We have so far acknowledged Bergson in our sessions as a primary influence on French philosophers such as Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, also popularised and revitalized later by Deleuze and influential to Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time. His influence also spreads however to other French speaking intellectuals, informing much of the philosophical content of the Negritude movement, which sought to resist the cultural prejudices and domination of France itself towards its former colonies, addressing classical questions in Descartes also selected for the basis of Bergson’s Matter and Memory.
One central concept within the Negritude movement is Bergson’s concept of Élan vital, understood by Senghor in a kind of animistic sense, where the vital force of an individual can be devalued or reinforced, entering into a hierarchy based on its strength. In Matter and Memory, Bergson conceptualises consciousness to a similar effect, where consciousness grounded in pure memory, rather than non-reflective, mechanical or habitual recitation prevented the consciousness of the individual from becoming automatic. The grounding of consciousness in the past has clear importance for post-colonial writers like Césaire:
“Négritude, in my eyes, is not a philosophy. Négritude is not a metaphysics. Négritude is not a pretentious conception of the universe. It is a way of living history within history: the history of a community whose experience appears to be… unique, with its deportation of populations, its transfer of people from one continent to another, its distant memories of old beliefs, its fragments of murdered cultures. How can we not believe that all this, which has its own coherence, constitutes a heritage?” (Césaire 2004).
Good work Piers. I like the fact that you placed Bergson's work as operating not just within the French tradition. The French tradition is also a colonial tradition, as well as a modern tradition. Indeed, modernity was in a way what Bergson was trying overcome, especially in the guise of the numerical and quantitative society. It is interesting also that you place Bergson as a precursor to the 'Negritude' movement, as it is normally Sartre via Fanon that is seen as the main intellectual grounding of this work.
ReplyDeleteI like what you did with the question of memory also. I think you have provided a good example of Bergson's distinction between lived memory and elapsed memory, and given it an interesting political inflection
A couple of questions:
How would you conceive of the question of emancipation within Bergson? The question of freedom seems more at home in Sartre. This question resides in what you by 'fragmentation.' Remeber fragmentation is another form of segmentation, or thought in another way negation. And transformation is purely positive for Bergson. Is it something that Negritude has overcome through Bergson's thought?
Citation?!!!
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ReplyDeleteSorry, the Césaire quote is from 'a lecture on negritude', but its printed in 'Discours sur le colonialisme', I pulled it from SEP's page on Negritude, found here: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/negritude/
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you mentioned Fanon; I had a thought about the influence of such a traditionally French thinker on post-colonial writing and philosophy related to Fanon's essay 'On National Culture', in which he describes the threat of a 'Universal Cultural Society', dominated by the cultural prejudices and assimilating nature of European colonialism:
"You will never make colonialism blush for shame by spreading out little-known cultural treasures under its eyes. At the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create a cultural work he fails to realize that he is utilizing techniques and language which are borrowed from the stranger in his country [...] the native intellectual who comes back to his people by way of cultural achievements behaves in fact like a foreigner."
Amilcar Cabral, also, writes in 'National Liberation and Culture', that one condition for national liberation is the reconversion of intellectuals and the petit-bourgeoisie. As far as the political influence of Bergson goes, I think it would be troublesome to make a connection, as while these sorts of arguments cement the influence of French thought in francophone countries, they also portray that as a negative effect of colonization.
I see Bergson as emancipatory to all post-industrial society however, and one thing colonialism definitely did was industrialise or proletarianize non-european countries.We clearly live in a society where time for example is far more than a clock face; the worker's time is commodified, he sells it for money. What this would imply for Bergson seems, to me, obvious, thought I doubt there are such political overtones in his work.
I'd suggest that the idea of qualitative and quantitative time, applied to history, also has a lot of significance for post-colonial thinkers searching for their pre-colonial history and culture; you suggested that a key theme in French philosophy might be simultaneity and change, so for native intellectuals to tap into this does not sound like 'assimilation' to me. Bergson's positivity about transformation and fluidity could be taken two ways: as a condonation of colonialism, or an encouraging indentification of the subjects of diaspora.
I think it's fair to suggest these connections, but Bergson is a bit of a minor player in reality, mainly adopted by Senghor, who ties in a lot of spiritual or religious ideas which in my opinion takes away a lot of credibility from the ideas he develops as 'philosophical content'.
(Fanon quote is from
Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory, Williams and Chrisman 1994 pg39)
Good response Piers. Very very interesting.
