Physical Bergsonism and the Worldliness of Time

This article approaches the problem of capital's cotemporary dispositifs from the rather unusual perspective of physics. It draws our attention to a surprising re-emergence of Bergson's critique of spatializing concepts of time in a paper recently published in the influential Foundations of Physics Letters, whose author, Peter Lynds, criticizes modern physics for maintaining at its very foundations a nonsensical notion of time, i.e. time as a succession of static instants. In doing this, he unintentionally revitalizes the famous debate between Einstein & Bergson, which the latter was believed to have lost. The fact that Bergson's critique re-emerges from within the physics community itself Olma takes as a sign of an increasing receptivity to qualitative -- i.e. non-spatial -- understandings of time. Taking Einstein's 'discovery' of relativity as a historical example, Olma argues 'that the materiality of social time forms the ontological fabric out of which conceptual -- i.e. physical -- time emerges'. If we are willing to follow him in this assertion, it seems evident that physics' newly-found interest in Bergsonism (or at least Bergson-inspired critique) indicates a dramatic shift in the materiality of the contemporary social. As much as modernity's dispositifs tended toward spatialization, Olma argues, as much do today's postmodern dispositifs temporalize the organization of social praxis. In order to substantiate the temporalization thesis he draws on today's financial markets as well as the spread of time-based organization. References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2007.]