Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism ii Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism Edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 175 Fifth Avenue 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10010 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Understanding Bergson, understanding modernism/edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-7221-1 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Bergson, Henri, 1859–1941. 2. Bergson, Henri, 1859–1941–Influence. 3. Modernism (Literature)–History and criticism. I. Ardoin, Paul. II. Gontarski, S. E. III. Mattison, Laci. B2430.B43U53 2012 143–dc23 2012026450 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-7221-1 e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-8837-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Contents Foreword Suzanne Guerlac vii Abbreviations x Contributors xi Introduction Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison 1 Part 1 Conceptualizing Bergson 1 (Re)Reading Time and Free Will: (Re)Discovering Bergson for the Twenty-First Century Mary Ann Gillies 11 2 Bergson’s Matter and Memory: From Time to Space David Addyman 24 3 Comedies of Errors: Bergson’s Laughter in Modernist Contexts Jan Walsh Hokenson 38 4 Sub Specie Durationis, or the Free Necessity of Life’s Creativeness in Bergson’s Creative Evolution David Scott 54 5 A Reading of Two Sources of Morality and Religion, or Bergsonian Wisdom, Emotion, and Integrity Michael R. Kelly 70 6 The Inclination of Philosophy: The Creative Mind and the Articulation of a Bergsonian Method Paul Atkinson 89 Part 2 Bergson and Aesthetics 7 Bergson, Vitalism, and Modernist Literature Paul Douglass 107 8 Perception Sickness: Bergsonian Sensitivity and Modernist Paralysis Paul Ardoin 128 9 “Blast . . . Bergson?” Wyndham Lewis’s “Guilty Fire of Friction” Charlotte de Mille 141 10 Bergson and Proust: A Question of Influence Pete A. Y. Gunter 157 11 Joyce’s Matter and Memory: Perception and Memory-Events in Finnegans Wake Dustin Anderson 177 12 Minds Meeting: Bergson, Joyce, Nabokov, and the Aesthetics of the Subliminal Leona Toker 194 vi Contents 13 Modernist Energeia: Henri Bergson and the Romantic Idea of Language Sarah Posman 213 14 H.D. ’s Intuitional Imagism: Memory, Desire, and the Image in Process Laci Mattison 228 15 Bergson and the Comedy of Horrors John Mullarkey 243 16 Time and Free Will: Bergson, Modernism, Superheroes, and Watchmen Eric Berlatsky 256 17 The Joys of Atavism Claire Colebrook 281 Part 3 Glossary 18 Bergson on Art and Creativity Mark Antliff 299 19 Bergson on Durée Rebecca Hill 301 20 Bergson on Élan Vital Paul Douglass 303 21 Bergson on Evolution Claire Colebrook 305 22 Bergson on Free Will and Creativity Rex Gilliland 308 23 Bergson on Habit and Perception Paul Ardoin 310 24 Bergson on Idealism and Realism Trevor Perri 312 25 Bergson on Image and Representation Garin Dowd 315 26 Bergson on Instinct Paul Atkinson 318 27 Bergson on Intuition David Scott 320 28 Bergson on Language Laci Mattison 323 29 Bergson on Memory Heath Massey 325 30 Bergson on Movement and Spatialization S. E. Gontarski 327 31 Bergson on Multiplicity Paul Atkinson 330 32 Bergson on Organization and Manufacture Scott Ortolano 332 Index 335 Foreword Suzanne Guerlac “With Creative Evolution under my arm,” Henry Miller wrote, “I board the elevated line at Brooklyn Bridge after work . . . my language, my world . . . under my arm.”1 Miller’s casual remark conveys the excitement Bergson’s thought inspired in thinkers, writers and artists on both sides of the Atlantic—and beyond—in the early twentieth century. Reading Bergson, or hearing his public lectures, changed people’s lives. Beyond inspiring individual artists and writers, however, Bergson also anticipated a number of the concepts that would prove essential to thinking modernity. In his essay Laughter, he has a lot to say about distraction, a term that becomes central to Walter Benjamin’s analysis of modern experience. In Time and Free Will, he provides a theory of alienation that will subsequently be important to Gramsci, among others. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, he presents a distinction between closed and open societies that not only challenges nationalist political and economic models but also invites us to think ethically beyond the human realm. He presents an acute analysis of the practical limits of human rights discourse and calls our attention to environmental damage that occurs as an effect of capitalism. It is perhaps only now, after the critical interventions of structuralism and post- structuralism, that we can fully appreciate the critical force of Bergson’s thought. Before Heidegger and before Derrida, Bergson undertook a deconstruction of metaphysics. The unthought that he exposed was not Being, or writing, but time, time that was irreducible to space, that could not be measured, and that occurred as qualitative intensity: time as force. Bergson was one of the first modern philosophers (along with Nietzsche) to call attention to the problems language poses for philosophical thought. Language requires iteration, whereas in Bergson’s view, there is no such thing as repetition in lived experience; by the very fact of being repeated, the same moment or feeling becomes a different one. Before Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, then, Bergson practiced a new kind of philosophical writing, one that challenged the conventions of traditional discursive thought and was prepared to “break . . . the frames of language.”2 The critique of the subject elaborated in the contexts of structuralism and deconstruction (supported by psychoanalysis) called into question the presuppositions