Mullarkey Forget the Virtual

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Continental Philosophy Review (2004) 37: 469493

DOI: 10.1007/s11007-005-7097-z c Springer 2005

Forget the virtual: Bergson, actualism, and the refraction

of reality

JOHN MULLARKEYDepartment of Philosophy, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, Scotland, UK

(E-mail: [email protected])

Abstract. In this essay I critique a particular reading of Bergson that places an excessive weight

on the concept of the virtual. Driven by the popularity of Deleuzes use of the virtual, this

image of Bergson (seen especially through his text of 1896, Matter and Memory, where theidea is introduced) generates an imbalance that fails to recognise the importance of concepts

ofactuality, like space or psychology, in his other works. In fact, I argue that the virtual is

not the key concept for Bergsonism and that there is a good deal of evidence in Bergsons

other writings, especially those connected with his actualist notion of refraction, to think of

him as a perspectivist philosopher. Moreover, it will be seen that Virtualism resides within an

economy ofreflection that is subsumed within the broader paradigm of Actualist refraction.

Taking these optical metaphors seriously, the virtual becomes a perspectival image seen from

an actual position, or rather, an interacting set of actual positions. This interaction is termed

virtualization, denoting the substitution of a substantive conception with a processual one.

In the first two parts of the essay, I direct my remarks more towards Deleuzian readings of the

actual rather than Deleuze himself (Deleuze is so open about the biases he brings to his reading

of Bergson as to be beyond criticism). In the second two sections, I pursue a philosophical

argument for the probity of a non-Virtualist position as such within philosophy, based upon

the concept of refraction. This is done not only because it is important that we remain open toother readings of Bergson that are not so heavily mediated in one direction, but also in view of

the power of refraction as a new concept for reconciling actual modes such as molar identity,

the present, and extension, with their virtual opposites.

Introduction

In what follows, I discuss what is rapidly becoming an unchallenged -ism

in Continental thought, that of the Deleuzian virtual.1 Not that one must

be against -isms per se in philosophy, for they are often productive and

galvanising influences on the generation of philosophical concepts. Recent

works such as Keith Ansell Pearsons Philosophy and the Adventure of theVirtual, Manuel DeLandas Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, and

Brian Massumis Parables for the Virtual have gone a long way in making

sense of this concept of immanent, intensive, difference.2 Indeed, Virtualism

has become a key term not just for Deleuze-studies but also within the current

agenda for Continental thought in its relationship to science, to Humanism

(and the so-called post-human), and to aesthetics (of the visual arts and


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new media in particular). Nonetheless, for every forceful thought, a corrective

movement is often needed to stem any exaggeration, and of late it appears that

the argument for the virtual has become somewhat Manichaean (the virtual,

difference, and multiplicity, being good; the actual, continuity, and identity

being bad) and, with that, tending to the kind of dogmatic transcendentalism

that Deleuzians usually hope to avoid.

The brakes I am going to apply to this movement concern its source, for

the virtual, in as much as it is deemed to be foundational, is built upon a

misinterpretation. Naturally, it is Deleuzesontologicaluse of the virtual that

has animated a great deal of interest in Virtualism, his idea that the virtual

is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so

far as it is virtual.3

But this is where a philosophical controversy lies, for itis grounded in a contentious interpretation of Bergson (who first employed

the terms virtual and actual philosophically in his Matter and Memoryof

1896).4 For the most part, the virtual is given its ascendancy at the expense

of the actual, the former alone being real. Here is how Michael Hardt sums

up the situation between the two:

Deleuze asserts that it is essential that we conceive of the Bergsonianemanation of being, differentiation, as a relationship between the virtualand the actual, rather than as a relationship between the possible and thereal. After setting up these two couples (virtual-actual and possible-real),Deleuze proceeds to note that the transcendental term of each couple relates

positively to theimmanentterm of theopposite couple. The possible is neverreal, even though it may be actual; however, while the virtual may not beactual, it is nonetheless real.5

The actual is normally aligned in these readings with the merely possible, the

molar, the spatial, the phenomenological, and the psychological, while the

virtual alone has privileged access to reality, that is, to ontology. Keith Ansell

Pearson, for example, sees a fundamental advance in Bergsons shift from psy-

chology to ontology in his analysis of virtual memory inMatter and Memory.6

Sometimes, what can appear to be an equitable treatment of the actual and the

virtual more often than not prepares a one-sided prioritisation by implication.

Hence, Ansell Pearson is careful when writing of the actualization of the

virtual to note that the virtual is only real in so far as it is actualized.7 Thiscommendable accent on the movement of actualization only partially con-

ceals the fact that the actual forms thus created are ontologically dependent

on a ground that is not their own. They emerge (according to a principle of

differentiation) from the virtual. Likewise, James Williams begins impartially

enough, arguing, after Deleuze, for the reciprocal determination between

the virtual and the actual and for the inseparability of the two concepts,


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FORGET THE VIRTUAL 471

before returning to a general thrust that remains anti-Actualist, actual ob-

jects being disassociated from the processes that bring us about such that

our maxim should be leave all actual things behind (forget everything).8

A contrario, I hope to show that in Bergsons work the virtual is best re-

garded as a psychological concept derived from actual processes and that,

if anything should be forgotten, it is the virtual. Though some early texts

like Matter and Memory can lead one to think of the virtual as an abso-

lute for all Bergsons work, later texts, especially in the period between 1910

and 1922, take a more Actualist approach pointing in a direction beyond the

virtual (understood as the pure difference ontologically subtending our ac-

tual world).9 Looking at these later texts, it is possible to see a Leibnizian

dimension in Bergsons thought emerge whereby the virtual is grounded by aplay of actualities: the virtual for Bergson becomes a well-foundedperspec-

tival and psychological phenomenon an emergent product formed through

the interplay between a multiplicity of actual entities (including spatial and

temporal continuities anddiscontinuities, identities anddifferences, quanti-

tiesandqualities). Being well-founded here means that the virtual, while a

function of the actual and an emergent product, has real effects on the actual

rather than being merely epiphenomenal, which is certainly more value than

Deleuze offers the actual, given his view, according to Ansell Pearson, that

phenomenology must be epiphenomenology.10

There is more to this debate, however, than a squabble within Bergson-

studies, for its ramifications have broad philosophical interest. In general

philosophical terms, Actualism follows the view that there are no (hidden)

forces, no potencies, potentials, ground or substrate to the real, no possibles

awaiting actualization, no ontological hinterworld, no absolute unconscious,

no realm of anomalous identity, no pure Being (be it as such, ambiguous

or Wild). And also that there is no virtual. But what does this mean? In

thespecificDeleuzian context tackled here, the virtual is configured as what

conditions the actual, as what allows it to pass, as what enables it to actu-

alise itself. Against this, Actualism proposes that the actual is always already

actualised somewhere, to some point of view. It is a form of ontological anti-

reductionism a saving of the appearances, only at every level and not just

as regards how things appearto us.

Ill also argue that a psychological reading of the virtual does not then op-pose it to the ontological realm (orrather themetaphysical realm a distinction

Ill explain later), as some Deleuzians would have it, for the Bergsonianpsyche

is itself cosmological rather than anthropological. Indeed, while Bergsonism

is a philosophy of consciousness, this consciousness or psycheis a synonym

for movement, in particular, a specific model of movement that Bergson de-

scribes as refractive. Ultimately, Ill argue by contrast that the virtual is best


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understood as a psychological activity of virtualizing derived from the ac-

tual, or rather, from a multiplicity ofrefractive actualities. Hence, along with

the demotion of the virtual goes its supposed process of actualization and in

their place come actualities and the processes of their virtualization.

