Bergson’s Legacy among the Avant-Garde: Intuition, Aesthetics, and Political Ideology

Abstract

In this article I will examine more closely why exactly Bergson’s philosophy of time and intuition proved so compelling to proponents of anarchist ideology, as interpreted by a key group of artists and activists affiliated with the London-based avant-garde movement known as Vorticism (1914-1918). As I demonstrate Bergson’s thought had special appeal among anarchists more generally because his process-oriented philosophy affirmed that movements’ ideological allegiance to notions of immediacy, affinity and prefigurative politics. Bergson’s philosophy enabled these radicals to reconceptualize ideology in terms of human psychology and social interactions, which in turn empowered the Vorticists’ to integrate art and aesthetics into their multivalent critique of the State. More broadly, this recasting of Bergson’s philosophy from an ideological perspective not only serves to distinguished the avant-gardes’ aesthetics from that of Bergson himself, it marks the crucial difference separating the era of the historical avant-garde from our own day, when Bergson’s thought no longer holds sway among contemporary political movements.