The Pregnant Moment and Algorithms: for an Aesthetics of Access to Online Information
p. 174-186
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1In describing the mechanisms of memory in the third chapter of Matter and Memory,1 “Of the Survival of Images,” Bergson presents readers with an architecture of memory that has, despite its originality, perhaps been overlooked. This architecture is rooted in the famous Bergsonian concept of duration, which is radically distinct from space. As we will see, this distinction between time and space is crucial, especially in addressing problems of an aesthetical nature. Moreover, it is based on his concept of duration that Bergson constructs an aesthetics,2 disseminated throughout his work, that is radically independent from existing philosophies of art, which had until then been mainly focused on the question of the beautiful.
2 Bergson’s concept of duration refers to a particular experience of consciousness during which the latter undergoes a series of qualitative changes that combine with one another, that interpenetrate, and that remain independent from space, with no tendency to mutual exteriorization and no relation to number. Duration is a pure heterogeneity whose constitutive instants fuse while retaining their respective qualities, whereas space is a homogeneous extensity whose parts cannot interpenetrate. If we bring this analysis up to date, cyberspace - as the name suggests - extends and amplifies, but still remains a space in Bergson’s sense of the term. Given the eminently temporal nature of his aesthetics, it is by turning to time that an aesthetics of access to online information becomes possible.
3Although duration does not explicitly come up in Bergson’s architecture of memory, it serves as its theoretical backdrop, its origin, and its source of ultimate meaning. The presentation of this architecture is simple: an upside-down cone in a plane, illustrating the mechanism of memories in a healthy subject. But, as always with Bergson, we start from what is simple to better work our way up to complexity. Here are some of the questions that the memory cone addresses and makes sense of: how is the past, which by definition has ceased to be, stored in memory? Does our memory retain all the information, events, and phenomena we have experienced, including the most trivial? Why is it necessary to forget? How and why do recollections we thought forever forgotten resurface in our consciousness? When do these hidden recollections return to our memory?
4 Finally, how can Bergson’s philosophy, so valuable and precise in dealing with time, fruitfully contribute to constructing an aesthetics of access to online information?
Architecture and mechanisms of the memory cone

SAB: totality of the recollections accumulated in my memory
AB: motionless base of my past (first childhood recollection)
S: this point indicates at all times my present, moves forward unceasingly, and continually touches P (my present)
P: the space in which I move, the plane of my current representation of the universe composed of images
A’ B’, A’’ B’’: memory-images of my past fixed in my memory, hidden images.
5In Matter and Memory, the precise description of memory’s mechanism begins in a section called “Of the unconscious.” It should be recalled that Bergson published his book in 1896, such that what he calls the unconscious is unrelated to the concept Freud was himself developing in Vienna while inventing psychoanalysis. For Bergson, the unconscious simply refers to an image we are unaware of in the present moment although it continues to exist, potentially, in our memory. Bergson’s unconscious comprises an incalculable number of memory-images of our past, each one liable to arise in our consciousness according to the circumstances that it is experiencing. The notion of the unconscious image allows Bergson to denounce an illusion, or what he calls a false problem:
But we are so much accustomed to reverse, for the sake of action, the real order of things, we are so strongly obsessed by images drawn from space, that we cannot hinder ourselves from asking where memories are stored up.3
6The false problem is located precisely in this “where,” because this relative pronoun refers to a place, a space, compelling us to envision the issue of the storage of recollections in terms of a container (the brain) and a content (the recollections). Yet this container is not only a body, it cannot be expanded at will, like Google or Yahoo’s storage centers. The value of Bergson’s approach is that it emancipates us from this flawed image of the brain and breaks us of a certain intellectual laziness. Against our usual way of thinking, the memory cone offers us a new conception of the brain, one that may be harder to fathom but that is much closer to reality. The brain should no longer be viewed as a spatial container but rather as the organ of our “attention to life,” a dynamic organ ceaselessly sorting out the information it receives, selecting it according to the present moment that we are experiencing. Bergson does not conceive this present as that which is: “the present is simply what is being made.”4 For consciousness, the concrete and actually experienced present largely consists of the immediate past as consciousness immediately turns to the near future, one in which there is an action to carry out:
