Bergson and The Art of Immanence - Painting, Photography, Film-Edinburgh University Press (2013)

BERGSON AND THE ART
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
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Contents
List of Illustrations vii

Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction: Art’s Philosophy – Bergson and Immanence 1

Charlotte de Mille and John Mullarkey
Part I: Bergson, Art, History

1. Bergson, History and Ontology 17
Craig Lundy
2. Art History, Immanently 32
Charlotte de Mille
3. Art History, Less Its Conditions of Possibility: Following
Bergson’s ‘Le Possible et le réel’ 47
Adi Efal
4. Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc. 63
Eric Alliez
5. Bergson Before Deleuze: How to Read Informel Painting 80
Sarah Wilson
6. Revolutionary Immanence: Bergson Among the Anarchists 94
Mark Antliff
Part II: Unconditional Practice

7. The Matter of the Image: Notes on Practice-Philosophy 115
Felicity Colman
8. Pasearse: Duration and the Act of Photographing 131
Stella Baraklianou
9. Duration and Rhetorical Movement 148
James Day
vi Contents
10. A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation: Towards a

Bergsonian Production of Subjectivity 165
Simon O’Sullivan
Part III: Immanence of the Visible

11. Painting the Invisible: Time, Matter and the Image in
Bergson and Michel Henry 189
Brendan Prendeville
12. ‘For We Will Have Shown it Nothing’: Bergson as Non-
Philosopher (of) Art 206
John Mullarkey
13. The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics: Reading
Diffractively 232
Iris van der Tuin
14. Hyperaesthesia and the Virtual 247
Howard Caygill
Afterword: An Art Historical Return to Bergson 260
Jae Emerling
Index 272
List of Illustrations
Figure 2.1 Duncan Grant, Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting

with Sound, 1914, © Tate, London 2013; estate of
Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2013. 33
Figure 5.1 Alfred Manessier, L’Elan, 1956, Photo Xavier
Grandsart. Courtesy Galerie Applicat-Prazan, Paris
© Adagp, Paris 2013. 83
Figure 5.2 Giulio-Carlo Argan, cover for Fautrier, Matière et
mémoire, 1960. 84
Figure 9.1 James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Symphony in
White, No. 1: The White Girl 1862, © Harris
Whittemore Collection, National Gallery of Art,
Washington DC. Image courtesy of National
Gallery of Art, Washington. 149
Figure 9.2 Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, oil on
canvas, 1863, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée
d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. 150
Figure 10.1 Bergson’s plane of matter (with ‘I’ at centre). 170
Figure 10.2 The line of matter and the line of memory. 170
Figure 10.3 Bergson’s cone of memory (from ‘On the Survival
of Images’, Matter and Memory). 170
Figure 10.4 Bergson’s cone of memory with ‘levels’ (from ‘On
the Survival of Images’, Matter and Memory). 176
Figure 10.5 ‘Shining Points’/fractal ecology in cone. 176
Figure 10.6 Cone of the mystic: 1. Static religion (habit/ritual)
2. Dynamic religion (introspection/intuition) 3.
The mystic. 176
Figure 10.7 Return path/circuit of the mystic/militant. 181
Figure 11.1 Rembrandt, Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Wife
of Jacob Trip, c. 1661, London, National Gallery.
Reproduction © The National Gallery; courtesy of
the National Gallery Picture Library. 201
vii
viii List of Illustrations
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. 217
Notes on Contributors
Eric Alliez (b. 1957) is Professor at University of Paris 8 and at

the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston
University. His books include Diagram 3000 [Words] (2012), The
Guattari Effect (ed., with Andrew Goffey, 2011), Capitalism and
Schizophrenia and Consensus: Of Relational Aesthetics (2010), L’Œil-
Cerveau (2007), La Pensée-Matisse (with Jean Claude Bonne, 2005),
Gilles Deleuze. Une vie philosophique (ed., 1998), De l’impossibilité
de la phénoménologie (1995), La Signature du monde (1993), and Les
Temps capitaux (preface by G. Deleuze, 2 vols, 1991). Forthcoming:
Défaire l’image. De l’art contemporain. He has been the general
editor of the Œuvres de Gabriel Tarde (Les Empêcheurs de penser en
rond / Seuil [13 volumes published]) and a founding member of the
journal Multitudes, for which he managed the section concerned with
Contemporary Art until June 2009.
Mark Antliff is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Duke

University. He is the author of numerous studies of European modern-
ism, including Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian
Avant-Garde (1993), Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth,
Art and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (2007), and Cubism and Culture
(2001) and A Cubism Reader 1906–1914 (2008), both co-authored
with Patricia Leighten. In 2010 he co-curated the exhibition ‘The
Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–1918’, with
venues at the Nasher Museum of Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
and Tate Britain. He is currently Marta Sutton Weeks Senior Fellow at
the Stanford Humanities Center for 2012–13.
Stella Baraklianou is a photographic artist and lecturer in photogra-

phy at the School of Art, Design and Architecture at the University
of Huddersfield, UK. As a practitioner her work explores themes of
memory and subjectivity, through still-life and landscape photography.
ix
x Notes on Contributors
Her main themes are memory, duration, and immanence, explored

through the work of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio
Agamben, as well as trace/index and time in photography, explored
through the works of Roland Barthes. Her work has been exhibited in
the UK (‘XS’ at FA Projects, London 2004) and abroad, including her
native Greece (‘The Space of Time’, PhotoBiennale of Thessaloniki,
Museum of Photography, Thessaloniki, 2008). She is currently working
on a monograph of recent photographic works, with a text contribu-
tion from John Mullarkey, under the title Orientation.
Howard Caygill is Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern

European Philosophy, Kingston University. He is the author of Levinas
and The Political (2002), Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience
(1998), A Kant Dictionary (1995) and Art of Judgment (1989).
Felicity Colman is Director of Studies in the Media Department,

Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. She
works on visual philosophy, with a focus on feminist and experimental
work. She is the author of Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts
(2011) and the editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key
Thinkers (2009).
James Day is a PhD student at The Courtauld Institute of Art.
Adi Efal is currently a Gerda Henkel post-doctoral researcher at the

Thomas institute of the University of Cologne, working on a project
construing a conceptual history of habitus. She has taught at the
Universities of Tel-Aviv and Haifa, as well as in the Bezalel academy of
Art and Design in Jerusalem and the Midrasha school of art at the Beit-
Berl College. Her research and publications concern the relationship
between art-historiography and the history of philosophy.
Jae Emerling is an associate professor of modern and contemporary

art in the College of Arts and Architecture at the University of North
Carolina, Charlotte. He received his PhD in Art History from the
University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the
intersection between art and continental philosophy, particularly the
photographic image and issues of time, memory and history. He is the
author of Theory for Art History (2005) and Photography: History and
Theory (2012). His work has also appeared in the Journal of Visual
Culture, CAA Reviews, Journal of Art Historiography, and X-TRA:
Contemporary Art Quarterly.
Notes on Contributors xi
Craig Lundy is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social

Transformation Research, University of Wollongong, Australia. He
is the author of History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of
Creativity (2012) and various papers on European philosophy.
Charlotte de Mille’s research concerns the intersections of painting,

music, and philosophy. She is the editor of Music and Modernism
(2011), and a contributor to Understanding Bergson, Understanding
Modernism (2012); Rival Sisters, Art and Music at the Birth of
Modernism (forthcoming 2014), and Modernist Games: Cézanne and
The Cardplayers. She curates a music series for the Courtauld Gallery.
She is Chair of the RMA Music and Visual Arts Group and Lecturer in
Art History at the University of Sussex.
John Mullarkey is Professor of Film and Television at Kingston

University. He is the author of Bergson and Philosophy (1999), Post-
Continental Philosophy: An Outline (2006), Philosophy and the
Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (2010), and is the editor of The
New Bergson (1999), Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics
(2007), and co-editor of Henri Bergson: Key Writings (2002), Laruelle
and Non-Philosophy (2012), as well as The Bloomsbury Companion to
Continental Philosophy (2013).
Simon O’Sullivan is Senior Lecturer in Art History/Visual Culture in

the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University
of London. He has published two monographs, Art Encounters
Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (2005) and
On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite–Infinite
Relation (2012), and is the editor, with Stephen Zepke, of both
Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (2008) and Deleuze
and Contemporary Art (2010). He also makes art, with David Burrows,
under the name Plastique Fantastique.
Brendan Prendeville is an art historian, whose published research con-

cerns painting and phenomenology, with reference to aspects of realism
and themes of embodiment.
Iris van der Tuin is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and

Philosophy of Science at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has
edited Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture (2009) with Rosemarie
Buikema and wrote New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies
(2012) with Rick Dolphijn. Her work on new feminist materialism has
xii Notes on Contributors
appeared in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Australian

Feminist Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, and Women’s
Studies International Forum.
Sarah Wilson is an art historian and curator whose interests extend

from postwar and Cold War Europe and the USSR to contemporary
global art. She was educated at the University of Oxford (English
Literature) and at The Courtauld where she took her MA and PhD
degrees. In 1997 she was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by
the French Government for services to French art and culture. In 2008
she was a presidential candidate for the International Association of
Art Critics (AICA). She is the author of The Visual World of French
Theory: Figurations (2010) and Matisse (2009, English and Spanish
editions).
Introduction:
Art’s Philosophy –
Bergson and Immanence
CHARLOTTE DE MILLE AND
JOHN MULLARKEY
In an interview made for the opening of her installation, Nowhere Less

Now, Lindsay Seers tells her interlocutor that the work was motivated
by a very Bergsonian problem: ‘I start with a question – where does the
past exist? But the starting point is from a notion of the philosopher
Henri Bergson’s intuition as practice, to make art ontological.’ To make
art ontological – to give it Being.1 We might, nonetheless, partly reverse
Seer’s formulation of this Bergsonian intuition: alongside making an
ontology for art, why not also give Being its ‘perception’ (aisthesis)?
After all, for Bergson, metaphysics – that is, an immanent, non-Platonist
metaphysics – is a kind of art of the people, offering enhanced percep-
tions ‘more continual and more accessible to the majority’.2 The being of
the world is not to be found in a transcendent realm discovered beyond
the senses through the (exceptional) power of philosophical intellect
(nous): reality is only in this world, and is re-discovered immanently
by extending our perceptual faculties by means of art or philosophy
(understood as a generic art, an art for the generality, for everyone and
every faculty).3 Moreover, the world that is thus rediscovered is not one
but manifold, an excess of realities, or ‘images’, co-existing at the same
‘space’ but in different temporalities (or ‘durées’): multiple presents with
different, multiple, pasts. Seer’s work in Nowhere Less Now, with its
proclamation of the equality of images (‘everything is images, and all
images are equal’),4 is no less excessive than Bergson’s universe – which
begins and ends, as Matter and Memory (1896) tell us, ‘in the presence of
images’.5 The essays collected in Bergson and the Art of Immanence each
testify in different ways to this multiplicity of realities and their respec-
tive perceptual images, as revealed through photography, film, painting,
or philosophy. In very specific modes, each examines how a sensuous,
mutable thinking – what Bergson calls ‘penser en durée’ – can be discov-
ered in both the recent history of art and in contemporary art practice.6
1
2 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
Bergson has been variously described as a poet-philosopher and an

aesthetic philosopher, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively.
As Maurice Blanchot noted as far back as 1949: ‘Bergson . . . was
imbued with an extreme distrust of words and an extreme confidence
in poetry’, whilst Paul Valery charged him with having ‘questioned as
a professor and replied as . . . a poet’.7 Yet Bergson would never have
accepted any dissociation between art and the reality philosophy dis-
covers, so that it is perfectly true that each of his books was ‘conceived
at once as a scientific work and as a work of art’.8 Hence, the point is
not only that Bergson philosophised about art and artistic perception
(which he certainly did across a number of texts), but also that he
approached philosophy in general and structured his own philosophy
in particular as a form of art, that is, with a view to it acting on our
powers of perception. Philosophy acts to make us see the world differ-
ently, to attend to it in new ways such that ‘art and philosophy can also
conceive . . . a new attention to life’.9 In this introduction to Bergson
and the Art of Immanence, we outline some of the ways in which
this immanent philosophy (of) art enacts poetic forms of perception
through reforming our sense of duration, affectivity, the body, memory
and intuition, and with reference to the collection’s specific chapters
on painting, photography and cinema. How does ‘immanence’ – the
concept of ‘existing or remaining within’ the sensuous world, or being
and acting ‘within the physical world’ – function within a philosophy
of time and creativity such as Bergson’s, and in relation to these visual
arts?
It is twenty years since Mark Antliff’s renowned 1993 study
Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde
appeared, reminding art historians once and for all that Bergson had
an extraordinarily significant impact on his younger contemporaries
within the avant-garde, particularly in France and Italy: Henri Matisse,
Albert Gleizses and Jean Metzinger, Marcel Duchamp and his brother
Raymond Duchamp-Villon, the Futurists, and the Francophile-Scots
artist John Duncan Fergusson and his circle around the Rhythm
journal. So definitive and wide in intellectual scope is Inventing
Bergson that, until very recently, few art historians have ventured
into the field for themselves beyond either an informed direction to
Antliff’s work, or a bland expression of Bergson’s influence as part of a
general circuit of changing ideas at the turn of the last century. Antliff
himself returned to the subject in ‘The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson
and the Art of Matisse’ for The New Bergson (1999), and, more
recently, in ‘Bergson on Art and Creativity’ for Understanding Bergson,
Understanding Modernism (2012). From other scholars, Federico
Introduction: 3
Luisetti’s article ‘Reflections on Duchamp: Bergson Readymade’ from

2008 is a notable exception to this lacklustre engagement, as is Todd
Cronan’s book-length study Against Affective Formalism: Matisse,
Bergson, Modernism.10
The reasons for this rather undistinguished reception of Bergson’s
ideas within art history are plural. To begin with, too often Bergson’s
ideas have been conflated with those of Gilles Deleuze (Bergson’s most
famous heir), whose more focused engagement with art and art history
is thereby used as a proxy for Bergsonism. The ideas Deleuze imported
from Bergson – multiplicity, the virtual, vitalism, immanence, the ontol-
ogy of images, the method of problems, the emphases on becoming,
creativity and fabulation, the critiques of negativity and possibility, of
Kant and Plato, etc. – are most often passed off as Bergsonian without
acknowledging both the specificity of Deleuze’s re-rendering (in his
work on painting, music, cinema and literature), and thereby also
the need to attend to what Bergson did differently with these original
concepts. Some of this more nuanced attention has already begun in
art studies – Laura Cull’s Theatres of Immanence (2012) for instance,
or, in this collection, Howard Caygill’s work on hyperaesthesia, which
acknowledges the greater value of actual perception for Bergson (as
opposed to its downgraded status in Deleuze vis-à-vis the virtual).11
More needs to be done, however, especially given Deleuze’s much more
transcendentalist approach (pace his critique of Kant) which compares
less well with Bergson’s more empiricist stance. Secondly, Bergson’s
work tends to pose a challenge to art history. He never published a
separate treatise on art or aesthetics, as he had planned, and, conse-
quently, it has been necessary to extract pertinent material from texts
on subjects (time, consciousness, memory, biology and comedy) that,
in themselves, though not necessarily so far from art history, remain
nevertheless unfamiliar territory for the non-specialist. Alternatively,
we can look to surviving lecture notes and letters from students lucky
enough to be present at one of Bergson’s lectures on art. However,
not only are these sources indirect, they also fail, more often than not,
to address specific works of art in a way that art historians would be
comfortable with.12 However, we would like to suggest that the chal-
lenge for art history is not so much a practical one of accessibility (to
Bergson’s thinking) so much as one concerning the methodologies and
expectations of art history itself. To accept the processes of creativity as
part of historical activity is to make a definite shift away from the focus
on the ‘finished’ art object as it is served up to us by artists, museums
and galleries. Until we accept Bergson as a philosopher of history in
the manner that Craig Lundy, following Bergson’s near contemporaries
Arnold Toynbee and Charles Péguy, has outlined in this volume

(‘Bergson, History and Ontology’), Bergsonian emphases on change
and movement have little to say to the archived and conserved art
object itself, while it lies dormant awaiting critical interest. Change,
time and memory are, of course, inherent to the survival of works of
art through generations, and are useful methods of approach for re-
enacting the social systems of value, patronage and exchange through
which objects move. All the same, these are matters of reception as
much as they are questions of aesthetics.
On the contrary, an abiding interest of this volume will be to think
creativity as a site for the productive writing of a history of art that is
open to potentiality, processuality and provisonality as embedded in
the art objects we consider. When Roger Fry, writing with a thorough
knowledge of Bergson, described the application of paint as a ‘gesture
of the artist’s feeling’, he turned aesthetics towards the body, towards
physical sensation and emotional affect as the modes of experience that
the arts addressed.13 Just as the concept of universal vision had been
destroyed by scientific knowledge of the individuality of sight, so was
art no longer accepted as primarily visual. The turn has been discussed
at great length in art historical texts: Jonathan Crary on Suspensions of
Perception (1999); Richard Shiff, Yve-Alain Bois and Crary on sensa-
tion in Cézanne; Leo Steinberg, Alistair Wright and Bois on the insta-
bility of Matisse’s canvases. But Crary contrasts Cézanne’s ‘broken’
perception with the ‘pure’ ideal of Matter and Memory, which is read by
Crary as part of a larger programme of synthesis, a desire to unify sub-
jectivity as the continuation of the past in the present.14 And, despite the
Bergsonism of Matisse’s ‘Notes of a Painter’ (1908), identified by Jack
Flam and substantiated by Mathew Stewart Prichard’s record of the
artist’s thorough understanding of Bergson, his philosophy is strangely
absent from these studies.15 In terms of theories of art (history), there
has been a recent reprisal of the concept of affect, particularly in Anglo-
American scholarship, most demonstrably in The Affect Theory Reader
(2010). But here too, Bergson is seldom referenced.
The ‘turn’ (to an experiential, sensation-based understanding of art
addressing multiple senses and memory), however, has a powerful reso-
nance with the very idea of ‘turning’ which is so crucial to Bergsonian
intuition. As Mullarkey suggests here in his chapter on Bergson and
‘non-standard’ philosophy, ‘For We Will Have Shown it Nothing’,
Bergson’s ‘reversal’ of thought extrapolated in ‘An Introduction to
Metaphysics’ asks precisely that we should turn away from conven-
tional systems of thinking. (Re-)turning to this in the light of recent
debates in postmodern history might open some probing questions for
Introduction: 5
Bergson studies, as well as for these debates themselves. For instance,

in the introduction to his Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity,
Keith Jenkins writes that ‘however irreducible, stubborn, painful, comic
or tragic the past may have been, it only reaches us through fictional
devices which invest it with a range of highly selective and hierarchical
readings’.16 This selectivity is present irrespective of whether these are
presented as ‘upper case’ analyses of past occurrences or ‘lower case’
academic history that studies events, both significant and mundane,
with equal attention (the emphases on conventionally marginalised and
obscured histories notwithstanding). In place of this ‘moribund condi-
tion’ of history, Jenkins advocates ‘working intellectual potentialities
. . . to construct new imaginaries of radical emancipation’.17 His terms
are provocative, and interestingly so in the context of Bergsonism, a
philosophy of potentialities that gives substantial weight to images,
virtual and actual, in relation to consciousness, recollection, perception
and bodily sensation. Where the image is a productive site for creativity
in Bergson’s thought, so too do Jenkins’s radical ‘imaginaries’ acknowl-
edge the creativity of historical discourse. In this light, Bergsonian intui-
tion, the rejection of habits of thought – his ‘reversal’ in Mullarkey’s
terms – has an uncanny resonance for both non-standard and postmod-
ern studies, as, in fact, their progenitor.
Yet, whereas Jenkins’s argument is unapologetically a-historical,
Bergson did not regard it necessary to distinguish between creativity
and history. Rather, he restores creativity to history through duration
and memory, offering another way into the paradoxical double bind of
art history as a discipline that historicises presentness:
In reality there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many
different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or
relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their respec-
tive places in the scale of being . . . To perceive consists in condensing enor-
mous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated
moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history.18
The historical moments we select for consideration may be regarded as
snapshots of significance, momentary arrests in the continuing stream
of time, much like the fleeting moments of intuitive insight acquired
through the effort of thinking in duration. In these terms, history
itself survives, whatever claims may be made today for its relativity or
indecision. History, like art, remains an engaging way to communicate
particular experiences and perceptions of the world, a site in which dis-
parate peoples (human and non-human), times, objects and events can
be brought into (temporary) co-existence, thereby remaining relevant
for so long as humanity retains a curiosity in life.
Concurrent with questions concerning the survival of history, there

has been another turn in which some art historians have reconsidered
the agency of the art object. T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death: An
Experiment in Art Writing (2006), offers close and highly personal
readings of Nicholas Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake
(c. 1648) and Landscape with a Calm (1650–51) as he encountered
them on repeated visits during a period of six months. Clark’s focus
is on what escapes us in looking, how art resists its translation into
a verbal medium, and what, ultimately, this leaves us with as art his-
torians. To discuss the sovereignty of the art object is in some way to
bestow upon it a power or existence separate to its maker or viewers.
W. J. T. Mitchell has taken this way of regarding works of art in a more
dramatic direction. His What do Pictures Want? (2005) seeks in various
ways to vitalise or animate the art object, working against a ‘tendency
of criticism itself to pose as an iconoclastic practice, a labor of demys-
tification and pedagogical exposure of false images’.19 In its place,
Mitchell asks us to acknowledge that ‘we cannot ignore that human
beings (including myself) insist on talking and behaving as if they did
believe’ that pictures – images – want power, independence, a voice as
authoritative and active as the spoken word or written text, however
much we might distrust this possibility with every fibre of our rational,
academic, and professional selves.20 To put it in Bergsonian terms, for
intuition, images are equal to us; but for (our) intellect, they must be
subordinated to their referents, that is, to what we want images to be
‘about’, what we want them to represent – a mere means for our ends.
Rather than allow the picture its own immanent being, our thoughts
(or representations) must transcend it. Only intuition can reverse this
attitude and actually perceive the picture or image as a material part of
the Real and so in a new, vital manner: an end without means.
This new attitude, a non-standard-rationality, is the ‘CAUTIUS’ or
warning that Georges Didi-Huberman, mining Erwin Panofsky, has
identified as the great risk for art historians: ‘If the image is what makes
us imagine, and if the (sensible) imagination is an obstacle to (intel-
ligible) knowledge, how can one know an image?’21 Didi-Huberman’s
suggestion for the future of the discipline is laid out in Confronting
Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (1990). In
order to ‘effect a true critique’, he asks, is it not necessary ‘to engage in
an archeology, of the kind that Lacan undertook with Freud, Foucault
with Binswanger, Deleuze with Bergson, and Derrida with Husserl? So
it is to the rhythms of an archeology of a history of art that the critique
of iconology should proceed.’22
In the case of Confronting Images, it is an archaeology of Panofsky
Introduction: 7
that concerns Didi-Huberman, as Panofsky had himself engaged in an

archaeology with his teacher Aby Warburg. Although not its first aim,
Bergson and the Art of Immanence should go some way to recuperating
Bergson within this lineage of art history, which stems ultimately (in
art history as opposed to philosophy), from Bergson’s contemporary
Alois Riegl (1858–1905). Riegl’s notorious kunstwollen has recently
been described by Saul Ostraw as an ‘immanent artistic drive’,23 and it
is certainly true that Riegl’s work prioritised an introspective turn not
only in art itself, but in his attempt to place human subjectivity (includ-
ing, in contemporary terms, ‘affect’) within an objective and rational
framework.
This collection, then, brings Bergsonian immanence and art historical
practice together for the first time. Bringing together aestheticians, art
critics, art historians and philosophers, the volume offers a variety of
perspectives and methodological approaches to argue for a new field of
exchange between art and theory. The collection draws aesthetics closer
to the history of art. It situates a trajectory of thinking, interpretation
and inspiration that comes out of Bergsonian immanence, both directly
through a reassessment of Bergson’s philosophy of history and through
artists and thinkers who turned consciously to Bergson (as exemplified
by the subjects of Antliff’s and Wilson’s chapters); and more indirectly
through acknowledging the potential of the concept of immanence as a
method of critical interpretation.
Since the earliest interest of artists in Bergson, intuition has been
fundamental. As Antliff has extrapolated, Matisse’s portraiture relied
on exactly this, the artist remarking that ‘I can never tell what a work
will reveal to me.’24 Surely this observation is, at least to some extent,
an acknowledgement of the animated escapes or escapades of images
outlined above. Re-thinking the so-called ‘ineffable’ qualities of the
image, or that which evades discourse, we do not argue for art to be
contextualised within philosophy, for philosophy to ‘speak for’ art (be
it in the tried and trusted manner of, say, Hegelian aesthetics, or of any
other kind). Rather, this collection shows how there are different kinds
of discourse, of showing, demonstrating, suggesting and thinking that
obviate the need for any ‘speaking for’ at all. A new practice of art-
philosophy and philosophy-art where nothing represents anything else,
but everything gestures towards, or allows the many kinds of singular
immanence to ‘speak for themselves’ (without that old adage only
licensing mute genius).25 ‘What assemblage of curves already known
can ever be equivalent to the pencil-stroke of a great artist? . . . are not
the original lines drawn by the artist themselves already the fixation
and, as it were, congealment of a movement?’26
Bergson’s questions in Creative Evolution are used in support of

the intuitive method of creativity, whereby ‘we seize from within, we
live at every instant, a creation of form . . . a creation of matter’.27 He
adds, however, that ‘in order that our consciousness shall coincide with
something of its principle, it must detach itself from the already-made
and attach itself to the being-made. It needs that, turning back on itself
and twisting on itself, the faculty of seeing should be made to be one
with the act of willing.’28 Bergson argues for reality to be understood as
tendency.29 Such a conception of reality en faisant also counters much
of the over-determinism within some critical methods current within
the history of art. Using the image of an expanding universe, Bergson
acknowledges that the reality of tendency and movement ‘suggests to us
the idea of a thing unmaking itself’, rather than one that works towards
fixture. For the exploding solar system, ‘the idea of a thing unmaking
itself . . . is one of the essential characters of materiality’. It follows,
Bergson contends, that ‘the process by which this thing makes itself
is directed in a contrary way to that of physical processes, and that it
is therefore, by its very definition, immaterial’.30 The inversion of our
conventional understanding of making and materiality may be just one
more Bergsonian turn – immateriality is not an opposite state to matter,
but matter-in-the-making, it is a process. As such, its implications for
a discipline founded on the materiality of art objects is surely worthy
of further consideration. It asks art historians to reconceive material-
ity and representation, and, moreover, to address the immateriality of
art history itself as a weak shadow of the objects on which it rests. At
the same time, perhaps, it offers a way to write around the intangible,
immaterial or more-than-material aspects of art objects – qualities that
are often obscured, in spite of the work of Clark, Mitchell, and Didi-
Huberman. A re-turn to materiality in immanence allows for these
aspects to be made visible in their becoming:
In this image of a creative action which unmakes itself we have already

a more exact representation of matter. In vital activity we see, then, that
which subsists of the direct movement in the inverted movement, a reality
which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself.31
Immanent practice suggests the possibility of unmaking in the act of

making. It offers a method to turn the object, and to turn past modes
of art historical and art critical writing, to re-make or re-conceive both
objects and writing closer together. Art history may not need resuscitat-
ing, but Bergson and the Art of Immanence should question our ways
of doing art history.
Part I of the collection, ‘Bergson, Art, History’, brings together a
Introduction: 9
range of historical research ranging from Craig Lundy’s exegesis of a

general Bergsonian historiography in ‘Bergson, History and Ontology’
(that shows how an ontology of historical creativity plays a critical
role in all of Bergson’s philosophical investigations), through ‘Art
History, Immanently’ – Charlotte de Mille’s use of Duncan Grant’s
‘Abstract Kinetic Scroll’ as a way into seeing whether an immanent art
history can be written – to Mark Antliff’s ‘Revolutionary Immanence:
Bergson Among the Anarchists’, which considers the impact of Bergson
on anarchist theory and an emerging, anarchist aesthetics of the early
twentieth century. Also in this section, Adi Efal, in ‘Art History, Less
its Conditions of Possibility: Following Bergson’s ‘Le Possible et le
réel’, analyses some of the epistemological consequences of applying
Bergson’s anti-Kantian critique of possibility (as a retrospective arte-
fact of real becoming) to art historical inquiries. Bergson argues that
no authentic generation can be understood as a result of ‘conditions
of possibility’, a finding that has very significant implications for his-
torical disciplines that deal with poietic acts, such as the history of art.
Eric Alliez’s ‘Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc.’, looks at the Bergsonian
paradigm of immanence within the field of art, taken through its first
historic inscription in Matisse and Fauvism. Here, the very notion of
the aesthetic finds itself radically problematised, while also crystallising
the most detailed aspects of Bergson’s thought (his critique of Form),
and its absolute outside, with specific reference to Matisse and Oiticica.
Sarah Wilson completes the section with ‘Bergson Before Deleuze: How
to Read Informel Painting’ which pursues a Bergsonian reading of Art
informel that shows how Bergson must be inscribed into the history of
this 1950s movement.
The second Part, ‘Unconditional Art’, has four chapters on various
art practices, film-making, photography, painting and drawing. In ‘The
Matter of the Image: Notes on Practice-Philosophy’ Felicity Colman
tests Bergson’s theory of the immanent behaviour of cinematographic
forms against the collaborative film work of American artists’ Robert
Smithson and Nancy Holt. Smithson was well aware of Bergson’s
work, and aspects of the conceptualisation of entropy and duration that
Bergson discusses in Creative Evolution are investigated in Smithson’s
solo works. Colman also looks more widely at methodological questions
surrounding the use of a Bergsonian cinematographic consciousness in
relation to the visual arts. Stella Baraklianou’s ‘Pasearse: Duration
and the Act of Photographing’ considers the temporality of the photo-
graphic frame and the need to situate it within the photographic act.
This ‘opening up’ of the time of the frame leads her to consider the
meaning of pasearse (‘to take oneself walking’) – a self-reflexive active
verb that exposes a temporality wherein immanence and being coin-

cide: a relational event combining stillness and movement when practis-
ing photography. In ‘Duration and Rhetorical Movement’, James Day
examines the relations between the time of writing and art historical
time by linking Bergsonian duration with rhetorical devices from
the postmodern historical novel, in particular Carlos Fuentes’ Terra
Nostra. Fuentes’ work provides modes of writing for art historians to
describe heterotopic relations such as between Whistler’s Symphony
in White, No. I. and Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. Given that the
times present in these paintings are unstable, writing can alter them
and render their histories constantly and creatively evolving. The final
chapter in this section is Simon O’Sullivan’s ‘A Diagram of the Finite-
Infinite Relation: Towards a Bergsonian Production of Subjectivity’,
which revolves around a diagram – the celebrated cone of memory from
Bergson’s Matter and Memory. The chapter looks at this drawing as a
form of thinking that leads to a commentary on the mystic in Bergson’s
The Two Sources of Religion and Morality, the mystic being the one
who actualises the pure past (seen in the cone of memory) in the pro-
duction of a specifically different kind of subjectivity.
The third and final section of the book turns to the ‘Immanence of the
Visible’, beginning with Brendan Prendeville’s ‘Painting the Invisible:
Time, Matter and the Image in Bergson and Michel Henry’. This
chapter examines parallels between the thought of Bergson and that of
the radically unorthodox phenomenologist Michel Henry, especially
in the light of the latter’s work on Kandinsky’s Voir l’invisible, and
finds Bergson’s theory of attention consonant with Henry’s apprehen-
sion of life as pathos. John Mullarkey’s ‘ “For We Will Have Shown it
Nothing”: Bergson as Non-Philosopher (of) Art’, makes another paral-
lel, this time between François Laruelle’s ‘non-standard philosophy’ and
Bergson’s immanent metaphysics of art. In very complementary ways,
they both radicalise the relations between philosophy and art, Bergson
seeing philosophy as a kind of general art, Laruelle making each of the
arts (non-standardly) philosophical. They both ‘de-philosophise philos-
ophy’ in the sense of making philosophy strange through what Bergson
calls ‘penser en durée’, ‘the immanent thinking-in-time that makes
philosophy a generic art and the arts specific, new, philosophies’. With
‘The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics: Reading Diffractively’,
Iris van der Tuin sees Bergson’s intuitive metaphysics as ‘untimely’
because it practises the very untimeliness of thought, and thereby must
not be classified or periodised. Exploring this strategy further, van der
Tuin then reads Bergson ‘diffractively’ through the work of the philoso-
pher-physicist Karen Barad in order to demonstrate the benefits of such
Introduction: 11
temporally non-linear interpretation. The final chapter in this section

is Howard Caygill’s ‘Hyperaesthesia and the Virtual’, which traces
the theme of hyperaesthesia and its correlates throughout Bergson’s
work, arguing for a reading of his contributions to psychic research in
the context of his theory of perception. The chapter also shows that the
experience of expanded perception was central to Bergson’s expansive
understanding of inherent human powers and their development.
Jae Emerling’s afterword to the collection, ‘An Art Historical Return
to Bergson’, explores a whole set of returns to Bergson, both with and
contra Deleuze, arguing in particular for art historians to look more
closely at the creative and transformative ‘Copernican turn’ Bergson’s
work presents ‘for any study of the relation between images and time’.
His apt resolution to our enterprise asks for a ‘becoming-Bergsonian’,
after Deleuze’s image of him. If anything, however, the preceding chap-
ters in this volume have shown how Bergson has, anachronistically no
doubt, outgrown the Deleuzian mould in which he has so often been
set: there are too many Bergsons in the philosophy of Bergson to match
one model, and each of them is as artful and creative as the next, each
an exemplar of the thinking in duration his work strived to perform in
its own writing.
We wish to express our gratitude to a number of others whose efforts
helped make this collection possible. Firstly, we thank Hager Weslati
for her excellent work in translating Eric Alliez’s chapter ‘Matisse,
Bergson, Oiticica, etc’. Our appreciation must also go to Carol
MacDonald, philosophy editor at Edinburgh University Press, for com-
missioning the volume and for all her help during the editing process.
The copy-editor at Edinburgh, Tim Clark, improved upon the work in
great measure. Lastly, we would like to thank Stella Baraklianou for
permission to use the image, Orientation For Auguste Choisy, for the
cover of 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.
4. Ole Hagen, Nowhere Less Now (London: Artangle, 2012), p. 8.

5. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer
(New York: Zone, 1991), p. 17.
6. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 34.
7. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Bergson and Symbolism’, translated by Joel A. Hunt,
in Yale French Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1949), pp. 63–6: p. 64.
8. Bernard Gilson, L’Individualité dans la philosophie de Bergson (Paris:
Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin), p. 64.
10. S. E. Gontarski, Laci Mattison and Paul Ardoin, eds, Understanding
Bergson, Understanding Modernism (New York: Continuum, 2012);
F. Luisetti, ‘Reflections on Duchamp: Bergson Readymade’, in Diacritics,
Vol. 38, No. 4 (2008), pp. 77–93; Todd Cronan, Against Affective
Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013).
11. See Laura Cull, Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of
Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012); see also John
Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality
(Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010), pp. 97–100.
12. Some short fragments have been published in Henri Bergson, Mélanges
(Paris: PUF, 1972). Others, such as the transcripts from Bergson’s Collège
de France lectures 1910–11 (possibly by Henri Gouhier), survive at the
Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, Paris.
13. Roger Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, in Vision and Design (London:
Pelican, 1937), p. 36.
14. In particular: Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge,
MA and London: MIT, 2001), pp. 323–8; Richard Shiff, ‘He Painted’, in
Nancy Ireson and Barnaby Wright, eds, Cézanne’s Card Players (London:
The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2009); Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the
End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical
Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1984); Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Cézanne: Words and Deeds’, in October,
no. 84 (1998), pp. 31–44; Yve-Alain Bois, ‘On Matisse: The Blinding: For
Leo Steinberg’, in October, no. 68 (1994), pp. 60–121; Leo Steinberg,
Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London,
Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Alastair Wright,
‘Arche-textures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History’, in October, no. 84
(1998), pp. 44–63.
15. Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, revd edn (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995); for Prichard see 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.
16. Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London:
Routledge, 1999), p. 2.
17. Ibid., p. 3.
Introduction: 13
18. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 207–8.

19. W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 8.
20. Ibid., p. 11.
21. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of
a Certain History of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2005), pp. xvi–xvii.
22. Ibid., p. xx.
23. Saul Ostraw, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Woodfield, Framing Formalism,
Riegl’s work (Amsterdam: G+B International, 2001), p. 7.
24. Antliff, ‘The Rhythms of Duration’, p. 199.
25. In African Art As Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude,
trans. Chike Jeffers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press Seagull Books,
2011), Souleymane Bachir Diagne uses Bergsonian intuition to argue that
African art is philosophy, where Bergsonian themes compare favourably
to the vitalism of African beliefs expressed in the continent’s art and
literature.
26. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London:
Macmillan, 1912), pp. 252–3.
27. Ibid., p. 253.
28. Ibid., p. 250.
29. In ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’, Bergson proposes that ‘reality is
mobility. Not things made but things in the making, not self-maintaining
states, but only changing states exist. All reality, therefore, is tendency’
(The Creative Mind, p. 188).
30. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 258.
31. Ibid., p. 261.
PART I
Bergson, Art, History

1. Bergson, History
and Ontology
CRAIG LUNDY
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.
BERGSON AND HISTORY?

Before embarking upon an exploration of Bergson and history, it must
be noted that at present there is no consensus on whether it is feasible,
let alone of value, to extract a philosophy of history from Bergson’s
thought or make use of his concepts for understanding the nature of
history. There is a Bergsonian philosophy of time of course, but as for
a Bergsonian philosophy of history, there is some scepticism within
the Bergsonian community as to whether it exists or even could. As
one eminent Bergsonian puts it, the suggestion that ‘the resources of
the ontological past . . . are open to the historian’ is ‘highly provoca-
tive’ and ‘needs to be adequately demonstrated and argued for’.1 For
17
someone such as myself with an interest in the nature of history, this

statement is rather perplexing. While it is true that Bergson never
explicitly set out a fully formed philosophy of history under that title,
the relevance of issues such as time, free will, memory and evolution
to the field of history and its theorisation is both evident and long
standing. To demonstrate, using the least obvious example on this list:
philosophers of science and history would agree that particular notions
of history are of great importance to evolutionary theories. Indeed, it
is not uncommon for commentators on complexity theory to single out
the historical character of Darwinian (and neo-Darwinian) evolution-
ary theory for criticism.2 For such individuals, an exploration of the
philosophy of history inherent in and advanced by Bergson’s alternative
account of evolution would therefore be of some value, or at the very
least be an investigation whose pursuit does not require a great deal of
justification.
The issues of relevance I listed above are, of course, the principal
problems to which Bergson devoted his first three books. If there is an
historical book in Bergson’s oeuvre, however, it is more common to
nominate his final work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,
for nowhere else in Bergson’s writings will you find a fuller expression
of his philosophy with respect to the events and people in history.
Although this observation is true, it is also somewhat constrictive as to
what counts as a philosophy of history and what might be of interest
to one. If one’s interest is in the nature of history, and more specifically
its ontology, then it would be remiss to limit one’s purview to the Two
Sources, given that Bergson’s ontological armoury is well and truly
formulated by that stage.
Charles Péguy would certainly agree. As an attendee of Bergson’s
Collège de France lectures, Péguy was a keen student and advocate
of Bergson’s philosophy. He was also attuned to the significance of
Bergson’s ideas for influencing our understanding of history. In a
number of essays, including most notably Clio (the essay, titled after
the muse of history, that will inspire Deleuze’s theory of the event),
Péguy explicitly employs several Bergsonian notions, such as duration
and the cone of memory, for the purposes of advancing a theory of
history that was in direct contrast to the dominant model of his day,
best exemplified by historians such as Ernest Lavisse, Charles Seignobos
and Charles-Victor Langlois. As Camille Creyghton has further pointed
out, Péguy’s Bergsonian thoughts on history date back to a 1901 essay
titled ‘Proceedings of Congress’, which recounts a fictional meeting
of four characters that debate the complexities of historiography and
memory. While it might be argued that Péguy fails to set out in these
Bergson, History and Ontology 19
essays a completely developed Bergsonian philosophy of history, it is

difficult to disagree that he at least saw the promise in pursuing one. As
Creyghton puts it: ‘At first glance, Bergson’s philosophy [of Time and
Free Will and Matter and Memory] has nothing to do with historiog-
raphy . . . However, his ideas about time and memory are estimated by
Péguy to be of so much importance that in his eyes they are essential
for anyone who wants to reflect on the conditions of the possibility of
writing history.’3
Nor was Péguy the only thinker of history who saw the potential for
a Bergsonian philosophy of history. In an exceptionally erudite study,
Christian Kerslake reveals how the once-revered English historian
Arnold Toynbee was significantly influenced by Bergson’s philosophy.
As Kerslake notes, Toynbee’s Bergsonism was no small matter, but in
fact the inspiration for his monumental history of civilisations: ‘it was
Bergsonian philosophy that provided Toynbee with his primary justifi-
cation for a turn to a global, synoptic view of human history, where the
rise and fall of civilizations became a further level of differentiation in
the ongoing cosmological and evolutionary differentiations that consti-
tute Bergson’s élan vital’.4
If there was sufficient cause for Péguy and Toynbee to mine
Bergsonian thought for insights into the nature and recording of history,
it would be due to not only the clear relevance of issues such as time,
memory and evolution to history, but also because Bergson himself
occasionally refers to history when describing his central concepts. I
will discuss some of these examples below, and in so doing call into
question the belief that ‘questions of history and of historical memory
and duration are to a large extent significantly absent from Bergson’s
oeuvre’.5 But for the moment I would simply point out the following:
while it is possible that Bergson’s references to history when describ-
ing his key concepts are of no relevance to the philosophy of history,
surely it is this claim that requires adequate demonstration and not the
contrary. It is also, to a certain extent, a moot point, for the prospect
that the resources of Bergson’s philosophy are closed to thinkers of
history most definitely did not stop philosophers and historians such as
Péguy and Toynbee from acting as if they were fair game. The debate
over whether Bergson himself explicitly advanced a coherent and fully
formed philosophy of history is therefore somewhat irrelevant, if one’s
interest is to explore the usefulness of Bergsonian philosophy for aiding
our understanding of the nature of history.
And yet it must be acknowledged that virtually nothing has been
written in this area (in a direct and sustained manner) since the revival
of Bergson studies in the English-speaking world. This fact was indeed
revealed by the editors at Radical Philosophy to be part of their moti-

vation for publishing an essay by Max Horkheimer on Bergson.6 In
my view, it is not entirely necessary to turn to critical theory in order
to engage in a discussion of Bergson’s philosophy and history; surely
we owe it to Bergson to first make a genuine effort at extracting and/
or developing a Bergsonian philosophy of history on its own terms
before we criticise it (or its lack) from the perspective of critical theory,
historical materialism, hermeneutics or anything else. In this spirit, the
remainder of this chapter will make some preliminary remarks on what
a Bergsonian philosophy of history might look like, and in so doing
demonstrate both the possibility and the promise of pursuing one.
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
Such references to history and becoming in Deleuze’s work affirm both

his ambivalence towards history and his casting of history on the side
of the actual. History, to elaborate, is the factual record of what actu-
ally happened in the past; it chronologically strings together actualities
that represent (capture) a virtual and productive force of becoming
(creation). The ‘stuff’ of history, furthermore, is that which has been
‘actualised’ – becomings, Ideas or Events that have ‘fallen into history’.9
On the levels of both method and metaphysics, therefore, history is one
with the actual.10 Mullarkey’s provocative response to this virtualist
tendency is to give the ‘actualist’ approach of Bergson its proper dues.
But whilst I share much sympathy with this agenda, the suggestion that
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:
This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the

present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the sepa-
ration or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains
to the essence of becoming to move and pull in both directions at once: Alice
does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa.14
We thus arrive at the following dualism. On the one hand there is the
living present. This living present ‘is the temporal extension which
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:
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
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
a virtual progression. When a new note emerges in a melody, it does not

so much ‘replace’ the previous note as form a continuity with it. This
continuity is duration. Although it is common to represent (‘symbolise’)
this continuity as a set of discrete moments lined up in a row (a chrono-
logical timeline), Bergson points out that in reality we do not experience
time as discrete instants, but rather as an interpenetrating succession,
what he refers to as ‘a continuous or qualitative multiplicity’. Duration
for Bergson is thus a heterogeneous multiplicity that must continuously
change in kind if time is to be allowed to pass – to endure.29
In his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (translated
as Time and Free Will) this notion of duration will be employed by
Bergson to solve Zeno’s paradox. As we find there, Achilles will never
be able to overtake the tortoise in a footrace unless the duration of
Achilles and the duration of his slower rival are respected as singular
heterogeneities or continuous (as opposed to discrete) multiplicities.30
Moving forward, however, Bergson will make use of this very same
idea to describe the evolution of life. As he will assert in Creative
Evolution, the evolution of life forms ‘a single indivisible history’.31
This invocation of the word ‘history’ is telling, for the history that he is
talking about is not some chronological spatialisation of a durational
movement. Rather, the indivisible trajectory that Bergson is referring
to is history itself. As such, history does not come after the durational
movement of evolution, for it is duration, or perhaps more exactly, a
part of it.
Bergson’s reference to history in this manner is no mere one-off. Nor
does it only occur at inconsequential moments. In fact, we can find this
use of history in one of the most beloved passages of Bergson’s entire
oeuvre:
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
As we can see here, history need not be thought of as an isolated system,

where past, present and future are spread out instantaneously in space,
for Bergson offers us another way of thinking about history, in which
‘this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a

duration like our own’.
It is this kind history that thinkers such as Toynbee, Péguy and
myself are so keen to explore. In articulating his various civilisations,
Toynbee’s histories attempt to elicit the singular duration of each
civilisation (and their relation to the élan vital). These civilisations are
naturally in contact/confluence with one another, and significantly so,
like Achilles and the tortoise. But they can each nonetheless be said
to exude their own métier or singular combination of reality – what
Deleuze and Guattari might call a cross-section of chaos or plane of
immanence.33 As for Péguy, when he insists upon the need to place
oneself within the depths of an historical event, it is precisely for the
purposes of ‘intuiting’ the durational rhythm of that historical event.34
As I previously remarked, these examples of Bergsonian history are by
no means the only possible applications, and it is debatable as to how
accurate or fully developed they are. Their existence, however, points
to the possibility of extracting an alternative conception of history that
is closely associated with the notion of duration and its affiliated terms.
From an historical theory point of view, it is hardly surprising that
one might turn to Bergson when seeking a form of history that escapes
the confines of determinism and representationalism. This is because
Bergson’s philosophy affords us one of the most prominent critiques
of historicism in the history of Western philosophy. In his critique of
evolutionary theory, Bergson takes to task two varieties of historicism:
radical mechanism and radical finalism. In radical mechanism, reality is
subjected to an a priori systematisation that is causal-linear and fixed.
The essence of mechanical explanation is therefore ‘to regard the future
and the past as calculable functions of the present, and thus to claim
that all is given’.35 Radical finalism, on the other hand, is teleological,
in so far as its movement is guided by a predetermined endpoint. In
Bergson’s words:
This doctrine of teleology, in its extreme form, as we find it in Leibniz for

example, implies that things and beings merely realize a programme previ-
ously arranged. But if there is nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation
in the universe, time is useless again. As in the mechanistic hypothesis,
here again it is supposed that all is given. Finalism thus understood is only
inverted mechanism. It springs from the same postulate, with this sole dif-
ference, that in the movement of our finite intellects along successive things,
whose successiveness is reduced to a mere appearance, it holds in front of
us the light with which it claims to guide us, instead of putting it behind.36
As it happens, it is of precisely this kind of teleological historicism that

