Bergson’s Matter and Memory dismantles the assumption that perception is a passive representation stored inside the mind. Its iconic proposition is that perception belongs to action: the body selects from the material world what is relevant to its possible movements, while memory inserts duration, difference and virtuality into the present. The theoretical contribution lies in refusing both reductive materialism and detached idealism. Matter is an aggregate of images, consciousness is not external to it, and memory cannot be localised as a cerebral deposit without losing its temporal structure. Methodologically, Bergson proceeds through conceptual differentiation, separating habit-memory from pure recollection and perception from remembrance in order to reconstruct their dynamic cooperation. The operation is subtractive rather than accumulative: perception does not fabricate the world but filters its inexhaustible field according to embodied interest. The wider bridge reaches phenomenology, cognitive theory, cinema and spatial practice by establishing that environments are apprehended through temporally layered capacities for action rather than through neutral optical reception.
URBANISM MEETS ART