), in Vision and Design (London:
Pelican, 1937), pp. 39–40.
30. Roger Fry, Last Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939),
p. 33.
31. Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, p. 36.
32. Watney, English Post-Impressionism, p. 98. Watney finds Grant’s use of
music to be an unsuccessful addition rather than a true synthesis, compar-
ing the work unfavourably with the more balanced cross-disciplinarity of
Sonia Delaunay and Blaise Cendrar’s La Prose du Transsiberien et de la
Petite Jehanne de France, 1913.
33. Ibid., p. 97.
34. Ibid.
35. Richard Shone, ‘Duncan Grant’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 117, No.
864 (1975), p. 186.
36. Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, p. 36.
37. Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, autumn 1914, in Guy Frances, Simon Shaw-
Miller and Michael Turner, eds, Eye Music, Kandinsky, Klee and all that
Jazz, ex. cat. (Chichester: Pallant House Gallery, 2007), p. 126.
38. See Michelle Ying-Ling Huang, The Reception of Chinese Painting in
Britain circa 1880–1920, with Special Reference to Laurence Binyon
(1869–1943), Ph.D. Dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2010;
Michelle Ying-Ling Huang, ‘Laurence Binyon and the Admonitions
Scroll’, Orientations, Vol. 41, No. 5 (2010), pp. 53–7.
39. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(London and New York: Continuum, 198), pp. 191–2.
40. It is tempting to compare this to Deleuze’s ‘montage’ as ‘composition, the
assemblage of movement-images as constituting an indirect image of time.’
Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 31.
46 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
47
48 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
the poietic past, to behave as potency. This will produce duration, i.e.
a delay or curve in the application of our classificatory schemes to the
conception of the thing. In a somewhat Cartesian manner,47 ‘durating’
would mean suspending any hasty judgement regarding the classifica-
tion of the thing in question.
call intuition, which, Bergson says, brings us ‘en contact direct avec la
réalité’.59
This may produce a thought of indivisible change; otherwise put, a
thought of a curve, whose basic shape is determined by the manner in
which our most distance past adheres to our present.60 Our memory,
according to Bergson, is responsible for the automatic conservation of
the past, without there being any special need of effort on our behalf.61
The past is preserved in any of our acts, in the very re-enactment of our
habits. But an ‘intellectual effort’, as Bergson says in an 1902 essay of
the same name,62 is produced when a movement is initiated between
various profound layers of the past. An intellectual effort neither entails
neglecting any system of classification (since rational architectonics
participate in any thought procedure),63 nor does it call for a free-play
of contextualisation or interpretation. Rather, an intellectual effort is a
directed, distinct movement, in which one endeavours to distinguish a
terrain within the reality of the past. This corresponds almost entirely
with Aristotle’s notion of recollection (ἀναμνήσεις) as distinguished
from memory (μνήμη): recollection happens when one seeks to locate
in one’s past some mental movement which is not automatically
approachable.64
In conclusion then, we can ask what a Bergsonian truth-procedure65
might look like in relation to the historical interrogation of artworks.
Such an inquiry would have to involve a re-organisation of intuition,
i.e. a re-shaping of space and time, so that both will better enable a
tailoring of the thing under consideration. A Bergsonian historical
procedure would consist of an espassément of history, performed from
within the domain of the work discussed. Any research ‘into’ a poietic
thing would thus demand a particular transfiguration of an entire cone
of history, guided by the work in question. Here there is a possibility
of understanding the iconological method (stemming from Panofsky’s
primary Kantian tendencies, rooted in the work of Aby Warburg) as
capable of being adapted to a Bergsonian method, in so far as iconol-
ogy follows and restores trails of schemes and figures in order to locate
better, or indeed to make an espassément of, a certain work or works.66
Giulio-Carlo Argan has rightly and poignantly pointed in this direc-
tion, when describing Panofsky’s ‘Process of traditions’ as ‘tortuous,
fortuitous, full of uncertainty, past echoes and unexpected turns . . .
it has no constant direction . . . but we are not saying that it does not
have its own order’.67 Henri Focillon’s encompassing dynamic world
of forms and Georges Kubler’s Shape of Time also exhibit qualities
that are concordant with Bergsonian principles.68 At one point in his
little book, Kubler describes exactly how, from within the web of
58 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
NOTES
1. I am thankful to the Fritz Thyssen foundation, which supported my work
in 2010–12, and to the Gerda Henkel foundation, supporting my work in
2012–13, thereby enabling the writing of this essay.
2. Adi Efal, ‘Philology and the History of Art’, in Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and
Thijs Weststeijn, eds, The Making of the Humanities Volume II: From
Early Modern to Modern Disciplines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2012), pp. 263–99.
3. Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus.
Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und
Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).
4. Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Berlin: Ferd. Dümmerls
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1885 [1871]).
5. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner
Verlag, 2003 [1781]), pp. 97–127, 153–75 [B33–73, 102–29].
6. Francesco Valerio Tommasi, Philosophia Transcendentalis: La questione
antepredicativa e l’analogia tra la Scolastica e Kant (Florence: Leo Olschki,
2008).
7. Kant, Kritik, pp. 274–313 [B218–65].
8. Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art and History: Moments of Discipline
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Karen Ann Lang, Chaos
and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2006), pp. 41–87.
Art History, Less Its Conditions of Possibility 59
63
64 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
in advance its refusal of the idea of a finalised history, and the very idea
of (art) History.
There follows a new, non dialectical-historical idea of the temporal-
ity of and in art, an operation into which Matisse will carry on delving,
in terms of a becoming that produces, that shows, nothing other than
itself in the events it embodies. So that with Fauvism it is becoming
that gives matter to art – and that exposes itself as such – by freeing
the Outside (the multiplicity of forces and their multiplication in an
original plastic conjunction) from the form of interiority that enclosed
each art within an Art-Form exterior to others, and prevented their
de-compartmentalisation.
While modern art – at least since the middle of the nineteenth
century – aspired to lift the barriers between the ‘fine’ and ‘low’ arts,
to associate painting, architecture and the decorative arts of everyday
life, Matisse was perhaps the first to understand that the becoming-life
of art could not be realised without a true becoming-other of painting,
the expansion (or rather, the intensive extension) that goes through an
architectural becoming; in other words, an extension affecting archi-
tecture itself with a plastic becoming so that their connection results
in an environment where a new and vital experience becomes possible,
supporting, carrying art beyond ‘itself’.
It is from the interior of painting, and within its very processuality,
that Matisse develops an experience of becoming that makes his paint-
ing (tableau) radiate beyond its frame and would lead painting outside
itself. Matisse will demonstrate, as no one else before, the plastic
reality of time and the temporality of the event in art – with a gesture
that, in each of his works, should be barely considered as an image of
a ‘given/giving’ (ideally engaging some sort of teleological essence of
art). Rather, it is a gesture that dismisses the ideal of the image itself in
favour of a ‘consciousness of the forces that (one) employs’ when one
moves, ‘pushed by an idea that (one) only truly knows to the extent that
it develops itself in the process of the painting’.1 Its contingent neces-
sity is a function of the impossibility of a difference/différance, from
conception to its most tangible realisation. Or again: in the absence
of a ‘break between thought and the creative act’,2 no conception is
worthwhile unless it can (rise to the) surface in full immanence, through
a continuous becoming in which the principle of construction can only
be perceived with what it constructs. It must be emphasised that this
processual materialism is the antipode of the post-romantic exaspera-
tion to which some have sought to reduce Fauvism.
The evocation of an exemplary work – Interior with Aubergines – will
allow us to show that this processual becoming, which Matisse consid-
Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc. 65
ered ‘decorative’ (in a sense that was his own), broke with not only the
image-form and the painting-form of painting but also with its very
pictoriality. The truly radioactive decorativeness of Matisse’s painting
made virtually possible, and even called for, a new alliance with archi-
tecture that he would later put to work pragmatically with The Dance
(at the Barnes Foundation, 1931–33). It is there that Matisse will come
into contact with John Dewey, who was himself associated with this
Foundation right from the start – Dewey’s treatise on Democracy and
Education (1916) having exerted a continuous influence, as also under
the heading of Art as Experience (1931–34). As we know, it is a matter
of intensifying, while soliciting, ‘the ordinary forces and conditions of
experience which we do not usually regard as aesthetic’; ‘of restoring
continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that
are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are
universally recognized to constitute [the] experience’ of the ‘living crea-
ture’.3 Following William James – in his point of strongest convergence
and divergence with the Bergsonism of the élan vital – experience is for
Dewey basically ‘activity’, understood thereby as a mixture of action
and reception, stability and struggle, disconnections and connections,
and in which the ‘intensest life’ implies experience as art in an expansive
movement that ‘enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in
the delight of experiencing the world . . . in a new experience of life’.4
And it is in this anti-formalist context that the reference to Matisse,
constantly associated by Dewey with the challenge launched by art to
philosophy, takes its entirely post-Bergsonian sense.5
This is what I would like to show now, coming back to Interior with
Aubergines.6 Interior with Aubergines presents itself as an explosive
and discontinuous multiplication of stacked or nested planes that are
quasi-rectangular, but often slanted and covered in swirling or lightly
suspended motifs. The abrupt jumps in scale and colour oppositions
are indifferent to any coherent image effect, responding to purely con-
structive, ‘decorative’ concerns alone. The play of colours is effectively
valued only for the tensions that the colours establish between them-
selves, and not for the pictorial valorisation of their intrinsic chromatic
or mimetic qualities. The dark red splashes and violet stripes of the
three aubergines stand out on the red tablecloth with big light yellow
and ochre leaf designs. This tablecloth, decentred by its reflection in a
slanted mirror, contrasts with the green of a folding screen, on which
oversized light mauve swirls break out. Big dark mauve buds with five
petals stand out from a large, dark brown and reddish brown ground.
And so on.
The eminently decorative plastic and chromatic weave (de)constitutes
66 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
the ‘objects’ – none of which is painted for its own sake – into ara-
besques, various stripes and rectangles, grids, pleated surfaces and
scattered patches. It does so in such a way that the possible decorative
‘motifs’, of which the objects might be the supports, are completely
denaturalised (properly ‘demotivated’) by their internal decorative
reassembling. There is nothing phenomenological or descriptive about
the multiplication of heterogeneous objects at incommensurable scales,
rather, it serves essentially as a vector for the general putting into
tension of planes and coloured elements. On the wall, an empty frame
lets one see the tapestry with its dark mauve buds on the ground,
and encloses another empty frame. This assemblage designates mural
decoration as being the real (or desired) object of painting, while the
coloured patches that sketch out a ‘landscape’ inside a window frame
give it the look of a flat tapestry in the room – and does so all the more
for having the same colours. This assemblage indicates a concern with
positioning the interior and the exterior on the same continuous plane.
The flatness that holds this multi-coloured patchwork together, and
that works the whole of the field overtly or covertly, integrates the
effects of relief or of depth, in force. This all-over expansion, is, at one
and the same time, both centrifugal and decentred (or de-focalised); it
is ‘interior’ to the painting while it also radiates all-around it, since the
painting’s edges, which slice randomly into the figures and deep into the
tapestry ground, do not hold it back.
Interior with Aubergines carries out an un-framing of any view
or staging whatsoever of an ‘interior’. For Matisse, this rupture with
painting’s interiority will have been a prerequisite and a condition for
moving away from easel painting towards what he will call ‘architec-
tural painting’ (referring to The Dance at the Barnes Foundation). This
painting presents itself as indicative of a kind of defenestration of the
Painting-Form, which it deterritorialises by making the Painting-Form
pass from the aesthetic to the aisthesic. Here, perception makes itself
the deterritorialised agent of the colours-forces that are put into play
and into tension within an ‘interior’ that does not describe or narrate
anything, that does not take form because it captures and ex-poses the
becoming-intense of a multiplicity comprising heterogeneous terms –
the relations of which compose a being of sensation – without either
reducing or formalising the elements in tension. Its duration is no longer
extensive (i.e. a distribution of objects narrating a whole life within an
interior). It is entirely, and intensively, processual: a diagrammatisation
of all the forces that make the Painting-Form explode.
If the painting does not by any means ‘structure’ itself into an
image, neither can it be reduced to a pure ‘hedonist’ play of colours for
Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc. 67
colours’ sake, and even less – were that possible – to a purely ‘formal’
abstraction: rather (figurative and/or abstract) form is that which
slips away and, in its place, we have colours-forces in a constant vital
confrontation, colours-forces that push beneath forms and beyond
the painting, in the manner of tensors. The generalised tensitivity of
space, which is thereby open to the entire expressive matter of duration
as well as to its plastic condition of real experience, results from its
appropriation by the processuality of a vital energetics that replaces the
aesthetics of forms composed (fixed) in space: the closed, reserved space
of Art: ‘the beauty parlor of civilization’ – according to the lapidary
formula of John Dewey, Matisse’s veritable intercessor in the United
States.7 As Matisse writes: ‘With me, colour is a force. My paintings are
composed of four or five colours that undergo mutual shocks, eliciting
sensations of energy.’8 Farewell to the image, goodbye ‘mise-en-scène’,
down with purism, long live the energetic ‘mechanics of the painting’
that dislocates it within its Form in order to constitute a sensational
block of forces.9
The break with the Painting-Form of Painting and with its forms of
historicity was only possible for Matisse because of the discovery with
which he associated Fauvism – the discovery that painting involved
the construction of colours in relations of forces where their expres-
sive power is intrinsically vital/vitalist, and not ‘purely’ pictorial. In
his quest for colour’s deepest expressivity, Matisse understood and
experienced that its nature must be energetic: ‘It is then the principles
which “resurface”, which take on life, which give us life. Paintings,
which are [all too often] refinements, subtle gradations, mixes devoid of
energy, [must] invoke beautiful blues, reds, yellows, matters that move
the sensual ground of men. That is fauvism’s point of departure: the
courage of recovering the purity of means.’10 Recovering the purity of
means has nothing to do with any purism whatsoever; on the contrary,
it means making a vital principle resurface, thereby ‘purifying’ colours
from any (purely) formal artistic finality, in order to give them over
to their vitalist ontological power and engage them in a bio-aesthetic
(or aisthesic).11 This ‘resurfacing’ of the vital ground (irreducible to a
hedonism), this becoming-sensible that carries with it an unprecedented
‘expressionism’, is indissociable from its production as (chromatic)
surface in an energetic constructivism for which it is the differences in
quantity of colours that underlie their quality – in accordance with a
principle repeatedly affirmed by Matisse.
The differences in quantity that produce the vital quality of all the
coloured surfaces in relation to one another are inseparably intensive
(they depend on the degrees of saturation of the colours) and extensive
68 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
NOTES
1. H. Matisse, ‘Notes d’un peintre sur son dessin’, in Le Point, No. 21
(1939), reprinted in Écrits et propos sur l’art, texts, notes and index
edited by Dominique Fourcade, new revised and corrected edition (Paris:
Hermann, 1972), p. 163.
2. H. Matisse, comment cited by A. Verdet, Prestiges de Matisse (Paris: EPA,
1952), p. 47, n. 11. It is necessary to have a vision of the global state at
each moment: ‘Everything must be envisaged correlatively when the work
is in progress’ (Notes de Sarah Stein [Paris: EPA, 1908], p. 71). ‘I never
know in advance what I will do’ (comment from 1942 addressed to J. and
H. Dauberville, cited in Verdet, Prestiges de Matisse, p. 47, n. 11).
3. J. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), pp. 4, 3.
4. Ibid., p. 104.
5. ‘The Challenge to Philosophy’ is the title of Chapter 12 of Dewey’s Art as
Experience.
6. H. Matisse, Interior with Aubergines (1911), 212 x 246 cm, Musée de
Grenoble.
7. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 344. This whole book reads like a fantastic
homage to Matisse.
8. This is the statement, from around 1942, made by the ever ‘fauve’ Matisse
to Pierre Courthion. Cited in Pierre Courthion, ‘Avec Matisse et Bonnard’,
in D’une palette a l’autre. Memoires d’un critique d’art (Geneva: La
Baconniere Arts, 2004), p. 173.
9. The expression ‘mechanics of painting’ is signed Matisse.
10. H. Matisse, ‘Propos rapportés par Tériade’ (extracts from ‘Constance du
fauvisme’), in Minotaure, Vol. 2, No. 9 (1936), p. 128 (emphasis added).
11. While, to our knowledge, the expression ‘bio-aesthetic’ appears only once
in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (see A Thousand Plateaus [London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987], p. 575, n. 34), it is a notion whose
determining importance is everywhere felt, to the extent that it involves a
becoming-life of art which amounts to a politics of sensation. Not without
a polemical intention with regard to the dominance of the Duchampian
paradigm, we can say that this is the becoming-life of modern-contempo-
rary art borne by Matisse, whose operation we have constructed under the
heading of Matisse-Thought.
12. We borrow this idea from Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers (New
York: Semiotext(e), 2006), pp. 43ff., and pp. 224–53.
13. ‘To obey the intentions of [Matisse’s] painting, I must subject myself to the
“motor diagram” that its form produces in my brain’, Matthew Stewart
Prichard, letter to Frances Burton-Smith, June 1914, cited in Henri Matisse
1904–1917, exhibition catalogue (25 February–21 June 1993), (Paris: Ed.
Du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993); ‘Anthologie’ by D. Fourcade and
E. de Chassey, in ibid., p. 499.
14. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 270. Involution, the motor
Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc. 75
the ‘mystic’ to extract the creation of human, too human, limits of the
world by making them coincide with life’s over-abundance of the creative
principle elevated to the plane of the universal; see Bergson, Les Deux
Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932).
40. Letter to Harold Höffding, 15 March 1915 (in Bergson, Mélanges,
p. 1148). In this letter, Bergson refutes the idea, wrongly attributed to him,
of the identification of philosophy and art, and he does so by stressing the
fact that ‘after having been engaged in the same direction as artistic intui-
tion, philosophical intuition, on the other hand, goes much further than
its artistic counterpart. It grasps the “vital” before it scatters around in
images whereas art remains concerned with and confined in images’.
41. But projecting a complete detachment, which would be too much to ask
of nature, because ‘were this detachment complete, the soul no longer
cleave to action by any of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist
such as the world has never yet seen’. See Henri Bergson, Le Rire, in
Oeuvres, p. 461. It is also worth looking at ‘the perception of change’ here
(Oeuvres, p. 1371): ‘the function of the artist is best revealed with clarity
in that art form which concerns itself mainly with imitation, and I mean by
this painting’. Because ‘the loftiest ambition of art . . . consists in revealing
to us nature itself’ (Le Rire, in Oeuvres, p. 461).
42. We have established the historical origins of this argument in Jean-Claude
Bonne and Eric Alliez, La Pensée-Matisse (Paris: Le Passage Eds, 2005),
pp. 50–6.
43. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 462. The same argument can be made about
Bergsonian intuition as such – entirely founded on the reality of inner life
that one needs to start by disentangling it from the ‘material’ necessities of
our practical life in order to recover its metaphysical meaning.
44. This did not escape the notice of Albert Thibaudet: ‘If Mr. Bergson for-
mulated [his aesthetics] one day it would probably be an aesthetics of a
musician’ (Thibaudet, Le bergsonisme [Paris: Gallimard, 1923], Vol. II,
p. 59).
45. Among whom were Georges Duthuit, from whom we are borrowing this
citation (in ‘Le Fauvisme’, p. 222), and to follow ‘the Fauves in their own
manner. . .’.
46. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 500.
47. A response to a question raised by Verdet, in Prestiges de Matisse, p. 47, n.
11. This is a permanent feature of Matisse’s reflection on his work. Thus,
for instance, he writes in his ‘Notes sur les dessins de la série Thèmes et
variations’ (1942): ‘The road I am on, has nothing predictable about it, I
am driven and not the driver. I always proceed from one point marked on
my model to another point, that I alone always see independently from
all other points towards which my brush is subsequently directed. Isn’t
it the case that I am only guided by an inner impulse that I am translat-
ing as it takes shape rather than by the outside that my eyes stare at . . .
while inventing my path to get there. Such an interesting path, indeed,
78 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
80
Bergson Before Deleuze 81
(1940) referred not only to a saint but resonated with a sense of place,
medieval architecture and narratives within a structure of religious
beliefs – despite a rigorous abstraction of the image. This art movement
is arguably poised on the brink of rediscovery: there was a splendid
showing of Manessier, for example, at the FIAC, Paris’s international
art fair, in 2012.10
Initially, the paintings of Lapicque, Alfred Manessier and Bazaine,
with their clandestine patriotism, were more or less inscribed within
perpendicular frameworks: compare Bazaine’s Mass for the Armed Man
(1944), Manessier’s The Grande Trappe Monstery (1944), Pilgrims at
Emmaeus (1944) (both notably figurative), or his great blue abstract
hymn, Salve Regina (1945). But as soon as the works lost their recti-
linearity, and the axis became diagonal or spiral-based, the sense of la
durée contained in their poetic references, signified by titles, becomes
easier to read, as we become optically disorientated, participants in the
flux.
