Forthcoming in: Helin, J., Hernes, T., Hjorth, D. and Holt, R. (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941)

Biography and Background

Henri-Louis Bergson, progenitor of modern process philosophy and the language of “becoming”, was born in Napoleon III’s rapidly-transforming Paris on October 18, 1859, a month before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, and the year in which Marx published his Critique of Political Economy, setting out his version of Hegelian historical materialism. Bergson was later to challenge both. Notable contemporaries were John Dewey (two days younger, d. 1952), and Alfred North Whitehead (four months younger, d. 1947). Cosmopolitan son of Michel, a Jewish Polish musician and an Irish Catholic mother, Catherine Levison, from Doncaster, England, Bergson grew up and was educated in Paris, although from 1863-66 the family lived in Switzerland, returning to Paris in 1866. His parents moved to England in 1870, although Henri remained boarding at the Springer Institution in Paris, continuing his studies at the Lycée Condorcet. He was therefore witness to the terrible consequences of French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War including the Siege of Paris, the Commune and its eventual overthrow in 1871; during and after the First World War onwards he became politically active in promoting international peace. Academically he displayed equal gifts in science and the humanities, attending the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS) a year below Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). He taught philosophy at lycées

first in Angers and then, in 1883, in Clermont-Ferrand, where he also taught at the University. He returned to Paris in 1888, teaching successively at lycées including the Lycée le Grand and the Lycée Henri IV (1890-98) for 10 years. Between 1894 and 1898 he applied twice to the Sorbonne, being rejected as a result of Durkheim’s opposition (Kolakowski 1985:vii), and was appointed Maître de Conference (Reader) at ENS in 1898.

In 1889 he published Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of

Consciousness, introducing a now-classic distinction between time as measured and time as experienced (durée or duration) and seven years later Matter and Memory appeared, arguably prefiguring, and confirmed by, brain science in the 1970s and 80s (McNamara 1996). 1891 saw his marriage to Louise Neuberger, whose second cousin, Marcel Proust, acted as best man. In 1895 he was appointed to the prestigious Collège de France, where in 1900 he became Chair of Ancient Philosophy. That year Le Rire or Laughter: An Essay on the

Meaning of the Comic (1900), his ground-breaking study of humour, illustrated the challenging processual crossing of levels between the physical and the intellectual that energised his critique of the philosophical reliance on intellect alone and neglect of intuition – the combination of which was the foundation of his anti-Cartesian, non-dialectical dualistic philosophy. In 1901 he was elected to the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and the following year received the Legion d’Honneur. In 1907 he published his most famous work, Creative Evolution, introducing the idea of élan vital (vital or life spirit). For the next 20 years Bergson was perhaps the world’s best-known philosopher. This was a mixed blessing - in 1914 he was both elected to the élite Academie Française and had his works placed on the Roman Catholic Church’s Holy Index of prohibited literature (the church rejected the idea of evolution). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.

During the First World War he undertook diplomatic missions to Spain and the USA due to his international prestige, and this developed into a commitment to the post-war activities of the fledgling League of Nations. The International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation (which prefigured UNESCO) organised a debate with Einstein concerning the consequences of his theory of relativity for Bergson’s concept of duration as originally given in Time and Free Will. Duration and Simultaneity (1922) arose from this. Einstein rejected the possibility of his multiple and potentially reversible times being reconciled with Bergson’s singular irreversible time (understood as a multiplicity), and Bergson was regarded by many as simply having misunderstood Einstein’s theories, particularly the mathematics. Although he made an important contribution to the understanding of the Riemann equations, a view of multiplicity on which Einstein had drawn [Lawlor and Moulard 2013; Deleuze, 1991:39–40]), his position was negatively received and from this point his reputation began to dwindle. This in combination with age and ill-health reduced his scholarly productivity. His last major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, did not appear until 1932, and although it offered a highly original account of ethics that influenced Lévinas, this was occluded by its religious and mystic aspects in its reception. Additionally two collections of essays were published - Mind-Energy in 1919 and The Creative Mind in 1934, although the latter includes older essays such as his ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, which dates back to 1903. In this later work though, there is a pulling back from the metaphysics of his second period and a return to the style of his earlier work.

In 1940 the Pétain government of Nazi-occupied France offered Bergson the

opportunity not to register as a Jew, partly because he was only half-Jewish, but also because he was an eminent and internationally recognised public figure. Although in later life he had embraced his mother’s Catholicism, Bergson felt it was important that, as a figure of note, he identified with “those about to be persecuted”. Having been forced to stand in line on the streets for several hours in the cold and damp to register, the experience proved too much for the heroic octogenarian’s fragile health and he died of bronchitis on the 3rd of January, 1941.

