Henri Bergson and New Materialism

Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory presents a panpsychist ontology. Bergson pushes the dualism of mind and matter to breaking point. Matter is reconceived as the sum of all images. Idealism and deterministic materialism are bypassed. We get an indeterministic and emancipative model of the world. The idea that matter is inherently creative and endowed with both perception and memory is highly relevant today. Materiality, far from being dead or passive, is equipped with agency. Bergson’s themes coincide with the concerns of contemporary New Materialism. Authors working in the latter school explicitly cite Bergson as a key inﬂuence. Bergson can help us understand what “newness” means in New Materialism. That being said, recent scholarship has pointed to certain unpalatable political implications of Bergson’s works, in particular the anthropological premises of Two Sources of Morality and Religion . In my article, I seek to address such critiques. In my view, by reading Bergson ontologically as a New Materialist process philosophy, some of the unfortunate cultural and ideological presuppositions Bergson did not reﬂect upon may be ameliorated to a great extent.


Introductory Remarks
Over the past decade, New Materialism has emerged as a trend within theory.The geographic loadedness of this term notwithstanding, theory 1 more broadly has demonstrated a new openness towards a range of configurations such as the ahuman, nonhuman or posthuman (Braidotti, 2022;Braidotti and Hlavajova, 2018;Ferrando, 2019;Grusin, 2015;Herbrechter, 2021;MacCormack, 2020).New Materialism is part of a general postanthropocentric turn.Despite their striking ideological diversity, the novelty of these tendencies lies in their shared rejection of humanism, as well as the systematic critique of various dualisms (mind vs body, matter vs spirit, male vs female, nature vs culture) associated with oppressive structures of anthropocentric domination.As Val Plumwood ecofeminist philosopher showed in the by now classic work, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, the various binaries undergirding Eurocentric modernity form a coherent whole.Underlying all the interconnected social structures of oppression is the dualism between humans and nonhumans (Plumwood, 1993).This insight informs much of subsequent New Materialist theory.According to the view proposed by New Materialist/posthumanist feminist scholars such as Rosi Braidotti, the devaluation of matter, especially acute since René Descartes' division of the world into thought and matter (the latter being categorized as passive, undistinct, uniform res extensa) can be mapped critically onto masculinist devaluations of the feminine as somehow irrational and being situated closer to the realm of nature than the male.For Braidotti, Descartes' separation between mind and body, the latter consigned to the benighted realm of mere extension, is by far the most disastrous of the modern dualisms, for it has contributed in greatest measure to the consolidation of a "modern rational order" that seeks to regulate and reorganize materiality (Braidotti, 1994, p. 58).In post-Cartesian metaphysics, the mind is conceived of as masculine, the seat of 1 Under this term, I understand contemporary philosophy of any type that deals with the big questions relating to reality, being, the meaning of nature and the ontological status of life.Any discourse lacking such a focus I hesitate to designate with the term "philosophy."activity, whereas the body is feminine, passively following (ideally) the commands of mind.
A recent critique of New Materialism emphasizes how the movement is far from "new".Indeed, the works of both leading feminist scholars quoted above (Plumwood and Braidotti) dates back to the 1990s, as do the early works of fellow New Materialist Neo-Deleuzian philosopher Manuel DeLanda (DeLanda, 1997).Michał Krzykawski goes even further back in time, highlighting how New Materialism's rejection of metaphysical dualism is essentially a rehash of the French process philosopher Henri Bergson's anti-dualist metaphysics.In Krzykawski's highly skeptical view, because of its resemblance and even explicit borrowings from Bergson, "it is (...) unclear on what basis new materialism can be defined as a new metaphysics (...) and what is actually new in this affair" (Krzykawski, 2019, p. 94).In this article, I seek to make explicit what the "newness" of New Materialism means, defending the movement from the accusation of empty sloganeering or, worse, academic marketing levelled against it by Krzykawski's rather mean-spirited critique.I shall argue that far from discrediting New Materialism, its endorsement of a Bergsonian view of reality is a strength.In the first half of this paper, I present a reading of

Towards the Frameless Mind: Taking Dualisms to their Extremes
In an interview with Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, two leading proponents of New Materialism, Braidotti emphasizes the following, interrelated points: "as a meta-methodological innovation, the embodied and embedded brand of feminist materialist philosophy of the subject introduces a break from both universalism and dualism" (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012a, p. 22).My goal here is not a reconstruction of materialist feminism, New Materialism or materialism as a whole.Rather, it is to critically investigate the specific uses of Bergson's metaphysics within New Materialist scholarship.My primary motivation with this piece is to craft a compelling response to Krzykawski's summary dismissal of New Materialism as a movement that brings nothing new to the table compared with Bergson's metaphysics.Bergson would supposedly give us everything we need, and New Materialism is therefore superfluous.In my view, this criticism is severely misplaced, resting upon a fundamental misunderstanding of what the "newness" of New Materialism actually is.Simply put, Krzykawski has attributed a falsely narrow meaning to the word "new", with devastating ramifications for the entire train of throught the author proposes.Firstly, however, I begin with an outline of how Bergson suggests we ought to overcome dualism in metaphysics.
