Movement and Memory: Intuition as Virtualization in GPS Art

1. Intuition as Composition?

If Bergson's philosophy has had lasting philosophical and cultural impact, it must be on account of the famous critique of the spatialization of time he undertakes in his first book, Time and Free Will, which, in a certain sense orients his entire philosophical career. The gist of Bergson's critique, as is commonly-known, is that time and space are heterogeneous with one another, different in kind, with time being a continuous flux and space being a discrete extension. When we seek to represent time in discursive or representational cognition, we necessarily spatialize it; we necessarily cut into its indivisible continuity, dividing or segmenting that which cannot be divided, and thus lose touch with what time really is. On the contrary, time as duration can only be lived through intuition, a form of apprehension that is qualitatively distinct from representation and that overcomes spatialization through effectuating a certain fusion with the very flux of time itself.

Thinking about Bergson today means rethinking Bergson's conception of duration and his critique of spatialization in the context of worldly technologies for materializing time. How might the technical capacity to specify the minimal unit of time—the atomic second (9,192,631,770 oscillations/second)—bear on Bergson's critique of spatialization and the resulting division of time and space, corresponding, respectively, to differences in kind and differences in degree, and that, as it has been repeatedly claimed, literally shapes his trajectory as a philosopher. I propose, in what follows, to conjoin Bergson's philosophy of time and space with recent work by new media artists deploying one exemplary concrete techno-social materialization of time (and one supported by the atomic clock), namely GPS satellite technology and the now-ubiquitous mobile PDAs that capitalize on GPS data. What this conjuncture will help illustrate is a new regime of the interrelation of time and space, one in which time and space lose their heterogeneity as they become more and more intensely imbricated with one another. This new interrelation of time and space will, in turn, open up possibilities for revisiting Bergson's work, and specifically, for reassessing the significance and consequences of his efforts, following Time and Free Will, to extend duration beyond consciousness to matter. Looking back at Bergson from today's perspective, we can discern in his philosophy a divergent configuration of time and space from the one he himself institutes through his initial opposition of duration and space in Time and Free Will. According to this configuration, there must be an originary form of space just as there is an originary form of time. This configuration, moreover, perfectly captures the ethos of Bergson's commitment to continuity, since it treats space, as well as time, as fundamentally, ultimately indivisible: the originary form of space is originary precisely because it has duration (just as, correlatively, duration is originary because it is extended, because it is an indivisible act).

As we shall see, this revised configuration of time and space will have important consequences for our effort to conceptualize (and to live) what Bergson calls intuition. Put bluntly, we will have to affirm the composite nature of intuition in any actual experience. Accordingly, we will have to take issue with Gilles Deleuze's conception of intuition as a "rigorous method" of division. Deleuze makes much of the fact that experience, in Bergson's account, always takes the form of a composite, or better, a badly-composed mixture that requires a purification via division. Thus, he says, ". . . a composite must always be divided according to its natural articulations, that is, into elements which differ in kind. Intuition as method is a method of division, Platonic in inspiration. Bergson is aware that things are mixed together in reality: in fact experience itself offers us nothing but composites" (Deleuze 22). The problem, in Deleuze's analysis, is that we think in terms of differences in degree rather than in terms of differences in kind, and intuition, accordingly, is a method for discovering real differences in kind beneath mere differences in degree: "We...