Admittedly, it could be suggested that all that is really involved here is a

name-change: like some inverted colour spectrum argument, we might simply

swap the terms virtual and actual in all that Bergson or Deleuze write on

the topic and end up with the same philosophical results. But the stakes are

larger than that, I believe, simply because the language of virtual and actual

are linked to cognate terms that cannot be so easily swapped, while also being

rooted in metaphysical thoughts with different emphases. One real conse-

quence of this for Deleuze-studies would be a loosening up of Deleuzes ownvarious dualisms: of the molar and the molecular, of Chronos and Aion, of the

extensive and the intensive, of psychology and ontology, of consciousness and

unconsciousness, of the movement-image and the time-image. Read through

a reoriented schema of virtualizing and the actual, molarity, for instance, is

not excluded from becoming (and, with that, reality): it too is a tendency, a

movement, and so is real for any thought such as Bergsons that sees processes

operating at every level, molar and molecular. Every moment can be an Event,

can be creative from some perspective, for there is no qualitative distinction

between false and genuine becoming.11

Consequently, there is no need for the Deleuzian prioritisation of Aion

(time as pure eternal return), for we can survive with the infinite series of

Chronos (time as actual succession), embedding each other. We dont need

a pure and empty form of time12 or eternity to contain other times: time is

always full.13 This redemption of the molar and the actual will also serve to

rehabilitate Phenomenology, in some shades at least, for Deleuzian thought.

A naturalistic (or cosmological) phenomenology, as pursued, for instance, in

the recent work of Renaud Barbaras on Merleau-Ponty, is quite compatible

with the naturalistic metaphysics followed by Deleuze (once the emphasis on

the virtual is tempered).14

A naturalistic metaphysics will appear impossible to many, but far from

being mutually exclusive, Bergsonian metaphysics and naturalism are actually

convergent in the manner in which they reform theirphilosophicalterms of

reference, namely, immanence (for naturalism) and transcendence (for meta-physics). Being part of a redeemed picture of nature, Bergsonian metaphysics

(like its Deleuzian descendant) is founded on the multiplicity and singularity

of beings rather than on a transcendental ontology of Being (understood as the

science of beingqua being). This contrast accords with the Wolffian picture

of ontology and metaphysics that defines ontology as that which deals with

possible things (whatever can be thought without contradiction), and meta-


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physics as that which deals with actual things.15 In Bergsonism, however, the

possible does not transcend the real but comes after it and is immanent to it: in

a creative evolution there is perpetual creation of possibility and not only of

reality.16 This production of the possible within the real is what we saw Hardt

allude to earlier. The possible is radically remade by the real all the time, and

so ontology must come aftermetaphysics when the latter is understood as

the promotion of a non-reductive naturalism, a metaphysics that comes after

a radicalised vision of the empirical, that is, after anomalous experience. 17

In this respect, Bergson both remains faithful to and goes beyond the history

of metaphysical thought by mobilising, multiplying, and materialising any

absolutes within it, by placing them sub specie durationis.18 We might also

call this a metaphysics without Being, for it is equally true that Bergsonscritique of Nothingness actually counters Being as well and consequently, as

Jacques Maritain charged, strikes a blow at all ontology.19

The anti-virtual

Slavoj Zizek describes Deleuze as the philosopher of the Virtual.20 The

definition of the virtual most pertinent to Deleuzes ontology is in terms of

Bergsoniandur eeand virtual memory. This virtual or pure memory is char-

acterised inMatter and Memoryas the persistence of the past, as the ongoing

existence of the past after its passing, and out of which new presents emerge.21

Whereas a recollection actualises the past, pure memory is this past. Yet this

position is difficult to countenance without also negating the reality of time

as genuine novelty (a characterisation much more in tune with his first sem-

inal work, Time and Free Will), given that actual, new presents seem to be

ontologicallyprefigured within the virtual. As A.R. Lacey has argued, the

persistence of the effects of the past, or the persistence ofmypast as a recol-

lection, may well make sense, but not the survival ofthepast: pure memories

do not exist now as entities they exist (timeless present) in the past, but they

have causal effects now, in so far as they generate memory images, which are

present phenomena.22 There will, of course, be the traditional retorts that ask

what conditions this movement of time, where lies its potential, where is itsynthesised, or how is it constituted. For instance, how is the past made from

the present, how is it madeto pass? The implication is that the survival of the

past is required in order to make the present pass. But ifdur eeis fundamental

change, then it needs no support, be it physical (in substance) or ontological

(in the virtual). Actuality is a creativity neither ex nihilo norex potentia: it

is its own ground. The passage of time (or movement) comes from itself at


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474 J. MULLARKEY

every level, and, as such, is unthinkable in itself. Bergson argues that we may

be able to feel it in an effort of sympathetic intuition, but all attempts to think

it or reflect upon it end in mediations that necessarily distort (or refract) it.

To pretend to think it through what we call the virtual is philosophically

confused (while also being unavoidable for reasons Ill explore later).

In fact, the Deleuzian theory of the virtual, of the persistence of the past, is

wholly compatible with its antecedents in Bergsonian vitalism, when the latter

is predicated on actualbecoming and affect, and the former is read through

a virtual ontology. That is to say, that the actual and the virtual are, if not

actually identical, at leastvirtually so. Im making painful play here on the

word virtual, alas, but this is necessary. Bergson was always very careful in

his choice of terminology,23

and we must not forget the sense of the virtual asan optical image that onlyapproximatesthe real. I hope to demonstrate that

the virtual existsonlyvirtually within a virtual ontology, and by that I mean

that it is a performative concept, it is produced from our point of view as an

image (another vital term for Bergson): one canvirtualizewithout anything

existing other than what we call and see as the virtual through refraction.

Refraction is the process whereby the path of light waves is distorted as

they move from one medium to another. In Bergsons hands this metaphor

does a huge amount of work, for it is the media themselves, as processes, as

mediations, that he is most interested in, not the light (if that is understood as

a persisting substance). Refraction doesnt happento light, it is all there is to

light, all there is to both its appearance and its so-called reality. It enjoys no

internal virtual/actual structure.

But we are moving too fast. Returning to Deleuze, there are, of course,

differences between actual perspectives, between our mundane and our ex-

treme experiences, between the perception of a neurotic and the enlarged

perception of a schizophrenic (or artist or mystic), between, in other words, a

transcendental, shocking or radical empiricism and routine perception.24 And

again, of course, it is the difference between these types of perception ones

that are in-depth, richer, transgressive, or liminal, and ones that remain on the

surface, narrow, or predictable that leads us to think of the virtual as an actual

fringe around our actual (and often spatialized) experience. But thinking of

the virtual in this substantive manner is incorrect (at least for Bergsonians), for

his later works reveal it as a well-founded artefact derived from and performedwithin our optical situation, that is, a situation of multiple, stratified actualities

with multiple interfering perspectives on each other. It is not that there is one

type of actual perception with the virtual existing beyond and around it (as a

reservoir of difference), but rather that there are numerous different forms of

actualities thatvirtualizetheir mutual differences such that a lowest common

denominator is abstracted or spatialized termed disparagingly the actual


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or the perception ofthe present or simply presence whilst those differ-

ences are consigned to a halo surrounding that single actuality and called the

virtual or the memory of the past.

To provide a less exotic analogy in terms of visibility and invisibility,25

Virtualism thinks of the invisible as the ontological ground of the visible,

while Actualism thinks of the invisible as a psychological artefact of vision.

For Actualism, things are always visible in and to themselves (and their near-

est neighbours) and only invisible to certain points of view. Indeed, we make

things invisible simply because we must occupy a certain point of view. The

Wittgensteinian phrase nothing is hidden is usually taken to relate episte-

mology to ontology, but, psychologically, it means that everything has its

own perspective (on it) and so what is hidden must be due to the position ofthat perspective and what is revealed must be due to amovementbeyond that

point of view (a position Ive described as metaphysics understood as radical

empiricism).26 Everything is public, but there are different forms of public

(not all of them human, to say the least), some of which are hidden from

each other due to virtualization. Being public does not entail being demo-

cratic (the idea that every public enjoys the same visibility). Actualism is al-

ways about the multiple: multiple publics, multiple perspectives, and multiple

presents.

