In this text Borradori address virtuality in resepct of first of all Henri Bergson, addressing how virtuality has been trapped in the grip of digital representations.

Philosophers seem peculiarly indifferent to the notion of virtuality, which has been discussed by sociologists and theorists in the humanities mostly in connection to the question of virtual space. But is virtuality reducible to the rise of the digital media, in all its various configurations? If so, should the question of virtuality be limited to the way in which we perceive space and time? Or should we grant it a constitutive role with respect to the intersubjective sphere? If this were true, would any externalist account of personal identity impinge on it and how?

My take is that all these questions stem from a specific definition of virtuality, which I shall venture to name the realist conception, insofar as it entails the belief that virtuality is a phenomenon external to the mind. By external, I indicate a kind of historical and/or technological shift, which is not a Weltanschauung but rather occurs at the level of Weltgeschichte. In contrast to this realist conception of the virtual, I wish to argue for an anti-realist interpretation, which focuses on virtuality not as a set of externally justifiable conditions, but views it as a constitutive condition of our experience. From this anti-realist angle, virtuality is neither a technologically supported event nor an occurrence located at a precise point in time. The relation between virtual and physical space is an embedded feature of the way in which we relate to the world around us.

The main objective of this paper is to disclose the meaning of virtuality in the metaphysics of Henri Bergson, particularly in connection with Bergson's treatment of duration. This feature of Bergsonian metaphysics has been discussed very scarcely by either European or Anglo-American scholars. After having analyzed the role that virtuality plays in Bergsonian ontology, I wish to point to an interesting convergence occurring between Bergson's concept of virtuality and Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of affirmation. This convergence, I shall suggest, reveals the possibility of putting Bergson's notion of the virtual to use as an hermeneutic category of historical understanding. Given the great versatility of the meaning of affirmation in Nietzsche's reflection, I will limit myself to the specific incarnation that affirmation takes up in the second of the Untimely Meditations, in connection to the notion of life.

Duration , Memory, Virtuality

For Bergson, virtuality is the ontological modality of duration. Duration roughly corresponds to what William James, with a famous metaphor, named "stream of consciousness." As James' conscious stream is continuous, forward-moving, and in constant change, Bergson's duration is the succession of qualitative states of mind, indiscernible as atomic units but only feasible in their interconnectedness and fluidity. The fluidity pertains to those deep currents that, while remaining submerged, push whatever stretch of the stream to the surface, allowing us to identify it. Both the deep currents of the stream and the ones that emerge to the surface are real components of our experience. But while the ones that reached the surface are actual, the submerged ones are virtual. What does this virtual modality entail?

In Matter and Memory, the notion of duration is mostly assimilated to the mental function of recollection, or memory, which Bergson discusses in opposition to perception. Both perception and memory are "tendencies" at work in our experience. The term tendency should be given careful scrutiny. Perception and memory are tendencies along which our experience "tends" to organize itself, but do not constitute independent kinds of experience, available separately from one another. Experience is a "composite" of tendencies insofar as, one the one hand, it contains them, and on the other, is the product of their internal dynamics.

Bergson defines perception as the "abstract" tendency of our experience, where abstract refers to how our experience would be like if extrapolated from the effects of time on it. This is the kind of experience that we tend to produce artificially, when we look at the world objectively, with causal models of explanation in mind. By contrast, memory, embodies the "concrete" tendency to experience the world as a constant becoming-other than itself, in terms of the effects of time on it.

Similar to Spinoza's conatus, or the persistence of a finite entity to maintain its essence actualized, perception and memory are individual tendencies, which act upon each other in order to impose their individual specificity. However, insofar as these tendencies are forces determining the course of experience, they are located elsewhere than experience itself, in a "virtual" region that Bergson makes accessible only via intuition.

Intuition is conceived less as a faculty embedded in the structure of the mind, than as a way of thinking modeled after duration. Borrowing Husserl's terminology, one could suggest that such an intuitive way of thinking depends on a kind of epoché, or bracketing of the objectivistic standpoint. The bracketing allows for the acknowledgment that the tendencies underlying experience are qualitatively distinct but cannot be quantified in any objective way, or defined according to any transcendental parameter. If the difference between the tendencies could be predicated in any other way than a purely qualitative difference, their distinction would not be primitive anymore but secondary to some other more fundamental distinction. Instead of a difference in kind, it would become a difference in degree. Let me try to explain this difficult but crucial point.

For Bergson, it is important to maintain the heterogeneity of the tendencies, that is, to posit the tendencies not on a continuum but on different ontological levels. In order to do that, the tendencies cannot lend themselves either to be categorized in terms of a third transcendental term, or to be quantified according to a specific scale of measurement. If their difference were thinkable in terms of a third either categorical or quantitative parameter, the tendencies would differ in degree and not in kind.

