Cinema & Synthesis: Time for a PreProcessed Deleuze

by Corry Shores
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The following is my presentation at the Annual Conference Dutch Association for Aesthetics at the University of Leuven, Belgium in March of 2012. Thank you Stéphane Symons and others at the Nederlands Genootschap voor Esthetica for organizing such a fruitful and interesting conference.

Corry Shores

Cinema & Synthesis:
Time for a PreProcessed Deleuze

James Williams’ recently published book, Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time, presents a compelling explanation of Deleuze’s three temporal syntheses. Williams’ process-based reading allows him to integrate the actions of each synthesis, like moving parts that fit together to make a larger machine. Yet, he devotes his conclusion to defending his decision to exclude from his analysis Deleuze’s second cinema book, The Time-Image. One of his reasons is that the cinema book portrays Bergson’s pure past as being an instantaneous crystallized doubling of the present and past, causing ‘before’ to be simultaneous with ‘after.’ Yet, if time can be instantaneous, and if ‘before’ can be simultaneous with ‘after,’ then there is no longer any need to regard the synthesis as being a process; for, a process requires the passage of time. So a process-based explanation of Deleuze’s temporality cannot apply to both Difference & Repetition and to the second cinema book. The question we ask is, would a more static or formal interpretation of Deleuze’s time synthesis work in both texts? Williams is also critical of the fact that the cinema text is “fatally attached to the more commonsense and experiential modes of exemplification and explanation we encounter in film.” This is because, instead of explicitly arguing for the simultaneity of the past and present, Deleuze rather expects us to grasp this concept merely by watching certain movie scenes.

However, I instead suggest we explore the possibility that these temporal concepts can be mediated aesthetically and not merely through stated propositions. Perhaps by watching Deleuze’s cited cinema scenes, we might find it easier to see how temporal synthesis can be conceived not as a process but more as a formal status.

To help us understand his logic of becoming, Deleuze in his book The Logic of Sense refers us to a scene in the text of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Here is Svankmajer’s rendition.

Svankmajer. Alice

[Thanks youtube / chantelle369]

Carroll’s text reads:

“Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words ‘EAT ME’ were beautifully marked in currants. ‘Well, I'll eat it,’ said Alice [….]
So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.

* * * * * * *

* * * * * *

* * * * * * *

[…] ‘now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!’”

Deleuze uses this scene to illustrate the ‘pure event’ of becoming. As Alice becomes larger, she of course becomes larger than the size she just was. But in that same stroke, she is as well ‘becoming smaller’ than the sizes she is now growing into. If we are assuming she will continue her growth, then in the next moment, she will be larger; but, that coming largerness is still smaller than the even larger size that comes after that. So it is not that Alice is larger and smaller than herself. Rather, Alice is becoming larger and smaller than herself.

Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now; she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of a becoming […]. becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future.[Logic of Sense]

Also in this book, Deleuze distinguishes possibility and impossibility from compossibility and incompossibility. Possibility and impossibility are matters of logic, specifically, of identity and contradiction. Compossibility and incompossibility, however, are alogical, and they concern compatibility and incompatibility.

So two incompatible states of affairs can coincide, when we are not concerned with possibility, identity, and contradiction. Thus ‘before’ and ‘after’ can coincide; so too can alternative paths of development. Deleuze elaborates this with the concept of bifurcation or forking.

There are two different senses to bifurcation. The first sort is the forking as a break in a linear progress, as described by Stengers. She describe how for certain chemical reactions, changes in one variable can be correlated to the variations of others, but then one variable will reach a point when its path is indeterminable. It could increase or decrease, but this outcome is always left to chance.

The other sort of bifurcation we find in Borges’ story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths.’ It describes a Chinese monk’s unfinished manuscripts for a novel with this same title. It went unpublished because it was incomprehensible. The chapters did not proceed just sequentially. A following chapter would be like an alternate version of the same prior one: “in the third chapter the hero dies, in the fourth he is alive.”

“He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.” and
“In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in [The Garden], he chooses— simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.” [Borges]

There is one remarkable scene in Mankiewicz’ Barefoot Contessa, which showcases both senses of bifurcation. The soon-to-be Contessa quite abruptly switches companions, taking her down a drastically different path. But this scene was remembered by two different people, each in their own way and with their own slight variations. We will place both scenes side-by-side, listening just to the audio from one.