Practically, we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future. Consciousness, then, illumines, at each moment of time, that immediate part of the past which, impending over the future, seeks to realize and to associate with it […]. It is in this illuminated part of our history that we remain seated, in virtue of the fundamental law of life, which is a law of action: hence the difficulty we experience in conceiving memories which are preserved in the shadow.5
7Our perception of space thus consists in a movement not only within external space but also within ourselves, the mechanical movement that traverses our immediate past, our present, and our near future. Hence, just as the present is not, the past has not ceased to be but rather has ceased to be useful for the practical action to come. This is the reason why we only remember fragments, still useful recollections, from our past; the rest of the past remains obscure to our consciousness, we forget the memories that are no longer useful to us. As we shall see with the memory cone, however, forgetting a memory does not mean it has disappeared or been reduced to nothing. It is merely hidden,
[…] inhibited by the necessities of present action, it will find strength to cross the threshold of consciousness in all cases where we renounce the interests of effective action to replace ourselves, so to speak, in the life of dreams.6
8The life of dreams refers to certain phases of our sleep as well as to moments when we are awake and freed from the necessity of useful action or thought: states in which the mind wanders, but also when we are tired by all the attention useful actions require and when our sensorimotor system is disrupted, says Bergson. In these moments of dream, a memory-image from my past can appear in my consciousness, by “falling” off the cone. The moment of its fall is a special and rare moment in comparison to the amount of mechanical movements and thoughts we accomplish out of habit. A moment of pure heterogeneity during which a useless and remote image from a past we thought forgotten fuses with the present and the future. It is a pregnant moment, as defined by Lessing in his Laocoon when he analyzes the resources of the pictorial image:
Painting, in its coexistent compositions, can use but a single moment of an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow.7
9For Lessing, painting is the spatial art par excellence, but it nevertheless maintains a relationship with time since it is capable of representing a pregnant moment, a moment discernable within a space (such as a painting, an image, or a screen) by an attentive viewer. If the viewer only focuses on the spatial dimension of the picture that he is looking at, he runs the risk of missing the perception of the pregnant moment before him. There are many pictorial examples of pregnant moments, of which I will give just one, painted by Paul Bril, a Flemish painter living in Rome. In his 1600 painting Venus and Adonis,8 the two lovers are represented in an expressive embrace indicating to the viewer the emergence of a pregnant moment.
10When the pregnant moment affects our consciousness, a bridge is formed between our two types of memory. In order to understand this connection, we will have to present the two forms of memory at work in Bergson’s cone. First, there is habit memory, which we use every day in every useful and practical action we carry out. This memory is necessary in order to adapt and react, and even to anticipate our most alert actions, but when we use it, we do so unknowingly. Habit memory allows us to perform the complete set of intelligently constructed mechanisms which ensure the appropriate reply to the various possible demands coming from our immediate reality. Whenever we accomplish a useful action, it (re) enacts our past experience without conjuring up its original image. All of our daily actions depend on this memory: whether we are clicking a mouse or swiping our finger on a touchscreen, we are accomplishing the most mechanical of actions without thinking about what we are doing.
11Second, there is memory par excellence, or true memory, which retains our past states in the form of images and ranges them alongside of each other in the order in which they occur (example A’ B’ - A’’ B’’). Each fact from our past, with all its details, occupies the place in this cone determined by the date it occurred. This memory moves through this definitive past, but in a plastic and elastic way, whereas habit memory moves through an ever renewed present.
12What connects these two memories is our body, and more specifically our brain. What is this body, and what is its function? According to Bergson, it is
that part of our representation which is ever being born again, the part always present […]. Itself an image, the body cannot store up images, since it forms a part of the images, and this is why it is a chimerical enterprise to seek to localize past or even present perceptions in the brain: they are not in it; it is the brain that is in them.9
13Let’s face it: our body is mainly an image that always exists in the midst of other images. But two types must be distinguished:
- What we perceive of the space in which we move indicates to our body that it must accomplish a useful and practical action, so that we only use mechanical images constructed by our intelligence to act (without resorting to memory-images).