The heterogeneity between perception and memory is indispensable insofar as it is, for Bergson, the primitive distinction. As such, it cannot entail anything objective because otherwise the distinction between subject and object would be primitive. This is why Bergson places so much emphasis on intuition as a new style of philosophical thinking.1 The heterogeneity between tendencies allows Bergson to establish experience as a composite of them as well as of their ontological modalities: the actual and the virtual. But how does Bergson describe the acting upon each other of the tendencies which constitutes experience?

Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past in general, then, in a certain region of the past -a work of adjustment, something like the focusing of a camera. But our recollection still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the appropriate attitude. Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on color, it tends to imitate perception. But it remains attached to the past by its deepest roots, and if, being a present state, it were not also something which stands out distinct from the present, we should never know it for a memory2

The sui generis nature of the act of remembering depends on the ability embedded in our experience to "switch" between tendencies. Either we are "in" memory or "in" perception. We don't reach the past from the present via the extension of a representational model. Quite the opposite. As we intentionally try to recollect something, we step into the past and its virtuality, and we navigate it until we meet the virtual current which is pushing along the memory we are looking for. In order for us to individuate it and recollect it, that memory needs to be actualized and transformed in a perception. But, as Bergson warns in the last sentence of the quote, part of the memory still remains attached to the past, otherwise we would not be able to discern it is a memory. This means that, as we experience it, it is a composite of memory and perception.

The co-existence rather than integration of perception and memory brings Bergson to develop, in Matter and Memory, a peculiar conception of matter as the aggregate of images, where by image he understands "a certain existence which is more than that which an idealist calls a representation, but less than what a realist calls a thing --an existence placed halfway between the "thing" and the "representation."3 The image is therefore neither purely mental nor purely external to the mind, but somewhere in between.

This intermediate zone is such that, on the one hand, "the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it: image it is, but a self-existing image."4 What does it mean that the image is self-existing? It means that the object never presents itself to us "in-itself," but always and inevitably in a pictorial manner. Translated in classical phenomenological language, the pictorial corresponds to the primitive "mode of givenness" of the object. If this is so, matter coherently emerges as the aggregate of all possible images of the world, as the sum total of all the possible past, present, and future experience.

In their being less than representations, happening in the mind, and more than perceptions, defined as the pure reactions to external stimuli, Bergsonian images constitute the region of "real," or "concrete," experience. The dynamics between tendencies produces experience as an exchange of images. The pictorial way in which the world gives itself to us is intertwined with the effects of time on it. Paradoxically, time itself is what constitutes experience pictorially, as a cinematic sequence.5 "Real duration" is the name Bergson gives to the continuous, forward-moving, ever-changing character of the self-reflective experience. The commitment to this "cinematic" quality of self-reflection marks Bergsonian metaphysics opposition to the French Cartesian lineage.

Why is the distinction between perception and memory primitive to the distinction between subject and object? Bergson says that an objective description is like a "snapshot" of the world, in that it portrays the nature of our experience as the range of possibilities stemming from the stability, stillness, and immutability of a photograph. It can be done abstractly, or artificially, but from the phenomenological perspective it does not address the primitive, or constitutive element of our experience: time. Thinking in objective terms means taking our experience as if matter were not an aggregate of images and as if time were not the condition for our experience of the world.
Duration describes the entirety of our experiential field, whose ontological modality is all that the real includes, either actualized or present in a virtual sense. When we take the objective standpoint, we analyze only actualized events and state of affairs. We take them in isolation from their becoming, as if they weren't in the process of evolving through time. In so doing, we reverse them, dissect them into discrete units, and put them back together as if they needed no time to happen. On the contrary, Bergson considers duration as constitutive a component of our experience as the perceptual one. In fact, one would not exist without the other, as they are they are the terms of the primitive distinction without which we would be unable to think.

Virtuality is the ontological modality of duration, whereas actuality is the ontological modality of perception. But since experience is a composite of memory and perception, it includes virtuality as well. Earlier, I defined duration as a range of deep currents that, while remaining submerged, push whatever stretch of the stream of consciousness to the surface, allowing us to identify it. Let me pursue this metaphor and say that the submerged currents are virtually present to the stream. It is these virtual movements of duration that determine the emergence, or actualization, of whatever stretch of the stream of consciousness reaches the surface. Bergson's suggestion is that the virtual currents in and of themselves correspond to what the pure past would be like if it were accessible. The emerged stream taken in isolation from the deep currents corresponds, instead, to what the pure present would be like, assumed as a self-contained discrete dimension. However, as it is true in the dynamics of aquatic currents, perception and memory need to be understood in combination, as do the related pairs of present and past, actual and virtual. Experience is the theatre of these dynamics, where the invisible, or deeper layer, is always responsible for the emergence of whatever come into view.
Pure perception or pure memory are abstract concepts. Perception, even the most simultaneous one, blinking my eyes, for example, takes time, as feeling cold or hot takes time. When I analyze perception and quantify it according to objective scales of measurement, I act as if this time, indispensable to experience, did not exist. In the same way, as I try to recapture a memory long past, I won't be able to revive it without transforming it into a perception. The interesting feature of the differential relation of these tendencies, memory and perception, virtual and actual, is that perception of actuality is arrived at, according to Bergson, from memory or virtuality. The present is accessed from the past, and not the reverse, so that experience is the constant reassessment of the present in terms of the past.


