If Bergson can provide a method for theorizing time and the cinematic nature of consciousness that advances philosophy and cultural understanding nearly a century afterward, surely there is not only a Supramental Time Vision but also a Cinematic Vision of Sri Aurobindo yet to be revealed…
This article which pulls from a preceding article on the “Meditations on the Second Movement of the Isha Upanishad” by Debashish, one on Bergson, Deleuze, and Cinema called “Thought Images and Acts of Creation” by Herzog as well as a recent translation of the first chapters of the latest volume of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time entitled: “Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise”, its theorizing begins by riffing on juxtaposed excerpts:
“A total view of the three times as one movement, singly and indivisibly seen, even in their succession of stages, periods, cycles, and that only in the instrumental consciousness, in the step by step evolution of the moments”….. Sri Aurobindo,
“Intuition is not duration itself. Intuition is rather the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm and immediately to recognize the existence of other durations, above or below us…..”Deleuze “Bergsonism”
“The Real-Idea as consciousness, that which always already knows the trajectory of past, present and future in a one-flash unit of Time, becomes the source of the memory which intuitive discrimination receives. This may come through the presence of the Lord hidden in the heart, the psychic being or through a “thought” received in the higher ranges of the mind. In either case, one of its distinguishing characteristics is the quality of memory, of something already known which is re-membered.” …. Sri Aurobindo
“As Bergson says, “The conscious present is the contraction of the entire past” “the present” for consciousness is memory and because time , which is primary retention, consists of selection via secondary retention that is the cinema in/of accelerated life, I see, I remember everything that has been repressed/archived: images, sounds, smells, touches, contacts, caresses; ” …. Stiegler Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise
“When a present, accompanied by a past, has past away it becomes a past event for any future present. All those past events accompany a new present because they constitute what that present passes away into. When the present passes away in relation to any present that went before it because the past that accompanied those former presents also accompanies later ones (He picked up the relic and suddenly felt old..) This means that all of the past coexists with the new presents in relation to which it is now past. We do not pass away with other present moments but with the passing away of all of them because the presents can never accompany us-only their passing away can” … Deleuze “Difference and Repetition”
AL: What Deleuze is getting at with his theorizing of cinematic experience is an “image of thought”, (That from an Aurobindian perspective may perhaps be seen as a bridge from higher to illuminated mind and beyond)
“The provocation, then, for both the filmmaker and the film theorist, is one posed by philosophy. The challenge is to see film not as a means of representation, but as an assemblage of images in flux with the world of images, to see the history of film and the history of philosophy as convergent. The art of living remains the becoming of true creation, but the image of thought introduces the stutters and hesitations that give us access to this movement. “It’s the image of thought that guides the creation of concepts. It cries out, so to speak, whereas concepts are like songs….” Deleuze in Herzog “Images of Thought and Acts of Creation:
AL: It is through an “image of thought” Deleuze’s Bergson articulates duration as both “time-image” and “movement -image” streaming through the flux of cinematic consciousness, and lest we forget that along with an experience of the three times is a corresponding movement of eternal return:
“It is because in Time the Many seem not to be eternal but to manifest out of the One and return into it as their essence that their reality is denied; but it might equally be reasoned that the eternal persistence or, if you will, the eternal recurrence of the manifestation in Time is a proof that the divine multiplicity is an eternal fact of the Supreme beyond Time no less than the divine unity; otherwise it could not have this characteristic of inevitable eternal recurrence in Time.”…. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine
“D.N. Rodowick notes that the “image of thought” is not a representational image (i.e. the concept is not contained within a concrete, physical image). Rather, the image of thought is a movement, a process of continual differentiation. While this movement, in terms of film, takes its roots in what Deleuze calls the movement-image, Rodowick notes that an image of thought, for Deleuze, only becomes an active force when it takes a step further: “But in order to claim for philosophy what is its activity by right, the philosopher must invoke the more fundamental ‘movement’ of the impersonal form of time and eternal recurrence.” This is what leads to the distinction between the movement-image and the time-image: a qualitative difference, where what is seen, what is conveyed becomes less significant than what is not revealed, what is unknown.”… Deleuze in Herzog “Images of Thought and Acts of Creation”
AL: If you have ever seen the film Intervista you would be touched by the image of thought, by times affective dimension unfolding in the following scene. After being immersed in Fellinesque imagery for most of the film one finally finds oneself in an aging Anita Ekberg’s living room:
“In the film Fellini appears in a scene with Marcello Mastroianni, with whom he pays a visit to Anita Ekberg. In the course of the evening the three of them watch the Trevi Fountain scene of Mastroianni and Ekberg from La Dolce Vita. Thus is Intervista we see an actress watching herself playing a character, and the scenes extreme tension results from the undecidibility ; Anita is appearing in a film by Fellini, but she is playing watching herself portraying a different character thirty years earlier, and no viewer of the second film, Intervista could escape being certain that as she watches the film –watches her past life, her past youth- Anita cannot simply play herself watching herself without knowing that this is a Quintessential performance, the most serious one of all, the first and last engagement, the play of all plays; no one looking at herself again, from thirty years later, having aged those thirty years, and could not feel the terrible reality of time passing the photographic “that has been” through the conjunction of reality of the past, the silvery co-incidence re-animated by cinema’s temporal flux. We see an actress playing an actress watching an actress play a real character in a fictional film, but we know she is playing herself having been, that what she is doing is no longer a simple portrayal, a pure performance any actor might be required to give, but the absolutely tragic staging of her own existence, in so far as that existence is passing by irremediably and forever- forever except for what concerns this silvery image she has left on film; an image in which she has been preserved”… Stiegler Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise,
AL: But before we can engage with any questions of the coincidence of intuitive mind and/or a supramental time vision with a cinematics of consciousness a critical question must be posed regards the yogic sadhana and the Vedantic genealogy of its epistemology and method..