of European discourses of humanism but made it difficult to think about agency. We could speak of the discontinuities of history, or evoke the will have been or the always already. What was missing was a way to talk about events in the making, as they arrive. When we return to Bergson after post-structuralism, we recognize that he offers us a viii Foreword subject position that is not a subject of consciousness but a subject of action, centered upon the dynamic body. Bergson proposes a subject position that is not only not tied to traditions of humanism, it can be extended across species. After Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis, we can appreciate in Bergson another way to think unconsciousness, one that does not depend on the structure of repression (or an instance or topography of the unconscious) that psychoanalysis has enmeshed with the Oedipal story and its normative gender positions. In Bergson, differences between consciousness and unconsciousness become subtle and fluid. A function of fluctuations of tension and attention in relation to action, the two registers become porous to one another. The two extremes of mental life—action and dream— inform one another interactively, as do action and memory. In his analysis of memory, Bergson thinks virtuality in relation to dynamics of coming into image. His analyses, which take account of modern visual technologies such as photography, chrono-photography, and the cinematographic, are especially pertinent in today’s visual culture. Affirming that the real can no longer be considered in static, or mechanistic, terms, Bergson was a quintessentially modern thinker. To think time, he declared, means breaking a number of frames or frameworks. In response, Bertrand Russell condescendingly (and defensively) relegated Bergson’s thought to the misty realms of poetry. But the untranslatable élan vital and the appeals to intuition, to free temporal flow, and to the forces of creativity and invention associated with it, were not mere poetic effusions. Bergson’s thought emerged from reflections on mathematics. He elaborated it philosophically with a deep appreciation of the history of philosophy and a keen attunement to the revolutionary developments in modern science (in fields such as kinetic theory, thermodynamics, and atomic physics) that ushered in the twentieth century. Bergson’s philosophy of duration, as one historian of science has put it, “lay in the direction in which physics would move sooner or later.”3 Bergson wrote in a time of historical dislocation, when certainties that depended upon a mechanistic view of the world were breaking down under the pressure of scientific and economic transformation. In many ways this juncture parallels our own, as we seek our bearings in a globalized post-industrial world that depends on information technologies, and inhabit a world culture that anxiously yearns for yet more technological innovation in the face of fast changing, and increasingly unpredictable, global markets. As the speed of communication across physical and cultural distances approaches “real time,” and the speed of calculating financial data accelerates beyond the capacity of markets to absorb the interventions based on these calculations, time has never been more central to our concerns. But what sort of time? What was at stake for Bergson in revealing the obsession with space, and the correlative repression of time that he diagnosed within the metaphysical tradition, was the philosophical specificity of life and life processes, as distinct from the relatively static inanimate things that could be manipulated, quantified, and controlled, and whose behavior could be predicted. Today, as we consider not only various critiques of humanism but discourses of the “post human”—whether in relation to information networks, technology, the human/animal divide, or all of the above—time is “of the Foreword ix essence,” as the proverbial expression goes. The distinction between the living and the nonliving that Bergson placed at the center of his thought has become pressing, if also more and more uncertain. If Bergson defined the comic in terms of the superimposition of the mechanical upon the living, today the hybridization of the living and the artificial is no longer a laughing matter. It is tied to very practical concerns such as biodiversity, global warming, and the availability of clean water. Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism invites us to reread Bergson and to reconsider modernism in relation to his thought. It also invites us to explore the limits of modernism—or modernisms. “[T]he (Bergsonian) duration of modernism’s moment is bound neither by clock nor calendar,” the editors of this volume write, “but . . . by time experienced.” This is a question that travels through the force fields of modernism, in its complicated relations with post-modernism and the “unmodern,” both intimately bound up with it.4 It is both timely and important to consider modernism—in all its diversity and according to its various temporal phases or rhythms—in relation to Bergson’s thought. This volume will give us new insight into modernisms past, as well as future. Notes 1 Henry Miller, The Tropic of Capricorn (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 217, qtd. in Paul Douglass, Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature (University of Kentucky Press, 1986), 173. 2 Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, in Oeuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 89 (translation mine). 3 Milič Čapek. Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1971), xi. 4 For the notion of the unmodern, see Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).