Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism

361 Pages·2012·1.98 MB·English

by  S. E. Gontarski

Understanding Bergson,
Understanding Modernism
ii
Understanding Bergson,
Understanding Modernism
Edited by
Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison
NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013
© Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison, 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Understanding Bergson, understanding modernism/edited by
Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-7221-1 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Bergson, Henri, 1859–1941.
2. Bergson, Henri, 1859–1941–Influence. 3. Modernism (Literature)–History
and criticism. I. Ardoin, Paul. II. Gontarski, S. E. III. Mattison, Laci.
B2430.B43U53 2012
143–dc23
2012026450
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-7221-1
e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-8837-3
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Foreword Suzanne Guerlac vii
Abbreviations x
Contributors xi
Introduction Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison 1
Part 1 Conceptualizing Bergson
1 (Re)Reading Time and Free Will: (Re)Discovering Bergson for
the Twenty-First Century Mary Ann Gillies 11
2 Bergson’s Matter and Memory: From Time to Space David Addyman 24
3 Comedies of Errors: Bergson’s Laughter in Modernist Contexts
Jan Walsh Hokenson 38
4 Sub Specie Durationis, or the Free Necessity of Life’s Creativeness in
Bergson’s Creative Evolution David Scott 54
5 A Reading of Two Sources of Morality and Religion, or Bergsonian
Wisdom, Emotion, and Integrity Michael R. Kelly 70
6 The Inclination of Philosophy: The Creative Mind and the Articulation
of a Bergsonian Method Paul Atkinson 89
Part 2 Bergson and Aesthetics
7 Bergson, Vitalism, and Modernist Literature Paul Douglass 107
8 Perception Sickness: Bergsonian Sensitivity and Modernist Paralysis
Paul Ardoin 128
9 “Blast . . . Bergson?” Wyndham Lewis’s “Guilty Fire of Friction”
Charlotte de Mille 141
10 Bergson and Proust: A Question of Influence Pete A. Y. Gunter 157
11 Joyce’s Matter and Memory: Perception and Memory-Events
in Finnegans Wake Dustin Anderson 177
12 Minds Meeting: Bergson, Joyce, Nabokov, and the Aesthetics
of the Subliminal Leona Toker 194
vi Contents
13 Modernist Energeia: Henri Bergson and the Romantic Idea
of Language Sarah Posman 213
14 H.D. ’s Intuitional Imagism: Memory, Desire, and the Image
in Process Laci Mattison 228
15 Bergson and the Comedy of Horrors John Mullarkey 243
16 Time and Free Will: Bergson, Modernism, Superheroes,
and Watchmen Eric Berlatsky 256
17 The Joys of Atavism Claire Colebrook 281
Part 3 Glossary
18 Bergson on Art and Creativity Mark Antliff 299
19 Bergson on Durée Rebecca Hill 301
20 Bergson on Élan Vital Paul Douglass 303
21 Bergson on Evolution Claire Colebrook 305
22 Bergson on Free Will and Creativity Rex Gilliland 308
23 Bergson on Habit and Perception Paul Ardoin 310
24 Bergson on Idealism and Realism Trevor Perri 312
25 Bergson on Image and Representation Garin Dowd 315
26 Bergson on Instinct Paul Atkinson 318
27 Bergson on Intuition David Scott 320
28 Bergson on Language Laci Mattison 323
29 Bergson on Memory Heath Massey 325
30 Bergson on Movement and Spatialization S. E. Gontarski 327
31 Bergson on Multiplicity Paul Atkinson 330
32 Bergson on Organization and Manufacture Scott Ortolano 332
Index 335
Foreword
Suzanne Guerlac
“With Creative Evolution under my arm,” Henry Miller wrote, “I board the elevated
line at Brooklyn Bridge after work . . . my language, my world . . . under my arm.”1
Miller’s casual remark conveys the excitement Bergson’s thought inspired in thinkers,
writers and artists on both sides of the Atlantic—and beyond—in the early twentieth
century. Reading Bergson, or hearing his public lectures, changed people’s lives.
Beyond inspiring individual artists and writers, however, Bergson also anticipated
a number of the concepts that would prove essential to thinking modernity. In his
essay Laughter, he has a lot to say about distraction, a term that becomes central to
Walter Benjamin’s analysis of modern experience. In Time and Free Will, he provides
a theory of alienation that will subsequently be important to Gramsci, among others.
In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, he presents a distinction between closed
and open societies that not only challenges nationalist political and economic models
but also invites us to think ethically beyond the human realm. He presents an acute
analysis of the practical limits of human rights discourse and calls our attention to
environmental damage that occurs as an effect of capitalism.
It is perhaps only now, after the critical interventions of structuralism and post-
structuralism, that we can fully appreciate the critical force of Bergson’s thought. Before
Heidegger and before Derrida, Bergson undertook a deconstruction of metaphysics.
The unthought that he exposed was not Being, or writing, but time, time that was
irreducible to space, that could not be measured, and that occurred as qualitative
intensity: time as force.
Bergson was one of the first modern philosophers (along with Nietzsche) to call
attention to the problems language poses for philosophical thought. Language requires
iteration, whereas in Bergson’s view, there is no such thing as repetition in lived
experience; by the very fact of being repeated, the same moment or feeling becomes a
different one. Before Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, then, Bergson practiced
a new kind of philosophical writing, one that challenged the conventions of traditional
discursive thought and was prepared to “break . . . the frames of language.”2
The critique of the subject elaborated in the contexts of structuralism and
deconstruction (supported by psychoanalysis) called into question the presuppositions
