Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

confined to their localized time-frames, like other datable events” (Gell 1992, 238).
Another way to state this is that, “[…] consciousness is understood metaphorically as a
flow which is not in time, but which is the constitutive source of temporality” (Mohanty
1995, 60). Many of these points raised by Husserl’s treatment of retention and
pretension as horizons of the present as a kind of extended temporal ontology and Gell’s
treatment of B-series time, overlap with some of Bergson’s ideas. 33
For Nancy Munn, “We cannot analyse or talk about time without using media already
encoded with temporal meanings […]” (Munn 1992, 94) and even though we are in some
sense constituted in A-series time, “[…W]e make, through our acts, the time we are in”
(Munn 1992, 94). This is not a solution for accessing B-series time, but it does present a
kind of practice theory approach towards studying how people construct time-reckoning
projects in and through their sociocultural activities and relations. For Bergson,
however, and despite time’s evasive quality, we can still come close to communing with
it, but only through something like the spirit. Where Bergson differs from Gell, and even
from the standpoint of a modified B-series theory of time, is that duration as an
abstraction can never be made sense of in intervals of dated ‘real time’ temporal
relationships. Duration for Bergson is the manifold substance of existence; the issue is
not about temporalisation but actualisation in the non-directionality and nonchronology
of duration’s flux. Moreover, Hodges points out that Bergson and Deleuze
have shown that, “[…] conceptual thought can only constitute a spatialization of la
durée” (Hodges 2008, 414). And so, where does that leave us?
Suzanne Guerlac contends that what Bergson shows us is that, “[…] we count in space,
not in time. The concept of number implies juxtaposition in space. In order for the
numbers to grow as I advance in my counting, I have to hold onto the successive images
or representation of the units I have already counted, and therefore I juxtapose them
with each of the new units I evoke in my mind. The juxtaposition occurs in space. Even
when we think we are counting in time, we are actually representing units in space”
(Guerlac 2006, 61). For Bergson, this is ‘real duration.’ Bergson’s philosophy attempts to
recast our relationship with ourselves, not in some kind of attunement of ourselves to an
external world unfolding in space, but in terms of an intuition of ourselves, in freedom,
33 It is interesting to note that Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson were both born in
1859.
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