If the first discovery of Bergsonism inTime and Free Willis that there is no

single present, no simultaneity (time endures in multiple forms), then there is

no single past either: there is simply what each of uscalls our pastfrom the

perspective of a (changing, that is, multiple) present: a mutating wake perpet-

ually recreated behind us.27 Now this core tenet of Bergsonism that there is

no simple present and so no such thing as simple presence is most often taken

by Virtualists as a licence to crown the virtual as absolutely sovereign, even

though Bergsons deconstruction of presence is rendered through a multiplica-

tion of presentsrather than their dissolution in the past. In much of Bergsons

work, from Time and Free Will in 1889 to The Perception of Change in

1911 (where these issues are directly addressed),28 it isdur eeas a whole, as

a continuity of change and a multiplicity of rhythms, that constitutes novelty,

not one dimension of time, the past (or the past in general), in isolation from

the others (as though they did not really exist, singly or multiply). There is,

admittedly, one chapter of one book by Bergson that does privilege the past,Chapter Three ofMatter and Memory, a text that Deleuze uses for his own

Virtualist ends (and the one that is endlessly referenced by Deleuzians). But

even in respect to Matter and Memory, it is a distortion of the text to forget

that Bergsons use of the virtual past is overtly psychological rather than on-

tological. The difference between Bergsons writings is illuminating in this

regard. As Jean Wahl once remarked:


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Many difficulties arise from the confrontation between the theory ofTimeand Free Will and the theory of pure memory inMatter and Memory, wherea new dimension, in depth, of the past appears. Words like action and lifesuccessively take on different aspects, often opposed.29

The language of Time and Free Will fosters images of continual transfor-

mation, of multiple succession, whereas Matter and Memory promotes an

imagery of depth and conservation. Yet both provide accounts ofdur ee, the

one multiple, the other singular. Those familiar with Alain Badious interpre-

tation of Deleuze and the various refutations that interpretation has received

may sense a little d eja vu here. For in this controversy concerning Bergso-

nian dur ee there is a foreshadowing of the same debate over the nature ofthe virtual between the commentators on Deleuze: some, like Badiou, see it

as a neo-Platonic One, others as what precisely gives Deleuzian thought its

force as a philosophy of difference that overturns Platonism. I will not enter

that discussion here, though I feel lessons may be learnt from looking at the

contrastbetween Badious Actualism and that of Bergson.30

When writing for or against the power of the past one must be aware that

most Virtualists use the Bergsonian term the past in general, which has

important distinguishing features.31 One recent Virtualist essay, by Stephen

Crocker, accounts for them as follows. It commences its analysis with an

unflattering depiction of Husserls theory of time-consciousness:

On this view, [Husserls] there is only a difference in degree between presentand past. The past is a past present, which means that it is of the same natureand kind as the current present. Its pastness, however, is still understoodas a lack of presence. In order for the past to present itself in memory, itmust still borrow its life-blood from the new present in relation to which it(the former one) is past. Whatever relation is constructed among presentsis derived from the properties of the present, which remains the generalelement of time.

With the concept of Past in General, Bergson elevates the Past to the statusof the universal, general element of time of which the different presents arenow particular expressions. The Past in General is not a tense, but ratheran enabling condition that allows relations of empirical and diachronic

resemblance to form among presents. [. . .

] Passing, or the past as suchis instead the general element, or whole in which different moments ofdiachronic and empirical time can form.32

If this analysis is meant to strike a contrast between Husserl and Bergson,

then it misses its mark, not necessarily in terms of its account of Husser-

lian protension and retension (which I wont comment on here), so much as


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its assumption that any hypothetical Bergsonian present would have general

properties ofpresence. Bergson has already deconstructed (singular) presence

without removing the idea of a (plural) present tout court. Indeed, if we try

to make sense of the persistence of the past or virtual by invoking it as the

past in general (as Crocker does), the very same move can be played with the

plurality of Bergsonian presents or actualities. In one piece of correspondence

with Georges Lechalas in 1897, Bergson draws a specific parallel between the

vast field of unconscious memories from which our recollections are chosen,

and a similar perceptual field surrounding our actualperceptions.33 He then

contrasts this field with our normal perception that distinguishes objects,

agreeing with his correspondent that it probably consists instead of things

in general.34

The similarity between this things in general and the past ingeneral is obvious, but it also allows Bergson to retain a dimension of the

present without supposing anyparticularpresence as metaphysically unique

or normative.35 A present actuality, qua perspective, is a force, an affect, that

virtualizes other presents and actualities. Its own presence is unthinkable but

immediately felt just as it mediates others and is mediated by others: this me-

diation, this refractive movement, this differential, simply is this felt presence.

Contrary to this lenience towards and recognition of the (multiplicity of

the) present or actual advocated here, most often Virtualists like Crocker

take the present as a monological straw man for their arguments in favour

of the virtual past. Even Leonard Lawlor, one of the most careful readers of

Bergson, writes that Bergsonian perception . . .is identical to a consciousness

enlarged beyond the present and thus it is not really a perception of matter but

amemoryof matter.36 Beyond the present. But where is that, if Bergson has

already so muddied the waters of presence as to make the location of the past

or memory equally untenable? Presence has been exploded by Bergson, but

only within its own immanent terms by differing with itself. And the location

of this difference is within the actual, as Ill explain in the section below on

refraction.

From the virtual to virtualization

Before we examine refraction, let me say that Im not being sceptical towardspastness per se, or rather, what stands behind that word: Bergson clearly

writes too much as a dualist to allow us to read him as a simple monist of

the actual. There is indeed somethingthat we call and see as the past that

guarantees both the novelty of the changing present and the reality of our

past. This something and my memory are genuinely correlated, they co-vary.

Hence the radical temporal duality we get in the essay Memory of the Present


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and False Recognition, for instance, where time splits in two as it unfolds,

creating simultaneously the changing present and its underlying memory of

that present its past. Yet I would argue that other writings of Bergson indicate

that this something we call the underlying past, while undoubtedly real, is

inherently unknown to us in itself, that is, it cannot be conceptualised or

symbolised without distortion. We may give it various names dur ee or a

multiplicity of presents but it remains radically different, that is, always

lying beyond our best epistemological categories. Beyond a covariance of

change, that is, a doubling of movement, we are given no other reason to

support our descriptions as normative. We are only given actual movements:

everything else of the other actuality, in its own actuality, is partially hidden

and different to us (though not to itself and those closest to it).Consequently, there is no reason to think that we might know this difference

any better by calling it virtual, unless that is intended only as a label for our

own ignorance, which,alas, it rarelyis, being unpacked by writers like Delanda

and Massumi as highly knowable through science, art, and sociology. When

we do try to conceive another actuality, we always mould it upon our own

actuality: we virtualize our actuality and project it onto the other actuality of

this something. This something underlying whatwe callour past, memory,

or the virtual, surely exists: it is deduced in a Kantian fashion in Memory

of the Present and False Recognition, just as it is empirically discovered

in the mind-brain correlations of neurological research, such that this other

actuality may even be that of what I call or see as the states of my brain (no

simple subject is being assumed here). But to name it or describe it thus is

to virtualize, to project our actuality onto something and call it the past, the

brain, the unconscious, the virtual, and so on.