While Marcel Proust, deeply read in Bergson, had been a family friend
since Bazaine’s childhood, Gustave Rodrigues, author of Bergsonisme
et Moralité,11 had been his teacher. In the mid 1940s, Bazaine chose the
metaphor of the diver to signify his plunge into la durée: The artist, he
said, must ‘dive, head down, eyes shut, into the deepest, most sincere,
most truthful part of himself whatever the consequences of this attitude’
(see Tree and Diver, 1949).12 The diver becomes a visual metaphor for
interiorisation, a dissolution of categories, of elements, earth, space,
water – a gesture against the intellectual, a heralding of the intuitive. In
1949, a critic, ‘J. G. M’ (Jean-Guichard Meili), spoke of the painter’s
paradoxical desire to petrify a ‘universe always decaying within durée’,
when only the ‘glory of light and necessity of rhythm’ are emitted from
canvases with titles such as Easter Morning or Sea Breeze.13
With a nod to Paul Klee in 1948, Manessier’s works became
abstract, more ‘musical’ with black ‘notations’ rather than composi-
tional grids, and with titles such as The Saint Matthew Passion (1948)
(referring to Bach’s oratorio). The flavour of Bergson enters through
ideas of impregnation, resonance and memory, including recollections
of joyful singing, of orchestral textures and sonorities. Time and space
combine in Espace matinale (Morning space – with a hint of matins),
Landscape for Easter Day (1949), or even Study for Games in the Snow
(1951), where the eye searches – using memory as well as perception
– to make sense out of abstract shapes: red or orange triangles might
be the hoods of running children, a white globe might be a snowball,
following Bergson’s contention in Matter and Memory that ‘space is
no more without us than within us’.14 This is why the ‘lyrical abstrac-
Bergson Before Deleuze 83
Figure 5.2 Giulio-Carlo Argan, cover for Fautrier, Matière et mémoire, 1960.
Bergson Before Deleuze 85
his personal experience of Alpine landscapes) – and above all the fluid
and all-encompassing experience of Monet’s Nymphéas paintings with
Rodin sculptures in the newly opened Musée de l’Orangerie. Paul
Valéry’s often republished text, ‘Degas, Danse, Dessin’, is also a clue to
an evolution which embraced a Bergsonian fluidity in Paris, completely
escaping Cubism/Dada/Surrealism debates.18
Early work had been shown during the Occupation at the Parisian
Galerie René Drouin: Fautrier Œuvres (1915–1943) with a text by Jean
Paulhan. This ended with darker canvases, where Rembrandt haunts
Turner, and still lives intimate tragic slaughter. The poetry of Francis
Ponge, Fautrier’s most eloquent commentator, author of Le parti pris
des choses, published by Gallimard in 1942, was steeped in Bergson,
explicitly so in his preface, ‘Matière et mémoire’, for Jean Dubuffet’s
lithograph series, shown in 1945 at the Galerie André.19 Ponge’s
accompanying text of February 1945 treated the lithographic stone
itself as intermediary or witness, a keeper of secrets, plutôt comme
témoin, intermédiare ou depositaire. Inscriptions were made in time
as well as memory, for the lithographic stone has a past of palimpsests
which can rise to the surface. Dubuffet’s ferocious images: Bird Eaters,
Telephonist: Telephone Torture, Typist; Coffee Grinder use a faux-
ethnographic, caricatural viewpoint infused with a Célinian disgust and
satire. They operated precisely as a critique of humanism at this sullied
period where ‘Bergson’ as reference was indeed overdetermined. For,
despite the integrity of Emmanuel Mounier’s personnalisme embodied
in his review Esprit, bien-pensant Catholicism (with the complicity of
Vichy’s pomp and circumstance) offered spiritual structures and a con-
science-salving practice in a world where the Vatican never denounced
the deportation of the Jews, and where in Paris itself, the French popu-
lace preferred to ignore the actions of its own citizens and police, within
the new, collaborationist order and its aftermath.20
Thenceforward, however (among a certain elite), the catchphrase
matière et mémoire became, as I have argued, a useful net for the elusive
art informel, suggesting not only intuition, but a temporal way of
experiencing a picture, very different from Bergsonian interpretations
of Cubism and Futurism. Key words such as durée, mouvance, mouve-
ment abounded in critical vocabulary. Turning back to Fautrier’s draw-
ings, prior to the application of matière as paint, the multiple contours
and rubbed shadings of his female nudes offered multiple and potential
images: ‘A drawing by Fautrier is a body in movement. Each drawing
proposes a being, offers a crowd of images which our life perceives in
space and time: we’re speaking with Fautrier about a new dimension.’21
The now-celebrated Hostage series was shown at the Galerie René
86 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
Drouin just after the war, during the bloody period of vengeance killing
and the épuration purge of collaborators. Their reception, in particular
André Malraux’s notion of the heads inscribed with ‘hieroglyphs of
pain’, has been extensively discussed.22 Fautrier’s colours, powders and
crystals, applied almost cosmetically, created layers and patinas laid
over rough, impastoed surfaces, worked on the flat. An idea of time
became ‘inextricable from the implications of matière, a matière whose
rough surface created variable colours in its shadowed regions, whose
accretions had their own geological history, containing the history of
Fautrier’s creative and imaginative experience’.23
A time-based reading of the Hostages fills their mutilated surfaces
with horror: after the victim’s agonising apprehension of imminent
death, the works we perceive re-enact and commemorate that very
moment, ‘the reappropriation of matter by matter, pregnant with the
moment of Fautier’s own témoigage’ – for the artist had been a first-
hand witness of reprisal shootings and Nazi atrocities in the Vallée au
Loups, where the series was generated.24 Fautrier’s conception of time
and emotion was intimately related to the paintings’ rapid execution
and small scale: ‘According to him, today one can no longer charge a
large-scale work with emotional significance. Our apprehensive era has
no place of emotions of a longue durée . . .’25
This is Fautrier’s friend, the writer and editor Jean Paulhan (author
of L’art informel, un éloge, 1962) writing in 1964. How was Bergson
still topical as an interpretative scheme through which to perceive and
to ‘think’ Fautrier in the early 1960s ? Giulio-Carlo Argan’s Matière et
mémoire quotes no editions, presupposing a complete familiarity with
Bergson – in French and to hand: ‘Relations between philosophical and
artistic attitudes may be the result of direct, indirect and quite often
reciprocal influences, such as the convergence of two distinct research
developments on the same problem’ he says at the outset. ‘The exten-
sive interpretation of Bergson’s thought in contemporary criticism, and
particularly in Merleau-Ponty, is able to include and explain pertinent
facts in modern painting – and I have in mind above all Fautrier.’ Argan
refers to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception
with its philosophy of the embodied, perceiving cogito, moving in
a real world of time and space, as embodied in Fautrier’s otherness,
his antipathy towards dualism.26 The artist is positioned at the outset
and in the conclusion ‘against’ the rectilinear, conceptual world of
Piet Mondrian, who ‘reduces consciousness . . . to mere perception’.27
Addressing the question of Fautrier’s hautes pâtes (his ‘pastes’ whipped
up with a palette-knife), Argan insists upon the ‘stratified appearance’
of his matter, considered ‘avant la dissociation que l’idéalisme et le
Bergson Before Deleuze 87
* * *
Deleuze wrote his first text on Bergson in 1956 initially for Merleau-
Ponty.34 He would go on to define three great moments in philosophy,
linked to Hegel, Husserl and, not Bergson, but Sartre.35 His writing
on artist Gérard Fromanger, the white canvas/screen and the ‘image
in the dark’ relates to his work on cinema; passages that are reprised,
curiously in his work on Francis Bacon of 1981.36 He describes the
passage from informel artists Fautrier and Dubuffet to the Hungarian
painter Simon Hantaï, not in conjunction with work on Bergson, but
in Le Pli, Leibniz et le baroque (1988, The Fold, 1993). Here he traces
a concept of the baroque within a modernist lineage, extending from
Mallarmé through to Pierre Boulez’s Pli selon Pli, (‘Fold according
to Fold’, 1959–62); Fautrier and Dubuffet are also ‘modern Baroque
painters’ . . . theirs is an ‘informal’ where form is ‘folded, as existing
only as “mental landscape” in the soul or the mind’.37 Was Deleuze’s
acquaintance with the ‘mental landscape’ of these artists a product of
his bergsonisme ? Is his ‘fold’ in fact as close to Bergson’s Matière et
mémoire as it is to the baroque?
In contrast, for Deleuze, the painter Simon Hantaï’s work embodies
‘the Unfold’. Hantaï represents the generation of artists who take up the
baton from Matisse (the favourite subject for Bergsonian art historians)
and the young or not so young ‘Painters of Tradition’ like Manessier.38
He worked with folds – on the ground, tying his canvas, painting it (on
the tie-dye principle), then unfolding, opening up massive surfaces, on a
scale that extends to huge, all-over environments.39 And though Deleuze
does not explore these issues, Hantaï’s art is both essentially Catholic
(see the beautiful blue Mariale series of 1960–62) and deeply concerned
with memory: the memory of his mother’s apron always in his folded
canvas, fused with the memory of emigration.40 The folded works are
Bergson Before Deleuze 89
like a metonym of the brain, their ‘unfolds’ like starry bursts of light
(Georges Didi-Huberman coined the word étoilement) – alternatively
bursts of blankness or pain.41 Deleuze uses a still Bergson-impregnated
language to speak of Hantaï: ‘Tantôt faire vibrer la couleur dans les
replis de la matière, tantôt faire vibrer la lumière dans les plis d’une
surface materielle.’ This passage is followed in Deleuze épars, the tribute
to Deleuze produced ten years after his death, with Hantaï’s Pli (1981),
a ‘painting in three states – difference and repetition’.42 Deleuze épars
ends mysteriously, explosively, with an unknown, undated manuscript
of Deleuze’s lecture ‘Bergson’s Theory of Multiplicities’. It is presented
as a graphisme, a snapshot of the pensée-Deleuze, where the classic
opposition between quantitative and qualitative oppositions, extensive-
intensive, virtual-actual becomes a trace of the speed of the philoso-
pher’s thought, as he creates concepts. The manuscript is studded with
the sign ‘X’ for multiplicités, a Bergsonian-Deleuzian starburst on paper,
a counterpoint and complement to the manner of Hantaï.43
NOTES
1. The term informel and its usage by critic Michel Tapié from 1950–51
had certain connotations specific to artists in his orbit. Translating it as
‘informal’ and extending the term to the ‘Young Painters of the French
tradition’ before 1949 was inaccurate in my MA thesis ‘Informal paint-
ing in France, 1939–1949’, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1979, a source for
this article. However, the term was used increasingly loosely: see Enrico
Crispolti, L’Informale, storia e poetica, subtitled Abstract-Expressionism,
Abstraction-Lyrique, Action-Painting, Art Autre, Art Brut, Automatismo,
Gesto, Informale, New-Dada, Nuclearisme, Spazialismo, Tachisme
(Assisi/Rome: Beniamino Carucci Editore, 1971).
2. Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, eds, L’Informe: Mode d’emploi
(Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996); Formless, A User’s Guide (New
York: Zone Books, 1997), described (with no knowledge of the French
informe) as ‘this puritanical American project’ by Richard Williams,
‘Informe and Anti-Form’, in Andrew Hussey, ed., The Beast at Heaven’s
Gate, Georges Bataille and the Art of Transgression (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2006), p. 153.
3. See Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’étranger (March–August,
1941), reprised as Études Bergsoniennes, Hommage à Henri Bergson
1859–1941 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942). This lists
Bergson’s complete works in print: fifty-two editions of L’Évolution créa-
trice, thirty-two editions of Matière et mémoire and seven current critical
studies. See also Albert Béguin and Pierre Thévenaz, Hommage à Bergson,
Essais et témoignages recueills (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière,
August 1943), published under the auspices of Les Cahiers du Rhône. The
90 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
15. The series of paintings to which I refer are illustrated more or less sequen-
tially in the founding monograph, J. P. Hodin’s Manessier (Bath: Adams
and Dart, 1972) (Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes for the French version).
16. Pierre Restany, Fautrier, 30 années de figuration informelle suivi d’un
historique de René Drouin (Paris: Galerie Rive Droite, 1957); ‘Fautrier –
30 Jahre informelle Malerei’, Galerie 22, Dusseldorf, 1958. Yves Peyre,
Fautrier, ou les outrages de l’impossible (Paris: Éditions du Regard, 1990),
is the most substantial picture book including early work.
17. G-C. Argan, ‘Da Bergson a Fautrier’, in Aut-Aut, revista di filosofia e di
cultura, Vol. 55 (1960), pp. 10–23 (over 400 pages involving existential-
ism, phenomenology, structuralism, etc); Argan, Fautrier: ‘Matière et
mémoire’ (Milan: Apollinaire, 1960) in Italian, French, English, German.
18. Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin (Paris: Ambroise Vollard, 1936); further
discussion in Wilson, ‘Jean Fautrier, Violence and Dissolution, Dialogues
of the informel’, forthcoming.
19. Jean Dubuffet, Matière et mémoire, ou les lithographies à l’école (Matter
and memory or Lithographs at School), text by Francis Ponge (Paris:
Fernand Mourlot, 1944).
20. See W. D. Halls: ‘French Christians and the German Occupation’, in
Gerhard Hirschfeld and Patrick Marsh, eds, Collaboration in France,
Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation, 1940–1944 (Oxford,
New York, Munich: Berg Publications, 1988); and Michael Kelly, Pioneer
of the Catholic Revival: The Ideas and Influence of Emmanuel Mounier
(London: Sheed and Ward, 1979) (the extensive bibliography continues in
French to today).
21. ‘Un dessin chez Fautrier c’est un corps en mouvement. Chaque dessin
propose un être, donne une foule d’images que notre vie perçoit dans
l’espace et le temps : l’on parle à propos de Fautrier d’une nouvelle
dimension’, Daniel Wallard, ‘Fautrier, trois dessins’, Poésie 44, Vol. 17
(December 1943–February 1944), p. 29.
22. André Malraux, ‘Les Otages’, preface, Fautrier exhibition (Paris: Galerie
René Drouin, 1945).
23. Sarah Wilson, ‘Informal Painting 1939–49’, MA thesis, The Courtauld
Institute of Art, 1979, p. 18.
24. Fautrier (illegitimate and Jewish on his father’s side) fled to the sanato-
rium created in Chateaubriand’s villa in the Vallée au Loups, where he
overheard Nazi reprisal killings outside the boundary walls of the jardin à
l’anglaise. By day he painted. See Palma Bucarelli, Jean Fautrier, pittura e
materia (Milan, 1960) (unfootnoted).
25. ‘Selon lui, on ne peut plus de nos jours charger de signification émotive
une oeuvre de grande étendue. Notre époque trépidante ne laisse pas place
aux émotions de longue durée’, Jean Paulhan in ‘Franges pour un Dossier
Fautrier’, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1964, n.p.
26. Argan quotes Merleau-Ponty’s ‘comment on the Bergsonian vision of a
“cosmological consciousness” ’, as regards Fautrier’s ‘curving’ universe,
92 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
94
Bergson Among the Anarchists 95
THE UNIQUE
Stirner’s book is divided into two sections, the first part, ‘Man’, focuses
on the ideological means through which individuals are coerced by
social forces to deny their own self-interest; the second part, ‘I’, seeks
to define ‘owness’, the condition of freedom from such pernicious
influences. Throughout the book, Stirner repeatedly defines the self
as embodied, as motivated by irrational sensations of physical desire,
and as a temporal being undergoing constant change, both physical
and psychological. This ‘egoist’ self is described as ‘the unique one’, a
particular being unlike any other.13 Thus our ego is a ‘corporeal ego’
and self-realisation can only be achieved when the individual ‘has
fallen in love with his corporeal self and takes a pleasure in himself
as a living flesh-and-blood person’. Likewise, the unique one’s actions
and demeanour should be wholly concerned with ‘a personal and
egoistic interest, an interest not only of our spirit, for instance, but of
total satisfaction . . . a selfish interest’.14 In the closing paragraph of his
Bergson Among the Anarchists 97
A UNION OF EGOISTS
Colomer also deployed this Bergsonian paradigm to critique the anar-
chist-communism of Grave and Kropotkin. In ‘Art, Anarchy and the
Christian Soul’ Colomer mocked Grave and his colleagues for making
their anarchism synonymous with Christianity. ‘Christianism taught
human fraternity, altruism’, wrote Colomer; ‘anarchist-communists
today’ reportedly endorsed ‘this humanitarian and altruistic ideal, this
belief in a universal concord and in an egalitarian fraternity to which
the individual must devote himself’. Colomer dismisses such univer-
sals as ‘idols more tyrannical than those of Divinity and Royalty’,
for ‘Anarchy must be individual or it does not exist’.57 This stinging
rebuke was later expanded by Colomer into a Bergsonian critique of
communist notions of collectivity and of the communitarian groups
Grave and his colleagues wished to generate. Colomer claimed that
anarchist-communists called on individuals to subordinate their egos
to an abstract conception, whether in the guise of a utopian vision or
the a priori set of moral principles outlined above.58 Their concept of a
union premised on communist ideals thus constituted an a priori frame,
a set of rigid precepts to which individuals must adapt if they are to
gain membership in the group. Such ‘Causes’ or ‘theories’ are ‘only
empty frames’ and those who would subordinate themselves to such
abstractions are not true anarchists, for they have ‘never fathomed the
reason for their anarchism’, namely the cultivation of their ‘personal-
Bergson Among the Anarchists 105
NOTES
1. Biographical studies of Kropotkin include George Woodcock, Peter
Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990);
and Martin Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1976); on Colomer see Jean Maitron, Dictionnaire biographie du move-
ment ouvrier française, Vol. 23 (Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 1964–1997),
pp. 102–4; Chapter 5 of Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics
108 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
45. Henri Bergson, ‘The Soul and the Body’ (1912), in Mind-Energy, trans. H.
Wildon Carr (New York: Henry Holt, 1920).
46. Colomer, ‘M Bergson et les Jeunes Gens d’Aujourd’hui’, p. 1.
47. Ibid.
48. For an overview of those culture wars, see Antliff, Inventing Bergson;
and R. C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914
(Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988).
49. Colomer, ‘M Bergson et les Jeunes Gens d’Aujourd’hui’, p. 1.
50. Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 100, 106, 111.
51. Bergson, Laughter, pp. 158–62.
52. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 40.
53. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 275.
54. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 6, 23.
55. Henri Bergson, ‘The Problem of Personality’ (1914), in Henri Bergson,
Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), p. 1071.
56. Colomer, ‘Ma Liberté c’est ma beauté’, p. 1.
57. Colomer, ‘L’Art, l’anarchie, et l’ame Chrétienne’, pp. 1–2.
58. Colomer, ‘Illusions sociales et delusions scientist’, p. 2.
59. Colomer, ‘La Bande’, p. 2.
60. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 149–50.
61. Colomer, ‘La Bande’, p. 2.
62. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 268–9; Bergson, Introduction to
Metaphysics, pp. 9, 37.
63. Colomer, ‘La Science et l’Intuition’, p. 3.
64. See references to the Bergsonian and Stirner-inspired import of ‘joie de
vivre’ in Colomer, ‘L’Art, l’anarchie, et l’ame Chrétienne’, pp. 1–2, and
‘L’Illusions individualisèe’, p. 1. For Bergson’s discussion of the qualitative
and transformative import of joy, and its relation to aesthetic feeling, see
Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 10–15.
65. Colomer, ‘L’Art, l’anarchie, et l’ame Chrétienne’, pp. 1–2.
66. ‘Les Conférences de René Dessambre sur Delacroix’, in L’Action d’art
(10 September 1913), p. 4.
67. On Beauduin’s art theory, see Cyrena N. Pondrom, The Road From Paris:
French Influence on English Poetry 1900–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1974), pp. 280–1.
68. ‘Les Conférences de René Dessambre sur Delacroix’, p. 4.
69. For an analysis of this aspect of the Action d’art project, see Antliff,
‘Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism’.
70. See my discussion of Severini in Inventing Bergson, pp. 154–5, 164–6; for
an analysis of Severini’s dance-hall subjects as they relate to his own self-
fashioning, see Zoë Marie Jones, ‘A Transnational Bohemia: Dandyism
and the Dance in the Futurist Art of Gino Severini, 1906–1914’, PhD
Dissertation, Duke University, 2011.