Deleuze and Guattari will accuse Hegel and Heidegger.37 The alterna-
tive, they will go on to argue, is found in the notion of ‘becoming’ and

the multiplicity of fusion (of which duration is said to be the pre-emi-
nent example).38 But as we have seen, this heterogeneous multiplicity
need not be opposed to history. On the contrary, history might instead
be durational, and duration part historical.
Such an association of history with the concept of duration is cer-
tainly contestable, especially if one takes The Two Sources of Morality
and Religion as a starting point. Indeed, it could even be claimed that
Bergson’s duration is in fact ahistorical.39 To do so, however, requires
a disregard for the references to history that I have detailed and the
broader philosophy of history operating through Bergson’s work. It
furthermore implies a convenient but somewhat questionable portrayal
of Bergson’s texts prior to the Two Sources as being works of specula-
tive metaphysics detached from contemporary reality.40 As a result, if
one wishes to ‘historicise Bergson’s durée’, one arguably need not go
beyond Bergson, but simply return to his formative texts. There one
will find a form of history that is not wedded to the act of spatial repre-
sentation, but is rather an integral element in the continual emergence
of duration.
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
‘made manifest to us in its impulse’ and ‘felt in the form of tendency’ is

nothing other than the ‘condensation of our history’ – or more specifi-
cally, our virtual history.42 Furthermore, both genuine movement and
creativity rely upon this continuity that history forms with the present:
as the arc of duration is drawn from the virtual past to the actual
present, what it forms is ‘a single indivisible history’43 – a history that
‘unfolds itself gradually’.44
Of course, much more remains to be said on the main features of
Bergson’s philosophy of history and its great relevance to art history,
in particular its bearing on creativity. In this chapter, I have touched on
two concepts – the virtual and duration – that might be productively
explored within the context of history and ontology. However, as the
work of Péguy and Toynbee demonstrates, other Bergsonian notions
such as intuition and the élan vital would almost certainly form a
part of the broader picture. To the extent that philosophers of history
share a desire with contemporary Bergsonians to better understand
the process of creativity, the relation of the present to what has come
before, and to combat conventional theories of determinism and tel-
eology, it would seem apparent that there is much to be gained from
further pursuing this line of thought, for the benefit of both Bergsonian
and historical scholarship.
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
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
as composite becoming. Nothing happens there, but everything becomes,

so that the event has the privilege of beginning again when time is past.’
21. Ibid., p. 157.
22. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola: Dover, 2001), p. 100.
(Mineola: Dover, 2004), p. 173.
24. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola:
Dover, 1998), p. 5.
trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Mineola: Dover, 2007), pp. 127–8.
26. See ibid., pp. 125–9 and 151.
27. See, for instance, Bergson’s discussion of Romanticism and earlier classical
writers on p. 12 of The Creative Mind.
28. Bergson, it should be noted, rarely refers to the term ‘virtual’ and does not
promote it as one of his major concepts.
29. See Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 100–5.
30. Ibid., pp. 113–14.
32. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
33. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 42–3.
34. For more on this see Lundy, History and Becoming, pp. 25–7.
36. Ibid., p. 39.
37. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 94–5.
38. Ibid., p. 127.
39. See Claire Blencowe, ‘Destroying Duration: The Critical Situation of
Bergsonism in Benjamin’s Analysis of Modern Experience’, Theory Culture
Society, Vol. 25, No. 139 (2008), p. 140.
40. See ibid. In her attempt to ‘destroy duration’, Blencowe relies heavily
upon a reading of duration drawn from the Two Sources of Morality
and Religion, with minimal consideration of this concept as it appears in
Bergson’s previous texts. In addition, and closely related to this, Blencowe
draws a distinction between the Two Sources and Bergson’s earlier ‘meta-
physical’ works, based on her reading of Walter Benjamin. As she says:
‘What Benjamin calls into question is not so much Bergson’s metaphys-
ics as his application of them to human experience. Indeed, Benjamin’s
critique can best be understood as a response to the sociobiological Two
Sources of Morality and Religion’ (ibid., p. 152). To suggest, however,
that Bergson’s philosophy prior to the Two Sources has nothing to say
about ‘human experience’ or the ‘sociobiological’ is highly dubious. What
are Bergson’s first two books if not investigations into human experience?
And what is Creative Evolution if not a development of duration beyond
the psychological context into the sociobiological realm of life, construed
in all its diversity? Granted, the Two Sources is a distinct text that more
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.
43. Ibid., p. 37.
44. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
2. Art History, Immanently
CHARLOTTE DE MILLE
Immanent art history cannot be written. Art history concerns selected,

condensed particularities, the material objects on which the discipline
is founded. Immanence denotes forces and events on a plane that
Deleuze in his final essay called simply ‘a life’. Art history is inherently
dialectical; recognised and developed by its originators, problematic to
their successors. For the last four decades, the socially and culturally
motivated ‘new’ art history has archived ‘lives’ for its subjects, often
deferring to critical writing that enables it to map its subjects within
networks or cultural fields. Such art history has often been hooked into
a sequence of theoretical -isms: Marxism, feminism, poststructural-
ism, postmodernism, staking a claim in an increasingly broad range of
media, nibbling at other disciplines, whilst attempting to define itself
amid them. More recently, these disciplinary practices have undergone
review through a return to subjective histories activated by attention
to the temporal unfolding of the art object, led by T. J. Clark’s medita-
tion The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing and W. J. T.
Mitchell’s provocative What do Pictures Want?1 Immanence offers
virtuality and multiplicity, the possibility of deferring definite meaning
even whilst that meaning is being written. The difficulty in immanent
writing is that the moment it is on the page – my cursor directing black
across a white (‘empty’) surface – it is too late. I fix the content in black
figures that cannot be erased or re-shuffled once they have gone to print.
But can (the non-verbal art of) painting any more easily suggest the pos-
sibility of its making without narrating it? Can we? Re-iterating David
Hume’s study of relations, Deleuze asks: ‘why, according to civil law,
does the ground win out over the surface, but paint over the canvas,
whereas paper wins out over writing?’2 In each case, material domi-
nates meaning. In these terms painterly abstraction restores meaning to
material by rectifying the surface-ground imbalance of representation.
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,
the bulk of his output being fashionable portraiture, and indeed he

was to paint Bergson himself in 1908.5 Despite Grant’s study at La
Palette, it is known that throughout his time there the majority of
his close links were to an insular British artistic community including
William Forrestier, Constance Lloyd, Helen and Boris Anrep, Henry
Lamb and Dorelia John. Outside the confines of art school however his
acquaintances ranged more widely, and his memoir mentions morning
coffee with Wyndham Lewis at Le Café de Dome.6 Grant was also on
friendly terms with Gwen John, who through Rodin was certainly more
integrated into French art circles. In 1909, Bussy introduced Grant to
Matisse, signalling the start of his assimilation into the Parisian avant-
garde. In 1913, he was again in Paris working for Jacques Copeau
to produce set designs for a production of Twelfth Night. According
to Frances Spalding, it was at this time that Grant met Bertrand Russell’s
niece Karen Costelloe whilst she was completing her thesis on Bergson.7
Costelloe invited him to a ‘tea party that included Gertrude Stein, Alice
B. Toklas, Charles Vildrac, Mme Bergson and her two daughters. Karin
. . . warned Duncan in advance that one of Bergson’s daughters was
deaf.’8 Spalding hardly makes the party sound enticing, and a social
gathering may not be an auspicious environment for sustained intel-
lectual debate. But whatever Grant may or may not have assimilated
from this exposure, he could not remain oblivious to the pervading
furore that Bergson’s work instigated amongst the avant-garde, and
he was certainly ready to develop his work according to Fry’s formal
aesthetic.
BERGSONIAN PERCEPTION AND IMMANENT ART

According to Gilles Deleuze, representation in Bergsonian thought is
‘divided into two directions that differ in kind, into two pure presences
that do not allow themselves to be represented: that of perception
which puts us at once into matter and that of memory which puts us
at once into the mind’.9 Bergson described pure or virtual perception
in Matter and Memory as ‘the lowest degree of mind – mind without
memory – [it] is really part of matter’.10 Whilst every perception is
stored in memory, there is a disjunction between image and experi-
ence: ‘to picture is not to remember’.11 As Bergson put it, ‘an image
may be without being perceived; it may be present without being
represented; and the distance between these two terms, presence and
representation, seems just to measure the interval between matter itself
and our conscious perception of matter’.12 It is in this gap that ‘pure’
perception functions, and, utilising this mode of consciousness, that
modernist art flourished. As the selective nature of everyday pragmatic

perception is arrested we are ‘actually placed outside ourselves; we
touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition’.13 Without
the continuity of our personal durations, the flashes of intuition in
this ‘pure’ perception appear dissociative, spatial ‘presences’, where
the processual temporality of consciousness is indefinitely halted.
But, although our consciousness may be expanded by this exterior
perspective, still we only gain a contracted image. Bergson writes that
‘representation is there, but always virtual . . . To obtain this conver-
sion from the virtual to the actual, it would be necessary to . . . obscure
some of its aspects . . . so that the remainder, instead of being encased
in its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a
picture.’14
Representation is selective, decontextualising its object. A picture is
the result when a ‘thing should detach itself’ from its environment.15
This would suggest that in Bergson’s aesthetic, painting can only serve
to draw our attention to the limitations of human perception. A paint-
ing cannot give more than the reduction of its parts. How, then, is it
so commonly acknowledged that art operates in culture to reflect upon
and shape experience, to reconnect us with our environment, and to
open up a fuller image of life? Rather than regarding the static painting
as a detachment from duration and as an actualisation of thought, we
should regard it as a re-affirmation of immanent possibility.
Grant’s mastery in Abstract Kinetic Scroll was to test these assump-
tions by animating the canvas. The Scroll is not a static enframed – or
encased – picture vulnerable to passers by, but a dancing, moving
stream of images that unfolds for those viewers sufficiently intrigued
to study it. The aperture through which he intended it to be viewed
might be regarded as another framing device, yet, crucially, it places
the viewer where the artist wants him or her to be, at the mercy of the
Scroll, not vice versa. By this small device, Grant instigates a radical
shift in gallery experience, challenging his viewers to reflect upon the
nature of looking at a work of art, and from where in the gallery one
looks at it. The Scroll’s materiality is an immediate intervention against
our dulled, overly categorical and representative perception, where,
contrary to expectation, representation is not what is offered on the
Scroll’s surface, but is rather our perception itself, orchestrated by the
process of looking.16 The effect is to place us ‘at once into matter’, to
awaken an attentive and fully participatory perception able to recognise
pure presence. The Scroll functions as both thing and picture, demand-
ing multi-perceptual assimilation to engage with the intangible limits of
representation and identification.
EMBODYING EXPERIENCE: BERGSON AND FRY

In the final chapter of Creative Evolution Bergson distinguishes between
the picture (like a jigsaw) that ‘is already created’, which ‘requires only
a work of recomposing and rearranging’ and the work of art which
brings to light ‘that unforeseeable nothing’ at its heart.17 Perception is
a ‘perpetual oscillation’ between repeated movements and ‘elementary
changes’ which are grasped as entirely new.18 These movements and
changes are the site of creativity and élan in the work, animated as the
viewer’s perception traces these paths in the act of looking. Attentive
looking is actively embodied, attentive to life in art. As Iris van de
Tuin acknowledges in her chapter in the present volume, Bergson fol-
lowed Théodule Ribot in Matter and Memory ‘to define attention as an
adaption of the body rather than of the mind’.19 By the time of writing
Creative Evolution life itself was characterised in Bergson’s thought as
the potentiality of pure matter prior to its assumption of recognisable
form.20 Life is perpetual becoming.
We can imagine that Roger Fry’s background in the natural sci-
ences would have predisposed him to the biological and physiological
premises of Creative Evolution. Although this has been contested
ground, there is extensive evidence of Fry’s thorough knowledge of
Bergson’s work.21 His initial interest in a perceptual and physiological
basis for art, however, commenced with his fellowship dissertation
‘Some Problems of Phenomenology and its Application to Greek Art’
of 1891.22 In this text, Fry analysed the ‘impressions made on us by
external objects in their entirety’ that could be regarded as common
to all without any ‘abnormal idiosyncrasy’.23 It is clear that during the
writing of his fellowship dissertation Fry had been travelling to France,
for his painterly elements are as much described in relation to contem-
porary work in Paris, which presented the ‘atmospheric luminosity of
the whole’, as they were by the Greek painting of his title.24 His analy-
sis of ‘tone-perspective’ as the ‘alteration of tone-relations through
distance’ in particular, gives us a tantalising glimpse of his response to
pointillism, and has resonance for the marbling in Grant’s Scroll.25
The transitional work in the development of Fry’s aesthetic was
the posthumously published essay ‘The Philosophy of Impressionism’
(1894). Referencing William James’ Principles of Psychology of 1891
together with modern ‘process . . . metaphysics’, ‘The Philosophy of
Impressionism’ provided the considered empirical observation that
‘Some Problems’ lacked. In the later essay, Impressionism was charac-
terised in durational terms as the ‘momentary group of sensations in
the perceptual flux, existing in necessary relations to its surroundings
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
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.
TEMPORALITY IN PAINTING AND THE

CINEMATIC CHALLENGE
In certain Chinese paintings the length is so great that we only look at it in
successive segments. As we unroll it at one end and roll it up at the other we
traverse wide stretches of a country, tracing perhaps, all the vicissitudes of
a river from its source to the sea, and yet, when this is well done, we have
received a very keen impression of pictorial unity.
Such a successive unity is of course familiar to us in literature and music,
and it plays its part in the graphic arts. It depends upon the forms being
presented to us in such a sequence that each successive element is felt to
have a fundamental and harmonious relation to that which preceded it. I
suggest that in looking at drawings our sense of pictorial unity is largely of
this nature; we feel, if the drawing be a good one, that each modulation of
the line as our eye passes along it gives order and variety to our sensations.36
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
wrote a book that parodied Western preconceptions of China through

masquerading as a series of Letters from John Chinaman (1901). This
was followed in 1911 by the influential publication The Flight of the
Dragon: An Essay on the Theories and Practices of Art in China and
Japan, Based on Original Sources, by the Keeper of Oriental Prints and
Drawings at the British Museum, poet Laurence Binyon.38 The example
of Chinese painting, and scrolls in particular, offered a particular means
through which to address temporality in painting, unsettling the spatial
preconceptions of Western viewers. It is no accident that Grant adopted
the example, however the Scroll is no straightforward appropriation,
mechanised as it is, as a material form of cinema.
According to Deleuze, the cinematic properties of Chinese paint-
ing fascinated early film-makers, Sergei Eisenstein among them.
Consequently Deleuze’s own writing on the painting of China and
Japan is coloured with description similar to his discussion of film:
Chinese and Japanese painting invoke two fundamental principles: on the
one hand the primordial void and the breath of life which permeates all
things in One, unites them in a whole, and transforms them according to
the movement of a great circle or an organic spiral; on the other hand the
median void and the skeleton, the articulation, the joints, the wrinkle or
broken stroke which moves from one being to another by taking them at the
summit of their presence, following a line of the universe. In the one case it
is the union which counts, diastole and systole, but in the other it is rather
the separation into autonomous events, all of which are decisive. In the one
case the presence of things is in their ‘appearing’, but in the other presence
itself lies in a ‘disappearing’ . . . All the art of execution is in fragmentary
notations and interruptions, although the aim is to achieve a total result.39
Grant’s scroll enacts this appearing and disappearing, following the
lines that both Fry and Deleuze emphasise as key to temporal art. But
do we regard Grant’s Scroll as a whole, or as an animation of frag-
ments? Grant subtly varied his technique. The collage introduced for
the rectangles of the opening seven sections gives way first to a mixture
of collage and paint, then for the last four sections paint alone, presum-
ably effecting a recession or visual weakening towards the work’s close.
The visual rhythm slows, allowing the viewer to wind down from acute
attention to reflection.
Or rather, we imagine it would, were the Scroll’s animation to be
realised. As I have said, the work remains latent and full of potential
rather than one anyone can visit and experience, because even when
on display, it is now shown stretched out as a strip, static and pinned
behind glass as a painting. I first shifted my analysis of the Scroll as
a result of searching for a way to convey its radicalism in a lecture
theatre. I needed to ‘perform’ the work as near as it was intended to be.
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
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
another’.49 The refrain orders, contains and escapes. Grant seems to

be contracting and extending time: is it such a leap from the so-called
seventeen sections of the scroll to the eighteen-frames per second of
the cinema of his day? Is it accidental that the movement of Bach’s
Brandenberg Concerto could just fit within the time of one side of an
early gramophone recording if carefully wound (three minutes forty)?
The work implies that one second is simultaneously one and multiple,
that three minutes forty can be over in a flash. Grant demands that
we inhabit his work, following, to return to the thought of his day,
Bergson’s demand in that final chapter of Creative Evolution:
In order to advance with the moving reality, you must replace yourself
within it. Install yourself within change, and you will grasp at once both
change itself and the successive states in which it might at any instant be
immobilized . . . A perpetuity of mobility is possible only if it is backed by
an eternity of immutability, which it unwinds in a chain without beginning
or end.50
My imperfect jigsaw of images regarded from without cannot create the
internalised movement either of Grant’s aspiration for this radical work
or the premises of immanence. As art historians we are ever translating
a visual art into a written one. This transposition of one art to another
– akin to Grant’s adaptation of Bach’s concerto – leaves open possibil-
ity, a multiplicity of potential interpretations any one of which might
be condensed onto the page.51 It is all too easy for art history to adopt
the cinematographic method, one that views its objects from without as
scientific specimens for the study of humanity and society.52 In this guise
it can never conjure ‘life’; at best it will always be ‘art’, or a weak reflec-
tion of art. We look at life indirectly, we turn with distant perceptions to
arrange lived experience in their light. We repeat successes and mistakes,
and record them in perpetuity. Just as Bergson, according to Deleuze, was
blind to the proximity of the cinematographical image to the movement-
image of duration outlined in Matter and Memory (including the move-
ment of consciousness bound in any perception), so do we often forget
creativity in the pursuit of history.53 Immanent scholarship reverses the
direction of this methodology to work in a gap of incompleteness. In the
words of A Thousand Plateaus, where ‘history is a memory that fixes
time in discrete points; becoming unfixes those points and generates free
floating lines’.54 It is not my intention to abdicate responsibility to histori-
cal understanding, to the knowledge that history alone can unlock. But
history itself is becoming, subtly altering even in the smallest fraction of
time, as my cursor flashes its perpetual question, what next?
Rather than the habit of ‘homogeneous and independent Time’
with which we tend to regard history, could we not consider a history
more attuned to the heterogeneous flow of consciousness that Bergson

identified?
Would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a con-
sciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch
the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great
phases of its evolution? . . . Now bring back consciousness, and with it the
exigencies of life: at long, very long intervals, and by as many leaps over
enormous periods of the inner history of things, quasi-instantaneous views
will be taken, views which this time are bound to be pictorial, and of which
the more vivid colours will condense an infinity of repetitions and changes.55
How to mobilise historical writing as an ‘inner history of things’? As

writers of history we could do worse than look to Bergson’s novelist
whose ‘infinite permeation of a thousand different impressions . . .
have already ceased to exist the instant they are named’. The novelist,
as any writer, may be chained to the homogeneous time of the site of
his writing, but by careful arrangement – what we could perceive as an
act of resistance – it is possible nevertheless to capture the ‘extraordi-
nary and illogical’, to render ‘outward expression to something of that
contradiction, that interpenetration, which is the very essence of the
elements expressed’. The novelist brings us ‘back into our own pres-
ence’,56 just as the good historian should in their history bring us back
to its own time in our time. Historical writing of this kind would follow
the poetical philosophy-art of Bergson’s method, an immanentist resus-
citation of the past to make it new.
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
for the prevalence of Bergsonian thought amongst Blanche’s colleagues

such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau c. 1900. See J-E. Blanche, Portraits
of a Lifetime, the Late Victorian Era, the Edwardian Pageant 1870–1914,
trans. W. Clements (London: J. M. Dent, 1937), pp. 244–5; Christopher
Green, Art in France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2000), p. 33.
6. D. Grant, ‘Memoir of Paris, Part II’, 4, King’s College Archives, Cambridge
University, c. 1907, CHA/3/3.
7. Karen Costelloe had recently published ‘What Bergson Means by
Interpenetration’, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XVIII,
1912–13. This paper and its context are discussed in my thesis Bergson in
Britain 1890–1914, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2008.
8. Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography (London: Pimlico, 1998),
pp. 114, 156.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 26.
Deleuze’s emphases. I have discussed the significance of Bergsonian
memory for another key work of pre-war Bloomsbury, Vanessa Bell’s
Studland Beach. Charlotte de Mille, ‘ “Sudden gleams of (f)light”: Intuition
as Method?’, Art History, Vol. 34 (2011), pp. 370–86.
11. Ibid., p. 173.
12. Ibid., p. 27.
13. Ibid., p. 84. See also p. 59; p. 25.
14. Ibid., p. 28; also p. 309.
15. Ibid., p. 28.
16. On the specific interest in the materiality of paint in pre-war British
painting, see David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art
and Visuality in England 1848–1918 (Manchester and New York:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), pp. 215–17.
Macmillan, 1912), pp. 340–1.
18. Ibid., p. 317.
19. Iris van der Tuin, ‘The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics: Reading
Diffractively’, below p. 232.
20. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 301. For a more nuanced reading of
Bergson’s occasional references to a third element, see John Mullarkey,
‘The Ambiguous Origin of Matter’, in Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 80–2.
21. In particular through his friendship with Matthew Stewart Prichard. I
have discussed this extensively in Charlotte de Mille, Bergson in Britain
1890–1914, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2008, pp. 134–236.
22. Roger Fry, ‘Some Problems of Phenomenology and its Application to
Greek Art’, fellowship dissertation at King’s College, Cambridge, KCA
(1891), REF 1/13. In the first section, ‘Phenomenology’, Fry considered
‘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.

42. Ibid., p. 305.
43. Ibid., p. 306.
44. Ibid., p. 308.
45. Deleuze, ‘Hume’, p. 38.
46. Deleuze, Cinema 1, pp. 191–2.
47. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Graham
Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), pp. 154, 164; Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the
Arts (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 164.
48. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 363.
49. Ibid., p. 345.
50. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 308, 325.
51. Ibid., pp. 320–31. ‘The generative idea of a poem is developed in thousands
of imaginations which are materialized in phrases that spread themselves
out in words. And the more we descend from the motionless idea, wound
on itself, to the words that unwind it, the more room is left for contingency
and choice . . . But our mind, by successive bounds, leaps from the words
to the images, from the images to the original idea, and so gets back, from
the perception of words—accidents called up by accidents—to the concep-
tion of the Idea that posits its own being.’
52. Compare Deleuze’s definition of his work on cinema as ‘taxonomy’,
Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. xix.
53. Bergson’s ‘movement-image’ cannot be separated from the cinemato-
graphic: physical movement is integral to consciousness. Ibid., p. xix.
54. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 363, in Bogue, Deleuze on
Music, Painting, and the Arts, p. 37.
56. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. Francis Pogson (Mineola:
Dover, 2001), pp. 133–4.
3 Art History, Less Its
Conditions of Possibility:
Following Bergson’s
‘Le Possible et le réel’
ADI EFAL1
In thinking about the applicability of Bergsonian epistemology to art

historical inquiries, one immediately faces a methodical problem: the
very use of the term ‘art historical inquiries’ is very much a gross gener-
alisation, and therefore does not comply with the Bergsonian demand
for precision in philosophy. Nevertheless, it is the basic view of this
chapter that Henri Bergson’s nominalism should not be automatically
viewed as an anti-rationalism. It does seem that one of the capacities
of Bergson’s philosophy has to do with a revision of the ‘rationalist’
tradition itself, in face of the nominalist challenge. I would like to begin,
therefore, by suggesting a rather structural working-definition: The
term ‘art historical inquiries’ refers to any experiment in possessing,
through some mode of inscription, things produced in the (recent or
ancient) past, entailing some relation, either primary or consequential,
intended or unintended, with a quality of beauty.2 We will concentrate
here on supporting the claim that Bergson´s philosophy might supply
art historical inquiries with the means of a partial disentanglement from
both their neo-Kantian and their historicist inclinations.
ART HISTORY’S NEO-KANTIAN STRAIT-JACKET

Neo-Kantianism and its mutations have shaped many of the historical
sciences as we know them today. Initiated in Marburg by Hermann
Cohen around the middle of the nineteenth century, neo-Kantianism
developed into one the most influential schools in institutional German
philosophy by the end of that century. Salient thinkers affiliated
with neo-Kantianism included Wilhelm Windelband, Paul Natorp,
Heinrich Rickert, Bruno Bauch, Georg Simmel Ernst Troeltsch and
Ernst Cassirer.3 Broadly speaking, neo-Kantianism applied Kant’s
47
critico-transcendental philosophy to the fields of culture, history

and epistemology, an endeavour within which the Kantian notion
of ‘conditions of possible experience’ (Bedingungen der möglicher
Erfahrung) played a decisive role.4 The conception of the conditions of
possible experience established the transcendental dictum of Kantian
philosophy, determining that reality (Wirklichkeit) is constituted by the
universal preliminary possibilities of experience, based on the twelve
Categories identified by Kant and the two pure forms of sensual intui-
tion: space and time.5 As is widely known, the conditions of possible
experience in Kant were described by him as having a ‘transcendental’
status.6 Kant contributed to the history of the concept of the ‘transcen-
dental’ by re-locating its usage: If in scholastic philosophy the tran-
scendental refers to ‘being’, ‘thing’, ‘something’ or ‘God’, in Kant, the
transcendental was transferred to human experience, construed upon
the dynamics of analogy, of comparison and repetition.7 A philosophy
worthy of being called critical, according to Kant, would be one that
abstains from going beyond the examination of experience from within
its transcendental conditions of possibility. The ‘thing in itself’ (‘Ding
an sich’) was kept by Kant outside the limits of the critical inquiry of
the transcendental realm. Moreover, the notion of reality itself was
accorded a problematic status, considered as inherent to ‘subjective’
experience and its transcendental capacities, and therefore as having
no sovereign existence apart from these. Most neo-Kantians adopted
these basic Kantian determinations, while developing an application
of the transcendental approach to the fields of culture, the arts and the
sciences. The principles governing the latter were then comprehended
as a continuous extension of the transcendental capacities of the human
subject.
As Mark Cheetham and Karen Lang have demonstrated,8 Kantianism
has been a permanent lodger in art historical inquiries, as it has been in
the other historical sciences. Neo-Kantian elements appear in the writ-
ings of nineteenth and twentieth-century art historians as they labour to
construct a transcendental platform to discuss the a priori conditions of
possibility of both art and its apprehension. We must differentiate here
between the ancient tradition of art theory, which distilled general rules
of artistic production, and the Kantian critical mapping of the schemes
of apprehension of artistic events, understood as subjective experiences.
The neo-Kantian watermark in the history of art is its tendency to pose
aesthetic experience (Erfahrung) as the definitive ground of the histori-
cal research of works of art.
An example of an explicitly neo-Kantian form of art history would
be Johannes Eichner’s 1914 work The Problem of the Given in the
Art History, Less Its Conditions of Possibility 49
History of Art (Das Problem des Gegebenen in der Kunstgeschichte),

in which one can find a definition of the ‘critical concept of the art-his-
torical object’ (Der kritische Begriff des kunsthistorischen Objekts), as
construed by art historical practice and dependent on an ‘optical image’
(‘optisches Bild’), namely, a representation which is apprehended by
an observer.9 Eichner specifies that ‘The praxis of art historical work
shows that there can be no talk about immediate donation of the mate-
rial of historical artistic production.’10
The neo-Kantian occupation with uncovering a priori categories in
the specific domain of the history of art appeared in what is considered
as the formalist school, notably in Heinrich Wölfflin’s synthetic a priori
stylistic categories.11 One of the richest examples of a Kantian-oriented
art history is to be found in Erwin Panofsky’s early engagements with
Kantian epistemology,12 as well as in the 1922 doctoral dissertation
of his student, Edgar Wind, which offered a systematic neo-Kantian
reconstruction of the transcendental conditions of possibility of art his-
torical inquiry.13 Later in the twentieth century, Kant’s critical dictum
continued to be a major influence, but this time as an interpretative
tool pertaining to modern art; for example in Clement Greenberg’s
formulations of modernist art as exhibiting a Kantian approach of
self-criticism;14 in Michael Fried’s absorptive ideal, in which modern
painting is defined by its internal autonomous conditions of possibil-
ity,15 or in Thierry De Duve’s Kantian interpretation of Duchamp and
contemporary art.16
As Bergson himself acknowledged, there is nothing inherently false
about trying to conceive of a set of rules ordering a certain domain of
production and its research; this is a basic requirement of any rational
inquiry, and of the human pragmatic mind in general. Nevertheless,
it is claims for the a priori, transcendental status of such rules that
may and should be called into question. As applied to art history, the
neo-Kantian approach tends to reduce the reality of the artwork to the
constellation of its transcendental possibilities. This approach is inher-
ently non-realist, and an art history that would take upon itself the task
of tackling the ‘thingly’ reality of artworks should attempt to furnish
methodological principles that will enable it to escape the Kantian
‘strait-jacket’.
One of the ways in which the neo-Kantians themselves approached
the complicated task of applying categorical definitions to the historical
or cultural sciences involved employing the notion of ‘cultural values’
or ‘values’ (Werte) in general.17 Values in neo-Kantianism are some-
what flexible sets of organising regulative ideas of the social organism,
which the researcher can discern a posteriori, but which are nevertheless
considered as a priori with respect to the cultural activity at the par-

ticular historical moment of its performance. This solution, therefore,
leans on the assumption of these values ‘being-there’, directing the
development of social activity before its actualisation and serving as
its principles; such values, therefore, are culture’s transcendental truth.
The neo-Kantians insisted on the efficiency of using the concept of value
in order to solve the problem of historical relativism, which threatens to
dispossess historical inquiries of their scientific validity.
Abandoning the search for an a priori set of categories, or quasi a
priori collections of values, does not necessarily mean that one has to
yield to a relativist practice of interpretation and subjective viewpoints.
How can one still aspire to think a work of art as a real thing, after rec-
ognising the shackles Kantian rationality has placed upon us? Such was
one of the many challenges Henri Bergson took up in his philosophy,
and here we examine whether and how far it might be applicable to the
history of art.
BERGSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHICAL GENRE

The approach taken to Bergson’s work in this chapter might be char-
acterised as philologically sensitive, in the sense that it seeks to locate
Bergson in a specifically French metaphysical tradition, demarcated by
a trail of terms and problems over roughly 300 years, from Descartes
to the twenty-first century. Following the work of historians of phi-
losophy such as Émile Bréhier, Dominique Janicaud, Pierre Montebello,
Francois Azouvi and Frédéric Worms,18 it is suggested here that Bergson
is best understood not merely as the vitalist philosopher of unexpected
creation and the powers of sentimental memory or imaginary virtual-
ism, but rather as a thinker working within a relatively compact meta-
physical framework encompassing issues of empiricism, realism19 and
dualism, which to some extent precede the Kantian ‘revolution’ in the
history of philosophy. In this sense, the questions Bergson addresses
can be understood as pertaining to the repertoire of a rather classical
metaphysical tradition. Bergson was not only the contemporary of
Nietzsche and Freud, but also the inheritor of a set of problems issuing
from Montaigne and Descartes, and continuing through eighteenth
and nineteenth-century philosophers such as Maine de Biran, Félix
Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier and Émile Boutroux.20 Indeed, in 1915
Bergson produced his own ‘compte rendu’ of this tradition, in an essay
titled ‘La philosophie Française’.21 This lineage was characterised as
‘spiritualist’,22 but was notably a spiritualism intimately imbued with
empiricist tendencies. An important moment in this tradition was the
genesis of the ‘positivist’ school of Auguste Comte,23 which continued

to serve as a constant reference point. Throughout his writings, Bergson
refers to empiricist and positivist thinkers, considering his own philoso-
phy to have its roots in both schools.24 Bergson examined what was left
of the notion of reality after the limits of Kantian transcendentalism
were generally recognised. Bergson’s text ‘Le Possible et le réel’, in
which he defended the reality of the work of art against the notion of
its historical ‘conditions of possibility’, should also be understood as
emerging from this background.
Bergson’s adversarial position (as one early scholar called it) vis-à-vis
the Kantian revolution seeks to rethink the relations between reality and
the conditions of possibility of experience.25 Bergson refused to accept
the a priori, transcendental status of the conditions of possibility, and
therefore his epistemology demanded a redefinition of the concept of
reality. Kantianism was a major influence in the French intellectual dis-
course of Bergson’s time: in the second half of the nineteenth century,
Charles Renouvier was structuring a ‘neo-critical’ philosophy;26 Jules
Lachelier, to whom Bergson’s first thesis of 1888 is dedicated,27 was
integrating Kantian insights into spiritualist metaphysics;28 and a little
later Léon Brunschvicg was to develop a universalist philosophy of
judgmental reason.29 In his above mentioned Latin thesis, Bergson dealt
extensively with Kant’s conception of space vis-à-vis the Aristotelian
conception of place. Bergson’s work can plausibly be seen as posi-
tioned in the terrain opened up by this thesis, extending between (an
Aristotelian) realism and (a Kantian) transcendentalism, at the centre
of which stands the concept of intuiton (‘Anschauung’ in German, or
νοῦς, in Aristotle’s terms).
In the thought of Aristotle, intuition is understood as the most elemen-
tary, simple and replete kind of apprehension; nevertheless, while for
the Platonist school intuition referred to an a priori form (εἶδος) serving
as a prototype, for Aristotle it was more the reality of the first and
simple principles which is given in intuition. As part of his ‘Copernican
revolution’, Kant located intuition at the very basis of human sensual
perception, consisting of the two a priori forms of time and space. In a
way, Bergson effected a re-binding of the Kantian notion of intuition
with its Aristotelian roots: though he retained a Kantian understand-
ing of intuition as composed of spatial and temporal parameters, he
rejected any conception of the a priori nature of either. In Bergson’s
metaphysics, neither time nor space are a priori platforms; instead, they
are woven into the concept of duration, which could be described as a
curve or a turned movement. In ‘Le Possible et le réel’, a relatively late
essay initially given as lecture in 1920, Bergson stated that things are
not in space, rather space is in things, space is extracted from things.30

Things, therefore, are prior to space; and spatiality, though always
constructed by reason as a coherent grid, is nevertheless the a posteriori
result of a movement of thought into the interiority of things and not
upon the supposed platform of their possibility.31
What does this movement into the thing consist of? It is carried out,
mostly, by the joining, in a rather plastic manner, of the intensities of
memory. And this adherence, which is a movement of placement in
things, is duration. When we endure in thought, i.e. when we intuit,
we engage in the past via the various surfaces and figures of memory.32
I find it appropriate to call this movement ‘espassément’, to note this
spatial work within the reality of the past.
THE POSSIBLE, THE POTENT AND THE REAL

In ‘Le Possible et le reel’, as in his earlier thesis, Bergson works in the
philosophical space opened up between Kant and Aristotle, examining
the assumed a priority of possibility to actuality. Bergson’s basic argu-
ment is that we have to reverse our understanding here: it is not that
possibility is prior to actuality, but rather that what is real precedes
and determines its own possibility:33 ‘c’est le réel qui se fait possible, et
non pas le possible qui devient réel’; or ‘Le possible est donc le mirage
du présent dans le passé.’34 As a retroactive construction, conditions
of possibility fail to provide us with real statements regarding either
the thing’s production or its precise, unique outlines; instead, they
merely express our utilitarian demands from the observed thing. As is
well known, it is the method of intuition that, according to Bergson,
supplies the approach whereby we may distinguish the precise ‘shape’
of the thing. Indeed, as Charlotte de Mille demonstrated,35 arriving
at a ‘sustained methodology of intuition’ from within the framework
of the history of art, is a deeply complex task, which perhaps, as de
Mille suggests, might be better conceived as an ideal to be constantly
re-realised, rather than as a schematic formula to be implemented.
Bergson’s argument here has an Aristotelian character, relating to the
connection between energeia (ἐνέργεια, or ‘actuality’) and dunamis
(δύναμις, or ‘potentiality’). His point can be phrased, in Aristotelian
terms, thus: energia (or that which is actual and realised) is prior to
dunamis (or that which is potential);36 and the relation between the
two, according to Aristotle, is achieved only in an analogical manner,
by the establishment of a similarity between the two. This perspective
is also expressed in Aristotle’s statement that the genre (γένος, result-
ing of series of generations) precedes the form (εἷδος, or the ‘essential’
form).37 For Bergson, reality, in the sense of that which is realised,

projects behind itself a shadow, into the past. This creates the illusion,
says Bergson, that the structure of that same reality was already there,
as the condition of possibility for the movement of realisation. This illu-
sion, analogically projecting backwards our present interests into our
pasts, deforms and shapes the reality of the past.38 The possible is the
real’s own shadow; it is a part of the (virtual) past of a concrete reality,
carried by the latter and to be found in the immediate encounter with
the thing in question.39
When we imagine the past merely as that which enables the experi-
ence of a certain artwork, we give it a status of a possible; but when we
think of the past as an elastic reality generative of things, upon which
our projections are laid, a past reality which is not exhausted by its
description as possible, then we endow the past with the status of a
‘virtual’ potentiality, i.e. an intensive infinite reservoir of realities that
the particular work, under a particular consideration, shapes. In this
sense, it is possible to view Bergson, as well as his predecessors Biran
and especially Ravaisson, as thinkers of potency (puissance), as distin-
guished from possibility.
If for Aristotle δύναμις is considered as carrying substantial capac-
ity, and therefore as no less real than actuality (ἐνέργεια), for Bergson
the possible, the scheme projected into the past, is conceived first and
foremost as an image. This does not mean that it is bad or corrupt, only
that it is the product of things rather than their cause. Moreover, like
any other element of reality, even the retroactively projected scheme of
the real can become productive and generative, in so far as one allows
it to, with the help of intuition. It was actually one of Bergson’s young
critical readers, none other than Emmanuel Levinas, who considered
the ‘shadow of reality’ as strictly idolatrous.40 The notion of pos-
sibility is presented by Bergson as one of the many images the mind
creates, trying to complete reality, which is described at one place in
‘Le Possible et le réel’ as an elastic balloon with no final, ‘absolute’
shape.41 Conditions of possibility are for Bergson imaginary products
of the utilitarian mind, trying to complete what reality leaves open.
Instead of looking for these, Bergson offers the method of intuition,
which, the present chapter suggests, could be viewed as a movement of
intensification of the reality of the past by which spirit, disentangling
and working through its accepted habits, re-locates itself in the past in
a manner which changes the reality of both itself and its past. Bergson
returns to this assertion: ‘philosopher consiste précisément à se placer,
par un effort d’intuition, à l’intérieur de cette réalité concrète sur
laquelle la Critique vient prendre du dehors les deux vues opposées,
thèse et antithèse’.42 Sometimes this movement into the past happens

involuntarily, and sometimes, as historians, or, surprisingly, as artists,
we engage in it voluntarily. ‘Durating’, on this understanding, would
consist of re-agitating the womb of the past, disturbing its quiet sleep
in archives, museums, libraries and introductory books; in this way the
image of the past can be transfigured into δύναμις. The burden of the
past can then be turned into a condensed potency, or intensified capac-
ity. Reality, and not only artistic reality, according to this Bergsonian
reading, is inherently, continuously poietic, i.e. productive or ‘creative’.
Poiesis demands neither to be predicted nor explained, but it does beg
for adherence. This adherence is a practice, an ethos,43 which calls
for an examination of the way in which a thing erupts into, as well as
survives throughout, ages, variations, repetitions and other ‘habits’ of
interpretation, reading, translation and transfiguration.
DURATION AND DETENTION

Within this framework, and perhaps differently from the standard
interpretation of Bergson, duration could be thought of in terms of
delay, hindrance, setback, foreclosure, interception, postponement,
prevention, retardation, suspension, blockage or deferment. In ‘Le
possible et le réel’, Bergson defines duration simply as hesitation.44
To use Fernand Braudel’s terminology,45 duration is always a ‘longue
durée’; it is always too long. Duration results from the fact that what is
immediately given to consciousness is first and foremost its past.46 That
could mean that any thought is historical, as any thought is essentially
memory. Even though all of the above can affect our conception of
history in general, it pertains in a stronger manner to disciplines that
examine poietic processes, such as the history of art. It suggests that
poietic acts cannot be submitted to a reversible historical rationality
of conditions of possibility. It is not that one cannot use notions of
Zeitgeist, milieu or organising values to draw out the context of a work
– one can indeed do that, and one has actually no other way in which to
start an inquiry; but we have to bear in mind that this will not enable us
to think precisely according to the measure and the figure of the thing.
In contrast, a Bergsonian-oriented history of poietic deeds would entail
going back on our accepted dogmas and thought-habits, re-thinking,
re-shaping, re-sculpting them in a new cone converging upon the par-
ticular thing we are inquiring into. In that sense, a Bergsonian history
will delay our approach to the thing; it will oblige us to go through the
entire ‘univocity’ of history and re-shape it from within the thing under
discussion. A Bergsonian method will thus stimulate the past, especially
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.
HISTORICISM AND ESPASSÉMENT

We’ve been trying to tackle the intricate and complicated relationship
between Bergson’s philosophy and the Kantian approach to the making
of history, by re-activating Aristotelian strategies which were incubat-
ing within the French tradition. In closing, we shall turn briefly to the
problem of historicism, which has been to some extent a sub-division of
the neo-Kantian school: the historicists tried to define the special char-
acteristics of the science of history, distinguishing it from other, mainly
natural or exact, sciences.48 This distinction could not be maintained in
a Bergsonian frame of mind: a science is a science, whatever the sup-
posed domain from which its object arrives. Jean Hyppolite even stated
that ‘C’est une “histoire naturelle” et non une histoire de l’humanité
qu’a écrite Bergson en philosophie.’49 History for Bergson is first and
foremost the history of life, i.e. of nature.
At least two of the German historicists, Ernst Troeltsch and Georg
Simmel, both adhering in some manner to the neo-Kantian school,
were aware of Bergson’s philosophy.50 Nevertheless, neither Troeltsch
nor Simmel pinned-down Bergson’s suggestions, precisely because both
were working within a late neo-Kantain framework of antimonies hov-
ering between actual singularity and the general conditions of experi-
ence, or values. The basic historicist structure of antimonies consists of
a split between, on the one hand, the ever-changing, temporal modus of
cultural events, and, on the other hand, the latter’s organising values,
functioning as conditions of possibility.51 This historicist structural
antinomy, suspended between a search for the details contained in a
cultural work and the need to use encompassing values as meaning-sup-
pliers, is an obvious and persistent habitus of art historical education
and writing. The historicist approach endeavours to define the organis-
ing values of history, which in most classical versions of historicism
comply with models of cultural evolution, universal history, and even
theological schemes.52 Bergson, without naming historicism explicitly,
nevertheless worked tirelessly to collapse this antinomy of the singular
and the universal, typical of historicism. For Bergson, by contrast, sets
of values themselves cooperate in the generative movement of thought,
not because everything is subjective or relative to circumstances and
agents, but rather because reality is a continuous divergence, demand-

ing thought to be constantly alert and always prepared for self-shaping
in retrospect.
PRODUCTION AND GENERATION IN THE

HISTORY OF ART
It is as if the Bergsonian dictum is – ‘produce!’ As an artist, as a scien-
tist, as a philosopher, as a moral-agent, or as a historian. As scholars,
we are invited to assume responsibility towards reality’s generative,
poietic dynamics and join the figural curve of things. Indeed, this
elementary figural curve of thought, extractable from Bergson’s phi-
losophy, may be regarded as an early genetic seed of the Deleuzian
elaborations of the ‘figural’ and its serpentine capacities that Sjoerd van
Tuinen has recently developed into a full-blown theory of ‘manner’ in
artistic deeds, capturing the intensive, deeply intricate flux of matter,
with its infinite possibilities and possible worlds inflected through and
by created bodies.53 If the Deleuzian serpentine figure, as van Tuinen
characterises it,54 entails sensations of ‘swooing, drunkenness, dizzi-
ness and vertigo’, then the Bergsonian method suggests a sensation of
absorptive vigilance: In order to follow the curve of things, one has to
be prepared to think at any moment, accepting that any use of clas-
sificatory terms necessarily re-organises the same system of classifica-
tions. Being ready to think means being ready to doubt; being ready to
doubt means being ready to make mistakes and to acknowledge them.
Any category we would use in order to talk about a picture would
be necessarily, to some extent, a mistake. Categories, like any spatial
construction, are necessary mistakes, without which no thought will
be possible. Nevertheless, according to Bergsonian epistemology, a
mistake is in itself a generative act: mistakes actually produce duration,
waiting and hesitation. But a series of mistakes could also tailor a thing,
draw its figure, follow its curve, and achieve, as Bergson recommends,
precision.55 Being imprecise means, says Bergson, including a thing in
an overly broad, pre-existing genre; achieving precision and access to
reality, on the other hand, entails creating a distance between accepted
concepts, revealing gaps and scissions where we usually see contiguity
and continuity, so that we may form concepts that will be ‘cette fois
taillés à l’exacte mesure de l’objet’.56 Under the perspective outlined
here, then, duration could be understood as a production of space,
to paraphrase Henri Lefebvre.57 If Giambattista Vico determined that
what man has made he can also know,58 then Bergson added that every-
thing man makes he can also un-make, and this un-making is what we
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
habits, a durational history of things is made possible: ‘Now and in

the past, most of the time the majority of people live by borrowed
ideas and upon traditional accumulations, yet at every moment the
fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to replace the old,
while from time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling
into new shapes and figures.’69 A Bergsonian-iconological art history
would not be satisfied with the practice of a rigid iconographical and/
or formalistic decoding, but would rather search out trails of duration
and transformation of figures in history, which suggests that it might
be closer to a philological practice. This history could be conceived of
neither as a hermeneutic deciphering of a work nor as a phenomeno-
logical description of its appearance. A historical thing would be, then,
first and foremost, a poietic thing: produced as well as producing its
own shadow into the past. As Henri Focillon suggested in a draft from
1940, it could well be that works of art are the sole genuine historical
facts.70 A Bergsonian history of art would then involve a searching for
the figures of things, and could be considered as a history of reality
tout-court.
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.
9. Johannes Eichner, Das Problem der Gegebenen in der Kunstgeschichte

(Halle A. S.: Max Niemeyer, 1914), p. 44 ff.
10. Ibid., p. 10 (unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine): ‘Die Praxis
der kunstgeschichtlichen Arbeit zeigt jedoch, daß von einer unmittelbaren
Gegebenheit des Materials von historischen Kunstschöpfungen keine Rede
sein kann.’
11. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der
Stilentwickelung in der neueren Kunst (München: Bruckmann, 1915).
12. Erwin Panofsky, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed.
Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verhezen (Berlin: B. Hessling, 1964).
13. Edgar Wind, Ästhetischer und Kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand. Ein
Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Pablo Schneider
(Hamburg: Philo Fine Art, 2011 [1922]).
14. Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in Forum Lectures (Washington,
DC: Voice of America, 1960).
15. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in
the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 1980).
16. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1996).
17. Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Überwindung. Fünf Vortrage
(Berlin: Pan Verlag Rolf Heise, 1924).
18. Émile Bréhier, Transformation de la philosophie française (Paris:
Flammarion, 1950); Dominique Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique:
une généalogie du spiritualisme français (Paris: J. Vrin, 1997 [1969]);
Pierre Montebello, L’autre métaphysique: essai sur la philosophie de
la nature, Ravaisson, Tarde, Nietzsche et Bergson (Paris: Desclée de
Brouwer, 2003); François Azouvi, La Gloire de Bergson: Essai sur le
magistère philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 2007); Frédéric Worms, La
philosophie en France au XXe siècle. Moments (Paris: Gallimard, 2009).
19. Georges Mourélos, Bergson et les niveaux de réalité (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1964).
20. Jean Beaufret, Notes sur la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle, De
Maine de Biran à Bergson (Paris: Vrin, c.1984); Jean-Philibert Damiron,
Les philosophes français du XIXe siècle (Paris: CNRS, 2007 [1834]).
21. Henri Bergson, ‘La Philosophie française (La Revue de Paris, 15 mai
1915, pp. 236–56)’ in Bergson, Écrits philosophiques, ed. Frédéric Worms
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), pp. 452–79 ; available
at http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/bergson_henri/la_philo_francaise/
Bergson_philo_francaise.pdf (accessed 26 March 2013).
22. Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique; Jacques Chevalier, Histoire de la
pensée, Vol. IV (Paris : Flammarion, 1966), pp. 411–91.
23. Bergson, ‘Philosophie française’, p. 10.
24. Henri Bergson, Oeuvres, ed. Andrés Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1959), p. 1333.
25. Madeleine Barthélemy-Madaule, Bergson adversaire de Kant (Paris:

Presses Universitaires de France, 1966).
26. Charles Bernard Renouvier, Essais de critique générale (Paris: Ladrange,
1854–64); Émile Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie, Vol. II.4 (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1966–68), pp. 843–53.
27. Bergson, Écrits, pp. 67–123.
28. Bergson, ‘Philosophie française’, p. 13; Bréhier, Histoire, pp. 873–6;
Beaufret, Notes, pp. 29–46.
29. Bréhier, Histoire, pp. 953–4; Worms, Philosophie, pp. 31–64.
30. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1336.
31. François Heidsieck, Henri Bergson et la notion de l’espace (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1961).
32. Miklos Vetö, ‘Le passé selon Bergson’, Archives de Philosophie, Vol. 68
(2005), pp. 5–31.
34. Ibid., pp. 1340–1.
35. Charlotte de Mille, ‘ “Sudden gleams of (f)light”: Intuition as Method?’,
Art History, Vol. 34 (2011), p. 384.
36. Aristotle, The Metaphysics, Books I–IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 454–5 [1049b5ff.];
R. M. Dancy, ‘Aristotle and the Priority of Actuality’, in Simo Knuuttila,
ed., Reforging the Great Chain of Being: Studies in the History of Modal
Theories (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing, 1981), pp. 73–115; Bergson,
Oeuvres, p. 1387.
37. Aristotle, Categories and De interpretatione, trans. J. L. Ackrill (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 100–3 [14b35–15a5]).
39. Ibid., p. 1264.
40. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘La réalité et son ombre’, Les Temps modernes, Vol.
38 (1948), pp. 771–89.
41. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1335: ‘La réalité est croissance globale et indivisée,
invention graduelle, durée; tel, un ballon élastique qui se dilaterait peu à
peu en prenant à tout instant des formes inattendues.’
43. See Alain Badiou, L’éthique. Essai sur la conscience du mal (Paris: Nous,
2003 [1993]).
44. Bergson, Oeuvres, pp. 1332–3: ‘Ainsi, l’être vivant dure essentiellement; il
dure, justement parce qu’il élabore sans cesse du nouveau et parce qu’il n’y
a pas d’élaboration sans recherche, pas de recherche sans tâtonnement. Le
temps est cette hésitation même, ou il n’est rien du tout . . . le temps est ce
qui empêche que tout soit donné tout d’un coup. Il retarde, ou plutôt il est
retardement.’
45. Fernand Braudel, ‘Histoire et science sociales: La longue durée’, in
Annales: Economies. Sociétés. Civilisations, Vol. 4 (1958), pp. 13–14,
725–53.
46. Bergson, Oeuvres, pp. 1–157.