To illustrate the a-logic of incompossibility, consider for example the very moment when Oedipus realizes he is the son of his wife Jocasta. Up until then, Oedipus had every reason to think that he is not her child but rather someone else’s son. But at the very shocking instant of his painful realization, he still holds onto the belief that he is not her son, while in the same stroke, he realizes that in fact he is her child. Yet, it is not impossible for both to be true. However, for him, those states of affairs are incompatible, they’re incompossible. Nonetheless, there was a moment when he was forced to place both incompatible facts together at once.


So incompossible states of affairs on the one hand, are exclusive. Either one or the other can be so, but not both.

Yet somehow they can also coincide, like ‘before’ with ‘after’ in pure becoming. As the cinematic examples will show, this is the case in the second synthesis of time as Deleuze describes it in Difference and Repetition; it is Bergson’s coincidence of the pure past with the actual present.

Let’s first examine Bergson’s expanding circuit diagram. We first consider what Bergson calls ‘after images’.

They are always a part of our perception. We look at some object, then abruptly avert our gaze to another place.

For a split-second, the image of the initial object will carry-into and overlay-upon the new scene we see. The prior object remains in our field of perception, even though it is actually no longer there. Instead, it is virtually there.

The virtual past-image inserts itself so thoroughly into the new actual-image that “we are no longer able to discern what is perception and what is memory.” Perhaps this is why fast moving objects leave a blurry trail behind them.

But just as soon as we see something, it will already begin to appear differently to us, because we move our eyes or the scene itself changes. Like before, the new image and its predecessor circulate immediately. Yet the even-older image has not gone away; it too re-imposes itself on the present perception, but in a somewhat less vivid way. Nonetheless, this enriches the object with another layer in its appearance.

With each additional moment, another new inner circuit pushes-out the former ones. So we see, then, that the past and present are perpetually crystallized together. “In truth,” writes Bergson, “every perception is already memory. Practically we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.”

Yet even though all of our past is always interposed in the present in an implicit way, sometimes what we see causes one recollection to stand-out more explicitly among the rest. Often we observe something in our daily life that causes certain prior memories to flare-out before our “mind’s eye.”

And sometimes our flashbacks can be so vivid that they drown-out the actual things we see. We then begin to feel as though we are reliving that past experience.

Deleuze illustrates these recollection-circuits with the cinematic flashbacks in Carné’s movie The Daybreak (Le jour se lève). The film follows events happening from sundown to dawn. During this short period, a murderer flashes back into his past. Whenever we return to the present, we hear a heavy doom-filled bass and drum beat. It gives us the feeling we are moving inevitably toward a fatal end. So during the flashbacks, the past is so vibrant that it completely covers-over the actual present things standing before him in his room. As viewers, we only see what he is remembering, and not the events still carrying-on in the present while he dreams. But because upon returning we hear that fatal march toward the end, we are reminded that even while reminiscing, we never escaped the current doomed situation.

So even though flashbacks take us away to a prior time, we should still realize that the present time caries forward simultaneously with the unfolding of the past, just as the character in the film keeps staring out his window while still calling-up distant memories.

Carne. The Daybreak (Le jour se lève)

The third synthesis is much more complex. However, our aim is to see how the cinema examples illustrate a formal rather than a process interpretation of the syntheses.

In Difference & Repetition, Deleuze characterizes the third synthesis as the pure and empty form of time.


We will see that his treatment of Ozu in the Cinema books portrays this temporality with still rather than with dynamic imagery. Deleuze writes:

The vase in Late Spring is interposed between the daughter’s half smile and the beginning of her tears. There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change, does not pass on. This is time, time itself, ‘a little time in its pure state’[…] everything that changes is in time, but time does not itself change […’]

The daughter has been reluctant to marry, because this would leave her widowed father all alone, creating too much drastic change in both his and her lives. Yet in this scene, she consents to her father’s wishes, and decides in fact that she will marry. Yet at that moment, Ozu shows the still life scene of the vase. This grand climactic moment of the film is substituted by a pure stillness. We feel a dramatic change, while perceiving a motionless image. The actual events coming before and after are not present in the still life, but they are both implied in the same still image, because this transition-point in the story marks the most drastically different ‘before’ and ‘after’. But the actual content of a determinate ‘before’ and ‘after’ are removed from this still image, nonetheless, this purified impression of great alteration remains. We feel in this moment the coincidence of an empty before and an empty after, that is, of the pure form of time.

