Introduction

In Volumes 2 and 3 of his Technics and Time series, Bernard Stiegler advances a complex series of arguments concerning the relationship between philosophy and film, and thinking and film more generally. This is done in the context, and fulfillment, of his broader project in this ongoing series. This broader project is to respond to one of the oldest and most persistent, indeed founding gestures, of Western philosophical thought, namely the exclusion of a consideration of technics and technique from the core of metaphysical questioning. Stiegler’s response is dedicated to reestablishing the basis for philosophical and critical thinking at a moment when such thinking is facing its potential demise in what he terms the “hyperindustrial” epoch.

In this paper I will attempt to outline a major thread of this sequence of arguments in order both to address the journal theme of film as a kind of philosophising, and to show that this questioning must today be extended to the forms which have come after (and indeed before) film, those which Stiegler names, along with film, “Industrial Temporal Objects” (Stiegler 1996: 275). While film is pivotal, both for Stiegler’s analysis and for the history of modern Western technoculture, film needs to be understood both as an adoption and modification of existing technical forms of the industrial reproduction of experience, and as a form that has itself been adopted and modified by the newer media based on information technology (film itself having been radically modified by digital technologies).

The Flow and Retention of Consciousness

Rather than thinking in terms of film or films as philosophy, as capable of (advancing) philosophical thought, Stiegler argues that all thinking is cinematic. This argument is prosecuted via an extensive critical revision of Kant and Husserl on the nature of cognition and consciousness. I will focus here on Stiegler’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenological approach to conceiving of the temporality of consciousnesss (as the consciousness of something in time). This is partly for reasons of space, but also because the discussion of Husserl raises most directly the theme of cinema and of the industrial temporal objects that come before and after it.

The critique of Kant occupies a chapter of Technics and Time 3: The Time of Cinema and the Question of Ill-being (Stiegler, 2001). It follows a discussion of cinema as an industrial temporal object that engages with, extends and transforms Husserl’s account of the temporal object, an account Husserl undertook in order to elucidate the nature of the phenomenon of temporal experience. For Husserl, Kant only formally examines the conditions of possibility of experience via his transcendental analytic. His account is literally lacking in experience, and this cripples its potential to understand the phenomenal inasmuch as it is always the object of lived experience. For Stiegler, however, Husserl, like Kant before him, fails to think the technical in his efforts to establish the basis for conceiving and understanding consciousness (as always the consciousness of something) from the perspective of the lived experience of phenomena. The phenomenological project seeks to discover the regulating idealities (the “eides”) of phenomena by neutralising the “natural attitude” or common sense way in which objects are routinely related to in real life. It nonetheless falls into the aporia between the sensible and the intelligible that has always haunted western philosophy (Stiegler 1996: 222-223).

Stiegler draws on Derrida’s and Ricoeur’s readings of Husserl to show that his insistence that the ground of phenomenological inquiry is the living-present presence of consciousness leads to contradictions and “reaction formations” in the course of Husserl’s project (Stiegler 1996: 219-277). Stiegler focusses on the problems with his account of the experience of the temporal object.
 
Husserl’s problem, in Stiegler’s view, is that he did not keep up with the new media of his day. When he tries to discover the eidos of the phenomenon of temporal experience, he needs to analyse the perception of an object in time because consciousness is “intentional,” that is, always the consciousness of something. So he chooses what he characterises as a temporal object, best suited for his purposes. While all objects are temporal to the extent that they are encountered in time, the term “temporal object” specifies those objects which consist in a temporal duration, that is, those objects (of consciousness) which are constituted temporally. Husserl’s example is a melody. But in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, melodies were increasingly heard on gramophone recordings, exact capturings of past productions of musical performance. Husserl’s failure to think the implications for his project of the experience of listening to a record is in Stiegler’s account critical. We will return to this point in a moment.

First let us give a brief account of Husserl’s analysis of the phenomenon of listening to a temporal object of consciousness. Husserl proposes that two kinds of “retention” are operative in consciousness, primary and secondary. He distinguishes between these through a discussion of the difference between the audition of a “temporal object” and its subsequent recollection. In a melody, he explains, a “note only ‘sounds’ through its rapport with preceding and following notes” (Stiegler 2001: 37). Primary retention is the “maintenance of the having-just-passed” in the present of consciousness, so that at each moment of audition consciousness retains the previous note of the melody, it itself retaining the previous note, and so forth (2001: 37). This is what allows consciousness to constitute the temporal object via a dual retention and anticipatory “protention” that at each moment of hearing projects the coherence of the melody based on these retained moments (and their protentions).