of European discourses of humanism but made it difficult to think about agency. We
could speak of the discontinuities of history, or evoke the will have been or the always
already. What was missing was a way to talk about events in the making, as they arrive.
When we return to Bergson after post-structuralism, we recognize that he offers us a
viii Foreword
subject position that is not a subject of consciousness but a subject of action, centered
upon the dynamic body. Bergson proposes a subject position that is not only not tied
to traditions of humanism, it can be extended across species.
After Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis, we can appreciate in Bergson
another way to think unconsciousness, one that does not depend on the structure of
repression (or an instance or topography of the unconscious) that psychoanalysis has
enmeshed with the Oedipal story and its normative gender positions. In Bergson,
differences between consciousness and unconsciousness become subtle and fluid. A
function of fluctuations of tension and attention in relation to action, the two registers
become porous to one another. The two extremes of mental life—action and dream—
inform one another interactively, as do action and memory.
In his analysis of memory, Bergson thinks virtuality in relation to dynamics of
coming into image. His analyses, which take account of modern visual technologies
such as photography, chrono-photography, and the cinematographic, are especially
pertinent in today’s visual culture.
Affirming that the real can no longer be considered in static, or mechanistic,
terms, Bergson was a quintessentially modern thinker. To think time, he declared,
means breaking a number of frames or frameworks. In response, Bertrand Russell
condescendingly (and defensively) relegated Bergson’s thought to the misty realms of
poetry. But the untranslatable élan vital and the appeals to intuition, to free temporal
flow, and to the forces of creativity and invention associated with it, were not mere
poetic effusions. Bergson’s thought emerged from reflections on mathematics. He
elaborated it philosophically with a deep appreciation of the history of philosophy and
a keen attunement to the revolutionary developments in modern science (in fields such
as kinetic theory, thermodynamics, and atomic physics) that ushered in the twentieth
century. Bergson’s philosophy of duration, as one historian of science has put it, “lay in
the direction in which physics would move sooner or later.”3
Bergson wrote in a time of historical dislocation, when certainties that depended
upon a mechanistic view of the world were breaking down under the pressure of
scientific and economic transformation. In many ways this juncture parallels our
own, as we seek our bearings in a globalized post-industrial world that depends on
information technologies, and inhabit a world culture that anxiously yearns for yet more
technological innovation in the face of fast changing, and increasingly unpredictable,
global markets. As the speed of communication across physical and cultural distances
approaches “real time,” and the speed of calculating financial data accelerates beyond
the capacity of markets to absorb the interventions based on these calculations, time
has never been more central to our concerns.
But what sort of time? What was at stake for Bergson in revealing the obsession with
space, and the correlative repression of time that he diagnosed within the metaphysical
tradition, was the philosophical specificity of life and life processes, as distinct from the
relatively static inanimate things that could be manipulated, quantified, and controlled,
and whose behavior could be predicted. Today, as we consider not only various critiques
of humanism but discourses of the “post human”—whether in relation to information
networks, technology, the human/animal divide, or all of the above—time is “of the
Foreword ix
essence,” as the proverbial expression goes. The distinction between the living and the
nonliving that Bergson placed at the center of his thought has become pressing, if also
more and more uncertain. If Bergson defined the comic in terms of the superimposition
of the mechanical upon the living, today the hybridization of the living and the artificial
is no longer a laughing matter. It is tied to very practical concerns such as biodiversity,
global warming, and the availability of clean water.
Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism invites us to reread Bergson and
to reconsider modernism in relation to his thought. It also invites us to explore the
limits of modernism—or modernisms. “[T]he (Bergsonian) duration of modernism’s
moment is bound neither by clock nor calendar,” the editors of this volume write,
“but . . . by time experienced.” This is a question that travels through the force fields of
modernism, in its complicated relations with post-modernism and the “unmodern,”
both intimately bound up with it.4 It is both timely and important to consider
modernism—in all its diversity and according to its various temporal phases or
rhythms—in relation to Bergson’s thought. This volume will give us new insight into
modernisms past, as well as future.
Notes
1 Henry Miller, The Tropic of Capricorn (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 217, qtd. in
Paul Douglass, Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature (University of Kentucky Press,
1986), 173.
2 Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, in Oeuvres (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1959), 89 (translation mine).
3 Milič Čapek. Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation
(Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1971), xi.
4 For the notion of the unmodern, see Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to
Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2004).