Bergsonian Connections and Contrasts.

Bergson’s lifetime encompassed the rise of modernism in all its forms – art, design, philosophy, literature, science, social science, urbanism, politics, mass production, consumption, communication and transport – including some of the definitive discoveries that shaped the twentieth century (electricity, air travel, the automobile, international telecommunications) and some of its indelibly tarnishing human disasters. Darwin’s evolutionary thought in biology impacted Herbert Spencer, who inspired Bergson’s early work, which launched a response to Spencer’s mechanistic approach and its essentially static treatment of time. This was also found in in 19th century science more generally, and was carried into the founding of the social sciences by Durkheim, who stood firmly in the tradition of Descartes in separating mind from body. This exclusion of the physical body, as an entity more suited to investigation by biologists, was part of Durkheim’s rationale for the sociality of social science. Bergson, however, contested this dualism, seeing it more as an interconnected duality with the brain practically engaged with the immediate world and selecting the most useful memories for dealing with it.

Durkheim’s damaging influence kept Bergson on the margins of the philosophical establishment and outside the official university system, giving lectures open to the public at the Collège de France. His emotionally appealing ideas were immensely popular, and were rapidly taken up and adopted piecemeal. Having no access to graduate or doctoral students,

Bergson could develop no “school” of rigorous interpreters, nor a unified programme of Bergsonism: Deleuze’s book of this title is in this sense ironic. His ideas were so widely dispersed, even dissipated, that pinning down his often unacknowledged influence on others is perplexing. Furthermore, his view of philosophy was that it must be in constant change to keep up with the shifting multiplicities of its main object, life, as its attentions brought new aspects into focus. Consequently other thinkers from a variety of disciplines found it possible, for better or worse, to take up different aspects of his thought and put them to a variety of uses.

Bergson particularly influenced phenomenology (Schutz, Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas, impacting on social constructionism and secular ethics); existentialism (through critical engagements of Heidegger and Sartre); process philosophy (notably Whitehead—see Rescher, 1996) and post-structuralism (in different ways by Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze). His dialogues with American pragmatists Dewey and James also had influence that has re-emerged in the postmodern pragmatism of Rorty (see Bergson, 1900/1999; Griffin et al, 1993). In the arts his conceptualisations of time and multiplicity influenced Cubism; the music of Debussy; American novelists Dos Passos, Faulkner and poet/novelist/critic Gertrude Stein; “stream of consciousness” novelists including Woolf, Joyce and Proust’s The

Remembrance of Things Past; and suffused the poetry of Valéry and T. S. Eliot (Le Brun 1967). Even a “minor” work, Laughter, was absorbed by both Sigmund Freud and Charlie Chaplin and was regarded by Koestler as being a major influence on his book The Act of

Creation.

Such a variety of interpreters have taken up and developed different aspects of his thought through their own particular intellectual lens that Bergson became himself a multiplicity. Yet, this is exactly what his own philosophy predicted in arguing that the process of perception is not the replication of its object but an act of replying to it, in that representation as a translation of stimulating sense data always entails interest, selection and creation (Linstead 2002). Bergson’s Key Ideas

Bergson suggested in 1911 (1934/1992:108-9) that most philosophies have at their heart one single important idea, which may be fairly simple to appreciate but is impossible for them to fully articulate. The philosopher then spends their career circling this idea, never quite expressing it, but in a series of near-misses creating elaborate symbolic systems that always fail to capture it. Throughout Bergson’s work this actualises as a mistrust of language that distinguishes him markedly from the analytic philosophers of his day, for whom logic simply needed to direct its energies towards perfecting its symbolic language rather than accepting its current limitations.

This influence of language on sensation is deeper [more profound] than is usually thought [generally believed] … the rough and ready [brutal] word, which stores up the stable, common, and consequently impersonal element in the impressions of mankind, overwhelms [crushes] or at least covers over the delicate and fugitive [fleeting] impressions of our individual consciousness (Bergson, 1889/1913; 131-2; translations in square parentheses from Guerlac 2006:73) Bergson’s use of language, and particularly metaphor, attempts to evoke the

ambiguity of the real rather than abstract and clarify it: avoiding reductionism, though not without a precision of its own. Bergson’s suspicion of symbolic systems may be considered proto-poststructuralist (he worked at the same time as Saussure and Pierce were developing semiology and semiotics, structuralism’s precursors) but this the critique of language did not

become a fixation, as the linguistic turn in Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida and poststructuralism has been accused of doing. Time

If Bergson does have just one central insight, then according to Kolakowski (1985/2001:2) it is that time is real. Bergson grew up in the early shadows of evolutionary theory, and whilst excited by its revolutionary rethinking of the nature of the human, he was increasingly frustrated by its mechanistic assumptions, its determinism, its lack of a sense of movement, its passive rather than active view of the organism (including the issue of freedom) and its lack of any dynamic consideration of time. For Bergson, the problem of time was not one of being, uniformity, stability and permanence, but of becoming, change and the future as the unfolding of novelty. Whilst arguing for the continuity of the flow of becoming and the irreversibility of time, he acknowledged the tension with novelty and discontinuity, and sought to understand this duality as a rhythm of connected and elastic expansions and contractions rather than as an oppositional dialectic. His philosophy is both intensive and tensile.

