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Naming words deceive to the extent that they seem to denote changeless things. Conceptual analysis tends to freeze reality into entities. Images deceive to the extent that they freeze objects and persons in moments of time. Instead, we need to conceive reality in cinematographic terms, as movement and change.¹⁴⁶

Not only are things on the move, where apparent entities present themselves as mere momentary appearances in a universe of action. The person experiencing things is always in a process of becoming, formed by the ever-changing experiences of their life where the immediate frame of experience is always changing too, and where “the same antecedents will never recur.”¹⁴⁷ The human species should be conceived more as homo faber, the creature who works to make the world, than homo sapiens, the creature who freezes the world in his conceptualizations, as do naming word or still image.¹⁴⁸ Experience is a process of “ceaseless self-creation.”¹⁴⁹ For this, Bergson proposes a metaphysics of “integral experience” whose capacity to capture movement and change is grounded in its methods of “qualitative differentiations and integrations.”¹⁵⁰

To re-say this in the terms of our grammar, the world is a place of active meaning designing, where the conditions of designing – the available resources for design action and the designed outcomes of our actions – are never quite the same, where exact repetition is never possible even if the similarities of word or image might lead us to think that. It is the action of designing that is more critical to our understanding of the meaning of reality than the apparently static objects of design that are mere residues of the past or the designed objects that become the legacy for another future.

Little wonder Bergson had a preoccupation with change, as the debris of the catastrophic twentieth century fell around him. He had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927 for his philosophical writings.^§AS1.3.1a But when, near the end of his life, the Nazis invaded Paris, he renounced all the French honors he had been awarded, and stood in line in inclement weather to register as a Jew.¹⁵¹

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¹⁴⁶ Henri Bergson, 1903 [1912], An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by T.E. Hulme, New York, NY: G.P. Putnam, pp. 25, 30–32, 56–58, 48–49; Henri Bergson, 1907 [1944], Creative Evolution, translated by A. Mitchell, New York, NY: Random House, pp. 333, 357–58.

¹⁴⁷ Henri Bergson, 1889 [1910], Time and Free Will, London, UK: Muirhead Library of Philosophy, p. 199.

¹⁴⁸ Henri Bergson, 1934 [1946], The Creative Mind, translated by M.L. Andison, New York, NY: The Philosophical Library, p. 99.

¹⁴⁹ Henri Bergson, 1907 [1944], Creative Evolution, translated by A. Mitchell, New York, NY: Random House, p. 10.

¹⁵⁰ Henri Bergson, 1903 [1912], An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by T.E. Hulme, New York, NY: G.P. Putnam, pp. 70–72, 92.

¹⁵¹ Jimena Canales, 2015, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 336.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 129-130. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Henri Bergson’s “Integral Experience” §MS1.2.2b