Vitalism B

Being in the mood to revisit some things, I ended up browsing Bergson before bedtime last night and was pleasantly surprised by a number of things. Among them were "On the Pragmatism of William James: Truth and Reality" [truth 'does not copy something which has been or which is: it announces what will be'] and this from "The Endurance of Life":

But too often one reasons about the things of life in the same way as about the conditions of crude matter. Nowhere is the confusion so evident as in discussions about individuality. We are shown the stumps of a Lumbriculus, each regenerating its head and and living thenceforward as an independent individual; a hydra whose pieces become so many fresh hydras; a sea-urchin's egg whose fragments develop complete embryos: where then, we are asked, was the individuality of the egg, the hydra, the worm? - But, because there are several individuals now, it does not follow that there was not a single individual just before. No doubt, when I have seen several drawers fall from a chest, I have no longer the right to say that the article was all of one piece. but the fact is that there can be nothing more in the present of the chest of drawers than there was in the past, and if it is made up of several different pieces now, it was so from the date of its manufacture. Generally speaking, unorganised bodies, which are what we have need of in order that we may act, and on which we have modelled our fashion of thinking, are regulated by this simple law: the present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause. But suppose that the distinctive feature of the organised body is that is grows and changes without ceasing, as indeed the most superficial observation testifies, there would be nothing astonishing in the fact that it was one in the first instance, and afterwars many. The reproduction of unicellular organisms consist in just this - the living being divides into two halves, of which each is a complete individual. Ture, in the more complex animals, nature localizes in the almost independent sexual cells the power of producing the whole anew. But something of this power may remain diffused in teh rest of the organism, as the facts of regeneration prove, and it is conceivable that in certain privileged cases the faculty may persist integrally in a latent condition and manifest itself on the first opportunity. In turth, that I may have the right to speak of individuality, it is not necessary that the organism should be without the power to divide into fragments that are able to live. It is sufficient that it should have presented a certain systematisation of parts before the division, and that the same systematisation tend to be reproduced in each separate portion afterwards. Now, that is precisely what we observe in the organic world. We may conclude, then, that individuality is never perfect, and that is is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell what is an individual, and what is not, but that life nevertheless manifests a search for individuality, as if it strove to constitute systems naturally isolated, naturally closed.

[...]

Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed. (Key Writings, p.178-180)

The old philosophers can be so charming

Guattari on Postmodernism

Via Larval Subjects

Are we not, then, at the center of what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls the postmodern condition, which I, unlike him, understand to be the paradigm of all submission and every sort of compromise with the existing status quo? For Lyotard, postmodernism represents the collapse of what he calls the grand narratives of legitimation (for example, the discourses of the Enlightenment, those of Hegel’s accomplishment of the Spirit and the Marxist emanicipation of the workers). It would always be wise, according to Lyotard, to be suspicious of the least desire for concerted social action. Any promotion of consensus as an ideal, Lyotard argues, is to be regarded as out-dated and suspect. Only little narratives of legitimation, in other words, the ‘pragmatics of linguistic particles’ that are multiple, heterogeneous, and whose performativity would be only limited in time and space, can still save some aspects of justice and freedom. In this way, Lyotard joins other theorists, such as Jean Buadrillard, for whom the social and political have never been more than traps, or ’semblances’, for which it would be wise to lose one’s fondness.

Whether they are painters, architects, or philosophers, the heroes of postmodernism have in common the belief that the crises experienced today in artistic and social practices can only lead to an irrevocable refusal of any large-scale social undertaking. So we ought to take care of our own backyards first and, preferably, in conformity with the habits and customs of our contemporaries. Don’t rock the boat! Just drift with the currents of the marketplace of art and opinion that are modulated by publicity campaigns and surveys.

But where does the idea that the socius is reducible to the facts of language, and that these facts are in turn reducible to binarizable and ‘digitalizable’ signifying chains, come from? On this point postmodernists have hardly said anything innovative! In fact, their views are directly in keeping with the modernist tradition of structuralism, whose influence on the human sciences appears to have been a carry-over from the worst aspects of Anglo-Saxon systematization. The secret link that binds these various doctrines, I believe, stems from a subterranean relationship– marked by reductionist concepts, and conveyed immediately after the war by information theory and new cybernetic research. The references that everyone continually made to the new communications and computer technologies were so hastily developed, so poorly mastered, that they put us far behind the phenomenological research that preceded them.

Here we must return to a basic truism, but on pregnant with implications; namely, that concrete social assemblages– not to be confused with the ‘primary group’ of American sociology, which only reflects the economy of opinion polls –call into question much more than just linguistic performance: for example, ethological and ecological dimensions, as well as the economic semiotic components, aesthetic, corporeal and fantasmatic ones that are irreducible to the semiology of language, and the diverse incorporeal universes of reference which are not readily inscribed within the coordinates of the dominant empiricity… (The Guattari Reader, 111)