47. Ferdinand Alquié, Leçons sur Descartes (Paris: La table ronde, 2005
[1955]), p. 66.
48. See Raymond Aron, Essai sur la théorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne
contemporaine. La philosophie critique de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1969
[1938]); Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
49. Jean Hyppolite, ‘Vie et philosophie de l’histoire chez Bergson’, in Actas del
Primer Congreso Nacional de Filosofia, Vol. 2 (1949), pp. 915–21.
50. Georg Simmel, ‘Henri Bergson’, Güldenkammer 4 (9 June 1914), pp.
511–25; Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme, Vol. 1
(Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1922), pp. 632–49.
51. See Frederick Beiser, ‘Historicism and Neo-Kantianism’, Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 39 (2008), pp. 554–64.
52. H. Ganse Little Jr., ‘Ernst Troeltsch and the Scope of Historicism’, in The
Journal of Religion, 46/3 (July 1966), pp. 343–64.
53. Sjoerd van Tuinen, ‘Michelangelo, Leibniz and the Serpentine Figure’,
Deleuze Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2011), pp. 63–72.
54. Ibid., p. 70.
55. Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1270: ‘Car l’imprécision est d’ordinaire l’inclusion
d’une chose dans un genre trop vaste, choses et genres correspondant
d’ailleurs à des mots qui préexistaient. Mais si l’on commence par écarter
les concepts déjà faits, si l’on se donne une vision directe du réel, si l’on
subdivise alors cette réalité en tenant compte de ses articulations, les con-
cepts nouveaux qu’on devra bien former pour s’exprimer cette fois taillés
à l’exacte mesure de l’objet.’
56. Ibid.
57. Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace (Paris: Éditions Anthropos,
1974).
58. James C. Morrison, ‘Vico’s Principle of Verum is Factum and the Problem
of Historicism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1978), pp.
579–95.
60. Ibid., p. 1387.
61. Ibid.: ‘Le passé se conserve de lui-même, automatiquement.’
62. Bergson, Oeuvres, pp. 930–58.
63. Heidsieck, Bergson et l’espace, p. 57.
64. Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, trans. David Bloch (Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2007).
65. See Badiou, L’éthique.
66. To the best of my knowledge, Panofsky did not explicitly refer to Bergson’s
writings in his works, and in his letters (ed. Dieter Wuttke, Harrassowitz
Verlag, 2001–11) Bergson is mentioned very little. However, there is
evidence that Panofsky was familiar with Bergson’s work and his notion
of duration. Warburg was already familiar with Bergson’s philosophy and
dedicated a small section of his ‘notice-boxes’ (to be found in the Warburg

institute, London, WIA III.2.1. ZK/ 51/ 5) to it, classified under the general
rubric of ‘pragmatic philosophy’ (Philosophie pragmatisch). It seems that
Warburg was less interested in Bergson’s concept of duration and more
in the general cultural controversy revolving around Bergson’s work just
before the First World War. I have been exploring these Bergsonian capac-
ities of the iconological tradition in several recent talks and forthcoming
publications.
67. Giulio-Carlo Argan, ‘Ideology and Iconology’, trans. Rebecca West,
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1975), pp. 297–305: pp. 298–9.
68. Henri Focillon, Vie des formes suivi de éloge de la main (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1981 [1934]); George Kubler, The Shape of
Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1962).
69. Kubler, Shape of Time, pp. 17–18.
70. Mathias Waschek, ed., Relire Focillon (Paris: Louvre et Ensb-a, 1996),
pp. 172–3; Andrei Molotiu, ‘Focillon’s Bergsonian Rhetoric and the
Possibility of Deconstruction’, In-visible Culture, Vol. 3 (2000), avail-
able at http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/molotiu.htm
(accessed 26 March 2013).
4. Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc.
ERIC ALLIEZ
Translated by Hager Weslati
I will venture to put forward – in the form of a short-circuit – this

unique proposition: there is no immanence other than that which
always constructs on a plane that is never bequeathed and whose plu-
rality depends strictly on the displacement of problems in function of
forces susceptible to radicalising its expression in the present impera-
tive. The projection of a ‘Bergsonian paradigm of immanence’ in the
field of art, taken at its very first historic inscription (in Matisse, in
Fauvism), is such a small exception to this that it is the very notion of
the aesthetic that finds itself radically problematised in a Critique and
a Clinique of Art. Or rather, to phrase it in a sharper manner: the aes-
thetic is problematised in a clinical Critique of the Art-Form that refers
less to a ‘new Bergsonism’ and more to a Bergson Oltre Bergson, whose
alterity would crystallise the most intimate within his thought (his cri-
tique of Form) with its absolute outside (in the form of a Clinique of Art
placed outside himself). This, I will develop abruptly, with one shot, in
‘Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc.’
Matisse – how can we approach what appears to me as the untimely
singularity of Matisse? We approach it through the radicality and
daring of his break with the Art-Form, to the extent that the latter is
both inscribed and made in a history, and as a history which is that
of the (continuous) evolution or the (discontinuous) succession of the
diverse forms of Art (in as much as this history is defined by Form), and
where modernist formalism posits itself as its ultimate finality (painting
returning to its essence in the optic of a pure pictorial flatness).
It is said that Fauvism (1905–7) would meet its ‘pictorial’ as well
as its ‘spatial’ limit with the question of form. Fauvism is also posited
as historically dated, in the sense that it was overtaken by the visual
syntax of Cubism (itself set up as art’s principle of modernisation,
leading towards modernist abstraction). But Fauvism had constituted
63
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
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
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
(tied to their spatial properties: quantities of surface, form, orientation,

mutual positions, and so on). Proceeding thus – through both ‘physi-
cally’ non-formed but tensively determined materials (and not through
formed substances pertaining to the order of representation), as well
as ‘semiotically’ informal functions constitutive of a-signifying ‘power-
signs’12 (force-signs instead of figurative or abstract form-signs that in
themselves signify) – the ‘motor-diagram’13 of forces tends to produce
at the very level of sensation (for which quality is nothing other than
contracted quantity), the identity, ‘Expression = Construction’, to the
extent that content and expression attain their highest degree of relativ-
ity, becoming the functives of a single function as well as the materials
of a single matter (becoming is the becoming-indiscernible of content
and expression). That is the very principle of this fauvist chaosmosis,
which, following Deleuze and Guattari, we can characterise – in a
radical after Bergson that we will have to define more precisely – as a
‘creative involution’ or a constructive/constructivist involution; that is,
as a ‘dissolution of form’ that does not ‘turn into a regression into the
undifferentiated’14 because it is exercised in the process of assembling
the heterogeneities put into play by the composition of an ‘abstract
machine’.15 To the extent that an assemblage is all the closer to the
‘living abstract machine’, it opens and multiplies connections and traces
a plane of consistency with its quantifiers of intensity and ‘consolida-
tion’.16 Each ‘work’ will show itself within the heterogenesis of an in-
the-making that makes it ‘stand alone’ through its intensive variations
qua consistent multiplicity.
Alongside Derain and Vlaminck, Matisse confirmed the vitalist dif-
ference of Fauvism in a chromatic dynamiting of forms where nothing
other than ‘the vital-based parallelism’ of lines and colours remained,17
This was so much so that ‘the canvas became a crucible where living
things are made’18 and propelled the outrageous Salle VII (referred to as
the ‘cage of wild beasts’) to the rank of ‘life centre’ at the 1905 Autumn
Salon.19 At almost the very same time, in his highly acclaimed 1904–5
lectures at the Collège de France, Bergson was introducing conceptions
which will feed into Creative Evolution (1907). Besides the study of the
interaction between the methods of ‘intuition’ and ‘construction’ and
the analysis of the notion of ‘force’ (based on a critical commentary
on Herbert Spencer’s First Principles), what came to the surface in a
more pronounced way in those lectures is precisely what was at stake
in Creative Evolution, namely life in its relation to will and to the
question of freedom.20 The treatise on Bergsonian method, which was
meant to ‘permit a glimpse, on some essential points, of the possibility
of its application’,21 was a sequel to Matter and Memory (1896), where
Bergson had already developed a ‘metaphysics of matter’ ‘advancing

through concrete extension, [to reveal] modifications, perturbations,
changes of tension or energy, and nothing else’.22 A method of imma-
nence is set against any ‘division of matter into independent bodies with
absolutely determined contours’.23 Worth mentioning in this respect is
Louis Vauxcelles’ insult to Matisse: ‘you profess that painting . . . must
resolutely move away from the object. No, and a thousand fold no! All
the great masters from de Greco to Manet and from Poussin to Cezanne
and Van Gogh, your teachers, wanted to represent the object.’24
Bergson departs from a ‘pure experience, which is neither subjective,
nor objective’,25 which implies the idea of duration, and then becomes
in Creative Evolution a continuous creation of novelty. As such, he
prefers to depart again from this sensation of becoming which he never
ceased to endorse. Subsequently, he would say that this notion is no
longer that of ‘our very small organised bodies (organised precisely
with immediate action as its objective)’, but of ‘our very large inorganic
bodies’ (‘the site of our potential and theoretically possible actions’).26
By allowing himself to be guided by an intuition leading ‘to the very
interior of life’,27 towards the same activity struck in different direc-
tions by material and spiritual energy, Bergson regenerates in depth
the conscience d’être of the vitalist movement. (At stake, differences in
tension foregrounded by the univocity of being as moving and living
continuity: ‘life and consciousness, probably terms which are coexten-
sive to one another in our universe’;28 ‘life, that is to say consciousness
launched into matter’, says Bergson in Creative Evolution).29 Driven
towards creativity as ‘vital impulse’ (l’élan vital) of difference to the
extent that it passes into act,30 ‘life in depth [la vie en profondeur] . . .
designates what art makes us feel some of the time and what philosophy
(the true one!) should make us feel at all times’.31 Indeed, is it not this
very ‘intention of life, the simple movement that runs through lines,
linking them to one another, endowing them with meaning . . . that the
artist aims to grasp by placing himself within the object through a kind
of sympathy, lowering, by an effort of intuition, the barrier that space
interposes between him and the model?’32 This Bergsonian formula
could, word for word, be assigned to Matisse. Reciprocally, Matisse’s
formula and, specifically, its movement – ‘first form, then life; here form
no longer matters’ – responds literally and intimately to the movement
of Bergsonian thought that recommends a passage from intelligence
with ‘a stable view (on the real) that we call a form’, to the intuition of
life’s ‘fluid continuity’, for which ‘there is no form, since form pertains
to motionlessness while reality is variation’. Thus, regarding living
beings, we should say, ‘the very permanence of their form is nothing
but the outline or drawing [dessin] of a movement’.33 It is this move-

ment that Matisse deploys in an energetic leap that liberates him from
the ‘historical’ limits of Bergsonism with respect to art (not to mention
its resonance with a ‘fin de siècle’ aesthetics that brought together
impressionist mobility and symbolist ideality). As for Bergson himself
(who praised and appreciated in particular the work of Rembrandt,34
Corot and Turner,35 proclaimed that he considered Jacques-Emile
Blanche to be the greatest painter alive,36 ignored the Cubists, and
disapproved of ‘revolutionary forms in art’),37 one can say that his
‘technical’ conception, fluctuating between mechanism and finalism, of
the ‘requirements of the matter on which (the artist) operates’ and what
would not pertain to ‘creation itself’38 (despite being an integral part of
its means . . .), prevented him from the practical elevation of aesthetic
intuition to the plane of philosophical intuition. For him, the fixation
of artistic-individual forms, that is to say their actualisation, signals the
interruption (= fall) of the generative action of the forces prompted by
the ‘vital impulse’.39 Never does the ‘created’ equal the vital exigency
of creation, the vitality from whence it proceeds, ‘before it is strewn in
images’.40 However, ‘art is about images’ and painting retains precisely
its exemplarity from that which it re-animates: in addition to the inner
perception of the artist, the function of imitation elevated to its ‘highest
ambition’ and detached from the ‘needs of practical life’.41 This is
where, as an after-effect, we can revisit the ‘Nietzschean’ affirmation
of Fauvism that will overturn the terms of the problem while offering,
in return to the idea of the Great Noon, an alternative force to the
antagonism of romanticism and classicism.42 The imaginative-imitative
necessity is displaced by demarcating itself from the ‘idealist’ dimension
of the Bergsonian metaphysical horizon grafted onto ‘a certain immate-
riality of life’,43 in such a way that the creative force (re)invents plastic
art as its most material transformation in the constituent processuality
of construction.
The fact remains that even though Bergson was still hampered by
this necessity, and could only find a definitive way out of it in music
(the most immaterial and least manufactured, the most dynamic and
least imitative, the most ‘temporal’ and ‘disinterested’ of all arts),44 he
nevertheless considered artistic creation a becoming where ‘sympathy’
with matter (the lowest degree) intersects with ‘intuition in duration’
at its highest requirement. To illustrate this, before these listeners and
readers – who enjoyed the fact that he brought ‘the philosopher’s words
closer to the painters’ works in such a way that the philosopher himself
would not probably concede in his aesthetics’ – the following formula
from the Creative Evolution may be useful:45
The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the

nature of the artist, by the colors spread out on the palette; but, even with
the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could have
foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would have
been to produce it before it was produced – an absurd hypothesis which is
its own refutation.46
Matisse will not put it differently: ‘a work of art that is to be created’,

he says, ‘is never done in advance, contrary to Puvis de Chavannes’s
claim that one can never enough see entirely beforehand the paint-
ing one desires to make. There is no break between thought and the
creative act.’47 Such is the primary reason for Fauvism’s overcoming
of the Painting-Form qua a critique en acte of the Form-Art (identified
with an art of Form severed from Life) when related to its material-
procedural conditions of ‘production’ through a discharge constructed
out of the vital energy inherent to the chromatic means. Driven by what
I call Matisse-Thought, it partakes in a Nietzschean Bergsonism (the
Nietzschean wasp and the Bergsonian orchid), enhancing the expansion
of the force-signs of art in life and vice versa.48
This vitalist de-formation of Art that Nietzsche called aesthetic phys-
iology (Physiologie der Ästhetik),49 is what now needs to be determined
by force as being at the origin of the Bergsonian idea that every vitally
experienced feeling takes, in its free impulse, an aesthetic character.50
Here, ‘the aesthetic character’ will find itself radicalised in its difference
with regard to the ‘normal perception’ and propelled beyond ‘aesthetic
enclosure’51 by the indefinite ‘widening’ of its object. This movement
takes place within the horizon of an inextricably linked problematis-
ing, differentiating and processually temporalising perspective where
the sub specie durationis power of the ‘in-the-making’ (se faisant) is
affirmed in its opposition to the theatre of the ‘ready-made’ (tout fait):
sub specie theatri.52
The full development of this idea will have to be, in truth, related
to the American experience of Matisse at the beginning of the 1930s,
with The Dance of the Barnes Foundation, and in its greatest effect of
resonance with Dewey’s 1934 book-manifesto Art as Experience.53 The
Dewey-Matisse encounter thus displaces and intensifies on the plane
of art the convergence of Bergsonism, Nietzscheanism and pragma-
tism produced by Creative Evolution, whose publication was warmly
welcomed by William James.54 One can thus say that it takes over, on
a more experiential plane, from this ‘work’, of which no trace can be
found anywhere else, and where Bergson proclaims in May 1912 – in
an interview with the American journalist Herman Bernstein – that
his artistic engagement was to ‘address ethics and aesthetics and the
principles of morals and art’. What is to be made, therefore, of another

text by Dewey on ethics, which he found ‘very interesting, very original
and quite new’?55 There one can find, modified by the ‘thought of a
painter’ (that would otherwise not be able to develop itself ‘outside
its means’),56 the Bergsonian conception of duration as cut off from
the mediation of homogeneous space to recover movement – and the
movement of the work of art in the making – a rhythmic extension,
living and throbbing with all our sensations. Matisse immediately
recognised the resonance of this idea in his own work as shown in the
most openly Bergsonian passages of ‘Notes of a Painter’, published
in 1908, where Matisse revisits, almost word for word, the terms of
the philosopher’s demonstration: that one needs to distance oneself
‘from the literal representation of movement’ and from its rendering
‘by means of an instantaneity’ in order to ‘awaken the idea of dura-
tion’.57 Matisse perfectly understood this idea of duration in terms of an
imperative to forge a new relation between tension and extension in so
far as ‘all sensations partake in extension’, in concrete extension.58 And
oh how much this imperative, formulated in its philosophical rigour
or intuitively apprehended, resonated with the painter who wanted
to ‘reach that state of condensed sensations which makes the painting
what it is!’59 The outcome is, indeed, immediate for Matisse: ‘an artist,
who wants to transpose a composition from one canvas to a larger one,
must conceive it anew in order to preserve its expression; he must alter
its character and not just square it up onto the larger canvas.’ This idea
overlaps with the argument put forward in this article that this very
practical position depends on how ‘drawing [but also painting] must
have an expansive force which gives life to the things that surround
it’.60
If we leave the Matissean reference aside and proceed to relays of
a totally different order, we can still note (with a trans-historical con-
firmation of our argument at stake) that the Bergsonian intuition of a
constitutive duration will, at a later stage, be directly mobilised at the
end of the 1950s by Hélio Oiticica, in his exploration of what he first
called ‘colour-time’ (côr-tempo). Conceived as an overcoming/displace-
ment of the plane, and of the aesthetic plane of the Art-Form in the
movement leading from the inside out (de dentro para fora), this idea
of colour-time is metaphysically identified with duration itself.61 ‘When
a colour is no longer submitted to the rectangle, nor to any representa-
tion of this rectangle’, explains Oiticica, ‘it tends to “embody” itself
[se corporificar, following his own neologism]; it becomes temporal,
it creates its own structure, and the work then becomes the “body of
colour”.’ With the ‘inclusion of time in the structural genesis of the
work’, the spectator no longer participates ‘in contemplation . . . but is

prompted to act in order to reach a pluri-dimensional perception of the
work’.62
It is in this manner that time, qua ‘active element’ and as ‘duration’,
becomes ‘the primordial factor of the work’, while ‘the viewer in front
of the work discovers his vital time as he engages in a univocal relation
with the time of the work’. He thus enters into a ‘vivência’ of colour
whose ‘polarities’ will be experienced by the viewer, or the spectactor,
as with Matisse, in a way that is less ‘contemplative’ or ‘organic’ than
‘cosmic’. It is important to note in this respect that ‘vivência’ – and,
to our knowledge, Oiticica first introduced this term in this very
Bergsonian context – will be distinguished by Oiticica from vitalism in
its immediate meaning at the very moment when the constitutive rela-
tional-differential character of colour (colour as power relations) was
being analysed in terms of ‘signification’ in the guise of what we called
earlier ‘force-signs’. Oiticica’s distinction arises because form-sign is
that which is excluded from colour, and because space will function
through colour ‘totally integrated with the sign’, no longer depending
on ‘form’ or ‘optic phenomena’, to be temporalised in the expression
of construction.63
Is there still any room to doubt that the ‘temporal vitality’ (vitali-
dade temporal) advanced by Oiticica should remind us that it is as
‘vehicle of all kinds of vivência’ that colour is ‘signification’?64 And that
this temporal vitality is endowed with an inextricably energetic and
metaphysical value in the very precise sense where Bergson, at the end
of his ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, defines the latter by an ‘integral
experience’?65 This integral experience translates vivência in the most
accurate way possible, while the metaphysics of the vital impulse that
animates it may also, in a limited sense, be identified with a liberation of
art propelled by the vitalist constructivism that characterises Oiticia’s
‘neo-concretism’.66 ‘Metaphysics is art itself’, Oiticica writes, in a man-
uscript dated December 1959 – the very same year of the manifesto of
all breaks (Manifesto neoconcreto)67 that will dictate all other ensuing
breaks from the perspective of the ‘non-object’ of art (with its strong
Matissean resonances): there is a break of meaning when it is no longer
from the outside towards the inside, but from the inside out,68 within
an architecturalisation of colour inextricable from the ‘direct participa-
tion of the spectator’.69
Seen from this Brazilian angle, once more, it turns out that perhaps
there is no worthy ‘Bergsonism’ other than the one that takes us beyond
Bergson, albeit, the Bergsonian lesson remains absolutely Matissean.
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
of becoming, is just as opposed to the idea of regression as it is to those of

‘filiative evolution’ or of development, which presuppose the continuity of
forms; see ibid., pp. 238ff.
15. Ibid., p. 256. Starting from the idea that in a semiotic system (or at the
level of the semiotic functioning of a system), expression and content ‘are
in reciprocal presupposition . . . because they are two faces of the same
assemblage’, Deleuze and Guattari call ‘abstract machine’ ‘something that
is even deeper’ than this double face, to wit the plan(e) of the work whose
assemblage is made of relations between all the forces (which are vital
forces in Matisse) and where consequently there is no longer any formal
distinction between the (forming) plan(e) of expression and the (formed)
plan(e) of content. This single and underlying plane of immanence or con-
sistency of all the forces is therefore more abstract, more radically deterri-
torialised than the formalist abstraction that bears only on the elimination
of content. The machine is no less real for being abstract, as it participates
in the (ontological) reality of the vital forces of which it is the assemblage.
It can also be called deterritorialising to the extent that it presides over the
reciprocal deterritorialisation of content and expression by investing them
with its energy. Every movement of deterritorialisation in effect comes
down to ‘crossing a threshold’ to attain ‘liberated zones of intensity where
contents separate themselves from their forms’.
16. Ibid., pp. 513, 507.
17. André Derain wrote in a letter to Vlaminck at the end of 1901 (dated
24 September [1901?]): ‘I believe that lines, colors have very powerful
relations in their parallelism with the vital foundation to make possible a
look into their reciprocal and infinite existence . . .’ (Letter 6 in A. Derain,
Letters to Vlaminck, text presented and edited by Ph. Dagen (Paris:
Flammarion, 1944), p. 52 (emphasis added).
18. Attributed to Derain by Geroges Duthuit, ‘Le Fauvisme’, Les Cahiers
d’art, 1929–31, reproduced in ID, Représentation et présence. Premiers
écrits et travaux 1923–1952 (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), p. 213.
19. Michel Puy, ‘Les Fauves’, in La Phalange (15 November 1905); re-edited
in Pour ou contre le fauvism, texts by painters, writers and journalists
collected and edited by Philippe Dagen (Paris: Ed. D’art Somogy, 1994),
p. 148.
20. The lecture on ‘Modern philosophy’ is titled ‘Evolution of the Question
of Freedom’. We will use the version of the lecture in Henri Bergson
Mélanges (Paris: PUF, 1972), pp. 648–9.
21. Henri Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice, in Henri Bergson, Oeuvres, Edition
du centenaire (Paris: PUF, 1970), p. 493. There is no doubt that this is
not entirely unconnected to the immediate success of the book which ‘sur-
passed considerably the narrow circle of philosophers and conquered the
mainstream press and the wider public’, as reported by Albert Thibaudet
in Le Bergsonisme in 1923, cited by François Azouvi, La gloire de
Bergson, Essai sur le magistere philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 2007),
p. 136. ‘As early as 1907–1908’, he adds, ‘Creative Evolution became

prominent outside the academic circles’ (p. 141).
22. Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire, in Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 337 (Unless
otherwise indicated, the italics are Bergson’s in all the cited texts.) ‘Matter
thus resolves itself into numberless tremblings, all linked by an uninter-
rupted continuity, all interdependent, and running in every direction like
so many shudders’ (p. 343).
23. Ibid., p. 332.
24. Louis Vauxcelles, ‘Le Salon d’Automne’, Gil Blas (30 September 1905),
reedited in Pour ou contre le fauvism, pp. 108–9 (emphasis added).
25. Henri Bergson, ‘Letter to William James’ (20 July 1905), in Bergson,
Mélanges, p. 660.
26. As defined by Bergson in Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion
(1932), in Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1195.
27. It was in the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ published in 1903 in the Revue
de metaphsyique et de morale that Bergson introduced the term intuition.
As François Azouvi notes, ‘few of his texts would have such a resonance
and in such diverse milieu’ (La gloire de Bergson, p. 102).
28. Bergson in an open letter to Leon Brunschvicg dated 26 February 1903 (in
Bergson, Mélanges, p. 585).
29. Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice, p. 649.
30. This is Deleuze’s definitive formula in the article from 1956 entitled
‘Bergson, 1859–1941’: ‘Elan vital is difference inasmuch as it passes to
the act.’ Reprinted in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts
1953–1974 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 28.
31. Bergson’s letter to L. Dauriac, 19 March 1913 (in Bergson, Mélanges,
p. 990).
32. Bergson, Oeuvres, p . 645 (emphasis added).
33. Bergson, Oeuvres, pp. 645, 750, 604 (emphasis added).
34. See Maurice Verne, ‘Un jour de pluie chez M. Bergson’, L’intransigeant
(26 November 1911).
35. Both are mentioned in ‘the perception of change’, see Henri Bergson, La
pensée et le mouvant, in Oeuvres, p. 1371.
36. See Isaac Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson (Neuchatel-Paris:
Delachaux & Niestle, 1942), p. 88.
37. Villanova, ‘Celui qui ignore les cubistes’, L’Eclair (29 June 1913).
38. Bergson will elaborate on this theme in the 1920s in ‘The Possible and the
Real’. See Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 1134. Bergson will confess later that he
didn’t spend as much time as he wished on aesthetic questions, even admit-
ting, with resounding laughter, that ‘if I come back a second time on earth,
I will certainly address those questions’; see Isaac Benrubi, ‘Un Entretien
avec Bergson’, 19 December 1934, in Essais et témoignages (Neuchâtel: La
Baconnière, 1941), p. 368.
39. ‘It is true that this aesthetic intuition, as indeed exterior perception, only
affects the individual’ (Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 645). It is the prerogative of
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. . .’.
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,
isn’t it the most interesting course of action?’ (Prestiges de Matisse,

p. 164).
48. Bergson wrote, limiting the realised possibility to philosophy (to his phi-
losophy): ‘But one can conceive of a research orientated in the same sense
as art, and that would take as its object, life in general’ (Oeuvres, p. 645).
We can also see here that ‘imposing this affinity (Bergson-Nietzsche) as
obvious, is truly one of the direct effects of Creative Evolution’ (Azouvi,
La gloire de Bergson, p. 173).
49. The ‘remarkably unexplored obscure domain . . . of the Aesthetic
Physiology’ appears in On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, § 8. We
will note that Julius Meier-Graefe, in his article on ‘Matisse and the End
of Impressionism’ (1923), relates ‘pictorial elements’ of the Bonheur de
vivre (1906) to simple ‘physiological stimuli’ which attested to the loss of
the aesthetic / historical sense of tradition, a loss linked to the ‘perception
proper to the great modern city’ (cited by Alastair Wright, ‘Arche-tectures:
Matisse and the End of (Art) History’, October, No. 84 [1998], p. 60).
50. See Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, in
Bergson, Oeuvres, p. 15.
51. Mark Antliff produced from it the first approach on a strictly Bergsonian
stance in his article ‘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.
52. Bergson employs this expression in Le Rire, in Oeuvres, p. 437.
53. There was at first a series of ten lectures given at Harvard in 1930–31 by
Dewey, part of ‘a lectureship . . . founded in Memory of William James’,
as the philosopher wrote in the Preface.
54. See William James’s letter to Bergson, 13 June 1907, in Bergson, Mélanges,
pp. 725–6: ‘Your book is marvelous . . . and . . . your theories require
an immediate attention.’ On the public and discussed character of the
kinship between Bergsonism and pragmatism see also Azouvi, La gloire
de Bergson, pp. 147–9. This went so far as for some to assert ‘the clearly
transatlantic origin’ of Bergsonism (Gaston Rageot, in 1905).
55. Herman Bernstein, With Master Minds (New York: Universal Series
Publishing, 1913), pp. 96–7. A little before this reference to Dewey (whose
work was long followed by Bergson: see the 1902 lecture on ‘Intellectual
Effort’), Bergson indulges in a vibrant homage to William James, who had
just passed away: ‘one of the great men, of all countries and all times’ (p.
94). More generally on the reception of Bergson in the States, see Philippe
Soulez and Frederic Worms, Bergson Biographie (Paris: Flammarion,
1997), pp. 132–9.
56. See Henri Matisse, Notes d’un peintre (Paris: EPA, 1908), p. 42.
57. Ibid., pp. 45–6. If we go by a claim made in 1944, Matisse has never
ceased to read Bergson: ‘I spent the whole day reading Bergson, something
which I have always done imperfectly at home, attracted by the drawings
and paintings around me’ (Matisse, Letter to Camoin, September 1944).

59. Matisse, Notes d’un peintre, p. 43.
60. Ibid.
61. One can thus read, in a manuscript dating from December 1959, a wholly
Bergsonian development: ‘Duration (inner time) now appears . . . from
the Inside out “because” the artist temporalizes . . . space’ – otherwise
‘we should once again arrive at rationalized matter’. Catalogue, Hélio
Oiticica: The Body of Colour (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), p. 190.
See also the important article by Mari Carmen Ramirez, ‘The Embodiment
of Colour: “From the Inside Out” ’, in the same catalogue, pp. 27–73.
62. Oiticica manuscript, dated 5 October 1960, in Hélio Oiticica: The Body of
Colour, p. 202.
63. See the two manuscripts dated 7 and 13 August 1961, in Catalogue, Hélio
Oiticica (Paris: Musée du Jeu de Paume, 1992), pp. 55–6.
64. Apart from the reference in note 63, all citations are extracts from
H. Oiticica, ‘Color, Time and Structure’, 21 November 1960, in the cata-
logue Hélio Oiticica: Body of Colour, pp. 205–7.
65. Henri Bergson, ‘Introduction à la métaphysique’, in Oeuvres, p. 1432.
66. In a ‘Testimonial April 1962’ a propos of his Nuclei et Pénétrables,
Oiticica evokes ‘a new constructivism, albeit one that owes nothing to
Constructivism itself’. Nor was there here, he adds, ‘anything to do with
Post-Mondrian Concrete Painting’ (it is the group of Paulists who are his
target here), since it is about how ‘to be to Mondrian what Mondrian was
to Cubism’. See Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour, p. 260.
67. See Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour, p. 190. At the start of paragraph
B, one reads: ‘Metaphysical color (color-time) is essentially active from the
inside out; it is temporal par excellence. This new sense of color does not
possess the usual relationships of color that existed in painting of the past.
It is radical in the broadest sense.’
68. Hence what is affirmed in Manifesto neoconcreto (March 1959).
69. ‘Testimonial April 1962’, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour, p. 260. The
liberation of painting in space is assimilated to an ‘architecture of painting’
(‘I am seeking an architecture of painting’) that can understand itself only
in so far as it is an ‘architecturalisation of colour’ (as Ramirez writes in
‘The Embodiment of Colour’, p. 53).
5. Bergson Before Deleuze:
How to Read Informel Painting
SARAH WILSON
Gilles Deleuze ‘rediscovered’ Bergson, according to some of the ‘New

Bergsonists’. Yet, far from there being a lapse in terms of Bergson’s
impact, he was named ‘philosopher of the age’ by the Nouvelle Revue
Française in 1939, and maintained a vital presence in France in the
1940s, not only in philosophical and Catholic circles. His thought was
key to the understanding of the turn in painting known as the informel
and the related movement known as lyrical abstraction.1 Created in
Occupied France at the moment of Bergson’s death, a multifarious
body of work, initially full of spirituality and anguish, expressed a
new attitude to painterly matter, time, space and duration. It was
based upon the encounter of matter and memory: Bergson’s Matière et
mémoire (1896) was referred to explicitly, and continued to be quoted
as a gloss on painting through to the 1960s.
The specifics of the informel, its production and its perception, includ-
ing non-verbalised feelings and affects as well as explicit Bergsonian
triggers, become lost in translation when seen as a European-wide
small-scale riposte to the painting of Jackson Pollock and the American
Abstract Expressionists. In the 1990s a new orthodoxy issuing from
America saw a European informel generated from Georges Bataille’s
definition of the informe – a verbal and conceptual slippage – embodied
in Rosalind Krauss’s exhibition, L’Informe: Mode d’emploi (Formless,
A User’s Guide), of 1996. European art was instrumentalised, while the
formal origins of an art whose lineage was entirely hostile to Surrealism
were obfuscated. The impact of war, Occupation and the context of
Bergson’s death had no place in this story.2
Henri Bergson died in 1941, aged eighty-one. Nobly, he had
renounced all previous honours and awards bestowed upon him, rather
than accept exemption from the anti-Semitic laws imposed by the
Vichy government. As an expression of solidarity with so many friends,
80
Bergson Before Deleuze 81
colleagues and respected intellectuals, he refused to engage with any

public procedures of conversion, despite his increasing engagement
with Catholicism. After queuing to register formally as an israélite
(despite the laws of matrilineal descent – his father was Polish-Jewish,
his mother from Yorkshire), he caught the pneumonia that would
kill him. Tributes were immediate: from Paul Valéry’s address to the
Académie Française, to the recollections of Raissa Maritain from New
York; significant assessments of Bergson’s life-achievements and philo-
sophical contribution were published – and republished – in 1942 and
1943, albeit with a strongly Catholic slant. Bergson’s complete works
were published by Albert Skira in Geneva in 1945–6.3 National celebra-
tions and a public homage at his tomb took place in 1947.4 The peridi-
odical, Études Bergsonniennes, continued to study and to re-evalutate
Bergson’s heritage throughout the years 1948–56.
In post-deportation and post-épuration Paris, it was remarked that at
a time of Catholic dominance of the University, the École Polytechnique
and the École Normale Supérieure, religion had become interesting;
Bergson was not only highly topical himself, but was absorbed through
Charles Péguy, Georges Duhamel, Marcel Proust and the wartime
philosopher-hero Gaston Bachelard.5 Evidently, this is the period of
Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism which came to dominate alterna-
tive Catholic existentialist narratives; but from Sartre’s metaphors
of impregnated matter and imagination onwards, the tension with a
Bergsonian heritage was omnipresent.6
During the French Occupation, the so-called ‘Young Painters of the
French Tradition’ specifically combined a bleu-blanc-rouge abstraction
with an overt Catholicism and explicit references to, for example, the
windows of Chartres cathedral.7 This spiritual reaction to a time of
humiliation, duress – and surely knowledge of mass deportation – was
also reflected in contemporary music, from Olivier Messaien’s Quartet
for the End of Time (premiered in a German Stalag in 1941) to Maurice
Duruflé’s Requiem of 1947. Painters such as Jean Bazaine, the theoreti-
cian of the group, have been challenged for using ‘abstract art as a veil’
(Michele Cone) – in fact a charge of covert Vichyism related to their
affiliations to the movement Jeune France. I find this reading unsympa-
thetic in terms of the constraints of the times.8 The artists’ combination
of a Cubist armature and Fauvist colour, increasingly dissolving forms
and coloured light echoing an Impressionist heritage, together with
Catholic references, made it highly popular in the 1940s and 1950s, and
the group was dominant as well in terms of its international promotion
outside France by official bodies.9 Anticipating a culture of reconstruc-
tion, titles such as Charles Lapicque’s Saint Catherine-de-Fierbois
(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-
Figure 5.1 Alfred Manessier, L’Elan, 1956, Photo Xavier Grandsart

Courtesy Galerie Applicat-Prazan, Paris © Adagp, Paris 2013.
tion’ (abstraction lyrique) of this group of painters was often known

as paysagisme abstrait or abstract landscape painting. The painting as
flux transcends its own borders and frame; it is here that the sense of
a bergsonisme becomes most explicit. The Source (1956), would imply
both the origin of a spring and a metaphor; L’Elan (1956) (Figure 5.1),
with its vital energy counters the downward swirl of Dawn Over the
Garrigue of the same year, with intimations of a perspective where
water itself has sculpted dry rock and scrubland.
Swirls (Les remous, 1958) is not specific as to what the paint itself
might refer (though black against colour always retains a memory of
stained glass and of Georges Rouault). A companion piece, Mounting
Moissac (La montée de Moissac) holds in its matter not just a memory
of landscape, but the emotions and expectations of a pilgrimage to the
romanesque abbey, in the footsteps of countless believers.15
Jean Fautrier (Figure 5.2), whose work is totally unlike that of the
Young Painters of the French Tradition, is an entirely exceptional artist
who makes the link between the 1920s and the 1960s – as claimed by
his exhibition of 1957, ‘Thirty Years of Informel Painting’.16
In 1960, the year of Fautrier’s triumph at the Venice Biennale, the
celebrated Italian critic Giulio-Carlo Argan wrote an extensive article
called ‘From Bergson to Fautrier’, subsequently published as a book
Fautrier: Matière et mémoire (Milan 1960).17 He notes that Fautrier’s
earliest informel works (misty evocations of landscape) were created
in Paris in the 1920s when Bergson’s influence was at its apogee. Their
lineage – unbeknownst to Argan – also relates to the artist’s training
in London under Sickert, his discovery of late Turner (confirmed by
Figure 5.2 Giulio-Carlo Argan, cover for Fautrier, Matière et mémoire, 1960.
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
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
réalisme ont opérée entre son existence et son apparence’. He continues:

‘But precisely because this matter is a matter of image – and has the
extension, depth, duration and history of an image – it is too, in the
Bergsonian concept, memory: it is the datum of that perception – which
may well be l’ensemble d’images, but related to l’action possible d’une
certain image déterminée, mon corps.’28 ‘Here is a page of Bergson’, he
says,
which could well be recalled to describe, step by step, the pictorial process
of Fautrier, intended as an écoulement de sa propre personne à travers le
temps, as the work, the tangible product of un moi qui dure . . .: Quand
je me promène sur ma personne, supposée inactive, le regard intérieure de
ma conscience, j’aperçoit d’abord, ainsi qu’une croûte solidifée à la surface,
toutes les perceptions qui arrive du monde materiel . . .
The extensive quotation in French that follows this excursus, given
as ‘(Introduction à la métaphysique. V La Pensée et le mouvant, pp.
182–3)’, takes one again to Merleau-Ponty, confirming ‘It is because of
this concrete presence of the ego as a body in the perception that the
matter of Fautrier’s painting . . . reveals a complete scale of states of
consciousness.’ Again from La Pensée et le mouvant, he quotes ‘nous ne
percevons pratiquement que le passé, le présent pur étant l’insaissisable
progrès du passé rongeant l’avenir’.29 Sensual colour images, striated,
impasted, clouded, scribbled or blotted (the works on paper), embody
and supplement Argan’s purposefully complex text, whose extensive
use of French quotation within the English and German translations, in
itself points to a now-disappeared European intelligentsia. Aut-Aut, the
substantial philosophical periodical in which ‘Da Bergson a Fautrier’
was first published, took its title from Søren Kierkegaard’s Either-Or;
Kierkegaard in the contemporary offered a religious, existentialist
alternative for Italians of a Catholic disposition hostile to a Sartrean-
type atheism.30 Bergson, too, offered a paradigm of being where the
past and the sacred coexisted with the present. Moralistic, Argan ends
with tropes of absolution or damnation . . . Fautrier ‘accepts, ready to
endure it to the bitter end, the confused darkness of the real’.31
Fautrier won the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale in 1960;
Manessier’s fourteen paintings on the theme of the Passion and
Resurrection won the Grand Prix in 1962. Robert Rauschenberg’s
shock prize of 1964 would be a message to Europe as well as the jury.
Pop art would be the damnation of the informel, its religious or human-
ist aura, its metaphysics, its philosophical claims, its detachment from
the real world, capitalism, from la dolce vita.
Bergson’s centenary exhibition was held in Paris at the Bibliothèque
Nationale in 1959. Only in 1960 was Bergson introduced into the
philosophy curriculum for the final year in French schools; hence, the
urgency and relevance for a new generation of young readers of Gilles
Deleuze’s compendia and critical studies.32 Yet, as I have demonstrated
here, there was no real hiatus in terms of reading and appreciating
Bergson, a living presence until 1941 whose influence permeated artis-
tic circles until the 1960s: philosophers such as Jean Wahl, Bachelard,
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and poets such as Ponge (a significant influence
for Jacques Derrida), conveyed his thought.33 Teachers and thinkers,
who had originally attended Bergson’s lectures, or moved in circles
of those who had attended, were faithful to Bergson and his message,
in a context where the painters of lyrical abstraction and the informel
looked compellingly modern.
* * *
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
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
Gazette de Lausanne (9 September 1941) published his widow’s letter to

Emmanuel Mounier, who confirmed that a priest arrived unable to baptise
him or adminster the last rites, and that he had no religious funeral (pp.
11–12). Tributes included those from Charles Péguy, Paul Valéry and
Jean Wahl. See also Bergson, Oeuvres complètes (Geneva: Albert Skira,
1945–6).
4. For the national celebrations and the homage at his tomb with the
President of the Republic and Minister of Education see, Henri Bergson,
Exposition centenair (Paris: Bilbiothèque Nationale, 1959), nos. 123–5.
5. See J. B. Duroschi, ‘De la nouvelle situation faite au Parti intellectuel’,
Cahiers de notre Jeunesse, Vol. 21 (1945); Gaston Bachelard, La dialec-
tique de la durée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), and Marie
Cariou, Bergson et Bachelard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1995).
6. See Sarah Wilson, ‘Paris Post War, In Search of the Absolute’, in Paris Post
War: Art and Existentialism (London: Tate Gallery, 1992), pp. 25–52; and
Florence Caeymaex, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson: les phénoménologies
existentielles et leur héritage bergsonien (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005).
7. Jean Bazaine, ‘Peinture bleu, blanc, rouge’, Comoedia (30 January 1943);
Bazaine’s interest in Bergson brought him into contact with the Catholic
milieu around the review Esprit. See Jean Tardieu, Jean-Claude Schneider
and Viveca Bosson, Bazaine (Paris: Maeght, 1975), p. 36.
8. Michele C. Cone, ‘Abstract Art as a Veil: Tricolor Painting in Vichy
France’, Art Bulletin, Vol. 78 (1992); see also Laurence Bertand-Dorléac’s
Art of the Defeat, 1940–1944 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute,
2008), Chapter 4, ‘The Red and the Blue’, pp. 276–93; and Natalie
Adamson, Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the Ecole de Paris,
1944–1964 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
9. Alfred Manessier, for example, exhibited in Brussels in 1945, in Frankfurt
and Stuttgart, 1948–9, and by 1959, when he showed at ‘Documenta 2’ in
Kassel, his works had been sent to São Paolo, South Africa, Pittsburgh and
New York.
10. ‘Alfred Manessier. Tours, Favellas et autres Oeuvres monumentales’,
Applicat-Prazan, Paris, FIAC, 18–21 October, 2012, available at http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW8ZCq_JwZM (accessed 27 March 2013).
11. Gustave Rodrigues, Bergsonisme et Moralité (Paris: Chiron, 1922).
12. ‘La morale de l’artiste, c’est de plonger, tête baissée, les yeux fermés, au
plus profond, au plus sincère, au plus vrai del lui-même, quelles que soient
les conséquences de cette attitude’, Jean Bazaine in Georges Charbonnier,
Le monologue du peintre (Paris: Julliard, 1959), Vol. 1, p. 98.
13. ‘gloire d’un lumière et nécessité d’un rythme . . . pétrifier un univers toujours
périssant dans la durée’, J. G. M. (Jean-Guichard Meili), ‘Jean Bazaine, le
peintre et le temps’, L’Esprit (January–March, 1950), pp. 138–9.
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,
‘éloignée de l’être et de son être propre, et en même temps unis à eux

par l’épaisseur du monde’ (M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la
Perception, p. 344)’, in Argan, Fautrier: Matière et mémoire, p. 40.
27. Ibid., pp. 32–3.
28. Ibid., p. 2.
29. Ibid., pp. 40, 44.
30. See Aut-Aut, Vol. 55.
31. Argan, Fautrier: Matière et mémoire, p. 47.
32. See François Chatelet, La philosophie des professseurs, 10/18 (Paris:
Grasset, 1970), Chapter 3, specifying six courses on L’Évolution créatrice,
14 March–9 May 1960.
33. See Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), with its passages on Fautrier.
34. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Bergson, 1859–1941’, in M. Merleau-Ponty, ed., Les
Philosophes célèbres (Paris: Mazenod, 1956), pp. 292–9; Deleuze, ‘La
conception de la difference chez Bergson’, in Études bergsoniennes, IV,
pp. 77–112 (also in L’Ile Déserte, 2002); Bergson, Mémoire et Vie, texts
selected by Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957,
1963); Gilles Deleuze, Le bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1966).
35. Jeannette Colombel, ‘Deleuze-Sartre: pistes’, in A. Bernold and R. Pinhas,
eds, Deleuze, épars, Paris: Hermann, 2005 (partially reproduced in Sartre
ou le parti de vivre, Paris: Grasset, 1981), pp. 39–40.
36. For Deleuze and Fromanger, see Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of
French Theory: Figurations (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2010), Chapter 4, pp. 137–42.
37. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Fold’, trans. Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies,
Vol. 80 (1991), p. 243.
38. Why Matisse rather than the Futurists? I would disagree with Mark
Antliff that ‘Matisse should be seen as the most prominent artist among a
cross-section of Parisian modernists who looked to Bergsonian theory to
justify their aesthetic innovations’ (emphasis added). See ‘The Rhythms of
Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse’, in John Mullarkey, ed., The
New Bergson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press,
1999), p. 186. See also Lorenz Dittmann, Matisse begegnet Bergson.
Reflexionen zu Kunst und Philosophie (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau,
2008).
39. See Hantaï, MNAM, Centre Georges Pompidou, 2013.
40. See Hélène Cixous, Le Tablier de Simon Hantaï – Anagrammes (Paris:
Galilée, 2005), p. 49.
41. Georges Didi‐Huberman, L’Étoilement: conversation avec Hantaï (Paris:
Minuit, 1998); see also ‘Les replis de Simon Hantaï’, Déplier, déplacer, dé-
couvrir: la peinture en actes, 1960–1999 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: LAM, 2012),
p. 46.
42. Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988), pp.
50–1; Deleuze, épars, p. 112, with three illustrations by Hantaï (Pli,

1981), pp. 113–15. ‘Here, setting the color in the coils of matter to vibrate,
there setting the light in the folds of an immaterial surface to vibrate’
(Deleuze, ‘The Fold’, pp. 243–4).
43. Deleuze, ‘Theorie des multiplicités chez Bergson’, in Deleuze, épars, pp.
227 ff (an eleven-page lecture manuscript in facsimile).
6. Revolutionary Immanence:
Bergson Among the Anarchists
MARK ANTLIFF
In 1913 a public battle occurred among prominent figures in the anar-

chist movement over the merits of Henri Bergson. This heated exchange
pitted the defenders of anarchist-communism – led by the prominent
Russian anarchist and scientist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) and his
ally Jean Grave, editor of Les Temps Nouveaux (1895–1921) – against
a group of anarchist individualists headed by André Colomer (1886–
1931), co-founder of the journal L’Action d’art (1913). At the time,
Kropotkin was an international celebrity among the European intel-
ligentsia, whereas Colomer was a self-styled philosopher, poet, theatri-
cal performer and rising star in the anarchist firmament.1 This schism
also implicated prominent avant-gardists like the Neo-Impressionist
Paul Signac who drew on Kroptokin and Grave’s scientific metaphors
in proclaiming the anarchist import of his artistic technique,2 and a
younger generation of symbolists and Futurists who participated in the
Action d’art project and shared Colomer’s enthusiasm for Bergson’s
metaphysics.3
Kropotkin and Colomer’s contentious struggle to define anarchism’s
epistemological foundations surprisingly dovetailed with another
heated debate over Colomer’s decision to publically defend the illegal
activities of a group of bank robbers known as the ‘Bonnot Gang’,
whose notoriety reached a crescendo during a well-publicised trial that
lasted from February to April 1913.4 From February to December of
that year, Colomer proclaimed his allegiance to Bonnot in the pages of
L’Action d’art in a series provocatively titled ‘From Bergson to Bonnot’
and ‘From Bergson to Banditism’. Colomer’s campaign was based on
a synthesis of Bergson’s thought with that of Max Stirner, whose book
Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844) was foundational for the anar-
chist individualist movement.5 Thus when L’Action d’art announced
the creation of a bookstore at its headquarters in the heart of the Latin
94
Bergson Among the Anarchists 95
quarter (25 rue Tournefort), Stirner’s manifesto, translated as l’Unique

et sa propriété in 1899, was advertised alongside Bergson’s Time and
Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896) and Laughter (1900)
under the heading ‘Philosophy-Aesthetics-Combat’.6
This interrelated defence of Bergson, Stirner and Bonnot led
Kropotkin and Grave to orchestrate the ouster of Colomer and his
group from the official congress of the Fédération Communiste-
anarchiste held in Paris in August 1913; that dismissal was then fol-
lowed by Kropotkin’s publication in the October edition of Les Temps
Nouveaux of a critique of Bergson’s philosophy, titled ‘The Crusade
Against Science of M. Bergson’.7 Kropotkin allied Bergson’s popularity
to a revolt on the part of the bourgeoisie and their clerical allies against
the rise of scientific materialism and its logical outcome, worker eman-
cipation. Kropotkin then argued that recent discoveries in the sciences
overturning previous assumptions did not warrant a wholesale refuta-
tion of the scientific method of inductive thinking, as Bergson asserted
in Creative Evolution.8 According to Kropotkin, Bergson’s alternative
method of intuition was no method at all, but a caricature of inductive
reasoning based on mere ‘analogies’ and ‘metaphors’ with no real basis
in scientific facts. He then accused Bergson of catering to a gullible
public by making ‘elegantly fantastical assertions’ in support of a priori
assumptions derived from ‘the fiat of Genesis’.9 In so doing he rejected
Bergson’s claim that intuitive thinking could serve as a salutary method
in the sciences, as evidenced by historical precedents such as the devel-
opment of infinitesimal calculus.10 Kropotkin’s unapologetic defence of
conventional scientific methods reiterated a position he encapsulated
in his book Modern Science and Anarchism (1912). There Kropotkin
argued that the only truly viable form of anarchism embraced ‘the sci-
entific inductive-deductive method’, and parted ‘forever with metaphys-
ics’ including that of ‘the Hegelian’ Max Stirner and his followers.11
Thus, Kropotkin’s attack on both Stirner and Bergson was part of a
calculated campaign to warn anarchists of the folly of metaphysics.
In examining this epistemological debate I will first consider how it
is that Colomer judged Bergson’s thought to be so compatible with that
of Max Stirner. As we shall see, that synthesis had its basis in Stirner’s
theory of radical nominalism and his related condemnation of Cartesian
rationalism, scientific discourse and what he called ‘fixed ideas’ as per-
nicious abstractions, constructed by vested interests to divert us from
an ‘egoist’ focus on the cultivation of our own personalities, free of all
societal constraint. These abstractions in Stirner’s view posited an arti-
ficial division between mind and body to fabricate an ethereal realm of
‘pure spirit’ composed of general ideas and concepts divorced from the
temporal world of our corporeal being. Stirner identified this nominal

or ‘egoist’ self as the ‘unique one’, calling on us to behave solely in
response to our embodied interests; but he also argued for the potential
existence of a ‘union of egoists’ conjoined in a contingent alliance by
virtue of their self-interest.
Colomer reconfigured Stirner’s thesis by aligning his condemnation
of abstractions with Bergson’s critique of the intellect and exalting
intuition as the means by which an anarchist perceived and developed
his or her nominalist self, the ‘unique one’ which was synonymous with
individual duration. Colomer also claimed that intuition facilitated
the establishment of the ‘union of egoists’ called for by Stirner and,
most importantly, that in plumbing the depths of personality through
intuition the egoist was able to augment and cultivate the creative
élan coursing through his or her very being. Stirner’s egoist self is here
made synonymous with Bergson’s conception of personality – it is ever
changing, qualitatively distinct, and described by Colomer in terms of
Bergson’s own metaphors for duration including references to rhythm,
melody, harmony and colour. The latter metaphors are classified as
beautiful by virtue of their qualitative character, thus to cultivate the
self was to engage in an act of artistic creation. This is what Colomer
meant by an ‘action d’art’ – our very lives were considered by him to be
works of art. To understand the full complexity of this anarchist notion
of artistic immanence, we can begin by examining Stirner’s L’Unique et
sa propriété (translated into English as The Ego and its Own).12
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
manifesto, Stirner describes the ego as undergoing a continuous process

of willed, creative destruction: ‘I am the owner of my might, and I am
so when I know myself as unique. In the unique one the owner himself
returns into his creative nothing, of which he is born . . . If I concern
myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transi-
tory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: All things
are nothing to me.’15 Thus Stirner rejects any notion of an ‘absolute
ego’ and instead exalts ‘the transitory ego’, ‘the self-dissolving ego, the
never-being ego, the – finite ego’.16
FROM PAGAN GODS TO THE GOD OF REASON –

