Bergson and the Metaphysics of Media

S. Crocker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137324504
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

What is a medium? Why is therealways a middle? Can media produce 'immediacy'? Henri Bergson recognized mediation as the central philosophical problem of modernity. This book traces his influence on the 'media philosophies' of Gilles Deleuze, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin and Michel Serres.

Part I

Medium as Means and Obstacle

1

Metaphysical Media: The Discrete and the Continuous in Deleuze and McLuhan

Two branches of Bergsonism: phenomenology and Catholic modernism

On the surface, nothing could be further apart than the technological determinism of Marshall McLuhan and the ‘transcendental empiricism’ of Gilles Deleuze. Nonetheless, Understanding Media and the Cinema books both look to the birth of motion pictures for insight into the nature of thinking itself. In the movies, McLuhan and Deleuze see a new image of thought that is no longer based on a Cartesian model of a machine linking discrete cells of activity, but on the active role of ‘resonant’ or ‘irrational’ intervals, in which the interstice or medium between events plays an active role in the creation of the sense that passes through it. For both, film’s significance is not only aesthetic or technical, it is also metaphysical. Film is a break boundary, as McLuhan puts it, between discrete and continuous forms or organization that offers us some new kind of insight into the nature of relations and intervals.

In this unexpected affinity, we can trace the convergence of two branches of Bergsonism that had split apart earlier in the century. One secularized version of Bergsonism passes through Georges Sorel, French existentialism, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Jean Hyppolite and Emmanuel Levinas, and on into the great Deleuzean ‘poststructuralist’ themes of multiplicity, time and difference. We should distinguish this stream of thought from the Catholic Bergsonism that passes from Bergson’s students Edouard le Roy and Etienne Gilson to Jacques Maritian, Charles Peguy, and on down through Pierre Tielhard’s Utopian Catholic idea of a noosphere, and then into mid-century Thomism, and what came to be called Catholic modernism. It is in this latter trajectory that we will first locate McLuhan’s media philosophy.

Bergson, McLuhan and Catholic modernism

Pierre Tielhard, the Jesuit priest paleontologist, ex communicant and all around visionary is perhaps the best known figure in this tradition. In The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu, he saw in Bergson’s Creative Evolution an invitation to spiritualize science and reconnect it with the Christian tradition.¹ Tielhard drew on Bergson’s image of élan vital to develop an understanding of God as a principle of complexity and evolutionary dynamism that led the world from a geosphere to a biosphere to, finally, a noosphere, or medium of thought and consciousness that surrounds the planet.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan embraced Tielhard’s vision of a noosphere and developed from it his idea of an emerging global village made possible by the world wide simultaneity of electric media.² How far McLuhan followed Tielhard is hard to say. Did he endorse the idea of the ‘Christosphere’ that was supposed to follow the noosphere, or the Omega Point, the final telos of history, recently the subject of a novel by Don Delillo?³ In a video made in collaboration with McLuhan’s daughter Stephanie, the writer Tom Wolfe suggests that McLuhan did not publicly acknowledge the full extent of Pierre Tielhard’s influence on him because the author of The Phenomenon of Man had been shunned by the Catholic Church, whose influence McLuhan felt through his association with St. Michael’s, the Catholic college at the University of Toronto, where he taught.⁴

Tielhard, however, was only the outer edge of a much larger, early twentieth-century movement of neo-Catholicism, or Catholic modernism, one version of which thrived at the University of Toronto and influenced McLuhan’s approach to media studies. Arthur Kroker explains that ‘ ... even as he studied the “maelstrom” of high technology, [McLuhan] never deviated from the classical Catholic project of seeking to recover the basis for a “new universal community” in the culture of technology. In the best of the Catholic tradition, followed out by Etienne Gilson in philosophy as much as by Pierre Elliott Trudeau in politics, McLuhan sought a new “incarnation,” an “epiphany,” by releasing the reason in technological experience.’⁵