The recollection of the melody at a time after it has concluded Husserl names “secondary retention,” one which occurs in consciousness via a dynamic operated by the imagination so that the memory is selectively recalled and reconstituted. That is to say, the memory is produced in dialogue with all the other recollections ordered in and comprising consciousness as such, that is, consciousness as a continuity maintained beyond or beneath the temporal flux of immediate perception. Secondary memory is the domain of the operation of the imagination, and forms the basis of the selection criteria that inform the specific, evolving shape of the individual’s consciousness across the length of its continual flux.  

Primary retention stretches the present moment of living-present consciousness into an extended “big now,” maintaining presence across the duration of the object of perception. Husserl, Stiegler shows, must keep this separate from memory, from the secondary retentional sphere of consciousness which is nevertheless another kind of extended continuity (Stiegler 1996: 220). If he fails to do so then the purity of the living present of perception - which is the ground of the phenomenological enterprise and its account of consciousness - is corrupted by the incorporation of memories generated in the imagination in the very moment of present perception. This is exactly what Stiegler is proposing: not that there is no difference between immediate perception and recalled perceptions, but that they can never be absolutely opposed, that they compose together both the experience of the present and the ongoing development of consciousness as continuity beneath momentary impressions.

In Technics and Time 2: Disorientation Stiegler analyses in detail how Husserl’s focus is on individual notes versus their combinations, tending to an emphasis on the isolated moments of the extended, enduring “big now.” This helps Husserl isolate the primary retention forming the temporal object. But if chords, and phrases, and timbre, and more complex “units” of musicality are considered more carefully in the analysis, then the problem with finding the pure starting point of the melody is clearer: from the first notes the “protentions” of consciousness concerning musical genre, style, etc. are conditioning the perception, rendering it possible to perceive it as music. A good illustration of the significance of this point is found in the popular, perhaps apocryphal, anecdote concerning the Japanese audience of a Western orchestral performance of a Classical symphony who mistake the sounds of the orchestra tuning their instruments as the commencement of the performance (and who receive it as its most appealing component to their ears). Stiegler compares the poem and the melody, arguing for the “essential complexity” of the temporal object inasmuch as it is “programmatic” (Stiegler 1996: 231). The program is anticipatory based on its repeated, routine arrangement of experience. The music program anticipates the next musical experience, and makes it perceptible as such. Further on Stiegler discusses the musicality of all sound, arguing that the ear is “originarily musical” (1996: 242). Husserl stays “on the surface of the profundity of modification” (1996: 238) It is in sticking with the individual sound that everything goes awry in Husserl project. For Stiegler, “the individual sound is nothing in the melody, it is always already the other sound, which precedes it, which follows it, because it is not punctual, it is non-punctually, it is never anything but the point of passage of a process of individuation before which the individual is not given….” (1996: 238). 

What’s more, and this is key to Stiegler’s revision of Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness, technical forms of memory provide the factical stock underwriting this formative and mutational dynamic that composes primary and secondary retentions in consciousness. Stiegler argues that if Husserl had thought about the consciousness sitting down in his/her living room to listen to a gramophone record, he might have revised his argument in Logical Investigations. Each relistening of the exact same recording amounts to a different experience of it. If the record remains the same, then it is the listener who has changed - the listener conceived phenomenologically not as pre-given individual but as determined perpetually in an ongoing individuation of the pre-individual, factical milieu in which it finds itself. And this change in the listener has changed the primary retention of the object in consciousness. It is precisely through a re-listening to the record that the “immediate experience” of it changes. But this takes place only on the basis of the memories of it that condition the selective attention it receives in the moments of re-audition. And this repeats and differs the first audition, itself conditioned by the protentions “toward” the music that come from both individual memories of musical experience, and the passive synthesis of “musicality” given to consciousness from the cultural archive.  