Ozu. Late Spring

But we will now consider a final image of time that shows something in continual change.

In […] Chronopolis, Kamler fashioned time out of two elements, small balls manipulated with pointed instruments, and supple sheets covering the balls. The two elements formed moments. [Deleuze, Cinema 2]

Notice Deleuze speaks here of forming moments, and not a flow of time, and also not an extending passage of time. When the two elements make contact, some new variation results in the clay. The figure, with each contact, becomes something different. But it does so by changing what it already was. What it was, and what it is becoming – its before and its after – coincide in each moment of contact.

Kamler. Chronopolis

The portrayal of time in this scene is not the extending passage of duration through which the changes happen, like how each frame of the movie-film blurs together to create the illusion of continuous motion. Rather, synthesis is found completely in each single frame alone, where the ‘before’ is synthesized simultaneously with its ‘after.’ It is not a process; it is a formal condition for time. This, I propose, is what Deleuze means by temporal synthesis.

Alice growing video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riAUmx_ObN0
Thanks chantelle369

Motionless Duration in Deleuze's Bergson

by Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]
[Corry Shores, Entry Directory]

[May I thank the sources of the images:
eyefetch
diagonalthoughts.com
marinagraham
Credits given below the image and at the end.]

The following is from my presentation at Leuven's Husserl Archive's Graduate Workshop in Phenomenology. May I thank Roland Breeur, Ullrich Melle, and Carlo Ierna for including me at the last minute, and may I also thank the other presenters, Akos Krossoy, Özlem Gürbüz, and Allen Jones, for their excellent presentations and their kind tolerance for my presentation's media needs. As well, I am grateful to Rudolf Bernet for his insightful question. This presentation is an expansion of the one I gave at the London Bergson conference [the new material begins with Bergson's double jets].

Motionless Duration in Deleuze's Bergson

Deleuze is often considered an anti-phenomenologist. Yet perhaps his critique of phenomenology is more of a constructive critique. Deleuze is not against the project of studying phenomenal appearances; he merely does so on the basis of different principles and methods. Namely, Deleuze seems interested mostly in the intensity of phenomena. Phenomenologists, however, often turn their attention to how phenomenal appearances become constituted throughout the flow of our internal time consciousness. But for Deleuze, a phenomenon is a flash. It could appear instantaneously. What we will explore is the possibility that a Deleuzean phenomenology need not appeal to a flow of time consciousness.

This endeavor is inspired by an article that phenomenologist Michael Kelly wrote, where he defends Husserl’s time consciousness against Deleuzean-Bergsonists. These critics charge that Husserl’s theory of internal time cannot “accommodate time’s fundamental characteristic, namely its passage.” This is supposedly because Husserl’s time consciousness struggles to explain how the present undergoes its radical conversion to the past. In Bergson, however, present perceptions are immediately shadowed as virtual memories in the past in general. So, he avoids the problem of a transition from present to past. Yet, Kelly shows that Husserl’s later writings on temporality are immune to this critique.

We might note how Deleuze famously said of his Bergsonism book that it is a classic instance of his buggering technique. He writes, “I imagined myself getting onto the back of an author, and giving him a child, which would be his and which would at the same time be a monster. It is very important that it should be his child, because the author actually had to say everything that I made him say. But it also had to be a monster because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips, break ins, secret emissions, which I really enjoyed.”

So what we will explore is the possibility that one such conceptual offspring is a surprising interpretation of Bergson’s duration: for Deleuze, duration’s fundamental characteristic is not its flowing passage. Perhaps we might characterize duration by employing terms with more of an a-temporal connotation, like instantaneous, simultaneous, and eternal. But these provisional characterizations should really only serve to avert our attention away from time’s flow in order to focus more on time in its absolute immediacy. Hence, I will not respond to Kelly’s specific defenses of Husserl’s temporality, because I do not adopt the opposing position that he disputes. I am not a Deleuzean Bergsonist. No. I am a Bergsonist Deleuzean. So I do not maintain Bergson’s model of time, but instead, I take-up Deleuze’s variation on it, which was fathered through his close reading of Bergson and articulated by means of cinematic illustrations.

