This document discusses concepts related to time, space, and perception from the perspectives of philosophers Bergson and Grosz. It references concepts like the coalescence of past, present and future when photographing or fictionalizing places. It also discusses how the present splits into an actual and virtual aspect, with the past coexisting in the present. Memory imports the past into the present. Similarly, any location contains the virtual whole of spatiality. The document examines how Bergson's ideas of duration can be applied to understanding spatiality as overlapping spaces. It references concepts like fabulation and how fiction allows reopening the future of events.

1. Seeing time: advertising images and the spatio-
temporalities of neo-capitalism
Anne Cronin | Lancaster University

2. Manchester, UK

3. Manchester, UK

5. ‘an immediacy of experience:
the this, here, now, so beloved of empiricist
philosophers’ (Donald 1999: 7)

6. the archive city enables
us ‘to live both here and
elsewhere’
(Donald 1999: 5)

8. Ian Wiblin, ‘Recovered Territory’ project

9. ‘The act of photographing allows past, present and
future to coalesce, at least momentarily within my
concentration of thought as I look through the
camera. In this state of being, I am temporally as
well as geographically disoriented, map or no map.
The waste ground, the eroded red bricks, the snow-
covered black earth, the grey tenements I see
through my viewfinder, they assume a significance
greater than their individual content. They become
part of yet another history. I implicate them
through association. I fictionalise a fiction. I invent
the city’ (Wiblin 2006: 555).

10. ‘The viewpoint was deliberately low to achieve this precise coalescing of
elements which reconstructed the courtyard, suggesting a space where
something might still happen – if it had not happened already’
(Wiblin 2006: 552-553).

12. ‘When used to make connections
to the city, the camera is not an
instrument of representation; it is
a way of making space and
attracting meanings’ (Liggett 2003:
120).

13. ‘And by “image” we mean a
certain existence which is more
than that which the idealist calls a
representation, but less than that
which the realist calls a thing, - an
existence placed half-way
between the “thing” and the
“representation” (Bergson 2004:
vii-viii).

14. ‘I call matter the aggregate of
images, and perception of matter
these same images referred to the
eventual action of one particular
image, my body’
(Bergson 2004: 8).

15. ‘a system of
The material world is
closely linked
images’
in which there are ‘real centres of action’ which are represented
by living matter such as human bodies (Bergson 2004: 21)

16. The degree of independence of which a living being is master, or, as
e shall say, the zone of indetermination which surrounds its
ctivity, allows, then, of an a priori estimate of the number and the
istance of the things with which it is in relation’ (Bergson 2004: 23)

17. ‘Conscious perception signifies choice, and
consciousness mainly consists in this practical
discernment’ (Bergson 2004: 46).

18. the past is essentially that which acts no longer’ and the present is
‘that which is acting’ (Bergson 2004: 74).
‘Memory, inseparable in practice from perception, imports the past
into the present, contracts into a single intuition many moments of
duration’
(Bergson 2004: 80).
‘Every present splits into a dual-sided actual and virtual, one of
which has effects, the other of which joins to and adds to the past.
The present thus directs itself to two series, two orientations at
once: to action, in space; and to memory, in duration. The past
could never exist if it did not coexist with the present of which it
is the past’ (Grosz 2005: 103)

19. ‘The spatial present
(“here”) defines its own
region but this region
intersects with the
regionality of other heres
and links to a larger
(world, universal) space’
(Grosz 2001: 128).

20. we might ‘consider spatiality in terms of
the co-existence of multiple relations of
succession, space as a layering of spaces
within themselves, spaces enfolded in
others, spaces that can function as the
virtualities of the present, the “here”….
The same attributes of becoming that
Bergson accords to duration can now be
seen to accompany spatiality: just as the
whole of the past contracts, in various
degrees, in each moment of the
present, that is, just as the present is
laden with virtualities that extend
beyond it beyond itself …. so too the
whole of space, spatiality, contracts into
the specificity of location, and the
occupation of any space contains the
virtual whole of spatiality, which is to
say, the infinite possibilities of my action
on and being acted on by matter in space
and time’ (Grosz 2001: 100)

21. ‘real action, the indiscriminate action of its various features upon
whatever surrounds it and comes into causal connection with
it, as well as virtual action, that potential to exert specific effects
on a living being of the kind which the being seeks or may interest
it. This cerebral delay allows the object’s indiscriminate actions
on the world to be placed in suspension, and for the living being to
see only particular elements of the object’
(Grosz 2005: 100).

26. ‘la fonction fabulatrice’ | fabulation

28. overcomes ‘the depressing margin of
the unexpected between the initiative taken…
…and the effect
desired’
(Bergson 1977: 140)

29. ‘“To produce the effect, which would mean so much to me, of
death or a serious wound, there must be a cause of equal
importance, there must be intent”. A soldier who, as it
happened, had been hit by a splinter from a shell, told us that
his first impulse had been to exclaim: “How silly!” That this
fragment of shell, projected from a purely mechanical
cause, and which might just as well have struck anybody, or
nobody, should nevertheless have come and struck him, him
and not somebody else, appeared to his natural intelligence
illogical’
(Bergson 1977: 146).

30. ‘The disturbances with which we have to deal, each of them
entirely mechanical, combine into an Event, which
resembles a human being, possibly a ‘bad lot’ but none the
less one of us. He is not an outsider…. It lends to the Event a
unity and an individuality which make of it a
mischievous, maybe malignant, being, but still one of
ourselves, with something sociable and human about it’
(Bergson 1977: 157-158).

31. ‘Hoping to change the event of the Titantic’s collision
doesn’t come only from making the event live and
feel, but also from having it present, reliving its
present, and so reopening its future. We believe we are
seeing it happen now, and it is from this temporal state
of actuality that our paradoxical beliefs, desires, and so
on, may follow. One could argue that fiction-making
is, by the same token, present-making, for the
present, broadly understood, is what is alive for
Bergson:
movement is actuality and animation (literally), for to
move is one condition of being alive
that, primitively, allows us to animate things even
further’
(Mullarkey 2007: 66).

32. ‘…does not the
fiction of an
isolated material
object imply a kind
of absurdity,
Since this object
borrows its
physical
properties from
the relations it
maintains with all
others’ (Bergson
2004: 11-12).

34. Manchester, UK

35. Detroit, USA