This document discusses the work of philosophers like Bergson, Barad, and Orlikowski and how their ideas relate to new mobile and augmented reality technologies. It argues that these technologies create an augmented form of collective memory that blurs distinctions between perception, action, and memory. This new "media-rich layer" can be understood through Bergson's concept of "duration" as a virtual reality that is part of the continuous flow of experience. It further suggests that sociomaterial perspectives provide a way to understand this new technological layer as both material and discursive.

1. Virtual, Phenomenal,
Real and Mobile
Dr David Kreps - Information Systems, Organisations and Society, University of Salford
17th Conference Of Society For Philosophy And Technology, Denton, Texas, May 2011

2. Introduction

3. Introduction
✤ GPS mobile internet devices
✤ facebook, twitter, layar and other AR
✤ durational as opposed to spatial understanding of this media-rich
virtual layer
✤ Wanda Orlikowski (Information Systems @ MIT and LSE) -
sociomateriality
✤ Karen Barad (Feminist Studies @ Santa Cruz) - agential realism
✤ Henri Bergson (Philosophy, College de France) - durée reélle

5. Wanda Orlikowski
✤ sociomateriality
✤ “the importance of considering materiality in our studies of
knowledge in organisations”
✤ ‘techno-centric’ vs ‘human-centred’ approaches
✤ knowing as emergent, embodied, embedded, and, significantly, material
✤ scaffolding ... cultural and material
✤ (sense of the) performative

7. “For Bohr, what is at
issue is not that we
cannot know both the
Karen Barad position and
momentum of a
particle simultaneously
(as Heisenberg initially
argued), but rather that
particles do not have
determinate values of
✤ Niels Bohr - quantum theory
position and
Foucault - discursive practices momentum
Butler - performativity simultaneously.”
✤ Barad concludes “the heart of the lesson of
quantum physics” is that “we are a part of
that nature that we seek to understand”
✤ whilst an object is something which is, a
phenomenon is something which happens.

9. Haraway:
“What counts as an
object is precisely
Agential Realism what world history
turns out to be
about.”
✤ Diffraction : natural and social together
✤ Agency : knowledge-making practices are material
enactments that are part of the phenomena we describe
✤ Performativity : “Butler draws on Foucault’s suggestion
that the repetition of regulatory practices produces a specific
materialisation of bodies…” hence iterative citationality.
✤ Matter : Butler - “a process of materialisation that stabilises over time to
produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter”
Barad - “an unsettling of nature’s presumed fixity”
✤ Agential Realism : human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and
natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices

11. William James said
admiringly that Bergson
had "killed
Bergson intellectualism
definitively and without
hope of recovery. I don't
see how it can ever
✤ Henri Bergson (b1859-d1941) : contemporary of revive again in its
Saussure, both in Nietzsche’s shadow : three ancient Platonising role
founding voices upon which Deleuze and others of claiming to be the
built Poststructuralism most authentic, intimate,
and exhaustive definer
✤ Matter and Memory; Time and Free Will; of the nature of reality."
Creative Evolution; Two Sources of Morality & Religion
✤ durée reélle; élan vital. durational vs. spatial;
intuitive vs. intellectual; dualistic explanation of
monistic ontology.
✤ Deconstructively bypasses many opposites with
contextualising insights that evince differences in
degree rather than in kind, speak of time rather than space,
focus on quality rather than quantity

13. Objective reality, then, in which,
as science describes to us,
objects relate to one another
Bergson: perception according to rules we can
deduce from them, continues
without regard to us.
✤ ‘pure’ perception - outlined in order to The fact that this objective
understand - doesn’t occur in reality world appears to be different
according to the subjective
perspective of each of us does
✤ Perception and action are a continuum with not, however, present any
our affections in the middle paradox: our subjective
perception of these objects has
✤ Representation: the brain is part of the isolated that which is useful to
material universe, not the other way around. us about them, and ignores that
which is not.
✤ “The objects which surround my body reflect
its possible action upon them” : Therefore,
“there is for images merely a difference of
degree, and not of kind, between being and
being consciously perceived.”

