Deleuze's Bergsonism by Craig Lundy

Author:Craig Lundy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

4

Dualism or Monism?

THE APPARENT CONTRADICTION OF BERGSONISM

There are three major stages of Bergsonism: duration, memory and the élan vital. In addition, there is the method, intuition, that guides the progress between these three. Deleuze dedicates a chapter to each of these four elements, but the reader will notice that there is an extra chapter in his book, placed in between his examination of the second and third stages of Bergsonism. This extra chapter is required in order to address an apparent contradiction that has emerged from the first two stages. On the one hand, Bergson’s philosophy is decidedly dualistic: a great deal of effort is given to distinguishing and separating out differences in degree from differences in kind, space from time, discrete from continuous multiplicities, the objective from the subjective, matter from memory, perception from recollection, the present from the past, etc. But on the other hand, Bergsonism also exhibits a tendency towards monism. For instance, in the analysis of the relation between recollection and perception, recollections were said to gradually take on a psychological existence; like a condensing cloud they move from the virtual to the actual ‘little by little’.1 With descriptions like this, it would seem that the difference between them is one of degree, and that genuine differences in kind have been lost. Before continuing to the third stage of Bergsonism it is therefore necessary for Deleuze to reconcile the dualistic and monistic dimensions of Bergson’s work, to articulate their unity and show how Bergsonism gives rise to a “new monism” (B 74).

Contraction, on Deleuze’s reading, is the concept that has been charged with doing the heavy lifting. As we saw in the last chapter, contraction features numerous times in Deleuze’s analysis of Matter and Memory, and in several different ways. Contraction is what produces the cone of memory, as the different levels or planes of the cone are determined by the differing degrees to which the whole of the past is contracted. In this respect, contraction is responsible for producing the depth of memory, for making a cone of memory (rather than memory being confined to a single-solitary plane). But aside from this operation of contraction, we also saw how contraction brings together successive moments to render them contemporaneous, as part of a duration. And finally, contraction was central to the connection of recollections with perception. To this Deleuze now adds that sensation itself is a manifestation of contraction: “[Sensation] is the operation of contracting trillions of vibrations onto a receptive surface” (B 74). In this description, which suggests that quality “is nothing other than contracted quantity” (B 74), contraction is again given the pivot-role – that which brings together differences in kind. Matter thus finds its place within the schema of memory, the present within the schema of the past, as its most contracted degree. Movement and change, furthermore, are no longer alien to matter, but can be “attributed to things themselves so that material things partake directly of duration” (B 75).2

But can Bergson have

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