THE FLUID MATERIALISM
OF DELEUZE AND BERGSON
Gilles Deleuze resurrects the
neglected, marginalised and unconventional names of philosophy - such as the
philosopher Henri Bergson - in order to reanimate some of the concepts and
problems produced. Ultimately, they point in different ways to a cardinal
point: the irreducible materiality of life or ﾔbeingﾕ suspended in an endless
process of variation or ﾔbecomingﾕ. ﾔBeing is becomingﾕ is a guiding principle
in Deleuzeﾕs work. For Deleuze: ﾒThe life of philosophers conforms to the
ordinary laws of succession; but their proper names coexist and shine as
luminous points that take us through the components of a concept once more or
as the cardinal points of a stratum or layer that continually come back to us,
like dead stars whose light is brighter than everﾓ.
Deleuzeﾕs ﾔpractical
vitalismﾕ points to Bergsonﾕs Creative Evolution (1911), where the fluid structure of the 四an vital is described as a form of materiality
in process of becoming, which eludes intellectual analysis and can only be
comprehended through empathy and intuition; it is an expression of the
pre-individual, of the flux and indeterminacy of life, where the constraints of
identity are yet to be applied. As Bergson points out, the intellect tends to
spatialise, to immobilise the flux of life. In this way, the perception of
being is reduced and impoverished. Accordingly, Deleuze adopts a mode of
thought and a style of exposition subtle enough to penetrate the flow of life:
ﾒYour writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and
opinion are solid, geometricﾓ.
Deleuze adopts Bergsonﾕs
model of perception which conceives the world as ﾔflowing-matterﾕ. This
involves a constant process of transformation, and a metaphysics in which the
light of consciousness is already in things
themselves, where ﾔmovement-imageﾕ and ﾔflowing matterﾕ, ﾔpure spiritualismﾕ
(philosophical idealism) and ﾔradical materialismﾕ, converge. A world ﾔwithout
eyesﾕ, without an ﾔegoﾕ or ﾔselfﾕ – free from that defensive ﾔcortical
layerﾕ separating the ﾔinsideﾕ from the ﾔoutsideﾕ, the perceiving ﾔsubjectﾕ
from the perceived ﾔobjectﾕ. ﾒIn other words, the eye is in things, in luminous
images in themselvesﾓ. Deleuzeﾕs Bergsonism therefore considers consciousness
as immanent to matter. A monistic, fluid materialism that provides us with ﾔa
world without a subjectﾕ:
My eye, my brain, are
images, parts of my body. How could my brain contain images since it is one
image among others? External images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I
return movement: how could images be in my consciousness, since I am myself
image, that is, movement? And can I even, at this level, speak of ﾔegoﾕ, of
eye, of brain and of body? Only for simple convenience; for nothing can yet be
identified in this way. It is rather a gaseous state. Me, my body, are rather a
set of molecules and atoms which are constantly renewed. It is a state of
matter too hot for one to be able to distinguish solid bodies in it. It is a
world of universal variation, of universal undulation, universal rippling:
there are neither axes, nor centre, nor left, nor right, nor high nor low.
Deleuzeﾕs delirious world-view
questions an established hierarchy privileging the primacy of disembodied mind
or intellect over the ﾔbaseﾕ physicality of the sensate, corporeal body. It
amounts to a full frontal attack upon a traditional dualism responsible for the
polarisation or split between the flesh and the spirit, the carnal and the
divine, masters and slaves; and that division of the sexes in which men are
associated with the divine qualities of spirit and transcendence while women
are associated with an inferior and degraded material realm encompassing the
body, flesh, carnality, nature, and the earth.
The fluid materialism of
Deleuzeﾕs Bergsonism emerges as the direct and immediate continuation of, and
as the legitimate successor to, the ancient Greek philosophers of the Ionian
school, who assert that the principle of all things is in matter alone; for it
is that out of which all things are and from which they come into being, and
into which, at the last, they pass away. This they say is the element and
principle of all things.
Thus the philosopher Thales
singles out water as the primary, material substance from which all else is
derived and to which it returns. Many have questioned as to why Thales takes
water as the primary stuff of nature, the essential reality of all other phenomena.
The philosopher Aristotle writes that Thales observed that every living thing
contains moisture. Plants contain moisture, all foodstuffs contain moisture,
whereas rocks are dry and cadavers very soon desiccate. Thales sees the
essential part played by water in nourishing life so that the hot element can
come from it, since what is alive has heat. Water is also the essence of seeds.
His favourite phrase is: ﾒWater is the most beautiful thing in the worldﾓ.