Bergson in Time and Free Will demonstrates that human freedom, or free will, is itself a reality that can be validated by a consideration of “real time” – time as experienced rather than measured – which he terms durée or “duration”. Still not free of the Cartesianism that dominated 19th century thinking, Bergson accepts implicitly the distinction between inner and outer experience, but rejects the assumption that they both consist of similar, quantitative, homogeneous units. For Bergson, the time of consciousness (duration) is inner, and immediate, experience – qualitative, heterogeneous and dynamic. A moment of duration can be tasted in the qualitative difference between a clock minute spent in a poolside lounger; a minute driving a car in a competitive race; a minute searching for painkillers when you have a migraine; a minute rising to the surface from a coral-reef SCUBA dive; a minute spent in a group scouring a field for clues after the discovery of a corpse; a minute’s trading on the FTSE; a minute birdwatching; a minute between rounds in a boxing ring; a minute fumbling for one’s gas-mask in an air-raid; a minute waiting for the end-of-shift factory hooter; or a minute watching your first child being born. None of these is experientially comparable: if you were doing one of them you would not mistake that feeling for any of the others, such is their qualitative difference though quantitatively identical.

In contrast, science emphasises homogeneous space over heterogeneous time. Space is abstract, quantitative and static. Its parts are identical and can be described mechanistically.

Spatialised time is time stripped of its intrinsic heterogeneity, the time of the clock or diary that can be represented on dials, inscribed on pages and captured in formulae where one moment ‘t’ is much the same as any other (Bergson 1934/1992:12-13). This spatialising of time is essential to deterministic approaches to experience, because it represents the unfolding of a hidden destiny that is always already pre-determined in the present condition of the world. Creativity and freedom are not required or even allowed as life unfurls along its prescribed path according to the laws of nature.

But for Bergson duration is definitively creative. Every emerging instant is new, unique and novel. Duration’s diverse components are our memories, our perceptions and affections, but they are entangled with each other and cannot be easily distinguished. Past, present and future as memory, experience and anticipation form duration where the real and the virtual meet. Spatialised time, which is of course artificial, consists of segments (which may be infinitesimally small) that are self-contained: in themselves they preserve nothing of any previous even though identical segment, being ahistorical and memoryless. This type of artificially manufactured time is constructed, against the “real” time we have identified as

duration, for the purposes of practical action, enabling us to do things in the world, to organise, sequence, synchronise or manipulate life. Duration is not measurable in this way, and hence cannot be predicted – it is full of exciting or terrifying potential. We can never be sure exactly how things will turn out and Bergson therefore argues that we need to learn to think backwards, to movement as prior to space. This is reality as process.

For Bergson the subject is not determined by external states, it is these states. It does not find itself in the predicament of having to choose between predetermined alternative choices: rather by its free action it creates these very choices. When reflecting on actual action these virtual alternatives emerge and appear as though they pre-existed action – as pre-formed possibilities - and were rejected by the consciously acting subject. The real therefore creates the possible in retrospect; the virtual is more than the possible. Real choices and real time are qualitative, heterogeneous and irreversible – and because, as he argues, they are prior to possible choices and spatialised time, the world is emergent and unpredictable, and we experience freedom. The flow of duration is without beginnings or ends, and is just constant movement in the middle. Freedom then is not only processual: it is a triumph of quality over quantity, duration over artifice. Rather than being apprehended by unreflective instinct, or the abstract operations of intellect, duration is known through engaged intuition. Memory, Materiality and Embodiment

Bergson argued in 1911 (Bergson 1934/1992:107) that philosophy must be close to real life, and in Matter and Memory (1896) he developed the position that method (whether philosophical or other) must be developed in relation to its object – and if that object changes, so must the method. So even methodology was to be in process.

What makes duration possible, Bergson argued, is memory. Memory cumulates the past in its entirety, not selectively. Not a single element is lost. Every remembered moment carries within itself the entire preceding flow of the past. As such it is irreversible, and specifically unrepeatable. Although our bodies – and other material counterparts of our memories - may decay, we are still able to recall the memories themselves. Old war stories may indeed be more vivid than those of the recent past. From this Bergson proposes that memory is entirely independent of matter, and is in no way constituted by it, as it would be regarded in the reductionist point of view that regards memory and even consciousness, to be merely an effect of the material brain.

