Driftwork

The fifteen tree species in my/our arboretum:

Beech
Sweet Chestnut
English Oak
Chilean Pine (Monkey Puzzle)
Hawthorn
Leylandia
Pine (2 varieties)
Evergreen (3 varieties)
Mountain Ash
Common Cherry
Californian Lilac
Holly

A Bibiolography from (1985)

promotion of film making in the community countries EEC Draft report 1971
Britannia rules the waves - L Champion and A Lipman (March 1st 1985 City Limits)
Judgements of the Italian Constitutional Court of 10 July 1974
Eluding Definition Kte Linbker Artforum Dec 1984
Red Notes Italian Archive Red Notes 1982
Marx beyond Marx A Negri - Bergin and Garvey 1984
New Means of Communication on the left - A Matterlart and Piemme -
The Case of Rai - F Iseppi
Media Cultures and Society Academic Press 1980
Though Piracy and Political pressure - R Barbrook - 1984 Draft Essay
A guide to the neo-television of the 1980s - U Eco Framework 25 1984 London
Italy’s first years of private television broadcasting - A Silj Intermedia sept 1981
Community Radio - P Lewis Media Culture and Society 1984
New Developments in Italy’s Communication Policy - D Pini and V Porter 1976
The poer and the arrogance - G Bultrani (L’Espresso
Rednotes Italy 1977=78
Rednotes Dario Fo and F Rame 1979
The Radio phenonmenon in Italy - Stsbourg 1977 - council of europe
After the goldrush - P Rawlikowski Stills March 1985
Free Radio in Italy - Gardner and Grimshaw - Wedges No 1 1978
Italy Autonomia - semiotext(e) 1981 NY

I have some difficulty writing a note on Elizabeth Grosz’s understanding of Bergson. The issue lies in my uncertainty about whether my reading of Bergson’s Creative Evolution isn’t simply to radically different to allow for such a note to make sense. Nor will I go through the way she represents such things as matter, perception, the relations to/with Nietzsche or even duration and past/present… I’m trying after all to convince Eric to read the text not re-write…

The key statement might be thought of as being: “The sciences, especially physics and chemistry, have been remarkably successful in enhancing our access to and control over (the actual) the first of these terms but, as Bergson argues, have been spectacularly unsuccessful in penetrating the mysteries of biological or psychical life or understanding its nonenumerable elements and their integration..” Her argument is built on the difference that this statement maintains.

Grosz understands Bergson very much as a metaphysician, a philosopher. Her interest lies along the lines of Bergson’s interest in the “…natural articulations of life’s evolutionary movement, the particular , historically specific ways in which life divides and complexifies itself according to the different ways that living beings experience the events that provoke and stimulate their existence and profusion…” It is in terms of instinct, intellect and intuition that Bergson states are the resources which life develops “from its own chemical and morphological processes” from which life invents collective and inheritable responses to these events. For Grosz Bergson “proposes a new way of understanding philosophy as the supplement of that which other knowledges cannot know” which marks philosophy as having an affinity with both the arts and sciences but which through its “elaboration of concepts” (shades of Deleuze and Gauttari) elaborates it’s own knowledge, which with Bergson placed firmly as an elucidation of the continuity of time.

Bergson produces a conception of duration as a qualitative difference in kind and explores the differences between the present and the past. The theory of time he produces does not have the past as the overriding factor but rather that tendencies of becoming mark the present and also the future. It is worth noting that Grosz presents Bergson’s interest in Darwin as an interest in the ontological roots of the evolutionary project and not as an ethical or evaluative project. Bergson presents evolution as a process of development, change and which demonstrates the irreversibility of time, (hence the irreversibility of evolution) the future is based on the past but it “inevitably surpasses it” involving innovation, emergence and the creation of the new and the unforeseen, “becoming” in short, but which takes into account life’s conceptual and epistemological limits. Grosz primarily understands Bergson through his metaphysics which contains a discernment of differences in nature, differences in kind which are immeasurable and cannot be thought of in mathematical terms. The other type of difference being the quantitative differences, differences of degree which are measurable and require a third term to mark the difference between entities or events, typically numerical measurement. Differences in kind however are heterogeneous, they lack clear boundaries and are not comparable. In nature the difference between animals is always a difference in kind as the differences between entities cannot be measured. Any attempt to do so fails because of the necessary introduction of a third measuring term. (Such a measuring term will always fail because of its historicism, it’s lack of becoming). What is presented is differences in degree between categories of subject (humans and non-humans) and qualitative differences which marks differences-to-come, becoming rather than differences that exist in the past or present. (pause)

