There is . . . a continuous flux . . . a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it. They can, properly speaking, only be said to form multiple states when I have already passed them and turn back to observe their track. Whilst I was experiencing them they were so solidly organized, so profoundly animated with a common life, that I could not have said where any one of them finished or where another commenced. In reality no one of them begins or ends, but all extend into each other.120
The external time with which we organize our ordinary experience in the world, in the spatial world of succession of points or “presents” is, the philosopher argued in Time and Free Will, something entirely incommensurate with this inner reality of “duration” as we experience it in conscious life. We can thus think of simultaneity as without spatial distinction.
I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, which does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it a distinct form, the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more probably, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity.121
It is this theme of memory that is of interest here—the multivalent and multidimensional nature of perception in time, and the notion of a temporal continuity connecting the remembered past to a dynamic present. Viola has himself often spoken of our “ability to extend the self into time with the capacity to anticipate and recall.”122 Memory renders absence present, while keeping absence absent. The full apprehension of “duration,” la duree, is possible only in memory wherein the past is accumulated in its fullness. Immediate sensory perception, then, is bound, for Bergson, with the creative forces of memory, where memory strengthens and enriches present perception. The interaction of no longer distinct “past” and “present” is defined as an indivisible movement and, as Gilles Deleuze has argued, as a simultaneity of differences marked by breaks;123 moments or “instants” are markings abstracted from the flow of the plenum, from, as Bergson himself put it, “the plenitude of becoming.”
Change is for Bergson a continuous process occurring within the conscious self in which “states” are not individually demarcated units, but mere points of greatest intensity trailing off indefinitely within the unbroken fabric of experience—a becoming, or poetic creation. Here is Bergson in his 1907 Creative Evolution, in which he specifies the constantly changing state of consciousness in terms of the perception of external objects.
I say that I change, but the change seems to me to reside in the passage from one state to the next: of each state, taken separately I am apt to think that it remains the same, during all the time that it prevails. Nevertheless, a slight effort to attention would reveal to me that there is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change every moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration would cease to flow. Let us take the most stable of internal states, the visual perception of a motionless external object. The object may remain the same, I may look at it from the same side, at the same angle, in the same light; nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs from that which I have just had, even if only because the one is an instant older than the other. My memory is there which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing . . . Still more is this the case with states more deeply internal, such as sensations, feelings, desires, etc., which do not correspond, like a simple visual perception, to an unvarying external object. But it is expedient to disregard this uninterrupted change, and to notice it only when it becomes sufficient to impress a new attitude on the body, a new direction of the attention. Then, and then only, we find that our state has changed. The truth is that we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change.124
Expressed here is the idea that that attention is malleable, susceptible to dissolution, fusions, forgetting, and recalling—a compounding of anticipation, recollection, and immediate experience. This is true to Viola’s manipulations of time and has resonance in Bergson’s notion of la dureé in perception and the multiplicity continually unfolding in the seamless flow of duration, incorporating the immanent past in the experiences of the present—what the philosopher refers to as memory. “Duration,” Gilles Deleuze has summed up Bergson, “is essentially memory . . . the conservation and preservation of the past in the present.”125 He continues:
The past and the present do not denote two successive movements, but two elements which cooexist. One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass . . . each present goes back to itself as past.126
For Bergson, then, we mistakenly divide up the flow of real time into units of space, into “instants,” which are the extensions of these units. That is, we convert the simultaneity of duration into abruptions of instants, and we do this because we have learned to “spatialize” time—this is the distinction between real, lived time and its “spatialization” or static conceptualization into objects, events, and activities of ordinary experience. Moreover, our conceptual thinking and its linguistic expression are “molded” upon this pre-prescribed world, a world “already made.” Our intellect, in reflecting or confirming this world—“in professing to reconstruct reality with percepts and concepts whose function is to make it stationary”—only serves to obscure reality itself, that is, the world in real time or duration.
Our mind, which seeks for solid points of support, has for its main function in the ordinary course of life that of representing states and things. It takes, at long intervals, almost instantaneous views of the undivided mobility of the real. It thus obtains sensations and ideas. In this way, it substitutes for the continuous the discontinuous, for motion stability, for tendency in process of change, fixed points marking a direction of change and tendency. This substitution is necessary to common-sense, to language, to practical life, and even . . . to positive science . . . In that lies what we call exactitude and precision.127
On this view, while thought-in-language synthesizes the complex material of sensuous experience—its indeterminacy and ambiguity—into homogenous objective concepts, like standardized units adapted to social discourse, perception, by contrast, demands the wealth—the flexibility and extendability—of variable perception. Words “store up the stable, common and consequently impersonal element in the impressions of mankind,” and “overwhelm or at least cover over the delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness.”128 This inability of language to describe duration actually reveals, for Bergson, the very nature of the limitations of our linguistic apparatus; as part of our intelligence, language is essentially a set of abstract signs whose task is to immobilize the experience of time, making the expression of change impossible. It is language, once again, that alienates us from direct experience. While language may be able to communicate the content of my experience in an intelligible way, the quality of what is being experienced is (linguistically) inexpressible; language, in effect, evacuates the multiplicity and mobility of the nuance, complexity and richness of the quality of that experience. To fix a name or word to something is to conceptualize experience and to lose sight of the deeper impression of innermost sensation: