A. Markavis, J. Motzkau, D. Painter, R. Ruto-Korir, G. Sullivan, S. Triliva, & M. Wieser (Eds.), Doing Psychology Under New Conditions (pp.

246253). Ontario: Captus Press, 2013.

Chapter 28

Re-actualizing Bergson's concept of duration: The role of

schematic memory in psychological life
Andrs Haye
School of Psychology, Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile

SUMMARY
The aim of this piece is to explore the notions of 'movement' and 'understanding', trying to show that
Bergson offers a challenging view on the relationship between time and space, as well as on the
important role played by shematic memory in verbal communication. I will discuss two main ideas.
First, that living beings consist in a process toward actualizing, in the form of action in space,
tendencies of action rooted in past experience and taking part as 'memory schemas' and 'memory
representations' guiding movement. Second, that action schemas are not alternative to representations,
but those more basic and these higher forms of memory work together to bring about the mixed quality
of concrete experience. Overall, I try to offer a new light on Bergson's account of psychological
experience, putting together two aspects of his work that have been traditionally worked out separately,
namely, temporality and language.

INTRODUCTION

The 2011 ISTP conference has been called under the title Doing Psychology Under
New Conditions. New life conditions demand a critical revision of psychology in
many different respects. Here we take the opportunity to focus in one condition of
contemporary psychology, namely, the felt need of concepts that could help us better
understand the temporal nature of mind and culture, thus accounting for the relationship
between time and experience. Despite the fact that this is an old issue, and that there is a
large consensus on the importance of temporal dynamics, psychological theories are
still today based on metaphors of space, like the memory storehouse or the neural
network while there is an increasing awareness that a key to studying psychological
processes in accordance with that old consensus, would be to discuss the conception of
the temporality of living organisms. In particular, I will draw mainly on Bergsons
Matter and memory (1912/1896) to re-actualize in this context an old but fresh idea
about the temporal and embodied nature of psychological consciousness.
The following quote expresses in a nutshell the theme of this talk: A movement is
learned when the body has been made to understand it (Bergson, 1912/1896, p. 112).
My aim is to explore the notions of 'movement' and 'body understanding', trying to
show that Bergson offers a challenging view on the relationship between time and
space, as well as on the important role played by shematic memory in verbal
communication. Instead of discussing Bergson's theory in detail, here I will just point
out two main ideas. First, that living beings consist in a process toward actualizing, as
action in space, tendencies of action rooted in past experience and taking part as
 A. Markavis, J. Motzkau, D. Painter, R. Ruto-Korir, G. Sullivan, S. Triliva, & M. Wieser (Eds.), Doing Psychology Under New Conditions (pp. 246253). Ontario: Captus Press, 2013.

'memory schemas' and 'memory representations' guiding movement. Second, that action
schemas are not alternative to representations, but those more basic and these higher
forms of memory work together to bring about the mixed quality of concrete
experience.

TIME AND BEING

The notion of duration is used by Bergson to account for the reality of movement as the
kernel of both matter and spirit. Following the philosophy of change pioneered by
Heraclitus, Bergson conceives of being in general as actualizing, as being not in a
complete form but in transit, not as a state of act but as a process of becoming.
From this perspective, everything is in constant variation, a variation at one or
another temporal scale, from highly compressed or contracted variation of matter to
the more distended duration of conscious experience. This implies that duration, as
the temporal reality of the process of actualization of the past, is not exclusive of the
consciousness of living beings which is the focus of most interpretations of Bergson.
Extending duration to being means that every moving thing is incomplete and in a
process of moving-toward or moving-against, in a process of change and of actualizing
in this way or the other. This was discussed by Bergson in his doctoral thesis about the
concept of local change in Aristotle.
According to this extension of duration to all matter, and to the link between being
and moving, we can say that things are always actualizing existence in space, changing
place, occupying an extension, keeping a spatial position, and so on. Although a
particular focus of Bergson was to account for subjective experience on the basis of the
temporal dynamics of living beings, a consideration of these more general links of time,
being, and space may help to get a deeper interpretation.