Thales also chooses the moist element because of his special studies of
climatic conditions: water assumes such different forms as ice, liquid, and
vapour, and to the ancient Greeks the phenomena of evaporation, mist, wind,
animal breath, the germination of plants and the origins of life are all intermingled
and identified.
Aristotle also suggests that
Thales might have been carrying forward the primacy that Greek and Egyptian
mythology accorded water, for he had spent time in arid zones such as Egypt and
Mesopotamia, where water-cults were widespread, owing to the fact that
agriculture and the very survival of the population depended upon the flooding
of the rivers. The Egyptians worshipped the river Nile as a God. Thales also
holds that everything has a soul and is therefore ﾒfull of godsﾓ. This hearkens
back to the animistic phase of religion, the knowledge that the body has of its
essential union with nature, that sense of awe, wonderment and reverence
towards nature as the outward, physical manifestation of a purpose that is
essentially spiritual, springing forth from depths unseen. It is a picture of
an enchanted world where every tree and river has its local indwelling spirit,
god or goddess. Thales considers water to be the soul of the world, the
universal essence of life: ﾒA divine power is present in the element of water
by which it is endowed with movement.ﾓ
ﾒEverything is in a flux,
everything changesﾓ observes the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. For
nothing remains what, where and as it was: everything is and also is not, for
everything is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing
away. ﾒAll things are flowingﾓ and change is universal, ﾒfor nothing ever is,
everything is becomingﾓ. This is a world where concrete sensuous ﾔlivingﾕ
opposites merge into one another. According to Heraclitus, ﾒSouls are vaporised
from what is wet. To souls, it is death to become water; to water, it is death
to become earth. From earth comes water, and from water, soul. Fire lives the
death of earth, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of air,
earth - that of water.ﾓ
The impermanence and
mutability of all things is expressed by Heraclitus in his famous aphorism: ﾒIt
is not possible to step twice in to the same river; for fresh waters are ever
flowing in upon you: we are, and are not.ﾓ
A radical follower of
Heraclitus, the philosopher Cratylus, argues against Heraclitus that it is
impossible to step into the same river even once, seeing that, while we are
stepping into the river, it is changing, is becoming another river. The extant
being is, so to speak, dissolved in the very process of becoming. Thus every
existing state of things inevitably breaks up, and every developed form is in
fluid movement.
For example, picture an
eternally flowing stream of molecules in motion, joining one with another, and
forming certain combinations, ﾔthingsﾕ, ﾔobjectsﾕ. Such combinations are distinguished by the greater or
lesser degree of there stability, existing for a more or less prolonged period
of time, and then passing away, to be replaced by others.
In like manner, every organic
being is at each moment the same and not the same; at each moment it is
assimilating matter drawn from without, and excreting other matter; at each
moment the cells of the body are dying and new ones are being formed; in a
longer or shorter period of time the matter of the body is completely renewed
and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organic being is
always itself, and yet something other than itself.
This celebration of the fundamental
fluidity and sacredness of nature, with its concomitant hostility towards a
disenchanted, cold hearted rationalism, cruelly ignorant of a vital and sacred
organic reality, is beautifully and poetically evoked in Ovidﾕs Metamorphoses:
As for Cyane, she lamented
the rape of the goddess, and the contempt shown for her fountainﾕs rights,
nursing silently in her heart a wound that none could heal; until, entirely wasted
away with weeping, she dissolved into those waters of which she had lately been
the powerful spirit. Her limbs could be seen melting away, her bones growing
flexible her nails losing their firmness. The slenderest parts of her body
dissolved first of all, her dark hair, her fingers, her legs and feet. It
needed but a little change to transform her slight limbs into chill waters;
after that her shoulders, her back, her sides, her breast disappeared, fading away
into insubstantial streams, till at last, instead of living blood, water flowed
through her softened veins, and nothing remained for anyone to grasp.
Everything becomes but nothing is. Like the Lethe and Mnemosyne rivers, the streams of forgetfulness and
memory, substance, matter, is in a perpetual state of motion and change. The
material ﾔobjectsﾕ of the physical world exist for a moment of time only as
temporary combinations amidst the perpetual flux of Becoming. However, for
however long as these combinations remain the same, we tend to judge and define
them as fixed, rigid objects of investigation, given once and for all in accordance
with the formula of traditional logic: ﾔEither yes or noﾕ. Thus a thing either
exists or does not exist; and cannot at the same time be itself or something
else. Natural objects and processes are therefore perceived in rigid isolation,
isolated from their general context; they are examined not in their motion, but
in a state of immobility; not in their life, but in their death. This
mechanistic point of view is one-sided, restricted and abstract: individual things are perceived outside
of their relationships, in a state of rest devoid of motion, where, in the
presence of their existence, their coming into being and passing away is
ignored. We cease to see the wood for the trees.