71. André Colomer, ‘Les Poètes joues par les Poètes’, L’Action d’art (25
December 1913), p. 1. On the Action d’art group’s founding of a ‘Théâtre
Bergson Among the Anarchists 111
d’Action d’art’ in April 1913, and the later involvement of the Futurist
painters Severini and Ugo Giannattasio in that project, see Antliff,
‘Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism’, pp. 115–16.
72. Signac claimed that Neo-Impressionist painting possessed a ‘general
harmony and a moral harmony’, by virtue of its ‘rational composition’.
See Paul Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au neo-impressionisme (1889), ed.
Françoise Cachin (Paris: Hermann, 1964), p. 104; cited in Roslak, ‘The
Politics of Aesthetic Harmony’, p. 382.
73. See Mark Antliff, ‘Bad Anarchism: Aestheticized Mythmaking and
the Legacy of Georges Sorel Among the European Left’, Anarchist
Developments in Cultural Studies, No. 2 (2011), pp. 155–87; and Bruce
Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism,
Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). Bergson codified
his defence of democracy in Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932),
but his views had their genesis in his writings before and during the First
World War. For a succinct overview of Bergson’s correlation of democ-
racy with intuitive consciousness see Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy,
pp. 97–103; for an analysis of his early writings on the subject, see Antliff,
Inventing Bergson, pp. 104–5.
PART II
Unconditional Practice
7. The Matter of the Image:
Notes on Practice-Philosophy
FELICITY COLMAN
‘Just walk in a straight line’, says the male voice in the opening of the
film titled Swamp.1 But the body holding the camera cannot comply
with these instructions, and the creation of the art form is left for
the camera to determine, frame by frame, as it records the process of
the camera-body movement. As the body moves within the landscape
of soft golden grassed tracks, a pale blue high skyline and brown-
topped flax-coloured reed stems are forced out of view and the line-
forms created are crossed, barriers to movement that are anything but
straight. Perceptual conflict arises from these seemingly benign images.
What is it that we are seeing? What are these images? As we explore
in this chapter, the processes that created them are controlled actions,
productive of images that record and make forms, by the direction of
their practice.
Swamp is the title of a six-minute colour film with sound, made
by American artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in 1970–71.
Smithson is the directing voice, and Holt is the camera operator. Filmed
on location in reed- and grass-filled land in Bergen County, New Jersey,
USA, the film’s resonating energy comes from its movement. Shot on
16mm film, transferred to video, the images have the faded cool-toned
appearance of those technological processes. Holt is filming through
the wind-up Bolex camera, with Smithson’s voice giving the directions.
The images are given a topological history by the performance of the
voice of the artist, overlaying the sound images as they emerge, frame
by frame. Boots, straps, equipment, and grasses, reed stems, dirt, mud,
grind and crunch as jerky footsteps connect camera and place, moving
through the reed, directed by the voices of Holt and Smithson. Looking
through the Bolex viewfinder, Holt has camera vision.2 The camera
vision has an unsteady gait and uneven pace. ‘Just walk in a straight
line’, he says. ‘I think I am!’ she emphatically responds. The sound
115
116 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
thought, their use for mapping the creative practices that produce
images and variations of forms of images is limited. Against the dia-
grammatic Bergson, artists test creative processes that are generative of
image forms. Most artists are not searching for definitions of thought
processes that will describe, step by step, how they arrived at their
image; rather, they are concerned purely with image and form. The
creation of forms of art follows from an intention, an interface with
the medium – which I refer to as the technological platform – and a
measure of artistic intuition. Matter is connected to all the images,
animating material, producing images. In addition to the Bergsonian
vector body, we can add the technological body, the machinic body.
The vectorising body, for example the camera-body, provides a regis-
tration within a vectorial field of a temporal action. For the image, this
may be the point of connection with other images, creating a virtual
image, an invisible yet palpable image.
Bergson’s diagrams embody a philosophical turn away from the
‘false’ Platonisms performed by philosophical allusions to repre-
sentation.27 Diagrams offer a modality for the expression of the
duration and performance of a mode of subjectivity.28 For example,
Simon O’Sullivan’s engagement with the Bergsonian diagram of bodily
memory performs a mattering of a body in process, rendering the
strictures of the matter of subjectivity within what Bergson describes as
‘the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back . . .
[this is] the seat . . . of the sensori-motor phenomena’.29 However, one
of the problems of the critical energy of Bergson’s diagrams, and of his
metaphors of techno-facilitation that express the multiple dimensions
of temporality, are the restrictions and limitations placed upon the
concept in question, as O’Sullivan suggests. In rendering qualitative
points of matter as diagrammatic images, mapped onto what can be
understood as a mathematical vectorial field, the diagram, like lan-
guages of all kinds, produces an already determined, quantitative plane.
In other words, in mapping the effects and the affects of the action
of matter, the diagram performs a construction of another symbolic
plane, one that may or may not be adequate for the practices it seeks
to describe. Paul Harris reflects that the problem with Bergson’s quest
for articulation of a dynamic notion through a static language is a
general problem, but one that especially poses difficulties for Bergson’s
work on duration where, in his expression of concepts and in order to
situate duration, he must ‘transpose a virtual concept into an actualised
symbolic entity’.30 While the contained sensorial matter has an opening
towards the infinitely expanding upward facing cone it rests upon a
point of a determined subjectivity. However, Bergson does address this
The Matter of the Image 123
problem. While his concern is the development of life from matter, his
attention to the perceptual structuring of that matter provides a way to
critique the political forms that ‘we’ describe in the affects and intensi-
ties resonating from the mattered image.
The error of the diagram is precisely its singularity, its requirement
of subjective intentionality for devising and interpretation, and its
capacity to corral the infinite of matter into its enclosures. The diagram
can demonstrate a range of paradigmatic notions, making sense and
making nonsense of planes of knowledge. The implications of matter,
and of all images in terms of their utility (technological, biological,
political) are shaped by the aesthetic forms that position and/or realise
them – by whatever sensorially recognisable mode (aural, ocular,
carnal, mental, olfactory, psychological). With Bergson, we may test
out the visual – for example, the art form or the filmic image – where
matter is indeed shaped and given form by our creative design and
politically designated desires. The diagram can assist in the articulation
and representation of the after-affects of actions, but in its stasis it will
map out these moments of the now and the infinitely possible as unique
events. Bergson’s own philosophical method and contribution to the
language of analysis is not in question here. As Deleuze, Grosz, Guerlac,
Lawlor, Lefebvre and White, Mullarkey, Olkowski, Worms and others
have argued, Bergson’s philosophy has a relevance and usefulness as an
account of and stimulus to the thought of some of the core issues for
life, such as speculation on death, accounts of experiences of duration,
matter, and change – as articulated within philosophy.31 ‘Diagrammatic
Bergson’ connects his philosophy in a transversal move across to the
practice of ‘creative Bergson’. The two need to be approached with
a regard to the modernist and gendered philosophies of Bergson’s
contextual milieu, where the evolutionary recourse to paradigms of
‘nature’ is overtaken by the paradigms of technology, as later addressed
in Heidegger’s ‘question’.32 Bergson turns the image from a stable entity
into a fluid form, arguing that the real consists of transitional forms.33
It is the transition into a progressive form that Smithson argues against
in his practice, where the determination of a form cannot be stable,
and where one must begin to examine closely the surface illusions pro-
duced by the apparatus of practice (writing, filming, walking, talking),
before any notions about what the form is can be ascribed. Conversely,
Bergson’s model of cinematographic evolution is generated in an era
deeply entrenched in the modernist philosophical positions that were
excited by technological changes. Both Smithson and Bergson apply
masculinist positions to their appreciation of forms, as befitting their
respective eras of patriarchal power bases.34
124 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
form and not that? If we want to try and quantify movement, then
we should acknowledge what measurement systems are being used.
Creation is different from intention. The determination of creativity is
a fraught measurement. The factors of artistry, commerce and strategy
combine for different modes of creation. Does this artwork come about
through inspiration, intuition or economics? For viewers versed in
twenty-first-century mobile digital imagery, the images styled in this
film are not unfamiliar. But Swamp is not a random or accidental few
moments recorded while walking. Its sound images are the result of
the artists’ use of their technology of choice, and they are a deliberate
analogue recording in a chosen location. Usually exhibited in an art
gallery, although viewable online, the viewer must be patient, watch,
and wait for the film work to play out. Holt has made a number of
films on the site, a place that she has been visiting since childhood,
sometimes daily.38 She does not say much about the images, only ever
empirically describing her interest in the ‘psychology of the place’.39
But this is leading us to a cognitive definition of the philosophy of art
process.
Let us return to the resonance of the image in order to explore its
practice process from another position. We learn more about the place
of Swamp from Holt’s images and Smithson’s directions than from
her words. It is inadequate to describe this film as a ‘creative’ practice.
What counts as creativity can only ever be subjective. Instead, let us
focus on the technology and the epistemological practices at play here.
In pushing the camera-body, the artist is marking out a limit. This limit
is recognisable; fed by its own rhetoric. This is the epistemological
mode of disciplinary work. This type of practice is undeniably deter-
ministic. Each practice is fed by the variation enabled by the body of
the creative platform – the organic and the machinic, and the connected
bodies that draw on all available resources. Yet, there are processes
within the practice that we can single out for being generative of what
we recognise as processual elements that combine to form the mattered
images. These include:
NOTES
1. Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Swamp, 16mm, 6 mins (1971), avail-
able at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYPWcdty7DE and http://
www.robertsmithson.com/films/txt/swamp.html (accessed 28 March
2013).
2. Holt uses a Bolex H-16 M-5 16mm Camera (made in 1967) with a macro
lens that uses 100-foot rolls of film, which give two-and-a-half-minutes of
film time.
3. Robert Sullivan, The Meadowlands (1998) (New York: Anchor, 1999),
pp. 13–20.
The Matter of the Image 129
131
132 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
defined through walking, the emphasis is placed on the fluid and instan-
taneous, the porous and limitless. Borrowing from philosophy but also
from film and photography theory, the aim is to describe the act from
the creative and practical stance. Whilst the disjunction between the
photograph as object to be viewed and the photographer as subject
remains, there appears to be a moment wherein the field of subjectivity
between who operates what, becomes, for a short instant, ambiguous.
In this short interval, when taking the image, the shutter release acts as
a break from within the apparatus.
Agamben’s notion of immanence, through his reading of Deleuze,
is important in that it allows for an understanding of immanence as
potentiality. The notion of the photographic act is a singular act of
recording an image, framing a perspective from a multitude of possibili-
ties. By situating this act in a state of transference, through a state of
walking, the various coordinates of physical movement, potential fram-
ings, and the activity of the camera shutter or the technical intervention
are all open to the field of immanence. The border demarcated between
decision making and creative idea are subject to the transference of
bodily movements towards the camera that will then capture or store
this image.
Following the trajectory in Deleuze’s Immanence: A Life . . .
Agamben articulates immanence beyond the transcendental or the
idea of transcendental subjectivity. As a movement of the infinite the
photographic act can also be articulated further within the trajectory of
phenomenology and that of the transcendental field.3 To show oneself
as walking: in the archaic Ladino dialect of the Spanish Sephardi Jews,
to ‘stroll’ or to ‘take a walk’, is expressed by the verb pasearse. With
no literal translation readily available even in modern day Spanish
(an equivalent would be pasear or dar un paseo), the term presents an
action in which agent and patient are inextricably linked.
The importance of this verb survived thanks to a passage in Spinoza’s
Opera Posthuma.4 Returning to his mother tongue of the expelled
Sephardi Jews, Spinoza establishes the use of the transitive-intransitive
verb. In tracing the Jewish etymological roots of Spinoza’s term,
Agamben is interested in establishing the Judeo-Christian tradition
above the Greek logos. As such, the Judeo-Christian word speaks of a
life in a state of suspension, which cannot literally be attributed to any
subject alone.
The associations of photography, particularly as an artistic practice,
with phenomenology and the field of the transcendental have been
addressed not only in photography but also film theory. Situating
the act of photographing from the practitioners’ perspective is about
Duration and the Act of Photographing 133
PHOTOGRAPHING
Now it is early morning. I am in an olive grove, surrounded by trees.
The sun sends its rays clear and strong tracing the landscape in front
of me in rhythmic patterns. The delicate green-grey leaves of the tree
withhold and refract light. Light and shade; light as it dances into the
green of the plant; shade as the veins of the leaves on a close-up go
darker and the green thickens. Light contracted in the shade, with-held
in the nests of the branches; light stretching and reaching even through
the tiniest leaf, seeking to burst onto the other side, dancing in unortho-
dox reflected patterns. In some places already it is so strikingly bright,
almost completely white.
‘To photograph is to affect.’11 The words pierce me like rays of light
pierce photographic film. What if I want to open up the moment, this
one and unique photographic instant that envelops the very act of affec-
tion. Now. Keep moving. In order to perform this act, of photograph-
ing, a creative force, a power imbued with desire (puissance) drives me.
It is in and through this movement that the creative force remains open
and re-defines itself, just as I constantly redefine my walk. Viewpoints
and angles are shifting, through internal and external rhythms. There
is no fixed or vantage point, only the desire to photograph. Within
this act the camera extends my physical action and inserts itself into
the folds of vertigo and immanence. The activity of the camera shutter
becomes at one and the same instant a passive recording that is consti-
tuted through exposure of the film to light. Passive and active coincide
within the darkened space of the camera, yet the act of photographing
is not over; it has only started.
More light, less light. I grew impatient with my own medium.
To photograph was not enough. This feeling grew and grew until it
Duration and the Act of Photographing 135
reached the tips of the hands and led them to perform this act. The
destructive part of cutting and tearing through the film becomes a set of
another potentiality; the two sides of the film are further exposed to the
surrounding environment.
The photographic body begins its own existence, cuts away from
me. Separated, entering the realm of impersonal, it has the potential of
bearing resemblance to a reality. In the field where time and light are
composed and re-composed, the photograph has no identity; it only
resembles. The photographic frame in its active-reflexive state allows
this: hovering in a state of transference passive and active forces take
place at the same time. It contains the ability to perform both the act of
pointing back to the subjectivity of the photographer whilst taking up
a true form of resemblance from reality or the world.
Spinoza had written extensively on both the active-reflexive verbs
and passive-active verbs in his Hebrew Grammar (Compendium gram-
matices linguae hebraeae): ‘We express what an object experiences
from oneself (Hithpael).’12 With his use of the reflexive-active verb,
such as pasearse, Spinoza constitutes the immanence of being as the
infinite movement of potentiality and actuality as they coincide. The
action of walking, as a ‘walking of one-self’ enters a zone of vertigo or
immanence, where subject and object, transitive and intransitive, lose
meaning.13
Immanence. Again. I read immanence. But what is immanence? Is
there a possibility that there is another space, and how do we articulate
that? What is the role of the trees in all of this?
In this movement or action of the self, that is immanent only from
within, it is impossible to designate the subject (self or individual
being) against the object. In a movement that implies continuous vari-
ations, the self is affected and driven by a force of existence to enter
into a relationship with the object.14 In this relationship potentiality
and actuality enter a zone of indistinctness, not, however, becoming
inoperative but allowing for the state of transference to emerge. What
an object experiences from oneself allows for the paradoxical nature
of the photographic frame: in its temporality, it allows for time to be
experienced in itself and further, to be expressed as such. In this sense,
the temporality of the photograph does not claim to be autonomous,
but opens itself to the potentiality of showing time explicating, forming
correlates to a life, albeit a life suspended.
Life and being in Spinoza’s work come together as the eternal
movement of mind and body as they coincide. There is no hierarchy
in the causality between mind and body, between the actions (affects-
emotions) and the passions leading to affection. For ‘the body cannot
136 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
determine the mind to thinking, and the mind cannot determine the
body to motion, to rest, or to anything else (if there is anything else)’
(Ethics III, P2).15 It is exactly this taking up of a movement or action at
the same time that inserts the self into nature, rather than constituting it
as an external subject. The fissure of transference occurs as a reflexive-
active temporality inserted between living and doing: the moment,
when the body and mind are affected, becoming, resembling nature.
‘Nothing happens in Nature which can be attributed to any defect in
it, for Nature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting
are everywhere one and the same . . . So the way of understanding the
nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, namely,
through the universal laws and rules of Nature.’16 And the biggest
surprise is that ‘no one yet has determined what the body can do’.17
Spinoza’s ethology of the body does not privilege the idea of a certain
body over others: what is created is the relational state of bodies as they
encounter other bodies. A body can be a tree, it can be a living organ-
ism, it can again, in its relational state, be a mind or an idea and, of
course, a photograph. The ‘unknown of the body’18 further points to an
unconscious of the body in the sense that we know what happens to it
only through its perceptions and affections. This experience, however,
is not a privilege of the intellect alone. There are parts of the body and
mind that intermingle, come into existence and turn towards other
bodies, and this is a relational movement.
For Spinoza, it is nature that points to the cause of mutual imma-
nence. ‘The cause remains in itself in order to produce.’19 Experience
of the landscape is immanent to itself, and not to an individualised
subject. The act of photographing remains immanent to itself and this
is a movement made of light and time. Photographing is the being
with, being through and within that I am after. Out in the open, then.
As Michel Serres says, ‘I am no longer talking about myths or about
rites . . . they are all about light, about opening, about explication and
getting-out-in-the-open.’20 Out, in the open, then, to let light speak.
More light; less light. One has to know when to stop. I control the light.
I am in charge of the moment. I take the image and alter it at will. Yet
the image runs back to me; breaking away, it slides, tosses, crumbles,
reacts, breathes air and absorbs light.
To photograph is an event presenting itself from within the body (via
the body’s perceptions and affects) and in which one does not know,
strange as it is hovering somewhere between movement and stillness, if
the event is going to happen.22 Thus, what I look for is not the separa-
tion of being in this participatory process, because from the maker’s
point of view, taking and making the image are at one and the same
time inseparably linked. Therefore, photographing ascribes the par-
ticulars of the chance encounter, framing the one possibility amongst
others. The impact of an event lies in how it emerges; trapped in its
suspended state, the photograph may correlate point by point to the
tree it represents, but it doesn’t stop the tree from appearing in differ-
ent states. Immanence; not as something completely new that emerges,
but rather as a state of transference that demarcates the boundaries
between frame and potentiality.
Now it is late afternoon. The sun still shines brightly, but is starting
its descent slowly into the horizon, as if to remind me that it wants to
linger on throughout an August day. The shadows are very long, the
branches of trees stretch out like fingers of a hand loaded with numer-
ous jewellery. Underneath my feet the earth feels soft but dry and dusty.
The small road is a hastily laid out dual carriageway, dug out from the
earth between the fields.
The smell of sea-salt still follows me and this makes me aware that I
am now coming away from the sea and heading for the plain. I stop at
a peach tree beside the road to rub away the mosquitoes that are finding
their way onto my skin, despite the salt and dust. All around me are
vineyards and small olive groves. But I am headed for the one that is
further up the slope, a little further off from the main road.
The cicadas have gone to sleep now, no more loud noises. I am
making the walk swiftly. Up the slope, now following the path, I turn
into the grove. Now a bird flutters past – I disturbed it when I leant on
the peach tree. Looking up, the horizon has not cleared. It has been a
fairly hot day. My gaze suddenly points down, I see my feet, now quite
dirty. The grove is open without any fencing or means of enclosure
from the main road.
The soil of the grove is well looked after. The farmer is careful to
cultivate it so that no weeds or parasites grow around the olive trees. I
duck to avoid the branches. Olive trees don’t grow much higher than
a little above eight metres. A number of small leaves brush my arm; I
138 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
can feel their smooth side but their rough side tickles me. I reach out
and absent-mindedly tear out a couple of these deep green-grey leaves
to have in my hand.
Now, having passed the first trees in the carefully aligned rows, I
am in the grove and I see in front of me, slanted in the slope, all the
rows forming vertical and horizontal lines. Apart from the rustle of the
leaves, and some far away mixed noises, nothing. I find a space under
one of the trees; I kneel down to scratch the skin previously attacked
by the mosquitoes. Slight ruffle of the trees in the summer breeze. I
look upwards through the branches. The leaves come together and part
again in a condensed moment that only a photograph would be able to
capture through its distinct successions.
One layer, over the other, and another one again, keep going until
it forms a solid image. A movement implies jumps from one place to
the other; movement implies traversing a known space; what about
traversing the places in the mind where memories meet, come together
as a whole and then part again, anticipating the metaphorical play in
the movement of the leaves? I can be just as lost in this perfectly aligned
grove of olive trees, as I can be safe in the winding paths of my thoughts.
What is the condition for the beginning of the work of art? Can I shape
the creative act? Is it a matter of simple elements that combine or is it a
complex chain of chemical reactions that release the desire? The single
instant of a present opening up and folding back on itself was born out
of a practice (or exercise) during the act of photographing and walking
amongst these olive trees.
