"New Bergsonisms, Social Acceleration, and Post-Cinematic Affect"

Time/ temporality is back. Following Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism (1966), there has been a return to, a renewal of, and an extension of the once revered, and thence ostracized project of Henri Bergson: to comprehend how humans relate to time as the experience of duration rooted in memory. However, in so doing, we cannot turn time into space. The experience of time cannot be intuitively grasped from mathematical symbols or discursive thought. Indeed for Bergson, his contemporary the Fauvist painter Robert Delaunay, and Deleuze, space is decomposable into "time images". The paper explains why this resurrection emerges. First, new Bergsonisms engage the question of what it means to live in the constantly accelerating, unfolding, enfolding, recombinant immaterial circulation of digitized information. This is the condition of the hyper-mediacy of globalization as a virtual environment of network imaging. It is an epoch in which the space and time we are immersed in come in proliferating layers of virtual space and time. These layers are constituted in recombinant paths, self-reflexive loops, fractal levels, and transversal connexions: which undermine and transform any sustained coherence of institutional/corporatist frameworks in any ordinary sense. Further, the very idea of representation has become destabilized. There is a dissolving of our own human memory. There is a fragility of stable point of view. It is a post-cinematic epoch of manipulated pixilated new media  resulting in the immaterialization of production, work and property. It is an epoch where the cinematic concept of frame itself is abandoned.