Living as Active Spacing

In this context, living beings are characterized as self-moving things that bring about
their past in order to orient movement with intelligence, that is, selecting relevant
aspects of the past. In non-living beings, movement (or lack of movement) is the
actualization of all the past trajectory of one thing in its interaction with the rest of
matter. In most living beings, on the contrary, the past takes the form of motor habits
that are constantly changing but concentrating, in a bodily tendency, tracts of the past
trajectory relevant for routine action.
In addition, in some higher order living beings, the past takes the form of particular
images or ideas, symbolic and discursive representations mediating the remembering of
some unique episode or the application of some prior knowledge to orient current
movement.
What is important to retain at this point is that self-movement and memory come
together. By virtue of this active nature given by memory, living things can be truly
conceived of as consisting in the process of spacing, in making space. This may sound
an unexpected interpretation, because most interpretations of Bergson would emphasize
time, duration, and not space. However, for the author of Matter and Memory duration
is the time of the becoming of space, neither an independent dimension nor a measure of
 A. Markavis, J. Motzkau, D. Painter, R. Ruto-Korir, G. Sullivan, S. Triliva, & M. Wieser (Eds.), Doing Psychology Under New Conditions (pp. 246253). Ontario: Captus Press, 2013.

movement in space. When growing, when acting on the environment and interacting
with other living beings, an organism actively makes space, even if keeping still.
Duration is understood as the time proper of the process of growing or acting, from the
initial organismic changes, still not unfolded as overt action, involved in preparing
action in space. Memory representations and thinking are forms of duration because
they prepare action in space, making the job of forming intelligent action, even if it
never unfolds in space and remains as a desire or an alternative plan.

Memory and Virtual Action

Duration, in this view, is not the subjective side of temporality, but the temporal side of
space-making. In less complex organisms, duration is reduced to perception, to the
conscious experience of discriminating the possible ways of action. That is why
Bergson defines perception as virtual action. In perceiving, the organism prepares and
initiates the movements that can be performed according to the conditions of the
environment and the interest of activity. These merely initiated movements are virtual
in the sense that participate as the background, so to say, in the actualizing of movement
in space.
In humans, it is not so different: Duration may take the form of images or
arguments, recollections or narrative fiction forms of virtual action that detaches the
organism from its immediate present of actualizing in space and can even take the
extreme form of philosophy as the free exploration of the virtual. Elaborated or basic
forms of duration play all the role of memory, that is, of a a delay of mechanic
response in order to introduce the past with intelligence in the formation of current
action. When experiencing a recollection, one is delaying action and penetrating the
movement under formation (actualization) with a remote past experience. This is by no
means an accidental possibility for Bergson, but the very nature of life, allowing for
learning and novelty in behavior.
Again, what is important to keep in mind here is the idea that in living beings,
duration is the inner temporality of singular and creative virtual movement made
possible by the work of memory, that reintroduces the past into the actual movement.
This temporality is the temporality of becoming, not the abstract time of instants.
Duration is, then, a temporal variation the wider, the more the past is made open in the
formation of current action, and the more freedom gets the organism from its immediate
present.

SCHEMATIC MEMORY AND COMMUNICATION

How is this idea of 'subjective consciousness as preparation for motor action' to be

understood? Since this may sound reasonable only for less complex living beings, one
may also ask: Is this relationship between duration and space-making relevant to
understanding human comprehension in social interaction?
The basic form of memory work is conceived of by Bergson in terms of schemas,
understood as motor habits enabling perception, automatic recognition, and the
transformation of virtual realities of imagination, remembering, and thinking, into
movements in space. Schematic memory, as the impact of a diagram of the action to
 A. Markavis, J. Motzkau, D. Painter, R. Ruto-Korir, G. Sullivan, S. Triliva, & M. Wieser (Eds.), Doing Psychology Under New Conditions (pp. 246253). Ontario: Captus Press, 2013.

be performed, thus plays a crucial role in actualizing life.

