dark night & the thought of Henri Bergson

                                          

                     Grimes - Oblivion

You hear a lot about holism these days. They say every thing is one organism, and yes, while that maybe true, unless we come to understand how things function together we really don't comprehend holism. Granted holism will always conceals most of it's mystery, to understand holism is to grasp the absolute... which is imposable, but some thinkers do get closer then others. Henry Bergson is among the most integrative thinkers of the western philosophical tradition. Dreams have long been investigated for hidden treasures of esoteric meaning, so it seems to me that Henri Bergson's book 'Dreams' would be a great place to start in a revaluation of his thought.

Henri Bergson’s 'Dreams'; unlike most books on the topic, is not psychology, nor is it some other type of inductive investigation into the meaning of dreams. It is a phenomenology of sleep; this means it’s the reported findings of some one that simply pays close attention to the experience of dreaming. This does not mean how ever that it is undisciplined or prejudiced against other types of methodology, there is psychological information in this book, as well as neurological explanations. Contrary to what many philosophers and scholars claim, Bergson is not in any way opposed to these kinds of methods of inquiry, on the contrary he simply seeks to understand, and explain how our human bodies produce meaning from/of our interactions with the world, and like all phenomenologist he uses an appeal to our basic experiences to do this. What really sets Bergson apart from other thinkers is the way he considers a topic from a middle point. When considering the mind and the body, Bergson presents the way our actions draw on experience stored in the mind as images(memory); the circumstance calls for an action, the body searches its past memories(images) for a possible course of bodily action, when is selected and the image(memory) has its baring on the circumstance through bodily movement. There you see, it's all one, continues whole, mind body, thiught action, pretty cool, hu!?

Memory has a different function when we rest, because a resting state is not the kind of circumstance that calls any particular action or image(memories) from our minds, so when our minds relax the images start floating around freely connecting in wild new ways, than we start to dream. 





You can see how this differs from a Freudian type psychological account of dreaming, in that there isn't really any one thing lurking in the sub-conscious mind trying to manifest it's self the way Freud’s sub-conscious does, instead dream images get there meaning from how our waking bodies might interact with them. Only when we no longer need the memories for any particular purpose do our bodies stop trying to call up the necessary images and the images start to float free. Of course this doesn't mean that dreams can't tell us something about ourselves, just not exactly the same sorts of things the Freud supposes they will. Dreams will tell us something of the nature of image and even the mind and body they just won’t tell us some secret about our mothers, or other such soup opera none sense. 



Bergson’s theory is really set apart from other theories of consciousness in that for him no pre-existing set of psychological figures need exist in order for us to make sense of the world or our dreams. For Bergson we make sense of the world through learning, and we learn through connecting actions with past images, so for him we don't need an 'id' to represent our desires, or a Platonic form to make sense of learning. For Bergson Reason is pattern recognition; taking the sense of varies memories and matching them with proper action, it's that simple. 



That might sound boring, "what no creepy esoteric knowledge which only doctors have access to, by which they lord over us, high priests and true authorities over our deepest selves!!!" but this also means that our dreams are free from the bounds of a narrow catalog of possible interpretations, because there simply drawn from life. This doesn't mean that there total chaos, ether, just that their meaning and potential is not entirely disconnected from our lived experience. This is good news for 2 reasons: 1 because we now have an intimate relation to the meaning of our dreams, and 2 because dreaming is now a creative process of invention; it isn't just a specimen to be dissected and studied by the elite doctors of the world. Dreams are now the building blocks of creativity and action.

For those wonderful, earnest, individuals among you that find this topic intriguing and would like to do some further reading of your own I have included a beautiful excerpt from Henry Bergson's book 'Dreams' in which the personified Dream introduces himself with ease and candor, a link to the full copy of the book at internetarcive.com, as well as this link to the Daniel Coffeen lecture by which I first heard the good name of Henry Bergson.

Now for Page 43 to 50 of "Dreams!!!"

43 DREAMS


But, then, what is the essential differ-


ence between perceiving and dreaming?