From this reductionist perspective, memory is a less vivid variant of perception, consciousness being an unextended epiphenomenon of the extended material world that impresses itself upon it. The Cartesian gap between mind and world, and hence mind and body is, for Bergson, incomprehensible and results from this spatialisation of experience into the extended and the unextended. He argues that mind is primarily memory, and accordingly the mind-body relationship needs to be understood through time (past and present).

How this works needs some explanation. Bergson’s view of consciousness involves his idiosyncratic concept of an image which can exist without being perceived – it sits somewhere between idea and representation, feeling and concept. The body thus becomes a centre of virtual actions which require pure perception for us to know they are there, but need memory to give them significance and meaning, or recognition. When the body repeats a familiar action, Bergson calls this habit or automatic memory. Image or pure memory is virtual and non-active, imprinting everything that happens in every moment of our experienced subjectivity, but it acts as a resource to occasion action when connected to, and actualised by, perception. However, this memory is the memory that releases itself into dreaming when not suppressed by the action-orientation of wakeful and pragmatic automatic

memory. Actual memory is what connects the other two types of memory strategically, and allows for spontaneity, creativity and innovation, in action.

Although suspicious of symbols, Bergson illustrated this with the image of an inverted cone, the lower tip of the upturned cone penetrating a flowing timeline of action in the present. At its widest base point, now at the top, the cone represents pure memory, an undifferentiated cloud. The cone, however, can be rotated clockwise and anticlockwise like the lens of a telescope or SLR camera, thus bringing different parts of the cloud into focus, like stars in the milky way, forming images. The operation of intelligence on this process of focusing and refocusing then contracts these virtualities into a concentrated form that can be practically applied in action in the real world (Linstead 2002; 2005).

Bergson is often seen, wrongly, as opposing instinct and intellect, and being anti-intellectual. He is anti-intellectualist in his views of representation and the symbolic, but that does not stop him using language evocatively, and neither does it prevent his considerable intellectual exertions. For Bergson these domains are connected and work together. Bergson’s view of memory is that it works on different levels, with bodily perception on the lowest and most material plateau, and with intellect operating at the most abstract. Intuition is not to be confused with instinct, as it is not understood either as reflex, or as an instant epiphantic flash of insight that emerges from nowhere. It consists rather of an often hard won sensitivity, the moment of actualization of a virtual potential that is the result of a real engagement with the world, rather than abstract speculation alone. Bergson is interested in the crossing of these levels and sees that happening in different ways. One direction, from the physical to the intellectual, is the irruption of laughter, that responds spontaneously to deliberate or accidental exposition of the presumptions of abstraction and the limits of mechanical constraints upon life. Another is when the subconscious insinuates its way, through dreams, to take advantage of the relaxation of the practical preoccupations of the brain and draw on the image-memory to create interventions into the reality of consciousness. Further, he looks at the intellectual effort required to achieve breakthrough moments of insight, the special conditions under which intuition can operate most profoundly. These creative dynamics do not just offer partial interpretations or images of reality (Bergson in Mullarkey 1999: 86):

The real whole might well be, we conceive, an indivisible continuity. The systems we cut out within it would, properly speaking, not be parts at all, they would be partial views of the whole. (Bergson 1911/1998:31; see also Ingold 2011:226).

Creative Evolution

Bergson does not think that an adequate account of evolution can be generated by viewing it as linear and mechanistic inner adaptation to change in external circumstances. When life unfolds “beneath the symbols which conceal it” we discover that “time is just the stuff it is made of … no stuff more resistant nor more substantial”. This means that

Our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present – no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and swells as it advances… it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness. (Bergson 1907/1998: 4-5). Change then is directionless, needs no plan, and is propelled by its own inward force

(Bergson’s image is of fusée, flare or rocket) towards a multiplicity of directions realised in

practice by the operations of intelligence, intellect, and instinct, through memory (Bergson 1934/1992:130-58; Brown 2006). This vital impetus, or élan vital, is the human creative drive but connects to the creative power of life itself. Here Bergson’s familiarity with Spinoza is demonstrated in the corporeal strength of this basic drive, drawing on Spinoza’s concept of the conatus (see, for example, the Spinoza chapter in this volume, and Scott’s [2009] chapter on Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza’s joyfully embodied approach). Whitehead apparently coined the term creativity (Robinson 2009:223 and note 1; Meyer 2005) but had it existed Bergson might have usefully deployed it here. Rather than simply being a matter of evolution as conformance to the demands of an environment, this is a turning of life towards itself, an autopoietic move that invents itself, involuntarily, as it evolves in an internal and intensive movement of difference.