ReplyDeleteJust three things
1. I agree that Bergson's qualitative and quantitative distinction has the potential to say a lot about even the phenomenology of industrial work time.
2. I agree that this is something that is just not as explicit as it might be in his work. I have seen him used a little in organisation studies. But philosophically, there is a lot of work that still could be done here. Would make an intersting essay.
3. It might be worth thinking about the Marxian analysis of industrialisation on this one. For Marx, colonial and industrialisation 'enabled' proletarization. The intensification and complexification of the means of production meant that workers could conceivably control them. Employers were dependent on workers for profit. This would be an interesting intersection to analyze the relation between work time and liberate time. In a sense, this is the tradition that Deleuze, Guattari and Hardt and Negri have taken up. Something for your dissertation maybe?
As I was reading this I also thought about Deleuze's philosophy on repitition and time, for Deleuze the central aspect of repitition is time. He believes that as with difference, repetition has been subjected to the law of the identical, but also to a prior model of time. For example, a repeated sentence is to same the same thing twice but at different moments. These two moments should be equal and unbiased, therefore repetition is considered as difference over time; a succession of moments.
ReplyDeleteDeleuze wants to ask that if we can renovate the meaning of difference as in-itself, we could also reconsider repitition. If however we are to consider difference-in-itself over time, based on the logic of repetition, we reach the point of identity. Therefore Deleuze's critique of identity re-evaluates the question of time.
His argument consists of three models; the circle, the straight line (taken from the kantian theory) and the idea of eternal return:
The circle represents circular time; mythical and seasonal, the repetition of the same after time has passed through its cardinal points. For example: sunset. There is a sense of destiny and theology and time representing a circle, Deleuze argues that when time is considered in this manner, repitition is solely habit. A person experiences the passing of moments cyclically and aquires habits which make time as a continually living present.
In the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant liberates time from the circular model by proposing it as a form that is imposed upon sensory experience. For Deleuze, this reverses the earlier situation by placing events into time (as a line,) rather than seeing the chain of events constituting time by the passing of present moments. Habit therefore no longer holds any power, as in this model, nothing returns. In order to make sense of what has occurred , there must be an active process of synthesis, which give past instances a meaning, Deleuze calls this second synthesis memory. Memory does not relate itself to a present, but a past that has never been present.
The final model of time attempts to make repetition itself a form of time by relating the concepts of difference and repetition to each other. Here he turns to the Nietzchean concept of eternal return. He believes it must not be considered as a cycle, as the return of the identical, nor of habit, as this would allow the return of something which has already existed. This would result again in the supression of difference through an inadequate concept of repetition. This concept is something I myself find very hard to understand as everything that exists as a unity will not return, only that which differs from itself. So, while habit was the time of the present, and memory the being of the past, repetition as the eternal return is the time of the future.
I think that Deleuze's arguments are extremely hard to understand and even though I studied his work for over a year, I sometimes fail to grasp completely his argument on time. I think it does have relevance to everyday life once you can overcome the complexity. What do you all think? (Sorry it is so long-winded...I tried to shorten it as much as possible!!)
Anneliese I think you're absolutely right, however I'd like to offer an explanation of Deleuze's reliance on Nietzsche for the future.
ReplyDeleteIf we understand that passive synthesis is duree (i.e. AB AB AB A...) and that all past instances are contracted into each other, one another, which creates the living present of all past instances i.e. the actualized present is a continuous becoming actualization of all of the past actualizations, which is to say the present contains all of the past forms that have unfolded further to create the living present, then we are up to date.
However Deleuze also insists that the Holy Ghost, Nietzsche, allows for the future, and the Eternal Return is the absolute keystone in
Deleuzianism, that which materially grounds the entire philosophy, and without which it would fall apart. The eternal return, Deleuze says,
is not the return of the self-same, but the return of difference itself. What does this mean? How can something return without the same
identity? Well, as we have seen, the past is difference-in-itself, the present is the living actualized instances of past contractions, so
therefore the future is pure virtuality, unactualized difference. The living present is always surging forth, surging and unfolding and
'becoming' that which it was not before, evolving, and those things that were pure affirmation, that which did not die or end, that which had will to power, carried on in duration and unfolded into something not quite what it was before, which for Deleuze is as good as saying something totally new. That is why what returns eternally is difference, the ability for the living present to unfold further, creating new difference.
Eternal return is the being of becoming itself.