What is sleep? I do not ask, of course,

how sleep can be explained physiolog-

ically. That is a special question, and be-

sides is far from being settled. I ask what

is sleep psychologically; for our mind

continues to exercise itself when we are

asleep, and it exercises itself as we have

just seen on elements analogous to those

of waking, on sensations and memories;

and also in an analogous manner combines

them. Nevertheless we have on the one

hand normal perception, and on the other

the dream. What is the difference, I re-

peat? What are the psychological charac-

teristics of the sleeping state?



We must distrust theories. There are

a great many of them on this point. Some

say that sleep consists in isolating oneself

from the external world, in closing the

senses to outside things. But we have

shown that our senses continue to act dur-

ing sleep, that they provide us with tjie

outline, or at least the point ojf departure,

of most of our dreams. Some say: "To







^ 44 DREAMS



go to sleep is to stop the action of the su-

perior faculties of the mind," and they talk

of a kind of momentary paralysis of the

higher centers. I do not think that this is

much more exact. In a dream we become

no doubt indifferent to logic, but not in-

capable of logic. There are dreams when

we reason with correctness and even with

subtlety. I might almost say, at the risk

I of seeming paradoxical, that the mistake ol

the dreamer is often in reasoning too much.

He would avoid the absurdity if he would

remain a simple spectator of the proces-

sion of images which compose his dream.

But when he strongly desires to explain

it, his explanation, intended to bind to

gether incoherent images, can be nothing

more than a bizarre reasoning which

verges upon absurdity. I recognize, in

deed, that our superior intellectual facul

ties are relaxed in sleep, that generally the

logic of a dreamer is feeble enough and

often resembles a mere parody of logic.

But one might say as much of all of our

faculties during sleep. It is then not by

the abolition of reasoning, any more than







DREAMS 45



by the closing of the senses, that we char-

acterize dreaming.



Something else is essential. We need

something more than theories. We need

an intimate contact with the facts. One

must make the decisive experiment upon

oneself. It is necessary that on coming out

of a dream, since we cannot analyze our-

selves in the dream itself, we should watch

the transition from sleeping to waking, fol-

low upon the transition as closely as pos-

sible, and try to express by words what we

experience in this passage. This is very

difficult, but may be accomplished by

forcing the attention. Permit, then, the

writer to take an example from his own

personal experience, and to tell of a recent

dream as well as what was accomplished

on coming out of the dream.



Now the dreamer dreamed that he was

speaking before an assembly, that he was

making a political speech before a political

assembly. Then in the midst of the audi-

torium a murmur rose. The murmur aug-

mented; it became a muttering. Then it

became a roar, a frightful tumult, and







46 DREAMS



finally there resounded from all parts

timed to a uniform rhythm the cries, "Out!

Out!" At that moment he wakened. A

dog was baying in a neighboring garden,

and with each one of his *Wow-wows"

one of the cries of "Out! Out!" seemed to

be identical. Well, here was the infinitesi-

mal moment which it is necessary to seize.

The waking ego, just reappearing,

should turn to the dreaming ego, which

is still there, and, during some instants at

least, hold it without letting it go. "I

have caught you at it! You thought it was a

crowd shouting and it was a dog barking.

Now, I shall not let go of you until you

tell me just what you were doing!" To

which the dreaming ego would answer, "I

was doing nothing; and this is just where

you and I differ from one another. You

imagine that in order to hear a dog bark-

ing, and to know that it is a dog that barks,

you have nothing to do. That is a great

mistake. You accomplish, without suspect-

ing it, a considerable effort. You take

your entire memory, all your accumulated

experience, and you bring this formidable







DREAMS 47



mass of memories to converge upon a sin-

gle point, in such a way as to insert ex-

actly in the sounds you heard that one of

your memories which is the most capable

of being adapted to it. Nay, you must ob-

tain a perfect adherence, for between the

memory that you evoke and the crude sen-

sation that you perceive there must not be

the least discrepancy; otherwise you would

be just dreaming. This adjustment you can

only obtain by an effort of the memory

and an effort of the perception, just as the

tailor who is trying on a new coat pulls

together the pieces of cloth that he adjusts

to the shape of your body in order to pin

them. You exert, then, continually, every

moment of the day, an enormous effort.