15. “Past images, reproduced
exactly as they were, with all
their details and even with
Bergson: memory their affective colouring, are
the images of idle fancy or of
dream : to act is just to induce
this memory to shrink, or
rather to become thinned and
sharpened, so that it presents
✤ Two kinds of memory: motor mechanisms, nothing thicker than the edge
and independent recollection: the former of a blade to actual experience,
is part of the present; the latter exists only in into which it will thus be able
the past to penetrate.”
✤ So, in sum, the present – pure perception – is
about consciousness of the body. The past –
pure memory – is about unconsciousness of
the body, the realm of fancy and dream.
✤ The reality of the human condition is always
a blend of the two.

17. Bergson: matter and spirit
“Our perceptions, actual and virtual,
✤ matter is placed neither exclusively in extend along two lines, the one
the ‘realist’ world of objectivity (what horizontal, AB, which contains all
our senses perceive), nor in the simultaneous objects in space, the other
‘idealist’ world of sensation (what our vertical, CI, on which are ranged our
successive recollections set out in time.
memory projects)
The point I, at the intersection of the two
lines, is the only one actually given to
✤ The survival of the past, by which consciousness.”
memory is possible, is therefore not
physical
✤ The present is not that which is... it is
simply what is being made.

19. Bergson: durée reélle
✤ A dualistic conception of existence: matter and spirit;
but monistic - these two are always indissolubly
coterminous.
✤ durée reélle : Real duration - the universe understood
as movement
✤ We don’t perceive real life as a succession of
demarcated conscious states, progressing along
some imaginary line, but rather as a continuous
flow
✤ Intuition, the direct apprehension of process, is the
discoverer of truth - intuition, not analysis, reveals
the real world.

21. Bergsonian sociomaterial agential
realism?
✤ When technologies "vanish" it is our perception isolating what is useful
✤ Scaffold: is it simply too spatial? Conceive the final building actually as simply a
longer lasting scaffold : the notion of scaffolding is freed of ‘object-hood’ and allowed
back into the continuous flow
✤ Iris van der Tuin reads Barad and Bergson diffractively through one another and sets
aside erroneous assertions of feminist, Rebecca Hill, that Bergson’s work is somehow
phallocentric, setting a masculine spirit in a dominant position over a feminine matter
✤ Bergson’s understanding of memory : repetition and citationality in the
performativity of the material-discursive
✤ Butler’s account of matter chimes with durational understanding of existence
✤ Intuitive : onto-epistemological... equivalences

23. Neuroscience and Bergson
✤ Neurosicentists:
✤ Mirror neurons : perception
(Rizzolatti & Craighero, Kilner)
✤ Much of our experience of the external
world is projected : memory
(Llinas, Gregory)

24. Augmented Memory
✤ Augmented reality = Augmented memory
✤ Collective memory: once just books
for the privileged few, now Google
- and AR apps for all: not making us
stupid
✤ The media-rich layer promised by
augmented memory becomes a
durationally understood virtuality
between action-perception and
dream-memory, a materiality that could
even be regarded as an exemplar of the sociomaterial.
✤ The question... of course, is then one of power : this is a whole other issue.

26. Conclusion
✤ The contemporary reality of the Mobile
✤ a Bergsonian augmented memory
✤ flux of a complex Orlikowskian scaffold of Bohr/Barad apparatus
✤ a new layer of media-rich collective memory at the fulcrum of the
old divisions
✤ A very real (durational) virtuality.

28. Contact
✤ Dr David Kreps
✤ Director, Centre for Information
Systems, Organisations and Society
✤ http://www.isos.salford.ac.uk
✤ http://snipr.com/davidkreps
✤ d.g.kreps@salford.ac.uk