Not that this is normally avoidable nor what should always be avoided: such

discrimination the positing of the virtual is a biological necessity of life

and the basis of our own continuous identity according to Bergsons theory

of the elan vital. Virtualizing is just the flip-side of this act of self-creation:

that is, what strings along (or condenses or dominates or synthesises) the

various presents we call one individuals own breadth of experience, simply is

this virtualization. This principle of individuation is what Bergson describes

as a refractive power, which must be explained as an unavoidable form of

mediation, or a seeing as.As such, there is also an ethical dimension to this Actualism: given the

tendency of refraction to reduce difference to identity, the actual can be seen

as not only different from but also other to us. There is an internal, affective,

dimension to actuality because all reality is alive and sentientfor Bergson,

only not like us.37 Bergson does his best to naturalise the ethical relation as

non-anthropocentric yet fundamentally biological.38 We usually think of the


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ethical Other as the other human, the otherperson, but Bergsons writings give

us cause to think of that relationfirstly in terms of ones own body in every one

of its physical and psychological dimensions.39 Between oneself and an other,

there is always an activity, a power-relation of dominance and domination (to

use Leibnizian terms). In other words, to call a physical state mybody, or

to call a conscious state mymemory, is already an act of appropriation and

dominance, or as Ill call it, a virtualizing of the other in the likeness or image

of oneself. Crucial to Bergsons theory of life is the exploitation of bodies

unlikeones own but which one makesones own, that is, ones bodys parts.

In 1922 he wrote that all the categories of perception. . .correspond, on the

whole, to the choice of a certain order of sizefor condensation. This peculiar

passage, fromThe Creative Mind, continues as follows:

the world in which we live, with the actions and reactions of its parts uponeach other, is what it is by virtue of a certain choice in the scale of size, achoice which is itself determined by our power of acting. Nothing wouldprevent other worlds, corresponding to another choice, from existing withit, in the same place and the same time. . ..40

Just as Bergson multiplies the present in different rhythms ofdur ee, now the

full consequence of this is embraced where our world is regarded as potentially

multiple: any one world is the sum or level of existence we choose to condense

or contain in an act of perception. And this act of condensation is an act of

perception, of refraction, of seeing as. Bergson adds that, through this actof containment, an indeterminate realm is transformed in our gaze into a

determinate one:

one might ask. . . if it is not precisely to pour matter into this determinism. . .that our perception stops at a certain particular degree of condensationof elementary events. In a more general sense, the activity of the livingbeing leans upon and is measured by the necessity supporting things, by acondensation of their duration.41

Let me repeat that last line: the activity of the living being leans upon and is

measured by the necessity supporting things, by a condensation of their dura-

tion. This is not simply a question of the predator exploiting its prey,that, inorder to live, one must nourish ourselves with others. Bergsons point is more

general still, with each plane of living reality having to treat other planes of

existence as relatively inert in order to support their own vitality. The actuality

of other planes of life is diminished. We consume, both literally (as food) and

figuratively (as identity), our own material embodiment. Consumption is the

first level of virtualization, a transformation of an other into the image of ones


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480 J. MULLARKEY

self. To say, my body, is to distinguish and appropriate at the same time. The

world of the living is thus one that must enclose (as my body) and exclude

(as non-living) at the most basic level. What is called matter would be the

most excluded, but the living matter of our biological constitution cannot be

far behind amongst these hierarchical acts of Leibnizian domination. Funda-

mentally, ones own actuality is determined by a stand taken over matter, to

be precise, the matter of ones own body. And this is a biological necessity:

Our needs are, then, so many searchlights which, directed upon the con-tinuity of sensible qualities, single out in it distinct bodies. They cannotsatisfy themselves except upon the condition that they carve out, within thiscontinuity, a body which is to be their own and then delimit other bodies

with which the first can enter into relation, as if with persons. To establishthese special relations among portions thus carved out from sensible realityis just what we call living.42

But Bergson is no moralist. This dominance of others, this consuming of oth-

ers (and consequently of oneself by others), is a necessary aspect of creative

evolution: with it lie all the creative forces of contraction and relaxation, of

repression and release, where otherwise there would only be static actuali-

ties or frozen images. That is why I am arguing that virtual images can be

well-founded phenomena rather than illusions. When they are generated by a

powerful act of virtualization, when there is a strong correlation or covariance,

then they are well-founded. It is tempting to say real covariance here, but

there are only ever stronger or weaker ones, co-varying movements which

dovetail toward a virtual identity without ever reaching it. Such strong or bod-

ily co-variances are never known in their own actuality, but they can be felt

in the free act of what Bergson calls the whole of the self,43 in those afore-

mentioned liminal and anomolous (but in no way supersensory) experiences

of the mystic and the artist, for example. So what I may be taking away with

one Kantian hand the possibility of knowing the actuality of another without

virtualizing our actuality onto that other (what we might also call a Levinasian

corrective against the totalising tendencies of Deleuzianism) Im happy to

give back with a Bergsonian hand. One might characterize this approach,

with the language ofTime and Free Will, as the interval between one ex-

treme that erases the otherness of our constituent parts with the phrase, my

memory, and another that discharges it through exaggeration within an alienmaterial void summed up in the modern parlance of an anonymous brain. 44

Perhaps only philosophy can occupy this interval, or perhaps philosophy is

this interval.

Let me expand on this point by taking the Cognitivist approach to mind as

an alternative example. The Cognitive paradigm would be another such vir-

tual representation: according to Bergson, all we ever get in neurological data


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are co-variances (between brain states and mental states such as memories).45

The cognitive nature of these co-variances are simply an interpretation of the

data, one more virtualization: that is, the brain is seen as a virtual store of

(my) representations with their cognitive form merely dormant or potential.

The brain in itself, in its own actuality, however, remains beyond our repre-

sentation. All we have are isomorphic changes: we have no access to what

it is like to be a brain state (to adapt Thomas Nagels well-known point).

Our representations are in the brain, but only virtually, Bergson says, as an

optical artefact or retrospective image.46 Cognitivists project our cognitive

functions onto the covariant processes of the brain and virtualize them as both

causal and quasi-cognitive. Cognitive localisation, therefore, is a virtualizing

interpretation of covariance.But it would be no less an act of virtualization to say that the mental states

are in themselves non-cognitive, or that they are virtual forces, or that they

belong to a plane of immanence, or that they aremy memories, and so on.

Hence, this covariance of the brain with, for instance, our own cognitive func-

tions, is not to say that there really is or is not cognition amongst ones parts

actualities (often dubbed the virtual), but rather that whatever those actualities

consist in (which we can never know though perhaps we can feel them), is

covariant with our own actuality. And it is this felt covariance that furnishes

us with what Deleuze calls an enlarged perception and what Bergson calls a

widened or expanded perception.47 It is not a case of the elements of a broader

perception being actualised from virtuality (they are always actual in and for

themselves and so have no need for any more existence),48 but rather the co-

variance of the actualities of the parts with that of the whole that allows the

former to enlarge the latter in the form of a resonating action (to maintain the

optical and electromagnetic metaphor to which both the images of the virtual

and refraction belong).

Actualist refraction

What this essay is attempting, then, is an Actualist genesis of the (Bergso-

nian) virtual.49 Following this line will remind us again that Bergsonism isa philosophy of the interval more than the extreme. There are, of course,

various extremes in Bergsons work pure memory, dynamic religion, elan

vitaland so on but they are ideallimits, beings that have anas ifexistence,

virtual in the originally optical sense of the term, perspectival images. Sim-

ilarly, the ubiquitous phrase in Bergsons texts, as if (comme si), must

be taken seriously in all of its perspectivist meaning. We have also called


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482 J. MULLARKEY

it seeing as, and though this colours Bergsons ontological commitment to

these limits, they are not reduced to nothing or pure error either, for, ascre-

ations of processes, within a process philosophy they possess reality.50 We

must remember that the virtual, being well-founded, has real effects on the

actual. Thus I hope to save the appearances on all sides, extending to every

existent whatMatter and Memory says of matter, namely that it is precisely

that which it appears to be, though also noting that appearances are multiple

and appear to a multitude.51 Nevertheless, what has more (or stronger) reality

is the interval, the concrete, the actual. The tension and knife-edge balance

maintained in the interval, in the mixture, is not a mererelation between static

substances: rather, the relation is what is most real about processes themselves

it is at the very heart of Bergsons substance abuse (to coin a new name forhis process thinking). We must recall that Bergson says he does not deny sub-