Your life in a waking state is a life of la-

bor, even when you think you are doing

nothing, for at every minute you have to

choose and every minute exclude. You

choose among your sensations, since you

reject from your consciousness a thousand

subjective sensations which come back in

the night when you sleep. You choose, and

with extreme precision and delicacy, among







48 DREAMS



your memories, since you reject all that do

not exactly suit your present state. This

choice which you continually accomplish,

this adaptation, ceaselessly renewed, is the

first and most essential condition of what is

called common sense. But all this keeps

you in a state of uninterrupted tension.

You do not feel it at the moment, any more

than you feel the pressure of the atmos-

phere, but it fatigues you in the long run.

Common sense is very fatiguing.



"So, I repeat, I differ from you pre-

cisely in that I do nothing. The effort

that you give without cessation I simply

abstain from giving. In place of attach-

ing myself to life, I detach myself from it.

Everything has become indifferent to me.

I have become disinterested in everything.

To sleep is to become disinterested. One

sleeps to the exact extent to which he be-

comes disinterested. A mother who sleeps

by the side of her child will not stir at the

sound of thunder, but the sigh of the child

will wake her. Does she really sleep in

regard to her child? We do not sleep in

regard to what continues to interest us.







DREAMS 49



"You ask me what it is that I do when I

dream? I will tell you what you do when

you are awake. You take me, the me of

dreams, me the totality of your past, and

you force me, by making me smaller and

smaller, to fit into the little circle that you

trace around your present action. That is

what it is to be awake. That is what it is to

live the normal psychical life. It is to bat-

tle. It is to will. As for the dream, have

you really any need that I should explain

it? It is the state into which you naturally

fall when you let yourself ^o, when you no

longer have the power to concentrate your-

self upon a single point, when you have

ceased to will. What needs much more to

be explained is the marvelous mechanism

by which at any moment your will obtains

instantly, and almost unconsciously, the con-

centration of all that you have within you

upon one and the same point, the point that

interests you. But to explain this is the

task of normal psychology, of the psychol-

ogy of waking, for willing and waking are

one and the same thing."



This is what the dreaming ego would say.







50 DREAMS



And it would tell us a great many other

things still if we could let it talk freely.

(listening to music) Grimes .

Grimes "live" in the studio.

                                

My Cousin Anders showed me this and it's really got me now.

dead-air of the network and the Object Oriented thought of Graham Harman.

Hi, no body! I know you’re reading this, and before I get into anything to heavy tonight I just want to thank you so much for listening to a lonely sole, it means more to me then you would ever know.




Man, there's got to be trillions of me out there, sorry bitches typing out there souls into an vast empty plain, vacuum clean nothing, internet! Who the hell is ever going to hear any of this atomic diy batting, the masters of nobodies and any bodies’ free willing expiration! Is this you’re information revaluation!?! Nobody listens
to anybody; no one knows anything everyone just dancing with their selves!! McLuhan was right, we set out for a social network but got egoistic islands , everyone is painfully alone, can't stop talking about the community, can't get enough shallow interaction, social anemia , it's a sickness, an orgy of weeping sad hippies!!! That’s the age we live in!! Not the utopian one world of love they promised us, a no-world of lust and contempt, and that’s it.

If you don't believe me now talk to me in 6 months, you'll see.



Sorry folks, that the way it is.



Now, how was my day? Fine, it was fine. On this new schedule I stay up all night working then I go home and go along my day with all the early birds until about 3 when I collapse out of sheer extortion, if you've never done this then you wouldn’t know that day light is actaly far more offensive then you could ever imagine, it burns like hell. Well I guess it's all a matter of perspective isn't it.



After I arrived home in the morning I read the first a portion of the 2ed chapter of Graham Harman's "prince of networks" about the actor-network theorist Bruno Latour, his work and thought. Actor-network theory is a school of philosophy that claims that all things act on all other things in other words it all doesn't hinge on us humans."No object is inherently reducible or irreducible to any other."* in other words it is a radical claim that each thing makes the universe through acting on other things and is at the same time unnecessary in the making of the universe, because other things would continue to act without it, that is that the universe would go on without it. Latour is actually the founder of the discipline and really does have some good ideas about the networks and the objects and identity and every thing, the book of course is written by Graham Harman so it's his take.