Here it comes a necessary distinction, felt as such by other classical authors in
different formulations (Bartlett, 1964/1932; Mead, 1934; James, 1950/1890; Vygotsky,
1999/1934), between action schemas (or motor diagrams, the term used in the English
translation) on the one hand, and memory-images on the other. For instance, this seems
to the case of Bartlett's distinction between schematic memory and remembering, where
the latter comes about only when schematic memory clashes. James distinction between
elementary memory and remembering proper is in the same line. In my interpretation of
Bergson, this is not a distinction between two alternative memory systems, but a relative
distinction of two abstract, pure cases motor habits and mental representations
between which concrete mixed memory processes do their job combining in varying
degrees schematic tendencies and representational signs. Vygotsky and Mead also draw
a gap between the organization of behavior before and after its mediation by language.
These distinctions may have deep grounds, but there is still the need to explain how
elementary mechanisms and symbolic meaning come together. Instead of assuming that
memory-images substitute action schemas along development, or that these two
processes unfold as distinct systems eventually interacting among themselves, Bergson
offers to contemporary psychology a new way of conceiving the distinction between
action schemas and memory-images, whereby cognition and discourse are
sensory-motor in nature and material existence is already infiltrated by meaning. To
extreme my point, I will show how Bergson sees the work of schematic memory in
human psychological life, specifically in verbal interaction.

Spoken Language as Spacing with Others

The movement of actualization in speaking beings, is elaborated by Bergson as a

specific case of actualization in living beings, but particularly analyzing comprehension
in speech. We argue that Bergson's perspective is that discursive life is not different
from sensory-motor space-making. As a starting definition, consider language as overt
actions that orient interlocutors about the virtual movement of thought, that is, about the
virtual forces of the past that participate in the actualizing of given subject. In speaking,
the subject makes space not only in the sense that the tongue and lips must articulate,
the larynx must be brought into play for coronation, and the muscles of the chest must
produce an expiratory movement of air (Bergson, 1912/1896, p. 113), but more
fundamentally because there is a collaborative effort in social interaction to move along
with others. In speaking, then, the subject makes social space, for instance taking an
attitudinal position before others or generating a common virtual action.
Now consider Bergson's description of language comprehension, specially attending
to the role of words:
every language, whether elaborated or crude, leaves many more things to be
understood than it is able to express. [] speech can only indicate by a few
guideposts placed here and there the chiefstages in the movement of thought.
That is why I can indeed understand your speech if I start from a thought
analogous to your own and follow its windings by the aid of verbal images
which are so many signposts that show me the way from time to time. But I
shall never be able to understand it if I start from the verbal images themselves,
 A. Markavis, J. Motzkau, D. Painter, R. Ruto-Korir, G. Sullivan, S. Triliva, & M. Wieser (Eds.), Doing Psychology Under New Conditions (pp. 246253). Ontario: Captus Press, 2013.

because between two consecutive verbal images there is a gulf which no

amount of concrete representations can ever fill. For images can never be
anything but things, and thought is a movement. (Bergson, 1912/1896, p. 125)

Verbal or sensory images used as signs in social interaction are, thus, never enough
for understanding. Put differently, symbolic representations as such are not the place of
meaning. Signs have a meaning insofar as they are part of a temporal and space-making
movement of thought. At this point we can recollect our interpretations of Bergson and
put forward the hypothesis that when understanding another's utterance, one is delaying
reaction and penetrating the interactive movement under formation (actualization) with
virtual interactions, that is, with past experiences and possible situations that orient
interlocutors along their co-spacing becoming. Paraphrasing Bergson, understanding is
motor accompaniment. To comprehend a words is, then, to follow a thinking
movement. Now, how can speakers follow the thinking movement of the other? The
same way living beings follow any movement: in terms of schematic memory. But how
thinking can be reduced to action and space-making?
As a living movement, thinking is also possible on the grounds of schematic
memory, at least as one fundamental component of conscious experience as a mix,
because this movement is a preparing phase of a larger movement of acting in the
spatial world. As such, thinking is a process of spacing ideas. The schematic mechanism
in speech comprehension can be explained simply in terms of the spontaneous
tendency of verbal auditory impressions to prolong themselves in movements of
articulation; a tendency which [...] expresses itself by an internal repetition of the
striking features of the words that are heard. Now our motor diagram is nothing else
(Bergson, 1912/1896, p. 113). When we listen to the words of another person with the
desire to understand them:
Do we not [...] feel that we are adopting a certain disposition, which varies
with our interlocutor, with the language he speaks, with the nature of the ideas
which he expresses - and varies, above all, with the general movement of his
phrase, as though we were choosing the key in which our own intellect is called
upon to play? The motor diagram, emphasizing his utterance, following
through all its windings the curve of his thought, shows our thought the road. It
is the empty vessel, which determines, by its form, the form which the fluid
mass, rushing into it, already tends to take. (Bergson, 1912/1896, p. 121)

It can be stated with certainty that for Bergson, discourse (language in movement) is
realized radically through, and not instead of, sensory-motor space-making. In this
sense, signs and utterances are firstly schematic components of movement, and not
symbolic structures that could be understood in abstraction from body movements and
action tendencies.