stances outright, but rather that he wishes to redefinesubstancesasprocesses,

oras processesofprocesses.52 And the relation, the as and the of here, is

perspectival, a contraction or refraction of the other.53

And so it is crucial that the virtual is understood as a metaphor in all of its

optical resonance, as well as its ontological connotation as what approximates

the real without being real. And this will entail a further excursion into a whole

field of Bergsonian optics, where the metaphors of light and vision must be

takenseriously, as theyhave beenthroughout this essay.54 Despite appearances

to the contrary that Bergsonism has no time for vision, for perspective, or

for the medium that purportedly spreads the disease of ocularity, space in

fact, these elements from the dark side of Bergsonian thought are embraced

as necessary counterpoints to temporality and all things durational.55 They

are not illusions or errors. As my earlier work on Bergson tried to explain,

spatiality, matter, and quantity are not dismissed as philosophical enemies

but are part and parcel of the philosophy of duration, being necessary bed-

fellows of novelty, qualitative multiplicity and heterogeneous difference.56

In Bergson, there is a well-thought out theory of mediation that must unfold

alongside the better known philosophy of radical novelty in order that the

two may exist at all: neither duration nor the elanare ever pure, but contain

contradictions and exist in perpetual tension with their internal other. They

are not opposites within a dualism but interfering tendencies in a system of

dualization processes that come to appear to be products, in a movementtowards and away from illusion, with pure illusion and pure truth being only

virtual.57 Mindreally canbecome spatialized, and matterreally canbecome

mentalized (that is precisely what a living body is) because spatialization and

mentalization are processes, the tela of which (pure space and pure spirit) are,

again, only virtual. Indeed, matter itself may simply be an inverse movement

to mind, or as Bergson famously said, physics is reversed psychology, or


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more simply, psychics inverted.58 So whether one is talking about material

or mental movement may well be a question of orientation, of a perspective

that simultaneously demobilises what it sees, by installing matter or mind as

static and virtual absolutes. It is the movement that is real, irrespective of the

names we give it.

These interfering tendencies are seen most keenly in the optical notion

of refraction a term which appears throughout Bergsons work, nearly as

often, in fact, as the virtual itself (when it is not used as a synonym for the

illusory possible, which is mostly within the pages ofMatter and Memory).59

Within this optical context, the virtual operates inside an economy of reflec-

tion rather than refraction: virtual images are images that are formed in a

location (whether in a plane mirror or otherwise) where light does not actu-ally reach; it only appears to an observer as if the light were coming from

this position. Virtuality concerns reflection and the mirroring of the unreal

as real. It belongs to a bivalent dialectic of appearance and reality. (It is not

without some irony for the Deleuzian reading that the origins of the virtual as

an image are representationalist and so, by its own lights, transcendental.) By

contrast, the system of refraction never leaves the actual it simply distorts

it. Refraction, or the bending of the path of light waves, is accompanied by

a change in their speed and wavelength: it does not create a mirror image

of the real it transforms it. Where reflection involves a change only in the

direction of light waves when they bounce off a barrier to form a replica of

the original image, their refraction involves even more change as they pass

from one medium to another. The image is neither copied nor destroyed but

transformed.

Given that refraction can be read as a form mediation, the optical nature

of refraction must be a purely local dimension of this process: sound too can

be refracted and refraction is really a metaphor for a theory of mediation in

general.60 But there are, in fact, four types of refraction in Bergsons theory,

moving from natural through differential and then integral modes before

going back to a natural mode again. These four types are generated by the

basic duality in Bergsonism that is sometimes given through the vocabulary of

repetition and difference (ontology), space and time (physics), or perception

and memory (psychology): the first of these feeds the Deleuzian reading of

Bergson (which emphasises the virtual as ontology). Space and time, though,give us the most optical figures of refraction that create a fourfold typology

that accommodates the virtual to the actual by showing how the virtual is a

well-founded perspectival phenomenon of the actual. That analysis of space

and time is first found in the last chapter ofTime and Free Will where the

forms of refraction are set out in terms of our consciousness of the spatial

world and how that conscious dur eemediates itself through space.


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484 J. MULLARKEY

The climax of Time and Free Will, in trying to explain the reason why

contemporary consciousness finds itself increasingly spatialized, gives the

process its name: refraction. By what mechanism, Bergson asks, does con-

sciousness let itself be thus reduced through space? His solution lies in our

own scientific and reductive vision of nature as a whole: we have reduced

ourselves in the act of reducing nature. Bergson thinks of our age of spatial

reductionism as but the latest stage of a process having its origin in primal

modes of thought. In other words, refraction is a process that carries on and

has carried on before on multiple levels. Primitively, we see a kinship between

our material selves (our bodies) and the physical world that we inhabit and

thus we naturally tend to animate this world with our own intentions. Our pri-

mordial predisposition is to hylozoism, a type of unreflective Leibnizianism,or, in religious terms, animatism (the view that nature as a whole is animated

by a living force).61 This is a primordial condition of consciousness simply

because perceptual consciousness itself is a realised contradiction a re-

fraction of self and other.62 But after a modern physical science has evolved

to divest both matter and then non-human nature as a whole of all such anima-

tion (which Bergson sees as the Cartesian momentpar excellence), there still

remains that earlier material relation between the human and the non-human,

from which it follows that the reductive gaze of science will inevitably turn

back on us and de-animate our own humanity. By a kind of refraction, as

he puts it, men become machines through making nature mindless and men

natural.63

Let us look at the four types of refraction at work in more detail. In the

first, natural refraction, nature is already refracted by being seen as like

ourselves.64 But this unity is never perfect, because, at its origin, unity for

Bergson is always dynamic, always only virtually unitary and consequently

prone to dualization, to break-up. Hence, under this internal pressure, nature

is de-animated in what we could call now a second differential refraction.

Nature alone is refracted through the medium of space, that is, what was seen

(by natural refraction) as its shared vitality with us, is refracted through the

medium of natures own tendency to repetition in space.65 Hence, a dissoci-

ation or dichotomy is installed between self and world, as the world is seen

as what is represented and the self is seen as what represents. But again, this

refraction is never perfect either, and is indeed dissipated by a third integralrefraction between the newly spatialized world and our enduring selfjust as

that very duration of ours is partly spatialized at the same time. 66 But the new

unity formed of self and world can never be completed (these are always

ongoing processes rather than static products) and cannot remain stable. It

must itself mutate through a further, fourth type of refraction that refracts

the previous refraction in the next turn of the frenzied spiral: a unity of a


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higher-order natural refraction already on the road to a further, higher-order

differential refraction.67 In terms of movement, there is only ever integration

and differentiation, only ever movement towards and away from unity, and

never static, consummated unities (for the unities are themselves of uniting

or disunitingtendencies, that is, meta-movements).

There are numerous examples of mutually refractive media in Bergsons

work: space and time refract each other, free will and mechanism refract each

other, open and closed morality refract each other, static and dynamic religion

refract each other. There are no purities outside of theory in the actual world

such purities are only virtual. Underlying all of these disparate vocabularies is

the one process of refraction working in the four modes of natural, differential,

integral, and back to natural. Refraction as such, then, is not tied to any particu-lar content it is seen in the psychological, social, physical, and metaphysical

realms: it is relational rather than substantive. In each case, however, its mode

of operation is of a psychological order, which for Bergson means a model

of movement. Moreover, refraction is always two-way, creating a hybrid of

any two media in virtue of the basic metaphysical hybrid that lies at the heart

of the Bergsonian conception of reality as a heterogeneous continuity. These

couples can all be said to be mutually refractive, of course, only because we are

talking here about seeing as, otherwise it might seem impossible that space

mightmix itselfwith consciousness (even though Bergson does often talk of

Nature itself operating as if it too sees aspects).68 Significantly, though,

for Bergson the medium truly is the message: when talking of refraction, he

only mentions the interaction between two coinciding media rather than any

third variable (a ray of light), travelling from one medium to another: there is

no ray of light (no message or substance), but only and ever different media

interacting refractively, that is, refracting each other side by side.69 Moreover,

the appearance of any one medium itself as a substance is virtual, too. Media

are best understood as mediations, as movements mediating each other in

intersecting trajectories that consequently transform each other.