Latour and Harman use the term actant to describe their basic unit of identity, as opposed to terms like subject, desien, signified, EST. To Latour and Harman representational thought is limited in understanding the universe because it makes one thing stained in for another thing which can never be entirely identical, and that at its best representations is only redundancy. They purpose instead that we think of each thing as an actent that acts on other things in order to exists, but their theory is deliberately anti-correlationist, which is to say they believe that each thing has a significant existence even without contact with human consciousness. At first this claim could be kind of offence and I admit that I too was offended when I heard this: "yeah, but you wouldn’t even know it exists without contact with it!!", "Phenomenologist (one of their assumed villains) don't deny that reality can be independent of human perception!!" "But humans do exist and they do correlate with other things!!" But after reading a little bit of this Object Oriented Ontology stuff I'm starting to understand what their getting at.



An object is inexorable and has an identity independent of the other things it interacts with. For one thing there is a sense in which we understand our selves in the light of the objects that surround us, this is part of Heideggers claim, but for Latour and Harman we know our selves because the objects that we interact with don't entirely give into our will, which is they resist us. This resistance is part of the way they act on us, and is the meaning of their "relative" independent from us. The radical part comes in when they show how objects act on each other, one such example is two atoms hitting each other:



“Every actant is fully deployed in the networks of the world, with nothing hidden beneath all the surface-plays of alliance. It is fair enough to call the world a site of immanence, as long as we reject any notion that immanence means ‘inside of human awareness’. For Latour, two atoms in collision are immanent even if no human ever sees them, since both expend themselves fully in the labor of creating networks with other actants. ‘Since whatever resists is real, there can be no “symbolic” to add to the “real”[…]. I am prepared to accept that fish may be gods, stars, or food, that fish may make me ill and play different roles in origin myths […]. Those who wish to separate the “symbolic” fish from its “real” counterpart should themselves be separated and confined’ (PF,p188). What is shared in common by marine biologists, the fishing industry, and tribal elders telling myths about icthyian deities is this: none of them really know what a fish is. All must negotiate with the fish’s reality, remaining alert to its hideonts, migrational patterns, and sacral or nutritional properties.”(38)



There’s lots pact into this little quote it is a heavy hitter: immanence is not thoughts being inside a subject, but the general ability for one thing to effect or act on another, this is true of Delueze's notion of immanence as well, immanence-in-itself, as well as N.O. Lossky's 'immanence of everything in everything,' albeit for Delueze in a vitalistic way, and for N.O. Lossky's in the form of Russian idealism. The whole point is though that these systems are independent form human interpretation. Delueze and N.O. Lossky's would both agree that the symbolic is real but in different ways. For N.O. Lossky's the symbolic is a priory and for Delueze it emerges from, and has a reciprocal relationship with the material world, but Latour and Harman don't really want to draw the battle lines there they seem to want to draw the battle lines in terms of epistemology, they simply wont to preserve the being of the fish to its self, and allow knowledge to be the ways fish act on us humans. They want us to admit that this knowledge is limited, but not entirely accessible. At one point they use the assessable of a window washer that tilts his head to see if the smug is on the inside or the outside of the glass, for Latour & Harman objects always determine the nature of action in this way. Another thing I like about this last passage is how it shows that a characteristic like divinity or deliciousness are only descriptions of the way an actants acts on other actants, but are non the less really happening.



