Bernard Stiegler has placed the notion of prosthetics at the center of his philosophical anthropology by arguing that there is an intrinsic relationship between the evolution of human beings (anthropogenesis) and technology (technogenesis), such that human beings develop through prosetheticization. Commenting on Rousseau’s notion of an ‘originary man’ who is “not contaminated by the artificial, the mediate, the technical and the prosthetic,” and who already walks on two feet and uses his hands, Stiegler notes that to walk on two feet and use one’s hands already involves the use of technology. [1] He writes:
For to make use of his hands, no longer to have paws, is to manipulate—and what hands manipulate are tools and instruments. The hand is the hand only insofar as it allows access to art, to artifice, and to tekhné. The foot is these two feet of the human, this walking and this approach only insofar as, carrying the body’s weight, it frees the hand for its destiny as hand, for the manipulative possibility, as well as for a new relation between hand and face, a relation which will be that of speech and gesture…[2]
In this statement, Stiegler is drawing a connection between tekhné and language. The human being as a zoon echon logon (language having animal), according to Aristotle, is intrinsically technical and therefore prosthetic. Understood in this way, language is a kind of concretization or representation of thought. Robert E. Wood has called the development of language in human beings “the most powerful and sophisticated of all institutions.”[3] While, Stiegler views the phenomena of anthropogenesis through technogenesis arising from a state of metaphysical “lack” or “de-fault” (défaut ) which is overcome through technics; Wood suggests a more robust metaphysics underlying technics like language by arguing that it is a result of our natural orientation to the whole of being.[4] Contrary to Stiegler, Wood argues that the institution of language is not attempt to overcome a fundamental “lack” or “de-fault” (défaut ) but rather to respond to the metaphysical horizon of being as a whole through the prosthetic instrument of language. In Aristotelian terms, language, understood as a prosthetic (Gk.: prosthesis; to add to, to place before; edifice), is added to reason in order to concretize thought. Reason unfolds prosthetically through a system of signs. Viewed in this way, the human person is a being grasping towards a meaningful whole through the prosthetic of language.
In spite Stiegler’s weak metaphysics, his notion of human prostheticization has interesting implications for the relationship of human consciousness and the technology of cinematic representation. Stiegler characterizes human prostheticization in technics as tertiary memory.[5] This characterization revolves around Edmund Husserl‘s distinction in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, between primary and secondary retention, or memory. In this work, Husserl understands primary memory as “what is constituted in the originary impression.” Eva T.H. Brann has explained Husserl’s notion of the primal impression as “the source-point in which the generation of an enduring object begins, changes and ends.”[6] Thus, in the example of a temporal object such as a melody, it is constituted in the original perceptual impression of hearing it. According to Steigler, Husserl’s secondary memory is understood as a “referring back” or “re-collection” of a previously perceived temporal object. For example, remembering a melody heard yesterday.[7] However, as Stiegler points out, in Husserl’s efforts to preserve the lebenswelt, and consequently the reality of the temporal object in perception, he eliminates image-consciousness from primary memory and grants it only to the “re-collection” or “representation” of secondary memory.[8] Thus, on Husserl’s account, the imagination is not involved in the perception of temporal objects but only in their representation in secondary retention. Brann has also noted this same rejection of image-consciousness in Husserl. She writes:
He [Husserl] begins by rejecting the notion that memory is pictorial consciousness. The past in memory does not involve the making of an image of what existed earlier. His reason is that memory is a direct consciousness, not a mediated one. In fact there would be no way, he thinks, of getting through the opaque image to the object as past. Thus, he must take on the perplexity (Aporie) whether memory could be simply perception preserved, and he evidently comes to see a middle way: The vivid “image” of a vivid experience cannot be an analogue; the thing itself appears as an unmediated internal phenomenon. The representation is of identity, it is not mere pictorial similarity…. The imagination (Phantasie) is now excluded from the time-nexus.[9]
Husserl rejected Franz Brentano‘s claim that the unity of past and present appeared in consciousness “in the mode of phantasy;” that is, through images, because his claim failed to distinguish “between act, content of apprehension, and the object apprehended.”[10] For Husserl, Brentano conflates the “perception of time and the phantasy of time” with the inevitable consequence of time-consciousness being simply a series of “phantasies of phantasies” and thus preventing the necessary distinction of past, present and future.[11] Husserl therefore eliminates the role of the imagination in the temporal constitution of an object in a primary impression because he wants to preserve the temporal distinction of past, present and future in the flux of consciousness. He sets up an opposition between primary and secondary retention and distinguishes these from image consciousness.