Unpacking the complications of co-implications of perception and the lived and pre-individual, “passive” syntheses of individual and collective retention is a very big task. Stiegler devotes many pages in Technics and Time 2 and Technics and Time 3 to exploring the implications of the impossibility of performing the phenomenological quarantining of present perception from memorious recollection, supplemented by the tertiary retentional forms that allow for the carriage of cultural tradition and heritage. These provide the milieu, a specific milieu in which individual experiences can take shape, make sense, be singular, and reinvent the milieu’s potential by adding to its stock of recorded, that is, exteriorised adoption.  

The Power of Industrial Temporal Objects

Husserl misconceives consciousness via his analysis of the temporal object, but he nonetheless anticipates the powerful potential of industrial temporal objects. The phonograph’s system of capturing a past musical or aural performance event for a replaying that replays the temporal duration of the event leads to a “passive synthesis” concerning phonography. In other words, a certain comprehension of the phonograph technology’s operation coalesces eventually through a cultural “doubling” of the technical innovation that arises out of the conversations, reflections, and reactions to its introduction and promotion. This (inevitably) selective understanding of the phonographic medium is that it amounts to a (potentially) integral retention of the past performance. Stiegler is of course at pains to contest this passive, pre-individual basis for understanding phonographic and, in its wake, cinematic technics by insisting on the limitation of any recording, as necessarily a selective and finite retention of the past. Nonetheless, cinema adopts the phonograph’s “dual synthesis” of a technical system of durational capture and a collective understanding of the power of mechanically automated retention to faithfully retain what has been. It is combined in cinema with the dual synthesis of the analogical photographic image: mechanical capture of the visible real. The cinema becomes the major industrial temporal object of the Twentieth Century. In its expanded, extended form, as audiovisual recording/projecting system/form of perception, it has had a massive influence on and as contemporary experience.

The co-incidence of the flow of consciousness and of the unfolding of the cinematic industrial temporal object is what makes it the epochal form opening a suspension and reshaping of the schemes of contemporary experience. Stiegler accepts the phenomenological stance that consciousness is always intentional, even as he challenges the sense of intentionality. He glosses Husserl on this point (in a discussion of the blinking perception of a piece of chalk) to affirm that the “passage of consciousness is that of the object” (Stiegler 1996: 231). Stiegler builds on this in elaborating his thought of the impact of technical objects on thinking.

Cinema repeats but also modifies significantly the interior/exterior composition of time conditioned for so long in Western culture by the dual syntheses of linear, orthographic writing. It has much in common with linear writing, but its unfolding co-incides point-for-point, or passage-to-passage, with the flux of the attentive consciousness. It is “exact” like orthographic textual production, but it bears photography’s “ontological” reception, the passive synthesis framed in classic accounts such as that of Roland Barthes: what was recorded was really there before the lens, available as an analogical and material continuity to the viewer. This has nourished fictional cinema’s impression of reality as well as non-fictional forms dependent on the indexical claims of cinematic and phonographic recording. (The enduring importance of the star system to the success of Hollywood cinema, and the neverending speculation about the authenticity of romantic and erotic scenes in movies, are some indications of the significance of the understanding of film’s continuity with the real even in its mainstream fictional form). And we can see this “ontological” repetition and transformation of writing played out across the classic debates in film theory between realist and semiotic theorisations of the cinematic arts.

As mentioned above, Stiegler is at pains to contest this passive, pre-individual basis for seeing cinema. His argument for the cinematic character of consciousness in general converges with his critique of the reductive reception of the cinematic system for recording experience. Cinema amounts to a process of the selection and assembling of retentions, a process engaging the secondary retentional sphere of imagination/desire, and providing a protentional horizon to the flux of consciousness that coincides with its unfolding. It can so engage the viewer precisely because it already structures his/her consciousness, as that of “millions of minds on the planet,” as a schema of consciousness as such, that is, as a complex of perception, recollection and recognition unfolding in the flux of time (Stiegler 2001: 103). (It is in this “atranscendental” register that Stiegler proposes that consciousness is cinematic (as previously it was “essentially” literary), and that what Kant’s “cinema of consciousness” lacked was Husserl’s notion of the flux of primary retention. I take up this question of the atranscendental character of Stiegler’s incorporation of technical systems and schemes into the philosophical tradition of metaphysical conceptualisation in my review of his Technics and Time 3 (Crogan 2006).