On the Role of Shemas in Comprehension

Of course, thinking is not only this, but also, in a variable extent, the construction of
representations that, with the help of the past experiences from whose remnants these
representations are formed, serve as aids in following the windings of thought, as
 A. Markavis, J. Motzkau, D. Painter, R. Ruto-Korir, G. Sullivan, S. Triliva, & M. Wieser (Eds.), Doing Psychology Under New Conditions (pp. 246253). Ontario: Captus Press, 2013.

signposts showing the way from time to time in my constant interactions. But both
motor schemas guiding habitual action and representations orienting the movement with
signs, join in bringing past experience to the dense present of becoming (indeed giving
it such density!).
The past then modifies the present, directing the movement of becoming in some
extent and in several manners, from motor habits enabling automatic behavior, to
images and ideas enabling a resistance toward the dominant tendency of movement and
an opportunity to virtually explore new possibilities. Schemas and representations are
conceptually opposed and frequently work in conflict that is why thinking and
remembering involve an effort. But this conflict between schematic conditioning and
representation would then be a central component of the mixed experience of becoming
from the past. In thinking, then, one is not only making space but spacing remembered
experiences, as well as anticipations.
Bergson illustrated the power of the introduction of the past in the present
comparing speech comprehension of a native language with that of an unknown
language. If the language spoken by two people is unknown by the listener, he or she
will perceive sounds but will not hear them talk, because all sound are alike. The
speakers distinguish separate words from the same sonorous mass in which the listener,
lacking the schematic memory of how to produce those words and discursive forms,
distinguish nothing meaningful. The question is, how can the knowledge of a
language, which is only memory, modify [...] present perception and cause some
listeners actually to hear what others, in the same physical conditions, do not hear
(Bergson, 1912/1896, p. 109).
At this point we need to stress that for Bergson representations neither substitute
habits, nor work in parallel (in a different brain structure or as a different process
system). Bergson emphasizes the mixing of schemas and representations, instead of
their independent functions, so to say, as a key for comprehension. Indeed,
representations are constructed to help movement, and in their construction they
become coordinated with sensory-motor schemas if they are to have any guiding or
signaling role in the actualizing of past experiences and anticipations into spacing
action.
The difference between those talking and the one not understanding the language
relies on been able or not to articulate the virtual tendencies co-spacing becoming with
the actual movement in the passing present. Not understanding a language is thus the
lack of the correct schematic memory tendencies. Bergson goes even further by stating
also the converse: Understanding a language is to be conditioned by the correct motor
habits. In the case of language learning, the listener would start organizing nascent
movements gradually and progressively capable of following the phrase-movement
which is heard and of emphasizing its main articulations. According to Bergson these
nascent movements are automatic reactions of internal accompaniment:
at first undecided or uncoordinated, might become more precise by repetition;
they would end by sketching a simplified figure in which the listener would
find, in their main lines and principal directions, the very movements of the
speaker. Thus would unfold itself in consciousness, under the form of nascent
muscular sensations, the motor diagram, as it were, of the speech we hear. To
adapt our hearing to a new language would then consist, at the outset, neither in
 A. Markavis, J. Motzkau, D. Painter, R. Ruto-Korir, G. Sullivan, S. Triliva, & M. Wieser (Eds.), Doing Psychology Under New Conditions (pp. 246253). Ontario: Captus Press, 2013.

modifying the crude sound nor in supplementing the sounds with memories; it
would be to coordinate the motor tendencies of the muscular apparatus of the
voice to the impressions of the ear; it would be to perfect the motor
accompaniment. (Bergson, 1912/1896, pp. 110-111)

In other words, language learning does not modify elementary memory and
perception of the living and spacing organism, but make them work for a different
movement, for (ever) new forms of life and space. Representation does not supplement
noisy sounds with meaningful memories, but articulates them into a blend in which
sounds and memories can be distinguished only by abstraction.