- When our sensorimotor system is disrupted or tired, perception turns into sensation, with all the instability entailed, and can then take on the most varied nuances. It is precisely the nuance it takes on which defines which memory-image from our past will move down from our memory cone to take place in point S. The connection between our sensation and the memory-image is then affective and made up of affects and percepts:
[…] between the sensorimotor mechanisms figured by the point S and the totality of the memories disposed in AB there is room […] for a thousand repetitions of our psychical life, figured by as many sections A’ B’, A’’ B’’, etc., of the same cone. We tend to scatter ourselves over AB in the measure that we detach ourselves from our sensory and motor state to live in the life of dreams.10
14The memory cone resembles in and of itself a full-fledged search engine working away in our minds but a qualitative one running on affection, an engine sensitive to time, to the pregnant moment. The only problem is that we never know at which exact moment the engine will launch into gear to trigger within us a state of dreams, a state that is a pure temporal experience of duration. The only clue we have is not to miss the pregnant moment when our perception stops being the driving force behind a useful action and turns into an affective sensation. In this context, an aesthetics of access to online information becomes possible the moment that we, launching a search on our screen, remain on the lookout for a pregnant moment that might arise in our consciousness at any time. Allowing this pregnant moment to surface within us begins by our being wary of habit memory, which pushes and coerces us to keep on clicking. Instead, we must stay attuned to the possibility that a memory-image - a pregnant image for meditation or for knowledge - may surface from our cone.
FOR AN AESTHETICS OF ACCESS TO INFORMATION
What we should in fact do, is stop allowing philosophers to reflect “on” things. The philosopher creates, he doesn’t reflect. I’m criticized for going back to Bergson’s analyses. Actually, to distinguish as Bergson did between perception, affection, and action as three kinds of motion is a very novel approach. It remains novel because I don’t think it’s ever been quite absorbed; it’s one of the most difficult, and finest, bits of Bergson’s thought. But this analysis applies automatically to cinema: cinema was invented while Bergson’s thought was taking shape. Motion was brought into concepts at precisely the same time it was brought into images. Bergson presents one of the first cases of self-moving thought. Because it’s not enough simply to say concepts possess movement; you also have to construct intellectually mobile concepts.11
- Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers -
15If we follow Deleuze’s advice, a new concept must be created in order to develop an aesthetics of access to digital information, in order to construct or update a concept capable of grasping this new movement, that of the searcher’s intellectual act as he explores online, a movement achieved by intelligent engines that begins in one space (a screen) and crosses into others (into clouds). But this poses an immediate problem: the journeys that search engines propose in order to retrieve information are easy. This facility was made possible for the sake of utility. Nowadays, it has become a necessity: all of us demand that the information on our connected computers potentially be always already at hand. And yet this facility puts us at risk of missing a fundamental piece of qualitative information, which appears within a spatial series in which information runs continually from one screen to the next. How can we resist this facility, which has become both an intellectual and gestural habit? How do we know that a piece of information is essential to us when it may only be implicit, diluted, and drowned in a series?
16But what is a piece of information? In itself, it is meaningless; it is not a piece of knowledge but merely one element transmitted by a signal. It is also a unit of measurement indicating the density of information contained in a message. We thus speak of quantities of information. This quantity can generate quality, but the quality of the information can be drowned in the quantity of data. And yet it is up to us to find the qualitative information, that which serves as a sign and bears meaning, sometimes unexpectedly and unbeknownst to us. It may even be that we do not know beforehand the nature or content of the information sought. We might even, on rare occasions, find what we were not looking for. Walpole calls this phenomenon “serendipity,” referring to the act of searching for something in particular and finding something else accidentally, fortuitously, such that the thing that we find is one we were not looking for at all.