Inevitably, however, in
proportion as things change to the extent to which they cease to exist as they
did formerly, and to the extent that we observe the movements, transitions,
connections, rather than the things that
move, change and are connected, we must apply a very different kind of logic:
the logic of contradiction; we say ﾒYes and no, they exist and they do not
existﾓ. Things are now perceived in their fluidity: in other words, in their connection, their
interlacement, their movement, their appearance and disappearance. Everything
is and also is not, for everything is in flux, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being
and passing away.
This, while supplying a
positive understanding of the existing state of things, at the same time
enables us to recognise that that state of things will inevitably break up.
Accordingly we are led to regard the things of the natural world, and their
concepts in the human brain, not as distinct, unchangeable, rigid objects,
given once and for all, but instead as transient, in fluid movement, in their
appearance and disappearance, in the perpetual flow of their life.
Furthermore, we find upon
closer examination that the two poles of any apparent division or dichotomy,
like subject and object, mind and body, self and other, male and female, are
inseparable, and interpenetrate; they are two different aspects of a single
entity, living, mobile, perpetually changing themselves in to one another; an
interdependence or unity of opposites, known in logic under the name of principium
coincidentiae oppositorium (the
principle of the coincidence of opposites). This unity of opposites is something more, however, than a
mere juxtaposition of opposing factors, but is, in the opinion of one
philosopher, ﾒthe root of all movement and life, and it is only insofar as it
contains a Contradiction that anything moves and has impulse and
activityﾓ.
We know that structurally the
physical world exhibits a fluctuating and dynamic equilibrium of opposing
forces in all its forms, down to the minutest combination of electrical
particles. The very life processes of the human body itself depend upon the
interconnection of opposing processes: the anabolic building-up processes and
the katabolic, breaking down processes. And the bodyﾕs simplest movement
involves an interconnected opposition of flexor and tensor muscles. In like
manner, we find that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in
their application to the individual case as such; but as soon as we consider
the individual case in its general connection with the universe as a whole,
they merge; they dissolve in the process of universal action and reaction in
which causes and effects are constantly changing places, so that what is effect
here and now will be cause there and then, in a world where all things are
linked and tangled a thousandfold and every deed gives birth to countless
others.
Ancient Greek philosophers
such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Heraclitus promote a ﾔfluidﾕ and
poetic mode of thought, a reverential approach to the substances of the natural
world. An outlook where concrete, sensuous, ﾔlivingﾕ ﾔoppositesﾕ are
interchangeable, permitting the continuous ﾔflowﾕ or transmutation of one
element into another. Nature is experienced as a living, all-embracing and
magical entity. For these philosophers, matter consists of four primal
elements: earth, air, water, and fire. Water is opposed to fire but allied to
earth, while air is opposed to earth but allied to fire. By arranging these
elements in pairs, four primary qualities evolve: namely heat (fire and water),
dryness (fire and earth), cold (earth and water), and moisture (water and air).
A conception later extended to the human body, which is held to be composed of
four fluids or ﾔhumoursﾕ: blood, phlegm, yellow bile (or choler) and black bile
(or melancholy), characteristic of the four human ﾔtemperamentsﾕ: choleric
(warm and dry, quick and strong), sanguine (warm and moist, quick and weak),
phlegmatic (cold and moist, slow and weak), and melancholic (cold and dry, slow
and strong). This is a world-view that establishes an intimate and physical
connection between the microcosm of the human body, consisting of 70% water,
and the macrocosm of the natural environment.
The ancient Greek physician
Hippocrates, known as ﾒthe father of medicineﾓ, investigates the link between
disease and environment in accordance with the theory that an imbalance in the
four humours, or bodily fluids, is responsible for disease. The voluminous
writings of Hippocrates, totalling up to sixty or so texts, amount to a
palimpsest or Corpus of works extensively elaborated upon by succeeding
generations of physicians. Two texts, On Regimen and On the Nature of Man, portray the human body as eternally flowing in a
condition of perpetual flux: health is a matter of keeping the body within
specific boundaries in order to ensure a proper balance or equilibrium.
Imbalance produces illness if it results in an undue concentration of fluids in
any particular zone of the body. What are being kept in balance are bodily
fluids or chymoi. Though naturally
present in the body, two fluids - bile and phlegm - are particularly associated
with illness, flowing immoderately from the body of the sick patient. Thus
excessive phlegm produces winter colds, surplus bile produces summer diarrhoea
and vomiting, and mania results from bile boiling in the brain.
