Untimely Bergson

We tend to think of time as consisting of instants, following one another in a kind of staccato succession – we ‘jump’ from one instant to the next. But time no more ‘consists’ of instants than a pencil ‘consists’ of centimetres. For Bergson, the symbolic system with which we measure time – instants - is eccentric to the ‘real’ of time itself. However, in a very basic and hard to eradicate conceptual error, we mistake this symbolic yardstick for the thing measured, for time itself, which we say actually breaks down into instants, which are then joined together like beads on a string.



I’m not sure, though, that Bergson’s alternative characterisation of time as ‘flow’ is any better. Why do we get nearer time by substituting an image (‘flow’) for a concept (‘instant’)? Must we not rather just surrender time to a Real which is outside the joints of language altogether? Is Bergson’s ‘flow’, moreover, not part of a (paradoxical) festishisation of the organic, the continuous, and the seamless in his work?

On the one hand, ‘flow’ is after all only a metaphor, where the function of metaphor is to hold the place open for a concept which is not yet formulated or available. The metaphor does not lay claim to its object but only says ‘this space is reserved’.

On the other hand, the value accruing to the fluid and organic only makes sense in contrast to the calibrated and mechanical, and is therefore mediated and ‘measured’ by them.. And it is only when the latter come increasingly to colonise our lives (e.g. E.P. Thompson on the introduction of clock time into the work place) that the fluid and the organic appear as objects of value, desire and nostalgia. It is as if the concept of ‘flow’ – amongst others - is a kind of spectre created by the disappearance of its referent.