A HISTORY OF ABSTRACTION
The enemy of this heterogeneous self is any institution or belief system,
whether religious or secular, that directs the individual away from their
own embodied interests and desires. This process of individual self-
delusion occurs when we swear allegiance to abstract ideas and con-
cepts declared to be eternal truths that transcend the material world.
This false consciousness generates a perverse bifurcation between the
material world and an otherworldly realm of ‘pure spirit’, indicative,
on the human scale, of an imagined separation of mind from body.17
Among ancient civilisations, such abstractions took the form of spectral
Gods, soon to be reduced under Christianity to a single ‘God’; but fol-
lowing the rise of Cartesianism in the seventeenth century human faith
in an absolute, eternal ‘pure spirit’ metamorphosed into a fetishised
veneration of rationalism. ‘Only by the more modern philosophy since
Descartes’, writes Stirner, ‘has a serious effort been made to bring
Christianity to complete efficacy, by exalting the “scientific conscious-
ness” to be the only true and valid one. Hence it begins with absolute
doubt, dubitare, [with] turning away from everything that “mind,”
“thought,” does not legitimate . . . Only the rational is, only mind is!’18
Such ‘pure disembodied abstraction’ is declared a ‘genuine Christian
principle’ by Stirner, but Cartesianism is deemed even more radical for
having been given no figural form in the human imagination.19
This notion of ‘pure spirit’ takes myriad forms: in addition to
Cartesianism and concepts of the ‘Sacred’, other such transcendental
‘essences’ include ‘Morality’, the ‘State’, the rule of ‘Law’, ‘Justice’,
‘Essence’, ‘Man’, ‘Humanity’, the ‘Citizen’ and the ‘Fatherland’.20 All
are characterised as ‘fixed ideas’, mere words,21 divorced from the
temporal flow of our embodied individual existence. He argues that
such ideas are invariably deployed by vested interests to encourage us
to subordinate our self-interest to those abstract principles outlined
above.22 ‘God, immortality . . . humanity are drilled into us from

childhood as thoughts and feelings which move our inner being more
or less strongly . . . ruling us without our knowing it’ – thus they ‘are
always not aroused, but imparted, feelings’.23 Morality, for instance,
is ‘nothing else than loyalty [to] fulfillment of the law’ and the State
judicial system imposes ‘monogamy’ and other restrictions on sexual
freedom as ‘a dogma of faith’ with the result that ‘every Prussian carries
his gendarme in his breast’.24
The internalisation of such morality precipitates a draining away of
the life force: Stirner cites the example of a young girl whose awaken-
ing sexuality is rigourously quelled by her Christian conscience;25 but
it even undermines our creative self-expression, for to act morally is
to respond to ‘habit’, the ‘mores of one’s country’. ‘Innovation’, by
contrast, ‘is the deadly enemy of habit, of the old, of permanence’, thus
behaviour departing from social norms is to be censored.26 This self-
regulation reaches an extreme in the case of the citizen soldier, called
to offer his very life in the service of another collective abstraction,
that of the ‘Nation’. The ‘egoist’ by contrast is one who ‘instead of
living to an idea, that is, a spiritual thing, and sacrificing to it his per-
sonal advantage, serves the latter’.27 Stirner also instructs us to ignore
concepts of good and evil and related notions of ‘illegality’ as moral
categories inhibiting ‘self-ownership’ and the freedom to respond ‘to
the full energy of the will’.28 On this basis, the individual should be free,
not only to engage in ‘unwedded cohabitation’, but also in a full blown
‘insurrection’ against the State.29
READING BERGSON THROUGH STIRNER

Clearly, Stirner’s pronouncements on the ‘unique’, ‘disembodied
abstraction’, ‘fixed ideas’ and ‘habit’, as opposed to ‘innovation’ and
creativity, had a strong resonance with Bergson’s metaphysics. In
the broadest sense, Stirner’s method is not unlike that of Bergson in
as much as he engages in an introspective meditation on the nature
of our individual being, grounding the self in the temporal flux of
sensate experience, and thereby privileging heterogeneity over the
homogeneous; embodied consciousness over disembodied abstractions;
willed empathy over Cartesian rationality; and temporal change over
concepts devoid of temporality. Bergson’s notion of duration – the
bedrock of his metaphysics – has all these characteristics. Stirner then
identifies modes of thinking that alienate us from ourselves, and it is
in this regard that he also anticipates Bergson by critiquing reductive
rationalism and related scientific methods for misrepresenting our
individual being and the world around us by robbing both of their

temporality.
For Colomer, a creative reading of Stirner’s egoism through the lens
of Bergson’s metaphysics proved especially compelling as a justifica-
tion for anarchist-individualism. To gain insight into that synthesis
we can turn to Bergson’s writings on the opposition between intui-
tion and analysis, as well as the role of what Bergson called ‘fixed’ or
‘abstract ideas’ in distorting and obscuring our understanding of our
own inner duration. Having begun his Introduction to Metaphysics by
distinguishing between ‘two profoundly different ways of knowing a
thing’, Bergson concludes that the attainment of absolute knowledge of
an object from within can only be achieved by means of ‘an intuition,
whilst everything else falls within the province of analysis’. Intuition
is a form of willed ‘sympathy by which one places oneself within an
object in order to coincide with what is unique in it’; analysis, on the
other hand, ‘is the operation which reduces the object to elements
already known, that is elements common to it and other objects’.30
Analysis ignores an object’s particularity, what Bergson refers to as its
uniqueness – the defining characteristic of duration; furthermore, this
comparative method leads to the fabrication of imperfect ‘symbols’
as substitutes for intuitive insight. Methods of analysis are especially
insidious by virtue of their denial of duration, whether in the guise of
‘the flow of my own conscious life’ or the inner life of living beings
surrounding us.31 Recourse to analysis is ‘the ordinary function of posi-
tive science’, since it works exclusively with ‘symbols’ and is used by
‘even the most concrete of natural sciences, those concerned with life’.
These natural sciences ‘confine themselves to the visible forms of living
beings, their organs and anatomical elements’, and in making ‘compari-
sons between these forms, they reduce the more complex to the more
simple.’32 Creative Evolution considered the role of such thinking with
reference to biology, but Bergson’s earlier books specifically focused on
human psychology. In Time and Free Will Bergson charted this para-
digm with reference to the scientific theory of psycho-physics, which
sought to subject our qualitative sensations, including those of colour,
to quantitative measurement.33 Matter and Memory in turn critiqued
the related theory of ‘associationism’ for parsing the durational flow
of memory images into a series of discrete ‘ready-made things, given
cut and dry in the course of our mental life’ that are then combined by
virtue of a ‘mysterious attraction’ like a ‘psychical atom’.34 In short,
analysis and the scientific method it generates translate living duration
into symbols devoid of durational properties.
Concepts exact a similar process of abstraction, ignoring what is
particular and unique and instead focusing on ‘abstract, general, or

simple ideas’. In the Introduction to Metaphysics Bergson eschews
such abstractions by representing duration solely in terms of concrete
images such as ‘the unrolling of a coil’ or a ‘myriad tinted spectrum’,
claiming that such diverse images, by virtue of the ‘convergence of their
action’ in our imagination, may ‘direct consciousness to the precise
point where there is a certain intuition to be seized’.35 Concepts by con-
trast point consciousness away from the willed effort of intuition and
towards habitual forms of analysis. When examined closely, a concept
‘retains only the part of the object that is common to it and others, and
expresses, still more than the image does, a comparison between the
object and others which resemble it’.36 Thus, while ‘abstract ideas can
render service to analysis, that is, to scientific study of the object in its
relation to other objects’ they are ‘incapable of replacing intuition, that
is, the metaphysical investigation of what is essential and unique in the
object’.37 Bergson calls on us to ‘invert the habitual direction of the
work of thought’ – that is, our predilection to think in terms of ‘fixed
concepts’ – in favour of intuition, in order to develop forms of repre-
sentation ‘capable of following reality in all its sinuosities and of adopt-
ing the very movement of the inward life of things’.38 In Laughter,
Bergson traced the genealogy of such habitual thinking to the pragmatic
function of our intellect and of language in facilitating our everyday
activity. In our ordinary perceptual experience, we do not grasp ‘the
individuality of things’ but only ‘the utilitarian side’ which allows us
quickly to ‘respond to them by appropriate reactions’. This selective
attention facilitates the hasty classification of objects into homogeneous
categories and linguistic signs, with the result that we routinely ‘confine
ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them’.39 In Creative Evolution
Bergson would go further, claiming that ‘it is the essence of science to
handle signs’, and that, though these signs ‘undoubtedly differ from
those of language by their greater precision and higher efficacy; they are
none the less tied down in the general condition of the sign, which is to
denote a fixed aspect of reality under an arrested form’.40
ANDRÉ COLOMER’S CREATIVE REVOLUTION

For Colomer, Bergson’s metaphysics amounted to an apologia for
Stirner’s politicised nominalism. What Stirner called ‘the unique’
coincided with what Bergson described as the durational nature of our
‘inmost’ self, our personality in all its particularity. Following Stirner,
Colomer endorsed the idea of a self-devouring subjectivity, which he
related to Bergson’s critique of the notion of an underlying subject
as opposed to an enduring subject. Bergson succinctly summarised

his thesis as follows: ‘there are changes, but there are underneath the
change no things which change: change has no need of a support.
There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which
moves: movement does not imply a mobile.’41 Colomer also synthe-
sised Stirner’s critique of the cultural function of habit in restricting
individual self-expression with Bergson’s condemnation of habit as the
enemy of intuition. He then identified intuition as the means by which
an egoist could tap into his own inner duration. Intuition enabled the
individual to resist the pernicious effects of analysis, and its offspring,
fixed abstractions, were condemned by both Bergson and Stirner for
denying temporality and particularity. Colomer also followed Bergson
in claiming that these abstractions, like science, had a ‘practical role’
with no other purpose ‘than to serve our action’ with regard to our ‘use
of matter’.42 Science therefore was ‘a marvelous instrument’ allowing us
to grasp the material world to meet our ‘external necessities’, but it was
ill suited to grasp individual duration. Drawing on Bergson’s descrip-
tion in Matter and Memory of our body as a centre of action among
an aggregate of images,43 Colomer compared our life ‘to a circle whose
destiny is represented by the circumference’ so as to reiterate the phi-
losopher’s claim that the intellect was incapable of inverting habitual
thinking to grasp the creative freedom that defined our individualism.44
Where Colomer parted ways with Bergson in favour of Stirner was
in his singular focus on individual duration and his denial of any notion
of a transindividual élan vital, as theorised in Creative Evolution and
Bergson’s recent lecture on the ‘Soul and the Body’ delivered in Paris in
April 1912 to the Christian Association ‘Foi et Vie’.45 In his first install-
ment in the ‘Bergson to Bonnot’ series, Colomer condemned Bergson’s
Catholic followers for interpreting the élan vital as a justification for
‘religious belief’, and identified Time and Free Will and Matter and
Memory, rather than Creative Evolution, as the principal sources for
his ‘heroic individualism’. Having noted Bergson’s critique in Time and
Free Will of ‘the English school of Associationism’ that ‘reduced human
will to an absolute mechanism’ and subjected our sensations ‘to meas-
urement, to calculus’, Colomer pointedly claimed that, with Bergson,
‘freedom does not exist, as metaphysicians believe, in the possibility
of an absolute without any motivation, like a miracle’, but is instead
nascent to our corporeal self, ‘perceivable by the individual alone – in a
harmonious plenitude flowing from his being’.46
Colomer also differed from Bergson by following Stirner in claiming
that science, rationality and fixed absolutes were ideological weapons
designed to suppress the unfettered freedom of the egoist. Thus
Colomer cast science as an oppressive tool in the hands of sociologists

and governmental officials who, thanks to Bergson’s critique, could no
longer ‘undertake to legislate on our thoughts and our acts’.47 Colomer
also intervened in the ‘cultural wars’ over the ideological import of
Bergson’s metaphysics.48 Speaking of Bergson’s new-found popularity
among Christians and French nationalists, Colomer argued that they
distorted Bergson’s philosophy by ‘separating intuition from individu-
alism’ in order to claim that intuition made us one with an élan vital
defined in terms of disembodied absolutes. Such abstractions took the
form of a God in the eyes of Bergson’s Catholic followers or a patriotic
esprit de corps in the minds of ultra-nationalists (he cites Maurice
Barrès, and Agathon, author of the nationalist polemic Les Jeunes
Gens d’aujourd’hui). By associating intuition with collective ‘values’,
such as ‘order, discipline, social solidarity’ and ‘patriotic spirit’, these
groups effectively converted that faculty into ‘a sort moral policeman’.
One is reminded of Stirner’s dismissal of ‘the fatherland’ and ‘God’ as
spurious abstractions, and his related assertion that Christian moral-
ity, enshrined in the judicial system, operates as a ‘gendarme’ within
the breast of each citizen. Colomer closes his diatribe with a spirited
assertion of his rebellious individualism, arguing that one can display
forms of ‘courage’ other than those of ‘the soldier’, fight a battle ‘other
than that of the citizen’, and possess ‘energy’ other than that of ‘the
unanimous heart of the nation’.49 Soldier, citizen, nation – these were
all homogenising abstractions antithetical to intuitive insight and crea-
tive self-expression.
THE SELF AS A WORK OF ART

Having marshalled Bergson and Stirner to banish abstractions,
Colomer’s next task was to clarify the relation of Bergsonian duration
to Stirner’s concept of the unique, and the special status of art and
artists within that matrix. Bergson, in describing duration, invariably
cast it in terms of musical metaphors, a practice repeated by Colomer.
In Time and Free Will Bergson compared duration to ‘the notes of a
tune, melting so to speak, into one another’ to constitute ‘a musical
phrase’ which is ‘constantly altered in its totality by the addition
of some new note’. Our consciousness, therefore, is composed of a
multiplicity of ‘qualitative’ sensations whose unity resembles ‘that of
a phrase in a melody’.50 In Laughter, Bergson describes the artist as
one uniquely able to plumb the depths of duration to grasp ‘our inner
life’s unbroken melody’ and with it ‘the individuality of things or of
beings’. Artists sought to evoke ‘certain rhythms of life’ through their
chosen medium, whether it be a ‘rhythmic arrangement of words’ in

the case of poets and writers, or an ‘original harmony of forms and
colours’ in the visual arts.51 Melodic harmony and rhythmic form were
an artist’s means of creating what Bergson later referred to as modes
of representation capable ‘of adopting the very movement of the inner
life of things’.52
In Matter and Memory Bergson extended his vision of durational
rhythm beyond the individual, asserting that ‘it is possible to imagine
many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree
of tension and relaxation of different kinds of consciousness’.53 In
Creative Evolution he incorporated a theory of human creativity into
the equation – a manoeuvre that had special import for Colomer.
Bergson argued that the universe was composed of durational activ-
ity, animated by a vital impulse manifest in terms of lesser or greater
degrees of freedom. Vibratory molecular matter was lowest on the scale
of free activity since its actions were almost wholly predetermined and
reactive, and as such pure matter is perfectly adapted to scientific analy-
sis. Living organisms, on the other hand, possessed varying degrees of
freedom ranging from rooted forms of plant life, to mobile creatures
governed by instinct (an unreflective form of activity), to humankind
whose actions are not only instinctual and pragmatic (intellectual) but
on rare occasions the product of intuition. Intuition, or willed empathy,
serves to define artistic expression in Bergson’s narrative, but intuition
can also be cultivated through individual effort to address other aspects
of human endeavour. Any human activity that is not an expression of
this free will, whether the product of coercion or habit, does nothing
to forward our own creative trajectory. By contrast, intuition not only
allows us to grasp the creative force or élan vital within and without us,
it also gives birth to actions that contribute to its ongoing development.
Thus, creative expression is synonymous with self-expression and it
is the most advanced instance of a life force permeating the cosmos.54
‘Each personality’, states Bergson, ‘is a creative force; and there is every
appearance that the role of each person is to create, just as if a great
Artist had produced as his work other artists.’55
While Colomer endorsed Bergson’s description of duration and his
exaltation of humanity’s creative capacities, he stopped short of embrac-
ing Bergson’s vision of a ‘great Artist’ akin to a cosmic élan vital, prefer-
ring instead to circumscribe this vital – and artistic – impulse within the
parameters of Stirner’s nominalism. Intuition reportedly enabled the
egoist to discover his or her uniqueness, and in so doing revolutionise
consciousness by augmenting an individual’s creative capacities. This
cultivation of the self amounted to a form of artistic creation, for
such intuitive self-consciousness gave birth to sensations of intensity,

rhythm, harmony and a vitalist joie de vivre. An artistic sensibility, as
the most unique and individual of our faculties, is described by Colomer
as integral to duration itself and thus able to translate these sensations
into forms of self-representation saturated with these same durational
qualities. According to Colomer, ‘it is precisely because the sensation of
the beautiful is the least fixed, the least rational, the least regulated, the
most changeable of human emotions that I choose it as the basis of my
philosophy, as the principle of my action.’ Following Stirner, Colomer
dismissed moral and ethical criteria for behaviour as abstractions, but
unlike the former, aesthetic discernment ‘does not risk creating a Law
for humankind, a common Law, an immutable Law; it can only accord
with my individual law – that is my harmony, the feeling of accord in
my emotions. It is the rhythm of my life, the synthesis of my being.’ The
‘beautiful’, we are told, ‘is the synthesis of the élans of a personality
in search of its harmony’ and as such it not only expresses individual
‘freedom’ but the life force itself, an individual’s ‘joie de vivre’.56
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-
ity’. ‘Communist colonies’ therefore constitute ‘hybrid ensembles of

inharmonious elements’, a random gathering of individuals lacking in
empathy and thus predisposed for conflict.59 Form and content – the
communist ideal and the individuals who bring about its realisation –
are therefore bifurcated in the anarchist-communist imagination.
Colomer’s polemic brings to mind Bergson’s critique of the intellect’s
propensity to fabricate such empty frames in order to foster our prag-
matic activity. ‘The intellectual faculty’, states Bergson, focuses solely
on ‘relations’ rather than on ‘things’, and as such ‘possesses naturally
only an external and empty knowledge, but it has thereby the advan-
tage of supplying a frame in which an infinity of objects may find room
in turn’.60 This radical division of abstract form from material content
is something Bergson seeks to overcome by means of intuition, a faculty
of willed empathy that enables us not only to grasp inner duration, but
to develop pliable forms of representation moulded to this durational
content. Thus intuitive knowledge produces representational forms that
are integral to the content they wish to represent; as such they are akin
to the vital order of living organisms.
For Colomer, such vital order has its ideological corollary in Stirner’s
‘union of egoists’, characterised as an anarchist band such as the Bonnot
Gang. ‘The band’, in contrast to the ‘empty frame’ governing the anar-
chist-communist collective, ‘is not a fixed form’, ‘it is not an Entity’ nor
‘a Cause’, for it cannot exist apart from the individuals who make it up.
‘The band has nothing apriori about it. It is formed by the force itself
of the individualities who compose it. It can transform itself or dissolve
following this same force.’ Rather than ask individuals to suppress their
unique personalities in the service of an abstraction, Colomer defines
his collective as a hetereogenous grouping that nurtures qualitative dif-
ference rather than homogeneity. Instead this ‘community of tempera-
ments’ arises spontaneously by virtue of an ‘intuitive sympathy which
draws these individuals towards each other’. What serves to unite them
is a sense of ‘harmony’ manifest as friendship and shared enthusiasm
which in turn maximises their own self-realisation.61 Thus, discerning
one’s own inner harmony can lead naturally to a sense of harmony with
others, and aesthetics, rather than morality or an abstract cause, are
the basis for this contingent union. Colomer further aestheticised his
conception by describing this union of egoists as ‘a community blazing
with colours of various hues’, echoing Bergson’s own use of colour as a
metaphor for duration.62
To Colomer’s mind, intuition is synonymous with aesthetic discern-
ment, and it is integral to our creative self-fashioning. ‘Intuition is a
synthetic force which is personal to us, it is an individual axis of vision
which forms a particular being, it is an original force of sensation, of

emotion, of consciousness’; further, ‘it is only comparable to a musical
symphony whose total value, total meaning, resides in the ensemble,
independent of each note which composes it’. Thus, ‘art is the child of
intuition’, for a work of art ‘is nothing other than the free expression
of an individuality that does not recognise any law other than that of
its individual harmony’. As an ‘anarchist of art action’, Colomer states
that his goal is to ‘reveal to anarchist-individualists that they can dis-
cover through art, with their intuition alone, the harmonious unity of
their action, their individual well being’.63
Colomer’s theory of art put a premium on ‘joie de vivre’,64 a celebra-
tion of sensory embodiment as an emotive register of an intuitive state
of mind, while exalting all cultural manifestations of novelty, intensity,
rhythm and harmony as fundamentally anarchist by virtue of their
durational and life-affirming properties. When Colomer looked to
historical precedents for this point of view he lauded Greek poets and
writers in the thrall of Dionysus, as well as the Romantics, advocates of
Naturism and free love, and proponents of high lyricism in poetry. ‘In
Athens’, wrote Colomer, ‘the artists and poets were professors of life,
professors of joy. They made Art for Life.’ Contemporary, artists, poets
and writers should follow these precedents by exalting ‘this joy of being
under the sun, this intoxication of feeling, of thought, of harmonious
play in accordance with nature’.65 Others among the Action d’art collec-
tive shared Colomer’s views – for instance, in August 1913, Colomer’s
colleague René Dessambre gave a lecture on ‘The Pictorial Work
of Delacroix’ to a group of French poets knowns as the Paroxystes,
whose leader was the Bergsonian and Futurist-oriented poet Nicholas
Beauduin.66 Beauduin’s doctrine of paroxysm celebrated the ‘perpetual
dynamism’ and ‘creative violence’ of the contemporary age as the vitalist
source for his ‘direct lyricism’ – an attractive doctrine for Colomer and
his allies.67 In speaking to the group, Dessambre described Delacroix
as ‘the great creator of images, of powerful symphonies, orchestrations
of tones’ who, through ‘the intensity’ of his ‘visions of life’ was able to
convey his ‘joie de vivre’.68 In his own writings on contemporary art,
Colomer praised the most novel artists of his own generation, exempli-
fied to his mind by the free verse praxis of Symbolists such as Stephane
Mallarmé; Oscar Wilde, whom the Action d’art collective celebrated for
his defence of individualism, amoral aestheticism and sexual freedom;
and members of the Futurist movement, most prominently Action
d’art contributor Gino Severini.69 Severini drew on Neo-Impressionist
technique as the foundation for his aesthetic, but he rejected the psy-
cho-physical underpinnings, moral precepts and anarchist-communist
metaphors that informed Signac’s theory of complementary contrasts.

Instead, Severini endorsed Bergson’s interpretation of colour as a
qualitative metaphor for duration, and utilised Neo-Impressionist
technique to express what he referred to as his ‘intuitive’ sensation of
the erotic energy of young female dancers who populated the cabarets
and dance halls of Montmartre.70 Such hedonism proved compatible
with Colomer’s doctrine of Bergsonian joie de vivre, which accounts in
part for Severini’s participation in plans to launch a ‘Théâtre d’Action
d’art’ by contributing stage sets and costume designs to the project. The
Action d’art group described the theatre as ‘a field of action wherein
there can be accomplished beautiful gestures, realised harmonies’ in
the service of ‘lyrical’ and ‘heroic’ individualism; presumably Severini’s
aesthetic sensibility furthered their aims.71
CONCLUSION: ART FOR INSURRECTION’S SAKE

In sum, by synthesising Stirner and Bergson, Colomer identified aesthet-
ics as the primary vehicle for his anarchist insurgency. Simultaneously,
he utilised Bergson to dismiss the scientific and rational underpinnings
of Kropotkin and Grave’s anarchist-communism, and attacked the
ethical basis of their doctrine as yet another ‘abstraction’ antithetical to
intuitive consciousness. This latter manoeuvre had dire implications for
Neo-Impressionists like Signac who based their art theory on the con-
flation of aesthetics, rationality and morality.72 Moreover, Colomer’s
merger of intuitive consciousness with Stirner’s ‘union of egoists’ con-
tradicted Bergson’s own attempt, beginning in 1912, to circumscribe
intuition within the parameters of parliamentary democracy. Thus
Colomer takes his place alongside fellow anarchists Dora Marsden
and Georges Sorel as a radical who precipitated an epismological shift
within leftist circles from an advocacy of scientific materialism to a
volontarist theory of insurrection, opposed to any conception of the
nation state, including Bergson’s own emerging notion of an open and
evolving society, governed by democratic precepts.73
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
and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1993); and Richard Sonn, Sex, Violence and the Avant-Garde: Anarchism
in Interwar France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2010), pp. 198–204.
2. On the Neo-Impressionists’ debt to Kropotkin and Grave and their use
of metaphors drawn from chemical science and cell biology in declaring
anarchist-communism integral to their aesthetic technique, see Robyn
Roslak, ‘The Politics of Aesthetic Harmony: Neo-Impressionism, Science,
and Anarchism’, The Art Bulletin (September 1991), pp. 381–90; and
Chapter 1 of Robyn Roslak, Neo-impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-
siècle France: Painting, Politics and Landscape (Burlington, VT: Ashgate
Press, 2007).
3. See Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 154–5; and Mark Antliff, ‘Cubism,
Futurism, Anarchism: The Aestheticism of the Action d’art Group,
1906–1920’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1998), pp. 99–120.
4. On the exploits of the Bonnot Gang and their ties with the anarchist-
individualist milieu, see Richard Parry, The Bonnot Gang (London: Rebel
Press, 1987).
5. The first article in the series (15 February 1913) had the masthead ‘De
Bergson à Bonnot: Aux Sources de l’Héroisme Individualiste’; subse-
quent articles appeared under the masthead ‘De Bergson au Banditisme:
Aux Sources de l’Héroisme Individualiste’ (1 March to 25 December
1913). The articles were titled as follows: ‘M Bergson et les Jeunes
Gens d’Aujourd’hui’ (1 March 1913), p. 1; ‘L’Art, l’anarchie, et l’ame
Chrétienne’ (15 April 1913), pp. 1–2; ‘La Science et l’Intuition: Leurs rôles
dans l’individualisme’ (10 May 1913), p. 3; ‘Ma Liberté c’est ma beauté’
(10 June 1913), p. 1; ‘Illusions sociales et delusions scientist’ (25 August
1913), p. 2; ‘L’Illusions individualisèe’ (10 September 1913), p. 1; ‘Soyons
des Hommes Nouveaux’ (25 September 1913), p. 1; ‘Quel est nôtre
Héroisme?’ (25 October 1913), p. 1; ‘La Bande’ (10 November 1913),
p. 2; and ‘L’Individualiste héroique et l’art quotidienne’ (25 December
1913), p. 1.
6. ‘Librarie d’Action d’art’, in L’Action d’art (25 July 1913), p. 4.
7. Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 142–3; Peter Kropotkin, ‘La Croisade
contre la Science de M. Bergson’, Les Temps Nouveaux (15 October
1913), pp. 2–4.
8. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), authorised translation by
Arthur Mitchell, 1911 (New York: Henry Holt, 1931), pp. 211–16.
9. Kropotkin, ‘La Croisade contre la Science de M. Bergson’, p. 3.
10. Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), translated by T. E.
Hulme, 1911, Introduction by John Mullarkey (New York: Palgrave-
MacMillan, 2007), pp. 41–2.
11. Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism and Modern Science (London: Freedom
Press, 1912), pp. 38–9; 50; 69–70; 92–3.
12. Max Stirner, The Ego and its Own, translation by Steven Byington, 1907
(London: Rebel Press, 1993). For an analysis of Stirner’s philosophy see

John Clark, Max Stirner’s Egoism (London: Freedom Press, 1976).
13. Stirner, The Ego and its Own, pp. 362–6.
14. Ibid., pp. 13, 363.
15. Ibid., p. 366.
16. Ibid., p. 182.
17. Ibid., p. 31.
18. Ibid., p. 85.
19. Ibid., pp. 21, 38, 85.
20. Ibid., pp. 26, 29, 32, 44, 46–8.
21. Ibid., p. 184.
22. Ibid., pp. 43, 61.
23. Ibid., p. 65.
24. Ibid., pp. 46, 52–3.
25. Ibid., p. 62.
26. Ibid., p. 66.
27. Ibid., pp. 29–30.
28. Ibid., pp. 51–5.
29. Ibid., pp. 54–5; 316.
30. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 5.
31. Ibid., p. 10.
32. Ibid., p. 6.
33. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (1889), authorised translation by F.
L. Pogson, 1910 (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), pp. 60–72. John
Mullarkey has perceptively analysed this aspect of Bergson’s argument in
his book Bergson and Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2000), pp. 22–4.
34. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), authorised translation by N.
M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, 1911 (New York: Humanities Press, 1978), pp.
214–15.
36. Ibid., p. 11.
37. Ibid., p. 12.
38. Ibid., pp. 40–1.
39. Henri Bergson, Laughter (1900), in Wylie Sypher, ed., Comedy (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 158–60.
41. Henri Bergson, ‘The Perception of Change’ (1912), in The Creative Mind,
trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p.
173; on the centrality of this concept to Bergson’s philosophical method,
see Garrett Barden, ‘Method in Philosophy’, in John Mullarkey, ed., The
New Bergson (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), pp. 32–40.
42. Colomer, ‘La Science et l’Intuition’, p. 3.
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.
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.
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
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
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
images connect the practice of this form of processually determined art

with the history of recent film work. ‘It’s OK’, says Smithson, ‘you’re
on fairly solid ground.’ This is a false claim as the Bergen County
swamplands are unstable ground full of industrial waste.3 The direc-
tion controls the actions of the camera, restrictive of the form of image
creation.
What is the process of deciding to ‘walk in a straight line’, as the
male voice directs in the opening of Swamp? We can imagine this
command in terms of the categories of its era of art production: dema-
terialised, earth, or conceptual art. But the question that interests me
here is not ‘what is the art historical classification of this art?’ nor
‘what is the meaning of this artwork?’ nor ‘how do I feel when viewing
this artwork?’ Instead, what this chapter explores is the practice of art
making – this is the question of process. In terms of a philosophy of art,
this is not so much an issue of production as it is a return to the matter
of visualisation. This is a process that involves the construction of the
image, as well as the production of visibility. Throughout recorded
human registration of the visual and their invention of different visual
schematic and creative responses to their worlds, different perceptual
models work to create and stabilise forms of reality. Images and the
matter of images are given form through social and political contracts
that enforce extensive histories. We can separate the components of
creativity into categories of form, genre and medium. However these
labels still do not account for the processes of practice, which include
the artist’s aims, methods, timescales, materials, contextual histories,
ideas and research.
Holt and Smithson’s work refines the terms of art grammar. The
labels of ‘modernist’, ‘conceptual’, ‘earth’, ‘political’, or ‘postmodern’
art do not provide much more than a surface appraisal of the style
and form of an art practice, and situate it within a linear disciplinary
historiography. When considering practice, philosophical notions such
as ‘creativity’, ‘art’, and ‘thought’ are outside of process. These notions
describe an image, a concept, an object and a subjective response to
materials and things. When describing the creation of forms, the basis
of process lies in the materiality of things and their potential for manip-
ulation or refiguring through other technological means, and the laws
of matter they are subject to. Nancy Holt’s practice concerns itself with
the situation of the human scale of the experience of time and place,
rendered through the processes of observation.4 Robert Smithson’s
practice is similarly concerned with the practice of perception, but
with a greater emphasis on the epistemic conditions of the perception
of change of energy forms.5 Smithson explores the manipulation of
The Matter of the Image 117
perception and of image forms. He is critical of art theory, history and

philosophical positions that, in explaining images and forms, apply
notions that are outside of the processes of practice that he and other
artists of his generation pursue.
Smithson has written a number of pieces that offer a commentary on
the ethos of 1960s practice.6 In a typical manifesto-style piece published
in Artforum in June 1966, titled ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’,
he constructs a defence of artists’ work against definitions that do not
account for their practice.7 Smithson describes the practice of his close
friend Robert Morris in terms of its attention to a negative energy, the
entropic state that he and others were investigating. That the 1960s
were an era of change in art practices, due as much to shifts in political
and social cultures as to changes in industrial and personal use of new
technologies, is by now well established, with the reactive aesthetic
positions taken by those such as Smithson, Donald Judd, Mary Miss,
Robert Morris and Dan Flavin also accounted for.8 But the details of
Holt and Smithson’s collaborative practice remain only partially docu-
mented. How can we describe this practice more fully?
Together, Holt and Smithson started utilising video and film as a
medium at the end of the 1960s. Separately and collaboratively, they
make art outside the art gallery, placing and making work at various
sites and ‘non-sites’, as Smithson refers to them. Their photographic
and film-based works highlight some of the key issues of process-based
art, and appear to expand on the situation and perception of ‘art forms’
enabled by the ready-made compositional work of earlier years. The
critic P. Adams Sitney described American independent avant-garde
cinematic interests in terms of a reflexivity, but also in terms of the
1960s interest in ruins and rituals, as seen in the work of film-makers
such as Yvonne Rainer (Rainer being Morris’s partner in the 1960s).9
Holt and Smithson were in pursuit of a different type of idea in their
investigation of modes of cognitive perception within art practice and
different modes of epistemological framing. In another of their video
works, East Coast, West Coast, a staged interview sarcastically mocks
the entire art world as a fabricated arrogance.10 Holt, playing a New
York gallerist, chides Smithson, playing a hippy west coast creative –
‘You don’t even know you’re a system of your own making’ – while
he affects a bemused expression. Of course, the opposite is true, and
this work acts out some of the sentiments Smithson expresses in his
essay ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, which contains further ideas
concerning Holt and Smithson’s critique of art gallery politics as part of
their intention to create images that render different systems, through
processes that perform a devolution of all kinds of historiographies.
‘Entropy and the New Monuments’ is an essay on the position of

many of Smithson’s art peers of the 1960s. The ‘monuments’ are a
testimony to the future obsolescence of art forms and images. Early on,
Smithson notes: ‘the artists have provided a visible analog for the Second
Law of Thermodynamics, which extrapolates the range of entropy by
telling us energy is more easily lost than obtained, and that in the ulti-
mate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into
an all-encompassing sameness.’11 The essay then refers to a number of
provocative philosophical positions taken by artists including Donald
Judd, Dan Flavin and Paul Thek, theorists such as Roland Barthes and
Marshal McLuhan, writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, and philoso-
phers such as Henri Bergson. Smithson argues that in his peers’ work
there is nothing new being created, thus rejecting the modernist sense
of progression towards the fulfilment of a retrospectively immanent
meaning of a form or image. Describing the nature of his fellow artists’
practices, Smithson uses a citation from Bergson’s Creative Evolution:
‘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 neces-
sity of making to measure.’12 Smithson’s polemic is intended to prove
that all things tend towards an entropic state, and that contemporary
artworks demonstrate this in their investigation into ‘falseness’, which
Smithson argues is ‘inextricably a part of entropy’.13 Placing Bergson’s
words at the service of his argument, Smithson notes that pre-figured
systems miss the point of artworks that are, as he says, ‘puns on the
Bergsonian idea of “creative evolution” with its ideas of “ready made
categories” ’.14 In Creative Evolution Bergson argues that it is the pro-
gression of differentiation that animates life.15 In defining his position,
Smithson’s observations about entropy run counter to Bergson’s notion
of evolution’s increasing specialisation of forms, where ‘sameness’ is the
entropic future of life.
While Smithson’s critique of intellectual categorisation follows a
similar line to Bergson’s anti-Platonism, Smithson appears blind (in this
essay at least) to the problematic of ‘psychological interpretation’ that
Bergson raises.16 We can observe that in terms of a practice – whether
the medium is film, language or sculpture – the practitioner’s concept
of themselves as a self, or their constituted subjectivity, gives a direc-
tion to the forms of specialisation that both Bergson and Smithson
seek to highlight, albeit each using different methods. Subjectivity
provides the energy that intervenes in and frames the processes of
intention – through selection, recognition and naming of methods, for
example; whether in terms of ‘progress’ or ‘entropy’, de/composition,
or in/activity of a form or material. This subject may be what Bergson

refers to as the ‘intellectual form of our thought’;17 this is the process
of practice itself, the processes that drive humans towards investigation
and naming, or to apathy and ignorance of things.
Before going further into the description of the role of subjectivity in
practice, and its determination of the forms of art, first let us step back,
with Bergson, into the very mattering of the image – the composition
and decomposition of things, framed as art practice. How are images
created? Drawing upon the work of artists and philosophers who
describe the cognition of thought, and the notion of mind, provides
us with language and concepts with which to articulate the cognitive
apprehension of image creation. But can a description of the processes
involved be robust? Is there a philosophy of practice that enables
thought, once articulated, to re-engage with the duration and rhythm
of the actions that coalesce and present as an act; so named as image?
How does the image of an art practice come into being? The matter of
art is a different consideration to the materials of art. Matter propels
determination and value of the content, while materials are the techno-
logical platforms that enable forms for matter. Connected, matter and
materiality form images that we recognise and classify as objects,
and are thus politically directed as objects by the ‘we’ of recognition
and animation of matter. When connected to gendered, racial, or other
economic identifiers, ‘our’ discussion of practice philosophy moves
into forms of political being. In description, a schematisation occurs
and becomes a fixed-act, a fixed account of the history of that form.
In its description, and in its utility, the image is subject to a process of
biopoliticisation and historicising stasis.
Bergson defines matter as l’ensemble des images, ‘all the images’.18
Now this definition and Bergson’s subsequent detailing of the image of
matter – its selection, recognition, survival and perception – provides us
with a plausible and logical argument that we can apply to the creation
of moving images. Yet, as we attempt to describe the creative processes
of the image, the surfaces and depths of Bergson’s inquiry into forms of
creation – the creative singularity of thought – are tested. Bergson’s
description of the image in Matter and Memory offers an account
of the ways that images are perceived, recognised and remembered.
Bergson’s descriptions are able to realise differences of the extensive
and intensive; differences of spatial and durational kinds; differences
of qualitative and quantitative measures, and differences in virtual and
actualised images. The processual nature of the image means that it is
always in movement, in a continuum of images, relational to the per-
ceptual body whose needs are generative of other images. This attention
to the ontology of the image is Bergson’s gift to the philosophy of

image. According to Bergson, qualitative accounts of the image must
attend to the ways in which matter is augmented by habitual perceptual
practices. In keeping with his method of addressing the duality of an
issue (looking at both poles of its possible mattering), Bergson diagram-
matises the production of qualitative duration. Bergson offers a useful
account of the modes of the mattered image, but in providing a schema-
tised, qualitative rendering of the process, his method has limitations in
relation to the discussion and development of a philosophy of practice
that Smithson identifies. I want to address this point a little further
before moving onto Holt and Smithson’s practice, in order to tease out
those aspects of a Bergsonian image-matter that are significant for any
philosophy concerned with sensory reception.
In Matter and Memory, Bergson diagrammatises the terms of image
production. All the images are provided with a mapping of forms of
thought production. We can describe this as the schema for a philoso-
phy of matter. But the mattered image is not its whole picture, and for
a philosophy of practice, Bergson’s diagrams themselves perform an
imposition of structure upon the very matter that Bergson himself is at
pains to refigure. Bergson’s diagrams map out five forms of mattered
images: 1. forms of perception as a closed circuit;19 2. the materi-
alisation of a memory-image;20 3. the illusory nature of co-extensive
spatialised consciousness;21 4. bodily-memory;22 and 5. the mental life
of the mind affected by matter.23 These diagrams describe Bergson’s
philosophy of matter, where the living image is the image that is created
through a vectorial image, which Bergson argues is ‘my body’.24 The
dualisms that Bergson describes are processes of the thought of matter,
but are not necessarily innate to the image. Bergson’s address of the
technological platform of image creation limits the capacity of the argu-
ment for the mattered image.
If we assume a Bergsonian position with regard to the technologi-
cally determined topography of the twentieth century, then we find that
the images produced in that century take a certain position and provide
a certain imagination of the world. This image is contingent upon a
subjectivity’s needs: ‘those moments that interest us’, ‘our perceptions
give us the plan of our eventual action on things much more than that
of things themselves’.25 But is this ever the final image? The image in
process, the actioning of matter by the camera, is different from the
diagrammatic final cut. Reading through Bergson, we can observe that,
when connected, different bodies of matter will respond in different
ways, over different durations. The mode of technological platform
– or medium (analogue or digital) – will determine the action. Action
is contingent upon its medium. The making of matter proceeds with

predication, such as we can observe with the gendered laws of image
production and manipulation, where the coding of ‘woman’, ‘man’ and
‘child’ still demand complicity within the economics of a pornographi-
cally driven marketplace.
Bergson’s cinematographic consciousness offers an economy of
affective intensities for thinking about the forms generated by the
perceptual, epistemic and temporal techniques of art practices. In his
two-volume study on philosophy of cinema, Gilles Deleuze argues that
specific film (and media) forms not only confirm Bergson’s thesis but
have also contributed to its evolution, through the cinematographi-
cally generated creation of new ‘organic life’ forms which have made a
new ‘regime of the image’ and continue to create, mutate and destroy
‘images of thought’.26 All of these points, however, are representative of
a mapped out position, whether one of subjectivity, the political, or of a
creative form. Bergson’s laws do enable a position of cinematographic
vitalism to be read in the images of film. What we can add to this dis-
course, however, is a critique of Bergson’s addressing of praxis, which
is how matter is actioned. The diagrammatic needs to be refigured in
order to animate methods of practice.
Forms of reality are what emerge through durational figures of
perception, offered by moving media such as film, art screenings, and
digitised information platforms such as mobile media. While we can
say that ‘reality’ is diagrammatised by the technological platform by
which it has been mediated, what are the critical processes that are at
work manipulating and shaping the direction of the given reality? If by
process we mean the crafting of matter, then the modes of that craft-
ing provide some access to the resulting forms. The only way to keep
images alive is to place them continually in action with other images.
Animating images that belong to other systems of thinking, Holt and
Smithson engorge the idea of ‘art’, continuing the work of previous art
practitioners who incorporate their vernacular as well as other systems
into the form of their mattered images. A paradigmatic shift occurs
throughout the 1960s, one in which the notion of discreet systems
and materials is stretched and the disciplinary fields of art exploded.
The matter of art becomes one of daily actions to be played out. The
matter comes before the image, and object. For a film such as Swamp,
the sound is the product of actioned matter, and produces a directed
receptor-orienting affect. This art makes its practice implicit by per-
forming the process of image construction, describing the representa-
tion of a mattering of an image, within a durational context.
While Bergson’s diagrams account for modes of philosophical
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
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
In the decomposition and recomposition of systems, the matter of

the self is also collapsed and altered. If we take the matter of actioned
‘subjectivity’, for example, we see that it is given and expressed in rec-
ognisable forms and images, and through exchanges that recollect pre-
vious encounters. In collaborative works such as those of Nancy Holt
and Robert Smithson or Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer, practice
proceeds through various means, testing out each plane of interface,
with the materials, the modes and the research driving the work. It
would be naive to imagine that an equilibrium and equity of working
method could ever be achieved, or would be desirable, as processes of
creation arrive in relation to the virtual body of work. This is work
not yet and perhaps never realised in form, but in thought it holds an
aim: an intention to create, test and find is what binds as a potential
form. By collaboration, we refer to the practice of the interactivities
of the living, the dead and the spectral, as well as the non-organic and
organic. Collaboration over a concept proceeds in ways that are not
always mappable, unless the intention has a commercial goal and seeks
some resolution of its image and form.
If we describe creativity not as a continuum of change through reac-
tive transformation (which lends itself to a practice of re-creation of
forms), but as a mode of ‘creative evolution’, as Bergson proposes, then
Smithson’s critique of the art world is correct. The desire that creativity
produces is directed by the psychological or subjective intentionality as
made by capitalism. This creativity is just another product of practices
of desire.
Although the subjective self or ego may be a contributing factor,
a practice, whether it aims to produce a philosophy or an artwork,
must operate before and in conjunction with the modes of the capital
market. Desire for image creation involves a different practice than one
in pursuit of the creation of a commercial subjectivity (although the two
often connect). However, rendered as diagrammatic, desire can only
ever be a clichéd practice. Discussion of practice involves thalamic, cog-
nitive and corporal activity. Naming and classifying creative practice
involves other issues, concerning technology, constructed subjectivity,
and the commercial intention of the practitioner.
Within every practice the production of an affective and immanent
plane of intensity, expressed in form, is possible. In investigating and
testing an idea through a specific technological platform, each discipline
must first move through its process of testing and creation. Making
forms, making sounds, making words. Making new grammars of crea-
tion, the artist moves towards what we recognise as an aesthetic realisa-
tion of the idea through its platform. Across all the different techniques
of creating and thinking about ideas, materials, or modalities, from the

most amateur and unskilled to the most technically precise, forms of
differentiation occur. But what may begin as a confrontational or reac-
tionary practice, whether in art or in philosophy, can only be realised as
aesthetically accommodating for the audience that recognises the differ-
entiation of knowledge forms and abstractions of ontology; this much
has twentieth-century art history and philosophical practice taught us.
Holt situates the significance of Swamp in the process of making the
film rather than in the final piece.35 This work is never complete, as its
process of making is on a continuum with its image as an organisation
of perception. In this sense of the intention of the artist then, Deleuze’s
post-Bergsonian perception-image as a need prescribed image, does not
hold up.36 In Bergson’s terms, duration is a cinematographic illusion,
consisting of ‘those moments that interest us’.37 We do not see only
what we need to see in the images of Swamp, because the framing
forces us to see only what the artist is seeing. This forced vision is
what intrigues us about the art image, just as the philosophical concept
presents a strange or different interest. What we cannot envisage is the
complete sensorial-image that the camera-body is experiencing as it
films. The camera frame is pushed forward into the reeds and closes out
the skyline to a close-up inside the world of the thick clumps of tall flax-
coloured reeds. The camera goes into the smooth net of stalks against
their black earth background. Inside the reed beds, orientation is given
by the sounds of the body-camera. ‘So much of it is out of focus’, says
Holt; to which Smithson replies, ‘Well, just keep going in. Don’t worry
about the focus.’
The intention of Swamp – its artistry we might say – seems obvious:
questioning perception, the woman with the movie camera, the disused
landscape, the limitations of perception. None of these ideas are novel,
and the emphasis on the falseness of the idea of anything new is one
of the cornerstones of Smithson’s practice philosophy. In terms of the
history of art, Swamp has not made it to the canonical grade. It is
seldom discussed. It is a film that stands as a screen test for the films
to come in each artist’s oeuvres. It is a film of process evaluation, of
images of entropic forms and, as such, it provides good scope for testing
out the applicability of Bergson’s philosophy of creative process as a
component of cinematographic evolution.
What was it that the artist intended? What is the subject of this
artwork? No one exactly knows, not even the artist. They might have
in mind an idea of what they are doing, but the action involved in the
production of movements that lead to the formation of matter into
recognisable forms and images is never absolutely achieved. Why this
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:
1. A component process and its repetition. A repeated phrasing/

framing of matter (whether image, sound, word, colour) will build,
through its edited rhythm, a form that has its own durational life,
and its own shape. The rhythm of repetition will determine the
peaks and troughs; the edges; the length. The sound-imaged repeti-
tion may continue to overlay other images, as carried forth in other
image-bodies.
2. The shape. It will often not take the shape of a cone. It is inevitably
bound to an entropic process of decay which will dissolve its initial

form.
3. Other image-bodies. These generate images; the camera, and
organic bodies. The first, the camera, presents a machinic-image,
no less attentive than the organic body.
Definitions of images in terms of paradigms of aggregated meanings

rely upon other authorisations, or normative values that are external to
the matter of the image.
Art in the hands of Holt and Smithson undergoes a cinematographic
devolution of the processual kind that involves a formation and
deformation of things. In pursuit of an abstraction of a physical site,
and looking to dissolve material elements that have just determined
elements of the ‘sight’ perception of a site, the subject of their work
remains, as one can say of Bergson, themselves. However, as objects,
their artworks activate interventions into physical forms, carving out,
so that it might be seen, a practice of cinematographic technique. Their
work situates the material conditions of a place through a little bit
of its physical, geomorphic history. While we can describe Holt and
Smithson’s dialogical films as heterotopic models that demonstrate
typical 1960s art and film-making praxes, what a Bergsonian perspec-
tive on this work as a mattered image offers is the sight of another
history of twentieth-century art practice.
Art is like comedy. It is a rearrangement of an ordering of a life
that can override, be subsumed, and/or change life by its paradigmatic
creation. The fact that certain artworks are collected, highlighted,
distributed and valued over others, means that our perception has
already been trained, narrowed and refined to appreciate those images
and forms and ideas within our purview. When we decide to respond
to this rearrangement with thought, then another practice emerges.
Response is not always about thinking. We might call our purview
bias our ‘aesthetic’, but the categories of aesthetics are entirely second-
ary to the work. We might call our response a philosophy, and give it
labels. Labelled practice is indicative of certain modes of analysis that
fit with other paradigms: modernism, phenomenology, post-feminism.
The philosopher, the writer, the musician and the artist each draw
from and attempt to create a repertoire of their practice. Our purview
is a politicised attention to life that pushes the definition of practices
concerned with art forms and art ideas. Attention to those practices of
art and those practices of philosophy of art that are pushing the para-
digms provide examples of where the standard definitions of change
are inadequate for the process. Whether or not some one or other thing
is modernist or postmodernist tells us little other than the standard

practice definitions. To consider any practice necessarily involves a con-
sideration of process. This is the technics of practice, the idea enlivened
by the technology of whichever medium platform it uses. Ka-Pow!
Collision of a notion and a technique = form. The art is in the process.
We describe the end product, sometimes the finished work, in other
terms, using iconography, imagery, visual and or audio descriptors. But
the practice of art is located in the duration and mode of the action.
Art is in the execution of different types of movement. Philosophies
of art have their own practice. Like the artist, the writer may arrange
their processes of practice to be visible; in lingering, they may form the
base of their text. The performance of practice engages other modes of
practice that feed further process. If I speak these words and find no
response, does that mean that my process is too opaque a rearrange-
ment, or too implausible as a work in process? The error of Philosophy
is to remain fixed upon a solution to the problematic. A major work is
different to the processual work, but the differences need to be noted.
A processual work is one that names its practice and performs a certain
generosity in its detailing of its processes. Philosophy is obsessed, like
artistry, with perceptual modes. The questions of ‘I know; I think; I
am’ of one generational practice are replaced with the ‘How do I think?
How do I see? How do I know?’ of another. In the twentieth century,
militarist events and rapid shifts in technologies of differentiation have
led to a devolutionary position, and in that redirection, in its details, we
can find no utopian solution to problems of perceptual bias, other than
through an attention to the processes of life, which is itself a political
activity. How does this work? We can characterise some of the modes
of creation offered by the artist – in this case, in the form of a short film
titled Swamp. The only way to keep matter alive is to continually place
it in action with other matter.
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.
4. Nancy Holt, ‘Selected Artist’s Writings’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, Alena