AFFECT – AFFECTION
As Deleuze notes, the terms ‘affectio’ and ‘affectus’ have posed signifi-
cant difficulty in readings of Spinoza’s Ethics, partly because they seem
to have both been translated as ‘affection’.23 This is a crucial distinction;
as Deleuze points out – when a philosopher employs two different words
he has reason to do so. It is even more important because it is through
this distinction that we can understand that an idea can be an affect
without yet having any representation or attribute attached to it. So the
distinction between the two interchangeable terms becomes crucial in
understanding the affirmative and non-reductionist elements of an idea.
Consciousness of the self is a transitive passage or mode of existence.
According to the degrees of affection encountered, each affect changes
the cause or attribute arisen to the self. Because of movement, affections
occur as a stratification of contractions at varying degrees from lesser
to greater passions. The illusion of a final cause to which the intellect
Duration and the Act of Photographing 139
DURÉE
In the open plane of the field, the practice of walking is a ‘via’ (Agamben’s
dia ti as noted earlier) that is formed not only of the conditions of
seeing, looking, taking or making; it is more importantly located on a
ground of experienced time and place. Reflected back through the lens
of the camera, the active state becomes a passive recording, an improb-
able, imperfect state: ‘the image captured and fixed on the photographic
plate is like the image fleetingly recorded on the retina of the eye. The
Duration and the Act of Photographing 141
DURATION AS TRANSFERENCE
To merge, to melt, to bring all possible divisions into one. Now the
yellow brushes with the orange, slightly dissolves into it. Now the
edge of the shadow is blurred, mixed with the contaminated colours.
Contaminated inside of the film the chemicals are quick to adapt. Two
different forces melt into one. Now the heat rises through my fingers
piercing the film. My heart beats faster; extending the pulse that reaches
the tips of my fingers. Seeking to dive into the image, the movement of
my hands breaks the frame. I cut; my small scissors lashing out every-
where around the places where the image is still securely fastened. I cut;
I am surprised at what my own hands can do. Guided by the cuts, the
fingers reach the sliced edges; the act is now blind; the fingers seek an
opening to reach the image. Now; a little bit more before the chemicals
will join forever. The sticky substance gives way. I pull; the two pieces
of film are detached from each other.
To go back to the act of photographing, via the enframing ability
of the body. There is only the constant movement of the body as it
addresses (its own) image. Thus the virtual (pure memory) actualises
in a set of sensations (perceptions and affects) and movements (matter
or materiality of the body), that appear to be unified, yet they, too, are
144 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
further refracted and are just a mere set of potentialities of the virtual.
It is the illusion of a stop or arrest that the photographic act plays out.
The passage from infinite to finite, then, is an occurrence described
via a feeling or passion that ceases to become exclusively affective as
it progressively attaches itself, through action or actualisation, to a
heightened state of experience.
Photographing is transference of a state rather than of a thing. Not
permanence, but perhaps change anew, otherwise there would be no
notion of durée. It is merely the illusion of arrest or of a stop that
gives a body its potential action. Because the action of the body will
be towards sensations and affects, so again towards the indivisible:
abstract space is divisible, the act of a body in space is indivisible.
Duration is indivisible and the only possibility of rest is a contraction
towards a heightened degree of affect. Photographing becomes the
activation of infinite degrees of passive forces of the imagination as they
begin to form a separate and third entity: the photograph. Separated
but not autonomous; the demarcation of the frame remains only as
permeable border, limitless entity. ‘The index, an incontrovertible fact,
a material trace that can be left without human intervention, is a prop-
erty of the camera machine and the chemical impact of light on film.’48
The collapse of the boundaries occurs precisely because the mechanical
action of the shutter release sets forth the process of potentially creating
an image that should resemble reality.
FRAME AS TRANSFERENCE
The photographs’ temporality belongs to a time of pasearse. This
temporality arises from within: active and passive at the same time.
Something, though, has to exist in order to be photographed; it cannot
simply be a vision arising from pure imagination. The ‘emanation of the
real’ appears as inherent from within, obeying its own mode of exist-
ence. As Roland Barthes clearly states in Camera Lucida, ‘the photo-
graph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which
was there, proceed radiations that ultimately touch me, who am here.’49
Following a path via the lens and converging onto a light-receptive sensi-
tive surface, an image of the tree is recorded. At the same time, this tree
is now expressing, via successive extensions, an event of my personal
and unrepeatable unique memory, endowed to me through my move-
ment. The passage from idea to image is translated via the passive-active
recording of the camera shutter. Passive and active coincide, opening up
their infinite possibilities to the conditions of durée and immanence. It is
at this very moment or instant of the shutter release that the illusion of
Duration and the Act of Photographing 145
NOTES
1. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, trans. M. Joughin (New
York: Zone Books, 1990), pp. 104–5.
2. Paul Klee, ‘Taking a Line for a Walk’, in S. Maghani, A. Piper and
146 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
J. Simons, eds, Images: A Reader (London and Los Angeles: Sage, 2006),
pp. 16–21.
3. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Absolute Immanence’, in Potentialities: Collected
Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp.
220–39; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard (London:
Vintage, 2000), p. 77.
4. Agamben, ‘Absolute Immanence’, pp. 34–5.
5. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 77.
6. Laura Mulvey, ‘The Index and the Uncanny: Life and Death in the
Photograph’, in Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books,
2006), pp. 54–66.
7. Ibid., p. 63.
8. Agamben, ‘Absolute Immanence’, p. 235.
9. See ibid., p. 233.
10. See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the
Eyes of Its Pupils’, Diacritics, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1983), pp. 2–20; Geoffrey
Batchen, ‘Desiring Production’, in G. Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing,
Photography, History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 3–24.
11. Yve Lomax, Writing the Image: An Adventure with Art and Theory
(London, New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000), p. 79.
12. Baruch Spinoza, Hebrew Grammar, ed. M. J. Bloom (London: Vision
Press, 1962), p. 102.
13. Agamben, ‘Absolute Immanence’, pp. 234–5.
14. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Lecture transcripts on Spinoza’s concept of Affect’ (1978),
Cours Vincennes, ed. E. Deleuze and J. Deleuze, available at http://
www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html (accessed 22 January 2012);
Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, pp. 146–7.
15. Benedict Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader. The Ethics and Other Works, ed.
E. Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 155.
16. Ibid., p. 153.
17. Ibid., p. 155.
18. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 19.
19. Ibid., p. 91.
20. Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations, trans. F. McCarren
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 79–81.
21. Ibid., p. 77.
22. Yve Lomax, Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of
Art, Nature and Time (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp.
5–7.
23. Deleuze, ‘Lecture transcripts on Spinoza’s concept of Affect’, n.p.
24. See Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 20.
25. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, p. 93.
26. Ibid., pp. 171–8.
27. See Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 47.
Duration and the Act of Photographing 147
148
Duration and Rhetorical Movement 149
Figure 9.1 James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl
(1862), oil on canvas, 213 x 107.9 cm, Harris Whittemore Collection, National
Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Art,
Washington.
manely refers to ‘the generation of 1863’ and this year is always being
generated, by 1678, 1996, 1907, 1753 as recently as 2012.1 As John
House writes in the exhibition catalogue, Inspiring Impressionism,
artists such as Whistler ‘were part of a wholesale reassessment of
150 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
Figure 9.2 Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, oil on canvas, 1863,
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski.
the history of painting that challenged academic values’ and that the
relation of this past to their own work was not external influence but
‘creative adaptation and transformation’.2 The realisation of a virtual
possibility through writing and its differing speeds suggests a rhetorical
surface with movements through liquid flows and solid definition. The
writing of art history is not simply outside the finished painting. What
ways of writing can describe a dialogue with a past which is very much
already part of art history?
Many months have passed since the initial paper from which this
chapter is drawn was written while on a trip to Bujumbura. Quite by
coincidence I have returned to Burundi at the same time as editing and
extending the paper for publication. Over the course of the interven-
ing months, subsequent reading has transformed that first paper’s
potential. This mixture of past possibility and the present realisation
are characterised as much by accident and constraint as the actual
succeeding possibility. Such concentration and expansion of this first
paper was one of its constitutive aspects, however, as part of an analy-
sis of Bergson’s philosophy of duration and rhetorical movement. The
continuity and loss between writing one paper and the other is not
Duration and Rhetorical Movement 151
The White Girl there is an art historical memory that contains several
potential objects which art history can make more or less real, demon-
strating the discipline’s creative and transformative potential. Bergson’s
analogy of the sugar dissolving in a glass of water develops two
mutually dependent movements, the one within the relatively closed
system of the glass containing sugar and water and the other, open,
unpredictable system including the impatience of the waiting subject
and the dissolving process within the glass.14 Duration is never static, it
is defined by movement. Writing can be seen to have its own duration,
with an elastic relationship between purity and hybridity. Its referent
is potentially transformed by the movement of writing, especially in so
far as this writing contains different planes of possibility and actuality.
The process of writing, therefore, becomes very important, as part of
writing’s creative evolution. Equally, the mode of critique cannot be
analytic and static, but accelerates or slows the speeds of writing, paint-
ing and thinking through its material manifestation. Such a mode of
criticism might more adequately demonstrate the relationship between
possibility and realisation that makes up each work, and would neces-
sarily reflect upon the human, historical, linguistic processes through
which it is actualised. Indeed the work of art history can be considered
an evolution of this process. This work is not exhausted, but energetic.
The task of immaterial representation is false then, in so far as it tries to
fix or capture a subject in process. Alternative, experimental practices
of writing seem to be called for.
In Quoting Caravaggio, Mieke Bal argues for more anachronistic
art history and suggests transformations in art writing as a result.15
In doing so, Bal follows Michael Ann Holly’s argument in her book
Past Looking, in which the chapter ‘Writing Leonardo Backwards’
is particularly suggestive for more experimental writing processes
in art history.16 Holly’s argument suggests the critical aspects of the
art objects that art history writes about, as she demonstrates that
Leonardo’s work limits the free play of writing. More recently she
argues that art history is a melancholic science, writing around an unre-
coverable object.17 Melancholic writing’s circumlocutory movements,
in which language expresses its inadequacy to represent its referent, are
suggestive for writing animated with a life of its own.18 Rather than a
melancholic emphasis on unrecoverable loss, the linguistic encounters
of moving along a rhetorical surface linked with the time of writing can
also be seen as a creative process of historical discovery, recovery, crea-
tion. In the history of Luncheon on the Grass and The White Girl these
movements are ways of realising different, shifting presences. In other
words virtual possibilities are realised through the actual movement of
Duration and Rhetorical Movement 155
the past in the present, through the play between rhetorical movement
and figural definition.
According to Bergson, words dupe the understanding into mechani-
cal, intellectual illusion. Individual, isolated words often have multiple
and metonymic definitions, suggesting that duration can be produced
through duplication: ‘But as we look closely, we shall see that the
explanation is merely verbal, that we are again the dupes of words, and
that the trick of the solution consists in taking the term “adaptation”
in two entirely different senses at the same time.’19 Linguistic accident
(such as the homony between ‘past’ and ‘passed’, or the many defini-
tions of the word ‘present’) might be multiplied to create a shifting
rhetorical surface made from the material components of language.
Stylistic performance would become just as significant as grasping a
referent external to the text, with devices such as visual punning and
anagram combining with argumentative exposition. Along with the
time of writing, the sediment of different uses and abuses of words
concentrates itself in the contemporary written word. The words we are
writing are, therefore, not our own, but intertextual hybrids. Equally,
the contemporaneity of writing is actually a mixture of different times.
The notion of duration in writing thus works against the expressive,
intentional subject grounded within a locatable historical or contempo-
rary context. Instead, it works towards an historical mixture realised in
the present writing’s movement across the page: ‘But, of the road which
was going to be travelled, the human mind could have nothing to say,
for the road has been created pari passu with the act of travelling over
it, being nothing but the direction of this act itself.’20 Bergson’s work
suggests that writing can produce its criticism immanently, although it
can not attain the smoothness of duration. The entropic, individuated
words move in inverse relation with their creative, common potential in
which their reality can be said to make itself in a reality that is unmak-
ing itself. The way of writing comes out of the process of writing, ‘the
act of writing, then, unfolds in a scene that is neither determined nor
indeterminate, but which, not quite in Bergson’s sense, moves’.21 There
are material limits to the immanent production of writing, but the
mobile rhetorical surface created by writing can work together with
discontinuous, delimiting representational language.
Whether Bergson’s imaginative prose offers a way out from the lin-
guistic dead ends his works identify can be seen as an open question. In
the essay on laughter he suggests that words’ rhythmical arrangement
can create a self-organised life, expressive of the virtual possibility of
discontinuous language.22 This rhythmical arrangement is connected
with the inert and material aspects of words, which prevent language
156 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
of dry ink in the nip of the nib. The pen, with multiple histories accu-
mulated within it, moves incessantly forwards, at each point in contact
with the page, tracing its histories in concentrated, concrete words.
Bergson explicitly analogises language when introducing his diagram:
‘It is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown
back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon
me and upon which I act – the seat, in a word, of the sensori-motor phe-
nomena.’26 Bergson’s scepticism regarding language as a stick-in-the-
mud, immobilising durational movement, might be elided by reading
his passages, a word he emphasises, as a description of a movement
of writing, a movement which contains, acts and is acted upon by the
past’s entirety, although the habitual or concrete words actualise only
the most useful memories, but also a language which never crystallises,
which, like the hyphen in Bergson’s sentence, is in transformational
process between the concrete (the word hyphen) and movements
through connecting links and places of passage (the character hyphen).
Bergson develops his hyphen further in Creative Evolution, clarifying
a movement in which the past intertwines with the present: ‘Evolution
implies a real persistence of the past in the present, a duration which is,
as it were, a hyphen, a connecting link.’27 The hyphen might be seen as
duration’s grammatical marker, joining the space between words. The
hyphen is horizontal whereas the authorial voice is vertical (at least in
the English), suggesting the importance of movement through figural
definition. John Mullarkey writes suggestively that, ‘In mimicking the
processes of reality, the metaphorical imagery Bergson employs can be
partly real itself, because every reality is a type of process or style of
movement. As Gilles Deleuze would say, metaphor equals metamor-
phosis.’28 Not only might Bergson’s metaphors be ‘partly real’, reality
might be partly metamorphoric. Language has its movements through
material limits in the metamorphic process of writing, which suggest a
linguistic agency different to the intentional expression through a trans-
parent medium that characterises most art historical writing, including
the greater part of this chapter. Intentional, expressive agency is formed
through the movement of becoming from the virtual to the actual in
the material object, which can be seen as an alternating flow between
resistant text and liquid thought. Art historical writing on Luncheon
on the Grass and The White Girl might realise possible histories, but
it is affected by the objects whose histories it writes. The art object’s
potentially disruptive presence in writing is an important caveat against
what some see as the irresponsible play of postmodernism. Luncheon
on the Grass and The White Girl can be seen as paintings which view
writing through the intensity of the passage between possibility and
158 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
art historical reality. The cone’s contact with the page or painting
suggests a leap into the past that demonstrates the inadequacy of an
active/passive agency when writing on a text or picture.29 When this
leap fails, it results in peals of laughter. The surging of the past object
into the present text affects writing’s metamorphic and metaphorical
limits through its material resistance. Equally the act of writing is acted
upon by written acts, hence the inhibition of rhetorical flow by mate-
rial figure. Mullarkey goes on to suggest that Bergson’s metaphorical
description of duration is actually precise because it instantiates what
it expresses, further suggesting the immanent expression of duration in
writing through the duration of language itself.30 The material limita-
tions on free play are produced in play; when these limits are stressed
the text cries a complaint. Linguistic play is reflexive about the way it
instantiates its expression through puns, anagrams, catachresis, mis-
spellings, etc. Such writing is often repressed in art history however. For
art history to be scientific then, it must write in so called literary ways
which reflect upon language’s discontinuities and creation of flows.
Jorge Luis Borges famously suggested that we cannot read the same
Zeno, Han Yu, Kierkegaard or Browning after we have read Kafka,
thereby arguing that the present alters the past.31 This chapter can claim
Bergson as an unacknowledged precursor. Bergson in his ‘Introduction
1’, subtitled ‘Retrograde Movement of the True Growth of Truth’, in
the collection of essays translated into English in 1946 as The Creative
Mind, reminds us that romanticism alters classical literature, thereby
retroactively creating its prefiguration and explanation of itself by
its precursors. Borges writes similarly to his near namesake Bergson,
who in this introduction works through his previous body of work, at
times nearly reproducing sentences from earlier works, modified by his
thought’s subsequent development, putting just this retroactive expla-
nation into play throughout his previous texts:
than there exists, in the cloud floating by, the amusing design that the artist
perceives in shaping to his fancy the amorphous mass. Romanticism worked
retroactively on classicism as the artist’s design worked on the cloud.
Retroactively it created its own prefiguration in the past and an explanation
of itself by its predecessors.32
George Burke, or Boy George or whatever, was not content with our moder-
nity or with our past or with the promise of our future, unless it included all
the wealth of our cultural present, including the present of all our pasts: our
modernity is all that we have been, all of it. This is our second history, and
Burgos, or Borja, or Berkeley has written its introduction.35
Bergson might easily be let slip in the middle of this punning action
(Jorge Luis Borges’ essay collection Other Inquisitions indexes Bergson
with his middle name, Henri Louis Bergson), as this chapter moves into
a brief analysis of a passage from Terra Nostra in order to see how
Fuentes’s fictional rewriting might describe the movements Bergson
impossibly desires from language. Raymond Williams describes Terra
Nostra as the centrepiece in Fuentes’s voluminous fictional cycle. As we
are told by Emir Rodríguez-Monegal, its historical setting was gener-
ated from Alberto Gironella’s parodic repainting of Velázquez.36 Brian
McHale claims Terra Nostra as an anthology of postmodern literary
devices: characters’ identities merge, appear in several historical times;
historical characters are synthesised and turn up anachronistically; past,
present and future spiral into unstable relationships.37 Terra Nostra is
too amorphous to reduce its differing temporal structures synoptically,
but it is possible to suggest that the movement of Fuentes’ writing
silently describes the history Bergson denied to language. In a passage
that mixes memory and reality with painting and writing, painter-priest
Brother Julián reportedly promises to tell the chronicler’s story to pass
time while he finishes painting:
Feverish and ill, he wrote through the night; reduced to a tiny space in the
depths of the prow in the reserve brigantine, he heard the groaning of the
ship’s skeleton, with utmost difficulty he held the inkwell upon one knee
and the paper upon the other; the motion of the little stub of candle swing-
ing back and forth before his eyes made him seasick, but he persisted in his
wakeful task.38
Sentences that twist through many clauses are typical in Terra Nostra.
While Brother Julián’s telling of the chronicler’s story is narrated, the
friar is finishing a painting and the chronicler, squatting in a galley
ship, is silently writing a story, which is later revealed to be Kafka’s
Metamorphosis. Fuentes draws attention repeatedly to the movement
of the chronicler’s pen, emphasising its embodied process as the chroni-
cler mutters another’s advisory words. Intertwining voices with shifting
identities speaking from various times are not only inscribed in the nar-
ration’s spiralling sentences but also in the movement of the painter’s
brush and chronicler’s pen which are rapidly trying to close off their
narratives. Text and paint blend throughout Terra Nostra as when, in
the same chapter, Julián removes heretical papers from the chronicler’s
Duration and Rhetorical Movement 161
cubicle, which the painting from Orvieto (which in Fuentes work can be
linked with the Signorelli murals through which Freud describes para-
praxis in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life) had earlier related to
a bewildered El Señor.39 Terra Nostra’s language is metamorphic and
condenses histories into its creative words. The chronicler writing the
Metamorphosis, which is ‘an exemplary novel that had everything and
nothing to do with what he was thinking’, founds the novel on every-
thing which can be said with words but also on nothing, the silence
behind words, their metamorphic movement, which continues with the
written words, like both Friar Julián’s brush and the chronicler’s pen.40
Like Bergson, Fuentes writes passages between the imaginary and
the real and is committed to non-linear temporalities. While Bergson
regards language sceptically, however, Fuentes’s language continually
moves across his pages, not only describing but creating its histories.
Rather than a stable historical referent, Bergson’s analysis of writing
suggests a dynamic, rhythmic approach to reading. A way that is not
only static and replicable, but also flowing and creative. That is to say,
it is intuitive and intellectual, with fluid transition between intellect and
intuition. Art historical writing, however, tends to be intellectual and
individual rather than intuitive and common, although through the
movement of writing intuition and common sense might be generated.
The way this road is created is through travelling over it, suggesting
that the argument towards more literary experimentation in art history
is most coherent through operative writing.