“These three poises of Purusha will be given names in the Bhagavad Gita as the Kshara Purusha, the Akshara Purusha and the Purushottama. The Kshara Purusha is the Person at the heart of things, the divine spark in the secret cave of all beings which mutates, changes, evolves. It changes because it is immersed in Nature, Prakriti, and through that immersion it gathers the properties of Prakriti to itself from life to life, forming a soul personality.
That soul personality, to the extent that it manages to identify with Prakriti and at the same time know itself to be free of Prakriti, because as was discussed earlier, this receives no stain of action, is entirely free within us, — to that extent it evolves in its power over Prakriti. It becomes master and lord of Prakriti in us”… D. Banerji
AL: From the perspective of the phenomenological experience of Kshara Purusha, identified with the movements of nature/culture, as a subject constructing a world, how does it begin a practice which brings it back to the unmediated realities of Akshara Purusha or Purushottama under the following conditions of our evolving cultural understanding:
“Unmediated experience signals a danger that is worse , if anything can be, than naïve realism; its polar opposite, naïve subjectivism. Earlier phenomenological investigations into the sensing body were left behind because they were difficult to reconcile with the new understanding of structuring capacities of culture and the inseparability both from the exercise of power and the glimmers of counterpower that mediate living. It was all about a subject without subjectivism. A subject constructed by external mechanism.”… Brain Massumi “Virtual Parables”
AL: Under the conditions described above the Kshara’s first task would seem to be one of deconstruction, no?
3 Comments
1. Nice hermeneutic reflections on the second movement of the IU as seen by SA braided with Bergson, Deleuze and Steigler and mediated by Herzog, Rodowick and Massumi.
2. Flattering though it is to have one’s words mistaken for SA’s, he needs to be divested of the responsibility for quote no. 2:
“The Real-Idea as consciousness, that which always already knows the trajectory of past, present and future in a one-flash unit of Time, becomes the source of the memory which intuitive discrimination receives. This may come through the presence of the Lord hidden in the heart, the psychic being or through a “thought” received in the higher ranges of the mind. In either case, one of its distinguishing characteristics is the quality of memory, of something already known which is re-membered.”
3. The relation between Bergson and SA in the matter of intuition, duration and the cinematic has been lately in my mind wrt the Vijnana Chatusthaya. Here is a passage from my essay on the subject, which includes another quote from SA. Delueze’s essay Bergsonism (particularly the chapter Duration as Immediate Datum) can provide potent passages to juxtapose with this:
In thinking about the experience of Time, Henri Bergson has noted that indeed all the past is present in every present object. This continuing presence and continuous passage of Time is what he calls duration. Gilles Deleuze points to this in his discussion of Bergson’s methodical use of intuition. It is due to the continuing duration of Time that one can intuit, that is, directly apprehend the past and the future in the present, for the sum total of developing realities in the present comprise the virtual space of the future. It is the extension of this intuition that Sri Aurobindo seeks, a conscious identity with the body of Time. The Bergsonian intuition of Deleuze bears comparison in its extended possibility in this quote from Sri Aurobindo:
“If we could be aware of all the present, all the action of physical, vital, mental energies at work in the moment, it is conceivable that we would be able to see their past too involved in them and their latent future or at least to proceed from present to past and future knowledge. And under certain conditions this might create a sense of real and ever present time continuity, a living in the behind and the front as well as the immediate, and a step farther might carry us into an ever present sense of our existence in infinite time and in our timeless self, and its manifestation in eternal time might then become real to us and also we might feel the timeless Self behind the worlds and the reality of his eternal world manifestation. In any case the possibility of another kind of time consciousness than we have at present and of a triple time knowledge rests upon the possibility of developing another consciousness than that proper to the physical mind and sense and breaking our imprisonment in the moment and in the mind of ignorance with its limitation to sensation, memory, inference and conjecture. ” (Sri Aurobindo, Synthesis of Yoga, CWSA, 890).