New Materialism is, in essence, a continuation of the Bergsonian project, as outlined in Matter and Memory.In this regard, its proponents are very clear.Bergson's importance, for Dolphijn and van der Tuin, lies in the demonstration that "while ordinary dualism is inherently problematic, the act of making distinctions between terms is not.It is the treatment the distinguished terms receive that makes dominant cultural theory-then and now-questionable" (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2011, p. 391).The philosophy of Bergson, for Dolphijn and van der Tuin, constitutes an opportunity for "rewriting" or "diffracting" modernity.By borrowing the method and even content of Bergson's process metaphysics (alongside other representatives of process philosophy influenced by Bergson, such as Alfred N. Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), we may elaborate a view of materiality that conceives of matter as active, self-creative or "agential."In the view of New Materialist feminism, materiality is itself laden with performativity (Barad, 2003).To paraphrase process theologian Charles Hartshorne, if "all activity is creative", then this also means that all matter is creative too (Hartshorne, 1937, p. 165).Bergson is often read as a vitalist, but, as Thomas Nail has correctly pointed out, the most important insight of Bergson's philosophy is its recognition of "the absolute primacy of mobility," identifying "duration and the élan vital with movement itself" (Nail, 2019, p. 35).Nail holds that this was a relatively late development in Bergson's work, but I believe this metaphysical position was present from the outset.Bergson's invocation of consciousness against both materialism and idealism already leads beyond the false dualism of matter versus mind.This theoretical breakthrough is the model which New Materialism follows in its attempt to similarly overcome dualisms still prevalent in late modernity (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2011, p. 394).Above all, I am interested in how Bergson's metaphysics can be read in a New Materialist vein.Of course, it is far from evident that Bergson is indeed amenable to a New Materialist, emancipatory, and/or feminist reading.Rebecca Hill for one has argued that underlying Bergson's vitalistic monism is a violently hypermasculinist fetishization of life as striving or growth, rendering it unsuitable for use in the context of feminist theory altogether (Hill, 2008).Against Hill's wholesale rejection of Bergson's philosophy, van der Tuin has argued for a "diffractive" reading that extracts and reuses various elements without affirming or denying the positionality of an author as a whole.Following Donna J. Haraway, van der Tuin characterizes diffraction methodologically as the rejection of any "fixity between signifier and signified, word and thing" (van der Tuin, 2011, p. 26). 3 Reality is simply too fluid for us to strictly confront various schools and concepts with each other.Conceptual creation as an imperative necessitates readings that heighten mutual interference among even antagonistic schools of thought.Instead of Descartes' ideal of reaching clare et distincte judgements, the aim is creative interbreeding of concepts, generating maximal conceptual chaos, an approximation of discourse with the real multiplicity of materiality.
