Primacy of time when we e-write

Downplaying space in favour of time .

Bergson is presented by Foucault as being chiefly responsible for a pervasive tendency of contemporary philosophers to downplay space in favour of time.

In 1978, during an interview with Watanabe, he refers to 'a kind of latent Bergsonism which dominated French philosophy' , cautiously qualifying his initial statement with a rather ambiguous remark :

' I say Bergsonism, I'm not saying this was the actual Bergson, far from it. There was a certain privilege of all temporal analyses over space, which was held as something dead and inert.'

In fact, it turns out that what Foucault wishes to oppose is rather something like an existentialist or vulgarly marxist over-valorization of historicity and historical consciousness at the expense of the 'reactionary' categories of spatiality. The reference to 'a Bergsonian valorization of time' does not only function as a philosophical cliché. It may in fact best be explained from an auto-biographical perspective. It is with the academic primacy of Bergsonian time (or Bergsonian primacy of time) that Foucault himself had to struggle in the fifties and sixties, as he tried to foster a new form of investigation invested in the constructions of space - sites, boundaries, thresholds, where power inscribes its marks.

Ironically, however, similarly sweeping accounts of the influence of Bergson on twentieth century French thought lead other commentators to radically divergent claims : Martin Jay, for example, traces back the 'denigration of vision' in French philosophy to the Bergsonian critique of spatialization as a specific mechanism of intellectual and social control, a critique which is supposed to bear its effects everywhere, from Luckàcs (whose concept of reification owes much to 'spatialization') and the Marxist tradition, up to Foucault himself.

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Wholeness and fragmentation

A concern with issues of wholeness and fragmentation, along with a focus on the material aspects of cultural media, identifies an important area of contact between the work of cultural critic Walter Benjamin and that of Lukacs.

In the important essay "The Storyteller," Benjamin argues in a mode reminiscent of Lukacs's narrative of gradual historical fragmentation that in the modern world the ability to tell meaningful stories is rapidly becoming a lost art. Storytelling for Benjamin is first and foremost a means of conveying advice for dealing with "real" life, but he suggests, writing in the tumultuous days of post-World War I Germany, that the modern world no longer makes sense. "Reality" itself is thus increasingly problematic, and there is no longer any meaningful advice to give. "The art of storytelling," he writes, "is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out". Benjamin suggests that events in the modern world (particularly World War I) have led to a general devaluation of human experience:

"For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power". And if experience is no longer meaningful, then it follows that the exchange of experiences in meaningful ways (the fundamental requirement of effective storytelling) is no longer possible".

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