25 Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, Princeton University Press, 2015, 7 26 Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher, 142. 27 Ibid., 143 28 With Bergson’s ideas about human experience of time passing, and how that differs from a scientific measurement of time, he questions the assumption made at the time that the model of the physical sciences can be simply automatically applied to a psychological room of human experience: that one can predict what the mind will do just like one can predict what a machine will do. As part of a wider movement in French Philosophy called Spiritualism, Bergson questioned the reduction of the human mind to the model of the Physical Sciences. Bergson’s concept of time explains the human experience of time as a philosophical phenomenon, and he has been criticised for giving time a mysterious quality and assigning intuition too central a place. And that was perhaps one of the reasons why Bergson seemed to disappear within the field of science as the fascination with new technological inventions that supported physics’ concept of time were growing, and, thereby, reducing the roles of philosophy and subjectivity. Ross Abbinnett, ‘The Anthropocene as a Figure of Neoliberal Hegemony’, Social Epistemology, A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, vol. 33, iss. 4, 2019: Neoliberalism, Technocracy and Higher Education, ed. Justin Cruickshank & Ross Abbinnett. 29 Keith Ansell-Pearson, Bergson. Thinking Beyond the Human Condition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 168
the sake of future generations to understand, it shows the human categorisation behaviour – the need to systematise, categorise and classify the world around as a desperate attempt to manage the unmanageable. A quantitative approach to time, measuring time by means of a number and systems offers only a practical solution – and one that the character Louis dismisses as ‘outdated’. French philosopher Henri Bergson has contributed to a plural understanding of time.25 Bergson was interested in that, which technology for monitoring and measuring cannot explain: memories, expectations, dreams, déja vú, flashback and fantasy. He saw time as a quest, guided by freedom and randomness that, because of its abstract and arbitrary size, could only be comprehended imperfectly by science. The question ‘what is time’? has been challenged by thinkers since ancient times.26 Bergson’s contribution explains the human experience of time as a philosophical phenomenon. He has been criticised by Heidegger, among others, for concentrating on quality instead of quantity, decoupling space and time.27 However, this qualitative notion of time may possibly offer as a tool for searching the limits of the technological utopia. In the Anthropocene epoch, the climatic, geological and biological systems of Earth have essentially been bound up with the technological systems that have been developed by human beings.28 For scholars looking into this, Bergson has gained renewed interest as a representative avant la lettre in what has become known as ‘the posthuman turn’ in philosophy and history.29 Throughout history, and parallel to the technological
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development, we have clung to the belief that we can measure and weigh time.30 And one of the most deeply rooted ideas about the world is that time is linear and homogeneous – ‘a container where events succeed one after the other according to the laws of causality’.31 As we have seen in Smith’s 51 e.DSO, there are two different notion of time: one is time as linear and the other is the human experience of a philosophical notion of time. The power system – embodied by Chin – is structured around a capitalistic agenda of sorting everything into predefined calculable categories. On the other hand – music – personified by Louis – represents the philosophical notion of time: art and, more broadly, the humanities as crucial to Homo sapiens’s philosophical and existential survival. Music, and especially the absence of music and art, causes what sounds like the final signs of the extinction of the human – as we know human beings today: We have been woken by sirens, going on and off for half an hour now. I don’t know how to stop it. On Monday, Louis was stabbed by a hostile drone. She’s still not herself. Last Wednesday, the bioprinter printed nails in breach. Last week, the air conditioner cooled the building down to freezing point. I’m afraid we’ve been hacked.32 The sound of music has been replaced by shrieking sirens and machine-like dog barking. Humankind has been hacked and, with that, the philosophical notion of time. Bergson describes duration through the example of music or listening to a melody:
ARKEN Museum of Modern Art