Blood is regarded by
Hippocrates as essential to life, yet even blood can exceed its natural bounds,
and is periodically expelled from the body in menstruation and nose-bleeds.
Such natural evacuation of excess blood suggested the need to maintain a
balanced bodily equilibrium of this life-giving fluid through the practice of
blood-letting, a therapeutic device devised by the Hippocratics, systemised by
the physician Galen, and serving for centuries as a cure for a host of
maladies.
In his text On the Nature
of Man, Hippocrates describes black
bile as an important, though predominantly harmful, humour. Visible in vomit
and excreta, it contributes to the dark colour of dried blood. Observing
clotted blood, Hippocrates asserts that the darkest part corresponds to black
bile, the serum above the clot to yellow bile, while the light matter at the
top is phlegm. Hippocrates correlates these four bodily fluids or ﾔhumoursﾕ -
blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm - to the four primary climatic
qualities: hot, dry, cold and wet; to the four seasons; to the four ages of
human development (infancy, youth, adulthood and old age); to the four elements
(air, fire, earth and water); and to the four human ﾔtemperamentsﾕ (sanguine,
choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic). The four fluids or ﾔhumoursﾕ of the
human body are the organising principles employed by Hippocrates and his
disciples to situate the body into a coherent, symmetrical grid, a system of
binary oppositions guaranteeing secure boundaries, physical health, and the
established hierarchical order of society. For example, Hippocrates affirms the
ﾔnaturalﾕ superiority of men over women to the binary distinction between
wetness and dryness:
The female flourishes more
in an environment of water, from things cold and wet and soft. The male
flourishes more in an environment of fire, from dry, hot foods and mode of
life.
According to Hippocrates, the
male body is characterised by a condition of dry stability never attained by
the female physique, which remains cold and wet all its life. Due to her innate
wetness, Hippocrates considers women at greater risk than men to liquefying
incursions upon the integrity of their bodies and minds, especially those of
love and emotion, regarded as particularly endangering forms of wetness. Of
special danger and concern is what he considers the intrinsically liquefying
emotions associated with female eros,
which threaten to soften, loosen, melt and dissolve physiological and
psychological boundaries men pride themselves on being able to resist.
The medical treatises of
Hippocrates are coloured by the subservient role of women in ancient Greek
patriarchal society. However, research conducted by generations of historians,
anthropologists, philosophers and archaeologists; for example, Lewis Morgan,
Johann Bachofen, Friedrich Engels, Elizabeth Gould Davis, Mary Daly, and Marija
Gimbutas, reveal, before the onset of patriarchy, women had enjoyed an
especially revered status. The evidence for womenﾕs pre-eminent role in ancient
Greek matriarchal societies is recorded in historical accounts of ancient
religious rites involving acts of symbolic death and rebirth linked with
baptism in the waters of the Styx. The waters of this underworld river, across
which all souls had to pass after death, were believed to possess the fecundity
and sacred powers associated with the cyclic flow of menstrual blood. The place
where the river was thought to originate was commemorated by a shrine at the
city of Clitor, or Kleitoris, sacred to Gaia, the Mother of the Earth.
The philosopher Luce Irigaray
argues that the historically dominant ﾔmasculineﾕ culture of the West idealises
formal structural qualities above everything else. According to Irigaray, this
sterile formalism in turn seeks and imposes unity, stability, consistency and
completion, everywhere. Thus everything incongruous, jarring, asymmetrical,
random and unfinished become terms of criticism, instead of praise. The
emphasis on unity and stability of form sees the production of fixed and final
meanings as the supreme goal of both philosophical reflection and scientific
investigation. The idea that anything may have a dynamically changing or
polymorphous identity, or have contradiction as its very essence or animating
principle, is defined as monstrous and abominable in a phallomorphic culture
that can tolerate only the homogeneous, the defined, knowable, consistent, and
contained.
Irigaray therefore affirms
alternative ﾔfemaleﾕ values subversive of that traditional emphasis upon unity
and consistency of meaning and identity. According to Irigaray, ﾒﾔSheﾕ is
indefinitely other than ﾔherselfﾕﾓ: there is no longer an insistence upon a
strict dividing line between the ﾔselfﾕ, and what is outside of it (the other).