Stiegler rejects Husserl’s opposition between primary and secondary retention on that grounds that it fails to account for the selection process inherent in perception and this process of selection involves an “image-consciousness,” which Stiegler refers to as tertiary memory. Stiegler explains this type of memory through the example of listening to a recorded melody. He explains:
You only have to listen twice to the same melody to see that between the two auditions, consciousness (the ear, here) never hears the same thing: something has occurred. Each new audition affords a new phenomenon, richer if the music is good, less so if not, and that is why the music lover is an aficionado of repeated auditions – a variation of selections . . . From one audition to the next the ear is not the same, precisely because the ear of the second audition has been affected by the first.[12]
What Stiegler is pointing out is that the temporal object of primary memory is constituted through the determinative process of secondary memory which guides the selection of eidetic features of the temporal object and therefore involves representation by the imagination. Ben Roberts explains Stiegler’s position:
This difference between auditions can be understood, for Stiegler, only if the primary retention of the melody I am listening to now is somehow modified by the secondary memory of the same melody heard previously. The experience of perceiving the same temporal object, that is, the melody, twice reveals that the temporal object cannot be simply constituted through primary retention. Moreover – and here the theme of technics reasserts itself – the very experience of perceiving the same temporal object twice is possible only by virtue of the prosthetic memory support of digital or analogue recording.[13]
Thus, temporal objects are
constituted by primary memory through secondary memory facilitated by tertiary memory. Put more simply, consciousness constitutes objects imaginatively. This leads Stiegler to make the startling claim that consciousness and cinema are similarly structured. He explains:
the singularity of the cinematographic recording technique lies in the conjugation of two coincidences: on the one hand, the photo-phonographic coincidence of past and reality .. . inducing this “reality effect,” that is, this belief which is installed in the spectator immediately by the technique itself; on the other hand, the coincidence between the film flux and the flux of consciousness of the film’s spectator that triggers, in the play of movement between the photographic stills linked by the phonographic flux, the mechanism of complete adoption of the film’s time by the time of the spectator’s consciousness that, itself a flux, finds itself captured and “borne along” by the movement of images. This movement, invested by the desire for stories living in all spectators, frees the movements of consciousness characteristic of cinematographic emotion.[14]
Human consciousness is therefore cinematographically structured, which is to say that both consciousness and cinema both constitute reality through the movement of images, or representations. Given that human beings are intrinsically prosthetic and constitute reality imaginatively; and given that human consciousness is cinematographically structured, cinema can therefore be characterized as prosthetic imagination. Just as prehistoric civilizations inscribed themselves in history through the development of stone tools and architecture; so now modern civilization inscribes itself in history through cinema. Films can therefore be understood as prostheticizations of our inner cinema.
[1] Stiegler, Bernard, Technics and Time, I: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) Originally published as La Technique et le temps, 1: La faute d’Epiméthée (Galilée: Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, 1994), 112.
[2] Stiegler, Bernard, Technics and Time, 113.
[3] Wood, Robert E, Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 9.
[4] Stiegler, Bernard, Technics and Time, 16.
[5] Ibid., 247.
[6] Brann, Eva T.H. What, Then, Is Time?(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999), 140
[7] Stiegler, Bernard, Technics and Time, 247.
[8] Ibid., 247-248.
[9] Brann, Eva T.H. What, Then, Is Time?, 146.
[10] Husserl, Edmund, Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. trans. James S. Churchill. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966.) (Originally published as Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins. ed. by Martin Heidegger, Marburg, 1928). 36, 37.
[11] Husserl, Edmund, Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, 36, 37.
[12] This translation is taken from Roberts, Ben, “Cinema as Mnemotechnics: Bernard Stiegler and the Industrialization of Memory,” Angelaki, Volume II, Number 1 (April 2006): 55-63, who relies on Stiegler, Bernard. La Technique et le temps. Vol. 3. Le Temps du cinéma et la question du mal-etre. Paris: Galilée, 2001. Partially translated as “The Time of Cinema.” Trans. George Collins. Tekhnema 4(1998): 62-113.
[13] Roberts, Ben, “Cinema as Mnemotechnics,” 58.
[14] Translation of “. . la singularité de la technique d’enregistrement cinématographique résulte de la conjugaison de deux coincidences: d’une part, la coincidence photophonographique entre passé et réalité . . . qui induit cet ‘effet de réel’, c’est-a’-dire de croyance, ou’ le spectateur est installé d’avance par la technique elle-meme; d’autre part, la coincidence entre flux du film et flux de la conscience duspectateurde ce film, qui parlejeu dumouvement créé entre les poses photographiques, liées entre elles par le flux phonographique, déclenche le mécanisme d’adoption comple’te du temps du film par le temps de la conscience du spectateur, qui, en tant qu’elle est elle-meme un flux, se trouve captée et ‘canalisée’ par le mouvement des images. Ce mouvement, investi par le désir d’histoires qui habite tout spectateur, libe’re les mouvements de conscience typiques de l’emotion cinématographique. (Stiegler, Le Temps du cinéma 34 [66]; original emphasis translation slightly modified). taken from Roberts, Ben, “Cinema as Mnemotechnics,” 58.