Bergson attempts to create a biologically extended philosophy that can account for the continuity of all living creatures – not just human life - and also for the discontinuity that the qualitative fact of evolution entails: creative evolution is another way of saying continuous discontinuity (Ansell Pearson 2002:71). Bergson argues that neither Darwinian mechanism (of adaptation to externalities) nor Lamarckian finalism (where evolution proceeds teleologically, directed by the organism towards a pre-given final state) can adequately account for novelty and change. This original common impulse drives creation in all living species – the élan vital. This germinal life-force is intransitive, the constant elaboration of novel forms rather than simple reproduction (Ansell Pearson 1999: 157). Although this impetus is common, the incredible diversity that has resulted from evolution must be explained by a principle of divergence and differentiation. Bergson suggests that these successive evolutionary movements constitute tendencies that cluster in two main divergent forms: instinct and intelligence. Human knowledge results from intelligence, which is analytic, external, practical and spatialized – and engages with the world through tools. It is thus more distanced from experience and duration than is instinct, although better able to reflect on it. Intuition and creative evolution (or involution) have no knowable endpoint, remaining always open (Williams 1916).

Bergson recognises that the vital principle does not reside in the organism itself but in genetic energy, and this allows for a non-organismic reading of evolution (Ansell Pearson 1999: 159-63). Essentially, organisms are to be thought of as intensive sites of influence, assemblages of symbionts, parasites, chemical and other reactions, with permeable and porous boundaries, that enfold their environment and radiate (and are irradiated by) vectors of transversal communication, with complex and multiple causal relations.

Ethics

In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion Bergson considers the tensions between two human tendencies. The first is towards accepting moral obligation, duty and the security of socially cohesive community, supported by rigid rules demanding obedience, a “closed” morality and static religion. Such a society exclusively aims at its own survival, and often sets itself at war with other societies, being intolerant of difference. Considering the often cultish nature of corporate culture initiatives, it is interesting to note that Bergson identifies in this society the “fabulation function”, a particular operation of the imagination that creates “voluntary hallucinations.” Myths of gods, and god-like founders, support cultural cohesion and discourage questioning of values.

Alternatively, “open” morality and dynamic religion are concerned with creativity and progress, are inclusive and welcoming of others and peaceful in their objectives, aiming to create an “open society”. They are fuelled by “creative emotions” like “the impetus of love” that spur us inwardly and intensively to prosocial action (Lawlor and Moulard 2013).

Creative emotions are not formulaic – emotion is unstable and disrupts the habitual socialised response of intelligence by creating its own representations. This extreme emotional creativity is close to both madness and mysticism, but it is a genuine experience that provokes action, not a categorical response that signals and occasions conformity.

For Bergson, dynamic religion is mystical, but this dynamism could be extended to other less mystical cultural formations. Organized and ordered doctrines – or engineered corporate cultures – are always static, because they are essentially representational and seek to render action predictable by controlling the predicates of action. But social collaborations where cultures develop without prescriptions or objectives are at least potentially dynamic. Machine bureaucracy and linear rule by accountants quickly extinguishes entrepreneurial dynamism as well as real social responsibility, and as Bergson would have expected, the spatialised extensive response is to try to engineer some representation or measure of “enterprise” back in, organise its “antecedents”, and engineer its increase somehow without ever understanding what “it” might be outside its abstract expression. Bergson’s active and changing morality discovers itself in action, as “action on the move creates its own route, creates to a great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled, and thus baffles all calculation” (Bergson 1935/1977: 291).

Bergson here links to the Kierkegaard of Either/Or (Kierkegaard 1992) in which judgment, by which we can read ethics, is more than the (extensive) application of codes or principles unbendingly from situation to situation: ethics and intuition are inextricably linked, and without intuition there can be no judgment, as ethics must be both intensive and open in relation to the other in each new and novel encounter, and must entail dynamic moral action. Existential uncertainty, and the risk that one may be wrong, is part of an open morality – with the perhaps unexpected conclusion that being ethical can bring its own excitement, as in Kierkegaard (see chapter on Kierkegaard in this volume). Bergson influenced Lévinas’ (1999) development of an ethics of becoming in Otherwise than Being, where the encounter with the other is not only the first ethical and relational demand but also first philosophy, but Bergson’s open society presents a stronger social dimension. Bergson in organization studies.