The armour of an alienating identity, the fortress-like exclusion of the
isolated ﾔegoﾕ or ﾔmonadﾕ, is identified with the tension, paranoia and
self-obsession of traditional masculine, bourgeois society and philosophy. The
alternative is described by Irigaray thus: ﾒﾔsheﾕ goes off in all directions in
which ﾔheﾕ is unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Contradictory
words seem a little crazy to the either/or logic of reason, and are completely
inaudible to those who listen with ready-made grids and a code prepared in
advanceﾓ. This rejection of a mechanistic, either/or logic culminates in the
philosopher Julia Kristevaﾕs assertion: ﾒTo believe that one ﾔis a womanﾕ is
almost as absurd and obscurantist as to believe that one ﾔis a manﾕﾓ. Thus it
is not the sexual difference between subjects that is important, as the sexual
differentiation within each subject: an androgyny celebrated by Kristeva in the
following terms: ﾒShe was a man; she was a woman.......It was a most
bewildering and whirligig state to be inﾓ.
Irigaray claims that the
traditional disquiet about that which is fluid is based upon an obsessive fear
of anything that might disrupt the apparent solidity of things, entities, and
objects; anything that threatens traditional notions of the self-identical, the
one, the unified, the solid. Within a phallomorphic culture female sexuality is
regarded as an uncontainable flow (associated with the menstrual flow); it is
regarded as a threat to secure boundaries, attesting to the bodyﾕs permeability,
its vulnerable dependence on an outside, and to the precarious division between
the bodyﾕs inside and its outside. Bodily fluids flow, seep, and infiltrate;
their control is a matter of perpetual uncertainty to the established order:
ﾒWhat she emits is flowing, fluctuating. Blurring. Fluid - like that other, inside/outside of
philosophical discourse - is, by nature, unstable. It overflows the ﾔsubjectﾕ,
who attempts to congeal, freeze and paralyse the flow, subordinating it to
geometrismﾓ. For Irigaray:
Fluids surge and move, and
a metaphysics that thinks being as fluid would tend to privilege the living,
moving, pulsing over the inert matter of the Cartesian world-view. The triumph
of a mechanistic rationality equates with transformation of fluid to solid.
Solid mechanics and rationality have maintained a relationship of very long
standing, one against which fluids have never stopped arguing.
The school of thought
established by the Swiss physician and alchemist Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus
(1493-1541) perceives the world as a vast chemical laboratory. An internal fire
located deep within the earth provides the explanation for the existence of
mountain springs and streams, understood as distilled by the earthﾕs central fire from vast subterranean
water reservoirs. Heat from the earthﾕs central fire vaporises this water,
causing it to rise and erupt through cracks in the earthﾕs surface; the result
is the ﾒdistilledﾓ mountain spring. Through a complicated process of
distillation and fermentation, mountains act as vast chemical alembics
responsible for the origin of hot and cold mineral springs and pure mountain
streams.
Nature, the striving to probe
it and to know it, is for the English philosopher and statesman Sir Francis
Bacon (1561-1626) an unquestionable law. In his view, matter ﾒseems to attract
manﾕs whole entity by winning smilesﾓ. According to Bacon, scientific truth is
impossible ﾒwithout dissecting and anatomising the world most diligentlyﾓ. In
his treatise, Novum Organum, Bacon
describes nature as female, who has to be ﾒvexedﾓ and thus ﾒforced to yield her
secretsﾓ. As the historian Carolyn Merchant points out:
Much of the imagery he
used in delineating his new scientific objectives and methods derives from the
courtroom, and, because it treats nature as a female to be tortured through
mechanical inventions, strongly suggests the interrogations of the witch trials
and the mechanical devices used to torture witches.....Bacon stated that the
method by which natureﾕs secrets might be discovered corresponded to
investigating the secrets of witchcraft by inquisition.
For Bacon, science exists as
a means towards power and domination, and the progress of science and
technological innovation is assessed against its capacity to subdue and control
the natural environment; ﾔbinding her into serviceﾕ, ﾔconstrainingﾕ and
moulding her:
For you have to follow and
as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like
to lead and drive her afterward to the same place again...... For like as a manﾕs
disposition is never well known or proved till he be crossed, nor Proteus ever changed
shapes till he was straitened and held fast, so nature exhibits herself more
clearly
under the trials and
vexations of art (mechanical devices) than when left to herself.
The English philosopher
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the systematiser of Baconﾕs scientific method,
continues Baconﾕs quest; and it is precisely with Hobbes that knowledge ﾒbased
upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract
experience of the geometrician. Physical motion is sacrificed to mechanical or
mathematical motion....Materialism takes to misanthropyﾓ.