The large scale industrial exploitation of the cinematic image-making and engaging system “encumbers” it (Stiegler 2005: 172). Stiegler discusses the standardisation of perception and protentions, and the impact of this standardisation on the realm of secondary retentions (memory). In Technics and Time 3 he draws on accounts of the significance of Hollywood to the formation of American cultural identity to argue that it was through the cinema that the adoption of American values was largely transacted -America requiring precisely a culture of general adoption as a means of generating a collective (labour force) from the massive and diversified immigration flows fueling its modernization. Subsequently this vision of an adoptable way of life animated the American led globalisation (replacing European colonial and imperial models).

The industrialisation of cinema (and the other mass media) was undertaken in line with the capitalist principle of the amortization of investment in the shortest possible time to produce profit. The focus on the capture and channelling of attention toward the coordination of consumption with production is key to Stiegler’s analysis of the encumbering of the cinematic system. Arriving at a similar account of the attention economy as that of Jonathan Beller in The Cinematic Mode of Production, Stiegler’s analysis of the cultural, political and indeed economic dangers of the continuing expansion of the efforts at channelling and coordinating the consciousnesses of individuals are framed as disturbing tendencies toward the erosion of the very dynamic of collective becoming (Beller 2006).

The squeezing out of non-standard, singular experience, and the influence of the temporal structure of capital amortisation in arranging the perception/imagination, image/desire compositions of the cinematic temporal object/experience, tends to exacerbate the imbalance between the factical stock of recorded memory and the recollection of singular experience in the ongoing becoming of consciousness. This all leads to the danger of the loss of individuating potential for individuals vis-à-vis the collective. What Stiegler calls “hyper-synchronization” (an excessive, preemptive industrial production of the collective through, above all, industrial temporal objects) can trigger “hyper-diachronization:” a breakdown of the individual-collective dynamic, a loss of self and collective, leading to, in psychoanalytic terms, the liberation of the drives in lieu of the mediations of the symbolic and the imaginary (Stiegler 2003: 89).

Consistent with his project of situating technics at the centre of the question of the human, Stiegler argues that it is only in and through inventive, idiosyncratic, “idiotic” adoptions of the technical program that alterations in the pre-individual, passive syntheses that have formed around them can mutate. As we pointed out above, these cultural formations are themselves a doubling of the developments and transformations of the technical system. The transformation in the technical system is, in Stiegler’s emplotment of the technical-cultural interaction, what suspends a previous epoch of human-technical relations and programs, opening other possibilities. Cultural-social adoptions of these transformations concretise these in and as a new “epoch.” Their re-doubling is critical to cultural and individual renewal, that is, to the processes of becoming other, becoming different. Epochal redoubling rearticulates experience, and therefore, thinks time, existence differently: “Art in general is that which seeks to temporalise otherwise” (Stiegler 2003: 182).

Cramming Time

The “epochal redoubling” potential of film (and other industrial temporal objects) to pose, reflect and inflect the technocultural nature and transformation of existence is also based on the coincidence of consciousness and the flow of the temporal object that the industrial-technical system exploits. Films with significant philosophical and aesthetic engagements would be instances of this epochal redoubling, and Stiegler analyses certain films and television programs in the Technics and Time series to advance his meditations on cinema and consciousness.

The “becoming temporal object of everything” in the epoch of informatic calculation amounts, however, to a major technological transformation that in fact challenges the continued existence of the human, technocultural potential for individual and collective individuation by undermining precisely its capacity for epochal redoubling (Stiegler 1996: 219).

The digital age, the era of numerical calculative systems, integrating various technical systems via the simulational propensity of the computer system, threatens (in a new way) this goal/practice of art to reinvent time. Stiegler draws on his analysis of Husserl to characterise the threat. He sees parallels between the “computer-generated” disciplines of cognitive science and Husserl’s efforts to isolate the present moment of perception as the ground of the constitution of consciousness (Stiegler 1996: 220). If Husserl struggles with the question of the big now, that is, the question of continuity, modification, of passage, most cognitive science fails to see the challenge to their computer modeling of cognition that this phenemonon of temporal experience represents. Husserl goes the furthest in his problematic effort to cordon off a pure present perception from memory, argues Stiegler, when he proposes that the recollection of the experience of a temporal object, that is, its reactivation as a secondary retention, could be potentially complete and total (Stiegler 1996: 252). This would be the ideal consequence of the purity of the initial primary retention of the temporal phenomenon.