The Affirmation of Life

The way in which Bergson describes experience as a "composite" of perception and memory, actuality and virtuality, present and past, is analogous, I suggest, to Nietzsche's view of affirmation as an alternative model of experience to ressentiment. Such an analogy revolves around a theme present in both Bergson and Nietzsche: the theme of "life."

What does affirmation mean? For Nietzsche, affirmation indicates both the generation of unforeseen perspectives and a process of regeneration of existing perspectives --forgotten, repressed, coherced, marginalized-- silently constituting the present. Affirmation is an immanent project aimed at two concurrent objectives: differentiation on the one hand, and recognition of the hermeneutical character of individual and social experience on the other. Nietzsche sees objectivism, or the "will to truth," as limiting our "will to create," that he reads in connection to vital impulses. "Essence" is something perspectival and already presupposes a multiplicity. Contrary to any form of epistemological dogmatism, affirmation is thus a project of activation of different interpretations and descriptions, whose scope is to give the undecidable, enigmatic, unpredictable features of existence a new legitimacy.

As Bergsonian duration, Nietzschean affirmation is a tectonic vibration which cracks the apparent unity and stability of the actual, opening up fissures of virtuality and becoming. To affirm means to unfold the multiplicity of "perspectives" that a present state of affairs contains in a virtual form. These perspectives can be envisaged as the virtual lines along which change, assumed as progressive differentiation, will occur, and they are real and present as, say, the DNA is real and present to an organic body. In this sense, Nietzschean affirmation is actualization of the virtual, where virtual is connected to whatever is vital, forward-moving and ever-changing.

But how far should we push, in both Bergson and Nietzsche, these vitalistic implications of the notion of life?
I propose to read the theme of life in connection to history. Nietzsche's early essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" presents a definition of life that serves to illustrate, I argue, the sui generis experience that Bergson refers to in his description of the process of recollection. 6

The resentful nature of the Western rationalist tradition, of which 19th century historicism is just the outpost, is, for Nietzsche, linked to the reduction of history to three teleologies --monumental, antiquarian, or critical. Nietzsche interprets teleology as a fearful reaction against the complexity and ever-changing perspectivist fabric. Teleology is an inauthentic mode of historical understanding which encourages "being in history" passively and resentfully as opposed to "making history" actively and affirmatively. Inauthentic history can kill.

But what can history kill? Nietzsche's answer is: life, the impulse of either an individual or a community to affirm themselves with any historically meaningful action, to remain themselves in the face of pain, change, and injustice, and therefore to "become what they are." Life is what Nietzsche calls the "plastic power," the power to shape new perspectives without becoming self-defensive or losing oneself. Only if this power is affirmed and cultivated, rather than suppressed, history will serve life.

This authentic understanding of history, and of human existence within history, is contingent upon the ability to step outside of history into the Unhistorical. The dynamics between the Historical and the Unhistorical is very similar to Bergson's "switching" between memory and perception, at work in his description of the process of recollection. In order for the plastic power to grow, indifference to history is necessary. It is this type of forgetting that is connected to life. The life of a living human entity, being it an individual, a people, or a culture, depends on their ability to forget. "It is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting."7 Forgetting means disconnecting from a linear sense of time, described as a series of punctual "nows," some of which are no-more and some of which are not-yet. This linear description of time represents selves and cultures as located in time, rather than constituted by it and becoming with it. Switching between the Historical and the Unhistorical means to deny the present the neutrality from which to set up sequential orderings and to make it part of becoming,. This is indispensable to develop a "healthy" relationship to history.

In both Bergson and Nietzsche, such a switching covers a shuttle function between past and present, the virtual and actual dimensions: what is no-more cannot be objectified as something without an active influence on the present but needs to be reactivated precisely in terms of these influences. Forgetting history, in Nietzsche's understanding, amounts to becoming aware of the transformative function of time. Implementing the role that time, in its transformative function, plays in existence means, I believe, to implement our contact with a specific ontological modality too, which is located in reality but is not actual: this is what Bergson calls virtuality.


1The heterogeneity and primitiveness of the distinction between perception and memory is based on Bergson's assumption that space and time are fundamentally a-symmetrical, due to four reasons:

1. Time has a direction. Space or objectivity does not

2. Time seems to "flow." Space does not

3. We can move freely in space, we cannot in time

4. An entity is complete at any points in time, but may not be
complete in space