This results in an
impoverishment and mortification of the senses, to the disenchantment of nature,
and its reduction to geometrical and mechanical laws. In like manner, humanity
is also impoverished, is also regarded as a mechanism, and is imprisoned by the
same laws. It is a world-view actively promoted by the French philosopher Rene
Descartes (1596-1650). A major physicist, mathematician, and one of the
creators of analytical geometry and modern algebra, Descartes conceptualises
the body of nature as a mechanical device and the physical bodies of human
beings themselves as soulless and lifeless corporeal mechanisms directed by a
ﾔsoulﾕ which alone is endowed with intelligence and will. The Cartesian
world-view tears asunder and fragments the organic unity of living beings by
establishing the centrality of the individualised and atomised ﾔegoﾕ or ﾔsubjectﾕ,
the metaphysical opposition of the thinking being to nature expressed by
Descartes in his famous dictum: Cogito, ergo sum - ﾒ(I) think, therefore (I) amﾓ.
Descartes then proceeds to
radically differentiate mind (ﾔthinking substanceﾕ, res cogitans) from matter (ﾔextended substanceﾕ, res extensa). Through detached visualisation, the disembodied
rational intellect apprehends ﾒclearly and distinctlyﾓ the natural world of
extended, material substance. The mind of the rational (male) subject is
proclaimed as the incorporeal and transcendent ﾒlord and possessorﾓ of
corporeal nature, which is perceived as a mechanical device, infinitely
divisible into discrete units; the cries and writhing of animals beneath the
vivisectionistﾕs scalpel regarded as insensate, mechanical reflexes. The
physical world of nature is treated as lifeless stuff to be quantified and
manipulated in accordance with the rules of mathematics, geometry, and
mechanics:
Lonely and lifeless nature
lay prone, fettered with an iron chain, strict measure and the arid number
prevailed. As into dust and winds, into dark words the immeasurable flower of
life disintegrated.
According to Descartes, the
totality of nature can be reduced to extended bodies differentiated by
magnitude, configuration, situation and motion; that is to say, the world can
be reduced to a system of measurements and mechanical laws. Like automatons,
the movements of human beings are viewed as the effects of mechanical laws that
describe the actions within the human body of the bony levers set into motion
by the processes of muscular expansion and contraction. Descartes duly compares
the internal workings of the human body to the novel mechanical artefacts
produced by the developing science of hydraulic engineering:
One may very well liken
the nerves of the animal machine I have described to the pipes of the machines
of those fountains; its muscles and its tendons to the other different engines and
springs that serve to move them; and its animal spirits, of which the heart is
the source
and the ventricles of the
brain the reservoirs, to the water that moves these engines. Moreover,
respiration and other similar functions which are usual and natural in the
animal machine and which depend on the flow of the spirits are like the
movements of a clock or of a mill, which the ordinary flow of water can make
continuous.
Henri Bergson, a leading
French philosopher at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, argues that life
flows, and that any attempt to cut this flow into segments kills it. Reality,
according to Bergson, is fluid, a fluidity that a mechanistic mind-set attempts
to grasp within a set of rigid, frozen concepts. Mechanism for Bergson is
merely the external, objectified form of an inner creative activity, a vital
impetus (四an vital); and we sense
the flow of this creative life force through a primary inner experience called intuition.
In place of the dominance in
our thinking of an ﾒesprit de geometrieﾓ mode of life, Bergson affirms theﾒesprit de finesseﾓ. This involves distinguishing between the geometrical
time that occurs in the theories of an overly analytical, mechanistic
scientific world-view, and the real time that we directly experience in our
consciousness introspectively, culminating in a fuller awareness and a deeper
understanding of reality as in a perpetual state of flux, a fluid duree of Becoming, of which genuine understanding can only
be had by a very different way of knowing - through intuition, involving empathy, feeling and participation. Thus
it is possible to comprehend realityﾕs fundamental fluidity, on the wing, as it
were, instead of freezing it, as is customarily done, into fixed, ready-made
categories:
There is one reality, at
least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis.
It is our own personality in its flowing through time. Our intelligence can
place itself within this mobile reality, and adopt its ceaselessly changing
direction; in short, can grasp by means of that intellectual sympathy which we call intuition. This is extremely difficult.
The mind has to do violence to itself, has to reverse the direction of the
operation by which it habitually thinks. But in this way it will attain to
fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all is sinuosities and of
adopting the very movement of the inward life
of things.