Stiegler likens this to Turing’s notion of computer memory: a potentially total, perfect recording of formerly isolable, discrete, present experiences. A completely replayable experience, reactivatable in the present. The age of the computer develops and extends this scheme of total recall in its burgeoning and converging informational mnemo-technics. It forms what Stiegler characterises, after Heidegger, as a powerfully “intratemporal” model of engagement in the programs of contemporary existence. Here is Stiegler:

The becoming-temporal object of everything that happens - produced by the media and, beyond them, by the omnipotence of the new programmatology “rhythming” and weaving space-time-light - is also the primordial phenomenon that arrives with informatic calculation. The different analogical and numerical identities systematically temporalise everything retained (as selected) in a new configuration of instances that are constitutive of all event-making. Synthetic cognition is constituted as the algorithmic sequentialisation of an unfolding of instructions or operations by which the regulatory loops determine recurrent moments as feedback…. It is evident that the structure of every object emerging from a network of neuronal automatisms is (intra)temporal in that all changes of state of the network (as changes of the ensemble) come to be crammed together on top of the “now” determined by the tickings of a clock (Stiegler 1996: 219).

Real-time is another name for this jamming of change, of modification, of passage into the “now” of Heidegger’s clock (Heidegger 1992) which Stiegler analyses in Technics and Time 1 (Stiegler 1998: 210-215). The past becomes an instantly retrievable modality of the present moment in the sequencing of instructed/instructing gestures which, on the basis of this modality, cram the future into the present as the goal and guarantor of the maintenance, precisely, of realtime.

A beautiful example of this is the Australian network Channel 9’s television cricket coverage. Each year a new technical innovation in the analysis of the televised contest is added to the stock of realtime processing of the sporting event. Cricket lends itself perfectly to this permanent experiment in technical innovations to maintain the viewer’s attention. This is because it is a game that unfolds, in the shorter forms of the game, across many hours and even across days in the longer “Test match” format. The “old world” temporal duration of the Test makes it, paradoxically, an ideal experimental ground for the techniques of realtime cramming. This is the real “test” of Test match cricket for the program industries that cover it here and internationally (the Nine network, Sky Sports, ESPN), engaged in an ongoing contest of innovation in the presentation of the game that in its most traditional format struggles increasingly to maintain crowd attendances over the five days of gametime (notwithstanding the recent spike in Test attendances over the 2006-2007 Australian summer).

Coverage is constituted as a flow of audio-visual and statistical analysis of significant (or potentially significant) past moments of action, advertising and product endorsement, punctuated and sustained by fresh occurrences of (potentially) significant moments. Analysis of past moments involves multiple repetitions of the past event as well as the longer view of statistical records-based comparison and even predictive techniques opening onto counter-factual hypotheses about how the course of play might or should have unfolded. Instant Replays in multiple angles, in slow motion, and in “super slo mo” not only recall for a second look significant or exemplary plays (catches, scoring shots, near dismissals), indoing so they supplement the moment of significance with its extended, processed comet-trail that maintains the moment for the viewer until the next significant moment. With the replaying of near misses and events requiring a decision from the umpiring officials, this extended maintenance opens onto, inevitably, the undoing of the finality of the decision in a permanent susceptibility to instantaneous evaluative review. The fact that replays are now used in the adjudication process for many kinds of official decisions in cricket (as in many professional, mediatised sports) acknowledges this structural delegitimation of the official occasioned by the immediate mediation of the event’s duration.

“Replays” featuring other image and sound processing systems such as infrared heat signature analysis to locate the point(s) of contact of the ball with the batter-equipment combination, and the “Snicko” sound analysis system for discerning between the sound of the cricket ball contacting wood (the bat) or non-wood objects, follow on and deepen this performative maintenance of the instant of action into a big now of instant “revisability.” The “Hawkeye” apparatus, adopted from missile-tracking and medical “remote” procedures technology, incorporates a virtualisation of the game’s event space with a trajectory-prediction system that brings the counterfactual “what if” (what if the ball had not struck the batsman and had continued on its trajectory?) into this big now of the game event (Caisley et al: 2002). While not adopted as a legitimate “supplement” to the onfield officials as is the case with the analog image replay technologies, these virtualising, hypothesising systems play their part in shifting the viewer’s reception of the moment of cricket action away from a constative synthesis and toward its potential for a permanent undermining of the legitimacy of the game’s subsequent unfolding.