17How can we avoid getting lost in a continuous stream of information passing on a screen? How can we avoid losing ourselves in this journey as we surf through cyberspace? How can we know, how can we sense that we are grasping, in the moment, the relevant and unexpected information? According to Bergson, the mistake would be to view this journey as a leap from one space to the next in order to reach an ultimate space, the final place, where the search is assumed to end. And when do we know for sure that a search has reached its end? If there is a concept that defines the searcher’s openness to this information as he uses a search engine, it must be of a temporal rather than spatial nature. In L’Inséparé, Dominique Quessada offers the following insight:
Internet and the seamless communication links that it creates make globalization all the more tangible […]. Our future is falling into line with a system that negates the temporal dimension and conceives everything within a purely spatial framework.12
18The difficulty of reflecting on the internet and new media from a temporal perspective runs through all of Lev Manovich’s research. Yet he perfectly addresses and frames the issue at hand:
By the end of the twentieth century, the problem was no longer how to create a new media object such as an image; the new problem was how to find an object that already exists somewhere. If you want a particular image, chances are it already exists […].13
19When Manovich arrives at what he calls the poetics of navigation, he addresses it only in terms of space:
While art history, geography, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines have come up with many approaches to analyze space as a static, objectively existing structure, we do not have the same wealth of concepts to help us think about the poetics of navigation through space.14
20In his search for these new concepts, the paradigm Manovich uses is based on an eminently spatial art: “One obvious candidate is modern architecture.”15 But this “obviousness” could only lead to an aporia: try as he might to find the foundation on which to forge these new concepts, he fails to find them, having limited his analyses to a reflection in terms of space. Even when Manovich turns to Ilya Kabakov’s installations, in which the artist uses methods borrowed from the theater and cinema, Manovich only focuses on their strategy of staging “particular kinds of narratives that in and of themselves lead to spatialization.”16 Clearly, time conceived as a pure succession is conspicuously absent from The Language of New Media.
21This absence can perhaps be explained by the fact that Manovich fails to analyze the specific nature of the space created by the internet. In fact, all information and potential knowledge can be found in the paradoxical place that is cyberspace. But this place, as Anne Cauquelin argues, is incorporeal (a concept she borrows from the Stoics), a virtual incorporeal which only exists in a “space without a place” and in “an abolished time.”17 This abolished time is that of social time, an adulterated time conveniently endowed with the features of space. Yet this incorporeal does not abolish all temporality. Instead, cyberspace possesses a specific temporality that is revealed by avoiding, suspending, the space and time that we commonly perceive. How might we grasp the specific temporality of this space without a place? How might we enter it?
22Whereas the memory cone fulfills its function for consciousness within the latter’s interiority, it seems that it can function only in front of a screen or search engine. There is a certain laziness and an intellectual or even social risk involved in expecting algorithmic combinations to satisfy our every need and want. A search engine does not solve anything on its own; it is purely mechanical. In front of our screens, time is not accelerated18 but rather the speed of the successive images - this speed is not time, it merely measures the velocity from one image to the next.19 Which fundamentally temporal concept could help us find the qualitative information that we were perhaps not expecting at the beginning of our journey in cyberspace? A partial response can be found in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse:
Mrs. Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? […] This is knowledge? Aren’t things spoilt then […] by saying them? Aren’t we more expressive thus? The moment at least seemed extraordinarily fertile. She rammed a little hole in the sand and covered it up, by way of burying in it the perfection of the moment. It was like a drop of silver in which one dipped and illumined the darkness of the past.20
23Woolf tells us that grasping a qualitative piece of knowledge can only occur when our consciousness is submerged in a pregnant moment. A journey in cyberspace is thus not a mere transposition in space from one point to another. It can also be a temporal experience that leads to the experience of a personal duration. The click is an act accomplished by way of habit memory, the succession of clicks is a leap from one space to another, and in these leaps any and all temporal dimension is negated. Such is the risk: to forget time, the time that passes but most important the time that shapes and nurtures us, a time that cannot be grasped through a strict chronology of its constitutive moments.
24The pregnant moment may well be the concept that designates the moment when an image from our past affects us and moves back down the cone. An affective image provoked by a piece of information, by a page, by an image or a detail on a screen - every time a quantitative piece of information (a spatial image in a series) is transformed, unbeknownst to us, into a qualitative one (the pregnant moment that affects our memory and produces a duration within us). We must be attentive and listen to our intuitions, and above all not let ourselves be drawn in, hypnotized, by a series of clicks. During a pregnant moment, we may find the qualitative information that we were not expecting. For the important thing is not always the information we sought from the start. There can be an element of unpredictability and unexpectedness in the journey proposed by a search engine and the pregnant moment is the sign within ourselves that our own memory (the affective images of the cone) has intervened in that journey, that it has become our own search engine leading us toward the qualitative and unpredictable information we unknowingly sought.
25The idea that our brain, independent of consciousness, is working in the manner of an (affective) search engine is already virtually present in Bergson’s memory cone. Although it may seem surprising, the same idea also features in Anne Cauquelin’s Les Machines dans la tête, in which the philosopher defends the “the possibility of mental activity without consciousness, a sort of internal mechanics within the brain accomplishing considerable work without our knowing it.”21 The author is aware that the idea is paradoxical, going against what she calls the technological doxa that dominates our IT-saturated societies.