Bergson condemns the
mechanistic and geometrical notion of time as lifelessly abstract and
mathematical; it is measured by clocks, scales and yardsticks. Time is
represented spatially, and is broken up into homogeneous units (years, hours,
and minutes). This mechanistic and mathematical notion of time neither flows
nor acts. It exists passively. Most of Western humanityﾕs practical life in
society is dominated by this conception, resulting in a loss of spontaneity,
and the rigidification of human responses to the stereotyped and mechanical
actions of automata. This overly abstract, intellectualistic and mathematical
approach to reality is at home only when dealing with what is static, fixed, and
immobile. The mind turns its back on the fundamental fluidity of existence and
solidifies everything it touches. Such an intellect freezes, fixes, and
coagulates movement into a homogeneous series of static concepts, arbitrarily
making abstract cuts into lifeﾕs continuum. It invents ﾒthingsﾓ - an artificial
world of hard facts: the domain of the solid, dead, and inert.
Bergson perceives this
tendency as expressing a technocracyﾕs tragically misguided attempt to assert
power over nature through industry and the mechanical automatism of the
machine. And Bergson repeatedly takes the large, impersonal business concern
and the subdivided, Taylorised tasks of factory machine production to
illustrate the life-denying economic rationalism he is determined to criticise
and devalue. For Bergson the abstract, degrading and alienated life experience
of the factory hand and office worker of today, compared with the concrete,
symbolic and humanly fulfilling activities of the artisan and craft worker of a
pre-industrial age, corresponds to the disappearance of the qualitative,
individual characteristics of work, and the transformation of time from the
concrete duration of creative activity into a process subject to mechanical
laws.
Consequently time loses its
qualitative, changing, fluid character; it freezes into a rigid, exactly
delimited, quantifiable continuum, filled with quantitatively measurable
ﾒthingsﾓ (which are the mechanically objectified ﾒperformanceﾓ and
ﾒproductionsﾓ of the worker, wholly detached from their total human
personality); in short, time is transformed into abstract, exactly measurable,
physical space. The personality of the worker can do no more than look on and
suffer helplessly as merely a rationalised and mechanically fragmented object
of labour power, an isolated particle fed into an alien system. The increasing
mechanical disintegration of the process of production into specialised
sub-components also destroys those bonds that had once bound individuals into a
community in the days when work was still ﾔwholeﾕ and ﾔorganicﾕ. Articulating
it philosophically, Bergson points out that a qualitative ﾔwholeﾕ consists of
several quantitative ﾔpartsﾕ: a ﾔpartﾕ is that of which many make a ﾔwholeﾕ;
therefore, the part is less than the whole - and the whole is always greater
than the sum of its individual parts. Tragically, the mechanical rigidification
of industry reduces and fragments workers into isolated, abstract atoms whose
labour activity no longer brings them together directly and organically; instead,
they are overtaken exclusively and to an ever increasing degree by the abstract
laws of a mechanism that imprisons them.
Nostalgia for an organic and
integrated community in comparison with the moral impoverishment and
ﾔtranscendental homelessnessﾕ of the modern world colours the cultural critic
Walter Benjaminﾕs most cogent essays. In ﾔThe Storytellerﾕ, for instance,
Benjamin compares printing and the dispersal of feeling in modern urban society
- what Benjamin describes as a growing inability to exchange experiences - with
the exemplary and authentic, highly personal and entertaining forms of verbal
art, which the modern world of industry and mass media are in the process of
destroying. Benjamin describes the yarns, the oral narratives woven by the storyteller
as a type of craft, ﾒan artisan form of communication, as it were. It does not
seek to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It
sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out
again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints
of the potter cling to the clay vessel.ﾓ
Life, for Henri Bergson, is
like a flowing torrent of creative activity, a ceaseless flow of energy, an 四an
vital. Matter, the condensed state of
free activity, represents the cessation, the ﾔobjectificationﾕ of the creative
action. Lifeﾕs creative 四an is
ceaselessly solidified into finite, material ﾔthingsﾕ or ﾔobjectsﾕ; calcified
or crystalline deposits which are, in time, dissolved and reabsorbed back into
the stream of life, into its
creative flow. Bergson compares this process, and life itself, to a shell,
bursting into fragments which are again shells. A view Bergson reiterates and
extends into a veritable cosmology:
Let us imagine a vessel
full of boiling water heated at a high pressure, and here and there in its
sides a crack appears through which a jet of steam escapes. The steam thrown
into the air is nearly all condensed into little drops that fall, and this
condensation and this fall represent simply the loss of something, an
interruption, a deficit. But a small part of the jet of steam persists,
uncondensed, for some seconds; it is making an effort to raise the drops which
are falling; it succeeds at most in retarding their fall. So, from an immense
reservoir of life, jets gush out unceasingly, of which each, falling, is a
world. The evolution of living
species within this world
represents what subsists of the primitive direction of the original jet, and of
an impulsion which continues itself in a direction the inverse of materiality.
