Joe Milutis: Let’s stick with Bergson and the virtual on this notion
of history. It’s really very simple. If I’m on a bus, and everything
is going OK, I caught it on time, the sun is flickering by, so I know
that once I get off the bus there will be no adversity in getting to
my destination. I have the leisure to read, to think, and to
effectively remove myself from the situation of my actual presence in
the bus. In fact, if I want, I can see the bus better, choosing to
move from my reflections, to the faces of the other passengers, to
the people on the street moving by, sometimes slow, sometimes fast,
like a passage of music. It is all very nice. Now, same bus: I’m
late, it’s raining. The bus will take the same amount of time to get
to my destination. However, now I can’t read. I’m on the edge of my
seat scrolling through multiple mental scenarios of what’s going to
happen as soon as I get off the bus: how I will manage the small
window I have to get to my destination without total failure, what
are the most effective scenarios (quickly dwindling) and how, in the
face of failure, will I reassess the value of the idea I had of
“getting there on time.”
Travel in space is the same as moving through intellectual data; and
this is not a metaphor, it is literally one and the same. You need to
know when to kick in the scenario-creating-mind, which is important!
It’s not just a rainy day drag! Conversely, you need to know when to
dream and relax the mind, so that virtual images come in. Are you
completely caught up in the labyrinths of self-referentiality or
buried by a responsibility to the past? Or is your work drained of
depth since you’ve molded your intellectual output on the buzz du
jour? For me, I don’t want my intellectual life dominated by the
“constant revolutionizing of production,” although I find that it can
be exciting to tap a particularly energetic flow, since I don’t feel
satisfied by my research until it finds a way outside of itself. Do I
have more place in my heart for the untimely rather than the timely?
…
The academic is untimely. That is the strength of this particular endeavor,
don’t mess with it.
– quoted from CTheory, full text here
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