26This doxa
[…] presents itself, under the name communications, as a “big machine,” which runs all by itself, automatically, without realizing the nature of what drives it. The machine functions thanks to a very sophisticated, attentive technological device whose purpose is not the quality of the transmitted content but the transmission itself. The transmitted data, whatever they may be, are treated as quantities, more or less heavy bundles of information. Transmission performance? So-called “real-time” speed verging on simultaneity, multi-directionality and multi-linkages, nearly unlimited storage and accessibility – these are the features of communications, at once accepted, sought out, and constantly enhanced.22
27But Anne Cauquelin stresses that within the “big machine” of “communications,” glitches, “noise,” or deficiencies appear. From the standpoint of the technological doxa, these accidents are failures; but if an accident or a “noise” is caused by the search engine that is our affective memory, then the accident becomes a success, because it gives rise to a pregnant moment unbeknownst to our practical consciousness. It is an unexpected and qualitative success unpredicted by our computers’ quantitative algorithms.
28If there is an art of access to online information, then this art is not spatial but temporal. The “big machine” of communications has unknowingly accomplished what Anne Cauquelin calls “the reversal of time”:
For the communications machine, the question of memories lies front and center, because the main focus of communications is time and because one can reasonably say that the new communications technologies have radically altered the perception and general representation of time. What I mean by reversal is not a return […]. It is a way of thinking about the temporal chain that breaks with the classical succession of moments of time and disrupts its order.23
29I believe that the pregnant moment specifically disrupts the temporal chain to which we are accustomed. The pregnant moment is the accident that breaks the classical succession of moments; it is in this break that the internal search engine activating our affective memory intervenes in the “big machine” of communications. In this way, the pregnant moment may be the concept needed to construct an aesthetics of access to information, an aesthetics that accepts the unexpected and opens our consciousness to the unpredictable by letting qualitative information surface from our past.
Notes de bas de page
1 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 133-177.
2 For more on this topic, see Pierre J. Truchot, “Pour une esthétique bergsonienne,” Philosophies 82 (2004): 36-58.
3 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, op. cit., 148.
4 Ibid., 149-150.
5 Ibid., 150.
6 Ibid., 154.
7 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Ellen Frothingham (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1910), 92.
8 On the history and analysis of this painting, see Pierre J. Truchot, Paul Bril, deux éternités (Angoulême, France: Marguerite Waknine, 2011).
9 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, op. cit. 151.
10 Ibid., 162.
11 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 122.
12 Dominique Quessada, L’inséparé. Essai sur monde sans Autre (Paris: PUF, 2013), 15.
13 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 35.
14 Ibid., 259.
15 Ibid., 264.
16 Ibid., 267.
17 Anne Cauquelin, Fréquenter les incorporels: contribution à une théorie de l’art contemporain (Paris: PUF, 2006), 121.
18 This is Hartmut Rosa’s argument in Alienation and Acceleration (Malmö: NSU Press, 2010).
19 This analysis, too rapidly sketched here, is based on Bergson’s concepts.
20 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 198-199.
21 Anne Cauquelin, Les Machines dans la tête (Paris: PUF, 2015), 9.
22 Ibid., 83-84.
23 Ibid., 203.
Auteur
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Pierre J. Truchot
Born in 1963 in the French region of the Morvan. He has a PhD in philosophy from Université Paris 1 and is a researcher in the FoRell research lab “Poétiques de la representation” at the Université de Poitiers. His dissertation provided a history of Western painting through the lens of movement and time. He is the author of numerous articles on Bergson’s thought and aesthetics, on the relationship between texts and images, and on 18th-century philosophy of art. He also writes on contemporary art in collaboration with artists such as Bruno Serralongue, Julien Berthier, and Vincent Ganivet. Other of his publications examine “serious games” and “art games.” He is the author of two books published by Marguerite Waknine, Le Théorème de Staël and Paul Bril, deux éternités. He was the recipient of a CNL grant in 2014 and has just published with L’Harmattan a book entitled L’Art (d’être) idiot. He currently lives in Angoulême and teaches philosophy.
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