As Bergson’s analysis of language’s discontinuity suggests, an authori-
tative art historical text cannot describe the mixed temporality and
differing speeds of becoming because it is falsely successive and suc-
cessful, because language is effaced and its movements crystallised into
static definition. Bergson’s writing suggests negatively and Fuentes’s
affirmatively that rhetorical movement can silently describe histories by
foregrounding a transformative language that does not stop at an objec-
tive meaning. While writing about Bergsonian duration and then Terra
Nostra’s spiralling language, the description of the unstable and shared
histories in The White Girl and Luncheon on the Grass might have
endured and rendered duration, and the few words mentioned at the
beginning – complicating the idea that this is an innocent introduction
– can be changed and are changing this resource to recourse – repeat-
edly to the movement of the chronicler’s pen – whether wither it is
only after the reputable laughter tabled had withered ‘the women had
stopped stifling their merriment with their handkerchiefs, and the men,
completely unrestrained, were holding their sides and roaring with
laughter’41 which met Whistler-Manet that we can find unstable what
162 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
NOTES
1. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
2. John House, ‘Painting Without a Subject?’, in Ann Dumas, ed., Inspiring
Impressionism: The Impressionists and the Art of the Past (Denver: exh.
cat. Denver Art Museum, 2008), p. 206.
3. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George
Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1910), p. 127.
4. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Basingstoke:
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), p. 3.
5. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 13.
6. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans.
Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd,
1913).
Duration and Rhetorical Movement 163
165
166 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
‘to do’, and so forth), then Bergson allows a kind of thinking outside
these parameters. In understanding the mechanisms of actualisation of
the virtual – I will go further into these terms in a moment – it becomes
possible to think of, and perform, different actualisations. In an echo of
Spinoza there is then an implicit ethics here, since Bergson’s philosophy
addresses the question of what our bodies, understood as actualising
machines, are capable.5
My commentary, which attends specifically to Chapter 3 of Matter
and Memory, ‘On the Survival of Images’, coheres around one diagram
– taken, initially, from Bergson’s book – that will be built up in the
following two sections of this chapter. The final part of the chapter
extends this diagram through a brief commentary on another of
Bergson’s major works, The Two Sources of Religion and Morality.
Here, I am especially interested in the mystic as the one who accesses/
actualises this pure past/virtuality, and ‘utilises’ it in the production of
a specifically different kind of subjectivity.
in, and reacting to, the world. In both accounts we are, simply put,
extended bodies amongst other extended bodies on a plane of matter.
Indeed, this sensori-motor schema – as Bergson calls it – constitutes our
experience of material reality.10 Again, the similarities with Spinoza,
and especially with Deleuze’s reading of the latter, are remarkable,
for what Bergson is saying here is that our capacities to affect, and be
affected by, the world constitute our world in so far as it is a world of
matter.
Our body, understood as this ‘system of sensation and movements’,
occupies the very centre of this material world since the latter is
necessarily arranged around it. The body, in Bergson’s terms, is then
a ‘special image’, situated amongst other images, that constitutes a
‘section of the universal becoming’ of reality itself.11 ‘It is . . . the place
of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a
connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things
upon which I act – the seat, in a word, of the sensori-motor phenom-
ena.’12 This ‘sectioning’ of reality is determined by perception, and the
interests of the organism that determine the latter. The body might then
be thought as a kind of hole in the universe: that which does not inter-
est me, and thus that which is un-sensed, passes through me and carries
on in that network of contact and communication in which all things
participate. It is ‘I’ that disrupts this contact and communication of the
universe. ‘I’ am the interruption. ‘I’, as a centre of action, am a partial
obstacle in the endless becoming of the universe.
It is also in this sense that the universe is bigger than any conscious-
ness we, or any other organism, might have of it. Indeed, we are like a
series of shutters closed against different aspects of this universe. This is
not, however, to posit an unbridgeable gap between my own world and
a universe ‘beyond’, for my own world is capable of being expanded
(or indeed narrowed).13 In passing we might note here Bergson’s side-
stepping of the Cartesian trap that posits an ‘I’ and then a world. For
Bergson – and it is this that gives his writings their speculative character
– it is always the world, or universe, that comes first and then the ‘I’ as
a subtraction from it.
The plane of matter that we perceive, or indeed can perceive (given
our particular psycho-physical structure as it is), might then be doubled
by another plane that contains all that has no interest for us as we are.
A kind of spectral (and dark) double to our own universe. The plane is
infinite in character in both cases. ‘Our’ plane of matter – our world as
it were – carries on indefinitely: there are always further objects behind
the present ones. We might call this first plane the system of objects.
It constitutes our ‘natural’ world, but also our manufactured one: a
A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation 169
We might diagram this plane of matter, with an ‘I’ at the centre and
the circles of the future arranged concentrically around the latter as in
Figure 10.1.
But this plane, and its spectral double, is not everything, for things
also exist that do not have an interest for me and thus that do not
produce sensations (which is to say are not in my consciousness), but
that are also not, as it were, on the plane of matter at all. The past
is precisely this: inextensive and powerless, it still exists albeit in an
unconscious state. As Bergson remarks: ‘We must make up our minds
to it: sensation is, in its essence, extended and localized; it is a source of
movement. Pure memory, being inextensive and powerless, does not in
any degree share the nature of sensation.’16
This past might become useful and thus conscious, but when it does
so it ceases to belong to this realm of the past and becomes present
sensation. The actualisation of a virtual memory – recollection – is
precisely this becoming-present of the past. Just as we do not doubt the
existence of objects that we do not perceive, as long as they are objects
that have been perceived or are at some point capable of being perceived
(such objects being merely outside of our immediate concern), likewise
Bergson suggests that our past exists – or subsists – even though it is
170 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
Figure 10.3 Bergson’s cone of memory (from ‘On the Survival of Images’,
Matter and Memory).
not fully present to consciousness at that time. Again, the past has not
ceased to exist in this sense but has only ceased to be of interest to us.
In passing we might posit the existence of a further spectral double
to this past that is unconscious, a spectral past that contains the pasts
of other consciousnesses – pasts that are not mine, and that perhaps are
not even human. I will return to this towards the end of my chapter, but
we might note here, again, that it is intuition, and not intelligence, that
allows access to these other non-human durations.
Just as in Deleuze’s Spinozist definition of a tick (with its small world
determined by just three affects), or, indeed, in Leibniz’s definition of a
monad, any given world is constituted against a dark background, the
‘immensity of the forest’ that holds no interest for the organism in ques-
A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation 171
we might say, that constitutes our difference from the ‘lower animals’
and brings about a certain freedom of action (in so far as we are no
longer tied to immediate reactivity). This is not a difference set in stone,
for it might be the case that such a hesitation can be produced in other
‘higher animals’ and certainly that it might be produced in life forms to
come, or in AI for that matter.
In any case this gap, which can be further opened up by slowness
or stillness (or indeed other ‘strategies’ of non-communication), might
in itself allow a certain freedom from the call of the plane of matter
with its attendant temporality (as we have seen, the plane of matter, or
system of objects, implies a certain temporality – of past, present, future
– and of time that passes between these). Again, this is the actualisation
of an involuntary memory, via a gap in experience, that has no utility
for the present.34 In an echo of Spinoza, this gap is then a passageway
of sorts ‘out’ of the plane of matter that determines a certain reality. It
is an access point, or portal, to the infinite as that which is within time,
but also outside it.
In passing we might note that the content of this Bergsonian cone
can also be understood in Lacanian terms as the Real in so far as it
‘contains’ everything not part of the sensori-motor schema (habit),
which here can be understood – in its most expanded sense – as the
realm of the symbolic (language, as it is typically employed, consisting
of a certain adaptation, however complex this might be, to the concerns
of the plane of matter). In Badiou’s terms we might understand the
‘content’ of the cone as ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ in that it ‘contains’
everything not counted in the situation/world as it is (within ‘consistent
multiplicity’, located on the plane of matter and within the system of
already counted objects). It also explains why certain elements of the
past are counted – simply that they ‘aid’ the present situation. Here
history is always a history of a given ‘present’, counted by and for
that ‘present’. We might note the importance of circumnavigating this
particular ‘history of the present’ and of excavating a different history,
what we might call a ‘present of history’.35 Indeed, the present in this
latter sense is produced, in part, by the reactivation of past present
moments. 36
We return to Figure 10.3 and add, following Bergson, more detail to
obtain Figure 10.4.
And, once more, Bergson’s comments:
between the sensori-motor mechanisms figured by the point S and the
totality of the memories disposed in AB there is room . . . for a thousand
repetitions of our psychical life, figured as many sections A!B!, A"B", etc.,
of the same cone. We tend to scatter ourselves over AB in the measure that
176 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
we detach ourselves from our sensory and motor state to live in the life of
dreams; we tend to concentrate ourselves in S in the measure that we attach
ourselves more firmly to the present reality, responding by motor reaction
to sensory stimulation.37
The realm of memory is then fractal in nature. Depending on the level
‘accessed’, less or more detail comes into focus, or, in Bergson’s terms:
‘So a nebulous mass, seen through more and more powerful telescopes
reveals itself into an ever greater number of stars.’38 Indeed, as I briefly
intimated above, on the ‘highest’ level all recollections are shared. This
A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation 177
is also the most dispersed level, where every memory – every virtuality
– has its own place complete in every detail. The content of the cone is a
veritable universe of galaxies, each a complex constellation of different
durations.
Depending on its location towards the summit or the base this repeti-
tion is smaller or larger, but, in each case, is a ‘complete representation
of the past’.39 The lowest point of the cone, point S, ‘corresponds to the
greatest possible simplification of our mental life’.40 At AB, on the other
hand, we ‘go from the psychical state which is merely “acted,” to that
which is exclusively “dreamed” ’.41 Here, in a ‘consciousness detached
from action’ there is no particular reason why any given memory will
actualise itself – no reason that we would ‘dwell upon one part of the
past rather than another’.42 ‘Everything happens, then, as though our
recollections were repeated an infinite number of times in these many
possible reductions of our past life.’43 We have here an explanation of
the different ‘tones’ of mental life – slices through the cone – a whole
temporal mapping as yet unexplored.
Just as there are relations of similarity, that is to say, ‘different
planes, infinite in number’ of memory,44 so there are relations of conti-
guity on these planes:
The nearer we come to action, for instance, the more contiguity tends to
approximate to similarity and to be distinguished from a mere relation of
chronological succession . . . On the contrary, the more we detach ourselves
from action, real or possible, the more association by contiguity tends
merely to reproduce the consecutive images of our past life.45
In this sense there is a whole complex ecology of memories – or what
Deleuze calls ‘regions of being’ – inhabiting each plane,46 with ‘always
some dominant memories, shining points round which others form a
vague nebulosity. These shining points are multiplied in the degree to
which our memory expands.’47
We might note again that we have here a different theory of history
(indeed, we could imagine Bergson writing a philosophy of history using
the cone as diagram). At different degrees of detail different moments/
events will be foregrounded and take on relevance and importance.
We also have something stranger with the idea that there might be dif-
ferent ‘personal’ histories – composed of intensive states – ‘contained’
within the cone. Is this not Klossowski’s Nietzsche, who in the eternal
return passes through different intensive states – precisely as an oscilla-
tion between base and apex – that he ‘identifies’ as different historical
characters? This also has some bearing on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea
of subjectivity as processual (and the subject itself as a residuum) as it
appears in Anti-Oedipus.48
178 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
THE MYSTIC
It is only at its topmost point that the cone fits into matter; as soon as we
leave the apex, we enter into a new realm. What is it? Let us call it the spirit,
or again, if you will, let us refer to the soul, but in that case bear in mind that
we are remoulding language and getting the word to encompass a series of
experiences instead of an arbitrary definition. This experimental searching
will suggest the possibility and even probability of the survival of the soul
. . . Let us betake ourselves to the higher plane: we shall find an experience
of another type: mystic intuition. And this is presumably a participation in
the divine essence.49
The plane of matter, or what I have also been calling the system of
objects, is also the realm of ‘static religion’ as it is laid out in Bergson’s
The Two Sources of Religion and Morality. Here habit includes intelli-
gence and the myth-making function as modes of utilitarian adaptation
to the world. Indeed, just as instinct meets its terminal point in insects
and the hive, so intelligence is also a terminal point that finds its ends
in man. But Bergson’s ‘vital impulse’, in man at least, finds ways of
extending itself beyond this intelligence. Indeed, it is from the plane of
matter – and through the especially complex organisms that inhabit it –
that the journey of life continues. This is precisely intuition in Bergson’s
sense, an intuition that operates contra intelligence and that allows an
access to that which lies ‘beyond’ the plane of matter, rediscovering, as
Deleuze puts it ‘all the levels, all the degrees of expansion (détente) and
contraction that coexist in the virtual Whole’.50
Indeed, the ‘creative emotion’ of The Two Sources is ‘precisely a
cosmic Memory, that actualizes all the levels at the same time, that
liberates man from the plane (plan) or the level that is proper to him, in
order to make him a creator, adequate to the whole movement of crea-
tion’.51 Again, it is a certain hesitancy that allows for this journey. The
gap between stimulus and response is here an ‘interval’ that is opened
up within the habits/rituals and intelligence of society (a specifically
disinterested interval as it were). Just as the body, at a certain degree
of complexity, allows for this hesitancy, so the myth-making func-
tion itself (or, static religion) puts the conditions in place for a further
gap – again, a ‘stopping of the world’ – and a concomitant movement
‘beyond’ itself. This is Bergson’s definition of ‘dynamic religion’.
Deleuze notes that ‘This liberation, this embodiment of cosmic
memory in creative emotions, undoubtedly only takes place in privi-
leged souls.’52 Indeed, it is the mystic that embodies the latter, and, in
A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation 179
NOTES
1. A version of this essay was published as the section ‘Bergson’s plane of
matter and the cone of memory’ in Chapter 1, ‘From Joy to the Gap: the
Accessing of the Infinite by the Finite (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson)’, of my
monograph On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-
Infinite Relation (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), pp. 38–57.
2. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer
(New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 71.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New
York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 28.
4. Ibid.
5. Has capitalism now colonised this virtual? My own take on this is that
certain technologies, for example the mapping of the human genome, do
indeed partake of a kind of future-within-the-present, but that in fact this
is a logic of the possible, tied as it is to a certain linear temporality and to
already existing knowledges and procedures.
A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation 183
189
190 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
faculty of acting. When they look at a thing, they see it for itself, and
not for themselves’.13 There are disputable aspects to this statement,
but for the moment it is worth noting that it inherently favours visual
art, and this despite Bergson’s having recognised the particular affinity
music must have for a theory of duration: ‘Let us listen to a melody,
allowing ourselves to be lulled by it: do we not have a clear perception
of a movement that is not attached to a mobile [object], of a change
without anything changing?’14 He even adds that, if we have a tendency
to break the continuity into ‘a juxtaposition of distinct notes’, this
is partly because ‘our auditory perception has acquired the habit of
absorbing visual images’.15 It would appear that Bergson singles out
(representational) painting because it might be seen to override or undo
the work of objectification on its own ground, so to speak. Conversely,
we might think in this context of the quasi-phenomenological concept
of the ‘tournant’ of experience he formulated in Matter and Memory:
there, he proposes a project to ‘seek experience at its source, or rather
above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our
utility, it becomes properly human experience’.16 Might we see a Corot
or a Turner – or any painter comparably representing the flux of the
visible – as situating themselves precisely at such a tournant?
I will leave this question in suspense temporarily, and turn to Henry
who, unlike Bergson, devoted an entire book to painting. There,
through an exposition and analysis of the ideas (far more than the
work) of Kandinsky, he arrives at the conclusion that all paintings are
fundamentally abstract (though as we shall see, he perhaps actually
means all ‘true’ paintings, since he also holds that not even all abstract
paintings are really abstract, in the sense he intends). The closest he
comes to approximating Bergson’s remarks on painting is in the fol-
lowing passage:
Painting is a counter-perception. What this means is that this chain of refer-
ential significations by which the ordinary reality of the world is constituted
– this continual movement of going beyond the sensible appearances to a
monotonous and stereotypical background of practical objects – is sharply
interrupted by the artist’s regard. By setting aside this practical background,
colours and forms cease to depict the object and to be lost in it. They them-
selves have and are seen to have their own value; they become pure pictorial
forms.17
associated the lesson he learnt from Monet’s haystacks ‘with the one
he learnt from Niels Bohr: physical reality has no substance and in
some way no reality; quanta of energy move in leaps without crossing
through it’.23 Yet in what immediately follows, it becomes clear that
he has evoked this quasi-Bergsonian vision only in order to deny its
relevance for understanding abstract painting; or, in order to outbid it
by postulating, beyond the mere disintegration of the visible, a more
radical invisibility. Abstract painting, he argues, did not grow out of ‘a
crisis of objectivity that is more or less analogous on the aesthetic plane
to what it was in the scientific domain, and in particular the physics of
the period. It does not come from a reworking of perceptual representa-
tion, either . . .’ ‘Abstract’, he insists, bears no relation whatever to the
world, but rather ‘refers to the life that is embraced in the night of its
radical subjectivity, where there is no light or world.’24
The question at once arises, how can ‘pure pictorial forms’ them-
selves be considered as other than objective, in the sense of being there
before our eyes? Henry’s answer to such a question – whose importance
he of course recognises – entails reliance upon Kandinsky’s definition of
the purely pictorial, in his theory of elements. The elements in question,
according to Henry’s summation, are ‘the pure components of all paint-
ings: colour and graphic forms. Kandinsky’s thesis is that every element
is double: both external and internal.’ This is not dualism, for ‘the
element is not double; it is one and the same element . . . divided in such
a way as to be both the external appearance of colour . . . and internally
a specific affective tonality.’25 It is a single reality with two aspects: ‘this
tonality on the one side and this colour or design on the other’.26 There
is thus a relation of strict dependence between the sensible and the felt,
the latter – the affective tonality in its ‘internal revelation’ – constituting
‘the true reality and being’ of the former.27 Henry distils his account of
Kandinsky’s theory of expression from the painter’s Point and Line to
Plane,28 published in the Bauhaus years; but the principle is established
already in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, where Kandinsky writes:
‘Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is a piano
with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key
or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.’29 Bergson, as it
happens, employs a similar metaphor in Matter and Memory, where he
writes that each organ of sense ‘is like an immense keyboard, on which
the external object executes at once its harmony of a thousand notes,
thus calling forth . . . a great multitude of elementary sensations cor-
responding to all the points of the sensory centre that are concerned’.
Even were object or sense organ to be suppressed, ‘the same strings
are there, ready to vibrate in the same way’.30 The context is of course
Painting the Invisible: Bergson and Henry 195
different, since Bergson is concerned here neither with art nor with
affective response, but is seeking to account for auditory images and
psychic deafness; the point to emphasise in any case is that the meta-
phor as Bergson employs it is tied to perception, whereas with Henry/
Kandinsky it is not.
Similarly, time-consciousness, in Henry’s account of it, has no com-
merce with what he terms the ek-stasis, external reality. It might seem
at first sight that aspects of his critique of Husserl’s theory of internal
time-consciousness betray affinities with Bergson: he faults Husserl for
reducing impressional self-givenness to ‘a pure ideality in the intentional
presentation of the now’;31 in thus criticising ‘the Husserlian conception
of the phenomenological flow as a continuum of homogenous parts’,32
he appears to echo Bergson’s critique of spatialised, homogenous time.
However, Henry’s identification of lived time with auto-affection and,
thereby, life itself, is not reconcilable with la durée, which Bergson con-
ceives as being universally pervasive as well as proper to consciousness.
Henry’s rejection of all conceptions of externality would probably have
extended to Bergson’s ‘images’ (the constituents of the universe), and
he would not have countenanced the latter’s ideas concerning differing
‘tensions’ of duration, tied as these are, theoretically, to the work of
perception.
This returns us to Bergson and durational consciousness, since he can
offer, with respect to painting, as Henry seemingly does not or cannot,
a model for understanding attention as action. Henry’s Kandinskian
theory is very good for telling me how I respond to particular kinds
of paintings, namely, those having a quality of revelatory immediacy;
attention in such cases is quasi-devotional, as when a bell sounds in a
religious service: attend! Yet painting may also, surely, draw us in more
gradually, and the work that goes on within attention may be complex.
Introspection will not necessarily help here: my reflective act will simply
supplant the spontaneous one, and I cannot necessarily reliably recall
or reconstruct what went on in my act of looking – precisely to the
degree that the act itself was sufficiently rapt and absorbed.
