The Stuff of Time

"Memory is not in us; it is we who move in a Being-memory, world-memory" (98).
I also watched Chris Marker's La Jetée recently, and while I was reading the text for this week, I was struck by some passages that could be read fruitfully with aspects of the movie. A man who has survived the 3rd World War is asked by his captors to allow them to conduct experiments on him. Since humanity is doomed, he agrees. Space has been made off-limits through radioactivity, and so there is only time through which humans may move. This man is asked to focus on an image from his childhood in order to experiment with the movement through time. After he succeeds in moving through time to the past, he then attempts to move through to the future.
I won't tell you anything more about the photo-novel, in case you haven't seen it. But the thought experiment gave me ways to sense what is at stake when Deleuze (with the help of Bergson) links movement to time in terms of memory. When it is no longer possible to subscribe to the illusion that we move through space (like when we are stuck underground because of radioactivity) we perhaps become aware of the movement of (in!) time and that it is not linear, that is, it is not chronological. It is not we as subjects who "feel" time pass, but rather "the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time," (82). Memory is no longer considered as the constitutive moment of a person or subject (ie. you are what you remember), but rather it is the world of experience through which everything moves - rephrased again: it is not a subject that remembers (no Weltgeist here!) but rather memory is the matter of the world. Hence Bergson's book title: Matière et Mémoire?