So let’s first examine Bergson’s expanding circuit diagram.

Bergson uses it to illustrate the way that the past is always contemporaneous with the present. He first has us consider what he calls an ‘after image’. They are always a part of our perception.

We look at some object, then abruptly avert our gaze to another place. For a split-second, the image of the initial object will carry-into and overlay-upon the new scene we see. The prior object remains in our field of perception, even though it is actually no longer there. Instead, it is virtually there.

The virtual past image inserts itself so thoroughly into the new actual image that “we are no longer able to discern what is perception and what is memory.” Perhaps this is why fast moving objects leave a blurry trail behind them.

According to Bergson, just while the perceived image is sent to our brain, the most recent image in our memory has already arrived-upon and overlaid our current perception, with both moving lightning fast in a continuous circuit.

But just as soon as we see something, it will already begin to appear differently to us, because we move our eyes or notice something new in what we see. Like before, the new image and its predecessor circulate immediately. Yet the even older image has not gone away; it too re-imposes itself on the present perception, but in a somewhat less vivid way. Nonetheless, this enriches the object with another layer in its appearance.

With each additional moment, another new inner circuit pushes-out the former ones.
So we see, then, that the past and present are perpetually crystallized together. “In truth,” writes Bergson, “every perception is already memory. Practically we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.”

Yet even though all of our past is always interposed in the present in an implicit way, sometimes what we see causes one recollection to stand-out more explicitly among the rest. Often we observe something in our daily life that causes certain prior memories to flare-out before our “mind’s eye.”

And sometimes our flashbacks can be so vivid that they drown-out the actual things we see. We then begin to feel as though we are reliving that past experience.

Deleuze illustrates these recollection-circuits with the cinematic flashbacks in Carné’s movie The Daybreak (Le jour se lève). The film follows events happening from sundown to dawn. During this short period, a murderer flashes back into his past. Whenever we return to the present, we hear a heavy doom-filled bass and drum beat. It gives us the feeling we are moving inevitably toward a fatal end. So during the flashbacks, the past is so vibrant that it completely covers-over the actual present things standing before him in his room. As viewers, we only see what he is remembering, and not the events still carrying-on in the present while he dreams. But because upon returning we hear that fatal march toward the end, we are reminded that even while reminiscing, we never escaped the current doomed situation.

Now consider if we were to memorize a series of spoken lines for a play. Each time we practice it, we create a new individual memory. When it comes time to perform, we just start with the first word, and the rest seems to follow automatically, without our needing to recall any single rehearsal. All the previous times were contracted into that present moment of automatic habitual bodily performance. But after the show, someone might ask us about how we memorized the lines. Then we could relax and daydream about those moments, seeing them in their vivid detail.

Bergson illustrates this with his famous cone diagram. As new things enter our memory, they add to a cone.

If we are acting automatically, like when performing something we rehearsed, then we are down closer to the S point.

Being near this tip does not mean our memories have gone away. Rather, they are all contracted into our physical actions, like how a performance expresses physically all our memories of past recitals. When instead we daydream about the past, the images expand-out in our minds, as during a flashback. In these moments, we reside at a higher layer of the cone. Always we are varying somewhere between automatic action and dreamful reflection, so we might be at any of the many possible layers of expansion or contraction of our memory.

So during flashback scenes, the character’s memory leaps-up to a higher level. But during an action scene where he acts automatically, his memory is contracted into the present moment, down at the cone’s tip. We are always changing level, varying ‘melodically’ between our intense physical engagement in the present moment and our drifting somewhere in dream-land.

So the larger circuits are more distant memories, and the higher cone levels are increased degrees of expansion on one part of those memories.

The cone levels and the circuits are not equivalent, but we might place them in correspondence by noting that when moving to a distant circuit, we are also expanding our memories. In these slides we might correlate the movement-into-flashback with the expansions in the diagrams.