Bergson’s creative evolution was identified as a paradigm for rebalancing the structure-process relation in human organization by the late Robert Cooper (Cooper 1976:1000; Thanem [2001:350]). Chia (1996:209-11) in his book on deconstruction follows Cooper, discussing Bergson’s approach to metaphysics in arguing for intuitive knowing against analytic knowing, and metaphysical inquiry as a “form of rigorous inquiry which attempts to dispense with symbols.” Bergson’s attempts to go beyond symbol involved the play of a great number of images that pre-echoed the mood of deconstruction but not its method. Chia complements his metaphysical argument with a requirement to get empirically and intuitively closer to the object, yet the decidedly intellectual discussion stops at the level of organizational analysis and neglects the potentially supportive existence of new anthropology and deconstructive ethnography (Linstead 1993). Bergson subsequently becomes part of a “process mix” with James, Bateson, Whitehead, Deleuze and Derrida in Chia and Ian King (1998) on how organizations structure novelty; Chia (1999) on non-Parmenidean change; and Tsoukas and Chia (2002:570-72) on organizational becoming, focusing on intuition and perception with an ironically highly rational argument, displaying a distinct cognitivist bias in parts. Expressing their central research question as “What must organization(s) be like if change is constitutive of reality?” Tsoukas and Chia (2002:570) miss the point that neither change nor reality in Bergson is transitive, which is what makes a language of change problematic. Chia and Holt (2009: 112-118 et seq.), put intuition, perception and duration to work in a gentle critique of the implicit documentary realism of research on strategy-as-practice.

Discussing strategic change, Letiche (2000) studies Bergson carefully and extensively and utilizes intuition, duration and the élan vital in outlining “phenomenal complexity theory”. This critiques the varieties of complexity theory where terms frequently have several acceptations, and the more general neglect of consciousness, which leaves the core concept of “emergence” poorly understood.

Memory suffers similar neglect, even in Chia’s (2002) short essay on time and duration, although it serves a crucial function in the mediation of multiplicities of order (which include structure), and multiplicities of organization (understood as the activity of life), and in any understanding of history and evolution. Brown (2006), whose work elsewhere in the psychology of memory has drawn extensively on Bergson, offers an extended discussion of Bergson’s take on evolution, and a careful exposition of the “organizational impetus”, and its relation to structure, both real and mythologised. Life is organization, insofar as it is the impulse to organise, rather than “the organized forms which it leaves behind, like shed skin.” (Brown 2006:319).

Scott (2010: 83-106) offers the most extensive and close reading of Bergson to date in the

field of organization studies. His project is a reading of Deleuze, outlining the development of a Deleuzian view of organization. This important treatment inevitably remains flawed by its dependence on Deleuze’s text on Bergson (Guerlac, 2006:176-95 outlines important differences) and being written ten years before it was published neglects recent advances in Bergsonian and Deleuzian scholarship. Nevertheless, it highlights important issues:

a) Bergson is a non-dialectical thinker. He struggled against the dominant Hegelianism

of his time, dualisms that become oppositions and dialectical agonistics.

b) Bergson’s ontology is positive but not positivist. It is affirmative, and I would add practical. Again this affirmative approach seeks to sidestep the need for dynamism to be found only in conflict as in Hegel, replacing it with the dynamism of heterogeneous multiplicity, rather than the homogeneous multiplicity of order (Scott 2010:102).

c) Organization is the actualization of the virtual, but is not quantitatively predetermined because memory and duration, consciousness and freedom are qualitative. Thus there is a difference between the realization of the possible (in which the real resembles one possibility delimited and selected from others) and the evolutionary process itself, where virtualities become creatively actualized (as with the actualization of DNA to organism, for example - see Deleuze 1988:97-99).

d) Organization is unforeseeable, and improvisable, and defies information processing or semiotic approaches to its definition. Organization and meaning are linked, and opposed to order and information (Scott 2010:92). Approaches to (strategic) foresight are flawed because if prediction is able to foretell a future, it is because a simple virtual has multiple actualizations. But Bergson argues that the virtual transforms itself through the process of its actualization, actively creating these terms, so that the actual cannot therefore be foreseen. Being is an actualization of becoming, expressed in a language that is invented or improvised as it goes along.

e) Organization is grounded in difference but contains convergence, through the

principle of coexistence at the level of the virtual – that is, everything is connected.

Humanity can cut across the planes and divisions that disrupt this coexistence at the level of actuality by the exercise of consciousness, intuition and intellect that offers freedom – the creative triumph over mechanism.