Bergsonism provided the philosophical engine for this new version of Catholicism that included among its converts T.S. Eliot, Edith Stein, Jacques Maritain, and even Bergson himself. The Catholic critique of mechanical modernity, and the embrace of Bergsonian philosophy seemed to fit well together. Catholicism’s holistic vision of an emerging human community in Christ was at odds with the atomism of science and mechanical life. In this climate, Bergson’s imagery of continuity and duration promised to reorient Catholic discontent with secular modernity away from a backward-looking nostalgia for the grandeur of the medieval Papacy, and to set in a new, exciting forward-looking direction. Through the filter of Bergsonism, Catholicism now seemed to have something important to say about the technologization of man. The new man called forth by science, the man of the future, would be a Catholic. In its subtler, milder forms, Catholic Bergsonism offered a sensibility and continuity that one could find in, for example, T.S. Eliot’s poetry. In its stronger, Teihardian formations, it was worked up into a near science-fiction kind of utopianism. In either case, it was Bergsonism that provided the basic imagery of a mechanical modernity and the diagnosis of the spiritual dilemma that accompanied it: Science could not provide the metaphysics it required, and so could not really understand itself. It called for another order of reflection to understand what made it possible and why it was significant. Bergson’s vision of the ‘incomplete modernity’ of scientific/mechanical thought opened up a new vocation for Catholicism: to produce a metaphysics adequate to our mechanical/technological age. All of this then is the background climate of McLuhan’s claim that his reflections on media were not a form of cultural criticism, but of metaphysics.⁶

Outside of France, where it originated, St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto was the epicenter of this movement of Catholic Bergsonism. The Pontifical Institute at St. Michael’s College was established and run by Bergson’s star student Étienne Gilson. McLuhan had praised Gilson in his PhD thesis, and Gilson, in turn, had been influenced by McLuhan, particularly in his late lectures on art. Gilson was a close friend of Jacques Maritian, who taught frequently at the Institute and pursued the relation of Thomism and Bergsonism throughout his career.⁷

Walter Ong, another St. Michael’s Jesuit, and author of the Provence of the Word and Orality and Literacy, deeply influenced McLuhan’s theories about the evolution of media from print to speech to electric communication. Ong recognized the Bergsonian tone that underscored McLuhan’s conceptual distinctions: ‘One thinks of Bergson’s misgivings in Time and Free Will about the tendency of the last few centuries to overspatialize everything.’⁸

The critique of the atomizing machinery of science, and the vision of a coming collective image of man, modeled on a Catholic notion of community and animated by a Bergsonian philosophy of evolution, fed directly into McLuhan’s hyperbolic declarations about electric media as the externalization of common sense. In Culture as Polyphony, James M. Curtis claims that ‘it is reasonable to assume that McLuhan originally found the concept (of technology as extension of man) in Bergson ... .’⁹

The renovation of Bergson’s metaphysics allowed the emergence of a kind of media studies that concerned itself not with the message, the technique or the political economy of media, but with the more basic, even phenomenological problem of mediation itself. For McLuhan, Bergsonian Catholicism provided a way of returning to an older theological problem of ‘participation’, or how divine thought is revealed in the world. Media, McLuhan supposed, provide an external representation not only of our thinking mechanism but also of the divine intelligence that passes through it. Deleuze’s interest, as we will see in a later section, is more immanent and recognizes in the film image a representation of the Kantian architecture of reason and of the intervallic, open nature of time that defines it. For Deleuze, what was ultimately at stake was not only a picture of the mind, but the opportunity to conceive of thinking itself as a kind of mediation between being and appearance.

Why Bergson dismissed film

Before we consider any further how the discrete and continuous found its way through the twentieth century, though, we should first recall the way that Bergson develops the idea. After all, it is strange to consider Bergson’s contribution to media studies when Bergson himself dismissed film. In fact, Bergson even goes so far as to adopt the name cinematographic thought to describe the inauthentic, reified and ‘spatial’ caricature of thought that his philosophy opposed.

Deleuze claimed that in spite of this disavowal, Bergson’s ideas contained all the essential ingredients for understanding the significance of the moving image.¹⁰ This is because Bergson dissolves an age-old distinction that places movement in the external world, and images in the mind. For Bergson, thinking is movement and mediation. The brain is an interval between the reception of sense and its execution in sensory motor schemas that combine thought and action in ways that are useful for life. Consciousness is, therefore, a kinesiology (hence, cinema), or a kind of movement. This movement of thought cannot, however, be reconstructed from discrete units because it always occurs in the interval between them. No matter how small the unit, or how precise the divisions, it is always in the betweenesss – the medium – that change occurs, and this, Bergson argues, is always missing from a spatial analysis, cinema (or movies) included.