4. Wrt your final point on the kshara pusurha and deconstruction, Massumi’s brilliant perception of a “subject without subjectivism” constucted by external mechanism is powerful indeed. Kshara purusha has unborn reserves which give it access to an autonomy beyond construction. But unless related to the constructed subject, such autonomy is also “naive” as per Massumi, the obverse of a “naive realism.” For mastery of the kshara over nature and not merely freedom in a transcendence as with the akshara, it must find allies within nature. The Gita sees the purified buddhi as such an ally. The purified buddhi through which the intuitions of the kshara purusha may illuminate phenomena must engage with the constructed subject, liberating it. This process is otherwise and in our discursively determined times, better known as deconstruction.
DB
DB: Kshara purusha has unborn reserves which give it access to an autonomy beyond construction. But unless related to the constructed subject, such autonomy is also “naive” as per Massumi, the obverse of a “naive realism.”
AL: The point here I think is that for many the attraction to sadhana or spiritual disciplines has to do with its “escape value”, the promise of easy transcendence. Yoga offers a way out of ones embeddedness in family, culture, nationality, education, economy ethnicity, religion. Naively taken, it is as if one could gain access to an autonomous consciousness through knowledge by identity, by forgetting ones own difference.
But the formidable problem with access to transcendental signifieds aside, (and I am not sure what differences in access there maybe between an Upanishadic age versus a Post Modern one in this regard; in that, was the former one “when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being” while the later one in which “there are others when it retires and men are left to act in the strength or the weakness of their own egoism?”) but, the promise of easy escape from ones own socially constructed identity into some transcendent autonomous consciousness seems to me -especially in light of recent events- remote.
Instance an entire community whose aspiration is for identity with an autonomous consciousness that they all call Supermind, have proven themselves to have irreconcilable differences with respect to their view of its founders of the community, -that involve lawsuits and malicious attempts to revoke visas- make any suggestion of collective yoga let alone access to non-constructed transcendent states far-fetched!
Moreover, in the Integral Yoga community how many claim higher authority because of the long beards they wear, or the wealth they have which grants them access to privileged boards, or because they are politicians, or are called doctor? Here ones socially constructed identity, rooted in difference, seems to take priority to any self-same identity within an autonomous transcendent consciousness.
Regards the deconstructive capacity of buddhi, Sri Aurobindo distinguishes several aspects of buddhi. In one instance he makes a division between the the supramental reason or vijnana buddhi, that is of the nature of a spiritual, direct, self-luminous, self-acting will and intelligence, that he distinguishes from the mental or manasa buddhi, which has its own graduations. aka higher/lower
Experience shows that any utterance now of vijnana buddhi is still premature because we have not even developed or employed the deconstructive function of the mental buddhi and therefore, we are all still puffed up with our certainties.
The paragraph below shows that Sri Aurobindo was extremely well aware of the use value of the mental buddhi’s deconstructive function as a solvent for our reliable certitudes:
“The memory and judgment are both aided by the imagination which, as a function of knowledge, suggests possibilities not actually presented or justified by the other powers and opens the doors to fresh vistas. The developed logical intelligence uses the imagination for suggesting new discovery and hypothesis, but is careful to test its suggestions fully by observation and a sceptical or scrupulous judgment. It insists too on testing, as far as may be, all the action of the judgment itself, rejects hasty inference in favour of an ordered system of deduction and induction and makes sure of all its steps and of the justice, continuity, compatibility, cohesion of its conclusions. A too formalised logical mind discourages, but a free use of the whole action of the logical intelligence may rather heighten a certain action of immediate insight, the mind’s nearest approach to the higher intuition, but it does not place on it an unqualified reliance. The endeavour of the logical reason is always by a detached, disinterested and carefully founded method to get rid of error, of prejudgment, of the mind’s false confidence and arrive at reliable certitudes” (SOY)
Excellent points all. What you have written about the problems of an uncritical transcendence is indeed what I also understood by “naive autonomy” or subjectivity as per Massumi. “A liberation that left the world as it is was felt by me to be almost distasteful,” wrote Sri Aurobindo. “Naive autonomy” is exactly why “spirituality” has not been able to provide any solutions in our times and has turned either into cultural capitalism or fascism. Regarding the community in question, “naive subjectivism” is a really good description for a community in self-imposed exile that was meant to develop the inner resources to resist the conditioning of world capital so as to enagage with it from a different vantage but has become a breeding ground for eccentric creatures of stagnation and worse, both naive and cunning agents of right wing hyper-nationalism.
Regarding buddhi as the purusha’s ally in the prakriti, Vijnana buddhi is something the Gita does not refer to – it is the more familiar manasa buddhi it has in mind – and as you say, different levels or operations of it, as per SA. Your quote is one of several which I had in mind. Buddhi yoga, a phrase Sri Aurobindo uses, is the ability of the intellect to separate itself from the conditionings of body, will, emotions and mind and open itself to a higher intuition. These conditionings are more and more ubiquitous today as the historical determinations of modernity and its subject forming capacities that leave increasingly illusory room for “escape.” Deconstruction may not be all of buddhi yoga, but it is certainly its first line of defense.