It would appear, therefore,
that for Bergson the manifestations of Life (the 四an vital) exist in perpetual conflict with ﾒmatterﾓ, in any
sense of that term in which it means something dead, inert, lifeless - in
short, the utter opposite of Life.
How, then, does Bergson
derive matter from Life? By the device, which is as old as Heraclitus, of
balancing the upward movement of life by a downward movement. For every upward
push there is a downward fall, for every tension of movement, a torpor or
slackening of effort, for every creative urge, the relaxation and listlessness
of fatigue. So, again, an action which, when first performed, was fresh and
original, a new achievement in doing or thinking, becomes, by repetition, a
habit. Plasticity yields to rigidity, variation to uniformity, effort to
inertia.
Thus, we get matter - the
burden against which Life is constantly struggling, yet at the same time the
very life-process itself. For Bergson, evolution is not from matter to life,
but from life to matter. Matter is derivative from life, a deposit or sediment
(as it were) of the cosmic flux or ネan, produced by its slackening and receding from its own creations.
This is another aspect of
Bergsonﾕs philosophy: like a river flowing through an alluvial plain, we
continue to follow the course which, aeons ago, the water once carved out -
only, with the passage of the years, the original irregularities of the channel
become exaggerated, the course more and more elaborately curved, the rate of
movement slower and slower. The river does not change: it only becomes more and
more characteristically itself. The sedimentation and accumulated weight of
these past external objectifications of the human spirit express an endlessly
flowing creativity concretised into ﾔthingsﾕ that infuse and enrich our lives
through the birth, internalisation and historical transmission of the outward
forms of ﾔcultureﾕ, as the stream
of time moves on, inexorably.
ﾒLife is a continuous stream
proceeding through sequences of generationsﾓ. And what are human individuals?
They are the bearers of this process. Is life more than the totality of its bearers? Yes and No. Life flows ﾒas these
individualsﾓ. But individuals are not continuous. Life is continuous, yet it
ﾒdams upﾓ in individuals, or more generally as individuated forms. All forms,
social and cultural, represent the same sort of crystallization and even
rigidification of life. The forms (including individuals) first appear as the
ﾒsubjectsﾓ of life, but they turn out to be instruments that are themselves
transcended by the flow of life.
The ideological encounter of
Gilles Deleuze with Henri Bergson results in a salutary dismantling of
identity, amounting to a ﾔdisenfranchisement of the subjectﾕ. ﾒTo be conscious
of real duration is to lose a sense of oneﾕs individuality in the worldﾓ. A
liberation of the self amounting to the experience of ﾒa succession of
heterogeneous states melting into one another and flowing in an indivisible processﾓ
allowing the subject to become ﾒidentical with being in itselfﾓ.
Similarly, the European
colonist Bernard OﾕReilly, in his autobiography Cullenbenbong, describes the language of Australiaﾕs Blue Mountains
Kanimbla people, an ancient people whose culture expresses a direct,
participatory experience of plants, animals, and elements - the sounds of
insects, the speech of birds, the tastes in the winds, the flux of sounds and
smells - in terms that seem to reproduce the breakdown of the split between the
self and the world of sensory particulars, thus questioning the traditional
dominion of European reason over a natural world construed as a passive and
mechanical set of ﾔobjectsﾕ:
The language of the blacks
was not made for white manﾕs tongue and that is why it sounds like blasphemy to
hear him try to pronounce an Aboriginal word. Black manﾕs words should never
nave been put on paper for their is nothing in our alphabet as we understand
its sounds which would make the written word any nearer to the original than a
feeble parody. It is with regret then and some shame that the name
Cullenbenbong must be written here; how cold and lifeless it looks in white
manﾕs type, yet to hear it pronounced by the Kanimbla was to hear majestic
thunder re-echoing amongst the granite mountains of their hunting grounds.
A strange thing this
language of nature; a haunting echoing softness might give way to unbelievable
drama and there were dread words which made your spine creep even though you
didnﾕt know their meaning. If you listened to the Aborigines speaking together
you didnﾕt hear a mumble of foreign words, you heard the sighing of trees, the
voice of birds, the sounds of storm and flood and wind, the rolling of rocks on
a landslide; you heard stark fear and infinite sadness.
Copyright 2010
K.Osmosis. All rights reserved.
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