J. Williams, Curator, Berkeley (Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 2011), pp. 83–4.
5. Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Los Angeles
and London: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 10–23. See, for
example, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), available at http://www.
robertsmithson.com/films/txt/spiral.html (accessed 28 March 2013).
6. Smithson, The Collected Writings.
7. Ibid., pp. 10–23.
8. See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, Vol. 8
(1979), pp. 30–44.
9. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000
[1974] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 30, 415.
10. East Coast, West Coast, dir. Holt and Smithson; dop. Peter Campus
(1969), available at Video Data Bank, Chicago, http://www.vdb.org/titles/
east-coast-west-coast (accessed 28 March 2013).
11. Smithson, The Collected Writings, p. 10.
12. Ibid., p. 19; Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell
(Mineola: Dover 1989), p. 48.
13. Smithson, The Collected Writings, p. 18; on entropy and Smithson see
Felicity Colman, ‘Affective Entropy: Art as Differential Form’, Angelaki:
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol, 11, No. 1 (2006), pp. 169–78.
14. Smithson, The Collected Writings, p. 19.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 49.
(New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 22, translation modified.
19. Ibid., p. 105.
20. Ibid., p. 132.
21. Ibid., p. 143.
22. Ibid., p. 152.
23. Ibid., p. 162.
24. Ibid., p. 20 (original emphasis); see Henri Bergson, Oeuvres, Edition du
Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), p. 172.
26. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989).
27. Len Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology,
Ethics (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 45.
28. See Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis,
trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).
29. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 152; Simon O’Sullivan, On the

Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation
(London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012).
30. Paul Harris, ‘Diagramming Duration: Bergsonian Multiplicity and Chaos
Theory’, Intermédialités: histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des tech-
niques, No. 3 (2004), pp. 97–117: p. 98.
31. See Deleuze, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2; Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone
Books, 1991); Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution,
and the Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Suzanne
Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2006); Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism;
Alexandre Lefebvre and Melanie White, eds, Bergson, Politics, and
Religion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); John Mullarkey, ed.,
The New Bergson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 1999); Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of
Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and
Frédéric Worms, ‘Is Life the Double Source of Ethics? Bergson’s Ethical
Philosophy between Immanence and Transcendence’, Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2004), pp. 82–8.
32. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William
Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977).
33. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 302.
34. See Nell Tenhaaf, ‘Of Monitors and Men and Other Unsolved Feminist
Mysteries: Video Technology and the Feminine’ (1992), in Hilary
Robinson, ed., Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968–2000 (Malden,
Oxford, Melbourne: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), pp. 377–87.
35. See Nancy Holt, ‘Nancy Holt introduces Swamp at EAI on Wednesday,
November 15, 2006’, at Electronic Arts Intermix (2006), 535 West 22nd
Street, 5th Floor New York, available at http://www.eai.org/titleVideo
Intro.htm?id=11675 (accessed 29 April 2013).
36. See Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 71.
38. See Holt, ‘Selected Artist’s Writings’, p. 248.
39. Ibid., p. 251.
8. Pasearse: Duration and the
Act of Photographing
STELLA BARAKLIANOU
The logic of expression seems to be one of duplication. Spinoza is too

careful a grammarian to allow us to miss the linguistic origins of ‘expres-
sion.’ Attributes are, as we have seen, names: verbs, rather than adjectives.
Each attribute is a verb, a primary infinitive proposition, an expression with
a distinct sense; but all attributes designate substance as one and the same
thing. The traditional distinction between the sense expressed and the object
designated (and expressing itself in this sense) thus finds in Spinozism direct
application.1
Pasearse is a self-reflexive verb that could be translated as to ‘take
oneself for a walk’. Walking as an artistic and intellectual practice has
had a substantial trajectory within the history of painting and photog-
raphy: from the early artists of the picturesque movement to the more
contemporary ones, including the urban walks of the Situationists’ or
those of the Land Art movement. For artists such as Richard Long
and Robert Smithson, walking is central to the development of tactics,
methods and practices that are confronted with the complexity of
physical as well as mental activity. A verb lies at the heart of this; a
practice made of walking. Even a line can go for a walk, as Paul Klee
demonstrated, interlocking the semantic notions of active, medial and
passive.2
The photograph as a form of artistic expression contains not only the
imprint or index of a recorded reality, but reflects the process of obtain-
ing this image. This process, linked to time, is what makes the photo-
graph unique compared to painting or sculpture, but not dissimilar to
film. Whilst working on a series of images of trees in the landscape, I
became interested in exploring the notion of photographic time as a
quality beyond a dichotomy of before or after but rather as a reflexive
state whereby landscape, photographer and camera all form and inform
the very act of photographing. With the common denominator being
131
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
exploring bodily perceptions alongside the mechanical or ontological

displacement operated by the shutter release of the camera.
In the series I used instant (polaroid) film and digital still images
to produce separate images of trees and explore the notion of time in
the photograph. The paradoxical nature of the photograph lies in a
unique instant-moment of capturing time. Throughout Camera Lucida
Roland Barthes demonstrates his fascination with the paradoxical
time of the noeme, or of the ‘that-has-been’, through a deeply personal
(especially in part two) and evocative account.5 Time is understood
as that a-syntagmatic structure whereby past and present coexist in a
future anterior. The ‘existential link’6 between material reality or the
index (one that corresponds point by point to nature) and the issue of
uncertainty with regards to situating this reality in time, or any time
for that matter, is what calls for the use of the future anterior. The
photograph slips away from the field of language and signification to
one of phenomenology. Laura Mulvey further elaborates by assimilat-
ing this imperfect tense of time with the function of the shutter release:
it separates the continuity assumed between the subjects’ existence
and that of the image. ‘Just as the photograph’s relation to time goes
beyond equivalence in the grammar of tense, so the autonomy of the
camera eye goes beyond the grammar of person. The human factor is
displaced.’7
Instead of asking of something, of the photograph, what it is, in
terms of subject-matter or representation, the question is placed on the
grounds of a relational process: through what does one thing belong
to something else? For Agamben, it is essentially through this question
of via (dia ti) that Deleuze’s notion of immanence can be understood.
Central to the Stoics’ definition of immanence and substance was the
image of walking: ‘who walks, the body moved by the hegemonic part
of the soul or the hegemonic part itself?’8 So the resemblance, rather
than correspond, point by point, to nature (index) can also operate as
a site of transference, as an inter-moment, lacking hierarchy yet con-
taminated from the inside by all signs that should point to or represent
real life.9
The self-reflexive active verb allows for an understanding of tempo-
rality where immanence and being collide. The scene that is given back
to the photographer through the apparatus allows her an understanding
of what could potentially become an image from a myriad possibility
of other images. The question of duration becomes an actualisation of
the image associated from within her body’s perceptions and enveloped
through her actions in movement. Because the camera in itself, as a
device, is already equipped with the technical ability of capturing time,
the photographic act as a conscious decision becomes subject to the

conditions of the apparatus itself.
This temporality constitutes the event of the photographic act as
a time that allows one-self to ‘view viewing’.10 The time from within
(technical or mechanical, non-human time) of the camera conditions
the flow or stop of images in a multitude of potentialities. The con-
scious decisions of the photographer are at the same time subject to
the conditions of the mechanical recordings of the device. Opening up
the field of immanence and inserting the photographic act allows for
a bypassing of the linear understanding of a time of before or after,
corresponding to the recorded event. Rather, it is the now, a constant
present tense, that is open to potentiality.
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
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
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.
FOLDING LIGHT AND TIME

Infinite light. The movement of light held in my hands. Light is an
impalpable set of relations: wavelengths of light, an incessant multiplic-
ity of bonds, to which folding and expanding are one and the same
thing.21 A photographer works in the dark; but her works belong to
the nature of light. Time folded and unfolded; time and time again.
Where do I situate myself in the picture? I want to throw myself into the
present moment and linger in it through the reds, yellows and browns.
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
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
aims, or the illusion of finality, is the basis for the misunderstanding of

the relational method.24 If the being only takes itself as the first body, it
explains effects as causes, arising from and belonging to the individual.
Consciousness needs a cause, but this cause can only arise from desire.
‘A mode’s essence is a power; to it corresponds a certain capacity of
the mode to be affected. But because the mode is a part of Nature, this
capacity is always exercised either in affections produced by external
things (those affections called passive) or in affections explained by its
own essence (called active).’25 Instead of positing cause as emanative in
a participatory relation, according to the Neo-Platonists,26 Spinoza’s
contribution is that cause remains at all times immanent: hence, bodies
can come into contact and produce whilst at the same time remaining
in themselves. What we are seeking is the internal principle of partici-
pation, affect alone that becomes adequate in its movement in order to
produce. The specific definition of a figure (circle) can be replaced by
its genetic definition of, let’s say, any line of which one end is fixed and
the other end movable.27 In the scheme of the photographic, this entails
an understanding of resemblance to reality through contact; the point
that corresponds to the emanation of the real thus (index) remains.
Michel Serres describes the impact of a moving end (or point) further:
‘Point, line, space – nothing is clearer and more luminous. The point of
singularity, the line of definition, the space where forces or fluxes move,
are born and move on. The point yields – the line vibrates.’28
Contact implies, to a certain degree, the relational method via a
set of actions of stratification, permuting variations that run from
lesser to greater degree, and, inversely, from greater to lesser degree.
The figure of a circle with its movable end describes this movement:
it can be stretched and adjusted horizontally or vertically. It can also
form a spiral, going upwards or downwards. In this line of continuous
variation, it is affection that implies the action or move from the (inad-
equate) idea towards a mode of existence. The object that pulls me with
its force already enters me into a relationship with it, thus constituting
another totality. What stands between in its perceptive qualities is the
intellect, but the intellect in its immanence.29 At the heart of this lies
the power of acting or conatus, if we understand affection as power
(puissance) and affect together. But affection also implies a mixture of
two bodies and, further, that bodies are subjected to infinite relations of
chance, movement and rest.
ESSENCE (ACT) OF POWER

Now, in the olive grove, it is almost seven in the summer evening. I am
in front of the tree I have chosen to photograph. I look through my
camera’s viewfinder, but nothing is clear. I move closer, so close to the
tree that this movement allows the leaves and branches to brush onto
me and against the camera. This contact allows me to aim for a frame
that is neither calculated nor ideally measured by points of distance.
I am working more with senses than with distancing myself from the
element. Perception? Nature? Where am I situated amongst all this?
‘An image is, in the strictest sense, an imprint, a trace or physical
impression, an affection of the body itself, the effect of some body on
the soft and fluid parts of our own body.’30 However latent or inad-
equate in itself my idea of the tree is, it has in this capacity the potential
(as it remains within its own cause) to explicate and affirm itself into
an active proposition. In the field of immanence, photographing is an
action brought together as a mode of existence, through the affections
produced by both external and internal essences. The power of acting
(or force of existing) is what allows for the right proportions of con-
tributing affections to manifest accordingly. The act of photographing
is one of the identity of power (puissance) and essence, where desire
heightens the mode-attribute and enters the substance relation.
As an affirmative act, the inexpressible of the transcendental field
(object-tree) should not then be grasped negatively (tree purely as sign).
Through the affirmative act, remaining in the plane of immanence, the
intellect composes a relational value, both passive and active at the same
time, just as the positive and negative parts of the photograph collide on
the film to give the image its representation. The principle of imitation
here points back to the thing itself – not to my rendering or represen-
tation of it. Immanently, the photograph remains on the ground of a
participatory act, of photographing, of giving back the expression of
time, and not any time, but one constituted through duration.
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
referent is not an object but a sensation.’31 Furthermore, the subject’s

continued existence, along with anything that she may have thought or
felt about the sensation, becomes superfluous, unnecessary, the instant
the shutter is released; the image separates itself irrevocably from those
simultaneous thoughts to assume a ‘separate unthinking existence’.32
What is at stake is a movement or action of the self, but this time, linked
to memory. This memory acts as the force demonstrating contact, and
it too, as in Spinoza’s pasearse, is a movement in time when both active
and passive coincide.
For Bergson, like Spinoza, movement is the relationship of conscious-
ness to action.33 Entering this zone of indistinction is like entering into
the planes of durée, of Bergson’s time of a stratified system of temporal
rhythms. Durée does not constitute the difference of states between past
and present. This is the ground of the experienced time and place; time
is not understood as a passage of linear sequences (thus, it is not spatial
localisation). This experienced time is change, perpetually, anew.
Therefore, it is a fissure of place and space, within the planes of durée.
Time is thus made of various plurals of the present. A paradoxical
state of being, because, just as in the photographic act, there is no need
for a pre-existence of the past. The photographic apparatus already
gives this a self-sufficient, self-constituted time of a perpetual present
enfolding the past. Entering this zone of immanence is like entering the
‘thickness of a duration where our memories are forged’.34 This notion
of time has also been described by Michel Serres and Yve Lomax as
entering into the ‘baker’s folds’.35 Entering into the thickness of the
folds, time becomes stretched, condensed yet malleable, palpable and
shot through with light.
Bergson’s Matter and Memory appeared in 1896 as a response to the
crisis that had arisen in psychology (and extensively, between realism
and idealism): namely, that the mental image, as psychic reality, could
not be opposed to the external world. In addition to the classic nomina-
tions of the virtual and the actual, the idea of the ‘image’ is central to
Bergson’s argument.36 Bergson’s ‘image’, like Spinoza’s ‘affect’, inserts
the being right into matter, right into nature. The uniqueness of the
body ‘image’ is that it is constituted as a ‘centre of indetermination’.37
As with Spinoza’s definition of the body, we will always be surprised
about what the body can do, because we can only know it from
within (its affections) and from without (its perceptions).38 The body
is endowed with a certain ‘enframing’ capability essentially because
there is no such thing as inside/outside, subject/object. As Marie Cariou
notes, Bergson’s ‘image’ does not necessarily correlate with the mirror
metaphor; the body, my body, thus constitutes a privileged image
amongst others.39 This seems to be echoed in Hansen’s reading, when

he proposes to reconfigure perception as a subtraction or diminution
from the wider aggregate of images. ‘From the frame, back to the
body’.40
The image, immanently, cannot be accorded the autonomy that
Deleuze assigns to it in his study of the cinema.41 The frame, the cut,
the shutter release are in all actuality a mere potentiality; remaining
immanently it cannot assume any type of concrete image (time-image).
‘Following its digitization, the image can no longer be understood as
a fixed and objective viewpoint on “reality” – whether it be theorized
as frame, window or mirror’, the image seems to be defined precisely
through a complete fluidity and lack of reference (with the digital image
in the extreme case).42 It is here that a closer understanding of the
process involved in creating images can be highlighted, as opposed to
the viewing or experiencing of the image at a later stage. If instead we
place the importance on the ‘operative character’ of the ‘image’ then we
can start opening up the photographic frame to what I would like to
call a space of transference.
Bodies enter into relations and compose and decompose each other.
It is the progressive levels of stratification of perceptions and affec-
tions via movement that are central to the notion of the body as image
amongst other images. Perception is therefore merely a contraction
(not a deduction) from the various multiple rhythms of duration. It is
not a stop; it is merely a possibility amongst other possibilities that the
body, through its action, has chosen in relation to other bodies, to other
matter.
Inserted between matter and memory, and supporting the idea of a
constant creative present, is the movement of the body in the present:
‘This image [my body] occupies the centre; by it all others are con-
ditioned; at each of its movements everything changes, as though by
a turn of a kaleidoscope . . . the effect is always in proportion to the
cause.’43 The body works as a filter giving back representations via
its constant movement, because it has this creative capacity. Creative
memory, therefore, does not substitute the body in its sensori-motor
aspects of ‘enframing’.44 Rather, we want to endow the creative capac-
ity of memory for the body at that moment when virtual and actual
coincide. Just as in the incessant movements of the kaleidoscope, every
effect will be proportionate to the cause, where each tiny fragment
mingles and refracts with the particles surrounding it. What perhaps
privileges the self against other bodies, subjects, objects, is its willing-
ness to enter into relations seeking the illusion of finality. This illusion
can only be regulated by a temporality of immanence: remaining in
itself in order to produce. This temporality is a heterogeneous accu-

mulation of condensations, each withholding an enormous multiplicity
of vibrations, appearing all at once.45 In its actuality it is forever open
to its own potentialities. The past always coincides with the present
because it is in the present. The actualisation of the virtual harbours
temporal rhythms that are nested within each other, contracting and
pulsating as incessant circles or variations of the present.
It is the photographic frame that creates the illusion of arrest or a
stop in the indivisible notion of a fluid time (durée). Bergson’s concept
of durée is the condition par excellence of ‘the continuous life of a
memory which prolongs the past into the present’.46 This is the tem-
porality of the photographic frame: time turns back, folds in on itself,
whilst incessantly open to its further potentiality of immanence. It
allows an opening up to an active-reflexive state of being. In the time of
pasearse the infinite movement of living-being becomes one with the act
of photographing. The photograph at one and the same time constitutes
my act by showing the act of walking, and through this act, turning
the walk (via duration) back onto itself, in a self-reflexive manner. The
act of photographing therefore asserts immanence and frees expression
from the emanative cause. ‘Being as pasearse’.47
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
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
a stop or arrest is being actualised: it will, however, continue to vibrate

and perpetually move towards the virtual. For this immobility of a
unique moment is an illusion; if the frame remains open, it also remains
open to its possibility of perpetual recreation.
Movement conditions the states of perception or contraction, and
the photograph acts as the filter that potentially will break or disturb
the fluidity of the passage of time. A ‘substance’, it merely acts in its
transitive state as a filter that contracts and releases affects interchange-
ably. The photograph becomes the body of an open state of transfer-
ence: aiming towards a final cause, it necessarily fails to adhere to the
intellect’s illusion of finality.
The one, the unity, the frame comes back to me and wants more.
Before the image freezes in its temporal fragment of the frame, I cut.
Cutting in, through and around the square my little scissors seek to
break, enter, and withhold just a little bit more time. The unity and
the infinity of the one pulsates and vibrates; opens up the moment into
essences, chemicals, micro-particles. The landscape in its finitude of
infinities of air, dust, heat and immaterial light all rush to meet this
moment and attach to it.
Now, in this same instant, the tree breathes. At various intervals of
a given time, it jostles and jumps and reverberates in a virtual mode of
a time that folds back again onto itself. Opening up and awaiting in its
temporality the infinite mode of pasearse. Colliding, brushing against
the tiny frame of the photograph, one single branch of the tree has been
moved, displaced, given more light, let out in the open to breathe.
Now the moment comes to an end, I must close the image again.
Something is leaving me or has left me to greet the image. In mixing up,
messing up, the image I leave something of myself in the frame. After
tension, a relaxation point. The hands that worked so swiftly now slow
down their movement. There is still movement; subtle and gentle. Now
the destructive force coming to an end wants to recompose the image.
Positive and negative are glued together again; now is the contact point
again. Here more heat goes to the film. Here the caress and touch want
to give it its last shape and form. The colours run; for a little while still;
soon they will stop. Frozen by the lack of air, they will be suspended in
pending movements; others here others there.
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
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.
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.
28. Serres, Rome, p. 191.

29. See Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, pp. 146–7.
30. Ibid., p. 147.
31. Ann Banfield, ‘L’imparfait de l’objectif: the imperfect of the object glass’,
Camera Obscura, Vol. 24 (1990), pp. 65–87.
32. Ibid.
33. On the importance of movement as central to Bergson’s theory, see John
Mullarkey, ‘Introduction’, The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1999); and also Marie Cariou, ‘Bergson: The Keyboards
of Forgetting’, ibid., pp. 99–117.
34. Cariou, ‘Bergson: The Keyboards of Forgetting’, p. 102.
35. Serres, Rome, p. 81; Lomax, Sounding the Event.
(New York: Zone Books, 1991).
37. Ibid., p. 36.
38. Ibid., p. 17.
39. Cariou, ‘Bergson: The Keyboards of Forgetting’.
40. Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004), pp. 1–16.
41. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson
and B. Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986).
42. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 7.
44. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 12.
46. Cariou, ‘Bergson: The Keyboards of Forgetting’.
48. Mulvey, ‘The Index and the Uncanny’, p. 63.
49. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 80.
9. Duration and Rhetorical
Movement
JAMES DAY
The two paintings we see in reproduction are James McNeill Whistler’s

Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862) (Figure 9.1) and
Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1862) (Figure 9.2), but they
are qualitatively multiple and the crowd writing this chapter sees many
of them. The paintings share a history as successful scandals at the 1863
Paris refusals’ salon, after the academy had denied them wall space
in the official salon. In their own time, these paintings were dissident
works through their disruption of representative normalcy and their
ambiguous, defiant gaze; however, their time is not their own. Both
paintings contain past and future art objects and writings, which surge
through their canvases. Art history has identified many of these works,
and its writing can be seen to be transformative. More has been written
about Luncheon on the Grass than about The White Girl, though art
historical writing has elaborated art history’s influence in both paint-
ings. For example in Luncheon on the Grass there is Giorgione/Titian’s
Pastoral Concert (c. 1508), Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael’s
Judgement of Paris (ca. 1515–16), Antoine Watteau’s Tranquil Love
(1718), Pablo Picasso’s The Young Ladies of Avignon (Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon) (1907); and in The White Girl Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s
White Duck (1753), Watteau’s Pierrot (Le Grand Gilles) (1717–19),
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Immaculate Conception of the Escorial
(1678). The revisionary art historical project is perhaps more obvious
in Luncheon on the Grass but is equally at work in The White Girl. Art
historical identification is not supplementary but integral to the work
because it realises possibility. The histories of these precedent and ante-
cedent works can be thought of as transforming Luncheon on the Grass
and The White Girl, which work retroactively upon them. To what
extent, then, can art historical writing be seen as altered by and altering
the history which these two paintings share in 1863? Michael Fried ger-
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
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
detrimental then, but rather beneficial. In other words, the passages

between past and present in the process of writing can be accelerated,
rather than improving writing in a linear progression. Indeed, Bergson
often reflects upon language and his activity as a writer as part of the
elucidation of his thought, suggesting that discursive autobiographical
commentary reflecting bodily distraction are important, constitutive
aspects of the knowledge produced by writing. ‘Whilst I am writing
these lines, the hour strikes on a neighbouring clock, but my inatten-
tive ear does not perceive it until several strokes have made themselves
heard.’3
Writers as different as Jorge Luis Borges and Gilles Deleuze have rec-
ognised that Henri Bergson’s philosophy radically rethinks temporality.
As it is described in Creative Evolution’s opening chapter, Bergsonian
duration describes the past’s presence and the process of becoming in
which past and present gnaw into the future.4 The flow of duration
suggests historical mixture more than linear progression, and implicit in
this is a critique of the linear succession of words across the page. While
Bergson’s concept of duration might be useful for art historians writing
on heterochronous art objects (such as The White Girl and Luncheon
on the Grass), because it suggests possible historical mixture realised
in a present action, it questions whether language can successfully
describe that duration itself. Despite the metaphorical, liquid quality of
Bergson’s writing, the philosopher denies that language can represent
duration and claims that it is partly responsible for philosophy’s confu-
sion.5 Writing can thus be associated with the failure of mechanical
laughter, as it cannot adapt with vital movement. Bergson’s essay on
laughter includes long analyses of dramatic writing, and words’ immo-
bility in comparison with life’s ceaseless creativity.6 The knowledge
art historians have produced about The White Girl and Luncheon
on the Grass, however, can also be used to think about Bergson’s cri-
tique of writing’s inadequacy to capture the smooth flow of duration.
Philosophy does not precede art history, rather their mixture suggests
different speeds of becoming between the past and present. The process
of these movements is the object of an analysis of duration, and must be
produced within and be creative of these movements.7 Such seems to be
Bergson’s argument in Creative Evolution and his philosophy is more
suggestive for immanent critique than its use as an isolated theoretical
lens, equally transparent from object to object. Philosophical, literary
and artistic practice can be combined in mutual, snowballing critique.
When read plainly, some of Bergson’s thought distrusts the language
which his argument dextrously manipulates, although this seems reduc-
tive to Bergson’s various attitudes to language. What Bergson’s work
seems to suggest is an experimental approach to writing that seeks to

find prose rhythms that perform the expansion of the past into the
present and concentrate virtuality in actuality.
One way in which Luncheon on the Grass and The White Girl realise
an art historical memory is through visual quotation. Art historians
trace these quotations to their sources, which are themselves the joining
together of several disparate sources. The paintings are not original
objects but compounds of several historical works, and dating them is
complex. As Carol Armstrong argues, Luncheon on the Grass is just
such a quotational mix, and this can be seen in the way it is painted:
If we return once more to the list, we can see how Manet piles on his
art-historical quotations and mixes up his manners. First there is the
‘from Florence . . . toward Venice,’ ‘from Venice . . . toward Florence’ of
the Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, with their quotations ‘after’
Raimondi/Raphael, Giorgione/Titian, and Titian, and their mix of harsh
contrast, hard contours and different kinds of painterliness.8
What would it mean to mix up quotations in this manner in the work
of art history, in combinations of literary styles? Both artists’ work is
characterised by mixtures of different times that actually anticipate the
work of art historians: according to David Fraser Jenkins, Whistler
was in fact a practical art historian.9 Denys Sutton calls Whistler an
‘exile in his own time’ and is one of many art historians who argue that
Whistler’s work is anomalous with artistic production in Europe during
the second half of the nineteenth century.10 Whistler’s work becomes
an exodus from contemporary determination in favour of a nomadic,
alien existence. The White Girl’s alloy of Pre-Raphaelitism and Realism
can be seen as an early example of the hybrid, precarious quality of his
painting. The recent Manet retrospective at the Musée d’Orsay sug-
gests that Manet’s painting is of all times and not the original work
of a modernist avant-garde, and similarly the fluidity of Whistler’s
painting was noticed in the nineteenth century by critics such as J. K.
Huysmans.11 The actual paintings have a shifting identity and chronol-
ogy with different passages from the past to the present, and some of
their possibilities can be realised through art historical writing. As well
as a Whistler-Bergson there is also a Bergson-Whistler. Arguments for
non-linear causality are made by both Jean Clay and Svetlana Alpers
about the precursors and antecedents to Manet’s work, suggesting
further that historical mixture and durational flow are common to both
Whistler and Manet.12 The question of precedent is displaced in the
work of art, art history and philosophy through the flow of the past
into the present. Although there is not necessarily an intellectual geneal-
ogy from Manet to Fuentes, a flux and reflux can be described from an
early avant-garde painting to a postmodern neo-baroque novel. In part,

the potential concentration of the past in the present and the realisa-
tion of past possibility in a future work confounds the expectations of
such a genealogy, because the solid march of time in fact proves to be
the intersection of different movements. The regimented march of the
soldier is a complex crossing of productive forces which make its linear
reconstruction by the cinematograph a pallid, false representation.13
A fluid rhetorical surface produced through the movement of writing
in combination with the figural definition of art historical identity and
chronology seems implicit in the work of art history, however, this
rhetorical surface is frequently sacrificed to art history’s realist expecta-
tions. These expectations include the purity of the authorial voice and
the strict division of writing subject from written object. As we write
in many different voices, separating them often seems a delirious task.
Rather than expressing historical continuity through chronological
succession, Bergsonian duration suggests historical mixing and anach-
ronistic assemblages, such as art history identifies in Luncheon on the
Grass or The White Girl. The melting and solidifying of memory and
its realisation through movements from past to present suggest that art
historical writing is active and creative rather than passive and docu-
mentary. Combining Fuentes’ Terra Nostra and Bergson’s philosophy
of duration with Luncheon on the Grass and The White Girl can
equally be seen as such a mixture, which must also include the writing
of this chapter. Rather than containing the sum of its parts animated
in a single movement, as in Bergson’s model of the cinematograph,
art historical writing is characterised by the intersection of varying
movements through the material of its language. Duration is not the
inevitable, discontinuous progress of the ticking clock, retaining more
or less passively the entirety of the past. As Bergson describes it, the
continuity of the past in the present does not eliminate death by writing
out historical loss and contention because of the universal coverage of
memory. The singular historical experience in Bergson’s thought only
results as a concentration of multiple possibilities, made actual by an
intellect with the capacity to remember. Transition between the virtual
and actual, past and present, is characteristic of durational flow, and
suggests real historical encounters between past and present in the intel-
lect realising a remembered possibility. What Bergson teaches in terms
of writing is a shift towards a more dynamic, rhythmic understanding
of language and that writing must come out of itself, meaning both
immanent production and opening onto an other. This double nature is
part of the creative potential of art historical writing, which is always
written in parallel with a material object. In Luncheon on the Grass and
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
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
from expressing pure duration. The potentially elastic relationship

between the crescendo of rhythmic language and the descending
stability of conventional meaning suggests that more experimental
writing practices might be used precisely and responsibly in art history.
Bergson’s writing itself raises questions about time’s ineluctable passage
and the possibility of writing alternatively to conventional, consequen-
tial time. It suggests a concentrated language in which past, present
and future coincide in creative, unforeseeable movements. Certainly,
Bergson is no mere writer because his language does not efface itself
behind philosophical argument; in other words, writing and its move-
ments are part of Bergson’s critique of temporally static metaphysics.
If Bergson’s writing has literary qualities, they are beneficial rather
than detrimental to his philosophical argument, in particular because
his work suggests the immanent production of philosophy through
writing. Attempts to draw together Bergsonism and deconstruction,
such as Paul Douglass’ essay ‘Deleuze’s Bergson’, suggest just this.23
For Bergson, the cuts between words deny it the smoothness of dura-
tional flow. This denial, however, emphasises these words’ materiality
over embodied processes of writing and rhetorical flow. In Matter and
Memory Bergson expresses his frustration with discontinuous, concrete
language’s inability to communicate thought’s movement:
In truth, there is here only a question of degree: every language, whether
elaborated or crude, leaves many more things to be understood than it is
able to express. Essentially discontinuous, since it proceeds by juxtaposing
words, speech can only indicate by a few guideposts placed here and there
the chief stages of the movement of thought . . . For images can never be
anything but things, and thought is a movement.24
In an essay explaining the differences between Symbolist art and
Bergson’s thought, Maurice Blanchot suggests that Bergson is ‘uneasily
vigilant when confronted by words, which are in a constant process of
crystallization and are weighed down by our intellectual and practical
habit’.25 This process of crystallisation can also be seen as the anach-
ronistic encounter of different word uses in a single text. The weight of
habit is thus the teeming potential of a word and is therefore energis-
ing and not enervating. Co-existential presents and pasts, processes of
continual creation, and a body which inhabits and is inhabited by time,
cannot be written down, according to Bergson, because writing down
seems to imply a pinning down, a dissecting process isolating individual
elements and arresting duration’s current. Later in Matter and Memory
Bergson proposes his famous cone diagram as a description of memory’s
relationship with the present. This diagram can be seen as an analogy
of the relationship between the fluid process of writing and the reality
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
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:
These sides, it would seem, belong only in retrospect to a former present,

that is to say to the past, and they possessed no more reality in that present,
when it was a present, than the symphonies of future musicians have reality
in our own actual present. To take a simple example, nothing prevents us
today from associating the romanticism of the nineteenth century with what
was already romantic in the classical writers. But the romantic aspect of
classicism is only brought about by the retroactive effect of romanticism
once it has appeared. If there had not been a Rousseau, a Chateaubriand,
a Vigny, a Victor Hugo, not only should we never have perceived, but also
there would never have existed, any romanticism in the earlier classical
writers, for this romanticism of theirs only materialises by lifting out of their
work a certain aspect, and this slice [découpure], with its particular form, no
more existed in classical literature before romanticism appeared on the scene
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
If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated

resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each
other. This second fact is more significant. In each of these texts we
find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka
had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other
words, it would not exist. The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’, by Browning,
foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens
and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do
now. In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable,
but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The
fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies
our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correla-
tion the identity or plurality of the individuals involved is unimportant.
The early Kafka of ‘Betrachtung’ is less a precursor of the Kafka of
sombre myths and atrocious institutions than is Browning or Lord
Dunsany.33
In Bergson’s ‘Introduction II’ to The Creative Mind, Creative
Evolution’s ‘continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the
future and which swells as it advances’ becomes ‘the uninterrupted
prolongation of the past into the present which is already blending into
the future’, in a sentence that earlier makes the distinction between
juxtaposition and succession also made in Matter and Memory.34 The
short ‘Introduction I’ recycles Bergsonian figures such as the cinemato-
graph and the glass of sugared water (both from Creative Evolution),
and prefigures the discussion of the colour orange in The Two Sources
of Morality and Religion. The past’s presence is affirmative and poten-
tially disruptive in Bergson’s text, something Borges’ essay proposes
when he suggests that Kafka’s writing ‘will modify the future’, compli-
cating the idea that this is an innocent introduction. Both Borges’ and
Bergson’s essays articulate a paradox in many art historical writings
about Whistler and Manet, which write originally about a past they
claim faithfully to represent despite the paintings’ variously coinciding
histories. In an essay that moves brilliantly through Borges’ written
body, Carlos Fuentes puns:
He gasped, and urged me to profit from my chance, our chance: second
chance for our terrible history, an opportunity to refashion time by admit-
ting its polycultural sources. Oh, what a chance this Borgia or Borja, or
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
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
Manet-Whistler meant? Michael Fried suggests Luncheon on the Grass

as Manet’s most famous example of old master quotation, summoning
all painting’s resources – of writing alternatively to conventional, conse-
quential time, suggesting a concentrated language in which past, present
and future coincide – and linking histories altogether all to gather dif-
ferent.42 Whistler’s White Girl while white wilting in writing was saw
touched up several times during her rude, erudite history, including a
remarkable, marred reworking of a photographic reproduction, and
revises her his story in co-existence with the art historical coincidences
that form from her haunting, hunting, daunting presence.43 What, many
years later latter the letter, was Whistler jawing about – aware that the
past’s presence is affirmative and potentially disruptive – and how could
he deface his first, who was only the first and whose history already lay
read – not simply outside the finished painting – this first time a long
time after her deflowering, verging on the virgin? A white – endured,
and that the few words – in Whistler is neither carte blanche nor a
dead duck, in what way is Whistler’s white his? Where do Whistler and
Manet with identities teeming with art history meet? Of the tandem
histories – silently writing a story, which is later revealed – written here
I worry we are only getting a jammed copy. Have we ever noticed that
– to pass time while he finishes painting – the two paintings we see in
reproduction – appear in several historical times – are James McNeill
Whistler’s Symphony in White, No 1. – White Girl (1862) – teeming
with art history meeting – and Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass
(1862) – co-existential presents and pasts, processes of continual crea-
tion and a body which inhabits and is inhabited by time – which share
histories as successful scandals at the 1863 Paris refusals’ salon?
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).
7. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 200.

8. Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2002), p. 17.
9. David Fraser Jenkins, ‘Nocturnes, Characters, and Sunlit Beaches –
Whistler, Sargent and Steer’, in Whistler, Sargent, and Steer: Impressionists
in London from the Tate Collections (Nashville, Tennessee: exh. cat. Frist
Centre for the Visual Arts, 2003), pp. 17–18.
10. Denys Sutton, Nocturne: The Art of James McNeill Whistler (London:
Country Life Limited, 1963), p. 15.
11. Philippe Sollers, with Stéphane Guégan, ‘The Manet Revival’, in Manet:
The Man who Invented Modernity (Paris: exh. cat. Gallimard and
Musée d’Orsay, 2011), pp. 107–13 and J. K. Huysmans, ‘Whistler’,
in L’Art Moderne/Certains (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1975),
p. 324.
12. See Jean Clay, ‘Ointments, Makeup, Pollen’, trans. John Shepley, October,
Vol. 27 (1983), pp. 3–44, and Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art:
Velásquez and Others (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
14. See ibid., pp. 6–7 and p. 216.
15. Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. ‘Art Writing’, pp.
126–7.
16. Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the
Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
17. Michael Ann Holly, ‘Interventions: The Melancholy Art’, The Art Bulletin,
Vol. 89, No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 7–17.
18. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S.
Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
19. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 37
20. Ibid., p. 33.
21. Joseph N. Riddel, ‘Modern Times: Stein, Bergson, and the Ellipses of
“American” Writing’, in Frederick Berwick and Paul Douglass, eds, The
Crisis in Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
p. 350.
22. Bergson, Laughter, p. 156.
23. See Paul Douglass, ‘Deleuze’s Bergson: Bergson Redux’, in Berwick and
Douglass, The Crisis in Modernism, pp. 368–88.
(New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 125.
25. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Bergson and Symbolism’, trans. Joel A. Hunt, Yale
French Studies, No. 4 (1949), pp. 63–6.
28. John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1999), p. 153.
29. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara

Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 56–7.
30. Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy, p. 153.
31. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms, in
Other Inquisitions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), pp. 106–8.
trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp.
24–5 (first and third emphases mine).
33. Borges, ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, p. 108 (emphasis added).
34. Bergson, ‘Introduction II, The Stating of Problems’, in The Creative Mind,
p. 35.
35. Carlos Fuentes, ‘Borges in Action’, in Myself with Others: Selected Essays
(London: André Deutsch, 1988), pp. 140–59.
36. See Raymond Williams, The Writings of Carlos Fuentes (Austin: University
of Texas Press 1996); and Manuel Durán, ‘Carlos Fuentes as an Art
Critic’, in Robert Brody and Charles Rossman, eds, Carlos Fuentes: A
Critical View (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 193–9.
37. Brian McHale, Postmodern Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 16.
38. Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra, trans. Margaret Sayers Pedan (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 233.
39. See Williams, The Writings of Carlos Fuentes, pp. 96, 97, 125; and
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VI,
ed. and trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud assisted by Alix Strachey
and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1960).
40. Fuentes, Terra Nostra, p. 235.
41. Émile Zola, The Masterpiece, trans. Thomas Walton, revised by Roger
Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 136.
42. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, pp. 150, 152, 175.
43. Glasgow University Library Special Collections, Whistler PH4/4. See
also Nigel Thorp, ‘Studies in Black and White: Whistler’s Photographs in
Glasgow University Library’, in Studies in the History of Art, Volume 19:
James McNeill Whistler – A Reexamination (Washington, DC: National
Gallery of Art, 1987), p. 92.
10. A Diagram of the
Finite-Infinite Relation:
Towards a Bergsonian
Production of Subjectivity1
SIMON O’SULLIVAN
. . . there is in matter something more than, but not something different

from, that which is actually given. Undoubtedly, conscious perception does
not compass the whole of matter, since it consists, in as far as it is conscious,
in the separation, or the ‘discernment’ of that which, in matter, interests our
various needs. But between this perception of matter and matter itself there
is but a difference of degree and not of kind.2
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS: MATTER AND

MEMORY
Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory amounts to a revolution in
thought, a radical ‘switch’ in how we understand ourselves, and espe-
cially our relation to the past (understood as that which is ‘outside’ our
present experience). For Bergson, we are not composed of a body and
of a mind inhered within the latter. Indeed, we are not a vessel or a
container for our memories (Bergson’s thesis is a critique of interiority
in this sense), but more like a point or probe that is moving through
matter and which is itself part of the very matter through which it
moves. In order to negotiate this strange landscape, with its challenges
to common (or Cartesian) sense, two principles are useful. The first, as
Bergson himself suggests in his Foreword, is that we remember that all
mental life, ultimately, is determined by action. An absolutely specula-
tive function of the mind, divorced from experience and action, does
not, for Bergson, exist (although, as we shall see, this does not prohibit
a kind of speculation understood as intuition). The second principle,
that in some sense follows from this, is that the past has not ceased
to be, but has merely ceased to be useful as regards this action. It is in
this sense, again as we shall see, that the past is co-extensive with the
present. It survives in a pure, albeit unconscious, state.
In what follows I will be especially concerned with the status of, and
165
possibility of accessing, this pure past, which might also be understood

as a kind of ontological ground of our individual being. It is my conten-
tion, following Bergson, and especially Deleuze’s reading of him, that
this past might be a resource of sorts in the production of a specifically
different kind of subjectivity. Another way of saying this is that in what
follows I am interested in the possibility of breaking habit, since the
latter, in its extreme form, staples us to the present and stymies access
to this realm of potentiality (indeed, typical subjectivity is a habit, con-
stituted as it is by a bundle of repeated reactions).
Bergson’s particular philosophical method allows for a form of
‘travel’ beyond our habitual, or all too human, configuration. It
involves the dividing of composites – in this case matter (objectivity)
and memory (subjectivity) – along lines that differ in kind, following
these lines beyond the particular composites to the extremes before
returning, armed with a kind of superior knowledge of what, precisely,
constitutes the mixtures. Habitually, we do not ‘see’ these divergent
lines because we are condemned, in Deleuze’s terms, ‘to live among
badly analyzed composites, and to be badly analyzed composites our-
selves’.3 We are subject to certain illusions about who and what we are,
and about the world in which we find ourselves – caught within repre-
sentation as it were. Bergson’s intuitive method hence involves a kind
of thinking, or more precisely, intuiting, of a larger reality ‘beyond’
this confused state of affairs, beyond our particular ‘human’ mode of
organisation and our specific form of intelligence that is derived from
utility. Following Spinoza – who will appear a few more times in the
account I give of Bergson below – we might add that this intuition is
also a kind of knowledge of that which lies ‘beyond’ our own very
particular (that is, human) spatio-temporal coordinates.
It is in this sense that, despite Bergson’s idea of the utilitarian
nature of thought, or, more precisely, of intelligence, philosophy itself
is an attempt at a kind of speculation – an intuitive speculation as it
were – beyond Kant’s conditions of possible experience (in Bergson’s
terms, simply habit) towards the conditions of ‘real experience’. This is
what Deleuze calls ‘transcendental empiricism’: ‘To open us up to the
inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior
to our own), to go beyond the human condition: This is the meaning of
philosophy.’4
This work of speculative intuition might also lead to a pragmatics of
experimentation in so far as attempting to ‘think’ beyond the confused
mixture that we are opens up the possibilities for constituting ourselves
differently. Indeed, if capitalism controls the matrices of emergence,
or simply determines what is possible (what we can buy, what there is
A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation 167
‘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.
THE PLANE OF MATTER

For Bergson the past has not ceased to exist, but has merely ceased to
be useful in the present. As Bergson remarks: ‘My present is that which
interests me, which lives for me, and in a word, that which summons
me to action; in contrast my past is essentially powerless.’6 In fact, this
present, in which we are situated, always occupies a certain duration,
the actual present moment itself being an unattainable mathematical
point. My present is precisely a ‘perception of the immediate past and
a determination of the immediate future’.7 It is in this sense that we
are determined by our pasts, but are also specifically future-orientated
beings. It is also this orientation that determines our particular world,
our consciousness being nothing other than the awareness of this imme-
diate past, and especially of this impending future.
Another way of saying this is that ‘my present consists in the con-
sciousness I have of my body’, which, ‘having extension in space’,
‘experiences sensations and at the same time executes movements’.8 My
body, in this sense, is simply a ‘centre of action’, or locus of stimulus
and reaction: ‘Situated between the matter which influences it and that
on which it has influence, my body is a center of action, the place where
the impressions received choose intelligently the path they will follow to
transform themselves into movements accomplished.’9
I will return to this question of intelligence below, but we might note
here the similarities that this sensori-motor schema has with Spinoza’s
first kind of knowledge: both name our general condition of being
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
plane of capitalism in so far as it is the plane of bodies and markets, of

commodities, shopping and other ‘possibilities’ of life. It contains, in a
word, that which has interest for me as a human organism, but also as
a subject of capitalism. Since we have a body, or bodily functions, we
have an existence in this world and on this plane. The other plane – the
double – is also infinite in character in so far as it ‘contains’ an infinite
field of not-yet-actualised virtualities (things that are unperceived –
unsensed – by me).
It is then the interests of the organism that dictate the arrangement
of its world, since ‘the objects which surround us represent, in varying
degrees, an action which we can accomplish upon things or which we
must experience from them’.14 And it is this spatial organisation that
also determines a particular temporality. As Bergson remarks:
The date of fulfillment of this possible action is indicated by the greater
or lesser remoteness of the corresponding object, so that distance in space
measures the proximity of a threat or of a promise in time. Thus space
furnishes us at once with the diagram of our near future, and, as this future
must recede indefinitely, space which symbolizes it has for its property to
remain, in its immobility, indefinitely open. Hence the immediate horizon
given to our perception appears to us to be necessarily surrounded by a
wider circle, existing though unperceived, this circle itself implying yet
another outside it and so on, ad infinitum.15
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
Figure 10.1 Bergson’s plane of matter (with ‘I’ at centre).
Figure 10.2 The line of matter and the line of memory.
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-
tion. This dark background is not simply composed of those objects

that are yet to be perceived, but is composed of that matter which holds
no interest whatsoever, at least to the particular organism as it is at
that moment of perception. Once more, however, the crucial point is
that this ‘larger world’ is not inaccessible, not barred from experience,
but is indeed a given in experience. It is the background, or simply
ground, from which the body/organism, and its particular perception,
is a subtraction.17
Following Bergson’s own diagram, we can then draw this image
of matter and memory on two axes that can be superimposed on our
earlier diagram of the plane of matter that is itself constituted by ever
wider circles of those objects that interest us (capitalism) – an infinitely
receding horizon that constitutes our future – superimposed on the dark
background of that which holds no interest (Figure 10.2).
In Figure 10.2 line AB represents objects in space, whilst line CI
represents objects in memory (objects which no longer interest us).
As complex bodies – or subjects – we exist at the point of intersection
between these two lines, this point being the ‘only one actually given
to consciousness’.18 These lines are then drawn against the two dark
backgrounds mentioned above: of that which has no interest for me in
the future, but also of that which has no interest for me in the past. In
fact, these two backgrounds are one and the same: the powerless past
and the future in which I have no interest constitute the virtual worlds
that surround my actuality.
We are active on the plane of matter, which is to say, following
Spinoza once more, we are not just the passive receivers of shocks.
Nevertheless, it is an activity that is still premised on passive affects,
and especially on fears and desires, threats and promises, themselves
determined by pleasure and pain. We might say then, again following
Spinoza, that it is still the realm of the first kind of knowledge in so far
as in it – on the plane of matter – we are still subject to the world.
Indeed, memory itself, as it is called forth by a present action, might
also be thought of as part of the first kind of knowledge since it only
becomes effective on the plane of matter when it operates to aid an
already determined action on that plane (I will return to this process of
recollection in a moment). This is habit, and, at an extreme, it deter-
mines our character, understood as a kind of extreme compression of
all our past habitual reactions. Looking once more at Figure 10.2 the
point here is that it is only those memories that are useful that become
conscious. So, as for the infinitely receding circles of the plane of matter,
so too there are receding circles for the past. Indeed, ‘the adherence of
this memory to our present condition is exactly comparable to the
adherence of unperceived objects to those objects which we perceive;

and the unconscious plays in each case a similar part’.19
THE CONE OF MEMORY

It is as if then there are two memories, different but connected. The
first, ‘fixed in the organism, is nothing else but the complete set of
intelligently constructed mechanisms which ensure the appropriate
response to the various possible demands’.20 This is a memory stored in
the body as habit. A memory whose proper terrain of action is the plane
of matter or system of objects. This is the realm of reactivity, of typical
responses in which we follow, blindly as it were, our desires and turn
away from our fears. It is an animal realm of sorts, or, at least, a realm
determined by a pleasure principle.
The second is ‘true memory’, which, ‘coextensive with conscious-
ness’, ‘retains and ranges along side of each other all our states in the
order in which they occur, leaving to each fact its place and, conse-
quently, marking its date, truly moving in the past and not, like the first,
in an ever renewed present’.21 This is a memory that is more neutral,
and ultimately, apersonal. We might even say inhuman in that it is not
selective or connected to the needs of the organism as the latter exists
on the plane of matter. It is less memory as such than a general ‘past-
ness’. Ultimately, it is also a species-memory, or even a kind of cosmic
memory of the universe in that it extends far beyond the individual (and
it is in this sense that both ‘my’ cone of memory, and that of any life
beyond me – the double I mentioned above – are one and the same).
The individual is nothing more than a local stoppage within this pure
past, which we might also call, following Deleuze-Bergson, the virtual.
In many ways it is more appropriate no longer to think of this as
the past at all – and the plane of matter as the future – but simply to
think about these two realms in terms of what is useful and what is not.
After all, notions like past, present and future constitute, for Bergson,
particularly confused illusions about the world and our own situation
within it. This virtual realm might then be understood as a realm of
infinite potentiality, whereas the plane of matter – the actual – is very
much the terrain of our finitude, tied as it is to the specific interests of
the organism. Indeed, following Spinoza’s understanding, death only
occurs on the plane of matter. The realm of the pure past, on the other
hand, precisely, survives. Part of our own incorporeal reality partakes
of this realm, or, again following Spinoza, part of ourselves has an
existence under a species of eternity. We are not just the finite organism
(we are somehow ‘part’ of this virtual) – although in another sense this
is precisely all we are (a habitual set of mechanisms). The connecting

link between these two distinct kinds of memory is simply our body
that exists on the plane of matter but which, in the very act of percep-
tion, calls up images from memory. Thus we have Bergson’s celebrated
cone of memory (Figure 10.3), where this true memory hangs, ‘like a
gyre’, over the plane of matter – anchored by a body on that very plane,
but with its base extending far into the virtual realm.
Here are Bergson’s comments on his diagram:
If I represent by a cone SAB, the totality of the recollections accumulated
in my memory, the base AB, situated in the past, remains motionless, while
the summit S, which indicates at all times my present, moves forward
unceasingly, and unceasingly also touches the moving plane P of my actual
representation of the universe. At S, the image of the body is concentrated,
and, since it belongs to the plane P, this image does but receive and restore
actions emanating from all the images of which the plane is composed.22
The cone then, fixed to the plane of matter by the sensori-motor schema
but extending far into the past, is specifically dynamic involving two
kinds of memory that are nevertheless connected. The first, ‘bodily
memory’, or habit, is the apex of the cone, ever moving, inserted by the
second, ‘true memory’, in the ‘shifting plane of experience’.23 Each kind
of memory lends the other its support:
For, that a recollection should appear in consciousness, it is necessary that it
should descend from the heights of pure memory down to the precise point
where action is taking place. In other words, it is from the present that the
appeal to which memory responds comes, and it is from the sensori-motor
elements of present action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives
it life.24
For Bergson it is the ‘constancy of this agreement’ between these two
movements, between the apex and the base, that characterises what he
calls a ‘well balanced mind’, or a ‘man nicely adapted to life’.25 A lived
life involves the coming and going, the oscillation, between these two
states.26
There are two extreme positions that help define this process. First,
the ‘man of impulse’ who lives predominantly on the plane of matter
and for whom memory’s role is solely the exigencies of immediate
action: ‘To live only in the present, to respond to stimulus by the
immediate reaction which prolongs it, is the mark of the lower animals:
the man who proceeds in this way is a man of impulse.’27 Following
Spinoza once more, this would be an individual consigned to live
solely in the first kind of knowledge. A purely reactive mode of being.
Second, there is the dreamer: ‘But he who lives in the past for the mere
pleasure of living there, and in whom recollections emerge into the
light of consciousness without any advantage for the present situation

is hardly better fitted for action: here we have no man of impulse but
a dreamer.’28 In passing we might note here Nietzsche’s comments in
The Gay Science about those who remain spectators of life rather than
active creators.29 As Bergson remarks: ‘Between these two extremes
lives the happy disposition of memory docile enough to follow with
precision all the outlines of the present situation, but energetic enough
to resist all other appeal. Good sense, or practical sense, is probably
nothing but this.’30
Nevertheless, good sense might also be understood as a kind of
limiting common sense that adapts to things the way they already are.
Again, this would be the ‘use’ of memory to serve the present and any
action determined by the plane of matter as it is already constituted.
To a certain extent this is the production of an efficient and functional
being (within capitalism as it were). It is in this sense that it might be
‘useful’ to think about those cases when memory actualises the pure
past, but not necessarily for any utility. In fact, Bergson goes on to
write about such cases, and specifically the dream state mention above:
‘But, if almost the whole of our past is hidden from us because it is
inhibited by the necessities of present action, it will find strength to
cross the threshold of consciousness in all cases where we renounce the
interests of effective action to replace ourselves, so to speak, in the life
of dreams.’31 This is the temporary suspension of the sensori-motor
schema that allows the past to be actualised, not in the service of the
present but in and as itself. Following my comments above we might
say that this is the actualisation of the virtual in and of itself, outside
of the immediate interests and concerns of the organism. We might
turn again to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science here, this time to his more
positive definition of idleness – or ‘leisure and otium’ – as being the
progenitor of genuine creative thought.32 Walter Benjamin also says
something similar in his own aphoristic style: ‘Boredom is the dream
bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives
him away.’33 Here non-productivity – hesitation, stillness – is in and of
itself creative.
In fact, this hesitation of the sensori-motor schema – situated at point
S between the actual and virtual – is also that which is constitutive
of us as humans beyond habit as it were. The gap between stimulus
and response is produced, almost as side effect, by our brain-body
assemblage (or, simply, our nervous system), which in its complexity,
instantiates a temporal gap in so far as any reaction to a given stimulus
has the ‘choice’ of a variety of pathways in response. A moment of
indeterminacy is introduced into the system. A ‘stopping of the world’
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
Figure 10.4 Bergson’s cone of memory with ‘levels’