At the same time this stream of event processing seems to exhaust the possible options for remembering the play. The legitimacy of an official decision, the statistical, historical, strategic or dramatic import of a play are staged in a permanent rhythm of feedback, analytic and statistical projection that links significant moments together for the viewer. This year’s major innovation the telco-sponsored “Three Tracker,” serves to illustrate this apparently exhaustive “coverage” of  the moment that provides the passage of hours of cricket into a big now sequenced in this general rhythm of overlapping smaller, just-past but ready-to-hand big nows. It presents the viewer with an image that both moves and presents frozen images of the sequence of movement (of the ball, a player, of both in convergent trajectories) somewhat in the manner of Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography or Edward Muybridge’s experiments. The both/and presentation of animated movement and still frame both completes and reverses the analytical ambitions of those pre-cinematic researchers of movement. It completes the incorporation of motion and still frame as separate elements in one epistemological and technical synthesis, but reverses its ultimate goal of definitively capturing the actual material components of real events: these occur now to the viewer as (pre) processed (in realtime) elements in permanent, performative (re)animatio of eventfulness.

For Stiegler, Husserl’s (and Turing’s) dream of pure presence, and hence of realtime as its ultimate mastery, is illusory, albeit powerfully concretised in contemporary technoculture. It masks the selective nature of any recording or retention, and the passive syntheses that always inform and allow any particular selection of what is perceptible and can be retained of experience. With the proliferation and convergence of this primordial phenomenon of informatic calculation, however, it gets more difficult to find an idiosyncratic, idiotic, artistic redoubling of realtime.

This is a common theme in discussions of the dilemma of new media artists who take up the technical systems of informatic calculation and try to find something to do with them outside of what is programmed, who try, that is, to idiosyncratically adopt the temporalisation delegated to them by design as core to their operation. And this is needed all the more, because what is emerging as an increasingly apparent tendency of the adoption of the industrial programming of/in realtime is the thing Husserl was anxious to avoid, namely:

the putting into crisis of any absolute separation between real and fiction (ie. also between performativity and constativity)—and it’s precisely such a crisis that arrives with the generalised performativity resulting from the becoming temporal-object of everything, of every event when retentional finitude is industrially rationalised. (Stiegler 1996: 233)

“Retentional finitude” is a concept Derrida elaborates in his critique of Husserl to name the limitation of individual human memory, the limitation necessitating reliance on the prosthetic supplementation of living memory by writing. Stiegler draws on this to account for the constitutive effect of all the technologies that supplement individual experience and provide it with a context and a heritage out of which in unfolds and in which it finds its singular significance. The industrial temporal objects of the numerical era tend to trip a kind of “short-circuiting” of the individual’s experience of events. They seem to arrive now as pre-selected, processed, and recalled (that is already past) via our realtime informational networks, rendering the individual increasingly bereft of the potential to individuate through the process of selective secondary retention in the “bath of local rhythms” (Stiegler 1996: 277). The necessary distinction between primary retention (lived experience) and tertiary retention (essential factical prosthesis of experience) tends to become “formal and void” in this circumstance (1996: 277).

A dangerous uncoupling of the dynamic of individual and collective individuation results. The individual loses faith in the protentional horizon of collective becoming that is borne in the factical stock of tertiary retentions as heritage, cultural tradition, and orientation. Tertiary retention in turn loses its connection to the singularity of experience. The immediate passage of the event into a processed and re-presented “already-there” for the viewer and for viewers in general tends to prevent, or preempt, the individuation of experiences in the interchange with “our” others.

What is needed are ways of shaping a less prescriptive, preemptive, and hence less destructive encounter with the event, where the undermining of the distinction between the performative and the constative, the fictional and the real would not come as a brutal discrediting of the cultural edifice built on informatic calculation. The numerical-digital technics by which phenomena are rendered programmable in the logics and schedules of the program industries undoes the manner in which they arrived to play their part in the orientation of the individual. In Stiegler’s diagnosis what is increasingly lacking today are ways of re-engaging with the profound complexity of temporal objects, ways of regaining the potential for individuation in eventfulness.