ii. In Matter and Memory, Bergson argued that perception and affection were inseparable though distinct modalities of sensation:
We must correct, at least in this particular, our theory of pure perception. We have argued as though our perception were a part of the images, detached, as such, from their entirety, as though, expressing the virtual action of the object upon our body, or of our body upon the object, perception merely isolated from the total object that aspect of it which interests us. But we have to take into account the fact that our body is not a mathematical point in space, that its virtual actions are complicated by, and impregnated with, real actions, or, in other words, that there is no perception without affection. Affection is, then, that part or aspect of the inside of our body which we mix with the image of external bodies; it is what we must first of all subtract from perception to get the image in its purity." (58; emphasis added)
Bergson's theory forms the basis for my account of new media in New Philosophy for New Media, where I argue that digital artists, in their efforts to distance themselves from cinematic conditions of perception, pursue a “Bergsonist vocation.'
iii. In Bergsonist terms, we must differentiate two “extremes" related to the "body": on the one hand, the corporeal body and, on the other, the larger field of the “out-of-body" where the body merely propagates, and does not filter, images. Indeed, the body acts “like a magnetic field," encroaching on these two zones, winning over the out-of-body insofar as we can delay our reactions and winning over the mineralized body to the extent that we can punctuate our automatisms. Perception can be said to take place only where both of these bodily actions are involved, only when “there is an increase in the field of images between the out-of-body of interactions and the mineralized body of our automatisms" (147). What this means is that perception is contaminated by affection in two ways: first, following Bergson, through its accompaniment by an affective correlate in the perceiving body; second, through the nonperceived force of the longitudinal—that is, the way the milieu of interactions forms a “texture of sensation” that pervades and influences the body's framing of space.
iv. Here is how Gil contextualizes his intervention:
This work is about the relations between power and the body. This does not mean those which result from the effects of the former on the latter.... Nor does it include those which come from the action of the body on power, which covers a domain occupied by all sorts of ideologies and “liberatory” doctrines of the body. It is about the effects on the circulation of bodily powers that nourish formations of power in all fields. In other words, and we must stress this notion, it is not a question of studying forces ... according to their representational contents, but to grasp them in the way they function in their own right, that is, in the way they may differ from the signs and symbols that are attached to them. (xii)
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