(from ‘On the Survival of Images’, Matter and Memory).
Figure 10.5 ‘Shining Points’/fractal ecology in cone.
Figure 10.6 Cone of the mystic: 1. Static religion (habit/ritual) 2. Dynamic

religion (introspection/intuition) 3. The mystic.
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
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
We might then draw this complex ecological subjectivity, and the

plane of matter on to which it is pinned, as in Figure 10.5.
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 direct echoing of Spinoza, the experience of such a mystical persona,

or personified intensive state, is characterised by joy. To quote Bergson:
It would be content to feel itself pervaded, though retaining its own person-
ality, by a being immeasurably mightier than itself, just as iron is pervaded
by the fire which makes it glow. Its attachment to life would henceforth be
its inseparability from this principle, joy in joy, love of that which is all love.
In addition it would give itself to society, but to a society comprising all
humanity, love is the love of the principle underlying it.53
In a further echo of Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, this mystical
experience is then also seen as divine: ‘In our eyes, the ultimate end of
mysticism is the establishment of a contact, consequently of a partial
coincidence, with the creative effort which life itself manifests. This
effort is of God, if it is not God himself.’54 Indeed, for Bergson, mystical
experience is God – or the ‘creative effort’ – acting through an individual
soul. This then is the movement of intuition beyond intelligence. The
latter stymies the former, but also puts the conditions in place for its
activation. The cone of the mystic might then be drawn as in Figure 10.6.
CONCLUDING REMARKS: CAPITALISM AND THE

ATTENTION TO LIFE
The above might lead one to believe that contemplation is the final
moment of the élan vital and, as such, that inaction is the privileged
mode of a different production of subjectivity. Certainly, capital-
ism encourages and extracts surplus from an endless productivity,
and, in this sense, a certain slackening in the sensori-motor schema
(and concomitant dreaming) works to upset a utilitarian outlook, to
counter-act the dominant injunction to live at a certain speed of life (the
‘always-being-switched-on’, or, more generally, the regulative speed of
the market) and to resist the world of commodities that accompanies
the latter.55 With no movement beyond the plane of matter there is no
freedom from this capitalism as it were, at least, no freedom from the
present plane of purely utilitarian interest.
This then is to suggest a strange kind of agency in which non-agency
is key. A production of subjectivity in which production, at least of
one kind, is refused, or simply halted. It is to privilege an involuntary
memory that does not come to the service of the plane of matter but
allows a circumnavigation of the concerns of this terrain. It is a call to
slow down, to hesitate, to open and occupy what Deleuze calls ‘vacuoles
of non-communication’.56 Ultimately, it is a kind of super-productivity
that arises from non-productivity; the sidestepping of given subjectivity
– that is already determined by the plane of matter – and a surrender-
ing of a kind to that which lies ‘outside’ the subject-as-is.57 Bergson

suggests in The Two Sources that this intensive state is also produced
by wine, drugs, hashish, ‘protoxide of nitrogen’, indeed any Dionysian
mechanism that disables the intelligence (the latter, again, being that
which stymies access to the divine).58
On the other hand, to dream is to remain passive. This passivity is
the second peril that arises from too great a detachment from life. It
lacks the activity – or participation – that the plane of matter gives life.
One might think here of the Situationist thesis on the Spectacle under-
stood as not just the world of commodities, advertising and so forth,
but also the way these inculcate a position of being a spectator of one’s
own life. We might also return here to Bergson’s thesis in Matter and
Memory and note what he says about a certain ‘attention to life’ that is
determined by action:
Our body, with the sensations it receives on the one hand and the move-
ments which it is capable of executing on the other hand, is then, that which
fixes our mind, and gives it ballast and poise . . . these sensations and these
movements condition what we might term our attention to life, and that is
why everything depends on their cohesion in the normal work of the mind,
as in a pyramid which should stand on its apex.59
Following Bergson then, and despite what I have said above about a
common sense that is limiting, we might say that although the gap and the
passage to the virtual is crucial, on its own this is not enough. It must, in
fact, be translated back into action on that plane from which it departed.
This is the case for an individual who returns from memory to action, but
also for the mystic who returns from cosmic-memory to action:
there is an exceptional, deep-rooted mental healthiness, which is readily rec-
ognizable. It is expressed in the bent for action, the faculty of adapting and
re-adapting oneself to circumstances, in firmness combined with suppleness,
in the prophetic discernment of what is possible and what is not, in the spirit
of simplicity which triumphs over complications, in a word, supreme good
sense. Is not this exactly what we find in . . . mystics?60
Indeed, for Bergson mystics are characterised less by contemplation
than by a ‘superabundant activity’.61 They are filled with the ‘supera-
bundance of life’ and thus have a ‘boundless impetus’ for action.62
Crucially however, this is not, it seems to me, the recollection of a past
in the service of a predetermined action – that is habit. Rather, it is
precisely the opposite of this: the return circuit is used as a means for
freeing up a habitual repetition which has lost some of this circularity
and mobility. In passing we might suggest that it is the latter – a kind
of freezing of actual-virtual circuits – which, it seems to me, charac-
terises capitalism’s terrain of operation to the extent that this extends
Figure 10.7 Return path/circuit of the mystic/militant.
‘into’ the virtual (the much heralded immaterial turn of capitalism,

etc.).
This travel, it seems to me, is precisely from the finite to the infinite,
but involves a return back to the finite (following my brief mention of
Klossowski’s Nietzsche above might we not also name this circuit the
eternal return?). In more prosaic terms we have here the beginnings of
an ethico-political account of memory: the actualisation of past events
in the present in order to counteract that present. A kind of calling to,
or re-calling of, the past. The past operates here as resource against the
present, at least to the degree that such a present is limited to a logic of
the possible – determined by a perspective of what, precisely, already
constitutes the plane of matter. We might also think here of Badiou’s
militant who has a fidelity to an event that might have happened in the
past but that is actualised in the present in order to transform the latter.
The militant ‘lives’ history in this sense.
Again, following Badiou, we might suggest that the two circuits –
of the mystic and militant – are similar, each accessing that which is
beyond the plane of matter/the situation or world as it is in order to
return and transform that very plane ‘using’ whatever has been learnt
on the ‘journey’ (Figure 10.7). In each case it is action – or the attention
to life – that determines the circuit, although this action must be under-
stood as one that is undetermined by habit. It is, in fact, the possibility
of a different future action that directs the circuit of the mystic and the
militant and that in itself implies and produces a different world (in
passing, we might also say that it is this return to the plane of matter
that constitutes the realm of politics in general in so far as the latter is
concerned with the former).
It is a human – at point S – that is then both the possibility of this

journey and that which prevents it. It is what we do on the plane of
matter – again, at point S – that determines whether we can exit this
plane, as well as the consequences of this exiting (and of our subsequent
return). In terms of thinking through the consequences of our exit it
might be worthwhile bringing Badiou and his concepts of fidelity to
bear on the above diagram.63 In terms of the possibilities of the exit
itself, is it the case, for example, that certain arrangements of matter
might work as a platform for the journey? Certain specific practices
for example? Indeed, what is the role of preparation in this diagram?
Lack of space prevents me addressing these important questions here,
but one such answer might be found by bringing Bergson’s cone into
conjunction with both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Michel Foucault’s
‘Technologies of the Self’.64 Indeed, it seems to me that ultimately it
is only through this kind of synthetic programme – of bringing het-
erogeneous philosophical, psychoanalytical and other materials into
productive encounter – that we begin to truly draw the contours of
an effective production of subjectivity in and against today’s reductive
and homogenising neoliberal landscape. In conclusion we might then
say that the Bergsonian cone is now ready to be spliced on to other
diagrams, other kinds of thought. If this non-philosophical practice is
not exactly what Bergson himself does in his own writings (although
intuition contra intelligence might be said to call for procedures such as
this) it is, it seems to me, precisely what the art of immanence – at least
in one of its instantiations – necessarily entails.
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.
(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.

7. Ibid., p. 138.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Or, as Bergson puts it: ‘ in that continuity of becoming which is reality
itself, the present moment is constituted by the quasi-instantaneous section
effected by our perception in the flowing mass, and this section is precisely
that which we call the material world’ (ibid., p. 139).
11. Ibid., p. 151.
12. Ibid., pp. 151–2.
13. And in this specific sense Bergson’s philosophy operates as a precursor
to the claims made by ‘Speculative Realism’ about being able to access
– or think – the ‘great outdoors’ of pre-Critical philosophy in so far as it
refuses the Kantian phenomena-noumena gap that itself determines what
Quentin Meillassoux has famously dubbed ‘correlationism’ (Quentin
Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency,
trans. R. Brassier [London: Continuum, 2008], p. 7). Importantly, here it
is not science – or, indeed the matheme – that allows this radically a-sub-
jective ‘thinking’, but the organism itself in so far as the latter is, as it were,
already a part of the ‘great outdoors’ (what else could it be?). For further
discussion of Meillassoux in relation to the production of subjectivity see
the section ‘Quentin Meillassoux and the correlation’ in the Conclusion,
‘Composite Diagram and Relations of Adjacency’, to O’Sullivan, On the
Production of Subjectivity, pp. 205–10.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., p. 140.
17. One need only think of cinema, as indeed Deleuze himself famously does,
or indeed other new technologies that open up these virtual worlds by
altering the spatial and temporal registers of human perception (cinema,
in this sense, continues the task of philosophy – or ‘transcendental empiri-
cism’ – ultimately moving towards an imaging of the pure past itself in the
time-image).
18. Ibid., p. 143.
19. Ibid., p. 145.
20. Ibid., p. 151.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., p. 152.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., pp. 152–3.
25. Ibid., p. 153.
26. I attend to this particular oscillation, and the intensive states – or singular
personae – that are ‘produced’ by it, in the section ‘Desiring-machines
and the body without organs’ of Chapter 5, ‘Desiring-Machines, Chaoids,
Probe-heads: Towards a Speculative Production of Subjectivity (Deleuze
and Guattari)’, of O’Sullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity, pp.

169–82. See especially the diagram on p. 174.
28. Ibid.
29. For Nietzsche the contemplative life might be counterpoised (in a dove-
tailing also, as we shall see, with Bergson’s thesis on the mystic) with
a more active participation in life that follows from it. Here one is not
merely a spectator of life, however attentive, nor, in fact, simply an actor
in the drama of life, but rather the author of this drama: ‘As the poet, he
certainly possesses vis contemplativa and a retrospective view of his work;
but at the same time and above all vis creative, which the man of action
lacks, whatever universal belief may say’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay
Science, trans. J. Nauckhoff [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001], p. 171). Nietzsche continues: ‘It is we, the thinking-sensing ones,
who really and continually make something that is not yet there: the whole
perpetually growing world of valuations, colours, weights, perspectives,
scales, affirmations and negations’ (ibid.).
31. Ibid., p. 156.
32. Amongst other things The Gay Science offers a powerful diagnosis and
critique of the speed of contemporary life – and of its profit-driven char-
acter. To quote Nietzsche: ‘already one is ashamed of keeping still; long
reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch
in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages – or lives like
someone who might always “miss out on something” ’ (Nietzsche, The
Gay Science, p. 183). It is here that Nietzsche opposes this ‘life in the hunt
for profit’ with a life of leisure, or, we might say, simply of slowness that
is counter to the regulative speeds of the market (ibid.).
33. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai
Leskov’, in Illuminations, trans. H. Zorn, ed. H. Arendt (London: Pimlico,
1999), p. 90.
34. It is the summoning up of an incorporeal universe. Guattari will say some-
thing similar about Duchamp’s readymades, specifically the Bottlerack,
and the universes of reference opened up by this trigger point, in his essay
‘Ritornellos and Existential Affects’: ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Bottlerack func-
tions as the trigger for a constellation of referential universes engaging
both intimate reminiscences (the cellar of the house, a certain winter,
the rays of light upon spider’s webs, adolescent solitude) and connota-
tions of a cultural or economic order – the time when bottles were still
washed with the aid of a bottle wash . . .’ (Félix Guattari, ‘Ritornellos
and Existential Affects’, trans. J. Schiesari and G. Van Den Abbeele, in
The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996],
p. 164). For a compelling discussion of Guattari’s take on the readymade
– understood as an ‘expressive mechanism capable of creating a people yet
to come’ – see Stephen Zepke, ‘The Readymade: Art as the Refrain of Life’,
in S. O’Sullivan and S. Zepke, eds, Deleuze, Guattari and the Production

of the New (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 39.
35. Deleuze writes about this first – and typical – idea of history in his essay
‘Control and Becoming’: ‘What history grasps in an event is the way its
actualized in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the
scope of history. History isn’t experimental, its just the set of more or less
negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something
beyond history . . . Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts only
the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order
to “become”, that is, to create something new. This is precisely what
Nietzsche calls the Untimely’ (Gilles Deleuze, ‘Control and Becoming’,
in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. M. Joughin [New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995], pp. 170–1.
36. We might go further than this and suggest that if the plane of matter con-
stitutes our ‘reality’ and those aspects from the cone that are actualised are
our ‘history’ then the actualisation of other aspects of the cone (or, indeed,
other aspects of the plane of matter) that were hitherto ‘invisible’ might be
thought of as a ‘fictioning’. It seems to me that this is fertile territory for
thinking art practice, but also a militant subjectivity that is intent on living
a life not already proscribed by dominant narratives of ‘reality’.
38. Ibid., p. 166.
39. Ibid., p. 168.
40. Ibid., p. 166.
41. Ibid., p. 167.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., p. 169. Bergson gives us the example here of hearing a word spoken
in another language. It might summon up the memory of an individual
that once spoke that word, in which case the memory is located closer to
the base. It might also however make one think of the language itself, in
which case the memory is located towards the summit, which is to say is
more ‘disposed towards immediate response’ (ibid.).
44. Ibid., p. 170.
45. Ibid., p. 171.
46. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 61.
48. Again, this is the subject matter of part of Chapter 5 of O’Sullivan, On the
Production of Subjectivity.
49. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. A.
Audra and C. Brereton with W. Horstall-Carter (New York: Doubleday
Anchor Books, 1935), p. 264.
51. Ibid., p. 111.
52. Ibid.
53. Bergson, The Two Sources, p. 212.
54. Ibid., p. 220.

55. It might be countered that the ‘creativity’ produced through ‘dreaming’ is
precisely that element that contemporary capitalism is most eager to both
generate and exploit, but crucially, I would argue, it is only a certain kind
of creativity, one that can be instrumentalised, that is encouraged. Can
this difference be sustained, or does cognitive capitalism, in fact, describe
a general exploitation of the human faculty for dreaming/creativity, or
actualising the virtual in new ways? The question here would be whether
pinning capitalism to the world of the sensori-motor schema runs into
difficulty in relation to cognitive capitalism, which exploits the intense
aspects of production – affect and creativity. My argument, following
Bergson-Deleuze, would be that it is not the virtual that is here being colo-
nised, but simply the possible, or, we might say – at a stretch – a specific
set of virtualities, or even a certain actual-virtual circuit (I want to thank
Stephen Zepke for discussions related to this particular note).
56. Deleuze, ‘Control and Becoming’, p. 175.
57. This question of strategy – of how we might, as it were, invite the outside
in – is compellingly addressed in Reza Negarestani’s thesis of ‘schizostrat-
egy’: ‘To become open or to experience the chemistry of openness is not
possible through “opening yourself” (a desire associated with boundary,
capacity and survival economy which covers both you and your environ-
ment); but it can be affirmed by entrapping yourself within a strategic
alignment with the outside, becoming a lure for its exterior forces.
Radical openness can be invoked by becoming more of a target for the
outside’ (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous
Materials [Melbourne: re.press, 2008], p. 199). I explore this further in the
section ‘Reza Negarestani and affordance’ in the Conclusion, ‘Composite
Diagram and Relations of Adjacency’, to O’Sullivan, On the Production
of Subjectivity, pp. 210–12.
59. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 173
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., p. 232.
63. This is something I attempt in Chapter 4, ‘The Strange Temporality of
the Subject: Life In-between the Infinite and the Finite (Deleuze contra
Badiou)’, of O’Sullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity, pp. 125–68.
See especially the diagram on p. 161.
64. And this is precisely the concern of Chapter 2, ‘The Care of the Self versus
the Ethics of Desire: Two Diagrams of the Production of Subjectivity (and
of the Subject’s Relation to Truth) (Foucault versus Lacan)’, of O’Sullivan,
On the Production of Subjectivity, pp. 59–88. See especially the diagram
on p. 79.
PART III
Immanence of the Visible

11. Painting the Invisible:
Time, Matter and the Image in
Bergson and Michel Henry
BRENDAN PRENDEVILLE
There are intriguing parallels between the thought of Bergson and

that of the radically unorthodox phenomenologist Michel Henry,
although the latter, so far as I can tell, made little or no reference
to the former and identified wholly – if also dissentingly – with
phenomenology.1 Bergson’s philosophy in any case has much in
common with phenomenology, through shared origins in nineteenth-
century psychology; Bergson, like William James and Franz Brentano,
conducted a philosophical enquiry into psychic life, in contrast to
the scientistic experimentalism of the psycho-physicians.2 In France,
Bergson’s thought left traces in the work of both Sartre and Merleau-
Ponty. Henry, a philosopher of a later generation, began his work
when phenomenology, rather than Bergsonian philosophy, was the
prevailing and rising current of thought in France, and his entire effort,
from the outset of his career to his death, consisted in radically inter-
rogating and revising this inheritance, principally with reference to
Husserl and Heidegger. His great contribution consisted in developing
a phenomenology of affectivity and immanence, and it was this that
brought him, without his apparent intention, into a certain proximity
with Bergson. I want to examine this unacknowledged affinity – while
taking note of significant underlying differences – with reference to
certain shared or comparable motifs. Central among these is a critique
of representation that is set out in different but partly congruent terms
in the thought of both philosophers, though Henry alone calls into
question the representation of the visible in art. It is here that Henry’s
book on Kandinsky comes into play, and I have evoked its challenging
title, Seeing the Invisible (Voir l’invisible), in my own.3
Bergson himself does not make play with the idea of invisibility, nor
is he especially concerned with the visible as such, normally deploying
instead the concept of perception in general. Unlike Henry, and in still
189
greater contrast with Merleau-Ponty, Bergson made scant reference to

painting. While the remarks he did make are significant, I intend to
show that, more than what he actually said about painting, it is rather
his concept of the durational nature of consciousness that is illuminat-
ing both for the way we see paintings and for the act of pictorial repre-
sentation. For indeed – perhaps surprisingly – representational painting
(in the Western, post-renaissance tradition) has particular relevance for
Bergson, and in this there is a marked contrast with Henry.
Among his remarks on art, some observations Bergson makes at
various points in lectures published in The Creative Mind (La Pensée et
le mouvant) find particular relevance here.4 At the end of ‘The Possible
and the Real’, he claims that philosophy can bring to all ‘certain of the
satisfactions which art at rare intervals procures for the privileged’,
by letting us apprehend, beyond our perception of immediate need,
the ‘ever-recurring novelty, the moving originality of things’. We will
thereby ‘feel we are participating, creators of ourselves, in the great
work of creation which is the origin of all things and which goes on
before our eyes’.5 He takes up the same theme in his lecture ‘The
Perception of Change’, addressing the question, ‘how can one ask the
eyes of the body, or those of the mind, to see more than they see?’; it is
possible, he proposes, by virtue of attending to what art shows us, in
particular,
that art which gives the most important place to imitation, I mean painting
. . . A Corot, a Turner . . . have seen in nature many an aspect that we did
not notice . . . If we reflect deeply upon what we feel as we look at a Turner
or a Corot, we shall find that, if we accept them and admire them, it is
because we had already perceived something of what they show us. But we
had perceived without seeing.6
Merleau-Ponty, as it happens, made a strikingly similar observation
(albeit in support of a different analysis) with respect to Rembrandt’s
The Night Watch, where we are made aware of the projecting hand of
Captain Frans Banning Cocq by the shadow it casts on the pale tunic of
his lieutenant: ‘Everyone with eyes has at one time or other witnessed
this play of shadows, or something like it, and has been made to see a
space and the things included therein. But it works in us without us; it
hides itself in making the object visible.’7
None of the foregoing would have satisfied Michel Henry, for whom
invisibility meant something more radical than the constitutionally
overlooked or subsumed complexity of the visible, or indeed anything
having to do with the perceptual relationship as such. Of essential
importance in this respect are two related sets of problems, which
occupied Bergson quite as much as Henry (and Merleau-Ponty for that
Painting the Invisible: Bergson and Henry 191
matter, indeed phenomenologists in general), concerning, respectively,

objectivity and awareness; these problems also have a close bearing
on the theme of invisibility, and on painting. Bergson and Henry, in
their different ways, each developed a concerted critique of the idea of
an objective, external reality, as espoused by science and by common
sense. Both philosophers, accordingly, had an essential concern with
subjectivity, where the latter was not to be counterposed to anything
external. If we consider the visible as the dimension most readily associ-
ated with objectivity, then it seems paradoxical that the philosophers
should have enlisted painting for their cause – albeit only tangentially
in Bergson’s case. Unlike Merleau-Ponty, for whom ‘the visible’ came
to denote, with its ‘lining of the invisible’, the world construed as an
intersubjective complex, neither Bergson’s nor Henry’s models of sub-
jectivity were designed for the reciprocal embrace of a (visuo-spatial)
world. Indeed, Henry states typically that ‘our body cannot be in the
world save on the condition of not at all being of it’.8 Bergson, contend-
ing with our ingrained tendency to spatialise the temporality of the vécu
(lived experience), proposes that we should consider the body not, in
accordance with habits of speech, as a kind of container, but rather as
‘a section of the universal becoming’.9 The objectivity we confer on our
own bodies as much as on other things is particularly attributable to the
sense of sight, since ‘the eye has developed the habit of separating, in
the visual field, the relatively invariable figures which are then supposed
to change place without changing form’.10
Bergson’s central intuition – to use a favoured term – is that the
universe is inherently dynamic, that duration, la durée, is its essence,
that matter is itself durational, the universe comprising ‘images’ at once
transmitting and receiving, so to speak, from all to all, in a continuous
vibration. Space, with its distinct objects, is the mere artefact and the
servant of our needs. We are at the apex of an evolutionary process
whereby there emerged from the mass of determinate vibrations con-
stituting the universe ‘centres of indetermination’ capable of selecting
from among all available information only that which interested them.
‘They allow to pass through them, so to speak, those external influences
to which they are indifferent.’11 Perception is a means to action, not
an instrument of knowledge; to serve our ends, we ‘throw beneath the
continuity of sensible qualities, that is to say beneath concrete extensity,
a network, of which the meshes may be altered to any shape whatever
and become as small as we please’.12 Artists, according to Bergson, are
defined by their exemption from this perceptual utilitarianism; they
are those ‘whose senses or whose consciousness are less adherent to
life. Nature has forgotten to attach their faculty of perceiving to their
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
Taking this passage in isolation, I find myself tempted at first to interpret

it along Bergsonian lines, as follows: a painter depicting, say, the corner
of a room with an open window (I am thinking of Adolph Menzel’s The
Balcony Room, of 1845),18 will attend to features of texture and of the
play of light that a person going across the room to close the window
will simply disregard. Unlike Bergson, however, Henry acknowledges

the qualities specific to painting, and while he is right to do so, I hesi-
tate over his assertion that depicted objects necessarily simply become
pure pictorial forms: in cases where the painting is plainly intended to
approximate appearance in some degree (Vermeer, say, or Chardin, or
Courbet – or Menzel), the thing represented is not superseded by the
depictive surface, but held in an alliance with it.19 Yet it is immediately
obvious that, however valid my observation in itself, I have miscon-
strued Henry’s statement, for he does not – he cannot – have any kind
of representation remotely in mind. ‘Painting is a counter-perception’,
i.e. it is nothing at all like a Bergsonian emancipation of perception
from the constraints of action. The ‘sensible appearances’ he has in
mind are not, say, the curtain blown by the wind, the sunlight on the
wall, but the shape made by the curtain, the colour of the light; and he
means, not that the erstwhile utilitarian objects become pictorial forms
– painted marks – in which they reappear transfigured, but rather that
they are replaced altogether by purely pictorial elements.
The recognisable elements in Kandinsky’s early paintings – onion
domes, flying horses – are clearly not representational in the sense of
depicting the visible, but are visionary elements identifiable wholly with
the colour and shape wherein they arise. Not only is Kandinsky quite
evidently free of realist or naturalist traits, but equally, for Henry, he
has nothing to do with the kinds of abstraction or near-abstraction pre-
dominant in early twentieth-century modernism, all of which, ranging
from Cubism to Constructivism, ‘never cease to relate to the visible as
their sole object. They seek only to grasp the object’s true nature and
ultimately to grasp the true nature of visibility, whether it is sensible
light (Impressionism) or transcendental (Mondrian, Malevich).’20 When
Henry claims that ‘all painting is abstract’ what he principally has in
mind are paintings which expressly turn away from the world and
towards what he considers the only reality, namely life itself, as lived
and felt; he finds abstraction thus understood in earlier Christian art,
and in the work and ideas of Kandinsky.21
The challenge that Henry sets himself, and pursues through a close
reading of Kandinsky’s theories, is to show how it is possible that paint-
ing might belong essentially to the invisible. At one point, making refer-
ence to the Monet painting of haystacks which so inspired Kandinsky,22
he evokes the Impressionist dissolution of the depicted object, in terms
suggestive of Bergson. The painter, he writes, overrides the limits of
the given object to configure ‘a bedazzlement where reality breaks
down into pure bursts of blinding light, slips into the unknown, loses
all consistency, and ultimately disappears’. Kandinsky, he continues,
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
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
reference to Bergson, whose impact on the actual practice of art, in the

early twentieth century, is, on the other hand, well known. Of the artists
affected by Bergson’s writing, Matisse appears to have been the first to
have reflected on the phenomenology of attention, and on the bearing
that Bergson’s concepts in this connection might have on the creative
process.34 Unlike the Futurists, Matisse did not make the elementary
mistake of seeking to represent temporal change; he understood that
duration inhered in the attentive acts of painter and viewer respectively,
with reference to an inescapably static object.
There is a point in Matter and Memory where Bergson, employing
terms which Matisse will come to use in turn in ‘Notes of a Painter’,
describes the artistic distillation of movement into static form, just as
Matisse himself will. He first imagines matter divorced from conscious-
ness and its ‘particular rhythm of duration’, in order then mentally to
bring it back and observe the effects:
at long, very long intervals, and by as many leaps over the inner history of
things, quasi-instantaneous views will be taken, views which . . . are bound
to be pictorial, and of which the more vivid colours will condense an infinity
of elementary repetitions and changes. In just the same way, the multitudi-
nous successive positions of a runner are contracted into a single symbolic
attitude, which our eyes perceive, which art reproduces, and which becomes
for us all the image of a man running.35
I observed earlier that we might take issue with Bergson’s statement
that artists have a general exemption from ordinary, utilitarian percep-
tion, and that this explains their ability to represent those complexities
of the visible we habitually overlook. In making this claim, Bergson
fails to take account of the act of painting, its material constraints and
the conventions that ground it, and in the passage just quoted he again
implicitly portrays the act of visual representation as if it were a matter
of directly transposing from perception to the picture surface or the
sculptor’s material. Matisse, unsurprisingly, made no such mistake,
instead using some of Bergson’s terms and even a similar example to
define, not the unreflective workings of our perception, but the deliber-
ate constructive processes of the artist. (These are in accord, however,
with Bergson’s concept of reflective or attentive perception, which I
will touch on later). In observing the model, Matisse writes in ‘Notes
of a Painter’, the painter selects and refines so as to attain ‘that state
of condensation of sensations which makes a painting’.36 The underly-
ing principle was long-established, even academic, and like Bergson
Matisse evokes Greek antiquity (Bergson’s allusion is brief and generic,
but I assume the image he vaguely has in mind is Greek, perhaps from
vase decoration): to illustrate the principle that to render the continuity
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
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
therefore evolved conventions to suggest that which might not be

represented directly. From the fifteenth century at least, in European
painting, portraitists made it a standard practice to present their sub-
jects with the shoulders turned slightly into the depth of the picture,
the head turned more fully forwards, and the eyes still more, to suggest
the act of noticing and acknowledging the viewer. It should be added
that this practice had already arisen in an earlier era of naturalistic rep-
resentation, as is evidenced by the Fayum mummy portraits of Roman
Egypt, where the rendering of the dead person as a living presence was
of essential importance. What is true of them holds for portraiture more
generally, in so far as it is in the nature of a memorial, and if we con-
sider therefore its manifold and contrasting connotations of lastingness,
momentariness, mortality and life, we find a subject in which Bergson
and painting perfectly intersect: the tournant of experience – awareness
of the other – is the mortal moment held within the portrait, and also
reflected by it. Mark Antliff, writing on Matisse’s Bergsonism, quotes
the painter’s comments on just such a concentrated apprehension of the
other, in the last in a series of drawings of Mabel Warren, made one
day in 1913: ‘there is a vitality in it . . . there’s movement in the eyes; it
is very difficult to achieve that in a drawing . . . She is a flowing stream
. . .’45
It is not surprising to find that Michel Henry, in his sustained reflec-
tion on life as pathos, found comparable qualities in portraiture – or in
one portrait, at least. One of his few positive references to representa-
tional painting concerns an officer in a painting of a militia company by
Frans Hals ‘who turns slowly toward us’. Henry continues, ‘one must
back up several steps to the place where these large brushstrokes will
change immediately’ into a feature or a face, or ‘into the eye of Life that
looks at us through time’.46 This is almost a Bergsonian motif: there
is movement, change and time, in association with life. As an account
of painting, it is unusual for Henry in making a positive – if brief –
reference to a material property, the ‘large brushstrokes’ whose sole
virtue however is that they will change into an expressive feature. Yet
the acknowledgement of change in this context is significant in itself,
for nowhere else does Henry take account of the durational in painting,
entailing as it does an act of attention. Attention requires an object and
involves perception, and Henry’s phenomenology of immanence sets
itself against that. The durational passage here is accordingly brief, and
Henry’s description moves towards a revelatory moment – although the
word ‘slowly’ impedes that movement.
For a model of painting unfolding in attention, we may look to
Bergson, even though painting is not his concern when, in Matter and
Memory, he formulates his definition of ‘reflective perception’ as ‘a

circuit in which all the elements, including the perceived object itself,
hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an electric circuit, so
that no disturbance starting from the object can stop on its way and
remain in the depth of the mind: it must always find its way back to the
object from where it proceeds’.47 Here Bergson produces the first of his
diagrams in Matter and Memory: circuits, like successive rings, arise
from the object into consciousness, passing from perception to memory
and then returning, to project beyond the object corresponding virtual
circuits, ‘creating anew not only the object perceived but also the ever
widening systems with which it may be bound up’.48
If the painted portrait at once embodies and reflects the act of atten-
tion, it may equally, in both its material and its figural complexity, invite
successive soundings rather in accordance with Bergson’s schema. The
extent to which this might be so will depend on the degree to which the
painter has, so to speak, withheld that which we must find. This would
be quite the opposite, therefore, of Henry’s norm of revelatory imme-
diacy. At the same time, it need not imply manipulation, direction to a
pre-arranged end. The portrait conventions to which I referred could be
used in so mechanical a way, and often were, but with a painter such as
Rembrandt, whose work stands at the apex of oil-painting portraiture,
we are on different ground. In his portrait of Margaretha de Geer, a
late work, in the London National Gallery (see Figure 11.1), he rejects
the customary turning pose – which he used in the companion portrait
of the woman’s husband, Jacob Trip – in favour of a frontal presenta-
tion. It is a large, three-quarter length portrait, with the evidently aged
woman seated in a large chair; her left hand, resting on the arm of the
chair, is nearest the viewer; the right, holding a cloth or handkerchief, is
further back, held against the body; her head, therefore, looks steadily
back from slightly further still, at a certain remove.
Here, clearly, it is not a case of suggesting motion, or staging an
imagined moment of encounter with the viewer. Nor is Rembrandt
concerned with signs of comportment, as with the prototype for such
renditions, Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione,49 or the self-portrait he
himself based on the latter.50 Raphael’s Castiglione turns to the viewer
with mild assurance, his soft and refined garments in entire accord
with his courtly bearing. The turning pose lends itself to such a social
self-presentation. By contrast, Margaretha de Geer’s steady presence
conveys no sense of an assumed or sustained attitude. The very signs
of age denote reality, as against the social mask. We recognise that she
is of high social standing from the quality of her dress and the hint of
monumental stonework in the background. Yet these indications of
Figure 11.1 Rembrandt, Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Wife of Jacob Trip,

c. 1661, oil on canvas, 130.5 x 97.5 cm; London, National Gallery. Reproduction
© The National Gallery; courtesy of the National Gallery Picture Library.
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
immediately attendant areas is also deliberative, and shows significant

divergences. While rendering the cuffs and – particularly – the ruff
with extreme particularity, he applies paint in an undisguised jumble of
brushstrokes to depict the cloth his sitter grasps. This is both appropri-
ate to the object and is also an index of (the painter’s) manual activity.
In this still figure, it is almost the only sign of movement. Yet her very
stillness may be the condition for our apprehending a temporality that
we cannot see. Any painted object, say a jug in a still life, may as it
were contain time. In a reverse of the process whereby – according to
Bergson – we break up the continuity of duration into distinct objects in
accordance with our needs, the painter offers us an object-for-attention
whose very stillness before our gaze imbues it with the sense of duration
– as if it reflected back to us the continuity of our regard. We give back
what need takes away.
Yet one quality in the object is not thereby eliminated: its thereness,
its otherness, the essential properties of the ek-stasis that Henry made
a subject of dispute. The marks of age on the woman’s face, presented
with such stark frontality and held as if for display between the paired
geometries of the circular ruff and the severe black headdress, appear
as if for our detached scrutiny. Light casts the head’s shadow on the
ruff just as it might that of a vase on a tablecloth. The cheeks sink,
the skull protrudes. Rembrandt renders face and ruff with equal atten-
tion to their material objectivity. The soft contours of the shadow and
the darkening of the ruff’s lower compartments show us that it is made
of fine material, and holds its form by virtue of the careful stitching of
its cellular structure. It is not stiff but flexible, as we may tell from the
slight curve. There is an immediate and one might say cruel contrast
with the aged flesh of the face, where Rembrandt’s brush breaks flecks
of orange-red into paler hues with traces of blue: a structure breaking
down.
From this, however, above barely parted lips, dark eyes look out.
Their darkness is accentuated rather than qualified by the slightest of
highlights at the upper edge of her right eye. We arrive at Rembrandt’s
discovery, an object that is not one, that moves without change of
place, is visible but acts invisibly. Where, in other portraits, eyes turn
to us as if in the moment of encounter, here the only action is inward, a
duration of mortal depth. It is like Poe’s purloined letter, hidden in the
open, lying in wait as we move through the painting’s gradients until it
takes us by surprise. Bergson’s model of attentive perception here finds
a most appropriate subject, consonant too with Henry’s apprehension
of life as pathos.
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).
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
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.
(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.
11. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 36; translation modified.
12. Ibid., p. 210.
14. Ibid., p. 123.
15. Ibid.
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 &
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.
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.
42. Ibid., p. 209.
43. Jan Vermeer, The Milkmaid, c. 1658, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; Diego

Velàzquez, The Fable of Arachne (‘The Spinners’), 1656, Madrid,
Prado.
45. Matisse, quoted by Matthew Stewart Prichard in a letter to Mabel Warren,
sent on 7 November 1913, the day after the drawing session. Mark Antliff
quotes the passages in his essay ‘The Rhythms of Duration’, in Mullarkey,
The New Bergson, p. 199.
46. Michel Henry, Barbarism, trans. Scott Davidson (London: Continuum,
2012), p. 31.
48. Ibid., p. 105.
49. Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, c. 1514–15, Paris, Louvre.
50. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait at the Age of 34, 1640, London, National
Gallery.
12. ‘For We Will Have
Shown it Nothing’:
Bergson as
Non-Philosopher (of) Art
JOHN MULLARKEY
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
Towards the end of Henri Bergson’s 1911 lectures on ‘The Perception

of Change’, a peculiar moment is reached when philosophy is for-
warded as a kind of popular art, only one that is not for the masses so
much as one that could be performed by everyone, generating altered
perceptions ‘more continual and more accessible to the majority’. This
general art allows a democracy of vision irrespective of artistic aptitude:
‘all things acquire depth – more than depth, something like a fourth
dimension which permits anterior perceptions to remain bound up with
present perceptions, and the immediate future itself to become partly
outlined in the present’.5 In this chapter, I would like to continue certain
themes from our introduction to this volume concerning the status of
immanent art as a form of thought, this time with an additional refer-
ence to the work of François Laruelle. I will, moreover, look at Laruelle
and Bergson’s conceptions of the image in photography and film respec-
206
Bergson as Non-Philosopher (of) Art 207
tively in order to discuss how a philosophy of the image might be less

a kind of alternative picture (to replace the false pictures of film and
photography proffered by other philosophers), and more about a kind
of ‘re-orientation’ or reverse ‘attitude’, wherein a certain redirection
of both body and mind would suggest a new way of seeing both phi-
losophy and these arts as equally disposed to thought on an immanent
plane. Whereas Laruelle calls for a democracy of thought against what
he sees as the reductive decisions of monomaniacal philosophies (each
philosophy forwarded as exclusively correct, with a uniquely truthful
portrait of reality), I think it is possible to see Bergson’s warning in
our first epigraph against even his own ideas becoming hypostatised in
singular concepts, and so as a call for new definitions of thought, and
the ongoing need for a democracy of images.
In his ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’, some time after the discus-
sion of philosophical games in the second epigraph above, Bergson
writes: ‘either there is no philosophy possible . . . or else philosophy
consists in placing oneself within the object itself by an effort of intui-
tion’.6 The object – even when the object is a philosophy – has its own
unique image that ‘an empiricism worthy of the name’ only discovers
through huge effort.7 Philosophy becomes the search for unique intui-
tions that are subsequently expressed indirectly through images and
then abstracted and extracted in ‘different concepts’. If knowing some-
thing normally implies the need for recognition through what Bergson
calls ‘ready-made concepts’, then it must be contrasted with intuitive
thought, which is expressed through the creation of new concepts and
images that participate in the movement of their unique object.8 It is not
that this creative philosophy, qua metaphysics, is applied to another
object or discipline, however, but that every object or discipline has
its own metaphysical core, that is, its own moment as a becoming,
as a movement, when one might say that it itself philosophises. The
imposition of concepts on objects is condemned by Bergson as relativ-
ist and exterior knowledge. This is because, be they one or multiple,
ready-made concepts do not belong to the Real. In contrast, intuition
is knowledge from the object, the object’s knowledge – that is sug-
gested or directed to others only by what we will see described as the
‘convergent action’ of multiple images – a suggestion that prompts a
quite different ‘action or attitude’. It is a becoming that the expressed
philosophy re-creates to match the ‘object’. In truth, therefore, perhaps
there is no one such thing as ‘metaphysics’, but rather as many different
kinds of metaphysics as there are objects in becoming. The subject-
matter of philosophy is the matter itself becoming (philosophical).
Normally, one thinks of ‘non-philosophies’ such as history, art, or
science becoming philosophical when there is a subject that thinks

about them (their conceptual foundations, presuppositions, objec-
tives, etc.), that is, when philosophers apply their concepts to them.
Bergson regards this as a retrospective rationalisation and a reversal
of the true order of things. Before any conceptual expression by the
subject, before the expression of traditional (‘symbolic’) philosophy
in other words, there is the becoming of the subject-matter itself, and
this is the moment of philosophical intuition. Philosophy is immanent
to the thing, in the thing’s own transformations. Bergson’s own work
in psychology, biology and physics are case-studies of how the objects
of even these harder sciences are transformative when followed closely,
that is, intuitively.
This is even more true of art, understood by Bergson as a philosophy
of ‘life in general’, a philosophy ‘turned in the same direction as art’ – as
Creative Evolution puts it:
That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved by the existence in

man of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception. Our eye perceives
the features of the living being, merely as assembled, not as mutually organ-
ized. The intention of life, the simple movement that runs through the lines,
that binds them together and gives them significance, escapes it. This inten-
tion is just what the artist tries to regain, in placing himself back within the
object by a kind of sympathy, in breaking down, by an effort of intuition,
the barrier that space puts up between him and his model. It is true that this
aesthetic intuition, like external perception, only attains the individual. But
we can conceive an inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would
take life in general for its object . . .9
This ‘life in general’ is not an abstraction, but the movement and

change of life in all its plurality and integrality – a democratised life.10
And cinematic art, I will argue, is (or at least could be) an equally trans-
formative, continuous creation, as seen through the various methods
it can utilise when juxtaposing and superimposing moving images,
making them coexist in a democratic space and time. The alternative to
the conceptual ‘ready-mades’ – metaphysical intuition – approaches a
non-standard philosophy in Laruelle’s sense of the phrase, and encour-
ages us to explore the role of the image, specifically the art of images
(cinema in particular) as a Bergsonian non-philosophical practice.
BEYOND A GAME: THE CIRCLES OF GIVEN

PHILOSOPHY
For Laruelle and his concept of ‘non-standard philosophy’, normal
philosophical practice always mixes reality with a pre-decided interpre-
tative schema – be it substance and accident, subject and object, differ-

ence and repetition, and so on. This marks out any resultant world-view
as entirely relative to its starting-point. As such, standard philosophical
practice remains ‘curtailed, repetitive, and superbly sterile’, and is
committed to the ‘Greco-unitary’ closure and enclosure of this prior
decision (or, as the saying goes, ‘everything is over by the first page’).
For Laruelle, the transcendent form of philosophy leaves no room
for thought outside of itself, no matter its variety – phenomenology,
Deleuzianism, structuralism, etc. By that very fact it cannot explain any
rival positions as anything but illusion or error (or improper, sloppy,
thought). Nor can it justify the grounds of such illusions, errors, or
sloppiness, without begging the question as to what good and proper
philosophy might be (assuming that such properties exist at all in one
form alone). At some or other stage it must eventually resort to being
dogmatic, overtly or covertly, about its basic terms (even in so far as
how it defines ‘simplicity’, ‘clarity’, ‘rigour’, ‘truth’, ‘error’, and so on).
However, such philosophies are always incomplete in as much as they
are dogmatic. Indeed, these dogmas are their assertoric point of emer-
gence. Laruelle calls this emergence a ‘decision’, an attempted cut-off
(decaedere – de- ‘off’ + caedere ‘cut’) from the Real. As he puts it: ‘to
philosophise on X is to withdraw from X; to take an essential distance
from the term for which we will posit other terms’.11
As we saw above, Bergson, like Laruelle, can be seen as a critic of the
circularity of (intellectualist) philosophical systems and the ever larger
circles in which they ‘enclose’ reality. For Bergson, the inflexibility of
‘ready-made concepts’ carry within them a ‘practical question’ which
can only be answered with a ‘yes or a no’ – any nuance, the complex
‘shape’ of the Real, is lost.12 All that ever follows thereafter is unend-
ing dialectic and the various oppositions of philosophy: phenomenon
and noumenon, mind and body, being and appearance, and so on. The
bivalency of ready-made logic is merely the necessary response to the
narrowness of the question: what is missed entirely between the two is
the polyvalency of the Real that does not allow for such rigid antith-
eses. In Creative Evolution, Bergson makes clear his view that ‘every
other method of philosophy’ – apart from his own of metaphysical
intuition – involves a ‘vicious circle’.13 ‘Pure intellectualism’ can never
extend philosophy into ‘something different’, into something that is not
already given and defined: ‘it is of the essence of reasoning to shut us up
in the circle of the given’.
It is noteworthy here to observe that where Laruelle sees standard
philosophy as decisionistic, Bergson sees it as definitional: a circular
game of names whereby whatever system of definitions is employed
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:
It makes little difference to me if one says ‘everything is mechanism’ or

