Bergson - duration & virtuality

Thoughts post reading ‘The Future of Space: Towards an Architecture of Invention’ Elizabeth Grosz

actual vs virtual - newness

- otherness ---> potential

- divergence

I am interested in Henri Bergson’s notion of duration as an unhinging of temporality in opposition to an understanding of spatiality.

Space - real, external, comparable and calculable

Duration - continuous, emergent and virtual

If space & time (duration) are thought of as discrete opposed phenomena we do not allow for the process of spatialisation through notions of duration & temporality. Bergson conceptualised space as the contraction of time while time is the expansion of space hence recognising the becoming one of the other (relation of direct inversion).

Space (medium of actuality) instead of being the dualism of duration (temporality) could be conceived as the field for the virtual, where motion unfolds and actualises space. Thus we could consider space not as an existing measurable relationism but rather consider it as we consider time, unfolding, emergent and open to ‘becoming’- that is becoming other than itself, other than what it has been considered to be. A re-invention of the concept of space, rather than an expectation of what we know space to be.

Spatiality contracts with the perception of the present (specificity of location), the possibilities of action and a memory of past (pre-established ‘being’?). Bergson suggests a return to the space of the immediate lived experience in order to override the pre-established understanding of space. Return to a moment of instability between what we know and the anticipation of what is to come.

Bergson defines perception and memory in pragmatic terms as our mode of access to the present and past.

Present – that which acts, lives, anticipates immediate future

Past – no longer acts, accessible as re-collections

Memory is faded perception (past, conciousness, duration) while perception (actual, present, space, objects, matter) is dawning action- action in potential. Perception relates to how we may experience, act and interpret.

perception – memory

present – past

Memory is the present’s mode of access to the past. The past could be seen as powerless but can moblise (have influence on) present perception. Therefore the present is not self-contained rather it straddles the past and the present and is thus the threshold of interaction of perception & action, the site of duration, the moment of the virtual.

Deleuze’s reading of Bergson goes as far as to say that the only subjectivity in life is time, which we experience through duration.

Bergson theorises the paradox of temporal simultaneity of present & past. Present not purely self contained- it requires the past as its precondition, hence the past is contemporaneous with the present. The past can only exist with the present of which it is the past.

If these two types of time coexists, one virtual (past) & one actual (present) is there a spatial correlation for this unhinging of temporal continuity? Can the virtual be transferred to concepts of space? The virtual implies an opposition to the actual, it has a sense of reality without any actuality. As well it seems the virtual cannot be specified directly, for when it exists, it exists as actual. In the process of actualisation the virtual annuls itself in order to re-emerge as an actual & therefore produces its own virtualities.

Bergson & Deleuze speculate on the potential of the virtual to be actualised, a capacity of the actual to be more than itself, to become other than how it has previous been seen or functioned. In the fleeting moment of the possible actualisation of the virtual we may experience an unhinging of spatial and temporal understanding.

things to consider

does the paradox of duration have spatial counterparts?

is (re)presentation past? – memory

conscious perception

duration as a charged moment?