Contingency

Free will is inseparable from qualitative time: because we live time as an undivided flow, we can act spontaneously, in ways no one could have fixed beforehand.

Put simply Bergson: free will cannot be separated from time lived as one unbroken flow. Because we live time that way, we can act spontaneously, in ways no one could have settled in advance.

Einstein's relativity theory measures time through instants, and that is the mistake: time must be flow, since only flowing time can accommodate contingency and free will.

Put simply Bergson against Einstein: relativity measures time as a series of instants, and that is the mistake. Time must be a flow, because only flowing time leaves room for an open future and free will.

In the text In the preface to Duration and Simultaneity (1922), Bergson presents the book as asking how far his idea of duration is compatible with Einstein's views on time.

Finalism (teleology) holds that life moves toward an end planned from the start; Bergson rejects it: more determinism means less contingency and free will, which he wants room for.

Put simply Bergson rejects "finalism", the idea that life heads toward a goal fixed from the start, as an apple seed already "aims" at its apple. The more is fixed in advance, the less room for chance and free will.

For Bergson life is choice, continual choice: a newborn child is already a whole, indivisible self, yet which of countless directions that self will take cannot be predicted, and should not be.

You cannot spatialize only the past. Lay elapsed time out like space and the future is spread out too, complete behind a screen; contingency vanishes and our acts arrive ready-made.

Put simply Bergson: if you lay out past time like space, you must lay out the future that way too, as if already complete behind a screen. Then nothing is left open, and our actions arrive ready-made.

Natality: every new being who enters the world injects radical contingency into it, able to head in many directions along courses no one can foresee.

Put simply Arendt's "natality": every newborn brings real openness into the world. A new person can head in many directions, along paths no one can foresee.

Dada is best understood, Shore thinks, in Clark's phrase, as contingency reified: the feeling that nothing is fixed and anything might happen next, turned into a thing in itself.

Put simply Shore thinks Katerina Clark put it best: Dada takes the feeling that nothing is fixed and anything could happen next, and turns that feeling into a thing of its own, "contingency reified."

Dada is rebellion without a program, freedom pursued for its own sake and pointed at nothing beyond itself; as Tzara put it, "the most acceptable system is in principle none."

The avant-garde's trajectory ended in politics: Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, to Mussolini's fascists; most others, the Russians above all, went left, to the Bolshevik revolution.

Put simply Shore: in the end the avant-garde turned to politics. Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, joining Mussolini's fascists. Most others, the Russians above all, went left, joining the Bolshevik revolution.

Shore reads Mayakovsky's 1930 suicide note, "the love boat crashed against the everyday," as the moment the avant-garde's leap proved existentially unbearable.

Put simply Shore's reading: Mayakovsky's 1930 suicide note, "the love boat crashed against the everyday," marks the moment the avant-garde's leap into a world where anything was possible became impossible to live with.

Structural anthropology hangs on a chance encounter: had Koyré not introduced Jakobson to Lévi-Strauss among wartime émigrés in New York, Shore judges, that intellectual history would never have happened.

Structuralists meet modernists on the point of arbitrariness: because the linguistic sign is arbitrary, meaning turns out contingent, neither natural, universal nor intrinsic.

Put simply Shore: structuralists agree with modernist artists on one point. Since the link between a word and its meaning is a matter of convention, meaning is never natural, universal or built into things.