A recurring feature of refraction is its fourfold structure, moving from a

natural (or relatively initial) mode, through differential and integral modes,

before returning back to a re-configured natural starting point. This fourfold

is found again and again in Bergsons work, from the four forms of genera in

The Creative Mind(vital, inert, human, and intellectual), the four configura-tions of imagery inMatter and Memory (monist, dualist, pluralist, and back

to monist), or the four forms of religious fabulation in The Two Sources of

Morality and Religion (animatist, animist, theist, and pantheist).70 In each

instance, the internal relations of the four are based on refraction. Amongst

genera, for instance, vital genera are formed from the natural refraction of

self and nature; inert genera are formed from the differential refraction of


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486 J. MULLARKEY

nature and mechanism; and human genera are formed from the integral re-

fraction of vital and inert genera.71 Alternatively, in the imagology ofMatter

and Memory, it begins by asserting a monism of undifferentiated images, but

follows this with an immediate movement of dualization. From the moment

that we try to think of the set of all images, the moment of perspective or

latent idealism in other words (which, in another of Bergsons texts is deemed

inescapable),72 we see reality refract in a dichotomous manner: the set of all

images differentiate into images which are for us and images in themselves.

This dualism is played out and explored in greater depth in the middle two

chapters, but it is in the fourth chapter that the split between ones own life

and mind, and the lifeless, mindless state of other images is undone by inte-

gration (the third form of refraction): they are not now simply images seenfrom the outside, but are living beings, forces, vortices, vitalities. Hence, this

pluralism actually uncovers a new monism of images, one that is animated by

a pluralism of internal as well as external being: not just the seenimages of

the first chapter, but feltimages,affectiveimages.

Refraction may sound like a Hegelian dialectic (or at least a stereotype

of it), but the methodology is wholly different: it is genealogical rather than

teleological, it is dissociative rather than associative (or synthetic), and it

is differential rather than negative. In fact, its Bergsonian source is actually

mathematical, to wit, the infinitesimal calculus, whose differentiation and in-

tegration Bergson took as paradigmatic for his own metaphysical method.73

A more appropriate analogy is with Michel Foucaults epistemology, for each

type of refraction can also be seen as a different metaphysic or episteme

relating reality to its appearances, things to words. In natural refraction, we

have a primitive episteme that fuses the human and the natural. The subse-

quent classical metaphysic creates a gap or dichotomy through differential

refraction between man and world: nature is now seen asthe mechanical

against which human freedom stands out.74 A virtualizing of natures actu-

ality. The third metaphysic of integral refraction exposes this discrimination.

Nature and the human are reunited as humanity, the representer or mediator,

is itself mediated (refracted through its own link with nature). Representation

or seeing as itself, as a medium, is represented and so becomes naturalised

along with the representer. Modernism. Mediation itself is integrally refracted

through the medium of perspectives, that is, through refraction as such, or,as Marshall McLuhan would say, the content of the new medium is the old

medium. Though reduced in value now we are all justimages,merema-

chines,onlynatural and so on this devaluation may be transvalued later as

the reunification is seen anew as positive. This change in attitude could well

be called Bergsonism itself.


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But its other name is postmodernism. The post-modern episteme would

welcomethe collapse of any ordered and reductive science so as toallowfor

a chaotic regime of signs to appear: not a new epistemic relationship between

word and thing, but, at a meta-level, a new, anarchisticethicbuilt on the reali-

sation that our own felt awareness of that relationship does not stand outside of

it as a science, but is one effect and affect created from within it. Not a science

but a pathos.75 The shift from Modernism to Postmodernism, then, would be

less one of known content than of felt value, for we must remember that dif-

ferential and integral refraction are forms of reduction, that is, both regard(in

every sense, cognitive and normative) mediation as a deflation in value, only

the latter is indiscriminate in what it reduces by refraction. The promise of

Bergsonism as a form of postmodernism, as a fourth refraction, is that it seesour new unity with nature as inherently valuable not merely natural but

brilliantly natural: an ecstatic naturalism, inflationary rather than deflationary.

Conclusion

One way to capture the two dominant approaches to time in contemporary

Continental philosophy is by depicting them as either futurist or pastist. Where

(the early) Heidegger demotes the present in favour of the future, Deleuze

attacks it from its flank of the past. In both cases, though, any depth that might

be thought to belong to other broader presents, to thick presents, is stolen

for the future or past. But this inability to see the present otherwise than as

unique, ideal and impossible, is itself the sign of a virtualizing, in this case

wrought by the infinitely narrow present of a reflective intellect interfering

with the broader presents on which it reflects, such that it can only see (but not

feel) one type of presence everywhere (its own) and all else becomes future

or past virtual images of itself. The infinite speed of reflective intellect

just is, and is the only, pure present that exists: the phenomena or virtual

images it creates accurately reflect only one reality its own. Intellect cannot

recognise the actuality of other presents because this would necessitate an

enlarged perception. But reflective intellect is intrinsically narrow.76 And so

reflection is, in truth, a special instance of refraction. It sees otherness only by

impoverishing it through the medium of itself, which is to say, by a species ofrefraction. As a mirror of nature it conceals the transformations it performs

behind the mask of its one (unconscious) achievement: the true representation

of the intellect. That is why the broader, plurality of presents Bergson writes of

can only be felt through a physical effort of intuition: they cannot be thought

or reflected without distortion.77 In a universe composed entirely of images,

reflection is generated by refraction, that is, transcendental representation


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488 J. MULLARKEY

itself is derived from an immanent, physical process: the transformation of

light. There is no need to move outside these optical processes to the silver

tain in the mirror, for example in order to subvert reflection, for light

subverts, or rather, converts itself in the very process of illumination. 78

Philosophers, artists, and writers have long held a fascination for mirrors,

for their power to reveal and conceal. It is noteworthy, then, that it is refrac-

tion that is responsible for the formation of our perceptual images through the

lenses of the eye, not reflection or mirroring. Certainly, it is refraction that

is fundamental for Bergson, for ours is a refractory planet.79 Life as such

is refractive too it distorts, it mediates, it virtualizes the actuality of others

(at the most brutal level, by simply eating them). That is why there is no

necessary shame in it: it is just what living organisms do in their own pursuitof life: to virtualize is to attempt to reduce difference to self-identity. It is

as philosophers, however, that we can conceptualise in some small way what

distortions we create through reflection, by occupying the shifting interval be-

tween extremes, and by acknowledging the need to open ourselves affectively

to the actuality of others. Hence, despite the ubiquity of refraction, Bergson

offers us hope in the form of a refraction that is aware of its own distorting

effects (the fourth form that refracts itself), and as such partly undoes them: in

The Two Sources of Morality and Religionhe calls this open morality. How

Deleuzians would pursue this openness is a broader question that might be an-

swered on many levels, but we could point initially to the feminist critique of

Deleuzes key notion of becoming woman as one attempt to rehabilitate the

actual, by pointing out the need to regard fully the molar being of individual

women, as political agents or as biological mothers, beyond any indifferent

flow of pure atoms of womanhood heading towards imperceptibility.80 This

affective openness and acceptance towards an actuality in all its proper need

for temporary stasis might well be a form ofmovementtoo, a de-virtualization

that saves the appearances my mobilising our regard of and for them.

Notes

1. I would like to thank the organisers and delegates at the following conferences for the

opportunity to air these ideas on a number of occasions: Sebastian Olmo, Maria Lakka and

Kostas Koukouzelis at Goldsmiths College for the conference on Lifes (Re-)Emergence:Philosophy, Culture, and Politics in May 2003; Wahida Khandker at Warwick University

forthe Bergsonand ContemporaryThought workshop in June 2003; andLeonard Lawlor

at theCollegium Phaenomenologicumin Italy in July 2003.