The overarching goal of Matter and Memory is to take us beyond the dualism of idealism on the one hand and materialism on the other.Bergson's method is to take the duality of representation and represented and extend it to the point whereby conventional concepts break apart.By pushing dualism to an extreme, the "contradictory elements" of each pole can be successfully "dissociated", fragmenting them until a third term emerges (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896]], p. 181).Key to the proposed transcendence of dualism is the idea of the self-existing image.This entails the rejection of the ontological gulf between primary and secondary qualities.As Bergson mentions, already George Berkeley recognized that secondary qualities are just as real as primary qualities.Differently put, a representation is not a second-hand derivative of a somehow "realer" or more material reality "out there."Everything is an image: "all seems to take place as if, in this aggregate of images which I call the universe, nothing really new could happen except through the medium of certain particular images, the type of which is furnished me by my body" (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896]], p. 18).Far from being the seat of representations, the brain too, just like the body, is an image among images, a media for the transmission of movement.As Bergson states, "my body is (...) an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving back movement" (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896]], p. 19).The world is built of images, centers of action that are always already active in themselves.No longer do we have Descartes' uniform res extensa, or discrete particles that can be neatly separated from each other.Materiality is defined by Bergson as the sum of active images: "I call matter the aggregate of all images, and perception of matter these same images referred to the eventual action of one particular image, my body" (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896]], p. 22).We can say that the universe in this model is not composed of objects and their movements.Rather, an image is movement itself.Decades prior to quantum physics, Bergson presents a cosmology wherein particles are conceived of as particles of change.Substance is alternation.As Mark Sinclair summarizes, in Matter and Memory "an ontology of unchanging, discontinuous and essentially inert things changing position according to relations of force which act upon them from the outside is dissolving in the development of the sciences, Bergson suggests, into an ontology of vibratory movements and lines of force showing up against a background of universal continuity" (Sinclair, 2020, p. 119).This emphasis on impermanence has important ramifications for the mind-body problem.
We cannot declare that an image is necessarily outside or inside of us.Presaging the insights of relativity theory, Bergson upholds the inherently relational nature of such spatial categories.There is no privileged image in the universe: any such view is an illusion stemming from our own imbrication in the manifold relations of the world (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896]], p. 26).As Frédéric Worms points out regarding images, "neither the body, nor for that matter consciousness can contain these representations" (Worms, 1997, p. 189).An image is movement or, more precisely, the manifestation of change visualized at the moment of its coming-into-interference with other changes.The relativity of images by no means reduces or minimizes the role of the body.Suzanne Guerlac correctly points out the dependence of memory (identified with virtuality) on action or perception, which Bergson identifies (at least in the case of biological organisms) with the body: "memory-images, which are virtual, need the body to come to life or actualize themselves"  (Guerlac, 2020, p. 115).In readings of Matter and Memory, perception is commonly associated with the actual, while memory has often been associated with the virtual. 4Far from privileging the virtual as some type of Platonic idea though, as Deleuze and the latter's followers are sometimes prone to doing, Bergson recognizes the unavoidable dependence of the virtual (memory) upon the actual (corporeality).To become actual -that is, recalled-memory needs a body.Recall is an action which is inherently embodied: "memories need, for their actualization, a motor ally, (...) they require for their recall a kind of mental attitude which must itself be engrafted upon an attitude of the body" (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896]], p. 120).This recognition again pre-dates the corporeal turn in French phenomenology by over half a century, the materialist turn in feminist philosophy, not to mention the very late concept of the "embodied mind" in analytical philosophies of mind.We are still in many ways coming to grips with Bergson's novelty.
The reason memory is contrasted with action here is to break down the boundary separating representation and represented.
What is most interesting from a New Materialist standpoint is that Bergson does not delimit the scope of perception.If we read Bergson diffractively, this entails a new interpretation of the body's parallel centrality and decentrality.While embodiment is key for representation and memory, the same does not apply to perception, the latter defined as the preparation of movement.The body is a limitation of perception, a narrowing and concentration of consciousness: "unlimited de jure", perception "confines itself de facto to indicating the degree of indetermination allowed to the acts of the special image which you call your body" (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896]], p. 40-1).From the standpoint of common-sense, the result is truly bizarre.As Dorothea Olkowski stresses, "for Bergson, any unconscious material point has greater perception than an entity with consciousness" (Olkowski, 2021, p. 85).The audacity of Bergson's move retains its radicalness over a century later.Ordinarily, it would seem all but certain that consciousness is concentrated within supposedly "intelligent" organisms, replete with highly organized nervous systems, displaying many neural connections.A dolphin is more intelligent than a fly, so we are told by biologists, because the latter's brain contains fewer neural pathways.And so on.Reducing consciousness to brain states alone would be, for Bergson, a bad way of going beyond dualism. 5On the one hand, materialists cannot explain manifestation, how something comes to represent something else.Idealists, on the other hand, are incapable of coming to terms with how material changes always exceed our consciousness of these changes.