Consequently then the impact of this on an understanding of the evolutionary process is that “difference is neither oppositional nor complementary, differences are understood as occupying different conceptual landscapes, qualitatively different, and thus incapable of being specified in advance or compared to one another…” Grosz uses the simplest and supposedly least difficult versions of this – sexual difference and racial difference which she adopts as politically radical terms. {do i need to add that this collapses at the moment you view the differences through the third term of the politics she introduces… such a politics is not necessarily radical in it’s simplest terms let me merely say Thatcher, Rice and Powell.} However where she does not introduce the third term and maintains that such differences – sexual difference, racial difference and species difference – and states that “ difference cannot be understood productively except in terms of internal (qualitative) difference” for they are not comparable as two or more known and measured categories or groups. Then the becoming is the critical concept as in - what a species can become cannot be known. This becoming is presented The present is the actuality that is “engendered by the virtual past…” so that the future is that dimension which obviously does not have any actuality either, the future, that which is yet-to-come is also virtual. A virtuality which is not contained by the past and which is the openness of becoming that enables the divergence from what currently exists.

The neo-Darwinist positions (obviously containing the work of Weismann/Dawkins/Dennett) present ontogeny as the combined result of genetic mutation and natural selection, a mechanical process that could in theory at least, be predicted. And which in it’s determinism can be seen to have direction, functionality and works within known and knowable constraints, and which theoretically can be predicted and further can theoretically completely dispense with the biological if another post-genetic reproductive mechanism could be found, whether it is biological or mechanical. Grosz presents Bergson as opposing this reductive account by arguing “… that if evolutionary change is broken down into units, parts or elements what is fundamentally changing about evolution, its mobility and dynamism is lost…” Grosz returns to her difference with the neo-Darwinists(represented in the main by Dennett) through the direct representing of Bergson as critiquing the algorithmic nature of neo-Darwinist accounts through Bergson’s understanding of evolution as being continuous. What is being engaged in by Bergson is a refusal of the reduction of life to states, to the genetic because it implies that temporal processes which are always continuous and are not understandable in terms of discreet determinable states, temporal processes are ignored. Bergson says of Weismann “…. from this point of view, life is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism. It is as if the organism were only an excrescence, a bud caused to sprout by the former germ endeavoring to to continue itself in the new germ…” (Grosz usefully discusses Bergsons detailed discussion of evolutionary convergence) The key point which Grosz emphasizes is that change is not random, for most if not all random variation is harmful to the organism rather than productive for it. Only changes which can be adequately absorbed by the organism to facilitate its functioning constitute evolutionary development and only those that constitute a productive enhancement of the body can be considered as successful variations – this proposition is increasingly being supported by genetic evidence. An change must be assimilated into the already existing and be coherent with it if it is function as an improvement. The accumulation of random characteristics does not contribute to the organism unless characteristics are capable of being integrated into the functioning of the organism as a whole. Hence the necessity of refusing reductive scientific accounts of being (genetics etc) as a means of constructing social and political perspectives.

Enough I think – this has become so long that it’s probably unreadable (sigh)… if i was constructing this as a Lyotardian differend (which I really should have) rather than extracting interesting moments from Grosz’s text The Nick of Time I would have more successfully drawn out the differend between a conservative reductive account of evolution as proposed by Dennett and Dawkins (which fundamentally must end with the depressing inevitability of mass extinction and extermination camps) – and a more radical account based on becoming and difference and unpredictable futures. There is a wonderful moment in an early Brin novel where scientists have altered the genetic structures of Dolphins and Chimpanzees and remade them as ‘tool using sapients’ - there really is nothing reductive about the delightful thought of extrapolating that instead of the Pig-organ-producing-machine being discarded as an unnecessary technological medical blind alley supplanted by stem cell research, George the pig will be able to discuss why Spinoza’s ethics is just humanist rubbish… lovely…

Nick said “most successful collective project we’ve created” and after a little extra thought, surely this is hyperbole of the same nature as the statement that the human brain is a very complex organism, more complex than a rabbits. And surely given that the scientific-industrial revolution has now brought us close to absolute disaster, examples such as climate change, nuclear warfare, liberal economics, the ongoing mass-extinction spring to mind but also here are some counter claims…

For example - the first industrial revolution - neolithic farming. The invention of the state. The invention of writing and later of printing…

For scientists this is what constitutes proof of planning ahead. No wonder we are in such trouble.

Love the Chimp…. though.