What we notice are the simultaneity of the layers. At any one moment, our consciousness is expressing, implicitly or explicitly, all our past actions and memories. We do not need time to flow in order for it to fully present itself in its immediacy. When the hero sees a memento and flashes back to an event taking place a couple months prior, he does not feel two months of time in their continuous passage. Instead, he experiences two months time in a sudden flash. So the simultaneity of the distant past with the active present becomes immediately evident to him. It is not an extent of time that he undergoes in this flash, but rather time in the form of an intensity.

To further illustrate, Deleuze discusses flashback movies made by Joseph Mankiewicz. In these films, flashbacks are the product of bifurcations. There are two dimensions to these bifurcations or forkings.

The first sort we will consider is the forking as a break in a linear progress, as described by Prigogine and Stengers.

They describe how for certain chemical reactions, changes in one variable can be correlated to the variations of others, but then one variable will reach a point when its path is indeterminable. It could increase or decrease, but this outcome is always left to chance.

The other sort of bifurcation we find in Borges’ story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths.’ It describes a Chinese monk’s unfinished manuscripts for a novel with this same title. It went unpublished because it was incomprehensible. The chapters did not proceed just sequentially. A following chapter would be like an alternate version of the same prior one.

The Garden, then, forks-not through space but rather through time. Characters in stories normally must choose between diverging paths. In the Garden, however, the character, “chooses— simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.”

There is one remarkable scene in Mankiewicz’ Barefoot Contessa, which showcases both senses of bifurcation. The soon-to-be Contessa quite abruptly switches companions, taking her down a drastically different path. But this scene was remembered by two different people, each in their own way and with their own slight variations. We will place both scenes side-by-side, listening just to the audio from one.

We notice that sudden instant of the slap, that crack in the flow of time, when the next moment is completely undetermined, entirely discontinuous with the present, that moment which is truly phenomenal, that pure, intense, dramatic moment outside the flow of time.

Now, the Contessa’s forking is the reason each of these people recalled the event. We see the relation between bifurcation and flashback shown even more vividly in Mankiewicz’ A Letter to Three Wives. In this story, a woman writes a letter to three wives saying she ran off with one of their husbands, but she does not specify which one. This is a forking in their lives, and it causes them to recall prior forkings in the past that foreshadowed the current situation. In one wife’s recollection, we see her discover a possible reason her husband might have left with the other woman. Her face makes a certain expression that is almost identical with her current one, as if in her past she was already flashing forward to the future. And likewise, events in the present unfold where she gets news that seems to confirm her suspicions, and she makes that same facial expression again, linking all three moments together.

So when something happens in our lives that takes us down a diverging unexpected path, we on the one hand might flash back to another forking in the past that only implicitly hinted at the current bifurcation; yet on the other hand, we are already living the present moment as a memory given in advance of its future recollection, only we don’t know yet what future forkings will bring out the present moment’s implicit significance. In the instant of the flashback, past, present, and future are all simultaneous and immediate to our consciousness, as if we are always in a way standing outside of time’s flow and experiencing events from the perspective of eternity.

The flashbacks in Carné and Mankiewicz give us recollections from certain parts of the past, but they do not give us impressions of the so-called past in general. Bergson writes that “The formation of memory is never posterior to the formation of perception; it is contemporaneous with it. Step by step, as perception is created, the memory of it is projected beside it.” And memory is “twofold at every moment, its very up-rush being in two jets exactly symmetrical, one of which falls back towards the past whilst the other springs forward towards the future.” And we also might wonder how to conceive the way differences arise and fill duration with new content. For these matters, Deleuze turns our attention to Jerry Lewis and filmed musicals.

American musicals might annoy us when the flow of normal theatrical action is interrupted by silly song and dance scenes. Deleuze references a number of musicals where such scenes resemble dream-like recollections. Yet these memories do not recall real events in the past, but rather they merely have the feeling of the past as given in dream. This unspecified past is Bergson’s past in general.

Here are some memorial dream scenes from Singing in the Rain, An American in Paris, and The Bandwagon.