Matter and
Memory, by extending consciousness beyond the body, seeks a middle way between materialism and idealism: "we maintain, as against materialism, that perception overflows infinitely the cerebral state; but we have endeavored to establish, as against idealism, that matter goes in every direction beyond our representation of it, a representation which the mind has gathered out of it, so to speak, by an intelligent choice" (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896]], p. 181).Because change is not instantaneous, every alternation has a history, so to speak, a durational thickness.By consequence, there is no meaningful qualitative difference between a "merely" material movement and behaviors exhibited by a living body: "concrete movement, capable, like consciousness, of prolonging its past into its present, capable, by repeating itself, of engendering sensible qualities, already possesses something akin to consciousness, something akin to sensation" (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896]], p. 245-6).Joel Dolbeault is entirely correct in characterizing Matter and Memory as in essence constituting a panpsychist cosmology 6 (Dolbeault, 2018, p. 555-6).Intelligence emerges when organisms learn to canalize consciousness, reducing its extension and upgrading its intensity in the process.Movement is already behavior.
Bergson's metaphysics attempts an overthrow of what we may call "ordinary dualism" by displacing the duality of mind and body (or mind and matter) with the new dualism of perception and memory.What Deleuze writes of the present is actually true of all durations: "it is pure becoming, always outside itself" (Deleuze, 1991(Deleuze, [1966]], p. 55).By extending perception far beyond the confines of either brain or body, Bergson elaborates a view of materialization as ceaseless self-actualization.If perception is boundless and contains all power, memory is the relative absence of change, the ebb within the flow: "sensation is, in its essence, extended and localized; it is a source of movement.Pure memory, being inextensive and powerless, does not in any degree share the nature of sensation" (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896]], p. 140).It is erroneous to equate the Deleuzian position with the Bergsonian one. 7The performativity of matter demands that we take change seriously.Bergson's own use of language is rather deceptive regarding past and present."Practically, we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future" (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896]], p. 150).From this, Deleuze and commentators influenced by the Deleuzian reading extract the conclusion that the present, for Bergson, is nothing and that which is past (concretized in memory) everything.But let us not forget: a material image is always more than any perception of it!Hence, what Bergson is really saying is that the immediacy of the present flows profusely, in excess of any consciousness of said change.A movement-image, to borrow Deleuze's expression, is one and the same thing as the ceaseless gnawing of the actualizing powerful present, washing away the sedimentations of the virtual, powerless past.Irrespectively of whether we ourselves notice it or not, "the movement-image passes" (Olkowski, 2021, p. 90).New Materialism is born the moment we learn to take novelty seriously.

Bergson Beyond Eurocentric Modernity
Is Bergson's metaphysics relevant for the emancipatory politics proposed by New Materialism?The latter positions itself as a consciously emancipatory discourse.In the words of Dolphijn and van der Tuin, "new materialists have set themselves to a rewriting of all possible and impossible forms of emancipation" (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012b, p. 86).Elizabeth Grosz has claimed that "Bergson may help us to articulate an understanding of subjectivity, agency, and freedom that is more consonant with a feminism of difference than with an egalitarian feminism" (Grosz, 2010, p. 142).Therefore, the question of whether  (Glezos, 2021, p. 772).Certainly, Two Sources abounds in degrading second-hand anthropological descriptions of "primitive" natives, but it must also be recognized -and Glezos also does so -that mysticism and the Bergsonian concern with dynamism can be divorced from their Bergson in Two Sources seems to slip back into a teleological conception of social evolution, one that constructs "a hierarchy of societies" centered around their supposed degrees of openness (Al-Saji, 2019, p. 15). 9  The focus of al-Saji's critique is the central distinction mobilized in Two Sources: closed and open (static and dynamic) morality, as well as closed versus open society respectively.Al-Saji proposes that due to the unreflected culturalist and racist assumptions contained in this work, we must proceed with 9 This despite Bergson's clear and evident rejection of Herbert Spencer's idea of teleological evolution in L'évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution) (Verdeau, 2007).Its importance notwithstanding, due to various constraints I will not reflect upon that particular work in this paper, as it does not add much of metaphysical substance to Matter and Memory, while only connecting tangentially to Bergson's social philosophy.(Bergson, 1935(Bergson, [1932], p. 191)], p. 191).Open, dynamic religion would be a love that brooks no bounds, so it strikes the reader as peculiar why Bergson chooses to anchor this attitude within a specific tradition.Even more troubling though is the denigration of small, closed, static, "primitive" societies.The problem with a "primitive" society based upon tribal affinity is that it cannot "advance": being "contaminated by the products of its own laziness", it supposedly persists in a paranoiac distrust of the outside world, unable to open itself up to the outflowing of love (Bergson, 1935(Bergson, [1932]], p. 145).Static religion, because of its intolerance and tribal closure, moves around in circles, shutting itself off from the vital impetus (Bergson, 1935(Bergson, [1932]], p. 178).It is no wonder that Al-Saiji identifies a highly problematic culturalism at work here, which resembles "contemporary cultural racism, where discrimination against so-called illiberal cultural-religious minorities (in particular, Muslims, but often also Hasidic Jews) is justified based on their supposed intolerance and closure to change" (Al-Saji, 2019, p. 15).Bergson does not seem to extend the scope of tolerance to those perceived as less tolerant than the modern, liberal, secular, progressive cultural "majority".Tolerance does not apply to those outside of Eurocentric modernity.
