Page 174 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 174
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
son’s discourse. Therefore, Bergson’s text still reminds us that a presumably
scientific explanation of perceptions of images lacks a grasp of complexity.
Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories, and
inversely, a memory, as we shall show later, only becomes actual by
borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips. These two
acts, perception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other,
are always exchanging something of their substance as by a process
of endosmosis (Bergson. 1982: p. 69).2
Saying this, Bergson proceeds towards clearing the concepts of per-
ception and memory through the criticism of psychology. He understood
very well that the narrow scientific approach could not be sufficient for
completing the task, which he envisioned as he tried to disassociate “pure”
memory from “pure” perception. Maybe without being aware about it him-
self Bergson worked in philosophy, and therefore in humanities in gener-
al, towards a parallel result as the brothers Lumiere had ensued in the tech-
nology of film.
The proper office of psychologists would be to dissociate them [per-
ception and recollection], to give back to each its natural purity; in
this way many difficulties raised by psychology, and perhaps also
by metaphysics, might be lessened. But they will have it that these
mixed states, compounded, in unequal proportions, of pure percep-
tion and pure memory, are simple. And so we are condemned to an
ignorance alike of pure memory and of pure perception; to knowing
only a single kind of phenomenon which will be called now memo-
ry and now perception, according to the predominance in it of one
or other of the two aspects; and, consequently, to finding between
perception and memory only a difference in degree and not in kind.
The first effect of this error, as we shall see in detail, is to vitiate pro-
foundly the theory of memory, for if we make recollection merely
a weakened perception we misunderstand the essential difference
between the past and the present, we abandon all hope of under-
standing the phenomena of recognition, and, more generally, the
mechanism of the unconscious (Ibid, 1982: pp. 69 -70).
2 This and other translations of Bergson‘s text are taken from the translation of Mat-
ter and Memory by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer from 1911. Of course,
such classic texts are available on the web.
172
son’s discourse. Therefore, Bergson’s text still reminds us that a presumably
scientific explanation of perceptions of images lacks a grasp of complexity.
Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories, and
inversely, a memory, as we shall show later, only becomes actual by
borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips. These two
acts, perception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other,
are always exchanging something of their substance as by a process
of endosmosis (Bergson. 1982: p. 69).2
Saying this, Bergson proceeds towards clearing the concepts of per-
ception and memory through the criticism of psychology. He understood
very well that the narrow scientific approach could not be sufficient for
completing the task, which he envisioned as he tried to disassociate “pure”
memory from “pure” perception. Maybe without being aware about it him-
self Bergson worked in philosophy, and therefore in humanities in gener-
al, towards a parallel result as the brothers Lumiere had ensued in the tech-
nology of film.
The proper office of psychologists would be to dissociate them [per-
ception and recollection], to give back to each its natural purity; in
this way many difficulties raised by psychology, and perhaps also
by metaphysics, might be lessened. But they will have it that these
mixed states, compounded, in unequal proportions, of pure percep-
tion and pure memory, are simple. And so we are condemned to an
ignorance alike of pure memory and of pure perception; to knowing
only a single kind of phenomenon which will be called now memo-
ry and now perception, according to the predominance in it of one
or other of the two aspects; and, consequently, to finding between
perception and memory only a difference in degree and not in kind.
The first effect of this error, as we shall see in detail, is to vitiate pro-
foundly the theory of memory, for if we make recollection merely
a weakened perception we misunderstand the essential difference
between the past and the present, we abandon all hope of under-
standing the phenomena of recognition, and, more generally, the
mechanism of the unconscious (Ibid, 1982: pp. 69 -70).
2 This and other translations of Bergson‘s text are taken from the translation of Mat-
ter and Memory by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer from 1911. Of course,
such classic texts are available on the web.
172
