I’m excited to read the intro of Bergson and the Metaphysics of Media by Stephen Crocker. It gives as good a short description of Bergson’s ideas as I have read anywhere and ties in some interesting names – particularly Marshall McLuhan, Michel Serres and Walter Benjamin (who I know criticised Bergson’s romanticism). It really puts the implications of mechanical thought into context in a few pages by using a visit by Zen guru Alan Watts to the IBM offices during the 60’s and relaying dis descriptions of prickly versus gooey thought. Although the prickly analogy doesn’t quite do it for me it’s an interesting read.
Crocker also talks about Deleuze’s Bergsonism and the relationship between renaissance perspective, the baroque and deep focus in cinema. Obviously there’s lots of talk about intervals and the move away from surface and line to recession, depth and shadow. Deleuze is next in my main body of background reading – I still have three more Bergson’s to read though!
Having taken a Michel Serres book out of the library and not really looked at it it was good to get a bit of a insight into his thoughts on mediation too. The idea of interface as noise really interested me. Also Benjamin’s concern with the emptying out of time into units, and the difference between the diachronic time of the past and the synchronic time of modernity was really well explained. It resonated with my thoughts around how we construct our world on the web, whereas during modernity time was emptied out and organised by someone else into work, leisure etc, now time is emptied out and we organise it ourselves, the illusion of control has shifted entirely into our individual domain, but we are still atomised and organised according to something other (neo-liberal agenda probably).
The final section introduces the chapter ‘Breakdown’ which discusses what happens when our ‘sensory motor schemas’ are disrupted – perhaps we can see how an event is unfolding as we move away from out habitual structures. I made a film a few years aago about drivig round a round about for an hour. In hindsight I was doing this, if the round about if a unit of travel amongst many – designed to be driven round once, then the act of circumnavigating it many times disrupted this habit and allowed ‘access’ to the event (I have bought Zizek’s penguin book about the event – not sure if it’ll be any good). This also could be said to apply to the last big body of work I completed, the large scale paper folding/crumpling works, in which I took that material and, I guess, attempted to push my working of it to absolute monotony to see what happened. I became much more aware of the paper, it’s qualities etc, but I also became terribly, terribly bored (to the point where I’ve struggled to re-engage with any sort of meaningful making since!). There are links to the Agamben ‘What is Contemporary’ text here, and Crocker also mentions him a lot – especially his crisis of the gesture (which I might have touched upon in the ‘Destruction of Experience’ essay). I will investigate. It relates to the link between Bergson and Hypnotism and my interest in being hypnotised by the screen.
I’ll have to have a careful think about what chapters to read so I don’t get bogged down trying to digest the whole book. I’m still writing chapter plans, it’s hard.
References to remember:
Deleuze ‘Difference and Repetition’
Agamben ‘State of Exception’ U of Chicago Press, 2008
Benjamin ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’