CONCLUSION

With this, we come back to our beginning: A movement is learned when the body has
been made to understand it. We are now, after pointing out the important role played
by schematic memory in discursive communication, in a position to extrapolate this to
thinking, rather than opposing it, and to realize that the actualizing of the virtual makes
us understand the temporal and embodied nature of psychological consciousness. What
are the theoretical and methodological implications of this notion of virtuality, as well
as this notion of the mixture of functions, for the micro-genetic approach to
psychological life? Here we have focused on two basic ideas which seem to be a
reasonable support to guiding discussion of new questions.
First, living beings consist in a process toward actualizing tendencies of action
rooted in past experience. This has important implications for the notion of time in
psychology. The dominant conception of time in old and new psychological research is
the common-sense idea that chronological coordination is a fundamental dimension of
mind, so that measuring cognition-times, or analyzing neural or behavioral synchrony,
psychology is in a good direction. It was Bergson who demonstrated that chronological
time, and similar concepts such as the space-time structure of the universe, reduce time
to space-forms and lose sight of the heterogeneous nature of temporality. His well
known suggestion was to approach both the mind and the universe as qualitative
variations of becoming. However, showing that a chronometric psychology assumes a
reductionist notion of time does not imply that psychological temporality can be studied
without reference to space, as was suggested by Descartes and others. The critical point
in contemporary psychology is to learn how to address the temporal nature of
experience without falling to the side of physiological and behavioral chronometry, or to
the other side of subjectivism, reducing temporality to represented time. Our reading of
Bergson offer a critical perspective of this problem, but much is still to be developed
conceptually and methodologically.
Second, representations are not alternative to action schemas, but ingredients of the
mixed quality of concrete experience. This other idea has implications for a critical
review of how elementary and higher-order psychological functions are articulated in
contemporary psychological theorizing and research. If the symbolic world that
language brings about to human experience is assumed to substitute the organismic
mechanisms shared with animals, then psychological research may be deviated through
the roads of abstract culturalism. If the symbolic runs in parallel to the bodily, we are
 A. Markavis, J. Motzkau, D. Painter, R. Ruto-Korir, G. Sullivan, S. Triliva, & M. Wieser (Eds.), Doing Psychology Under New Conditions (pp. 246253). Ontario: Captus Press, 2013.

not in a better position, but biased by the dominant approach to psychological

experience from the point of view of the interaction of several different systems,
favoring the independent study of biological and cultural systems. If the biological and
the cultural aspects of psychological experience are conceived of not as real things or
systems, but as indissoluble aspects of one process of becoming, then we will be better
prepared to study mind without dividing it into separate functions such as perception,
memory, decision making, imagination, attention, and so on, but following the
unfolding of experiences that, for example, are perceptual and mnemonic at the same
time, or show voluntary and non conscious aspect. As another implication in this vein,
consider that higher-order psychological functions would be of special interest because
they might be responsible for the ever changing mixtures that human experience is
capable.
In addition to bringing Bergson's ideas to contemporary discussions, we offer a
special interpretation of Bergson's account of psychological experience, putting together
two aspects of his work that have been traditionally worked out separately, namely,
temporality and discourse. On the one hand, most interpretations that make the focus on
temporality, elaborate on the notion of duration as radically different from space and
with no reference to the theme of spacing that we have emphasized first. On the other,
interpretations focused on discursive life take into account the radical difference
between free thinking (in philosophical intuition) and action conditioned by
immediate circumstances, without paying attention to the mixed nature of language, as
we have emphasized in the second place.

REFERENCES

Bartlett, F. C. (1964). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1932)

Bergson, H. (1912). Matter and memory (Trans. N. M. Paul & W. S. Palmer). London: George Allen &
Co. (Original work published 1896)

James, W. (1950). Principles of psychology. New York: Dover. (Original work published 1890)
Mead, G.H. (1934). Mind, self and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Vygotsky. L.S. (1999). Thinking and speech (Trans. N. Minick). In R. W. Rieber, A. S. Carton (Eds.),
The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky, V. 1. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. (Original work
published 1934)