A compelling argument can be made against readings that would overemphasize Bergson's pacifism (Dombrowski, 1991).Everybody, after all, desires peace, but more often than not exclusively on their own terms.We could certainly read the following statement as an implicit critique of France's imperialism: "a country considers itself incomplete if it has not good ports, colonies, etc.All this may lead to war" (Bergson, 1935(Bergson, [1932]], p. 250).However, al-Saji argues that "while imperialism and colonialism are often thought to be coextensive, this cannot be assumed in Bergson's theory (...) Bergson remains uncritical of French colonial politics, even while he condemns German imperialism" (Al-Saji, 2019, p. 17). 10 From the privileging of supposedly more universalist, open Christianity and European civilization, the legitimation of colonialism is but a small step: if we ourselves are genuinely open, should we not export our undiscriminating love of change to as many parts of the globe as possible?There certainly is not much to commend Bergson's rigidly dualistic contrast between dynamic, open societies and those which have solidified into stagnation (Bergson, 1935(Bergson, [1932]], p. 102).As Al-Saiji explains, "while mystics emerge in all societies, according to Bergson, the mystic call will find an easier foothold and greater receptivity in societies that are already in movement; there will be a more fluid acceptance of changing habits" (Al-Saji, 2019, p. 25).Because of its culturalist bias, one could easily draw the conclusion that Two Sources in itself is untenable as a social philosophy, and we ought to abandon any idea of a specifically Bergsonian mysticism.It is simply too compromised, dated and culturalist to be of any use.
However, it should also be emphasized that the aspiration towards universality is just that: a tendency, a movement that is never resolved once and for all.Paola Marrati recognizes something that seems to have escaped al-Saji's reading, namely the absolutely empty nature of Bergson's universalist "mysticism".The universal can pertain to absolutely nothing, for "the universal has no figure, the universal is empty.
(...) The universal is a movement, a movement without preestablished direction and without continuity" (Marrati, 2006, p. 600).In this context, what Marrati means is that open societies and open systems of morality represent an emergent case of social evolution: they cannot be traced back to prior social forms.There is, in other words, a break in the continuity of evolution, openness being a revolution in morality.We also do not have to define its content too precisely.By extracting and purifying, so to speak, the Bergsonian emphasis upon spiritual change, we can make Bergson's social philosophy applicable to a New Materialist emancipation of materiality too, provided that we work with a suitably liquified and non-teleological conception of "emancipation".This is especially relevant when it comes to the relative lack of engagement of New Materialist scholarship with spirituality.As John Ó Maoilearca correctly points out, "the possibility of a nontranscendent (or immanent) spirit is rarely, if ever, entertained" in New Materialist scholarship or, for that matter, within contemporary philosophy as a whole (Ó Maoilearca, 2023, p. 13).Returning to Bergson could help us reenvision a continuity between spirit and material becoming, without reducing the spiritual to an epiphenomenon of materiality.