‘Everything is will’: in either case everything is identical. In both cases,
‘mechanism’ and ‘will’ become synonyms of each other. Therein lies the
initial vice of philosophical systems. They think they are telling us something
about the absolute by giving it a name . . . But the more you increase the
extension of the term, the more you diminish comprehension of it. If you
include matter within its extension, you empty its comprehension of the
positive characteristics by which spontaneity stands out against mechanism
and liberty against necessity. When finally the word arrives at the point
where it designates everything that exists, it means no more than existence.
What advantage is there then in saying that the world is will, instead of
simply saying that it is?15
Clearly, Bergson’s approach to definition comes close to Laruelle’s

critique of decisionism here, but what do these philosophers offer in
place of either definition or decision? How do they make their (‘non-
standard’) philosophies any different? After all, can we not read their
own methodologies as simply more philosophy, more definitions
and decisions? What is the difference between ‘everything is will’
(‘Schopenhauer’) and ‘everything is becoming’ (‘Bergson’)? To answer
this, we need to look more closely at the optical and imagistic sig-
nificance of Bergsonian ‘definition’ (as in ‘high’ and ‘low’ definition for
instance), as well as what Laruelle means by decision as a kind of ori-
entation, a withdrawal. It will become clear that such orientations also
have things in common with Bergson’s idea of metaphysical intuition as
a change of attitude, a ‘thinking backwards’ that is as much corporeal
as it is incorporeal. What they offer is not one more picture of the world
(‘everything = x’) for acceptance or rejection, but what we will describe
as a ‘behavioural’ means of reviewing what such pictures entail and
how they can mutate.
To begin with the optics of the image means to look at definitions
and clarities in terms of the materiality and logic of these images. Think
only of the opening of Matter and Memory: instead of the lexical defini-
tions of systematic philosophy, be it materialism or idealism, Bergson

begins with the ‘presence of images in the vaguest sense of the word’.
But this presence of images is not itself vague – it is what can only be
expressed with vague words. The ‘definition’ of image, in the optical
sense of the term, is different. How might this other definition, as
image, work? In Bergson’s ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’ there is
another analysis of images, and in particular of their multiplication as a
philosophical method. It is no one kind of image, simple or ornate, that
interests him here, but the combination, the interference or attunement
between many different kinds of images that is crucial. Images must be
differentiated in order that the movement of images can be discovered
in an ‘integratory’ intuition. The unrolling of a coil, the rolling up of a
thread, the myriad-tinted spectrum, the infinitely small elastic body – all
of these images of the self (in Bergson’s chosen example) are incom-
plete. In fact, they are not much better than concepts in terms of their
discrete nature. They do, however, have the virtue of being concrete
and so more suggestive, and it is the specific becoming of the self that
can be suggested through their proliferation: taking ‘images as dissimi-
lar as possible’ and composing them all ‘at once’, we can re-create the
movement that animates them. An extended quotation is merited:
In this regard, the philosopher’s sole aim should be to start up a certain

effort which the utilitarian habits of mind of everyday life tend, in most men,
to discourage. Now the image has at least the advantage of keeping us in the
concrete. No image will replace the intuition of duration, but many different
images, taken from quite different orders of things, will be able, through the
convergence of their action, to direct the consciousness to the precise point
where there is a certain intuition to seize on. By choosing images as dissimi-
lar as possible, any one of them will be prevented from usurping the place of
the intuition it is instructed to call forth, since it would then be driven out
immediately by its rivals. By seeing that in spite of their differences in aspect
they all demand of our mind the same kind of attention and, as it were, the
same degree of tension, one will gradually accustom the consciousness to
a particular and definitely determined disposition, precisely the one it will
have to adopt in order to appear unveiled to itself. But even then, conscious-
ness must acquiesce in this effort. For we will have shown it nothing. We
shall simply have placed it in the attitude it must take to produce the desired
effort and, by itself, to arrive at the intuition.16
Direction, attitude, disposition, convergent action. All of these orienta-

tional, behavioural terms will be of increasing significance as we pro-
gress through this chapter. For now, what is important is that Bergson
argues that the intuitive method does not involve the easy clarity, nor the
sterility, of a name. Undoubtedly intuition will appear vague to many
philosophers and artists alike, yet this difficult (even at times painful)
effort of creating a new attitude is the only precise manner in which

we can understand it.17 Intuition is precise in virtue of the fact that it
instantiates the Real rather than represents it. And the idea of vague, or
rather the ‘indefinite’, is central to Bergson’s methodology. Indefinites
(or ‘dynamic definitions’) are found throughout his work, even in his
own concepts of freedom, intuition, duration, virtual memory and the
élan vital, along with his preference for metaphor as a mode of descrip-
tion for these ideas.18 Whereas the Real can be presented directly to
us ‘in an intuition’, such an intuition can only be shared with others
‘indirectly by images’, multiple, indefinite, suggestive images.19 Such
indefinite and indirect images capture best the processual moment that
an immanent philosophy aspires to communicate. One might say that
‘principles of uncertainty’ abound in his work, and belong objectively
to the Real as much as they also do to subjective states of knowing.20
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
or otherwise. Alternatively, it can be seen as a demonstration that only

suggests a re-orientation of belief as to what philosophy is, and even of
what belief is, that is, not a propositional attitude but the attitude or
‘posture’ of propositions (from attitudine, ‘fitness, posture’).
It should also be noted that the ‘non-’ in Laruelle’s non-standard
philosophy is not a negation but an extension of what counts as phi-
losophy, an inclusive amplification of thought. This non-philosophy
also claims to be a ‘radical inversion’ of philosophy’s relationship
with reality (or ‘the Real’) in as much as it does not merely reverse
the relationship between the two but inverts it fundamentally.23 If it
is a reversal, then it is a ‘reverse mutation’ that suffers no possible re-
inversion (to use an image from biology whereby the wild-type pheno-
type is spontaneously restored and undoes the genetic alterations of the
laboratory). In this biological model, what happens in the philosophy
lab (all the various mediations and distortions of the Real wrought by
philosophy’s decisive quest for mastery, for ultimate authority) mutates
– or is reviewed – to be seen no longer as the best picture of reality but
as a product or effect of the Real. Again, the relationship is inverted:
from the direction of Philosophy to the Real, towards the direction of
the Real to Philosophy.
Bergson’s own version of this re-orientation can also be understood
through the idea we saw earlier of a general aesthetic – the democratic
art of philosophy – and its contrast with the ready-mades of analysis:
We try to find out up to what point the object to be known is this or that,
to what known genus it fits, what kind of action, step or attitude it should
suggest to us. These various possible actions and attitudes are so many
conceptual directions of our thought, determined once for all . . . To try a
concept on an object is to ask of the object what we have to do with it, what
it can do for us. To label an object with a concept is to tell in precise terms
the kind of action or attitude the object is to suggest to us.24
In contrast to this conceptual ‘attitude’ comes the most famous for-
mulation of intuition in ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’: thinking in
duration, or practising philosophy immanently, means ‘to reverse the
normal direction of the workings of thought’.25 Other than Laruelle,
few philosophers before or since have argued anything so heretical as
we find in Bergson’s approach to metaphysics here: a radical reversal of
what we think metaphysics (and philosophy) to be and how we think
it operates (in an ‘anti-Kantian’ metaphysics of immanence, as Quentin
Meillassoux describes Bergson’s method).26 More than this, it leads us
to a redirection of where thinking is supposed to take place: thinking
changes source and direction, passing from things to concepts, and
not from concepts to things. His idea is not that we merely change the
‘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
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,
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
Bergson’s ‘promise’ is to replace Plato’s classical metaphysics of immu-

table and universal ideas with bespoke, tailored concepts – mobilising a
haute couture fitted for everyone and everything – rather than one-size-
suits-all. I would like now, therefore, to bring together this mobilisation
(invention) of concepts through imagery and convergent action, with
Bergson’s call to re-orient or reverse our stance: the reverse of the work
of the mind is not intellectualist, but behavioural, and even spatial in
attitude. At the most abstract level, this postural aspect will have to
engage with Bergson’s ontology of images in Matter and Memory.
Furthermore, I want to look at a range of materials from Bergson which
suggests that, when it comes to this reversal that would allow us to see
photographic or filmic images as new forms of philosophical thought,
that is, as objects with their own philosophy, this cannot be shown
with extant concepts and so within extant (ready-made) philosophical
language: the new forms can only be gestured towards (gerere, ‘bear,
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.
wield, perform’), indexed (‘to point’), or suggested (suggerere, ‘bring

from below’, from gerere).
With Laruelle, we already know the importance of the behavioural
dimension to the photography (of) philosophy: he seeks ‘concepts
which . . . might appear to you as a sort of mimesis of the photo’, for
what he calls ‘photo-fiction’ is not a ‘technological and perceptual
act of photographing but a theoretical act “miming” the material act

but which is irreducible to it’.35 We must remember that the whole of
non-standard philosophy is rooted in its non-decisionism: its basis is
in a stance or posture, an embodied attitude that reverses philosophy’s
withdrawal from the Real. As Laruelle’s Concept of Non-Photography
puts it, ‘stance’ means ‘to be rooted in oneself, to be held within one’s
own immanence . . . If there is a photographic thinking, it is first and
foremost of the order of a test of one’s naive self rather than of the deci-
sion.’36 Behaviour as posture or stance – it is a philosophical and photo-
graphic behaviourism in this materialist and immanent sense, then: ‘the
experimental act of photographing that is its postural model’.37
And what of Bergson? Let us recall the basics of his imagology in
Matter and Memory: what we perceive is what interests us (and our
bodies) at any moment:
To the degree that my horizon widens, the images which surround me seem
to be painted upon a more uniform background and become to me more
indifferent. The more I narrow this horizon, the more the objects which it
circumscribes space themselves out distinctly according to the greater or
lesser ease with which my body can touch and move them. They send back
[renvoient, ‘return’], then, to my body, as would a mirror, its eventual influ-
ence; they take rank in an order corresponding to the growing or decreasing
powers of my body. The objects which surround my body reflect its possible
action upon them.38
There is a ‘background’ that re-turns to my body only what interests

it, so that even ‘distance’ itself takes on an axiological form, represent-
ing ‘above all, the measure in which surrounding bodies are insured,
in some way, against the immediate action of my body’.39 My body is
simply ‘an object’, but one capable of performing a ‘new action’ upon
surrounding objects, and this ability to act anew is what marks out its
‘privileged position’ in regard to other, background objects. Hence,
to undo what the body instigates, to reverse this ‘narrow’ attitude,
is to look again in detail (higher-definition) and in close-up at this
background: it requires a reversal of orientation. Indeed, Matter and
Memory describes mental attention in bodily, attitudinal terms: ‘stage
by stage we shall be led on to define attention as an adaptation of the
body rather than of the mind and to see in this attitude of conscious-
ness mainly the consciousness of an attitude’.40 This rich behaviourism
of Bergson renders the problem of propositional attitudes (of beliefs)
bodily, a matter of physical ‘posture’ (attitudine). Even memory, the
most virtual element of Bergson’s thought, is tied to bodily stance:
Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of
our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach
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
If this seems to go too far – especially given Bergson’s purportedly

disembodied ‘spiritualist’ tendencies – then the following description
of education from the introduction to The Creative Mind may help to
confirm this revision of his work. Here he argues that, to understand a
text, a student
must fall into step with him [the author] by adopting his gestures, his
attitudes, his gait, by which I mean learning to read the text aloud with the
proper intonation and inflection. The intelligence will later add shades of
meaning. Before intellection properly so-called, there is the perception of
structure and movement; there is, on the page one reads, punctuation and
rhythm. Now it is in indicating this structure and rhythm, in taking into
consideration the temporal relations between the various sentences of the
paragraph and the various parts of each sentence, in following uninterrupt-
edly the crescendo of thought and feeling to the point musically indicated
as the culminating point that the art of diction consists . . . One knows, one
understands only what one can in some measure reinvent.42
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
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
Here we have a kind of micro-behaviourism of the brain as well as the

macro-behaviourism of bodies in relation – a combination or super-
position that would short-cut the traditional disputes between ‘central
state’ materialists and logical behaviourists by rendering behaviour
neurological while also upgrading cerebral motor-mechanisms to some-
thing more than just mechanical movements. If the brain does ‘control’
behaviour, it is because it too is behaviour.45
SHOW NOTHING, SUGGEST EVERYTHING

At this stage in our chapter then, it might be expected that we finally
turn to examples from cinema (for Bergson) and photography (for
Laruelle) that illustrate our intentions by applying this behavioural,
postural approach in these cases. However, I am going to resist that
move. This is not only on account of the fact that I have written
extensively on the problem of using art – or any other supposedly non-
philosophical entity (in the non-Laruellean sense of that term) – as the
material vessel for philosophical thought. That motive for resisting the
use of examples has always concerned the need to see individual films,
for instance, as philosophical in their own right and through their
own medium-specificity, that is, through their indigenous audio-visual
resources of editing, composition, camera movement, focus and so on
(rather than as a kind of quasi-text that merely ‘paraphrases’ ready-
made philosophical ideas through the plot and dialogue of films).46 The
philosophy of cinema should be its own philosophy and recognisable as
philosophy in its own terms – not one borrowed from elsewhere (irre-
spective of the problems of what then counts as ‘proper’ philosophy
that may follow).47 In terms of filmic properties in general, however, I
have also written elsewhere on the close-up as a sign of philosophical
intention (following Stanley Cavell’s idea that it indicates choice, and
so the presence of mind): this could, in fact, be understood as a matter
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.
A philosophy-without-symbols (PwS) is really a philosophy-without-

standard-symbols, therefore, and is practised without fixed representa-
tions (be they conceptual, or linguistic in other forms), with suggestive
images to begin with. This practice of PwS can be likened to Laruelle’s
call, in Photo-Fiction (which similarly has no examples of philosophical
photography but merely gestures towards a ‘photography of philoso-
phy’), to ‘under-practice philosophical language’.55 Yet this attempt to
‘under-understand it, is not to lower oneself as an individual, or at
minimum, it is to think in a more generic manner without exceptions’.56
He continues:
No synthetic portmanteau, but non-localizable indeterminations in the
philosophical sense, a language brought to its simplest status and sufficiently
disrupted in order for the superior form of expression certain of itself in
the concept to be rendered impossible. Philo-fiction is a gushing [jaillissant]
and subtractive usage of the means of thinking, of philosophemes-without-
philosophy, of mathemes-without-mathematics, and from here, all of the
dimensions of philosophy rid of their proper all-encompassing finality, an
insurrection against the all-too great superior finalities.57
Laruelle’s ultimate message for philosophy is that not everything is

‘philosophisable’, or, in other words, that not everything is reducible to
standard philosophy.58 And Bergson’s own message is that not every-
thing is ‘sayable’, that is, symbolisable with ordinary language – some
things cannot be shown other than through their own showing – and, if
new to it, we can only be directed to that showing at best. An immanent
metaphysics like his, then, is a non-standardly-sayable philosophy. If
it were ordinarily sayable with ready-made concepts, then it would be
reducible to them. If you can say x in perfectly recognisable terms, then
x possesses nothing that eludes those terms – and so cannot be new. If,
say, the ‘indigenous audio-visual resources’ of any film (editing, compo-
sition, camera movement, focus . . .) are sayable with words, then their
philosophical bearing is reducible to those words. Whatever it is that
we talk about, the very fact that we can refer to it at all shows that at
least some aspect of it is sayable, an aspect which can then be taken for
all that it is. Hence, Wittgenstein’s remark on the gestural: ‘shrugging of
shoulders, head-shakes, nods and so on we call signs first and foremost
because they are embedded in the use of our verbal language’.59
To say the unsayable comes on pain of contradiction: what we can’t
say, we can’t say. And we can’t whistle it either, at least according to
Frank Ramsey’s famous resaying of Wittgenstein’s final remark on inef-
fability in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But ineffability in toto is
something other than this – ostensive gesture – being totally unsayable.
In other words, there are different ways of saying/not-saying, rather than
total ineffability – and even ‘representation’ may only be another kind

of gesture.60 Indeed, there are various levels to the Modernist ‘unrep-
resentability’ thesis: psychological (that it is too painful to represent
certain experiences), moral (that one shouldn’t try to represent certain,
violent events – out of respect for the victims, to protect the impres-
sionable, and so on), aesthetic (that art flounders in its own inadequacy
when faced with such a task of representation), metaphysical (that,
literally speaking, a past event of any sort cannot be present again), and
epistemological (that one cannot understand an experience simply by
witnessing a representation of it, that it is ineffable).61 Here, though,
non-representation is intended to multiply and embed representation
within immanence, to allow it to belong to the Real rather than stand
outside it. For what if x is not ‘directly’ said because it cannot be shown
with those words (de-monstratively ‘those’, un-showing ‘those’), but
only ‘directed’, or indexed, with images, with words acting as images,
being read through what they say rather than about what they say?62
We suggest things, but show nothing. Significantly, Bergson’s philoso-
phy was once described as ‘an analysis against analysis’, and as such it
could only suggest rather than demonstrate its truth.63 Accordingly, it
is entirely true, as we said in our introduction, that each of his books ‘is
conceived at once as a scientific work and as a work of art’.64 Writing
in 1965, Paul de Man put the scientific nature of Bergson’s aesthetic in
an even clearer light:
The poetic image . . . becomes a close verbal approximation to what percep-
tion and sensation are actually like, much closer, at any rate, than the purely
intellectual representation of reality found in the scientific concept. Poetics
thus becomes a vital source for theoretical psychology, rather than a minor
part of it.65
The poetic image is not an ornament but an aisthesis, which we see
now as a matter of attitude, an imagery that embodies suggestion, at
least when it comes to communicating an intuition to another mind.
In Laruelle’s terms, it is the ‘so-called “generic” extension of art to
aesthetics; the moment when thought in its turn becomes a form of art’.
This is ‘an art of thought rather than a thought about art . . .’; ‘not a
conceptual art, but a concept modeled by the art, a generic extension of
art’.66 Bergson’s fluid representations, in ‘structure and rhythm’, com-
municate or relay an attitude, an aisthesis rather than a thesis.67
In sum then, we will not speak for the philosophy in cinema (or
any art, viewed immanently) by speaking of it directly (representing
it and so transcending it). We can only relay an attitude, a suggested
reviewing of this art as philosophy, while hopefully not reducing it to
ready-made concepts (be they philosophy’s or anyone else’s – including
even Bergson’s or Laruelle’s). A reverse mutation (reversion to the ‘wild

type’) that alters our vision, the one that Laruelle’s Théorie des Identités
describes as ‘more than an enlargement of the detail and a variation of
the optical field’ but also as a ‘mutation in the conditions themselves of
the “optic” of thought’.68
The democratisation of philosophy, at least with respect to the arts,
can mean various things. For non-philosophers in art, though, first and
foremost it must mean that any art can be philosophy, and equally so.
Yet if that idea only entails any art being philosophical ‘with specific
reference to philosophy = x’, then even this thesis is also reductive, no
matter how broad or plural ‘x’ may be. Being ‘sayable’ or ‘philosophis-
able’ at all with one or many ready-made concepts brings nothing new
with it. If instead, this democratisation means being philosophical
‘through art understood as a reverse mutation of what philosophy
is qua gesture/suggestion’ (non-standard philosophy or PwS), then it
equally follows that philosophy too = a general aisthesis (through sug-
gestion, gesture, attitude, posture, or image, but always understood as
convergent action). Art is philosophy just and only when philosophy is
art. Indeed, though Bergson and Laruelle place the emphasis differently
– Bergson focusing on philosophy as a generic art, and Laruelle making
each of the arts (non-standardly) philosophical – the two processes nec-
essarily complement each other to create a flat, democratic thought.69
If Bergson’s PwS is an ‘art of the people’, such gestural, non-standard
philosophy is also an art-form, but one that acts equally on all our
faculties and hence all possible art-objects (that is, the world), imma-
nently and at once, so that art’s being-philosophical is equally realised.
Such a democracy is achieved through reverse mutation – an ‘under-
understanding’ or PwS – acting on philosophy and art simultaneously.
The mutation, therefore, is of both the so-called subject (philosophy)
and object (art), being ‘object-oriented’ and ‘subject-oriented’ at once
because the mutation re-orients thought-as-an-orientation (what was
directed from concepts to things reverses to being directed from things
to concepts). There are only directions, orientations, or vectors. Hence,
again, there would be no one such thing as ‘metaphysics’, but rather as
many different kinds of metaphysics as there are objects in becoming.
Philosophy is process, is the event of transformation: when the object
mutates, there is the moment of philosophy, the intuition, the reflexive-
feeling when the thing-within-us starts to think, as us. The effort of
intuition is the effort of the ‘thing’ as well as the so-called ‘thinker’,
the ‘object’ and the ‘subject’, re-integrating each other through move-
ment.70 The effort of attention – a tension suggested through gestural
thought, or PwS – is philosophy becoming art/thing/object as well as
vice-versa in mutual mutation. An emergent philosophy that tries to

change us and our ways of seeing, but not by showing us anything
directly.
This (non-standard) philosophy is the most democratic art – the
specific arts themselves being philosophical without being spoken for
(sayable) or represented. This philosophy – on account of reverse-
mutating (‘integrating’) towards a PwS of gesture, of de-monstration
or un-showing showing – merely places or orients (us) towards the
attitude needed to make the effort of attention that might then see art-
as-philosophy. But to show art as existing philosophy, with a recognis-
able set of extant philosophical terms, would be to reduce it to that one
image. The multitude, the plural images, by a ‘convergence’ of their
‘action’ direct, index, or vectorise – but they do not directly show. They
direct to show, or direct such that the art might show itself to/with the
subject in a new ‘degree’ of attention/tension, a duration that concen-
trates (with effort) their relation such that what was once two practices
exterior to each other, ‘philosophy’ plus ‘art’, are no longer so: their
spatial dis-unity becomes a temporal continuity of varying degrees
of attention/tension. The images’ convergence point de-monstrates or
‘points’ (ostensive images or gestures) as a means and without an end.
They de-philosophise philosophy in the sense of making philosophy
strange, reverse mutating it into the Real, integrating it within duration.
This would be Bergson’s ‘penser en durée’, the immanent thinking-in-
time that makes philosophy a generic art and the arts specific, new,
philosophies.71
NOTES
hardback edition, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1946), p. 35.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
29. Ibid., pp. 13–14, my emphasis.

30. The reference to ‘analytical’ here is not meant to be identified exclusively
with Anglo-American philosophy, but to a form ubiquitous in all philo-
sophical cultures.
31. Ibid., p. 19.
32. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 192–3 (emphases added). See also: ‘in
using the intellect to transcend the intellect, we find ourselves turning in a
real circle, that which consists in laboriously rediscovering by metaphysics
a unity that we began by positing a priori, a unity that we admitted blindly
and unconsciously by the very act of abandoning the whole of experience
to science and the whole of reality to the pure understanding’ (Bergson,
Creative Evolution, p. 208).
35. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, pp. 11, 55.
36. François Laruelle, Le Concept de non-photographie/The Concept of Non-
Photography (Bilingual Edition), trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth/New
York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011), p. 12.
37. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, p. 57. See also p. 58: ‘The photographic prepara-
tion is positional and technological and therefore must be able to be inter-
preted in terms of vectors. These take the shape of geometrical, postural,
relational, positional variables within the space of the world.’
(New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 21 (first italics mine).
39. Ibid., pp. 20–1.
40. Ibid., p. 100.
41. Ibid., pp. 133–4 (emphasis added).
43. Ibid., p. 304 n. 14.
44. Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wilson Carr
(Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), pp. 56–9.
45. Should such an amplification of the neurological be deemed anthropomor-
phic is a debatable point, given that anthropomorphism can be understood
as a reciprocal process, rather than simply a one-way projection (think
only of the ‘Chinese Brain’ thought experiment in the philosophy of mind
which, in a prefiguring of the internet, likened a vast population of elec-
tronically intercommunicating individuals to the interacting neurons of a
brain: see Ned Block, ‘Troubles with Functionalism’, Minnesota Studies in
The Philosophy of Science, Vol. 9 [1978], pp. 261–325). On two-way or
‘complete’ anthropomorphism, see John Mullarkey, ‘The Tragedy of the
Object’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 17, No. 4
(2012), pp. 39–59.
46. See Paisley Livingston, ‘Theses on Cinema as Philosophy’, in Murray
Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg, eds, Thinking Through Cinema: Film
as Philosophy (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006),
pp. 11–18; and Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking

Images (London: Continuum Press, 2011), pp. 90 ff on this.
47. See John Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of
Reality (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010).
48. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 380, 384. See Howard Caygill’s essay
on Bergson’s concept of ‘hyperaesthesia’ in this volume, to see how far
Bergson can take this notion of ‘detail’.
50. See John Mullarkey, ‘Temple Grandin’s Animal Thoughts: On Non-
Human Thinking in Pictures, Films, and Diagrams’, in Kristof Nyiri and
Andras Benedek, eds, Images in Language: Metaphors and Metamorphoses
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 155–68; and Mullarkey, ‘The
Tragedy of the Object’.
51. The notion of background becomes even more crucial in Matter and
Memory as it becomes a material analogue for the virtual itself, a ‘series
of objects simultaneously set out in space’ behind me, such as when I walk
from one room to another (Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 145).
52. See Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History
of Cinema’, in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books,
2007), pp. 93–4. Agamben’s analyses of cinema indicate a nostalgia for
‘the homeland of gesture’: see Benjamin Noys, ‘Gestural Cinema? Giorgio
Agamben on Film’, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 22 (2004), available
at http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8–2004/n22noys (accessed 2 April
2013). But they are also a political and ethical call for a future cinema
that reconfigures the relationship between image and gesture. For him,
the moving image as gesture has the power to liberate the cinematic
from the last traces of a static image. See also Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes
on Gesture’, in Means Without End, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp.
49–62: p. 53: ‘In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at
once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss.’ For an overview of
the importance of gesture in early cinema, see Pasi Valiaho, Mapping the
Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema Circa 1900 (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2010), pp. 25–52.
53. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Author as Gesture’, in Agamben, Profanations, p. 66;
Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, p. 58.
54. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 162, translation modified.
55. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, p. 62. Laruelle also wishes to change the ‘syntax’
(‘arrange together’) of any language that would speak about the Real,
transforming its syntax into what we might call now a ‘uni-tax’, where we
speak and think ‘alongside’ or ‘according to’ the Real. This re-orientation
to the Real is also to the One, the ‘uni-versal’ (turned to the One): see
John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London:
Continuum, 2006), pp. 140–2.
56. Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, p. 62.
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:
Laruelle and Non-Human Philosophy, forthcoming. Mutations occur

through reversal and as reversal. This biological model can also work as
an analogue for ‘logical’ recursiveness, or self-reference, especially when it
leads to paradox. To undo the paradox, the self-referred-to must mutate,
or ramify, into different types. Our own statements in this paragraph are
already paradoxical in this fashion: the demand not to reduce ‘to ready-
made concepts (be they philosophy’s or anyone else’s – including even
Bergson’s or Laruelle’s)’, is made in the name of Bergson’s or Laruelle’s
ideas. But what type of demand is it, what type of saying or para-saying
(para-doxa), and so what type or version of Laruelle and Bergson is being
invoked here?
69. The origins of their different emphases stem from the fact that Bergson,
remaining a philosopher in name, wants to redeem philosophy within an
immanent metaphysics, while Laruelle, as a self-styled outsider, wants to
review the historical content of philosophy as only one form of material-
ised thought.
70. See also Mullarkey, ‘The Very Life of Things’. See also Anne-Françoise
Schmid’s work on ‘integrative objects’ (which is also influenced by
Laruelle) in Anne-Françoise Schmid, ‘The Science-Thought of Laruelle
and its Effects on Epistemology’, in Mullarkey and Smith, eds, Laruelle
and Non-Philosophy, pp. 122–42; and Anne-Françoise Schmid, Muriel
Mambrini-Doudet and Armand Hatchuel, ‘Une nouvelle logique de
l’interdisciplinarité’, Nouvelles Perspectives en Sciences Sociales, Vol. 7,
No. 1 (2011), pp. 105–36.
13. The Untimeliness of
Bergson’s Metaphysics:
Reading Diffractively
IRIS VAN DER TUIN
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
sion’.5 Bergson invites us to start from other acts for philosophical

purposes.
Distinguishing acting freely from automaton-mode, Bergson hints at
interference patterns or ‘diffraction’ as a tool to think with. In physical
terms, such patterns describe how waves react when they encounter
each other or an obstacle. Having said that, Donna Haraway and Karen
Barad have introduced diffraction to feminist studies in an attempt to
invent a novel methodology of relating to texts; their productive dimen-
sion should not be undone (as in a subjective comparison, for example).6
Taking full advantage of diffraction for feminist philosophy, they did
not refer to Bergson. In this chapter I will unearth where diffraction
appears in the work of Bergson, so as to bring it together with dynamic
ontology and feminist epistemology. Furthermore, reading the work
of Haraway and Barad through Bergson demonstrates how Bergson’s
philosophy can be made productive for feminism, and leads to insights
into the work of these more contemporary theorists. Following diffrac-
tion and the practice of ‘reading diffractively’, our discussion will hinge
on the temporality of dynamic onto-epistemology. I will argue that,
while diffraction disrupts the spatialised interpretation of time that
Bergson’s oeuvre labours over (in order to realise a conceptualisation
of ‘duration’), it can also disrupt any linear reception. The latter break-
through is advantageous. The contemporary feminist interpretation of
Bergson is, at times, unnecessarily narrow. This does a disservice to the
movement that is constitutive of Bergson’s philosophy and the critical
creativity of feminist thought.
DIFFRACTION AND INTERFERENCE PATTERNS

IN BERGSON
Let me extend Bergson’s example. On Saturday mornings I may allow
myself to stay in bed for a while. Eyes closed, no glasses. I hear the bus
pass by. I stumble upon a conversation I had last night. I am anxious
about the trip to the North that I will have to make later in the weekend.
Hearing the clock strike 7 a.m., ‘I might receive this impression [with
my entire soul] as Plato says; I might let it blend with the confused
mass of impressions which fill my mind.’7 On a Saturday, the sound of
seven does not hit a solidified coupling with an established idea. But
in this situation, hearing the clock strike the familiar hour of 7:30 will
‘disturb . . . my whole consciousness like a stone which falls into the
water of a pond’.8 Staying put on Saturday mornings, I experience my
deepest self. But the possibility of the habitual morning routine is now
interfering because clock time does not determine me to act in this case.
Bergson affirms ‘that we generally perceive our own self by refraction

through space, that our conscious states crystallize into words, and
that our living and concrete self thus gets covered with an outer crust
of clean-cut psychic states, which are separated from one another and
consequently fixed’.9 The actuality of this most common self-perception
conceals our conception of the free act as much as it disguises our sense
of self. And here we find that each singular Bergsonian dislocation
(durational temporality over spatialised time, inner states over lan-
guage, and process over aggregation) is at work in the now-significant
event of getting up freely.
It has been argued that one stone falling into the water of a pond
does not make an interference pattern.10 The stone produces a single
series of waves circling into infinity. Even in this picture, however, dif-
fraction is at work and we can be most certain that, at some point, the
pattern of circling waves will be disturbed by a fixed or floating object
(a fountain in the middle of the pond, a dead leaf floating on its surface)
or it will hit another pattern of waves (generated by the leaf that has
just fallen off a tree). Still quivering because of the sound of 7:30, I can
now be repeatedly disturbed: by hearing the loud horn of the bus, or by
the tender smell of coffee. It is in this way that we can read Bergson’s
famous circles of memory as an interference pattern. And indeed, also
in Time and Free Will, Bergson alludes to such a pattern when suggest-
ing that a dynamic approach to reality embraces a certain complexity
as simple:
[Contrary to mechanism] dynamism is not anxious so much to arrange the
notions in the most convenient order as to find out their real relationship:
often, in fact, the so-called simple notion – that which the believer in mecha-
nism regards as primitive – has been obtained by the blending together of
several richer notions which seem to be derived from it, and which have
more or less neutralized one another in this very sense of blending, just as
darkness may be produced by the interference of two lights.11
It is the latter use of diffraction that informs my reading of the circles
of memory, albeit that the example of darkness has become stuck to the
determinacy paradigm of classical physics. What is important here is
that a dynamic ontology (complexity) does not allow for a retrograde
movement to be made because it positions itself before a representa-
tion (or a simple notion) has captivated us. We are no longer obliged
to believe in the instantaneous truth of the sentence ‘it is dark’. We are
to inquire whether two light beams might be out of phase, producing a
sense of darkness in their interference. Quantum physics would unpack
this notion further; there are deeper oscillations at work not allowing
themselves to be captured by such a one-and-one-is-two scenario.
Bergson opens his discussion of the circles of memory in Matter and

Memory by discussing the work of Théodule Ribot. The work of this
French psychologist is as useful as it is in need of ‘rewriting’.12 Bergson
takes up Ribot’s work in order ‘to define attention as an adaption of
the body rather than of the mind’.13 But since Ribot describes attention
along the lines of the negative, stating that attention implies ‘an inhibi-
tion of movement, an arresting action’,14 Bergson extends attention to
the positive, concentrating on the fact that ‘upon this general attitude,
more subtle movements will soon graft themselves, . . . all of which
combine to retrace the outlines of the object perceived’.15 Positioning
himself according to this particular embodied a priori, attention is
‘continued by memories’.16 Attention does not involve a zooming in of
the perceiving mind that comes to a standstill, implying the perception
of a fully delineated object outside of itself, but a careful attending of
the body, working out ‘a solidarity between the mind and its object,
. . . a circuit so well closed, that we cannot pass to states of higher
concentration without creating, whole and entire, so many new circuits
which envelop the first and have nothing in common between them but
the perceived object’.17 These circuits include diffractions that have a
productive effect:
reflective perception is a circuit, in which all the elements, including the
perceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an
electric circuit, so that no disturbance starting from the object can stop on its
way and remain in the depths of the mind: it must always find its way back
to the object whence it proceeds.18
Perception, then, is reflective precisely because, though seemingly
external, it instantly motivates memory to reflect upon the perception
of its image, memory-images of the same kind, or deeper, more distant
regions of memory.19 This is a process that stretches out into infinity,
since every doubling of the perception evokes new memories, allowing
pure memory to grow, that is, to be the storehouse of an ever growing
repertoire of images. I must note that the many perceptions that are
made habitually, for instance during the morning chores, do not make
it to this storehouse. They are not ‘the projection, outside ourselves, of
an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object on
which it comes to mould itself’.20 This is why I only notice in class that
I wear my acetate glasses and not my other pair. In class, and not at
home, these glasses produce a stir, which sets the machinery of attentive
perception in motion.
Bergson’s discussion of the circles of memory continues with a
discussion of the memory cone. This discussion makes the distinction
between habitual and free actions precise; it affirms that there are two
interconnected memories. The first (habit) consists of ‘nothing else but

the complete set of intelligently constructed mechanisms which ensure
the appropriate reply to the various possible demands’, thus, ‘it acts
our past experience but does not call up its image’.21 The second (pure
memory) is ‘truly moving in the past and not, like the first, in an ever
renewed present’.22 The seeming disjunction between the two and the
movement that is constitutive of the second can explain why I am so
disturbed by the sound of 7:30, the horn of the bus, or the smell of
coffee on Saturday morning. Experiencing my deepest self, these unre-
alised images have a localising effect, whereas
this special image which persists in the midst of the others, and which I call
my body, constitutes at every moment . . . a section of the universal becom-
ing. 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 the things upon which I act – the seat, in a word, of the sensori-motor
phenomena.23
The summit S of the inverted cone of memory, which is ‘the image of
the body’, coincides with the ever-moving plane P ‘of my actual repre-
sentation of the universe’.24 There is an unceasing traffic between the
summit and the base of the cone (AB), which is ‘the totality of the recol-
lections accumulated in my memory’, also continually in movement.25
This memory cone demonstrates how true memory is the base of habit,
too, as ‘it is from the present that comes the appeal to which memory
responds, and it is from the sensori-motor elements of present action
that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life’.26 (See Figure
10.3 in Simon O’Sullivan’s chapter, ‘A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite
Relation’, for an illustration of the memory cone.)
Again working from an embodied a priori rather than allowing for
a retrograde movement to be made, Bergson gives this bidirectional
traffic between the two memories priority; ‘within the cone so deter-
mined the general idea oscillates continually between the summit S and
the base AB’.27 Bergson laments ideas that are not ‘incorporated in the
fluid mass of our conscious states’, ideas that ‘float on the surface, like
dead leaves on the water of a pond’.28 These are the ready-made social
ideas that we are obliged to function with, just like we are sometimes
obliged to get up at a certain hour. The discussion of these ideas has
an important bearing on diffraction. And indeed, in the case of ‘an idea
which is truly ours [that] fills the whole of ourself’,29 ‘we are not in fact
dealing here with an idea, but with a movement of ideas, with a struggle
or with an interference of ideas with one another’,30 as Bergson contin-
ues in the essay ‘Intellectual Effort’ collected in Mind-Energy.
DIFFRACTION AND DIFFRACTIVE READING IN

HARAWAY AND BARAD
Haraway was the first to specify the potentials of diffraction for
feminist theory and methodology. Her seminal book on feminist and
technoscientific practices – Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium –
adds diffraction to the toolbox of semiotics (which consists of syntax,
semantics and pragmatics) in order to affirm how ‘interference patterns
can make a difference in how meanings are made and lived’.31 Taking
further advantage of the utopian dimension of her work on ‘cyborgs’
and ‘situated knowledges’, Haraway invents diffraction as a tool for a
past-present-future relationality around the theme of difference which
is not linear or spatialised, thus approaching the Bergsonian theme of
the temporality of free (and bound) acts as well as social (here: power-
laden) ideas. Working with the paintings and expository words of Lynn
Randolph, Haraway affirms that ‘diffraction is a narrative, graphic,
psychological, spiritual, and political technology for making conse-
quential meanings’.32 With this, Haraway comes close to Bergson’s phi-
losophising about self-perception and his dynamic ontology as a whole.
According to Randolph, ‘every woman’ is situated on a brink that is
constantly on the move. This image of a singular woman, itself made
up of ‘multiple selves’ whilst being ‘one body’, travels through time in
a state of being marked by ‘the screened memory of a powerful male
figure’. This screened memory ‘marks a place where change occurs’.
This change is a diffraction ‘occur[ing] at a place at the edge of the
future, before the abyss of the unknown’.33 The image of woman as
metaphorically material is for once confirmed with the tool of diffrac-
tion.34 Qualitatively shifting the feminist critique of the denigrating,
sexist gesture of naturalising women by making sure that they are
and will remain their bodies only, bodies that have to live up to social
images of beauty,35 this body is no longer the body that is successfully
administered by patriarchy, where process installs the powerful male
figure as a mental origin that oppresses woman through sexist imagery
and the woman as a physical origin that gives birth to and arouses men.
The body as itself an image incorporates images of patriarchy, repro-
duction and male lust, of feminism, generativity and female desire as
constantly changing ‘with age and psychic transformations’.36
Whereas Bergson does not explicitly start from woman as an image,
the body or matter, for him too, is ‘an aggregate of “images” ’ whereby
images are at the same time more than representations and less than
things.37 Transversing thingification and representationalism, both acts
of spatialising time, Bergson defines ‘that which is given’ as ‘the totality
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
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
nothing to say to quantum physics based on their understandings of

position and momentum. In addition, quantum physics embraces the
key role of the physical research set-up in all this, which has comple-
mentary epistemological and ontological consequences that form the
basis of Barad’s onto-epistemology. What we find is that the traditional
correspondence theory of truth which stands at the basis of classical
physics (that the researcher is positioned outside of her research object
and the instrument is but a neutral mediator) is being reworked along
the lines of a co-responsive theory that allows for researcher, instru-
ment and researched to be active and entangled agents.52 This is just
like Bergson’s affirmation of a solidarity between mind and object, and
‘advocates [for] different types of reality (static and mobile) and so dif-
ferent types of concept to correspond with these realities’.53
Without going into the curious and ambiguously received discus-
sion between Bergson and Albert Einstein about (the philosophy of)
physics,54 it is important to be aware of the fact that Bergson produced
his works from the brink of classical and quantum physics with Barad’s
main interlocutor Niels Bohr, among others, playing a key role in the
debate. This debate, as a whole, ‘forced into discussion a number of
philosophical questions (concerning causality, indeterminacy, and the
limits of knowledge) that Bergson had raised philosophically through
the notion of duration since the late 1880s’.55 In addition, we must
see that ‘today, if one accepts the analysis of [Isabelle] Stengers and
[Ilya] Prigogine, whose collective work comes close to the work of
Barad, Bergson’s conception of time has won out in the debate among
physicists’.56
So where does the interference pattern come in? Twice in this chapter
we have encountered the image of ‘the water of a pond’. First, this
image was evoked very positively, as an image of my whole conscious-
ness being disturbed by a certain impression. The positivity, here, stems
from what such an image can do: it allows us to reach the faculty of
intuition. In the second instance, Bergson wrote in an almost mournful
manner about ‘dead leaves on the water of a pond’. This lamentation
stems from ideas that block methodological intuition: ideas received
in ready-made format cannot but effect the retrograde movement that
forms the basis of analysis. The fragment from Time and Free Will that
features the dead leaves nevertheless also features diffraction. Let me
provide a lengthy quotation from it:
the impulsive zeal with which we take sides on certain questions shows how
our intellect has its instincts – and what can an instinct of this kind be if not
an impetus common to all our ideas, i.e. their very interpenetration? The
beliefs to which we most strongly adhere are those of which we should find
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
This fragment makes use of the differentiation we have already stum-

bled upon in the discussion of the paradigms of classical and quantum
physics. Bergson makes use of the two paradigms and the confusion
surrounding them in an attempt to make the life of ideas precise.
Associationism, he claims, does not reach the inner life of ideas; by
seeing ideas as cells and thus making epistemological use of position (a
spatialisation), it is at most able to speak of ideas that affect the deepest
self and the deepest self that affects ideas. This thinking is structurally
related to what classical physics is capable of. Displacing association-
ism in his own work, Bergson sees ideas that are truly ours as ‘fill[ing]
the whole of ourself’ and as ‘incorporated in the fluid mass of our
conscious states’. Working his way around the classical problem of the
disjunction between waves and particles, Bergson allows for certain
circumstances to be in need of particle images (ready-made concepts,
social ideas) and for others to necessitate wave metaphors (fluid con-
cepts, our own ideas). Associationism, like certain ways of life, is an
apparatus in the Baradian sense: it is part of the reality with which we
are entangled. Exemplars, retrograde movements, intuitive metaphys-
ics, the psychologist, the philosopher are entangled.
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
us see kindred ties to today’s contradictory feminist reception of

Bergson.
The contemporary feminist reception of the philosophy of Bergson
demonstrates two trends. First, scholars like Olkowski and Elizabeth
Grosz read Bergson closely and affirmatively. In Time Travels, in
particular, Grosz explains that this way of reading entails ‘a mode of
assenting to rather than dissenting from those “primary” texts’.59 Grosz
explicates how a critical rendering of texts, a gesture that is an analyti-
cal distancing act Bergson has argued, functions ‘as a form of dismissal
of texts, rather than as an analysis of the embeddedness of critique in
that which it criticizes’.60 Reading closely and affirmatively does not
allow for leaving a text unaffected, it requires a text’s readers to engage
with the transformation.61 In other words, assenting to philosophical
texts does not mean that the texts are solely celebrated. It is a moving
away from the tendencies to either critique Bergson or to read his work
only celebratorily – the two sides of the same analytical coin. Grosz’s
methodology is innovative. In her own affirmative readings of Bergson,
however, a disjunction between Bergson and feminism is still found.
It is only after Bergson has been discussed in depth that the reading is
affirmatively applied to feminist theory and politics.
Secondly, there is Rebecca Hill, who, in two recent articles, has
commented on the phallocentrism (and Eurocentrism) that, she claims,
is constitutive of the philosophy of Bergson. Bergson, in her reading,
offers a phallocentric philosophy because ‘his intuition of the enduring
self is elaborated within restrictively masculine parameters’.62 First,
she sees his work as dualist, whereas the sexist hierarchy that admin-
isters all dualism is not addressed. Second, she argues that ‘Bergson’s
celebrated monistic integration of the divergent tendencies of life and
matter maintains this sexed hierarchy’.63 In doing so, Bergson’s work
is said to propose yet another ‘hypermasculine theory of life and cor-
responding devaluation of matter as feminine’.64 Even though Hill
asserts that ‘this is not a binary hierarchy because Bergson’s concepts of
life and matter are never actualised as pure activity and pure space’,65
she does claim that ‘we would do better to reconsider the life-matter
relation beyond dualism’.66 Most Bergson scholars, including feminist
ones, argue that this is what Bergson does, not by repeating dualism,
but by having ‘pushed dualism to an extreme’.67
Hill is also critical of the feminist reception of Bergson offered by
Grosz and Olkowski. They are said to have affirmed the feminist ben-
efits of Bergson much too fast on the basis of links between Bergson and
sexual difference theory, found because Bergson and Luce Irigaray both
theorise ‘duration’ and ‘the interval’, the former being non-spatialised
time and the latter the shifting of a utilitarian relationality between

living beings and things.68 Hill asserts that a complicating move is
necessary, and she makes use of the work of Irigaray to try to alter
Bergson’s presumed phallocentrism, in turn, making Bergson poten-
tially valuable to Irigaray scholarship. Whereas this move sounds dif-
fractive rather than critical, Hill’s conclusions show the text of Bergson
left untouched, as she concludes by ascribing a failure to qualitatively
shift spatialisation to Bergson69 on the basis of a residual, sexed hierar-
chy. Obviously, this leads her to conclude that Bergson’s metaphysics
is not monistic.
What can diffraction do in order to help make up our minds about
contemporary feminism and the admittedly disconcerting work of
Hill? First, diffractive reading embarks on Grosz’s call for running
with the transformation of texts. Going with this flow is Bergsonian, as
Bergson has suggested, and, as noted above, ‘it is not enough to deter-
mine, by careful analysis, the categories of thought; we must engender
them’.70 Hill’s call of phallocentrism, therefore, appears as a stale-
mated category and does not bring feminist philosophy any further.
Hill’s analysis comes out as strangely disconnected from the persistent
gendering of an intuitive metaphysics which has been connoted as
feminine based on its anti-Cartesianism and supposed spiritualism.71 It
cannot be overemphasised that Hill also attacks an older generation of
feminist philosophers, which leaves her pretty much empty-handed.72
Second, diffraction comes in as useful as it makes Bergson’s work
precise. Bergson makes use of metaphors of ‘reflection’, metaphors that
Haraway and Barad have argued convincingly are dualist and not living
up to the expectations of Bergson’s own ‘fluid concepts, capable of fol-
lowing reality in all its windings and of adopting the very movement
of the inner life of things’.73 Whereas Bergson has argued consistently
and convincingly against representationalism, ‘reflective perception’ is
a suggestive concept for which diffraction has a lot to offer. Bergson’s
work, which works on the instantaneity of perception, memory and
object, gains by making explicit that it does not suggest ‘hold[ing] the
world at a distance’.74
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.
4. Ibid.
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).
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 167.
10. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp. 80–1.
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).
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.
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.
38. Ibid., p. 30.