We need a theory, therefore, and one lies to hand in Bergson’s
highly developed and differentiated model of attention. That the act of
attending to painting is durational – necessarily so, precisely in being
an action – and that paintings may structurally reflect or embody this
durée, has long been acknowledged: art historians and philosophers,
from Bergson’s near-contemporary Alois Riegl to Michael Fried,
Svetlana Alpers, Michael Podro, Richard Wollheim, Wolfgang Kemp
and others, nearer the present, have developed concepts defining what
Wollheim termed ‘pictorial seeing’.33 None, so far as I know, make
196 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
of movement one must use deliberate artifice, the painter observes that
in Greek sculpture ‘a man hurling a discus will be caught at the moment
in which he gathers his strength. Or at least, if he is shown in the most
strained and precarious position implied by his action, the sculptor will
have epitomised and condensed it [l’aura résumée dans un raccourci] so
that equilibrium is re-established, thereby suggesting the idea of dura-
tion [la durée].’37
Matisse’s concluding point is critical: ‘Movement is in itself unstable
and is not suited to something durable like a statue, unless the artist
is aware of the entire action of which he represents only a moment.’38
Here he acknowledges, as Bergson does not, the artist’s essential
problem with respect to the evocation of movement: the painted or
sculpted object is inherently immobile. Like Velàzquez or Vermeer
before him, Matisse realised that it is the very stillness of the medium
that needs to be not merely respected but affirmed, in rendering the
continuity of la durée. Admittedly, the latter part of his sentence, con-
cerning the summation of an entire action, restates an academic precept
concerning history painting and the depiction of a climactic moment;
the first part, however, contains a new insight, more largely implied in
the assonance between duration and the durable: between l’idée de la
durée and quelque chose de durable.39 The implied principle is that the
unchanging stillness of the work may come to embody the continuity of
movement and change.
If this was indeed a new insight, it was one long implicit in post-
renaissance tradition, with respect to the representation of the visible.
While the renaissance ideal of mimetic perfection might be realised with
clarity and consistency in the depiction of buildings and piazzas, mobile
phenomena presented a different problem. It took a Leonardo to tackle
so intractable a subject as flowing and turbulent water – that archetype
of temporality – and the solution he arrived at takes us to a very familiar
tournant of experience, in which we cannot avoid surprising ourselves
in the moment of our perceiving. In a famous sheet of drawings in the
Windsor Castle collection showing studies of water passing an obstacle
and falling into a pool, Leonardo’s pen converts the complexities of
fluid motion into distinct, rhythmically curving lines.40 In spatialising
the stream, he renders it into coiling strands, like plaited hair. He was
thus the first to depict a perceptual object universal in human experi-
ence: as I watch the flowing or changing thing, it assumes an almost
solid form in which its continuity lies, as it were, suspended. This could
stand as epitomising what Bergson writes of as ‘the dawn of human
experience’, wherein fluxuous immediacy separates into graspable
objects.41 ‘The change is everywhere, but inward [en profondeur]; we
198 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
localize it here and there, but outwardly [en surface]; thus we constitute
bodies which are both stable as to their qualities and mobile as to their
positions, a mere change of place summing up in itself, to our eyes, the
universal transformation.’42 Painters, however, reversed this process,
by creating visual objects that opened en profondeur into durational
change, in their engagement of the viewer’s attention. Like Leonardo,
they noticed that certain kinds of phenomena particularly lent them-
selves to such treatment, namely those in which the object constituted
in perception retains the traces of continuity: milk pouring from a jug,
for example, in Vermeer, or a wheel in motion, in Velàzquez.43 These
are quasi-objects in that they may not be picked up or grasped as imple-
ments, and they do not undergo any change of position, for change
passes through them.
Bergson might aptly have reflected on painting, since the project
of representing the visible demanded of painters that they set in play
precisely that tension between the spatial and the durational, the objec-
tive and the vécu, that he reflected on himself, most concertedly in
Matter and Memory. Furthermore, the painter’s task of causing paint
to become image epitomised as perhaps no other art could the interpen-
etration of spirit and matter. One object in particular involved painters
in attending to the tournant of experience, and so at once recording
and undoing those perceptually stabilising processes Bergson was to
describe; that object was the human individual, the portrait subject.
Bergson – to recall – proposed that we take the human body to be less
a spatially distinct entity than ‘a section of the universal becoming’;44
how might a painter set about representing such an entity? We might,
of course, think at once of Boccioni, or perhaps of a Cubist portrait,
yet it is in more evidently representational portraiture that we may find
painters confronting a problem that the Cubists and Futurists bypassed,
namely, that of the duality of the other, as both a subject and an objec-
tive presence. I see the other both as a physical entity, whose features
I may readily distinguish from those of any other individual, and also
as an agent, another subject. Hence, when I recognise even a slight
acquaintance at a distance in a crowd, comportment and action may be
at least as important factors as physiognomy, and these we may think
of as durational.
Accordingly, painters, from the time of the renaissance, balanced
two aspects of portraiture: the rendering, respectively, of likeness and
of comportment (or, as is often said, of character, or personality, or
living presence). While the former might be attained straightforwardly,
if with difficulty, the latter – the durational aspect of embodiment,
as ‘a section of the universal becoming’ – clearly might not. Painters
Painting the Invisible: Bergson and Henry 199
wealth and position are visually subordinate, and Rembrandt has ren-
dered them in broad terms, as the vague dark setting for the hands and
face, which are framed by white cuffs and a ruff, and it is here that his
work with the brush is at its most concentrated.
His strokes and touches of paint necessarily become most intri-
cate, his colour most varied, in face and hands, but his work in the
202 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
NOTES
1. Recent studies of Henry in English include John Mullarkey, ‘Henry and
the Affects of Actual Immanence’, in John Mullarkey, Post-Continental
Philosophy: An Outline (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 48–82; Dan
Zahavi, ‘Subjectivity and Immanence in Michel Henry’, in A. Grøn, I.
Damgaard, S. Overgaard, eds, Subjectivity and Transcendence (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2007), pp. 133–47; Jeffrey Hanson and Michael R.
Kelly, eds, Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought (London: Continuum,
2012).
2. See E. G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950), pp. 351–83, 600–11.
3. Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, trans. Scott Davidson
(London: Continuum, 2009), translation of Voir l’invisible (1988).
4. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics,
trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Dover, 2007). For discussions
of Bergson with reference to painting, see Joyce Medina, Cézanne and
Modernism: the Poetics of Painting (New York: SUNY Press, 1995); and
Mark Antliff, ‘The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse’,
in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1999), pp. 184–208.
5. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 86.
6. Ibid., p. 112.
7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The
Primacy of Perception, trans. Carleton Dallery, ed. James Edie (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 167.
8. Michel Henry, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps. Essai sur
l’ontologie biranienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965),
p. 264.
9. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer
(New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 151. I do not, of course, mean to imply
that Merleau-Ponty considered the body as a container, for he clearly did
not, though it is the case that the problem of expunging the subject-object
dialectic from his thought occupied him in his last writings.
10. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 122.
11. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 36; translation modified.
12. Ibid., p. 210.
13. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 114.
14. Ibid., p. 123.
15. Ibid.
16. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 184.
17. Henry, Seeing the Invisible, p. 28.
18. Menzel, Das Balkonzimmer, 1845, Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie.
19. This is a long-standing topic in criticism; for a discussion of the relevant
issues, see Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London: Thames &
204 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
Hudson, 1987), pp. 43–100: Chapter II, ‘What the Spectator Sees’, and
Michael Podro, Depiction (London: Yale University Press, 1998).
20. Henry, Seeing the Invisible, pp. 14–15.
21. Ibid., pp. 126–32.
22. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Painting
in Particular [1912], trans. Michael Sadleir, revised by F. Goffing,
M. Harrison and F. Ostertag (New York: George Wittenborn, 1947), p.
45.
23. Henry, Seeing the Invisible, p. 15.
24. Ibid., p. 16.
25. Ibid., p. 35.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., p. 36.
28. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane: Contribution to the Analysis
of the Pictorial Elements (1926), trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla
Rebay (New York: Guggenheim, 1947).
29. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 45.
30. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 128–9. Charlotte de Mille makes this
connection in her introduction to Charlotte de Mille, ed., Music and
Modernism (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), p. 3.
31. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 26.
32. Ibid., p. 32.
33. See for example, Alois Riegl, The Group Portrait of Holland (1902),
intro. Wolfgang Kemp, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los
Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999); Michael Fried, Absorption and
Theatricality: Image and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago and
London: Chicago University Press, 1988); Svetlana Alpers, The Art of
Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (London: Penguin,
1989); Podro, Depiction; Wollheim, Painting as an Art.
34. Henri Matisse, ‘Notes of a Painter’ (1908), trans. Jack D. Flam, in Matisse
on Art, ed., trans. Jack D. Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), pp. 32–40.
35. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 208–9.
36. Matisse, ‘Notes of a Painter’, p. 36.
37. Ibid., p. 37; the French is quoted from the text in Henri Matisse, Écrits
et propos sur l’art, ed. Dominique Fourcade (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp.
45–6.
38. Ibid.
39. Matisse, ‘Notes of a Painter’, p. 46.
40. Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Water Passing Obstacles and Falling Into a
Pool, pen and ink drawing, c. 1508–9, Windsor. Reproduced in Leonardo
da Vinci (London, Hayward Gallery, exhibition catalogue, 1989), p. 129.
41. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 185.
42. Ibid., p. 209.
Painting the Invisible: Bergson and Henry 205
The habitual labor of thought is easy and can be prolonged at will. Intuition
is arduous and cannot last . . . and intuition, like all thought, finally becomes
lodged in concepts such as duration, qualitative or heterogeneous multiplic-
ity, unconsciousness – even differentiation.1
Thus a multiplicity of different systems will arise, as many systems as there
are external viewpoints on the reality one is examining, or as there are larger
circles in which to enclose it. The simple concepts, therefore, not only have
the disadvantage of dividing the concrete unity of the object into so many
symbolical expressions; they also divide philosophy into distinct schools,
each of which takes its seat, chooses its counters, and begins with the others
a game that will never end.2
Philosophy is an affair of movements and becomings, of lines and vectors,
of reversals and displacements – it mostly uses transcendence, which comes
(in a circular although broken manner) from experience toward the ground,
from being toward Being, from Being toward the Affair of thought.3
My problem is that of the re-orientation of thought.4
206
Bergson as Non-Philosopher (of) Art 207
at the outset (‘body’ means x, ‘mind’ mean y, and so on) ensures the
desired outcome by sheer dint of reproducing the terms of the problem
with near-synonyms in the supposed solution.14 Bergson thinks of this
perpetual self-fulfillment as a definitional matter. All the reductionist
philosophies, both naturalist and anti-naturalist – be they based on
physics, biology, or cognition; or culture, language, or spirit – are
impossible to believe because they are irrefutable on their own terms,
their absoluteness being based on the unassailable purity of a conven-
tionally given name. With that unalloyed purity comes a certain steril-
ity, as Bergson writes:
NON-STANDARD ORIENTATIONS
Laruelle also practises this same ‘weak’ thought of indefinition in his
own non-standard philosophy. Where philosophy tends to totalise
what counts as thought under a current (or its current) definition,
Laruelle will refuse to define it. Any one form of thought entertained
(the thought of photography outlined in his Photo-Fiction, A Non-
Standard Aesthetics, for example) is always hypothetical – a scientific
experiment (hypothesis) in what counts as thought and philosophy. As
such, thought in general is unconditioned (by philosophy) because it is
‘occasioned’ (as he puts it) by the Real, and non-philosophy is ‘a type
of experience or Real which escapes auto-positioning, which is not a
circle of the Real and thought, a One which does not unify but which
remains in-One, a Real which is immanent (to) itself rather than to a
form of thought, to a “logic”, etc’.21 Yet the ‘it’ here is not a new, supe-
rior ‘philosophy of thought’ but simply all the thoughts (of philosophy,
but also of the sciences, the arts, politics and so on) re-envisioned as
material, as parts of the Real rather than as about the Real. As Laruelle
himself puts it: ‘I absolutely do not overturn philosophy; were I claim-
ing to overthrow it, it would be a pointless gesture, a zero-sum game.
The entire enterprise would then be contradictory.’22 Laruelle simply
reverses the relationship of philosophy to the Real so that philosophy
is no longer about the Real, but comes from the Real. Philosophy does
not ‘access’ the Real, correctly (truth) or incorrectly (falsity). Such a
Real ‘integration’ of thought (to use Bergsonian terminology now as
well) could, of course, be taken up as just one more totalising ‘theory of
everything’, including philosophy – more of the same ‘game’, zero-sum
Bergson as Non-Philosopher (of) Art 213
‘direction’ of our thought about things (whatever that might mean), but
that metaphysical thinking somehow belongs to the object too.
Such a reversal is not a simple inversion, however, in that it reverses
what are themselves the habitual reversals of normal thought and
perception, which always throw the ‘possible’ (be it in terms of logical
conditions or principles of sufficiency) behind the actual Real and into
the past or virtual.27 Bergson believes, therefore, that the reversal called
for here is actually a kind of restoration, being the reversal of a prior
inversion whereby the order of the possible and the Real was inverted
by ‘normal’ intellect that installs possibilities as ontologically prior to
reality, when, for Bergson, the possible only emerges after the Real and
out of it. No less than having the negation of a negative to make a posi-
tive, this reversion of a reversal actually creates more change, a progress
over a regress, or a reverse mutation.
PHILOSOPHICAL BEHAVIOURS
Laruelle’s own most recent experiment in non-standard philosophy –
one that belongs to photography – is a case in point. Fighting against
the philosophical aesthetics that over-determines photography from
without – ‘the Principle of Sufficient Photography or photo-centrism’,
as he calls it – Laruelle gestures us towards a philosophy that is pho-
tography’s own:28
I call this gesture of creation non-aesthetics or non-standard aesthetics, its
standard form being philosophical and photo-fiction being one of its non-
standard objects . . . This project seems absurd. It will no longer be absurd
if we accept changing our level of reference for defining the real. Instead of
treating the photo and the concept of the photo as two given and describable
physical, intellectual objects or representations, we treat them as completely
different than given objects closed in on themselves.29
The ‘absurdity’ of his project is what will strike analytical, that is,
standard, philosophical thinking:30 it cannot abide not being allowed a
transcendence over the (photographic) object, hence, ‘it takes quite an
effort to render the photographic act immanent, to interiorize it, and to
render it real without external determinism or realism’. And this new
‘effort’ is also a matter of re-orientation and posture: ‘what we must
really consider as an indivisible whole is the “photographic posture,”
a conjugation of optical, perceptive, and chemical properties that can
only be fully understood as those entangled, non-local properties of a
generic matrix’.31 Inventing philosophy, for Laruelle as for Bergson,
takes tremendous, real effort.
To recap where we have got to so far: these philosophical reversals
Bergson as Non-Philosopher (of) Art 215
in Bergson and Laruelle are not simply new names for the old, and even
‘eternal’ concepts of philosophy, but genuinely new positions as regards
what those (or any) concepts are and from where they originate:
reversed, re-oriented, or re-directed, as a posture or behaviour that is
often achieved only after real effort. And thereby, this behaviour opens
up the ‘possibility’, or rather, performs the gesture, that philosophical
thoughts are not the privilege of philosophers. They need not belong
exclusively to what we currently deem ‘proper philosophy’ (whatever
that is supposed to mean at any one moment, which is nearly always
different depending on the perspective adopted). They can also belong
to other disciplines, experiences, and practices – cinema and photogra-
phy included – and even to other beings – non-humans included.
Returning to Bergson’s own earlier criticism of question-begging
intellectualist philosophy, the following renowned passage from
Creative Evolution sets out more fully his use of ‘action’ as the best way
of breaking through, not only the circularity of ready-made thought,
but also a circularity that was attributed to his own methodology:
But this method has against it the most inveterate habits of the mind. It at
once suggests the idea of a vicious circle. In vain, we shall be told, you claim
to go beyond intelligence: how can you do that except by intelligence? All
that is clear in your consciousness is intelligence. You are inside your own
thought; you cannot get out of it. Say, if you like, that the intellect is capable
of progress, that it will see more and more clearly into a greater and greater
number of things; but do not speak of engendering it, for it is with your
intellect itself that you would have to do the work. The objection presents
itself naturally to the mind. But the same reasoning would prove also the
impossibility of acquiring any new habit. It is of the essence of reasoning to
shut us up in the circle of the given. But action breaks the circle . . . So, in
theory, there is a kind of absurdity in trying to know otherwise than by intel-
ligence; but if the risk be frankly accepted, action will perhaps cut the knot
that reasoning has tied and will not unloose. Besides, the risk will appear
to grow less, the more our point of view is adopted. We have shown that
intellect has detached itself from a vastly wider reality, but that there has
never been a clean cut between the two; all around conceptual thought there
remains an indistinct fringe which recalls its origin . . . So you may speculate
as intelligently as you will on the mechanism of intelligence; you will never,
by this method, succeed in going beyond it. You may get something more
complex, but not something higher nor even something different. You must
take things by storm: you must thrust intelligence outside itself by an act of
will. So the vicious circle is only apparent. It is, on the contrary, real, we
think, in every other method of philosophy.32
Yet Bergsonism does not do without concepts altogether (especially
given its close relationship with the sciences that produce so many con-
cepts for it to work with). Rather, an immanent metaphysics mobilises
them: ‘concepts are indispensible to it’, Bergson writes,
216 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
for all the other sciences ordinarily work with concepts, and metaphysics
cannot get along without the other sciences. But it is strictly itself only when
it goes beyond the concept, or at least when it frees itself of the inflexible and
ready-made concepts and creates others very different from those we usually
handle, I mean flexible, mobile, almost fluid representations.33
Of course, the notion of a ‘ready-made’ has various cultural associa-
tions, both ‘high’, in Duchampian aesthetics for instance, and ‘low’,
in the ready-made fashions that are contrasted with the unique shapes
of haute couture. In some passages of Bergson’s texts, the connection
between thought and tailoring is even more evident, the ‘ready-made’
– tout fait – having something of the ‘ready to wear’ – prêt-à-
porter – about it (see Figure 12.1): according to Bergson, the classic
designs of philosophical attire, of fashionable behaviour, need to be
undone:
Our reason, incorrigibly presumptuous, imagines itself possessed, by right
of birth or by right of conquest, innate or acquired, of all the essential ele-
ments of the knowledge of truth. Even where it confesses that it does not
know the object presented to it, it believes that its ignorance consists only in
not knowing which one of its time-honored categories suits the new object.
In what drawer, ready to open, shall we put it? In what garment, already
cut out, shall we clothe it? Is it this, or that, or the other thing? And ‘this,’
and ‘that,’ and ‘the other thing’ are always something already conceived,
already known. The idea that for a new object we might have to create a
new concept, perhaps a new method of thinking, is deeply repugnant to
us. The history of philosophy is there, however, and shows us the eternal
conflict of systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the
ready-made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity of making
to measure.34
Figure 12.1 ‘M. Bergson a Promis de Venir’, Robe de dîner de Worth, Plate 30
from Gazette du Bon Ton, Vol. 1, No. 3, Mars 1914, Bernard Boutet de Monvel;
courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past
in general, then, in a certain region of the past – a work of adjustment,
something like the focusing of a camera. But our recollection still remains
virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the appropri-
ate attitude.41
In the footnote that follows this passage Bergson goes even further in
this gestural comprehension of comprehension, arguing that ‘rhythm
roughly outlines the meaning of the sentence truly written, that it can
give us direct communication with the writer’s thought before study
of the words has given them color and shading’. In one lecture at the
Collège de France on Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode, he tells us
that he took some pages of the text as an example ‘to show how the
comings and goings of thought, each in a particular direction, pass from
the mind of Descartes to our own solely by the effect of the rhythm as
indicated by the punctuation, and especially as brought out by reading
it aloud correctly’.43 This footnote then refers the reader to Bergson’s
1912 lecture ‘The Soul and the Body’ where thinking is vectorised in
a clearly behaviourist manner, albeit also being internalised as a ten-
dency, ‘nascent’ and ‘performed in the brain’:
Consider thinking itself; you will find directions rather than states, and
you will see that thinking is essentially a continual and continuous change
of inward direction, incessantly tending to translate itself by changes of
outward direction, I mean by actions and gestures capable of outlining in
space and of expressing metaphorically, as it were, the comings and goings
of the mind. Of these movements, sketched out or even simply prepared, we
are most often unaware, because we have no interest in knowing them; but
we have to notice them when we try to seize hold of our thought in order to
220 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
grasp it all living and make it pass, still living, into the soul of another. The
words may then have been well chosen, but they will not convey the whole of
what we wish to make them say if we do not succeed by the rhythm, by the
punctuation, by the relative lengths of the sentences and part of the sentences,
by a particular dancing of the sentence, in making the reader’s mind, continu-
ally guided by a series of nascent movements, describe a curve of thought and
feeling analogous to that we ourselves described . . . The rhythm speech has
here, then, no other object than that of choosing the rhythm of the thought:
and what can the rhythm of the thought be but the rhythm of the scarcely
conscious nascent movements which accompany it? These movements, by
which thought continually tends to externalize itself in actions, are clearly
prepared and, as it were, performed in the brain.44
of posture, taking a close-up look being a bodily attitude first and fore-
most, especially in the light of Bergson’s theses concerning attention
and the purpose of metaphysical intuition being, contra Plato, to illu-
minate ‘the detail of the real’.48 The changing definitions of philosophy,
therefore, would be a matter of ‘close-ups’ and ‘long shots’, of zooming
in or zooming out (Bergson himself having linked recollection to both
bodily attitude and ‘the focusing of a camera’).49 Philosophical names
would be born in part from their degree of fine visual detail – an optical
and attitudinal phenomenon.
