COLLAPSE III
88
them, we say that this rarefaction is due to cuts, barrings,
which only permit certain flows to penetrate into conscious-
ness. The essential remains: perception is in every way still
thought as a rarefaction of matter.
We can formulate these two postulates more precisely by
including both in the following proposition: there is becoming,
and becoming is fluxes and their interceptions. This statement
allows us to say the following: a flux is not sufficient to
constitute a becoming – for this, there must also be inter-
ception. Fluxes, certainly, transmit movement: but this
movement is not a becoming, in the sense that, ruled by
the laws of nature, it connects every image to every other
image, according to a necessity which saturates the real
in some way. Every thing being connected to every other
according to laws, the cognition of an image is sufficient in
principle for us to determine the present, past and future
movement of all the others – and this to such a point that
the very difference between the three dimensions of time is
erased, to the profit of an immutable web of transmissions
of movements. One is faced with an immobility made of
movements, analogous to that of a powerful jet of water, in
which the continuous movement of matter gives rise to a
continuous immobility of form. Flows, left to themselves,
are just such a pure mobility, immobilising themselves by
the very fact that no obstacle obstructs their deployment:
they are the bonds between all things ruled by fixed laws.
For there to be becoming, something must happen, and
for something to happen, it is not enough that something
comes to pass – on the contrary, it must be the case that
something does not pass: there must be a disconnection.
This is the only way to introduce a becoming into matter, Meillassoux – Subtraction and Contraction
we do not simply passively perceive the signs on the page;
for the mind, on the basis of various characteristic traits,
fills the interval with memory-images projected onto the
paper and substituted for the actual printed characters. The
second type of memory which impregnates our perception
is not that which impregnates the present with our memory
of the past, but that which constitutes that present itself:
contraction-memory. For however brief a perception might
be, it always occupies a certain duration and thus neces-
sitates an effort of memory which prolongs a plurality of
moments one into the other. So that, as Bergson writes:
‘memory in these two forms, covering as it does with a
cloak of recollections a core of immediate perception, and
also contracting a multiplicity of external moments into a
single internal moment, constitutes the principal share of
individual consciousness in perception, the subjective side
of the knowledge of things’.13
The problem of the cognition of matter thus becomes
the following: our perception seems (this was the decisive
advance made in the first chapter) to join directly with
matter in itself. In the object, we perceive the image in itself
which it effectively is. Matter contains no depths, no hidden
aspect. In this sense, Bergson’s immanentism held fast to
the fact that matter is given wholly as that which it is: no
space being left for a thing in itself inaccessible to cognition,
a hidden transcendence. And, what’s more, the world was
not immanent to consciousness, it was not a transcendence-
in-immanence like Husserlian objectivity.
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