Two organization studies journals have garnered contributions applying Bergson to

problems in the field. Organization (9/1, 2002) featured contributions by Linstead, Calori, O’Shea and Wood. Linstead distinguishes Bergson’s qualitative and intensive approach from the more mechanical approaches to psychological and affective phenomena, such as motivation and emotion, found in mainstream organizational psychology, and driving the continual refinement of means to measure the object, arguing for organization theory to be seen as a process of continual refocusing (developed in Linstead 2005). Calori (2002) offers a dynamic attempt to integrate Bergson with Merleau-Ponty’s hyperdialectics, illustrating this with the extensive reflections of a successful CEO of an international family company (Salomon). O’Shea (2002) addresses the issue of new product development and innovation. The future is not to be known, but to be realised, which makes a significant difference to understanding innovation, which he illustrates through ethnographic field work. Wood (2002) applies the concepts of creative involution (Williams 1916) and transversal communication to critique dominant approaches to the organization of knowledge, developing a threefold process model of problematization, differentiation, and temporalization (see also Wood 2003; Wood and Ferlie 2003).

There has also been a special issue of Culture and Organization (9,1, 2003). Here

Linstead and Mullarkey (2003) argue that Bergson offers an embodied conception of culture through his views of intuition as situated within experience rather than about it; the importance of the body in social experience; and the importance of morality and religion in social life. Bergson’s culture for them is socialised time actualised in experienced duration or durée – culture is always in motion, and does not need culture clash to drive change. But actual cultural expressions and formulations are not, which runs counter to functionalist and psychoanalytic views of culture. Culture grounded in experienced time and driven by the élan

vital is in ceaseless motion – it is duration because it is en-dured as a multiplicity rather than as a unity. Styrhe (2003) complements Wood’s work on knowledge and the virtual; Watson (2003) discusses bodily entanglement and affect; Hatzenberger (2003) offers a Utopian reading of the concept of “open” society in Bergson’s final work; and Power (2003) outlines the relation between freedom and sociability, and hence culture, in Bergson (see also Scott 2010:105). Bergson: Why now and what next for organization studies?

Organization studies has tended to encounter Bergson largely through a rear-view mirror via and through Deleuze, and although there is a significant if still relatively small body of work that encounters Bergson directly, he is usually discussed partially, alongside James, Whitehead and Deleuze. As we have seen, his work has been used in discussing creativity, innovation, knowledge management, new product development and change management and these efforts merit further application. But outside existing studies, what more is there to gain by approaching his work directly after, in most cases, more than a century?. Below I identify three orienting beacons of relevance, significance and impact and a few more speculative inspirational fireworks to initiate the process.

First beacon, relevance: Bergson’s philosophy is one of action, process and

movement. In a world where organizational change is regarded as constant, Bergson offers a philosophy that makes change its basic principle and thinks it through ontologically,

metaphysically and methodologically – offering the radical principle (for organization studies) that the discipline needs to change (conceptually, empirically) along with immanent changes in its object or field of inquiry. His tensile understanding of the real as virtual multiplicity dissolves polarised discussions of realism and constructionism.

Second beacon, significance: Bergson reorients the simplistic divisions that still haunt organization and management research by a radical clarification of the distinction between quantitative and qualitative multiplicity (with associated concepts of the extensive and intensive, focusing and refocusing, and immanence) in a way that exposes the flaws of seeing the latter in terms of the first, without dismissing the former – rather placing it more accurately in terms of what it can and cannot be used to achieve. His methodological questioning of how to think the new offers responses relevant to everyday life as much as to new media and the new sciences (Hansen 2004).

Third beacon, impact: anyone who has read literature, watched film or perused art from the 20th century period of aesthetic modernism has, directly or indirectly, been impacted by Bergson. This is because Bergson’s philosophy is a practical one and requires philosophy to engage, and stay engaged, with life directly – the kind of super-empiricism that animates process philosophy more generally. Bergson’s intuitive style offers resources to underpin a non-psychologised turn to affect, as suggested by Thrift’s (2007) summary of non-representational theory. It also opens out to the incorporation of an immanent aesthetics into new methodologies incorporating the humanities and arts into the practices of social inquiry (cf. Rancière 2010; see also Linstead and Höpfl 2000).

More specifically, we can identify some fusées that could usefully be launched:

First flare: Bergson is an aporetic (or problem-focused) thinker (Moore 1996: 97-104; During 2002) – that is, he thinks philosophy in terms of the history of its problems and in particular its false problems (which are generated by its regimes of self-reference). Organization studies is rarely if ever conceived of in this problematizing way (Wood 2002). Within critical approaches problems that emerge as the result of applying preassigned positions would fall more within the consideration of dialectics than Bergson’s teasing out of problematic relations within duration. Rasche (2011) devotes considerable discussion to a Derridean approach to aporetics, but completely neglects Bergson’s influential contribution.

