The transformation of the public sphere

I was upbraided (see here) for not challenging someone in a cafe over an indolent accusation of imposture. Public space should involve engaging with strangers, I was told. So today, this woman was sat reading out loud from Bergson:

“We instinctively tend to solidify our impressions in order to express them in language. Hence we confuse the feeling itself, which is in a perpetual state of becoming, with its permenant external object, and especially with the word which expresses this object…. Sensations and tastes seems to me to be objects as soon as I isolate and name them, and in the human sould there are only processes. .. the wordwith well defined outlines, the rough and ready word.. overwhelms or at least covers over the delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness.

I eyed her suspiciously. she smiled and suggested that

'It's Language which ‘lends’ objects and impressions their immobility - the ‘illusion’ of immobility. In reality it's pure flux.'

I replied with:

'But isn’t this precisely what Hegel celebrates: the force of cognition to seize, immobilise and separate from the ‘mere continuum’ of pure sense (etc) the Word, the Word or Name which arrests an element of the ‘real’ and extracts its meaning?'.

she continued:

'For Bergson, the ‘articulations of the real’ never coincide with the articulations of language (the Symbolic Order) and perhaps, therefore, our inclusion within that Symbolic Order involves necessarily a severance from the organic immediacy of perception'.

To which I could only add:

'But in Hegel, the phantasmagoria of mere sensation is not the ‘most real’ level in any case. We must extract its underlying reality using the cold violence of conceptual thought'.

We agreed that I should move to another table.