I have also previously looked at the notion of cinematic background
(formed through both composition and focus, especially as used in
Japanese horror cinema), as a genuinely idiosyncratic contribution to
various philosophical discussions of ‘background’ in philosophy of
mind, ontology and even ethics.50 This too could be connected to the
idea of the background in Matter and Memory that returns to my body
only what interests it.51 Even more explicitly behavioural than that,
however, would be to turn to a theorist such as Giorgio Agamben,
whose short essay on cinematic gesture, ‘The Six Most Beautiful
Minutes in the History of Cinema’, discusses a sequence from Orson
Welles’s unfinished Don Quixote in terms of gesture: for Agamben,
rather than the image, it is gesture that is the fundamental filmic
property.52
Yet, this is not the line this chapter will follow even if, in one respect,
we will stay true to Agamben’s own line (which itself follows Foucault)
that what we call ‘gesture’ is only ‘what remains unexpressed in each
expressive act’ and ‘the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of
making a means visible as such’.53 Indeed, we will conclude here with a
discussion of Bergson’s philosophy of comportment, a general-aesthetic
philosophy ‘turned in the same direction as art’ but with life in general,
that is, all of life, as its object. This will be akin to a (non-represen-
tational) democratising philosophy in the Laruellean sense, a generic
art that sees others arts, thereby, as philosophies too, albeit focused
on more specific objects. And doing this means, as a ‘means’ without
an ‘end’ (in Agamben’s sense), that ‘we show nothing’ according to
Bergson, but suggest everything.
One of Bergson’s most notorious demands for a philosophy is that
it should seek a ‘means’ to know the Real ‘without any expression,
translation or symbolic representation, metaphysics is that means.
Metaphysics, then, is the science which claims to do without symbols.’54
And yet we know that when he describes a metaphysics that would
dispense with symbols, it is really a question of what type of symbolism
is at stake, fluid or fixed, suggestive or direct, bespoke or ready-made.
222 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
NOTES
1. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics,
hardback edition, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1946), p. 35.
2. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 168.
3. François Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubczak
and Anthony Paul Smith (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 301.
4. Laruelle cited in Robin Mackay, ‘Introduction: Laruelle Undivided’,
in François Laruelle, From Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-
Standard Thought, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic/Sequence
Press, 2012), p. 23.
5. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 157. In ‘The Possible and the Real’,
philosophy is also described as what ‘will give each of us, unceasingly,
certain of the satisfactions which art at rare intervals procures for the
privileged’ (ibid., p. 105). Or, again in a letter to Dauriac, 19 March 1913:
‘life in depth designates what art makes us feel some of the time and what
226 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
philosophy (the true one!) should make us feel at all times’ (Henri Bergson,
Mélanges, ed. André Robinet [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1972], p. 990).
6. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 168.
7. Ibid., p. 175, see also, on this image, Bergson’s essay ‘Philosophical
Intuition’, ibid., p. 109.
8. Ibid. See also John Mullarkey, ‘The Very Life of Things: Reversing
Thought and Thinking Objects in Bergsonian Metaphysics’, Introduction
to Henri Bergson: An Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. John Mullarkey
(Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), pp. ix–xxxii.
9. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London:
Macmillan, 1911), pp. 176–7 (emphases added).
10. Bergson connects life in general to movement at ibid., p. 128 and general-
ity to integrality (rather than abstraction) at Bergson, The Creative Mind,
p. 200.
11. François Laruelle, ‘Is Thinking Democratic? Or, How to Introduce
Theory into Democracy’, in John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith, eds,
Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2012), p. 229.
12. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 189.
13. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 204.
14. In Bergson’s Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness (trans. F. L. Pogson [London: George Allen and Unwin,
1910], p. 170), he argues that the truly free act is performed, or ‘decided’
upon, ‘without any reason, and perhaps even against every reason’ (or
as Laruelle would say, with no principle of sufficient reason): ‘the action
which has been performed does not then express some superficial idea,
almost external to ourselves, distinct and easy to account for: it agrees
with the whole of our most intimate feelings, thoughts and aspirations,
with that particular conception of life which is the equivalent of all our
past experience, in a word, with our personal idea of happiness and of
honour.’ Intellectual, deliberative decisions can only be re-constructed
retrospectively, after the act. And that act expresses only our character,
one to which Bergson’s later work, from Matter and Memory onwards,
will give a more and more embodied form.
15. Bergson, The Creative Mind, pp. 48–9.
16. Ibid., pp. 165–6 (emphases added).
17. See ibid., pp. 42–3.
18. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 89, 90, 111–12; The Creative Mind,
p. 211; Time and Free Will, p. 172; Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of
Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton,
with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre
Dame Press, 1977), p. 296.
19. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 168. In Time and Free Will, Bergson links
indefinable freedom to art as follows: ‘we are free when our acts spring
Bergson as Non-Philosopher (of) Art 227
from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that
indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist
and his work’ (p. 172).
20. Clearly, Laruelle’s Photo-Fiction, A Non-Standard Aesthetics (trans.
Drew S. Burke and Anthony Paul Smith [Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012])
utilises ideas from quantum mechanics and its notions of objective prob-
ability and uncertainty (see, for instance, p. 14: ‘This plane is not that
of an identification within an over-photography, but we would say of a
“non-photography” obtained by a process of “superposition” taken from
the quantum and which has several similarities with the optical processes
of photography.’ And Bergson too eventually realised that some of his
ideas had been re-invented by the new physics: ‘sooner or later, I thought,
physics will be brought around to the point of seeing in the fixity of the
element a form of mobility. When that time came, it is true, science would
probably give up looking for an imaged representation of it, the image of a
movement being that of a moving point (that is to say, always of a minute
solid). In actual fact, the great theoretical discoveries of recent years have
led physicists to suppose a kind of fusion between the wave and the par-
ticle – between substance and movement, as I should express it’ (Bergson,
The Creative Mind, p. 72).
21. Laruelle, Principles, p. 32.
22. François Laruelle, ‘Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of
Philosophy’, in François Laruelle, The Non-Philosophy Project, ed.
Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjevic (New York: Telos Press, 2011),
p. 83.
23. François Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy,
trans. Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis: Univocal,
2012), p. 199. Laruelle also talks about the ‘degrowth’ of philosophy when
referring to such counter-movements (see ‘The Degrowth of Philosophy:
Towards a Generic Ecology’, in Laruelle, From Decision to Heresy, pp.
327–49.
24. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 177.
25. Ibid., p. 190.
26. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence,
and Matter and Memory’, Collapse, Vol. III (2007), pp. 70–1.
27. Some Deleuzians will not recognise their version of Bergson here, heavily
mediated as theirs is through Deleuze’s virtualist philosophy. For the
strong evidence that Bergson is more actualist than they think, see John
Mullarkey, ‘Forget the Virtual: Bergson, Actualism, and the Refraction
of Reality’, Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 37 (2004), pp. 469–93.
Howard Caygill’s essay in this volume, ‘Hyperaesthesia and the Virtual’,
by placing an emphasis on actual (hyperaesthetic) perception and its crea-
tion of the virtual through de-actualisation, can also be seen as an actualist
reading of Bergson.
28. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, p. 19.
228 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
57. Ibid., pp. 62–3. ‘Philo-fiction’ is another name for Laruelle’s non-standard
philosophy. Its similarities with Bergson’s theory of fabulation would be
well worth a fuller examination.
58. François Laruelle, En Tant Qu’Un (Paris: Aubier, 1991), p. 246.
59. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, 2nd edn, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe (Oxford:
Blackwell Press, 1981), §651, p. 114.
60. That is, it could be that representing embodiment may well be another
kind of embodiment (another kind of showing), and an action of another,
other kind, that is, at another level of corporeality (or speed or tension)
awaiting incorporation (‘showing’) ‘here and now’ in this placement and
its level/speed/tension. Perhaps the performance of a thesis, the en-actment
of a thought, is the mutation or movement of ideas at other levels/speeds/
tensions (mutation to another type) and would involve the micro-perfor-
mances of brain behaviour. Not all so-called ‘performative utterances’
(contradictory or not) are alike.
61. See John Mullarkey, ‘Bergson and the Comedy of Horrors’, in Paul
Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and Laci Mattison, eds, Understanding Bergson,
Understanding Modernism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp.
243–55.
62. Of course, the ‘de-’ in ‘demonstrate’ is not a negative but simply means
‘from’ in the Latin. The play on words here is Anglophone.
63. V. Delbos, ‘Matière et Mémoire: Revue Critique’, Revue de Métaphysique
et de Morale (1897), p. 373, quoted in François Heidsieck, Henri Bergson
et la notion d’Espace (Paris: Le Circle du Livre, 1957), p. 90. The question
of how to analyse without the standard presuppositions of analysis might
well be the key problematic that links Bergson’s immanent metaphysics
with Laruelle’s non-philosophy.
64. Bernard Gilson, L’Individualité dans la philosophie de Bergson (Paris:
Librairie Philosophique J.Vrin), p. 64.
65. Paul de Man, ‘Modern Poetics in France and Germany’, in Paul de Man,
Critical Writings 1953–1978, edited with an introduction by Lindsay
Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 154.
66. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, pp. 2, 5.
67. On rhythm in Bergson, especially with reference to the British modern-
ists, see Charlotte de Mille, ‘ “Sudden gleams of (f)light”: Intuition as
Method?’, Art History, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2011), pp. 370–86.
68. François Laruelle, Théorie des Identités. Fractalité généralisée et philoso-
phie artificielle (Paris: PUF, 1992), p. 302. In genetics, a reverse or ‘back’
mutation occurs when the wild-type phenotype is restored spontaneously
(undoing the genetic alterations of the laboratory); such organisms are
called ‘revertants’. Laruelle’s enterprise, to unbound thought from phi-
losophy and so render it ordinary and popular again – which Bergson
calls thinking in reverse – can be likened to this biological process, given
his own preference (especially in the third phase of non-philosophy) for
biological models of thought: see John Mullarkey, Postural Mutations:
Bergson as Non-Philosopher (of) Art 231
Monday morning, the first semester of the academic year. I hear the
English table clock in my living room strike 7:30. I put on my glasses,
get up, switch on the radio, feed my cat, take a shower. At ten minutes
past eight I hit the road in order to take the train to the university. An
hour later I am in front of the students, waiting for them to unpack
their bags. My thoughts are lingering and I realise that I am wearing my
acetate glasses. Why did I wear these and not my other pair? Searching
for answers I come to realise that at home, ‘I [was] a conscious automa-
ton, and I [was] so because I [had] everything to gain by being so.’1 I
start with my lecture.
Henri Bergson in Time and Free Will makes use of the seemingly
trivial event of waking up in the morning so as to conceptualise the
difference between habitual and free activity. Getting ready for work
in automaton-mode does not allow for one’s thoughts to linger. In
such a state, the striking of the clock ‘merely stirs up an idea which
is, so to speak, solidified on the surface, the idea of rising and attend-
ing to my usual occupations’.2 The impression of the clock hour has
coupled with a fixed idea, and the consequential act follows the impres-
sion ‘without the self interfering with it’.3 This ‘interference’ should
be read as virtual and is not actualised when getting up is habitually
done. We rarely change our mind in automaton-mode. And in equally
seldom cases we can trace back why we have done something the way
we did it during the morning chores. Bergson argues that this does
not imply the correctness of associationist or determinist philoso-
phies of the self. Both these theories have taken their exemplars from
‘acts, which are very numerous but for the most part insignificant’.4
Associationism and determinism alike make ‘retrograde movements’,
and ‘from this results an error which vitiates our conception of the
past; from this arises our claim to anticipate the future on every occa-
232
The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics 233
of the images of the material world, with the totality of their internal
elements’.38 These images have an inner working; the workings-on-
matter, for instance the patriarchal administering of sexist imagery,
are fundamentally deceptive. In the words of Bergson: ‘The reality of
matter consists in the totality of its elements and of their actions of
every kind. Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible
action upon bodies: it results from the discarding of what has no inter-
est for our needs, or more generally for our functions.’39 What we find
here is a dynamic ontology of images that become-with one another.
Dorothea Olkowski neatly formulates its working:
All [images] function without ever producing a single representation of the
material universe. Rather, external images influence the ‘body’ image by
transmitting movement to it. The body image responds by bringing about
changes in its surrounding images and giving back movement to them,
choosing how it returns what it receives.40
This leads us to question: where does the interference pattern come in?
The pattern that is so important for both Randolph and the argument
of this chapter? Let us first look closely at the philosophy-physics of
Barad in order to understand what diffraction can do.
In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad is explicit about the double
role of diffraction. Diffraction is ‘a physical phenomenon that lies at
the center of some key discussions in physics and the philosophy of
physics’ and ‘also an apt metaphor for describing the methodological
approach . . . of reading insights through one another in attending to
and responding to the details and specificities of relations of differ-
ence and how they matter’.41 The physical phenomenon features in
classical and quantum understandings, implying that the phenomenon
is immediately entangled with ‘the shortage of words’42 that character-
ised the turmoil in physics in Bergson’s time. Additionally, the current
intellectual landscape, which features Barad as a prominent player, is
likewise on a cusp, searching for alternatives, most pertinently alterna-
tives to what Bergson has called ‘the power of negation’43 or the dia-
lectical stance that ‘leads to contrary philosophies; it demonstrates the
thesis as well as the antithesis of antinomies’.44 It appears as important
for the philosophy of Bergson to affirm explicitly what Barad hints at
with the proposed methodology of reading primary texts closely and
through one another:
divergences are striking between the schools, that is to say, in short, between
the groups of disciples formed around certain of the great masters. But would
one find them as clear-cut between the masters themselves? Something here
dominates the diversity of systems, something, I repeat, simple and definite
like a sounding of which one feels that it has more or less reached the
The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics 239
bottom of a same ocean, even though it brings each time to the surface very
different materials. It is on these materials that disciples normally work: in
that is the role of analysis. And the master, in so far as he formulates, devel-
ops, translates into abstract ideas what he brings, is already, as it were, his
own disciple. But the simple act which has set analysis in motion and which
hides behind analysis, emanates from a faculty quite different from that of
analysing. This is by very definition intuition.45
Alongside Bergson echoing his circles of memory and the memory cone
by affirming the discipleship of the master that works on his or her own
thought, bringing this process to the surface is what Barad seems to
attempt with the methodology that this chapter picks up on.46
Barad opens her Harawayian account of diffraction by stating that
‘diffraction attends to the relational nature of difference’.47 Difference
as a relation, or rather, as a relating, has nothing to do with essences
(Being), but it does not shy away from ‘understand[ing] diffraction
patterns – as patterns of difference that make a difference – to be the
fundamental constituents that make up the world’.48 Diffraction, we
can say, is at the very heart of Barad’s ‘onto-epistemology’, which
affirms that ontology changes with epistemology (which would be a
Kuhnianism), just as much as epistemology is obliged to attend very
closely to the windings of reality. Therefore, we have to continue by
asking what diffraction is in classical and quantum physics so as to
tune diffraction for the precise purposes of the problematic here at hand
(which concerns diffraction in Bergson and the divergent trends in the
contemporary feminist reception of dynamic ontology).
The classical understanding of diffraction pertains to ‘the way waves
combine when they overlap and the apparent bending and spreading of
waves that occurs when waves encounter an obstruction’.49 Noting that
classical physics considers particles (that are in one location at a given
time) and waves (that superimpose and are in and out of phase) as two
paradigms, it must be concluded that ‘from the perspective of classical
physics, diffraction patterns are simply the result of differences in (the
relative phase and amplitudes of) overlapping waves’50 and that parti-
cles do not produce them. Quantum physics has, with the help of the
famous two-slit experiment, been developed on the basis of the research
finding that, under certain circumstances, particles, and even single
particles, can produce diffraction patterns. This does not cancel out the
possibility of particles not producing diffractions or light (classically a
wave) behaving like a particle.51 These puzzling empirical results from
the 1920s have constituted the wave-particle duality paradox and form
the backbone of quantum physics. It is important to note that quantum
physics can understand classical physics, but that classical physics has
240 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
it most difficult to give an account, and the reasons by which we justify them
are seldom those which have led us to adopt them . . . they do not take in our
minds that common looking form which they will assume as soon as we try
to give expression to them in words; and, although they bear the same name
in other minds, they are by no means the same thing. The fact is that each
of them has the same kind of life as a cell in an organism: everything which
affects the general state of the self affects it also. But while the cell occupies
a definite point in the organism, an idea which is truly ours fills the whole of
ourself. Not all our ideas, however, are thus incorporated in the fluid mass
of our conscious states. Many float on the surface, like dead leaves on the
water of a pond: the mind, when it thinks them over and over again, finds
them ever the same, as if they were external to it.57
BERGSON AS UNTIMELY
How to pick up on the strengths of diffraction for the feminist reception
of Bergson, so as to push Bergson’s thinking in time and feminism’s
critical creativity to the limit? This question has a particular relevance
in light of the often-affirmed timeliness of Bergson’s metaphysics (for
instance, in the suggestion that ‘Bergson is the first contemporary,
and our epoch is Bergsonian’58). But doesn’t this ascribe to a progres-
sive linearity that does not comply with Bergson’s thought? In this
final section I will develop the claim that diffractive reading provides
us with a durational thought and with an apparatus that can help
242 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
NOTES
1. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data
of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson, 3rd edn (London: George Allen,
1913), p. 168.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
244 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
4. Ibid.
5. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics,
trans. M. L. Andison (Mineola: Dover, 2007), p. 11.
6. Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_
Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York:
Routledge, 1997); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2007).
7. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 168.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 167.
10. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp. 80–1.
11. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 141.
12. For the methodology of rewriting, see Jean-François Lyotard, The
Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
13. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer
(Mineola: Dover, 2004), p. 121.
14. Ibid., p. 122.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 127.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 123.
20. Ibid., p. 124.
21. Ibid., p. 195.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 196.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 197.
27. Ibid., p. 210.
28. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 135.
29. Ibid.
30. Henri Bergson, ‘Intellectual Effort’, in Mind-Energy, trans. H. W. Carr
(Hampshire and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), p. 179.
31. Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 14.
32. Ibid., p. 273.
33. In ibid.
34. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western
Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1993).
35. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against
Women (London: Vintage, 1991).
36. In Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 273.
37. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. vii.
The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics 245
62. Rebecca Hill, ‘Interval, Sexual Difference: Luce Irigaray and Henri
Bergson’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. 23, No. 1
(2008), p. 119.
63. Rebecca Hill, ‘Phallocentrism in Bergson: Life and Matter’, Deleuze
Studies, Vol. 2 (2008), Supplement, p. 124.
64. Ibid., p. 132.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., p. 133.
67. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 236.
68. Hill, ‘Interval, Sexual Difference’, pp. 120–1, 130, n. 1.
69. Ibid., p. 129.
70. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (Mineola: Dover,
1998), p. 207.
71. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, pp. 13, 22.
72. In the end, Hill seeks her recourse in Manuel DeLanda, whose work is
said to be able to highlight that ‘ “inert” [feminine] matter is capable of
organising itself and acting in ways that exceed mathematical prediction’
(Hill, ‘Phallocentrism in Bergson’, p. 135).
73. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 160.
74. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 87.