But if duration involves injections of radical difference and newness, how might we conceptualize this? Deleuze refers us to the chaotic forces of variation that reverberate through Jerry Lewis’ body and the world around him. These forceful energies produce new phenomenal data that pushes duration forward by infusing it with waves of original content. Here are scenes from Jerry Lewis’ The Patsy, Who’s Minding the Store, and Hollywood or Bust.

Recall Bergson’s circuits. They layer into the past, yet they all remain virtualities that are contemporaneous with the actual present.

Certain Orson Welles scenes make this visible. Special lenses allowed him to keep many spatial layers all in focus simultaneously, even though they extend very far back into the movie set.

In The Magnificent Ambersons, an impression of time is conveyed by placing two generations at different simultaneous layers of depth.

In Citizen Kane, there is a scene with Kane walking toward the office of an old friend.

They have not spoken for years, so Kane’s journey expresses a movement backward through simultaneous layers of time, presented visually as spatial depth.

We noted at the beginning how phenomenology requires time to pass in order for phenomena to appear. This in a way gives the present moment a sort of thickness. It swells out from the present, fading into the past like a comet tail, as Husserl puts it.

Husserl's Thickness of Time

And we are only able to constitute a phenomenal object by means of associative similarities that present themselves and synthesize across a span of flowing time. But for Deleuze, we need not think that appearances show themselves through time in its flowing.

Bergsonist Deleuzean Depth of Time

(Thanks eyefetch)



(Thanks diagonalthoughts.com)


(Thanks marinagraham)

The phenomenon of motion, for example, might just be the diminishing vibrancy of layers of after images all showing in one instant of perception.

If ever we feel time, we feel it as a difference or a gap, like when peering in the mirror and seeing someone who looks older than we thought we were. Abruptly-noticed signs of age make us feel the depth of many years all in that sudden instant when they flash before us. Instead of an extensive thickness of time, we might think of an intensive depth of time. Each moment in our lives has the depth of all time, here and now immediately. A Deleuzean phenomenological time need not flow, and perhaps should not flow. If the flow is based on associating similarities bridging one moment to the next, then more flow would mean less difference from moment to moment, and thus less standing out, less appearing, less phenomenality.


Image credits:
http://www.marinagraham.co.uk/files/IMG_355.jpg

http://www.diagonalthoughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/idris-khan.jpg

http://www.eyefetch.com/image.aspx?ID=1193241

The Still of Time: A-Temporal Phenomena in the Duration of Deleuze’s Bergson

by Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]
[Corry Shores, Entry Directory]

[May I thank the sources of the images:
eyefetch
diagonalthoughts.com
marinagraham
Credits given below the image and at the end.]


The following is from my presentation at the Bergson and his Postmodern and Immanent Legacies conference.

The Still of Time:
A-Temporal Phenomena in the Duration of Deleuze’s Bergson

Deleuze is often considered an anti-phenomenologist. Yet my sense is that his critique of phenomenology is more of a constructive critique. Deleuze is not against the project of studying phenomenal appearances; he merely does so on the basis of different principles and methods. Namely, Deleuze seems interested mostly in the phenomenality of phenomena. Phenomenologists, however, often turn their attention to how phenomenal appearances become constituted throughout the flow of our internal time consciousness. But for Deleuze, a phenomenon is a flash. It could appear instantaneously. What we will explore is the possibility that a Deleuzean phenomenology need not appeal to a flow of time consciousness in order to account for the production of phenomena.

This endeavor is inspired by an article that phenomenologist Michael Kelly wrote, where he defends Husserl’s time consciousness against Deleuzean-Bergsonists. These critics charge that Husserl’s theory of internal time cannot “accommodate time’s fundamental characteristic, namely its passage.” . Yet, Kelly shows that Husserl’s later writings on temporality are immune to this critique.

We might note how Deleuze famously said of his Bergsonism book that it is a classic instance of his buggering technique. He writes, “I imagined myself getting onto the back of an author, and giving him a child, which would be his and which would at the same time be a monster. It is very important that it should be his child, because the author actually had to say everything that I made him say. But it also had to be a monster because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips, break ins, secret emissions, which I really enjoyed.”

