Abstract
This chapter turns to the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson to accomplish two goals. First, I use Bergson’s distinction between spatial and temporal thought to explain how inanimate objects and environments can be constitutive components of affirmative feedback loops. Second, through a close reading of Bergson’s description of memory, I extend my account of affirmation from the psychological into the somatic. That is to say, I argue that affirmation is both a psychological component of identity formation and the process that determines our embodied relationship to specific people and spaces. This allows me, over the rest of the text, to explain why hostile or unwelcoming interactions and spaces have a harmful impact on our movement and bodily comfort, while affirming and welcoming environments allow for physical relaxation and what I call fluid mobility.
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Notes
- 1.
One word of caution: rainbow flags and other visible markers of LGBT inclusion should only be displayed if you are certain that the space is safe for LGBT people. Putting up a flag does not guarantee safety, and you should only use these signals if the staff has been trained and policies put in place to protect LGBT constituents.
- 2.
Remember that by self I mean what Lindemann calls the “embodied locus of idiosyncratic causation and experience” (Lindemann 2014, 203), and I use the term self interchangeably with personality and identity.
- 3.
In using the term fluid mobility I am not positing a normative set of capabilities. Fluidity can only be defined in reference to a specific person’s embodiment. Fluid mobility for someone who walks will be very different from that of someone who uses a wheelchair. Fluid mobility has clear resonance with phenomenology and specifically with discussion of habit or habitual motion. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the soccer player in Phenomenology of Perception comes to mind. Inasmuch as fluidity is structured by memory and also determinative of how our identities come to bear upon the way we inhabit different spaces, I think the account most similar to my own is Sara Ahmed’s “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” where she says, “Public spaces take shape through the habitual actions of bodies, such that the contours of space could be described as habitual. I turn to the concept of habits to theorize not so much how bodies acquire their shape, but how spaces acquire the shape of the bodies that ‘inhabit’ them. We could think about the ‘habit’ in the ‘in-habit’” (Ahmed 2007, 156).
- 4.
“Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states. … The past and the present states [form] into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another. … The proof is that, if we interrupt the rhythm by dwelling longer than is right on one note of the tune, it is not its exaggerated length, as length, which will warn us of our mistake, but the qualitative change thereby caused in the whole of the musical phrase (Bergson 2001b, 100–1).
- 5.
It might be helpful to think of a multiplayer video game where the screen is divided into different sections for each player. The players see the world from the perspective of their character—it is arrayed around their point of view or the image of their own bodies. If you approach another player and then look at their screen, you will see the fact that your view of the world is rooted in what is, for the other player, the image of your body in the world.
- 6.
I am reminded of spam emails which claim that “it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.” The fact that we can read this jumbled text speaks to the role of memory images in aiding our perception.
- 7.
One notable exception is Ed Casey’s Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. 1997. University of Indiana Press. See, in particular, Chap. 8, “Body Memory,” 146–80.
- 8.
See Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage; and Halperin, David M. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge.
- 9.
The past is “continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing—rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow” (Bergson 1998, 2).
References
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———. 2001a. Matter and Memory: Essay on the Relation of Body and Spirit. New York: Zone
———. 2001b. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. London: Dover Press
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Johnston, T.R. (2016). Embodied Memory and Fluid Mobility. In: Affirmation, Care Ethics, and LGBT Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59304-7_3
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