2. SeeKeith AnsellPearson,Philosophy and the Adventureof the Virtual (London: Routledge,

2001); Manuel DeLanda Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy(London: Continuum,

2002); and Brian MassumiParables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

2002).


21/25


3. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press,

1994), 208.

4. Henri Bergson,Matter and Memory, trans.NancyMargaretPaul andW.ScottPalmer (New

York: Zone Books, 1988). Future references will give the English pagination followed

by the original French, in Oeuvres, Andre Robinet, ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1959), henceforth,OE.

5. Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (London: UCL Press,

1993), 1617, last italics mine.

6. See Ansell Pearson,Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, 171ff.

7. Keith Ansell Pearson,Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London

and New York: Routledge, 1999), 37, 38.

8. James Williams,Gilles DeleuzesDifference and Repetition: A Critique and Commentary

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003), 11, 7, 13. It should be stated that Williams is here

writing directly of Deleuzes handling of the actual and the virtual, rather than of hisappropriation of the terms from Bergson. As excellent a reading of Deleuze as his work

is, Williams interpretation still illustrates the one-sided value given to the virtual despite

its more even-handed provenance in Bergsons work.

9. The fuller meaning of Actualism will emerge soon. Connections with discussions in An-

alytic philosophy of Actualism are only partially motivated (the idea that only actual

things and not possibilia exist), given that these are too often linked to quantification

(both scientific and logical), presentism (of a simplified kind), and a restrictively dialec-

tical relationship with possibility: see Michael J. Loux, ed., The Possible and the Actual

(Ithaca: Cornell, 1979). Alternatively, any relations with Gentiles philosophy of action

(also termed Actualism) are wholly in the eye of the beholder. Likewise, the connection

between Deleuzian Virtualism and the cybernetic and new media theories of virtual re-

ality is loose at best (given the latters often representationalist foundation): see Slavoj

Zizek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (London and New York:

Routledge, 2004), 3. Finally, there may also be connections with Whiteheads notion of

actual occasions but this would need extensive further research.

10. See Ansell Pearson,Germinal Life, 87. The term epiphenomenology alludes to the term

epiphenomenonon, and so would reduce the study of appearances from a science of

subjective reality to the study of a useless by-product, an illusion.

11. See Gilles Deleuze,Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone,

1983) for the most thoroughgoing expression of this duality.

12. Deleuze,Difference and Repetition, 276, see also 284.

13. But can one have an actual infinity? Is this not just another term for pure Act (God),

an unmoved mover? In this vocabulary, we would normally say that movement needs

potency and what makes God the unmoved mover is His infinite actuality. But, if we

follow Bergson, we can see the infinite in actual infinity as a metaphysical (and moral)

concept ofcreativity and so not opposed to movement: not a God standing outside and

transcending the world but the world itself as infinite creativity and movement, with nounderlying unmoved mover, no God or Aion. The holistic and immanent nature of the

divine is clear in Bergson, for like us, he says, the Absolute endures, being nothing less

than creativity itself (Henri Bergson,Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London:

Macmillan, 1911), 262, 315 [OE, 706, 747]). Bergson himself calls for a thinking of the

infinite which,given itscreative power, does notoppose itselfto actualfinitebeings anduses

the term indefinite instead to reconcile the two. See Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind:

An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical


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490 J. MULLARKEY

Library, 1946), 211 [OE, 1442]. For an argument for the tenability of an infinite actual

temporal series, see Quentin Smith, The Infinite Regress of Temporal Attributions, in

L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith, eds., The New Theory of Time (New Haven and

London: Yale University Press, 1994), 180194.

14. See Renaud Barbaras, Le tournant de lexperience: recherches sur la philosophie de

Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Vrin, 1998) and Le desir et la distance introduction a une phe-

nomenologie de la perception(Paris: Vrin, 1999).

15. See Christian Wolff,Philosophia Prima sive Ontologia (1729).

16. Bergson,The Creative Mind, 21, 2324 [OE, 1262, 1265].

17. Seemy Creative Metaphysics andthe Metaphysics of Creativity,inBergson Now, special

issue of theJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology, John Mullarkeyand Stephen

Linstead, eds., 35/1 (2004): 6881.

18. Bergson,The Creative Mind, 129 [OE, 1365].

19. See Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, trans. Mabelle L. Andisonand J. Gordon Andison (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 316; he uses the phrase

strikes a blow at all metaphysics, but it is clear that it is Being and so Ontology that is at

issue.

20. Zizek,Organs without Bodies, 3.

21. This is the definition of the virtual most pertinent in Deleuzes cinema books, especially

Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone,

1989) there are others.

22. A.R. Lacey,Bergson(London: Routledge, 1989), 134.

23. As Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron notes, il use frequemment dimages empruntees a la ge-

ometrie, comme la rotation ou la projection, ou a loptique comme la reflexion et la

refraction; et, on ne comprend rien a sa pensee si lon prend ces images en un sens vague

et banal,Bergson(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 23.

24. See Gilles Deleuze, Boulez, Proust, and Time: Occupying without Counting, trans.

Timothy S. Murphy, in Angelaki3/2 (1998), 6974: 72.

25. We are not here maintaining any strong association between the ontologies of Deleuze and

Maurice Merleau-Ponty but are simply using this image for its optical resonance.

26. See Mullarkey, Creative Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Creativity, 6881.

27. SeeHenriBergson, Timeand Free Will: An Essay on theImmediate Data of Consciousness,

trans. F.L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910).

28. See Bergson,The Creative Mind, pp. 130158 [OE, pp. 13651392].

29. Jean Wahl, A Tribute to Bergson on the Occasion of the Bergson Centennial in Paris,

1959, translated by Thomas Hanna, in Thomas Hanna, ed., The Bergsonian Heritage

(New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962), 150154: 152. Edgar Wolff

has proposed that Bergsons argument as regards the continuity of mediate and immediate

memory actually undercuts his own dualism of memory and perception, and marks as

a result the abandonment of his hypothesis of the integral conservation of the past: see

La Theorie de la memoire chez Bergson, inArchives de Philosophie20 (1957), 4277:5571.

30. Prima facie, my position does bear comparison with that of Badiou who has said that I

uphold that the forms of the multiple are. . .always actual and that the virtual does not

exist (Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2000), 46). But where he takes a Platonist and ontological approach to

these actualities (they are mathematical in form), I take an intuitionist and metaphysical

approach: they are psychological in content and only take a mathematical (or geometrical)


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form through virtualization. In fact, this is the ultimate form of virtualization performed

through the infinite power of reflective intellect to create, by spatialising refraction (our

mind has its own natural geometry says Bergson), a mathesis universalis around itself.

Badiou sees Actualism as a rejection of intuition understood as a non-conceptual access

to the unthinkable (see Peter Hallward, Ethics without Others: A Reply to Critchley

on Badious Ethics, in Radical Philosophy, no. 102 (July/August 2000), 2730: 28).

But Actualism does not preclude the possibility of affect as a form of non-symbolic

knowing. Moreover, to say that everything is actual to someintellectual point of view is

not tantamount to saying also that everything is actual to every intellectual point of view,

which is Badious position.

31. For this notion see Henri Bergson,Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wildon

Carr (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 134185 [OE, 897930].

32. Stephen Crocker, The Past is to Time What the Idea is to Thought or, What is General in

the Past in General? in Mullarkey and Linstead, Bergson Now, 4253: 47.33. See Henri BergsonM elanges, Andre Robinet, ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1972), 412. On this vaster perceptual field, see Matter and Memory, 144145 [OE, 286

287].

34. Bergson,M elanges, 413: 411.

35. Bergson,Mind-Energy, 137: 166 [OE, 899, 918]; Bergson,M elanges, 1062.

36. Leonard Lawlor, What Immanence? What Transcendence? The Prioritization of Intuition

over Language in Bergson, in Mullarkey and Linstead, Bergson Now, 2441: 27.