Taking change seriously means questioning the static elements still present within Bergson's philosophy.Al-Saji correctly diagnoses Two Sources as constituting a theoretical regression: "Les deux sources inscribes a teleology of life, which the rest of Bergson's philosophy had disavowed" (Al-Saji, 2019, p. 26).Her solution, one that accords strikingly with the focus of New Materialist readings of Bergson, is to read Bergson diffractively by returning to the metaphysics of Matter and Memory.Instead of discontinuity, including cultural imperialist scissions between supposedly superior and inferior cultures, the Bergsonian embrace of permanent novelty dissolves stasis and discreteness.Even matter "resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers through an immense body" (Bergson, 1991(Bergson, [1896], p. 208)], p. 208).This shows us the possibility of a "spiritual matter", conceived of as the creative self-actualization of reality (Schelling, 2019(Schelling, [1811]] As Bergson writes toward the end of Laughter, "the more society improves, the more plastic 12 It is far from trivial whether a male author has the right to even use feminist conceptual methodologies.Jacques Derrida, for example, regularly spoke of female positionality and of the need for "invagination" of the dominant white Eurocentric metaphysical tradition.One could level the charge of appropriation against Derrida.Whatever we think of the inhabitation of feminine or subaltern positionalities by white male authors, deconstructive reading often necessitates "staying with" the author, at least for a while, and if the performer of a theoretical "invagination" happens to identify as a male of any persuasion, this in itself is not automatically problematic, except perhaps when done to gain credibility and score ideological points.However, this risk is far from exclusive to male authors alone (Armour, 1999, p. 81).
11 Further on, Schelling notes regarding matter that "inwardly, it is the purest spirituality, even though outwardly it is complete passivity" (Schelling, 2019(Schelling, [1811]]).This non-dualist immanentism is not lost on some contemporary New Materialists.Iain Hamilton Grant for one has elaborated a New Materialist reading of Schelling's works (Grant, 2006).
is the adaptability it obtains from its members" (Bergson, 1914(Bergson, [1900], p. 199)], p. 199).It does seem as if Bergson is attempting to excuse society and life of their crimes against the human spirit.In Laughter, we learn that the comic phenomenon is a tool of society which serves to maintain social cohesion.We laugh at those who are clumsy, individuals who behave mechanically.The butt of a joke must suffer, because this is what guarantees the plasticity of society.Scott takes the equation of social life with adaptability to be corrosive of all moral systems, alleging that by representing the goal of social integration in dynamic terms, Bergson opens the door to unrestrained "moral relativity" (Scott, 1914, p. 164).For Bergson, the idea of the good would consist in the permanence of change.This does not mean any particular society has a permanent monopoly upon malleability, just as no existing society has actually achieved the openness posited in Two Sources.A good Bergsonist would be somebody willing and able to modify their own positions, often in extreme ways, abandoning, if need be, even sacred ideals or moral principles, so as to guarantee the persistence of changeability.A Bergsonian morality, if it were to exist, would consist in a single principle: "be adaptable."Always modify yourself.Scott does not essentially dispute Bergson's equation of humor with social pressure, instead taking issue with the positing of maximum changeability as the ultimate goal of social life.As a critic of Bergson's supposed nihilism, Scott cannot imagine how anybody could believe in a moral code which is grounded upon impermanence, including the malleability of its own principles (Scott, 1914, p. 165).Scott's critique could arguably be applied to New Materialism as well.The embrace of the continuity of change seems to commit us to a moral relativism, an uncritical acceptance of change.Does incorporating impermanence into our morality make living well impossible?Is the ceaseless shifting of moral standards capable of "squandering" all ethical values, as Scott suggests?Not if we remain true to the self-actualization of the present moment.One could state the following moral injunction, originally formulated by John Dewey, pragmatist philosopher and contemporary of Bergson: "act as to increase the meaning of present experience" (Dewey, 1922, p. 283 - emphasis mine). 13Accepting reality as the continuity of change does not necessarily commit us to abandoning the "good" versus "evil" distinction altogether.If we accept the Deweyian imperative, then a New Materialist or Bergsonian must act so as to make possible further changes.Evil, on such a reading, on both an individual or societal level, would reside in the inhibition of change, whereas good could be defined as the construction of possibilities for further alterations of the present state.It would be a grave error to reject an ontological position because of its commitment to change.
Perhaps it is time that we learn to imagine the unimaginable and free ourselves of our inveterate desire for permanent fixtures and universal truths.