So what we will explore is the possibility that one such conceptual offspring is a surprising interpretation of Bergson’s duration: for Deleuze, duration’s fundamental characteristic is not its flowing passage. Perhaps we might characterize duration by employing terms with more of an a-temporal connotation, like instantaneous, simultaneous, and eternal. But these provisional characterizations should really only serve to avert our attention away from time’s flow in order to focus more on time in its absolute immediacy.

To do this, let’s first examine Bergson’s expanding circuit diagram.

Bergson uses it to illustrate the way that the past is always contemporaneous with the present. He first has us consider what he calls an ‘after image’. They are always a part of our perception.

We look at some object, then abruptly avert our gaze to another place. For a split-second, the image of the initial object will carry-into and overlay-upon the new scene we see. The prior object remains in our field of perception, even though it is actually no longer there. Instead, it is virtually there.

The virtual past image inserts itself so thoroughly into the new actual image that “we are no longer able to discern what is perception and what is memory.” Perhaps this is why fast moving objects leave a blurry trail behind them.

According to Bergson, just while the perceived image is sent to our brain, the most recent image in our memory has already arrived-upon and overlaid our current perception, with both moving lightning fast in a continuous circuit.

But just as soon as we see something, it will already begin to appear differently to us, because we move our eyes or notice something new in what we see. Like before, the new image and its predecessor circulate immediately. Yet the even older image has not gone away; it too re-imposes itself on the present perception, but in a somewhat less vivid way. Nonetheless, this enriches the object with another layer in its appearance.

With each additional moment, another new inner circuit pushes-out the former ones.
So we see, then, that the past and present are perpetually crystallized together. “In truth,” writes Bergson, “every perception is already memory. Practically we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.”

Yet even though all of our past is always interposed in the present in an implicit way, sometimes what we see causes one recollection to stand-out more explicitly among the rest. Often we observe something in our daily life that causes certain prior memories to flare-out before our “mind’s eye.” And sometimes our flashbacks can be so vivid that they drown-out the actual things we see. We then begin to feel as though we are reliving that past experience.

Deleuze illustrates these recollection-circuits with the cinematic flashbacks in Marcel Carné’s movie The Daybreak (Le jour se lève).

The film follows events happening from sundown to dawn. During this short period, a murderer flashes back into his past. Whenever we return to the present, we hear a heavy doom-filled bass and drum beat. It gives us the feeling we are moving inevitably toward a fatal end. So during the flashbacks, the past is so vibrant that it completely covers-over the actual present things standing before him in his room. As viewers, we only see what he is remembering, and not the events still carrying-on in the present while he dreams. But because upon returning we hear that fatal march toward the end, we are reminded that even while reminiscing, we never escaped the current doomed situation.

Now consider if we were to memorize a series of spoken lines for a play. Each time we practice it, we create a new individual memory. When it comes time to perform, we just start with the first word, and the rest seem to follow automatically, without our needing to recall any single rehearsal. All the previous times were contracted into that present moment of automatic habitual bodily performance. But after the show, someone might ask us about how we memorized the lines. Then we could relax and daydream about those moments, seeing them in their vivid detail.

Bergson illustrates this with his famous cone diagram. As new things enter our memory, they add to a cone.

If we are acting automatically, like when performing something we rehearsed, then we are down closer to the S point.

Being near this tip does not mean our memories have gone away. Rather, they are all contracted into our physical actions, like how a performance expresses physically all our memories of past recitals. When instead we daydream about the past, the images expand-out in our minds, as during a flashback. In these moments, we reside at a higher layer of the cone. Always we are varying somewhere between automatic action and dreamful reflection, so we might be at any of the many possible layers of expansion or contraction of our memory.

So during flashback scenes, the character’s memory leaps-up to a higher level. But during an action scene where he acts automatically, his memory is contracted into the present moment, down at the cone’s tip. We are always changing level, varying ‘melodically’ between our intense physical engagement in the present moment and our drifting somewhere in dream-land.

So the larger circuits are more distant memories, and the higher cone levels are increased degrees of expansion on one part of those memories.

The cone levels and the circuits are not equivalent, but we might place them in correspondence by noting that when moving to a distant circuit, we are also expanding our memories. In these slides we might correlate the movement-into-flashback with the expansions in the diagrams.