37. See Bergson,Mind-Energy, 131 [OE, 811841].

38. This is seen clearly in Henri Bergson,The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R.

Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter, (Notre

Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1977) [OE, 9791247].

39. See my Duplicity in the Flesh: Bergson and Current Philosophy of the Body, inPhilos-

ophy Today38 (Winter 199495): 339355.

40. Bergson,The Creative Mind, 60 [OE,1301], translation altered.

41. Bergson,The Creative Mind, 303 (hardback edition) [OE,1301], my emphasis.

42. Bergson,Matter and Memory, 262 [OE, 334].

43. Bergson,Time and Free Will, 165167 [OE, 109110].

44. See Bergson,Time and Free Will, 120 [OE, 80].

45. See Bergson,Matter and Memory, 22 [OE, 174].

46. Bergson,Mind-Energy, 245250 [OE, 968971].


48. This was one of the few telling points Sartre made against BergsonsMatter and Memory:

if the virtual is already real, why should it strive to actualize itself? See Jean-Paul Sartre,

Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan, 1962), 4651.

49. I follow, rather informally, the Leibniz of the earlier Discourse on Metaphysics (1686)

more than of theMonadology(1714) in virtue of the formers more sustained organicism.50. SeeBergson, The CreativeMind,5657[OE, 1298].My language will only appearslippery

here if one assumes that seeing as is exclusive to human consciousness and acting as

if is a projection onto nature by human consciousness and so, while related, nonetheless

categorically different. But, I would argue, firstly, that all seeing as (or refraction), is, like

perception, a concentration and a (normal and necessary) distortion,and, secondly, that

natures as if activity is of the same form of movement, namely a concentration.

51. Bergson,Matter Memory, 80 [OE, 219].


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492 J. MULLARKEY


53. As Bergson writes, movement is always a movement of movements (The Creative Mind,

148 [OE, 1383]), and it is the of here, the never ending, ramifying, infinite levels of

capture (or refraction), that is most significant. Perhaps the best book on Bergson before

DeleuzesBergsonismwas Georges Mourelos Bergson et les niveaux de r ealit e(Paris:

Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), which may well be summarised thus: realityis

its levels.

54. I will nothavetime here to explore thequestionof imagery andmetaphor, butit is important

to remark that Bergson uses them as seriously as Deleuze does: they are literal in as much

as their own fluid meaning follows the fluidity of the real: see Bergson, The Creative Mind,

4243 [OE, 1285].

55. See Martin Jay,Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French

Thought, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

56. See John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame UniversityPress, 2000).

57. Bergson calls this illusion-making power fabulation in the second chapter ofThe Two

Sources of Morality and Religion.Error for Bergson is never total, and fabulation, like so

many other illusions for him, is wrong only on account of being partial, that is, being a

part-view of the Whole. It cannot be totally wrong because no representation for Bergson

can be totally right either, given that the Whole is always evolving: both of these positions

(bivalency in other words) assume that representations are imagesofthe totality(that are

right or wrong) whereas Bergsons epistemology is mereological, that is, representations

are images amongst a reality itself made of images, that is, a Whole which is always

growing, and so only ever graspable from an angle, from a perspective, like a snap-shot

or image. Truth is a name we give to a particularly strong correlation between covarying

images: hence, truthbecomes: see Bergson,The Creative Mind, 1129 [OE, 12531270],

on the true growth of truth.

58. Bergson,Creative Evolution, 219: 213 [OE, 672, 666].

59. Thirty one times, in fact, across all his texts (in the original French). At this point some

might argue that I am confusing the possible with the virtual, for it is said that Deleuze

clearly shows that Bergsons fallacy of retrospection pertains to the possible rather than

the virtual. Yet, on the one hand, no such clear water exists in Bergsons texts between

the virtual and the possible as it does in Deleuzes reading (the terms are often used

interchangeably), and, on the other, Bergson also says that sometimes there is a real basis

for this projection of the possible: see my Bergson and Philosophy,173174.

60. On this see Mark Hansen,New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

2004), which gives a full-blown Bergsonist account of new media such as digital art.

61. By contrast, animism sees nature as animated by many local forces, spirits, inhabiting

particular places or dimensions such as trees, springs, storms, and so on.

62. This is howMatter and Memorylater puts it 204 [OE, 339].

63. Bergson,Time and Free Will, 217 [OE, 142.]64. Bergson,Time and Free Will, 211215 [OE, 138141].



67. Those familiar with Bergsons texts will recognise terminology fromTime and Free Will

being mixed with that of the Introduction to Metaphysics, from where the vocabulary of

differentiation and integration is taken (seeThe Creative Mind, 191 [OE, 1423]). That this

comes from Bergsonsmethodologyis obviated by the fact that it is clearly ontologised in


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The Two Sources of Morality and Religion as the laws of dichotomy and twofold frenzy

(from where the rest of my terminology comes: see The Two Sources of Morality and

Religion, 296ff [OE, 1227ff]).

68. See note 46 above.

69. Bergson sometimes uses the language of endosmosis instead of refraction (seeTime and

Free Will, 112 [OE, 75]) a liquid of certain concentration moving through a porous

membrane into one of a greater concentration with exosmosis working in parallel: a

liquid of certain concentration moving through a porous membrane into one of a lesser

concentration. This less frequent terminological use might get us past the initial oddity of

using the term refraction when not actually making a medium/object distinction, but the

latter still makes perfect sense within a process metaphysics.

70. See my Life, Movement, and the Fabulation of the Event, forthcoming in Lifes (re-)

Emergence, special section of Theory, Culture, and Society, 2005. For an explanation for

the four religious forms inThe Two Sources of Morality and Religion .71. See Bergson,The Creative Mind, 5261 [OE, 12941303].

72. See Bergson,Mind-Energy, 248 [OE, 970]: we are always more or less in idealism:

Bergsons point here is as much methodological as it is metaphysical; indeed, from the

perspectivist position, we cannot dissociate method from metaphysics.

73. See Bergson,The Creative Mind, 191 [OE, 1423], and Jean Milet, Bergson et le calcul

infinit esimal(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974).

74. Ive used chronological phrases so far, but nothing precludes the possibility of a temporal

mixing of these types. Of course, the allusion here is to the four epistemes of Foucaults

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (London: Routledge, 1970),

Renaissance, Classical, Modern, and, by implication, Postmodern.

75. This locus in affect distances Bergsonism from Structuralism and Post-structuralism (two

other possible analogues) to the degree in which the latter disavow the purity of their

scientific, conceptual, basis.

76. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 155157 [OE, 619621] on the infinite power, and

infinite emptiness, of the intellects powers of reflection.

77. See Bergson,The Creative Mind, 8788 [OE, 1328].

78. I wont labour the allusion to Derridas own philosophy of anti-reflection (and Rodolphe

Gasches interpretation of it: see his The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of

Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). But it is noteworthy that the

tain (or tin-foil) that Gasche says provides the dull surface (6) behind a mirror (and so

creates a non-luminant source for reflection), functions in precisely the opposite way: the

reflective power of a mirror actually begins with this tin-foil because it is so reflective; in

fact, a mirror is made by coating a thin sheet of aluminium or other metal onto the back of

glass because the glass is very flat(not because glass reflects it is transparent). And it is

this flatness of theglassthat, transferred to themetal,makesit even more reflective.In order

to subvert the power of light, then, we must stay in the realm of light (in refraction): there

is no need to transcend light to invoke a material substance, like the tain, or the propertiesof any other reflective surface. I will not spell out the significance of this extension of the

mirror metaphor for Derridas methodology here.

79. Bergson,The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 317 [OE, 1245]. This is the last line

of Bergsons last work.

80. See Christine Battersby,The Phenomenal Woman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 194.

And one might ask: from whose point of view do we become imperceptible?

Mullarkey Forget the Virtual

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