Conclusion: Newness After Dualism's Demise
New Materialism seeks to construct a new form of ontology and, from that, an emancipatory politics of change.As I see it, Bergsonian philosophy, when taken seriously, allows us to elaborate an affinity with change.While Bergson never elaborated anything like a system of morality, or any systematic philosophy for that matter, its emphasis on the permanency and unavoidability of change is undoubtedly radical, without being teleological, deterministic, or uncritically progressive.What is needed is an elaboration of what newness means for New Materialism.In my view, criticisms of the vacuous or implausible status of the "new" component in New Materialist scholarship badly miss the mark.Novelty is something that demands repetition.The new is always commencing again, hence it should come as no surprise that serious attention to change recurs throughout the history of philosophy and 13 Here I do not wish to delve deeper into what Dewey understood under "increasing" the scope of "experience."As an anthropocentric author, Dewey presumably meant expanding human possibilities through education.However, if we conceive of reality as being inherently composed of both perception and memory, as Bergson and other panpsychist-oriented thinkers do, then this would entail an ethical commitment to allowing as many varieties of becoming as possible to make themselves manifest.The imperative to allow the self-fulfilment of human and nonhuman entities alike is a frequent theme of post-anthropocentric ecological thought.
theory.Instead of being merely an academic fad, New Materialism is an engagement with the reality of change.Newness here would denote the indeterminate, open nature of all becomings, material and social alike.Indeed, the generality of change means that there is no all-encompassing ontological gulf between the sum of images in the world ("matter" or "nature") and representation ("society" or "culture").Feminist methodologies, in turn, help us decolonize and "invaginate" Bergson's ideas, renewing a shared, engaged commitment to change, without necessarily adhering ourselves to a single, universalist, static conception of emancipation, progress or, worse, the "good." A recent highly compelling experiment in an emancipatory reading of Bergson is that of Heike Delitz.Drawing upon the portrayal of materiality in Matter and Memory, Delitz makes the case that a "Bergsonian theory of society could (...) be regarded as a New Materialism, in different ways: on the one hand, in regarding living (Bergson) or non-living (Simondon) matter as having its own potentials of meanings and forms -or seeing matter as 'alive' -these authors share a literal materialism" (Delitz, 2021, p. 110).I am doubtful about the description of Bergson as a "literal" materialist.Rather, following Ó Maoilearca's lead, we may speak of a reanimation or "ephemeralization" of matter itself in process philosophies such as that of Bergson: "the spiritualization of matter is not its transubstantiation (the insertion of a ghost into another substance), but its ephemeralization -seeing matter as moving, traceless, evanescent, and thereby real" (Ó 'Maoilearca, 2023, p. 131).This is the "newness" New Materialism aims for.Not only does such a New Materialist position commit us to an open view of matter as indeterministic, but also this makes possible a new view of society and human history too.Because of its rejection of all teleologies, "a Bergsonian social theory always stresses the openness of human history, its unforeseeable becoming-another" (Delitz, 2021, p. 110).Delitz forcefully rejects Marxist historical materialism and other teleologically-influenced strands of deterministic social theory. 14If we

"
decolonizing Bergson" via "a critical and a creative reconfiguration of Bergsonian philosophy" (Al-Saji, 2019, p. 14).Our task, in other words, is to remain true to the central metaphysical insight of Bergsonian thought (the permanency of change and invalidation of dualism) while identifying those areas where Bergson as author failed to live up to this principle.Despite the apparent blending and mixture of openness with closure, at the end of the day it remains evident that for Bergson European society and the Christian religion are most open, while other cultures fail to approximate the abstract ideal of universal love to nearly the same extent.Indeed, not even Buddhism is adequate: in Bergson's view, Christian mysticism, through its supposed combination of contemplation with active love, is the sole authentic representative of open, dynamic spirituality Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion).Al-Saji suggests that we may read Bergson "against" Bergson through an affirmative materialist interpretation of Matter and Memory, while rejecting Two Sources of Morality and Religion.I propose that alongside Matter and Memory, we may also use Laughter (Le Rire) in a similar manner, highlighting how social reality can be reinterpreted in light of Bergson's concept of reality as the permanency of change.In my conclusion, I respond to Heike Delitz's suggestion that Matter and Memory could serve as the foundation for a new form of emancipatory politics.