Another term used in the book is 'black box', which is the name for the mystery that surrounds an actent and is often necessary for its functioning. A 'black box' is a skipping of steps in order to ovoid fussing with endless speculation, and just get right to the expected resolution. Now that I'm thinking about it, this blog is like a 'black box' because no one reads it, it just gets skipped over. This is how Harman describes the concept:



“Black boxes face two primary and opposite dangers: too much attention from other actants, or too little. When a black box receives too little attention, it is simply ignored. And this is the fate of most of the objects in the world. We are surrounded by trillions of actants at any given moment, and overlook the vast majority of useless flies, beetles, and electrons that swarm amidst our more treasured objects. Most patents are for inventions that never catch on in the market, or are never built at all. Most novels and scholarly articles go entirely unread: not criticized, but simply overlooked. Black boxes go nowhere if they fail to become obligatory points of passage for other entities. The second danger for black boxes is the opposite one—that of gaining too much interest in the form of skepticism and scrutiny. The work of the fraudulent South Korean clone doctor was not over looked, and neither was that of Utah’s failed cold fusion researchers. Instead, their black boxes were torn open and laid waste by sophisticated doubters. We do not want our love letters to arrive unnoticed, but neither do we wish them to be challenged or critiqued, their grammar marked with red ink.”(50)



So there you have it, this dame blog and many many like it are 'black boxes' are just skipped over, in such a way that they become powerless in their inability to act on any other objects. Trillions of blogs out there have there our independent being apart from any readership or many time even any attention from there writers, but none the less have they being in themselves and have their own innate action that could have an effect on the world, but that’s not quite right because in another place Harman explains that each object is negotiating with other objects in order to gain more prevalence, and that apart from this negotiation the object has no other power. So this pathetic little blog is pretty much dead in the water. As Herman states:



"Actants are always completely deployed in their relations with the world, and the more they are cut off from these relations, the less real they become."(19)



So I am actually becoming more and more unreal as I type this with every new word even the pretty much none existent readers of this blog are leaving, and literally taking this blogs existence with them. But wait isn't the whole point of Object Oriented philosophy to safe guard objects from those that would like to think that they can control them meanly by their intentions and attention! Hm?!





"Actors become more real by making larger portions of the cosmos vibrate in harmony with their goals, or by taking detours in their goals to capitalize on the force of nearby actants. For Latour, the words ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ are not inscribed in inscribed in the essence of a thing, since there is no essence in the first place. Any actant has a chance to win or lose, though some have more weaponry at their disposal. Winners and losers are inherently equal and must be treated symmetrically. The loser is the one who failed to assemble enough human, natural, artificial, logical, and inanimate allies to stake a claim to victory. The more connected an actant is, the more real; the less connected, the less real. "(19)



What a wonders statement, reality is not constituted by human attention necessarily, but just the tension of the some of its parts, those parts intern only have share in reality insofar as they influence other such parts. I sense a mite bit of Nietzsche in this highly competitive view of the world. It's like Friedrich Nietzsche's will to power mines am a fotie. I also see someone you wouldn’t expect allied with Nietzsche, the Russian Christian idealist philosopher N.O. Lossky. For Lossky absolute value of any what he calls an agent is entirely derived from its ability to join the eternal through influence on other such agents, for Lossky this is part of the way this world is joined to the Divine Trinity, but on the converse just like Latour N.O. Lossky considers an agents inability to connect with other such entities as resulting in its eventual annihilation.





"Returning periodically to his former activities, an
individual does not simply repeat them, but sometimes he perfects them in accordance with his creative inventive ability in the sense of attaining a somewhat greater fullness of content. Usually, however, these changes are insignificant, so that the type of action remains the same.
Any considerable step forward in the achieving of the
fullness of content usually requires the removal of certain
Forms of egoistic exclusiveness and the transition to a
new type of life, to a higher level of it. "(90)



Inspite of Lossky's perfound differences from Latour in terms of their views on things like transcendence and humanity they both manage to share the idea that an actent actually becomes more real through its influence on other actents. Something else I'm noticing is that while Lossky shares a view that an increase in influence makes something more real. Latour dramatically contrasts Nietzsche in that where as for Nietzsche the repeatability of an event, in the form of an eternal return, lends value to that event, for Lossky repeatability amounts to mechanization and the loss of individual value.



Oh well, all this hope for meaning is grand and all, but really it's clear that this blog is doomed for annihilation, and really I think Latour is right, it's because it will never make the "cosmos vibrate" in "harmony with their goals," and this isn't do to some essence of the blog, each one is different, it's simply the "weaponry at their disposal," it just has absolutely no "allies," and that’s all there is to it.