Second flare: Bergson’s view of [non-sexual] desire, like that of Deleuze and Bataille, is of a differentiating force that proliferates rather than as a lack to be filled. This alternate non-Hegelian take on desire is one that organization studies has found it difficult to integrate critically, but which underpins very different orientations to a variety of social and organizational phenomena including motivation, knowledge, consumption and identity (Brewis et al 2006). Bergson is a key figure in the translation of a tendency running from Spinoza through Lyotard and Baudrillard but significantly contrasting with Lacan and recent appropriations of his work in organization studies. Any question of freedom, as Guerlac (2006:105) observes, is also a broader question of desire, and this is where Bergson’s ethics engages with both alterity and novelty.

Third flare: Bergson’s concept of duration and the nature of time remains to be applied to most areas of organizational studies as temporalization (Wood 2002), where time is still spatialised as this mirrors the practical needs of its production-oriented object field. This has enormous empirical potential, especially in studies of culture. Approaches to story-

telling and narrative can be informed by his cinematic understanding of the fabulation function (where stories are actively completed by the audience, and may therefore be incomplete in their presentation – a feature of common-sense understanding that influenced Schutz and Garfinkel, who found empirical evidence for the basic process [Mullarkey 2009]).

Fourth flare: Bergson’s approach to memory within temporality has implications for organization and management history, and the emerging field of organizational memory studies, and remains distinct from that of his interpreters like Sartre or Ricouer (contra Cunliffe et al 2004). Whilst organizational memory has been recognised as part of the construction of organizational knowledge, and considered from perspectives of information conservation, narrative construction and discourse analysis, Bergson’s distinctive “rotating cone” of processual focusing, refocusing, contracting and inserting of memory into action emphasises the dynamics of memory over its representational aspects.

Fifth flare: Bergson challenges evolutionary approaches familiar in organization studies (though more in tune with recent developments in biological thinking). His non-

determinist thought challenges evolutionary approaches in organization theory that follow neo-Darwinist, Lamarckian or evolutionary psychological approaches. His understanding of the nature of a population, the multi-level dynamics of variation-selection-retention, isomorphism, transversal communication and the transmission of affect differs productively from current understandings in population ecology, institutional theory and critical realism.

Sixth flare: Bergson also challenges some recent descendants of social constructionism in organization studies that argue for non-polaristic relationality. These attempt to reconnect constructionism, language, dialectics and dialogics, and existentialism are fruitfully undermined by Bergson’s non-dialectical approach. Similar approaches to relationality that see the construction of reality as occurring in the communicative space between subject and subject (Cunliffe 2011) simply add a qualitative spin to spatialization through their construction of intersubjectivity.

Seventh flare: Bergson can renew concerns with writing organization that avoid some of the “exhaustion” characteristic of poststructuralist treatments of text and discourse. His suspicion of representation and his discussion of writing prefigures Derrida, in particular, and yet does not limit the scope of his attention nor his deployment of metaphor. Here his subtle understanding of “image” can be a fruitful alternative to emerging cognitivist treatments of metaphor in organization studies, and connects to approaches to non-representational theory (Thrift 2007).

Eighth flare: Bergson enables a revisitation of the human in human organization. Bergson was pioneering in attempting to incorporate the latest advances in biology and psychology into a philosophy of the human and social sciences. Contemporary developments in physics (Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Prigogine 1997), biology (Dawkins 1983; Ansell Pearson 1999) and complexity have underlined the continuing relevance of his ideas, including that of the irreversibility of time, and there has been increasing discussion of his connection to the “new” sciences in the past two decades (Papanicolaou and Gunter 1987; cf. also Rose, 2013).

Ninth flare: Bergson offers a radical ethics of alterity, grounded in the corporeal and empirical, creatively fusing questions of freedom and desire. Bergson influenced Lévinas, whose work has been taken up in some of the more ethical corners of organization studies, but in his later work Bergson offers a broader and less phenomenological understanding of notions like obligation (Mullarkey 1999b). Further, he offers an alternative to the Heideggerian prioritisation of language as the “house of being”, and the insistence that being is one rather than multiple – Heidegger’s collective concept of “gathering” is not a multiplicity, nor does such “gathering” constitute a community. Bergson’s “open society” offers a way to think of the immanence of commonality, the inclusive but dynamic “community to come”, participating in an intuited relationality that discovers itself in action with the potential of outstripping its own concepts – like ethics and social responsibility.

Finally, Bergson, for all his with influence on others and the comfortable temptation to read him through these interpretive refractions, deserves the kind of direct and intimate reading that his method urged on philosophy in engaging with life itself. He did, after all, win the Nobel Prize for literature, and his writing is its own reward. But for those nervous of taking this journey alone, Robinson (2009:220-34) offers a brief but useful process glossary.

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