14. Hyperaesthesia and the
Virtual
HOWARD CAYGILL
247
248 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
on the cornea of the hypnotist, playing the role of a convex mirror. Without
doubt the reflected image must have been extremely small, given that the
numbers or letters must have been hardly 3 millimetres in height. Taking
into account the radius of the cornea at 7 to 8 mm, a simple calculation
shows that this cornea, working as a convex mirror, would reflect an image
of the numbers and letters a little less than 0.1 mm.15
adopted by Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age
of its Technical Reproducibility’. It is clear that by the end of the essay
Bergson has divined that we see more than our consciousness allows us
to see and that our senses are restricted by consciousness to a small area
of their virtual operation. His study and teaching of the philosophy of
Leibniz, and in particular his theory of perception, allowed him both to
entertain the hypothesis of hyperaesthesia and to appreciate its impli-
cations. These would be explored further in subsequent work, most
fully and explicitly in Matter and Memory, but also in future work on
parapsychology and finally towards the end of his life on the question
of metaphysics and technology.
is to live, to act, and life and action look forward’.36 This total memory
returns
when the attention to life is weakened for a moment – I do not speak here of
voluntary attention, which is momentary and individual, but of a constant
attention, common to all of us, imposed by nature and what might be called
the ‘attention of the species’ – thus the spirit whose gaze is always forcefully
held forwards, relaxes and consequently returns backwards where it finds
its history. The panoramic vision of the past is thus due to a sudden disin-
terestedness of life, born of the sudden conviction that one is at the point of
death.37
NOTES
1. Henri Bergson, Oeuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959),
p. 873; all translations my own.
2. For the importance of Leibniz in the courses taught by Bergson at
Clermont-Ferrand and his experiments in hypnotism, see Philippe Soulez
and Frédéric Worms, Bergson: Biographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 2002), pp. 65, 56.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 27.
4. Ibid.
5. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 27.
6. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 28.
7. Ibid., p. 98.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 100.
10. Ibid., p. 101.
11. Henri Bergson, Mélanges, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1972), p. 333; all translations my own.
12. Ibid.
13. Bergson, Mélanges, p. 335.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 336.
16. Ibid.
Hyperaesthesia and the Virtual 259
260
Afterword 261
is capable of, its capacities, its positions’; on the other, the compelling,
vertiginous reality that images have an existence, a survival, independ-
ent of us.10 But even this Janus-face is only a pause before an explosion
that traces a multiplicity of lines. Beyond that split-image, a ‘depth of
duration’ (épaisseur de durée, Bergson’s great phrase) emboldens us to
go beyond existing well-worn narratives and methodologies in order to
experiment with higher levels of risk and tension between history and
becoming, to encounter images and signs, to become attentive to life.11
To do so we must return to the Bergson who argues that ‘continuity
of change, preservation of the past in the present, real duration’ suggest
that ‘life, like conscious activity, is invention . . . unceasing creation’.12
What must be emphasised here, as we return to Bergson, is that every
return is a revision, a seeing-again (perception) and a transformation
(memory as duration). Hence each and every return is a re-creation of
Bergson, who will have been our ‘future contemporary’.13 So forego any
illusory synthesis between Bergson and Deleuze, Bergson and Benjamin,
Bergson and whomever. Just as there is no synthesis of history and life,
matter and memory. Instead, ‘there is radical contingency in progress,
incommensurability between what goes before and what follows – in
short, duration’.14 This incommensurability is in Bergson’s terms a
‘tension’, a ‘rhythm’ or ‘double movement’ wherein unforeseen, alea-
tory, new creations are produced. ‘Duration means invention’, Bergson
remarks, ‘the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the
absolutely new’.15 In what follows then, we ‘survey’ Bergson through
a number of contemporary readings, before focusing on Deleuze’s own
monstrous, but still faithful, rendering.
MEMORIES OF BECOMING-BERGSONIAN
An image is a true problem for Bergson. As such it is inseparable from
memory and from the past as such. The past as such (a virtual pure
past) is never anything like empty, homogeneous time, but is only dura-
tion, that is, intensive time as difference. In his great work Matter and
Memory (1896) Bergson argues for the ontological status of the past,
which necessitates a shift from memory-traces and associative represen-
tation towards something more dynamic and fluid: a philosophy with
real movement and coexistence between past and present, virtual and
actual, infinite and finite.
For Bergson, present and past are different in kind rather than
degree. This means that the past does not simply follow the present
in any discrete linear order; rather, the entirety of the past coexists
– differently – with each moment of the present. Hence the ‘past can
Afterword 263
with how we think and imagine the tensions and involutions between
materiality and duration. Becoming-creative forces us to rethink our
practice because ‘the final effort’ of art historical research is ‘a true
work of integration’.36 A passage from Bergson is an opening to an art
history to come:
To give up certain habits of thinking, and even of perceiving, is far from
easy: yet this is but the negative part of the work to be done; and when it
is done, when we have placed ourselves at what we have called the turn of
experience, when we have profited by the faint light which, illuminating the
passage from the immediate to the useful, marks the dawn of our human
experience, there still remains to be reconstituted, with the infinitely small
elements which we thus perceive of the real curve, the curve itself stretching
out into the darkness behind them.37
NOTES
1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York:
Dover, 1998), pp. 176–7.
2. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1974–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 22.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 115. In addition to
Bergsonism, see ‘Bergson, 1859–1941’, which was written at the request
of Maurice Merleau-Ponty for his Les Philosophes célèbres in 1956, and
‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’ (1956), in Gilles Deleuze, Desert
Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael
Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004). Of course, the entirety of
Deleuze’s two volumes on cinema as well as his work with Félix Guattari
are written under the sign of Bergson; in particular see ‘1730: Becoming-
Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . .’ in Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
268 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
21. Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual
(London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 7.
22. Burton, ‘Bergson’s Non-Archival Theory of Memory’, p. 329.
23. Ibid.
24. The phrase ‘the finest thread’ is used by Bergson and later by Deleuze; see
Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and The Adventure of the Virtual, p. 41. This
is the guiding principle of my own work; see Jae Emerling, Photography:
History and Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) and Jae
Emerling, ‘A Becoming Image: Candida Höfer’s Architecture of Absence’,
in Isabelle Wallace and Nora Wendl, eds, Contemporary Art About
Architecture: A Strange Utility? (London: Ashgate, 2013).
25. Mullarkey offers the following: ‘ “Attention to life” is one name Bergson
gives to this effort, but it is really “a-tension” which is in question, a
holding together of opposites. This is not a voluntary attention, which
would be momentary and individual, but a range of mental plasticity that
is species-specific, imposed by nature . . . Though this attention is very
fatiguing, it is one which, simply by being “more complex” and “delicate”
in the precision of its adjustment to reality, is thereby “more positive” . . .
a continual active adjustment, always on the brink of losing its balance,
always on a knife-edge’ (Bergson and Philosophy, pp. 54–5).
26. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 26.
27. We must reassess Henri Focillon’s interpretation and use of Bergson’s
concepts throughout his work, notably in Vie des Formes (1934). See
Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan
and George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1992).
28. Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy, p. 183.
29. Ibid., p. 185.
30. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 71.
31. The phrase ‘unstable tension’ is used by Mullarkey (Bergson and
Philosophy, p. 181).
32. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 22.
33. ‘Thought and instability’ refers to the original French title of Bergson’s
Creative Mind, which was La Pensée et le mouvant. Mullarkey elaborates
on the importance of this phrase, stating that it ‘might have been a better
choice of translation, for [it] clearly states the aim of Bergsonism to be a
philosophy which “would follow the undulations of the real” ’ and would
oppose ‘all “artificial unities” in philosophy that attempt to embrace [any]
totality’ (Bergson and Philosophy, p. 179).
34. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 22.
35. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 155.
36. For effect I have altered a line from Bergson that reads: ‘The final effort
of philosophical research is a true work of integration’ (Matter and
Memory, p. 185). Also, on Bergson’s ‘law of dichotomy’ in relation to
‘integration’, Mullarkey explains that we must come to understand how
and why Bergson’s ‘law of dichotomy’ or ‘integration’ has nothing to do
Afterword 271
abstract ideas, 97, 99–100, 239 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 40, 42, 82
abstraction, 95–102, 104, 105, 107, background, 51, 170–1, 218, 221, 229
125, 127, 208, 226, 264, 265 Badiou, Alain, 175, 181–2
in art, 32, 63, 67, 75, 82, 192–4 Bal, Mieke, 154
lyrical, 80–1, 83, 88–9 Barad, Karen, 233, 238–40, 243–6
actual, 20, 23–4, 52–3, 60, 135, 142–3, Barthes, Roland, 118, 144
152, 154, 171, 234, 257; see also Bazaine, Jean, 81, 90
virtual becoming, 3, 8, 20–2, 27–30, 36, 42,
actualisation, 35, 41, 50, 70, 133, 64, 68–70, 75, 136, 151, 185,
143–4, 167, 169, 174–5, 181, 185, 206–8, 262–4, 266–7
248, 263 behaviour, 104, 215–16, 218, 220
aesthetics, 3–4, 7, 12, 37–8, 45, 58, Bell, Vanessa, 33, 38, 43, 45
67, 70–1, 77, 105, 107, 127, 223, Benjamin, Walter, 30, 174, 252, 262–3,
261 268
affect, 37, 83, 86, 104, 106, 134–6, Bergson, Henri, 1, 3–5, 7–13, 17–20,
138–42 22, 24–30, 33–4, 36–7, 43–4,
Agamben, Giorgio, 132–3, 140, 221, 46–7, 50–2, 54–63, 65, 68–73,
229 75–83, 85, 87–90, 94–6, 98–102,
anarchism, 94–5, 104, 108, 110–11 104, 106, 108–10, 118–23, 125,
animal, 172, 173, 175, 267 129–30, 141, 143, 147, 150–1,
Antliff, Mark, 2, 7, 13, 92, 108, 153, 155–64, 166–70, 173–6,
110–11 178, 182, 185–6, 189, 193, 196,
architecture, 64–5, 79, 270 198, 202–3, 206, 208, 210, 213,
Argan, Giulio-Carlo, 57, 83, 86 215–16, 218, 221, 223–6, 228–33,
Aristotle, 51–3, 60–1 235, 237–8, 240–8, 254, 258, 260,
art history, 1–11, 13, 28, 32–3, 37, 262–3, 265, 267–71
41–5, 47–55, 57–61, 150–2, 154, cone of memory, 122, 126, 170, 173,
158, 161–2, 261, 265–9, 271 175–9, 182, 185, 236; see also
immanent, 9, 32 diagrams
realist expectations of, 153 Deleuze’s Bergson, 22, 156, 163, 172,
work of, 152–4 267
art objects, 3–4, 6, 8, 32, 148, 154, 157 epistemology, Bergsonian, 47, 56
art practices, 9, 39, 116–17, 119, 121, feminist reception of, 241–2
127–8 history, Bergsonian, 26, 54, 58
associationism, 99, 101, 232, 241 method, Bergsonian, 9, 54, 56–7, 68,
attention, 20, 23, 32–3, 35–6, 41, 117, 104
127–8, 180–1, 195–6, 199, 235, philosophy of history, Bergsonian,
252, 257–8, 264, 270 17, 19–20
attitude, 6, 207, 210–11, 213, 216, Bergsonism, 3–5, 65, 70–1, 73, 78, 156,
218–19, 223–5 215, 248, 258, 260, 263, 267, 270
Index 273
habit, 5, 42, 53–4, 57–8, 98, 101, 103, James, William, 71, 78, 189
156, 166, 171–5, 178, 180–1,
191–2, 236, 247 Kafka, Franz, 158–60
Hantaï, Simon, 88–9 Kandinsky, Wassily, 10, 192–5
Haraway, Donna, 233, 237, 243 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 47–52, 55, 57–60,
harmony, 96, 103–6, 194 166, 183, 254
Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 26, 88, 95, 261, 263, Kierkegaard, Søren, 87, 158
271 Klee, Paul, 82, 131
Heidegger, Martin, 26, 123, 189 Kropotkin, Peter, 94–5, 104, 107–8
Henry, Michel, 10, 189–95, 199, 202–3
Hill, Rebecca, 242–3, 246 Lacan, Jacques, 6, 175, 182
historicism, 26, 55, 261, 265 Laruelle, François, 10, 206–10, 212–15,
historiography, 9, 18–19, 117, 261, 266 217, 220, 222, 224, 226–7,
history 229–31
durational, 58 laughter, 77–8, 95, 100, 102, 151, 155,
inner, 43, 196 158, 161
nature of, 17–19, 28 Le Rire see laughter
philosophy of, 3, 17–19, 24, 27, 29, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 26, 88,
177 170, 247, 252–5, 257–9
Holt, Nancy, 9, 115, 117, 124–7 Leonardo Da Vinci, 154, 197–8
Horkheimer, Max, 20, 268 life, 35–6, 42–3, 65–9, 71–2, 77–8,
human experience see experience 103–4, 127–8, 135, 179–81,
Husserl, Edmund, 6, 88, 189, 195 184–5, 199, 241–2, 252, 256–8,
hyperaesthesia, 3, 11, 229, 247–59 264–7
attention to, 180, 252–3, 258, 264–5
illusion, 53, 138–9, 142, 144–5, 166, inner, 77, 99, 102–3, 241, 243
209 mental, 99, 120, 165, 177
imagery, production of, 116, 119–21, ‘life in general’, 78, 208, 221, 226, 264
124, 128, 216, 223 life of dreams, 174, 176
images logic, 181–2, 210, 212, 263
indirect, 45, 212
mattered, 120–1, 123, 126–7 Maine de Biran, 50, 53, 59
moving, 119, 208 Manessier, Alfred, 82, 87–8, 90
Index 275
Manet, Edouard, 69, 148, 152, 159, non-philosophy, 4–5, 10, 207–8, 210,
162 212–14, 218, 224–25, 227, 230
materiality see matter
materials see matter Oiticica, Hélio, 9, 72–3, 79
Matisse, Henri, 2–4, 7, 9, 11–12, 34, Olkowski, Dorothea, 123, 238, 242
63–75, 77–9, 88, 92, 196–7, ontology, 1, 3, 9, 17–18, 20, 28, 120,
199 125, 221, 233–4, 237–9, 266
matter, 8, 21, 32–4, 41, 68–70, 80,
86–7, 116, 119–28, 141–3, 155–6, painting, 1–3, 9–10, 32–3, 35, 37–9,
165–8, 237–9, 242, 253–4 41, 63–7, 69–72, 77–80, 82–3,
perception of, 165, 253 86–9, 148, 157–62, 190–6, 198–9
plane of, 168–9, 171–5, 178–82, abstract, 192, 194
185 representational, 190, 199
reality of, 238, 255 Panofsky, Erwin, 6–7, 49, 57, 61
Meillassoux, Quentin, 183, 213 Péguy, Charles, 4, 17–19, 24, 26, 28,
memory, 2–5, 10, 18–19, 34, 52, 57, 81, 90
82–3, 87–8, 141–3, 153, 170–7, perception, 1–2, 33–7, 86–7, 116–17,
180–2, 185, 234–6, 261–5 119–21, 125, 140–3, 167–9,
cosmic, 172, 178 189–91, 195–6, 198–200, 235,
historical, 19, 152, 154 247–50, 252–7, 261–3; see also
involuntary, 175, 179 sensation
pure, 143, 169, 173, 235–6, 248 body’s, 133, 137
virtual, 169, 212 virtual, 34, 251, 256–7
memory cone see Bergson’s cone of phenomenology, 91, 127, 132–3, 189,
memory 196, 209, 260
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 86–8, 91, philosophy
189–91, 203, 267 immanent see immanence
metaphor, 82–3, 94–6, 105, 107–8, non-standard see non-philosophy
122, 157, 194–5, 212, 238, 243, standard, 209, 214, 222
255 philosophy of art, 116, 127, 224
metaphysical intuition see intuition philosophy of mind, 29, 221, 228
metaphysics, 1, 10, 20, 36, 73, 87, 95, photographic act, 9, 132, 134, 136,
98, 207, 213, 216, 221, 224, 228, 138, 140–1, 143–4, 218
241 photographing, act of see photographic
Modernism, 127, 193 act
monads, 170, 249, 255, 257, 259 photography, 1–2, 9, 131–2, 134, 136,
Mondrian, Piet, 79, 86, 193 140, 144, 206–7, 212, 214–15,
Monet, Claude, 85, 193–4 217–18, 220, 227, 255, 258–9
Mounier, Emmanuel, 85, 90 physics, 194, 208, 210, 227, 238, 240
movement, 7–10, 23, 36–42, 52–4, classical, 234, 239–41
69–72, 132–45, 150–1, 153–4, quantum, 234, 239–41
156–7, 160–1, 167–9, 178–80, Plato, 3, 21, 29, 51, 122, 221, 233
196–7, 206–8, 235–6 Ponge, Francis, 85, 88
of thought, 52, 156 possibility, 3, 6, 8–9, 19–20, 41, 48–9,
retrograde, 232, 234, 236, 240–1 51–5, 57, 64, 68, 101, 137, 154,
Mullarkey, John, 11, 20, 109, 157, 181–2, 214–15
265 conditions of, 9, 48, 51–2, 54–5, 166
mutation, 224, 230–1 posture, 213–15, 218, 221, 224; see
mystic, 10, 77, 167, 178–81, 184 also gesture
potentialities, 4–5, 36, 38, 52, 132,
Neo-impressionism, 94, 106–8, 134–5, 137, 142–4, 166
111 presence, 34–5, 39, 254–5, 264
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 50, 71, 174, past’s, 151, 159, 162
184–5, 271 see also representation
276 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
process, 3, 8, 23, 28, 33, 35–7, 64, space, 1, 22, 25, 51–2, 56–7, 67, 79–80,
68, 97, 99, 115–22, 124–8, 151, 82, 85–6, 138–9, 141–2, 190–1,
154–7, 224 228–9, 252, 255–6
Proust, Marcel, 81–2, 268 Spinoza, Benedict de, 166, 171–3
Stirner, Max, 95–8, 100–2, 105, 107
Rainer, Yvonne, 117, 124 subject, 10, 100, 118–22, 124, 132,
Randolph, Lynn, 237–8 135, 141–2, 166–7, 177, 179,
Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), 182–3, 197–8, 208–9, 224–5,
148, 200 264–5; see also self
Real, the, 6, 175, 207, 209, 212–14, Svetlana Alpers, 152, 195
218, 221, 223, 225, 229
recollection, 5, 57, 169, 171, 173, technology, 123–4, 126, 128, 182,
176–7, 180, 218–19, 236, 251–2, 258
263 temporality, 1, 9–10, 33, 39, 64, 98–9,
Rembrandt van Rijn, 70, 85, 190, 101, 122, 133–5, 142–5, 151, 175,
200–2 191, 197, 202; see also duration
re-orientation, 206–7, 213–14, 229 tension, 65–6, 69, 72, 145, 195, 198,
representation, 6, 8, 32, 34–5, 49, 224, 230, 262, 266
68, 72, 100, 103, 121–3, 140, thinking, 7, 10–11, 97–8, 119–22, 127,
189, 223, 237–8, 254–5; see also 156, 165–8, 182–3, 206–7, 209,
presence 212–16, 219–20, 222–4, 230,
reversal, 1, 4, 5, 6, 42, 52, 54, 202, 263–7; see also intellect; intuition
206–8, 212–16, 218, 224–5, Toynbee, Arnold, 19, 24, 26, 28
230–1, 256; see also turn and transcendence, 206, 214, 265 see also
return immanence
rhythm, 5–6, 26, 37, 41, 82, 96, 103–4, transcendental, 48–9, 51, 97, 132, 140,
106, 119, 126, 219–20, 230, 262, 193
264 turn and return, 4, 6–8, 11, 32, 37, 41,
Riegl, Alois, 7, 195 52, 57, 80, 116, 136, 142–3, 166,
Robinet, M., 249–51 177, 180–2, 192–3, 197–9, 200,
romanticism, 30, 70, 158–9 208, 218, 221, 229, 256–7, 260–2,
264, 266–7; see also reversal
Sartre, Jean Paul, 81, 87–8, 189 of experience, 192, 197–9
Schmid, Anne-Françoise, 231 Turner, J.M.W., 70, 190, 192
science, 18, 36, 47–8, 55, 95, 99–101,
183, 191, 208, 212, 215–16, 221, universe, 26, 39, 69, 82, 90, 103, 118,
227–8, 249, 258 168, 172–3, 184, 191, 195, 236,
self, 24, 77, 88, 96, 98, 103, 118, 248, 253–5; see also world
135–6, 138, 141–2, 178, 194, 211,
232–4, 241; see also subject Valéry, Paul, 2, 81, 85, 90
sensation, 4, 36–8, 41, 56, 66–9, Velàzquez, Diego, 160, 197–8
72, 74, 101, 104, 106, 141, Vermeer, Jan, 193, 197–8
143–4, 168–9, 180, 196; see also virtual, 22–3, 28, 30; see also actual
perception
Serres, Michel, 136, 139, 141 Wahl, Jean, 88, 90
Severini, Gino, 106–7, 110 Warburg, Aby, 7, 57, 261
Signac, Paul, 107, 111 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 10,
Simmel, Georg, 47, 55 149, 152, 159, 161–2
Smithson, Robert, 9, 115–18, 123–4, world, 1–2, 5, 41, 44, 65, 77, 85–7,
126–7, 129, 131 99, 116, 120, 135, 168–72, 181,
soul see self 191–4, 210; see also universe