What we notice are the simultaneity of the layers. At any one moment, our consciousness is expressing, implicitly or explicitly, all our past actions and memories. We do not need time to flow in order for it to fully present itself in its immediacy. When the hero sees a memento and flashes back to an event taking place a couple months prior, he does not feel two months of time in their continuous passage. Instead, he experiences two months time in a sudden flash. So the simultaneity of the distant past with the active present becomes immediately evident to him. It is not an extent of time that he undergoes in this flash, but rather time in the form of an intensity.

To further illustrate, Deleuze discusses flashback movies made by Joseph Mankiewicz. In these films, flashbacks are the product of bifurcations. There are two dimensions to these bifurcations or forkings. The first sort we will consider is the forking as a break in a linear progress, as described by Prigogine and Stengers.

They describe how for certain chemical reactions, changes in one variable can be correlated to the variations of others, but then one variable will reach a point when its path is indeterminable. It could increase or decrease, but this outcome is always left to chance.

The other sort of bifurcation we find in Borges’ story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths.’ It describes a Chinese monk’s unfinished manuscripts for a novel with this same title. It went unpublished because it was incomprehensible. The chapters did not proceed just sequentially. A following chapter would be like an alternate version of the same prior one.

The Garden, then, forks-not through space but rather through time. Characters in stories normally must choose between diverging paths. In the Garden, however, the character, “chooses— simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.”

There is one remarkable scene in Mankiewicz’ Barefoot Contessa, which showcases both senses of bifurcation. The soon-to-be Contessa quite abruptly switches companions, taking her down a drastically different path. But this scene was remembered by two different people, each in their own way and with their own slight variations. We will place both scenes side-by-side, listening just to the audio from one.

We notice that sudden instant of the slap, that crack in the flow of time, when the next moment is completely undetermined, entirely discontinuous with the present, that moment which is truly phenomenal, that pure, intense, dramatic moment outside the flow of time.

Now, the Contessa’s forking is the reason each of these people recalled the event. We see the relation between bifurcation and flashback shown even more vividly in Mankiewicz’ A Letter to Three Wives. In this story, a woman writes a letter to three wives saying she ran off with one of their husbands, but she does not specify which one. This is a forking in their lives, and it causes them to recall prior forkings in the past that foreshadowed the current situation. In one wife’s recollection, we see her discover a possible reason her husband might have left with the other woman. Her face makes a certain expression that is almost identical with her current one, as if in her past she was already flashing forward to the future. And likewise, events in the present unfold where she gets news that seems to confirm her suspicions, and she makes that same facial expression again, linking all three moments together.

So when something happens in our lives that takes us down a diverging unexpected path, we on the one hand might flash back to another forking in the past that only implicitly hinted at the current bifurcation; yet on the other hand, we are already living the present moment as a memory given in advance of its future recollection, only we don’t know yet what future forkings will bring out the present moment’s implicit significance. In the instant of the flashback, past, present, and future are all simultaneous and immediate to our consciousness, as if we are always in a way standing outside of time’s flow and experiencing events from the perspective of eternity.

Husserl's Thickness of Time

We noted at the beginning how phenomenology requires time to pass in order for phenomena to appear. This in a way gives the present moment a sort of thickness. It swells out from the present, fading into the past like a comet tail, as Husserl puts it.

And we are only able to constitute a phenomenal object by means of associative similarities that present themselves and synthesize across a span of flowing time. But for Deleuze, we need not think that appearances show themselves through time in its flowing. The phenomenon of motion, for example, might just be the diminishing vibrancy of layers of after images all showing in one instant of perception.

Deleuzean Bergsonist Depth of Time

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If ever we feel time, we feel it as a difference or a gap, like when peering in the mirror and seeing someone who looks older than we thought we were. Abruptly-noticed signs of age make us feel the depth of many years all in that sudden instant when they flash before us. Instead of an extensive thickness of time, we might think of an intensive depth of time. Each moment in our lives has the depth of all time, here and now immediately. A Deleuzean phenomenological time need not flow, and perhaps should not flow. If the flow is based on associating similarities bridging one moment to the next, then more flow would mean less difference from moment to moment, and thus less standing out, less appearing, less phenomenality.


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