39. Ibid.
40. Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 96.
41. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 71.
42. Bernard Pullmann cited in Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An
Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2006), p. 40. See Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and
Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime
Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come’, Derrida Today, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2010),
p. 252.
44. Ibid., p. 115.
45. Ibid., p. 168.
46. See Iris Van der Tuin, ‘ “A Different Starting Point, A Different
Metaphysics”: Reading Bergson and Barad Diffractively’, Hypatia: A
Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2011), pp. 22–42;
and Aud Sissel Hoel and Iris van der Tuin, ‘The Ontological Force of
Technicity: Reading Cassirer and Simondon Diffractively’, Philosophy &
Technology (forthcoming).
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., p. 74.
50. Ibid., p. 80.
51. Ibid., p. 83.
52. See Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Tim Ingold, ‘Toward an Ecology of
Materials’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 41 (2012), pp. 427–42.
53. John Mullarkey, ‘Introduction: la philosophy nouvelle, or Change in
Philosophy’, in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 11.
54. Many Bergson scholars have affirmed that Einstein remained within the
classical understanding of linear time and causal determinacy (see for
example Timothy S. Murphy, ‘Beneath Relativity: Bergson and Bohm
on Absolute Time’, in Mullarkey, The New Bergson, p. 70; and Guerlac,
Thinking in Time, p. 40 n. 83).
55. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, p. 38.
56. Ibid., p. 199.
57. Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 134–5.
58. Richard A. Cohen, ‘Philo, Spinoza, Bergson: The Rise of an Ecological
Age’, in Mullarkey, The New Bergson, p. 22.
59. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005), p. 3.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 2.
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.
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).
14. Hyperaesthesia and the
Virtual
HOWARD CAYGILL
. . . we perceive virtually many more things than we perceive actually, and

that here again the role of our body is to separate from consciousness all of
that which we sense to be of no practical interest, all that which does not
lend itself to our action. (Bergson, ‘Fantômes de vivants’)1
Bergson’s conviction that we perceive much more than our con-
sciousness allows us to perceive is central to his understanding of the
virtual. This enigmatic part played by the virtual in Bergson’s theory
of perception receives its compelling quality from the confluence of a
philosophical interest in Leibniz’s monadology and its theory of petits
perceptions, with a parapsychological inquiry into the phenomenon of
‘hyperaesthesia’ or states of extreme perception. The latter are charac-
terised by a high intensity of perception – mainly but not exclusively
visual perception – that becomes manifest in pathological contexts
where conciousness and the habits of daily life are suspended. Already
at Clermont-Ferrand in the 1880s Bergson’s teaching of Leibniz allowed
him to situate the hyperaesthesia he encountered in his experiments
with hypnotism within a broader theory of perception which was at
the same time confirmed by his experiments.2 Leibniz’s theory of petits
perceptions and the experimental encounter with hyperaesthetic states
allowed Bergson to frame the argument – altogether at odds with the
Cartesian tradition – that conscious perception is above all the outcome
of limitation. The conviction that consciousness entailed limitation led
Bergson to pursue a theory of expanded perception, framed temporally
in terms of durée in Time and Free Will but thereafter consistently in
terms of hyperaesthesia and the virtual.
The relation between hyperaesthesis and the virtual points to a dif-
ferent understanding of Bergson’s theory of perception than that which
has largely prevailed in interpretations of his work. It can, for example,
be distinguished from Deleuze’s influential understanding of intuition
247
as method in Bergsonism, a method that impels ‘us to go beyond the

state of experience towards the conditions of experience’.3 According
to this view, the determination of a ‘line of articulation’ pushes ‘each
line beyond the turn, to the point where it goes beyond our own experi-
ence: an extraordinary broadening out that forces us to think a pure
perception identical to the whole of matter, a pure memory identical
to the whole of the past’.4 Following method as intuition requires us to
take from experience ‘a little light which shows us a line of articulation,
all that remains is to extend it beyond experience’.5 Contrary to this
view of intuition and its method as a forcing, hyperaesthesia shows us
that our experience is already always far beyond itself – it has no need
to be extended, but rather, for practical purposes, has to be restricted;
method consists less in pushing lines to their limits than in relaxing the
border controls of consciousness. We do not need to be ‘opened’ to ‘the
inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior
to our own)’ since the phenomenon of hyperaesthesia shows that we
are already within and beyond these durations.6 We do not so much
need a method in order to ‘broaden’ experience but rather procedures
that will exhibit and break down the conscious restrictions that limit
and distract it.
In departing from hyperaesthesia, Bergson in effect proposed the
actualisation of perception; from this point of view everything is already
and always perceived. This point of departure was then qualified by
the view that perceptions obstructing action had to be de-actualised
or consigned to the virtual. But with these steps the dominant modal
categories of possibility and necessity were definitively subordinated
to that of the actual. The priority of actuality relegates possibility and
necessity from their prominent place among the categories of modal-
ity, substituting for them the non-modal virtual. Deleuze’s perceptive
reading of Bergson’s exit from modality however limits itself by depart-
ing from the question: ‘Why does Bergson challenge the notion of the
possible in favour of that of the virtual?’7 His question and his answer
ignores the significance of hyperaesthesia and relies instead on a cri-
tique of a backward projection from the real to the pseudo actuality of
the possible: ‘We give ourselves a real that is ready-made, preformed,
pre-existent to itself, and that will pass into existence according to an
order of successive limitations. Everything is already completely given:
all of the real in the image, in the pseudo-actuality of the possible.’8
Yet with hyperaesthesia everything is actually given and only restricted
by consciousness and its modes of selective de-actualisation. While
Deleuze recognises that ‘the virtual as virtual has a reality; this reality
extended to the whole universe, consists in all the coexisting degrees of
Hyperaesthesia and the Virtual 249
expansion (détente) and contraction. A gigantic memory, a universal

cone in which everything coexists with itself, except for differences
of level’9 – he does not follow Bergson in regarding the ‘differences of
level’ as the effects of limitation and de-actualisation. He assumes that
the virtual has to be actualised, and is indeed actualised according to
lines of differentiation ‘some successive, some simultaneous’. Implied in
this position is a refusal of Bergson’s monadology: ‘For what coexisted
in the virtual ceases to coexist in the actual and is distributed in lines
and parts that cannot be summed up, each retaining the whole, except
from a certain perspective, a certain view.’10 But what if there is no
distribution in the actual, if there are no lines or parts and, furthermore,
that a perception of the the whole is always and already available
throughout the population of monads. This was the understanding of
the virtual elaborated by Bergson, one in whose formulation the dis-
covery and proof of the existence of hyperaesthesia played a vital role.
THE DISCOVERY AND PROOF OF

HYPERAESTHESIA
In the first of his contributions to the genre of the philosophical article
in which he excelled – ‘De la simulation inconsciente dans l’état
d’hypnotisme’ published in the Revue philosophique November 1886 –
Bergson reports on a series of experiments in hypnotism which led him
to the discovery of the phenomenon of hyperaesthesia. His narrative
begins like a short story by Edgar Allen Poe: ‘It was about two months
ago that I heard that an inhabitant of Clermont, M. V . . . had con-
ducted hypnotic experiments on young people of 15–17 years of age in
which he had obtained remarkable effects of mental suggestion.’11 Our
narrator goes on to describe a most curious and even perverse scene of
reading: ‘opening before their eyes a book of which they could glimpse
[apercevaient] only the cover, he was able to make them divine or read
the number of the page that he was looking at, even words, entire
lines’.12 But, Bergson adds, this feat was accompanied by occasional
errors of recognition and sequencing. Their curiosity aroused by this
mysterious phenomenon, Bergson and his colleague from the faculty of
sciences at the Academy of Clermont, a certain M. Robinet, set out with
the collaboration of M. V to find an explanation for this prodigy and to
refute any claim that it was due to the workings of mental suggestion.
The two investigators called in the four young people, hypnotised
them and then conducted a series of experiments. One of the subjects,
‘Young L’, who had a history of headaches, proved a particularly inter-
esting case. After hypnotising him, M. Robinet stood with his back to
a window and, opening a book at random, held it ten centimetres from

his eyes before asking Young L the number of the right page. After
being asked to move the book some centimetres to the left or right by
the subject, it became possible for the page number and text to be read.
All four subjects, when asked in their hypnotic trances how they were
able to read a number or word, replied ‘I see it’ and passing their hands
under the book touched exactly where they were reading. But when
asked to show the cover of the book, they once again touched the page,
proving that they assumed the book was open before them and the
cover in its proper place.
Bergson and Robinet were especially struck by the character of the
errors made by the experimental subjects. While the error in placing
the cover of the book behind what they thought in their hypnotic trance
was the open page facing them was cognitive, a matter of inference
from the fact of reading, there were also evident specific errors of per-
ception. These were manifest in the reading of sequences, exemplified
by the case of the subject P. who often reversed page numbers ‘saying
213 for 312 or 75 for 57 etc.’13 For Bergson and Robinet it was as if the
hypnotised subject ‘read everything correctly, but as if read in a mirror
where they had perceived symmetrical images of real objects’.14 From
this the investigators drew the startling conclusion that the reading took
place
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
This extraordinary deduction pointed to the existence of hyperaesthe-

sia, or the ability to perceive way beyond the limits of normal percep-
tion. Bergson comments that ‘there is nothing implausible about such a
hypothesis given the singular hyperaesthesis that one can confirm in the
case of hypnotic states . . .’.16 The first step following this insight was to
test the theory of mental suggestion by the simple expedient of the hyp-
notist closing his eyes and concentrating on remembering the page. The
subjects could no longer respond with any accuracy, thus refuting the
thesis of mental suggestion. Then the experimenters varied the lighting
and position of text and cornea in order to control the legibility of the
microscopic reflection, with results that corroborated the hypothesis.
In many ways the hypothesis of hyperaesthesia was even more
remarkable and its consequences more striking than that of mental
suggestion. Bergson and Robinet then decided to subject Young L to

a further experiment. Ideally they would have liked to reduce a page
photographically to about 1/33 of its size and to present that to the
hypnotised subject. But here the experiment met its technical limits; the
amateurs of Clermont-Ferrand did not have at their disposal ‘a photo-
graph of this sort’ but decided to test the ‘remarkable hyperaesthesia’ of
Young L with an expedient: ‘We showed him first of all a microscopic
photograph, representing the members of an English learned society.
This photograph was in the form of a rectangle of which the longer side
measured about 2mm; a dozen figures were shown seated or standing
around a table.’17 Bergson is referring to a genre of microscopic pho-
tography pioneered by J. B. Dancer in 1853 and popular in the latter
half of the nineteenth century; the subjects included Michelangelo’s
Last Judgement, ‘eminent men’, landmarks and group photographs
such as the one in Bergson and Robinet’s possession. It was a genre
that ‘remained popular until the 1890s when interest in them waned’.18
Bergson and Robinet put their possession to novel use. Showing it to
Young L under hypnosis without the aid of magnification and telling
him that its dimensions were those of a normal page, they found him
able to describe the microscopic figures in the photograph and even
to mime their gestures. Rifling through their collection of microscopic
photographs, the investigators landed on a botanical slide of the stained
cells of an orchid; on showing it unmagnified to Young L they found
that he was able to reproduce the hexagonal cells with a fair degree of
accuracy.
Bergson was astounded by the results of his experiments, finding the
evidence for hyperaesthesia more remarkable than the refutation of
‘mental suggestion’. He concluded that a hypnotised subject ‘uncon-
sciously put to work means of whose existence we hardly suspected, a
hyperaesthesia of vision for example or of all the other senses, and that
also unconsciously, we ourselves would have suggested this appeal to
illicit means when giving him an order incapable of being executed in
any other way’.19 It is a striking result in many respects. First of all, it
showed the existence of a hyperaesthesia, an ‘illicit means’ surround-
ing normal perception that became available when consciousness was
suspended through hypnosis. As opposed to the conclusions drawn by
fellow hypnotist Freud, Bergson did not interpret this as confirming
the existence of an unconscious, but rather as showing the limitations
applied to virtual perception by consciousness. It is also striking for the
use of photography and photographic technology to confirm the expe-
rience of hyperaesthesia, but perhaps also to suggest that technology
might release the potential of hyperaesthesia, an argument subsequently
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.
HYPERAESTHESIA AND ‘ATTENTION TO LIFE’

Why should consciousness set itself to limiting, even disabling percep-
tion? Bergson’s first attempt to explain the suppression of hyperaesthe-
sia appears two years after the report on the hypnotism experiments,
in his first book Time and Free Will. The celebrated opening claims
that ‘We express ourselves necessarily by words and we think most
frequently in space. In other words, language demands that we establish
between our ideas the same clear and precise distinctions, the same
discontinuity as between material objects.’20 The limitations of this
understanding of logos as spatialised thought and expression are traced
to considerations of utility and practical life. This thought develops the
suggestion in the hypnotism report that space is not a condition of per-
ception, specifically of visibility, but its restriction. By proposing that
we think durée and a logos oriented towards time, Bergson seeks to free
perception from the limitations imposed on it by consciousness. It is not
just durée that is limited by spatial thinking but a virtual hyperaesthesia
that can be released by challenging spatial with temporal thinking.
The opening analysis of the intensity of psychological states is con-
ducted within the horizon of the maximum intensity of hyperaesthesia.
Nevertheless, while the intensity of the hyperaesthetic life is inconsist-
ent with the limitations of the practical life, it nevertheless persists as a
condition for the distracted life of utility and spatial manipulation. It is
when the rule of the latter is challenged that perception and with it life
resumes its full intensity.
Underlying this view is a distinction between consciousness and
attention to life. The distinction is complicated by consciousness being
understood as a species of the genus ‘attention to life’, but Bergson
worked with a clear distinction between different types of attention
appropriate to different understandings of life: the conscious life of
perception limited in the interests of action, and the joyful life of

hyperaesthesia. This is stated in Leibnizian terms in the résumé of
Time and Free Will Bergson contributed to a discussion at La Société
Française de Philosophie, 3 March 1905. There he observed that ‘One
might say, speaking like Leibniz, that we have a confused perception
of the entire universe, but that our distinct perception limits itself to
those parts of the universe upon which we can exercise a more or less
immediate action. Physiological process designates precisely these pos-
sible actions.’21 Conscious, distinct perception consists in the selection
of those perceptions that accord with action, but this requires an act
of deliberate distraction, turning away from or de-actualisation of
the confused perception of the entire universe. The latter, however,
can be attended to without the brutal simplifications that correspond
to the range of possible actions. The one is the practical life of action
and manipulation while the other is the sphere of an ‘attention to life’
appropriate to the hyperaesthetic perception of the entire universe and
in accord with its primary cosmic function.
Hyperaesthesia plays an important role in the analysis of the ‘atten-
tion to life’ that is the main concern of Bergson’s second major work
Matter and Memory. Its presence is most emphatic in the first chapter
on the ‘selection of images’, in the monadological description of the
relations between body and the images that make up the universe.
Bergson’s reflections on how ‘dimension, form, the colour itself of
exterior objects modify themselves according to whether my body
approaches or distances itself from them’ seems to assume definite
limits to the body’s action on the universe of images.22 Yet this limita-
tion is immediately qualified in the provisional definitions of matter and
perception that follow: ‘I call matter, the set of images, and perception
of matter, these same images related to the possible action of a certain
determined image of my body.’23 The degree of perception or ‘attention
to life’ depends on the given image of the body, but this need not neces-
sarily be fixed in terms of the restrictions of the body image assumed in
the ‘idealist’ and ‘realist’ positions. Bergson avoids this limited view of
the body by approaching the problem of perception, that is to say, the
relation of body image to the set of images that make up the universe,
from the standpoint of hyperaesthesia.
By starting from the standpoint of hyperaesthesia Bergson is able
to accomplish a methodological innovation that consists in moving
from full to limited perception rather than the other way. That is, he
departs from an image of the body capable of perceiving the entire set
of images that make up the universe. Bergson sets out from the distinc-
tion between being and being-perceived: ‘It is true that an image can be
without being perceived; it can be present without being represented;

and the distance between these two terms, presence and representation,
seems precisely to measure the interval between matter itself and our
conscious perception.’24 This interval is usually considered from the
standpoint of consciousness, a position which assumes that represen-
tation adds to presentation: ‘If there is more in the second term than
in the first, if, in order to move from presence to representation it is
necessary to add something, the distance will remain intractable and
the passage from matter to perception will remain enveloped in an
impenetrable mystery.’25 If consciousness is considered to be augmenta-
tive, as it was from Descartes to Kant and beyond, then the relationship
between matter and perception in Bergson’s eyes must remain obscure.
However, if we start from hyperaesthesis and the view that conscious
perception is subtractive, then it becomes possible to imagine a very dif-
ferent relationship between the set of images that make up the universe
and the image of the body.
Bergson proposes precisely this inversion of method. If the relation
between matter and perception is intractable when we consider repre-
sentation as additive, this is not the case if we move from ‘the first term
to the second by way of diminution, regarding the representation of
an image as less than its mere presence; for thus it would suffice that
present images would be forced to abandon something of themselves
in order that their simple presence might be converted into repre-
sentation’.26 This conversion consists in a violent simplification, an
obscuring of a complex nexus of presence that is perceived virtually in
hyperaesthesia. Bergson’s method proposes that consciousness simpli-
fies, cuts and obscures the set of relations between images:
To transform its existence pure and simple into representation, it is enough
to suppress all at once that which follows, that which precedes, and also
that which surrounds, to keep only the external crust, the superficial film.
That which distinguishes it, the present image, the objective reality, from a
represented image, is the necessity from where it is to act through all of its
points on all the points of other images, to transmit the totality of all that
which it receives, to oppose to each action a reaction equal and opposed, to
be in short nothing other but a path along which passes in every sense the
modifications that propagate themselves throughout the universe.27
The hyperaesthetic body is such a ‘present image’ receiving the total-

ity in its full form rather than in representative forms as edited by
consciousness.
Bergson then draws out the Leibnizian source of his method in
Matter and Memory, but not before underlining some of its implica-
tions and the view that there is but a difference of degree and not nature
between presence and representation. If ‘the reality of matter consists in

the totality of its elements and of all their actions’ then our representa-
tion ‘is the result of the elimination of that which is of no interest to our
needs and more generally our functions’.28 Bergson leaves no doubt as
to the brutality of the ‘necessary poverty of our conscious perception’,
going so far as to insist that, ‘In a sense, one might say that the percep-
tion of some unconscious material point in its instantaneity is infinitely
more vast and complex than ours, for this point receives and transmits
the actions of all the points of the material world while our conscious-
ness rises to only certain parts of certain aspects.’29 The humiliation of
consciousness refers to its tendency to reduce to the point of elimination
all useless complexity; Bergson is, however, convinced that the phe-
nomenon of hyperaesthesia shows us that in receiving and transmitting
the entire universe we can vaunt ourselves as equal to any ‘unconscious
material point’.
Bergson then arrives at the direct citation of Leibniz and, through the
mobilisation of a complex photographic metaphor, achieves the linking
of hyperaesthesia and the virtual. He teasingly suggests that many of
the problems with which he is engaged issue from the metaphor
of the camera, that somehow ‘perception is like a photographic view
of things, taken from a fixed point with a special apparatus, namely
the organ of perception, and which develops itself subsequently in the
cerebral substance by means of I know not what processes of chemical
and psychic elaboration’.30 This view, recalling Locke’s closed room
criticised by Leibniz in the New Essays on Human Understanding, is
unacceptable to Bergson, but he does not respond by entirely rejecting
the photographic metaphor. Instead, he universalises it: ‘Why not see
that photography, if there is photography, is already taken, already
printed, in the interior itself of things and for all points of space?’31
Hyperaesthesia is in this way extended to the atomic structure of the
universe, with lines of force emanating from all points and in all direc-
tions linking together all the material points. Bergson concludes by
aligning this view with Leibniz, these photographic points that receive
and transmit the entire universe precisely describing the Leibnizian
monad: ‘With monads then? Every monad, as Leibniz maintained, is
the mirror of the universe.’32 Then, returning to the already seriously
distressed metaphor of photography, not only is every atom a camera
in which a photograph of the whole has already, hyperaesthetically
been taken, but in these cameras there is no film with which to take
or detach the image – the photograph is ‘translucent’. The screen of
consciousness serves as a ‘zone of indetermination’ which does not add
anything to perception but subtracts what is of utility – ‘real action’
leaving ‘virtual action’. After further discussion, Bergson arrives at

a provisional conclusion regarding perception, one that assumes the
primacy of hyperaesthesis: ‘That which you have thus to explain is
not how perception arises but how it limits itself, since it should be by
rights the image of the whole, and that it reduces in fact to that which
interests us.’33 With this reversal of method, regarding consciousness as
subtractive rather than augmentative, Bergson is able to open the view
to a virtual perception which consciousness devotes itself to restricting.
His method becomes one of investigating those moments when the
vigilance of consciousness is relaxed and full perception can emerge, as
in the case of the hypnotised subjects of Clermont-Ferrand.
Evidence for the blanking out or de-actualisation of vast areas of per-
ception by consciousness can be found in the traces of hyperaesthesia
that intrude from outside the limits of consciousness at those moments
when its vigilance is compromised. One of Bergson’s most sophisti-
cated inquiries into such intrusions is to be found in his Presidential
Address to the Society of Psychological Research in London on 28
May 1913. In the various versions of ‘Fantômes de vivant’ Bergson
opens his Presidential Address informally, deprecating himself before
the honour of being called to the presidency and joking at his and
at the expense of his audience interested in mysterious psychological
phenomena: ‘I suspect that there has been an effect of “clairvoyance”
or of “telepathy”, that you sensed from afar the interest that I took in
your investigations, that you perceived me four hundred miles away
reading your reports, following your work with an ardent curiosity.’34
Bergson revealingly inserts himself in the ranks of those who explore
parapsychological phenomena in the face of the hostility of the learned
world and refers to himself as a ‘sub lieutenant’ in the battles of psychic
research who spends his life recalling an earlier battle, in this case surely
his early research into hyperaesthesia.
‘Fantômes de vivant’ indeed continues and extends the notion of
hyperaesthesia and the thought that consciousness does not augment
the limits of perception but restricts and limits it. Bergson is prepared
to countenance an extreme extension of the limits of visibility, across
space and time. He looks at two examples of how a crisis in the habits
of practical life reveal a virtual hyperaesthesis. His most telling example
is the panoramic view of the past that is evoked in a moment of mortal
danger. This is not the spatialisation of time, but the phenomenon of
hyperaesthesia assuming its temporal dimension in memory. Bergson
begins with the assumption that ‘the past is conserved in its least details
and that there is no real forgetting’.35 He continues: ‘Our past is entirely
there, continually’, but that we cannot return to it ‘because our purpose
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
A new attention to life thus emerges, one not restricted to voluntary

action and oriented ahead, but which assumes the complex nexus of
past, present and future that constitutes the monad.
Bergson continues saying that the same holds for perception as for
memory, that hyperaesthesis and hypermnesia are conditions restricted
by consciousness in the interests of life. The organs of perception are
not translating material into psychic states, but serve rather to mutilate
hyperaesthesis in the interest of living; cerebral centres are in short
‘instruments of selection charged to choose in the immense field of our
virtual perceptions those which must be actualised’.38 Once again this
alignment of hyperaesthesis and the virtual is described with reference
to Leibniz: ‘Leibniz said that every monad and consequently, a fortiori,
every one of those monads he called spirits, carry within them the
conscious or unconscious representation of the totality of the real.’39
While Bergson disingenuously claims to his London audience that he
would ‘not go so far’, he does maintain, absolutely consistently, ‘that
we perceive virtually many more things than we perceive actually, and
that here again the role of our body is to separate from consciousness
all of that which we sense to be of no practical interest, all that which
does not lend itself to our action’.40 Indeed, in the transcript as opposed
to the published version Bergson is more audacious. He uses the notion
of a ‘field of consciousness’, phrasing the role of the body as separat-
ing ‘from the field of consciousness’, the same field into which ‘certain
useless or dream memories’ intrude during ‘moments of inattention to
life’ – ambassadors of the virtual into the field of actuality.
BERGSON’S LAST WORD

At the end of his last work, The Two Sources of Religion and Morality,
Bergson returns for a final reflection on the themes of hyperaesthesia,
the virtual and parapsychology that had occupied him since the begin-
ning of his philosophical career. This last time, however, he chose to
frame his thoughts in terms of technology, a factor that had always

been present in the guise of photography from the outset of his philo-
sophical and parapsychological investigations. The last of the ‘final
remarks’ that conclude The Two Sources of Religion and Morality
departs from the ‘talent for invention aided by science’ in order to
revisit, for the last time, the theme of the suppression of hyperaesthesia
accomplished by consciousness in the interest of action. Once again
it is ‘psychic research’ that allows access to the realm of the virtual
beyond consciousness, and Bergson seems to ask only that we accept
the vast terra incognita that it points to with an open mind. But there
is something more in these last lines, something that had always been
there. Bergson intimates that the life of action and utility preserved by
the ‘attention to life’ of consciousness can be succeeded by a new atten-
tion to life appropriate to hyperaesthesis and the virtual, an ‘attention
to life’ to which he gives the name ‘joy’. Such an attention to life, one
of hyperaesthesia, would free us from the limits of action and survival
and would bring the ‘refractory earth’ back in line ‘with the essential
function of the universe, which is a machine for making gods’.41
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.
Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 27.
4. Ibid.
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.
17. Ibid., p. 337.

18. See www.victorianmicroscopeslides.com/slidephot.htm (accessed 7
January 2013). My thanks to an anonymous member of the audience at
the Courtauld Institute for drawing my attention to the existence of this
genre of photography.
23. Ibid., p. 173.
24. Ibid., p. 185.
25. Ibid., p. 183.
26. Ibid., p. 185.
27. Ibid., p. 186.
28. Ibid., p. 188.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., p. 189.
32. Ibid., p. 188. In his Cours du College de France of 1904, Bergson refers
to Leibniz’s hyperaesthetic monads, this time identifying them with the
noeta of Plotinus and seeing in them a challenge to the theory of durée:
‘Suppose that a monad accepts an infinity of views, it would have all the
predicates at once, all perceptions. Time would become for it this immo-
bile reality, extended to the second power’ (Bergson, Mélanges, p. 378).
Bergson would indeed move towards the identification of hyperaesthesis
and hypermnesis threatened in this course.
35. Ibid., p. 872.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 873.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., p. 1245.
Afterword:
An Art Historical
Return to Bergson
JAE EMERLING
That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved by the existence . . .

of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception.1
What we’re after certainly isn’t any return to Freud or return to Marx.
Nor any theory of reading. What we look for in a book is the way it trans-
mits something that resists coding: flows, revolutionary active lines of flight,
lines of absolute decoding rather than any intellectual culture.2
‘A Return to Bergson’ is the title of Gilles Deleuze’s famous afterword

for the English translation of Bergsonism (1966). Written more than
twenty years after the book’s initial publication, the afterword is itself
another opening, another invitation to return to Bergson that extends
his project today. As Deleuze writes, this renewal or extension is under-
taken ‘in relation to the transformations of life and society, in parallel
with the transformation of science’.3 These well-known lines express
Deleuze’s methodology of ‘return’, his history of philosophy as repeti-
tion and masquerade. Hence his singular ‘Bergsonism’ is a method that
prioritises concepts inherent in Bergson’s own texts such as multiplic-
ity, the virtual, becoming and immanence; yet they are transformed in
Deleuze’s appropriation of them.4 What Deleuze demonstrated was
that a return neither recollects some putative origin nor shores up an
author-function. Instead, it always involves a radical untimeliness, an
event. Any return worth its salt ‘dissipates the temporal identity where
we like to look at ourselves to avoid the ruptures of history’.5 Deleuze’s
‘return’ to Bergson allowed him to render new lines of thought that tra-
versed the history of philosophy, offering alternatives to structuralism,
phenomenology and psychoanalysis.
So what kind of challenge is the call for an art historical return
to Bergson? First and foremost, it is a challenge to accept that there
has yet to be an art historical methodology that is truly Bergsonian.
Undoubtedly the first steps of such a visual, cultural, theoretical
260
Afterword 261
and historiographic ‘return’ to Bergson are to be found within this

anthology.6 Nonetheless, it remains evident that to date art historians
have disregarded the creative and transformative ‘Copernican turn’
Bergson’s work presents for any study of the relation between images
and time. Second, perhaps there are reasons for the blind-eye we
have turned to Bergson, who too often appears only in discussions of
simultaneity in Italian Futurism or histories of perception. Perhaps it is
because critical art historical practice, indelibly coloured by Frankfurt
School theory and poststructuralism, has been caught in a double-bind
of sorts: it is enthralled with psychoanalytic and Hegelian frameworks,
even as it simultaneously tries to extricate itself from these very frame-
works.7 Conversations about mnemonic traces, archival practices,
social history, the digital apotheosis, artistic survival, and melancholy
as a congenital discursive condition all involve psychoanalytic and
Hegelian modes. Simply put, they are renewed attempts to deal with
the presupposition that ‘art is a thing of the past’. This discursive con-
dition is only worsened by the persistent desire for Kunstwissenschaft,
the desire for art history to be a social science: objective, historicist,
transcendent, global.
These current debates over aesthetics and historiography evince that
we have become inattentive to the inseparable epistemic and aesthetic
effects of the image itself. As art historians work through their disil-
lusionment with the anti-aesthetics of postmodernism and a related
anxiety about a rearticulated formalism, Bergson awaits his untimely
return. This return can only transform our critical practices if we
reaffirm ‘the enormous influence Bergson has had on French art and
culture’ and do not shy away from the complications of Bergsonian aes-
thetics: we must ‘read Bergson anew as a contemporary’ rather than as
a ‘historical curiosity’.8 It is Bergson who haunts art history. So perhaps
now, as we consider affect theory, the reappearance of Aby Warburg’s
notion of Nachleben (survival), and neuro-aesthetics, art history – one
of the professional arts of memory, ‘one of a network of interrelated
institutions and professions whose overall function has been to fabri-
cate a historical past that could be placed under systematic observation
for use in the present’ – can become Bergsonian.9
So it is to the event of Bergson that we must turn. The event that
makes art historical language stutter by adding all of this foreign
language and inelegant phrasing to our discursive glossary: time as
duration? materiality begetting oblivion? passage as absolutely real
phenomenon? memory as an ontological ‘magnetiser’ (a shaping
force)? The Janus-face of Bergson: on the one side, the challenge ‘to
learn what a non-thinking body [an image, any nonlinguistic element]
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
never be recomposed with a series of presents since this would be to

negate its specific mode of being’.16 Memory and perception are thus
simultaneous rather than sequential. We can state with Bergson that
the past is rather than was.17 As Deleuze intimates: ‘We are touching
on one of the most profound, but perhaps one of the least understood,
aspects of Bergsonism: the theory of memory . . . What Bergson calls
“pure recollection” has no psychological existence. That is why it is
called virtual, inactive, and unconscious.’18
Besides an image of thought that veers away from Freud, Walter
Benjamin and others, Bergson’s theory of memory forces a ‘leap into
ontology’ that reorients art historical practice. As Deleuze writes:
We only grasp the past at the place where it is in itself, and not in ourselves,
in our present. There is therefore a ‘past in general’ that is not the particular
past of a particular present but that is like an ontological element, a past that
is . . . the condition of the ‘passage’ of every particular present . . . According
to Bergson, we first put ourselves back into the past in general . . . We really
leap into being, into being-in-itself, into the being in itself of the past. It
is a case of leaving psychology altogether . . . In any case, the Bergsonian
revolution is clear: We do not move from the present to the past, from per-
ception to recollection, but from the past to the present, from recollection
to perception.19
The past as such is an ‘unattainable limit’.20 There is no call in Bergson

for any idealism or mysticism about this pure past. Nor is there any
reason to desire to represent it ‘as it truly was’. For Bergson, the pure
past is what allows for the actualisation of each and every particular
past (as a former particular present). The pure past is contracted,
actualised into a present. Simultaneous with its actualisation, this real
movement of contraction-dilation reorganises the coexistent pure past:
time as an open whole, as virtual becoming.
Time as virtual becoming is the real, immanent mode of what is
because it has no other mode than its own actualisation (its continued
differing from itself). Thus there is no preceding place that the past is.
One does not look or go back in time as if retracing one’s steps. Nor
does any ready-made narration in the present assure your encounter
with the past as such. On the contrary, the entirety of the past is always
enfolded within each and every actualisation (every measurable, exten-
sive, useful succession of time imagined as a one-directional movement
from past to future). On time as virtual becoming Ansell Pearson writes:
We can posit it realizing itself and becoming what it is – pure otherness
and pure difference – without any need to appeal to either a logic of con-
tradiction and negation [Hegelian dialectics] or to an abstract universality
or generality . . . Conceived in itself it is the mode of the ‘non-active’ since
it only acts and comes to be what it is (otherness) in differentiating itself,

both ceasing to be itself and retaining something of itself, and it is in this
very respect that it can be considered to be ‘the mode of what is.’ Bergson’s
challenge to thinking consists in the claim that this is not to move thought in
the direction of an abstract metaphysics. Indeed, he insists that the contrary
is the case. The virtual is not, then, a general idea, something abstract and
empty, but the concept of difference (and of life since it is vital) rendered
adequate. The concept of the virtual gives us the time of life.21
This ‘time of life’ is a complex splitting of time: a memory-perception

circuit. It helps account for Bergson’s interest in hallucinations, déjà vu,
dreams, delirium. These anomalies are intriguing to him because they
disclose the splitting of time: the operation of memory as more than
a recollection-image, a re-presentation of a former present. The pure
past is therefore an ‘unattainable limit’ that is nonetheless operative in
every act of recollection-perception, body-image. In addition to these
anomalous states, which Bergson refers to as ‘de-tensifying’, meaning
a lessening of one’s practical self-interest, we could add our relation to
artworks.22
Our attentiveness to images requires a ‘de-tensifying’ mode that
allows us to sense the virtual, time as such. An image embodies an
opening in time. Becoming attentive to images demands that we
experiment with recollection-perception, dilation-contraction, rhythm
beyond measure. Attentiveness does not, paradoxically perhaps, mean
an intensified focus on an image, but is rather a mode of encounter. A
‘de-tensifying’ of consciousness allows one to become-other, to move
beyond habitual being and to open oneself to other durations, worlds
other than one’s own. Attentiveness is a mode of becoming that does
not ‘cut up the past into separate memories corresponding to present
needs and interests’.23 Rather, it allows one to touch and sense an image
as a material-force, as the ‘finest thread’ opening us to an outside, to
radical alterity, to a life beyond the subject.24
With Bergson we become attentive to images and time: to an ethics
of an event. An event is the untimeliness of the image: how and why
it embodies an ‘attention to life’.25 An art historical return to Bergson,
an art historical ethics of this event, requires that ‘we must no longer
speak of life in general as an abstraction’ but rather as ‘a visible
current . . . traversing the bodies it has organized one after another’,
individuating itself into a myriad of forms ‘without losing anything
of its force’.26 For Bergson, life is certainly not the ‘spirit’ of an age,
an individual, or a culture. Nor does it avail itself of a symptomology
or any indexical, anthropological reading of presence. Nor is it an
autotelic life of forms.27 Perhaps it goes without saying, perhaps not:
Afterword 265
art never simply represents any life, whether of an individual, society,

or a culture, unless that ‘life’ is understood narrowly in a strictly realist
manner. For too long the discipline of art history has maintained an
abstract quasi-scientific, quasi-religious system wherein art supposedly
reflects, expresses and/or exposes sociocultural, economic, or formal
issues. Or else, inversely, it posits artworks as autonomous from social
and cultural history. Bergson’s work, however, consistently sets itself
against this understanding. Hence ‘there is no solid, first-order brute
reality upon which a hierarchy of abstraction can elevate itself’.28 As
John Mullarkey explains: ‘Reality, says Bergson, is neither finite nor
infinite but “indefinite”: “action on the move”, we recall, “creates its
own route . . . and thus baffles all calculation”.’29 Contrary to the false
interpretative movements of art historical discourse, which is spatial
and abstract in structure, Bergson encourages us to form any and all
‘questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their
union’ in terms of ‘time rather than space’.30 Begging the question: what
is the value of our historicist yet atemporal art history?
Bergson emphasises the ‘unstable tension’ between life as duration
and any abstract, scientific system such as art history or museology.31 In
Creative Evolution he addresses ‘concrete time’ (duration) and ‘abstract
time’. Abstract, scientific systems are ‘never in that real, concrete dura-
tion in which the past remains bound up with the present’. He adds that
in abstract time ‘what will flow on in the interval – that is to say, real
time – does not count, and cannot enter into the calculation’.32 Bergson
challenges us to experiment with immanence: idealism and realism,
monism and pluralism, thought and instability, form and content,
discourse and archive, in order to regain ‘real time’, that is, ‘attention
to life’.33 In part this means conceiving and performing an art historical
methodology capable of encountering the concrete time of duration: life
as such and an image.
It is important to stress this point: history and life, matter and
memory, are immanent but not ahistorical or atemporal. It is only
within duration – ‘a hyphen, a connecting link’ – that art historical
research becomes-creative, becomes-immanent.34 What we are after is
the irreducibility of history and life. Bergson termed this irreducibility a
‘law of dichotomy’, neither the transcendence of one over the other nor
the disappearance of either within an artificial, abstract system. Many
of Bergson’s terms evince precisely such an insistence on embodiment
and immanence: life within and inseparable from a certain particular
embodiment, ‘interpenetrating, so that each has to abandon some of its
original purity’.35 Far from a call for metaphysical escape or historical
evasion, Bergson always calls for immanence, for becoming-creative
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
FROM BERGSON TO DELEUZE:

BECOMING-BERGSONIAN
It is this Bergsonian mode of encounter and becoming that art histo-
rians have obscured. Our disciplinary desire to officiate and parse the
relation between art and life leads to neither one. Curating art objects
and articulating historicist determinism has led to only more ‘abuses of
history for life’.38 Ready-made narratives and self-satisfied commentary
on discourse evince only that nothing is risked, nothing wagered, and
therefore nothing gained in relation to our sensitivity or experience of
duration. Time and again, we substitute the demands of ontology for
the concerns of historiography. We should take Deleuze here as a con-
temporary Delphic inscription for art historical practice:
Each image has two halves: it designates an object, it signifies something
different. The objective side is the side of pleasure, of immediate delight, and
of [historiographic] practice. Taken this way, we have already sacrificed the
‘truth’ side. We recognize things, but we never come to know them. What
the sign signifies we identify with the person or object it designates. We miss
our finest encounters, we avoid the imperatives that emanate from them: to
the exploration of encounters we have preferred the facility of recognition.39
As art historians our ‘finest encounters’ must be with Bergsonian time
itself – ‘a single, universal and impersonal Time’, as Deleuze character-
ises it.40 And yet far too often we relish in the ‘immediate delight’ of
recognition. Encountering images and the ‘imperatives that emanate
from them’ – an ethics of becoming within art historical practice –
has nothing to do with either the eternal, the primal, or the utopian.
Instead, it is an untimely encounter with a material-force, with a
deframing power, that ‘acts counter to the past, and therefore on the
present, for the benefit, let us hope, of a future – but the future is not
Afterword 267
a historical future, not even an utopian future, it is . . . untimely, not

an instant but a becoming’.41 In other words, Deleuze and Guattari
describe the untimeliness of an image as an event.
To rethink art history, yet again, requires a return to Bergson through
Deleuze because his work forces us to think how and why an artwork
is what it transmits, that is, a ‘nonsignifying passage’, a deframing
power that renders an opening within history. Within this opening, art
historians confront a difficult lesson: ‘Life is not your history.’42 Art
is and opens us to a ‘vertigo of immanence’, a life that exceeds lived
experience without abandoning art as an end-in-itself because ‘thought
and art are real, and disturb the reality, morality, and economy of the
world’.43
An image of thought, art history is a little two-step that goes awry
when it stops counting, when it goes beyond cadence or measure, when
it becomes experimentation with events rather than the interpretation
of states of things. Experimentation means here something like working
with and alongside images, in order to grasp how and why an image
‘maintains a relationship with language in its entirety, but rises up or
stretches out in its holes, its gaps, or its silences’.44 It remains to be seen
if we can seriously think the coexistence of the past with the present,
one of the essential theses of Deleuze’s Bergson. But we mustn’t forget
that there are also other Bergsons, and so other theses that we can
engage with as both philosophers and art historians. This is surely what
this collection of essays has demonstrated so well: the becomings imma-
nent within Bergsonism are multiple and unforeseeable.
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.
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,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

This chapter of A Thousand Plateaus has a section entitled ‘Memories of
a Bergsonian’ that I allude to below.
4. These concepts are found throughout Bergson’s texts; see especially Henri
Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New
York: Zone Books, 1991); and Bergson, Creative Evolution.
5. Michel Foucault cited in Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts
and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges
and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 351. See also
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on
Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books,
1972).
6. In addition to the essays in this anthology, there have been other recent uses
of Bergson’s work in relation to images. See Mark Hansen, New Philosophy
for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Eric Alliez, ‘Undoing
the Image (Signposts of a Research Programme)’, in Armen Avanessian
and Luke Skrebowski, eds, Aesthetics and Contemporary Art (Berlin:
Sternberg Press, 2011), pp. 66–85; and John Rajchman, ‘Deleuze’s Time,
or How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art’, in D. N. Rodowick, ed.,
Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 283–306.
7. Much has been made of Walter Benjamin’s criticisms of Bergson in his
essay on Charles Baudelaire and in relation to his thoughts on Marcel
Proust. These criticisms were shared by Max Horkheimer as evidenced
by Benjamin’s correspondence and the context around the writing on
the essay on Baudelaire: see Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of
Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W.
Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994). However, Benjamin’s admiration
for Matter and Memory as well as his treatment of Bergson in his The
Arcades Project, particularly in ‘Convolute H: The Collector’, is alto-
gether different. In fact, Benjamin characterises his entire unfinished
project in undeniably Bergsonian language as an attempt to grasp ‘the
crystal of the total event’: see Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire’, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 155–200; and
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1999), especially ‘Convolutes H and N’. For a nuanced and insight-
ful discussion of Bergson in Benjamin’s work see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter
Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); for
Benjamin on collecting and temporality see Jae Emerling, ‘An Art History
of Means: Arendt-Benjamin’, Journal of Art Historiography, Vol. 1
(2009).
Afterword 269
8. John Mullarkey, ‘Introduction’, in Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson

(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 13,
12.
9. Donald Preziosi, ‘Art History: Making the Visible Legible’, in Donald
Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), p. 7.
10. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001),
p. 189; Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 201.
11. I would like to note that Bergson’s phrase ‘épaisseur de durée’ is used by
Deleuze and Guattari in a discussion of modern painting that refers to
Hubert Damish as well as Clement Greenberg’s predilection for flatness
in painting. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), pp. 193–9. The word translated as ‘thickness’ is
the French word épaisseur, which is a reference to Bergsonian duration
rather than a mere spatial, formalist term. See the original French edition:
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris:
Minuit, 1991), p. 195.
13. The phrase ‘a future contemporary’ is from Alain Badiou, in a remarkable
memorial piece he wrote for Deleuze: Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon:
Figures of Postwar Philosophy (London and New York: Verso, 2009),
p. 113.
14. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 29. Bergson’s comment here comes in a
footnote wherein he contrasts his understanding of art and life with that
found in Gabriel Séailles’s Essai sur le génie dans l’art (1897).
15. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 11. Mullarkey explains that Bergson
acknowledged how metaphysics (philosophy) must ‘be perpetually
“remodelling” itself on the processes of reality’. In a passage that rein-
forces our discussion here, he adds: ‘Remember that Bergson advises that
his own concepts such as durée and qualitative multiplicity must eventu-
ally be superseded . . . it is essential, he says, that we continually create
new concepts instead of simply new names for old concepts.’ See John
Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame, 2000), p. 185.
16. Keith Ansell Pearson, ‘Bergson on Memory’, in Susannah Radstone and
Bill Schwarz, eds, Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (London and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 71.
17. This is, of course, Deleuze’s famous summation (Deleuze, Bergsonism,
p. 55).
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., pp. 56–7, 63.
20. James Burton, ‘Bergson’s Non-Archival Theory of Memory’, Memory
Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2008), p. 329.
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).
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.
31. The phrase ‘unstable tension’ is used by Mullarkey (Bergson and
Philosophy, p. 181).
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).
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
with Hegelian sublation; rather, it posits that ‘every unity is provisional

and practical, being destined to fragment for the simple reason that life
. . . is understood as a reciprocal interpenetration of opposed forces held
together in an unstable tension . . . constant dichotomisation (without sub-
sequent Hegelian mediation, we must add) is the driving force of reality’
(Bergson and Philosophy, p. 181).
38. This phrase alludes to Nietzsche’s famous 1874 text on historiogra-
phy ‘On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life’ (Vom Nutzen und
Nachteil der Historie für das Leben). See Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely
Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), pp. 57–125. In addition, see Emerling, ‘An Art History of
Means: Arendt-Benjamin’.
39. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard
Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 27.
Deleuze’s conception of semiology upholds this statement: ‘Language has
no self-sufficiency . . . it has no significance of its own. It is composed
of signs, but signs are inseparable from a whole other element, a non-
linguistic element, which could be called . . . “images.” As Bergson has
convincingly shown us, images have an existence independently of us’
(Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 201).
40. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 80. It should be noted that Deleuze’s interpreta-
tion of Bergsonian time has been criticised for being more metaphysical
in nature than it is for Bergson himself; see Ansell Pearson, Philosophy
and The Adventure of the Virtual, and John Mullarkey, ‘Deleuze and
Materialism: One or Several Matters?’, in Ian Buchanan, ed., A Deleuzian
Century? (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 59–83.
41. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 112. Some attempts to
theorise this art encounter have already been undertaken. See Georges
Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning The Ends of A Certain
History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2005), and Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze
and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (New York: Palgrave-
Macmillan, 2006).
42. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002),
p. 15.
43. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 48; Gilles Deleuze, The
Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, ed. Constantine Boundas
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 60.
44. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and
Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),
p. 162.
Index
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
Blanche, Jacques Emile, 33, 43–4 Creyghton, Camille, 18–19

Blanchot, Maurice, 2, 156 Cubism, 63, 70, 79, 81, 193, 198
body, 2, 4, 22, 36–7, 115, 135–7,
139–45, 167–9, 172–3, 190–1, De Mille, Charlotte, 52, 204
209–10, 218–21, 235–8, 253–4, Delacroix, Eugène, 106, 110
257 Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 20–2, 26–7, 32–4,
extended, 168 39, 41–2, 45–6, 74–6, 80, 88–9,
image, 126–7, 236, 238, 253, 264 177–9, 260, 262–3, 266–7,
memory, 122, 173 269–70
organic, 127 democracy, 111, 206–7, 224
Bonnot, Jules, 94–5, 108 Derain, André, 33, 75
Borges, Jorges Luis, 158–9, 164 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 88
Browning, Robert, 158–9 Descartes, René, 50, 97, 219, 254
Dewey, John, 65, 67, 71–2, 74, 78
camera, 115–16, 120, 122, 125–8, diagrams, 10, 120–4, 156–7, 165, 167,
131–4, 140, 144, 219, 255 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179,
Capitalism, 87, 124, 169, 171, 174, 181–6, 200, 229, 236; see also
179, 181–2 Bergson, cone of memory
Caravaggio, M. da, 154 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 6–8, 13, 89
Caygill, Howard, 227, 229 diffraction, 233–9, 241, 243
Cézanne, Paul, 4, 12, 69 Duchamp, Marcel, 2–3, 49, 74, 184,
change, 4, 25, 42, 101, 116–17, 123–4, 216
127, 141, 144, 192, 197–9, 202, duration, 5, 23–8, 54–6, 61–2, 72–3,
208, 213–14, 237 98–100, 102–5, 122–3, 140–4,
cinema, 2–3, 33, 39, 42, 46, 88, 142, 150–1, 153–5, 157–8, 161, 195–7,
183, 208, 215, 220–1, 223, 229, 261–2, 264–6, 269; see also
267 temporality
philosophy of, 121, 220 individual, 96, 101
circuits, 181, 200, 234–5, 239, 264 inner, 99, 101, 105
Clark T.J., 6, 8, 32 durée see duration
close-up, 218, 220–1
Colomer, André, 94–6, 99–107, 109–10 effort, 5, 53, 57, 179, 207–8, 211–12,
concepts, ready-made, 118, 207, 209, 214, 224–5, 260, 270
216, 222–4, 231, 241 Einstein, Albert, 240, 245
conditionality (conditions), 19, 48, energy, 67, 69, 75, 102, 118
51–5, 65, 96, 138, 140, 143–4, entropy, 9, 118, 129
166, 178–9, 202, 224, 248, 252, error, 128, 209
257 event, 5, 18, 20, 22, 26, 29–30, 32, 40,
conditions of possibility, 9, 47–9, 51, 64, 134, 137, 185, 260–1, 264,
53, 55, 57, 59, 61 267
consciousness, 5, 34–5, 42–3, 69, 86–7, evolution, 18–19, 25, 43, 63, 75, 85,
102–3, 138–9, 167–71, 173–4, 118, 121, 154, 157
190–1, 195–6, 211, 247–8, 251–2, experience, 4, 11, 34, 39, 48, 51, 53,
254–8 64–5, 136, 168–9, 171, 178–9,
continuity, 25, 28, 35, 40, 56, 75, 133, 223, 248, 266
150, 153, 183, 191–2, 196–8, 202, integral, 73
262 mystical, 179
Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 70, 190, subjective, 48
192 turning (‘tournant’) of, 192, 197–9
Crary, Jonathan, 4
creation see creativity Fautrier, Jean, 83–8, 91–2
creativity, 2–5, 8, 20, 26–8, 36–7, 42, Fauvism, 9, 63–4, 68, 70–1
69–70, 77, 94, 98, 115–16, 119, feminism, 32, 233, 237, 241–3
124, 126, 128, 154, 158, 178, 186 Flavin, Dan, 117–18
Focillon, Henri, 57–8 present, 23, 254

forces, 32, 63–4, 66–8, 70, 75, 139, sound, 115, 126
248 suggestive, 212, 222
Foucault, Michel, 6, 182, 221 immanence, 1–3, 7–10, 26, 32, 42,
freedom, 68, 96, 98, 101, 103–4, 175, 63–4, 69, 75, 132–6, 139–44, 153,
179, 212 155–6, 182, 212–13, 265; see also
Freud, Sigmund, 6, 50, 161, 164, 251, transcendence
260, 263 impossibility see possibility
Fried, Michael, 49, 148, 162, 195 intellect, 6, 69, 96, 100–1, 136, 138–9,
Fry, Roger, 4, 33–4, 36–9, 41, 44–5 153, 161, 166–7, 170, 178–80,
Fuentes, Carlos, 10, 152, 159–61 215, 219, 228, 240; see also
Futurism, 2, 92, 94, 106, 111, 196, 198 thinking
intellectual effort see effort
gesture, 4, 7, 37, 64, 214–15, 219, intelligence see intellect
221–5, 229, 242, 251; see also interference, 211, 232–4, 236–8, 240
posture intuition, 1, 2, 4–7, 13, 28, 35, 51–3,
Grant, Duncan, 9, 33–4, 36–42 57, 68–9, 72,77, 95–6, 99–103,
Greenberg, Clement, 49, 269 105–7, 165–6, 178–9, 206–13,
Grosz, Elizabeth, 123, 242–3 223–4, 247–8; see also thinking
Guattari, Félix, 22, 68, 74, 184, 267 invisibility, 185, 189–91
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
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

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BERGSON AND THE ART

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by

ISBN 978 0 7486 7022 2 (hardback)

The right of the contributors

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction: Art’s Philosophy – Bergson and Immanence 1

Part I: Bergson, Art, History

Part II: Unconditional Practice

10. A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation: Towards a

Part III: Immanence of the Visible

Figure 2.1 Duncan Grant, Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting

Figure 12.1 ‘M. Bergson a Promis de Venir’, Robe de dîner de

Eric Alliez (b. 1957) is Professor at University of Paris 8 and at

Mark Antliff is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Duke

Stella Baraklianou is a photographic artist and lecturer in photogra-

Her main themes are memory, duration, and immanence, explored

Howard Caygill is Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern

Felicity Colman is Director of Studies in the Media Department,

James Day is a PhD student at The Courtauld Institute of Art.

Adi Efal is currently a Gerda Henkel post-doctoral researcher at the

Jae Emerling is an associate professor of modern and contemporary

Craig Lundy is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social

Charlotte de Mille’s research concerns the intersections of painting,

John Mullarkey is Professor of Film and Television at Kingston

Simon O’Sullivan is Senior Lecturer in Art History/Visual Culture in

Brendan Prendeville is an art historian, whose published research con-

Iris van der Tuin is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and

appeared in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Australian

Sarah Wilson is an art historian and curator whose interests extend

In an interview made for the opening of her installation, Nowhere Less

Bergson has been variously described as a poet-philosopher and an

Luisetti’s article ‘Reflections on Duchamp: Bergson Readymade’ from

Arnold Toynbee and Charles Péguy, has outlined in this volume

Bergson studies, as well as for these debates themselves. For instance,

Concurrent with questions concerning the survival of history, there

that concerns Didi-Huberman, as Panofsky had himself engaged in an

Bergson’s questions in Creative Evolution are used in support of

In this image of a creative action which unmakes itself we have already

Immanent practice suggests the possibility of unmaking in the act of

range of historical research ranging from Craig Lundy’s exegesis of a

verb that exposes a temporality wherein immanence and being coin-

temporally non-linear interpretation. The final chapter in this section

4. Ole Hagen, Nowhere Less Now (London: Artangle, 2012), p. 8.

18. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 207–8.

Bergson, Art, History

BERGSON AND HISTORY?

someone such as myself with an interest in the nature of history, this

essays a completely developed Bergsonian philosophy of history, it is

revealed by the editors at Radical Philosophy to be part of their moti-

Such references to history and becoming in Deleuze’s work affirm both

This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the

a virtual progression. When a new note emerges in a melody, it does not

As we can see here, history need not be thought of as an isolated system,

‘this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a

This doctrine of teleology, in its extreme form, as we find it in Leibniz for

As it happens, it is of precisely this kind of teleological historicism that

tive, they will go on to argue, is found in the notion of ‘becoming’ and

‘made manifest to us in its impulse’ and ‘felt in the form of tendency’ is

as composite becoming. Nothing happens there, but everything becomes,

Immanent art history cannot be written. Art history concerns selected,

the bulk of his output being fashionable portraiture, and indeed he

BERGSONIAN PERCEPTION AND IMMANENT ART