From robber to Pompidou director, the legendary Bernard Stiegler is also the hottest figure in French philosophy today after Derrida. All three volumes of his magnum opus Technics and Time have already been introduced into China by Yilin Press.
Although this third volume was written after the first two, it can also be read independently; the author himself notes that, in a certain sense, this volume can serve as the “best introduction” to the first two.
Compared with the subtitles of the first two volumes — The Fault of Epimetheus and Disorientation — the subtitle of the newly published third volume, The Time of Cinema and the Problem of the Pain of Existence, seems a bit more specific; at the very least, one can see that it has something to do with cinema. The back-cover blurb of the Chinese edition says: “In this book, the author points out that when cinema turns into television, symbolic industry and logistics industry achieve integration, making possible both control over the entire market and control over the entire stream of consciousness involving synthesis.”
Seeing the title and the “blurb,” readers may perhaps take this book to be a work of artistic-philosophical reflection on cinema, or something like a cultural critique of mass media. If so, then after actually reading it they will surely cry foul — what on earth is this talking about?
In fact, this is the real thing: a bona fide philosophical work, stylistically combining the obscurity of classical philosophy with the airy drift of postmodern philosophy; in other words, it is extremely, extremely hard to digest. Even for the most specialized philosophical scholars, it will likely be a formidable challenge.
In this volume, Stiegler discusses several films, but a much larger portion is in fact devoted to commentary on several of the most classic philosophical works — Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Heidegger’s Being and Time… Technics and Time can also be seen as their sequel. Like the philosophical traditions represented by Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, and others, Stiegler is concerned with philosophy’s “big questions” — truth and essence, human nature and the world, existence and death, who we are, where we come from, where we are going…
But what do philosophy’s “big questions” have to do with cinema? In fact, cinema is indeed a crucial thread in this book, and by no means a mere eye-catching gimmick. Yet cinema does not appear simply as a “topic” for philosophical reflection; rather than saying that cinema is the object of the book’s reflection, it would be better to say that it is the medium or point of departure for reflection — “thinking through cinema.”
Stiegler says that the “central objective of this book is to, from the perspective that ‘consciousness is like cinema,’ re-interpret this critical moment” — that is, to re-interpret “Kant’s schematism and the transcendental deduction that brings schematism into view” (Chinese translation, p. 7).
We know that when we speak of “philosophy of science,” there may be two meanings: first, philosophical reflection on science (Philosophy of Science); second, a philosophical character that takes science as its point of departure (Scientific Philosophy). Clearly, Stiegler’s philosophy of technology or philosophy of cinema is in the latter sense.
You may wonder: how is such a philosophy starting from technology possible? In particular, how could one possibly start from so recently arisen a technology as cinema and still answer those oldest of philosophical questions? But modern science is also a recently emerged thing, and yet people seem more readily able to understand a form of philosophy grounded in modern science than to understand that philosophy could be grounded in cinema.
This difference involves a certain ancient opposition: craft is opposed to science, technical objects are opposed to natural objects, and the former are seen as contingent existences that may or may not be there, rather than as the domain that a theoretical science seeking certainty ought to concern itself with. Philosophy or science is thought to pursue eternal certainties, and to have nothing to do with the history of technological development, which is full of contingency.
Thus the fact that contemporary technology and science are combined is something that “for an ancient Greek philosopher, is unimaginable.” (p. 251) This paradoxical fact forces us to re-examine the essence of technology and science. Stiegler puts forward many new insights. For instance, he believes that rather than saying that technology has become “applied science,” it is better to say that science has become “applied technology.” In a certain sense, technology is the foundation of science, and the history of technological development has thereby become a task for transcendental philosophy.
Transcendental philosophy concerns what comes prior to experience and makes experience possible. For Kant, the transcendental is the pure form of sensible intuition — time and space — and Kant uses “schematism” to show how the subject constructs objects; the unity of the self guarantees the unity of the object of experience, and knowledge is achieved through the “triple synthesis” (the synthesis of apprehension, the synthesis of reproduction, the synthesis of recognition).
Stiegler, however, believes that Kant became confused in the doctrine of the “triple synthesis” — when speaking of the synthesis of apprehension, Kant mistakenly thought he was speaking of the synthesis of reproduction. And this confusion precisely requires us to look to the third synthesis for its root.
Stiegler believes that the triple synthesis corresponds to three modes of retention, or three “memories.” The first memory is the retention of what has “just passed”: for example, when listening to a melody, when we hear a sentence, we are able to grasp it as a whole rather than as fragmented notes, and this depends on the fact that the notes that have just passed are still, in some sense, “retained.” And when, after hearing this music, I recall it, it is re-presented in my mind — this is the second memory. The third memory refers to technical objects such as paper and records that can retain this memory.
“The third synthesis configures and edits the first two syntheses, making them into one and the same singular temporal flow — and all this, to some extent, makes ‘consciousness like cinema,’ projected toward its future moment.” Stiegler points out that “the unity of Kant’s own stream of consciousness was formed and constructed in the course of the writing work of each of his volumes.” (p. 59)
The way someone who has never learned to write organizes their thoughts differs from that of someone situated within a culture of writing; the illiterate find it harder to form a conceptual logic of reflection, and it is difficult for them to regard words as some sort of Platonic self-subsistent entities, still less to carry out the kind of delicate reasoning with structurally complex long sentences that Kant does. Even speech itself is a kind of externalizing technology: what is said may be retained and re-enacted by others. It is precisely by relying on these actual or potential processes of “externalization” that a unified self-consciousness is constructed. “If consciousness is to become the consciousness possessed by someone, the precondition must be that this consciousness can be externalized and objectified in the form of certain traces, while through these traces other consciousnesses are able to enter that consciousness.” (p. 62)
Time and space are indeed the background in which objects of experience can appear, but this time and space are not some abstract, floating mathematical relation; rather, they are presented by technology (what Stiegler calls prostheses): a pipe’s worth of time, a step’s distance… More fundamental than mathematized time and space is the human “being-in-the-world.” This was already disclosed by Heidegger. But Stiegler points out that Heidegger neglected the insight he had already touched upon, “ultimately excluding the ‘temporality of the world’” (p. 218); he became entangled in the history of concepts while forgetting the history of technology, and he also “completely forgot to think through the ontological characteristics of education.” (p. 217)
Education constitutes a process of “internalization”: first, within a real, acquired technical environment, we learn to speak, write, and draw, to read, listen, and watch. Through education, the structures of these external technologies are internalized as the way we understand the world — “transcendental imagination — which enables us to draw a line in our minds and thereby construct space, must as the basis of geometrical construction be inseparable from drawing a line by hand in actual space.” (p. 72) In a certain sense, transcendental capacities are also acquired post factum. “The a posteriori prosthetic synthesis is ‘transcendental,’ but at the same time it exists only in, and is constrained by, the ‘a posteriori’ conditions of the history of technical invention.” (p. 190)
On the one hand, human beings are able to create and watch films, which hints at some “mechanism” of the human soul; human consciousness is a kind of “montage.” On the other hand, the modern art of memory represented by the film industry is constructing the self-consciousness and world-experience of modern human beings: “Hollywood has become the world capital of schematism” (p. 14), and thus is the entry point to the problem of modernity, or rather the problem of the “pain of existence.” Stiegler shows us a unique philosophical path.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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