Here is what he says about it:

Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic of this becoming itself. Perception, intellect, and language so proceed in general. The mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.¹¹

Because Bergson’s central philosophical interest is mediation, the question he asks about the new medium of cinema is: How does it move? What happens in the middle, or the interval? On viewing the very first forms of film he finds that cinema deals with already formed, discrete cells to which it simply adds movement. It is a mechanism, Bergson concludes, that processes separate blocks of movement like the Cartesian mind processes clear and distinct ideas.

Cinema strings together immobile sections of movement with an external, indifferent time, which does not emerge from inside the moments, but is added on from outside them. The ‘mechanisms of association’, or mediating intervals that connect these elements are only inert means of conveying a form along a line from ‘T1’ to ‘T2’. So, while the apparatus of cinema may be stunningly new, the form of mediation that animates it is not, and so, Bergson concludes, it does not make it any easier to appreciate the fluid and dynamic nature of thought.

Discrete and continuous media

Bergson’s interest in mediation is part of a strong Kantian element in his work. Like Kant, he regards space and time not as properties of the external world, but as the background condition of thought. However, where Kant describes these conditions as pure forms of intuition, for Bergson they are kinds of mediation, or media.

Bergson’s philosophy offers us a basic dualism for understanding how the diversity of life – people, sensation and objects – can be organized. Discrete multiplicities transform everything into distinct units with well-defined borders. They operate on a principle of ‘mutual externality without succession’.¹² Continuous multiplicities, on the other hand, like the structure of a melody or the sound of a dripping tap, are dynamic wholes that become qualitatively different with the addition of each new part. They operate on a principle of ‘succession without mutual externality’.¹³

In the early formulation of these ideas, Bergson wraps up the theory of multiplicity in a psychological dualism of real and derived aspects of the self. Discrete multiplicities, he tells us, correspond to objects in the external world, whereas continuous multiplicities are found within the self:

Within our ego there is succession without mutual externality, outside our ego mutual externality without succession.¹⁴

Thus, we are offered two very different images of the world as a set of distinct points outside us, or a single fluid continuum we experience ‘when the ego lets itself live.’¹⁵

When I listen to the tick of a clock, or the sound of a dripping tap, I gather together a quantity of distinct elements, but I also register a qualitative impression of a whole sequence. It is not difficult to multiply examples of these sorts of phenomena on which Bergson built his philosophy. The fatigue I feel at the end of the day, the progression of a disease, the intensity of the sun’s heat passing though my window, the emerging realization of an idea, the conviction that I am in love or that I am no longer, all develop in time. In each case, a multitude of elements presents itself as a set that is continually altered with the appearance of each new one.

These elements, of sound or heat or light, are all distinct and occur at different times. They come from different directions, and they carry different intensities. But if I can experience them as a single physical force unfolding itself in time, that is because I can arrange their duration, intensity and regularity all under a common measure. Our sense of time and continuity has a special relation to our ability to count, and to distinguish between qualities and quantities.

In order to count the moments of a day, or the events that make up a life, we must be able to retain past elements and set them alongside those presently in view. As long as we rely on images of coexistence and adjacency, however, we are understanding time through one of the defining qualities of space, namely simultaneity. Here, then, is the difficulty that Bergson follows through Time and Free Will: In order to count and analyze things in succession, we must first project them into a homogenous medium in which they can be juxtaposed and counted. Counting filters the continuous quality of time through the discrete medium of the number.

Counting and time are thus different kinds of mediation, which is to say that they deal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction Any-Moment-Whatever: Elaborating Bergson’s Ideas
• Part I   Medium as Means and Obstacle
• Part II   Killing Time: Synchrony and Diachrony
• Part III   Man Falls Down: Unanswerable Situations
• Conclusion: On Failure and Wonder
• Notes
• References
• Index