Bergson's concept of time

In Creative Evolution Bergson argued that the creative urge, not the Darwinian concept of natural selection, is at the heart of evolution. Man's intellect has developed in the course of evolution as an instrument of survival. It comes to think inevitably in geometrical or 'spatializing' terms that are inadequate to lay hold of the ultimate living process. But intuition goes to the heart of reality, and enables us to find philosophic truth.


Bergson's thinking and concept of time has influenced greatly Arnold Hauser, Claude Simon, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Santayana, and such authors as Péguy, Valéry, and John Dos Passos. Whitehead expanded Bergson's notions of duration and evolution from their applications to organic life into the phycial realm. It is said that for Marcel Proust, whose cousin Bergson married in 1891, the philosopher gave the idea for the great novel of reminiscence, À la recherche de temps perdu (1913-27). Sartre also paid tribute to Bergson, and Martin Heidegger, whose ontology is echoed in existentialist writing, used some of Bergson's concepts, such as "no-being". However, Bergson's influence on existentialism is not straight forward and in his own time the philosopher was considered an empiricist.

On the other hand, Bergson's argumentation frustrated such philosophers as the empiricist Bertrand Russell, who criticized his thoughts in 1914 and later returned to them in History of Western Philosophy. Philosophers have pointed out that Bergson did not satisfactorily show how intuition could work apart from intellect. Albert Einstein found serious mistakes from Bergson's DURÉE ET SIMULTANÉITÉ À PROPOS DE LA THÉORIE D'EINSTEIN (1921), dealing with Einstein's theory of relativity. Bergson had opposed in 1911 Einstein's ideas, but then his view had changed and he introduced the concept of non-linear time. Bergson is generally regarded as having lost his public debate with Einstein, but some of the leading physicists have devoted articles to his work.

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David Kolb and deconstruction

Sometimes when this problem of using hypertext in philosophy is discussed, there is a tendency to think that hypertext is useful when there is a sort of deconstruction of the linear form. What is your opinion about this relation about hypertext and deconstruction?

David Kolb - It is a complex issue. You could summarise by saying that in many ways hypertext shows that the things which deconstructive literary theorists and philosophers have been saying about texts are true. It is shows that texts are open, that they cannot be completely closed, that they cannot be completely dominated by the author, that meaning has a certain contingent way of arising, so that it is not totally under the control of anyone, reader or author; those things hypertext demonstrates very rapidly. But it is also true that hypertext stands somewhat opposed to some of the things that are said by deconstructive writers because, in fact, a hypertext is a network, a finite set of relationships; it is something made, it is an artefact. I think many of the authors who sing the praises of hypertext as somehow "the native language of deconstruction" are making a confusion. They are forgetting that there is no pure text, that any kind of presentation, any kind of writing, brings the sort of general textuality they are taking about down to a concrete mode of presentation. There is a dream, after all, of total freedom. There is a dream of a permanent avant-garde situation in writing, but I think the flag of hypertext seems like something that might lead you in the direction of that dream. But only in the direction: the dream is impossible by itself.

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Keeping text free

The idea for organizing information, which allowed the user to select and display any stored section of information was first imagined by Vannervar Bush. The “Memex” couldn’t be built then in 1945. It wasn’t until 1960 that Theodor Nelson, who studied computer programming had an idea of “hypertext”. It was not until 1968 that the prototype for the hypertext was developed by Douglas Englebart. The Augment system he developed was used in organizing the government’s research network, called the ARPAnet. This first internet linked all information as “group memory” with it’s appropriate documents to with government projects. 1975 Andries Van Dam , a computer engineer collaborated with Mr. Scholes, an English professor at Brown University.

By making hypertext available in different windows this Non-linear learning style reinforced new ideas and methodologies. It’s interesting to note that with hypertext linkage readers could now go through books at the speed of human intellect. I’m sure we have all experienced having to look in numerous books for the information needed for a research project.With this new introduction of hypertext, slowly boundaries of specialized careers are being removed. The controversy of text plagiarism soon erupted as Publishing industry protected their profit by forming copyright laws. In regards to claims of owning words, I also agree with keeping text free, it is just the ideas such as an invention that a person should be recognized for in their own right. Hypertext opened many doors to new ideas and inventions that groups of differently trained professions would otherwise not have collaborated with each other. To try and ban these is a constriction of future advances in all fields.

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Linearity

Roy Christopher: What have you found when comparing levels of metacognition in linear texts versus hypertext situations?

JDBolter: On the question of linearity vs. hypertextuality as modes of thinking and learning, I’m an agnostic. I don’t know how we could decide whether associative (hypertextual) or linear thinking is more “natural.” Both hypertexts and linear texts are highly artificial forms of writing. Both have to be learned. The idea that hypertext is natural can be refuted simply by browsing through a random sample of Web sites. We see that people do not find it easy or natural to create good sites — either of the hierarchical or associative kind.RC: Who do you admire writing about media and/or hypertext these days?JDB: I always admire the work of my collaborator, Michael Joyce, and in particular the second volume of his collected essays, Othermindedness. I admire George Landow’s Hypertext 2.0, which remains the standard work on the subject. Meanwhile, there is a great deal of exciting work being done in new media studies. I’ll just mention two: Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and a new book by Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media.
Among electronic works, I admire M. D. Coverly’s Califia. I’m also impressed by work that does not follow the now traditional hypertextual paradigm. I mean, for example, the kinetic poetry of John Calley and the digital installations and creations of Mark Amerika. My colleague Diane Gromala, a digital artist and theorist, is doing fascinating work in with biosensing equipment to create a kind of animated writing that she calls ‘biomorphic typography.

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Syntagmatically oriented hypertext

Hypertext writing and systems that emphasise 'usability' (where usability seems to assume ease of use as a positive attribute for any hypertext), place an emphasis on the syntagmatic.

This emphasis on the smooth flow of links into nodes describes a highly linear reading experience. Interestingly, in Bernstein's examples most of the patterns that would probably relate to 'usability' are represented by highly linear images, the sieve for instance. However, the emphasis in the syntagmatically oriented hypertext is not, as might be thought, on simple patterns (any variety of pattern could be formed by the reader) but on linear continuity.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/
See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts