Inner Cinema: Stiegler and Husserl on Time, Consciousness and Imagination

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.

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[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.

The Ethical Frame, Part 4: Redemption and Responsibility in The Reader

Have You Spent Much Time Thinking About The Past?

Michael’s marriage does not last and during the painful divorce he begins reading again and discovers his notebook where he kept track of all the books he had read to Hanna during their affair. He decides to record his readings of these books on cassette tapes and send them anonymously to Hanna. Hanna learns how to read and write in prison through these tapes and writes to Michael hoping to renew their relationship but Michael does not respond. Eventually, Hanna’s prison sentence is over and a prison official contacts Michael to assist with her release. Hanna does not have anyone else to help her. Michael agrees to help her and goes to visit her where he tells her that he as found a job and apartment for her. During their meeting Michael asks her, “Have you spent much time thinking about the past?” The question is a rupture in what had been up to that moment a casual conversation about her release. The question pares her prison experience down to an ethical inquiry. What Michael wants to know is whether the Hanna that helped him when he was sick, taught him to make love and nodded when he asked her if she loved him was still teeming behind the face of the woman who selected human beings for extermination. He wants to know if there is redemption. He wants to know if there is someone to redeem. Hanna responds that it doesn’t matter what she thinks or feels because “the dead are still dead.” Redemption glimmers in her answer. She realizes her responsibility for what has occurred. The severity of what she did cannot be mollified or ameliorated by her thoughts and feelings. She does not resolve the tension between the murdered and the murderer. She simply shoulders the responsibility for their deaths.

How Am I Supposed to Deal With This?

Hanna, cannot face her release and hangs herself in her cell the night before her release. She leaves a small tin with money she had saved and asks Michael to give it to the survivor who had testified at her trial. Michael travels to New York where he finds the woman who testified at Hanna’s trial and tells her about his relationship with Hanna. After Michael finishes sharing Hanna’s story with the woman she asks him, “How am I supposed to deal with this?” The question catches Michael off-guard. He had assumed she would find some solace in the story of a Nazi’s redemption. He had hoped that Hanna’s humanity would reveal itself in her story, but this was not the case. To accept the money would amount to granting Hanna absolution and that is not a gift the survivor can give. The dead remain dead. To absolve their killer would be an injustice. She refuses the money but suggest that Michael give it to a Jewish society for adult illiteracy. Michael agrees with this suggestion and leaves with a new sense of justice in which redemption involves responsibility; responsibility for the Other. This responsibility requires an act of substitution without the expectation of reciprocity. The film ends with Michael telling his daughter Hanna’s story.

The Ethical Frame, Part 3: Rupture and Redemption in The Reader

Having established a methodological approach to film as an ethical frame and having teased out a Levinasian notion of ethical time and discourse I will employ these insights in an analysis of the recent film The Reader. As this analysis will show, The Reader serves as a frame for discussing and debating the moral issues surrounding the Holocaust and Germany’s responsibility. David Hare, who wrote the screen play for the film, has written that the film was an attempt to articulate the dilemma of the succeeding generation of Germans who were wrestling with issue of truth and reconciliation.[1] The film is concerned with the rupture of the holocaust which called into question everything we believed about humanity and the hope of redemption. This observation demonstrates the intentional ethical frame of The Reader and the latent capacity of films in the Cinema of Redemption to serve as agents of temporal rupture and ethical provocation.

Four questions punctuate The Reader and constitute diachronic ruptures in which the Other is revealed and redemption becomes possible. Each question is answered in the film by one of the characters but remains unanswered for the audience. The questions reveal our responsibility for the Other and provoke us to moral action. These questions become catalysts for redemption, not just for the characters but for the audience as well.

Do You Love Me?

The film opens with the central character and narrator Michael Berg reminiscing about a time when he was fifteen in the Germany of the 1930s and became violently ill on a tram. Unable to control himself he vomits on the tram and gets off at the next stop and wanders the streets until he becomes exhausted and pauses in alley way where he vomits again. Hanna Schmitz, a moderately attractive middle-aged tram conductor, happens upon him, takes him to her apartment, cleans him up and walks him home. This act of kindness and compassion overwhelms and arouses the young Michael Berg. For the next three months, Michael remains confined to his bed with scarlet fever. After his recovery he returns to Hanna’s apartment to thank her for her kindness. During the visit Michael catches sight of Hanna undressing and when she sees him watching her she seduces him. This begins a series of regular sexual liaisons after Michael gets out of school each day. During their encounters Hanna asks that Michael read to her. They read Homer, Chekhov, Lessing, Twain, and others.

After several weeks of their affair, Michael and Hanna agree to meet on her tram when her shift ends. Michael boards the second car of the tram that Hanna is working on but she is in the first car. Michael anticipates that she will move back to the second car but she doesn’t. In fact, she acts as if she doesn’t know him. Michael is hurt by this and follows Hanna to her apartment when she finishes her shift but she asks him to leave. He is devastated by her actions but Hanna is indifferent to his feelings. He cannot believe that this woman whom he loves could treat him in this way. Their argument escalates and he leaves but returns a short time later. He fears their relationship is ending but Hanna does not seem to mind. She is cold and indifferent. He tells her that he cannot imagine living without her and then asks her, “Do you love me?” She looks at him oddly as if the question is unintelligible. Suddenly, her indifference is ruptured by Michael’s question. The reverberations of a vulnerable Other echo in the question. She is bound to this Other, this boy whom she has seduced and used for her pleasure and intellectual stimulation. She is responsible for him. She nods and invites him to bathe with her. Her nod is not an answer but simply an affirmation of Michael’s proximity and her responsibility. She redeems him from despair with a nod. The question exceeds the bounds of “what is love?” and “who is loved?” The echo of the Other that makes love possible resounds in the question and reverberates in the ears of the audience. The affair ends abruptly after Hanna is notified that she is being promoted to a clerical position at the tram authority. Michael arrives at her apartment the next day only to find it empty and no sign of Hanna. He becomes distraught and mourns for his loss.

Have You Spent Much Time Thinking About The Past?

The film, then leaps to Michael’s days in law school in the 1960s where he takes a course taught by a professor who is a holocaust survivor. As part of the course the professor has the students attend a trial of several female SS guards who were accused of allowing 300 Jewish prisoners to die in a burning church during the Allied liberation of Auschwitz. Michael is shocked to see his former lover, Hanna Schmitz, among the defendants. During the trial a survivor of Auschwitz testifies that each of the guards on trial participated in the selection process that led to the extermination of prisoners under their watch. She adds that Hanna Schmitz had favorites that she would invite to her room to read to her and pass over in the selection process. Michael is reminded of their affair and how he used to read to her. When the court produces a handwritten report of the church fire Hanna’s fellow defendants testify that she wrote the report. Although she denies the allegation initially she eventually admits to writing it to avoid providing handwriting sample. Michael then realizes that Hanna is a functioning illiterate and would rather accept responsibility for genocide than admit her illiteracy.

When the judge asks Hanna about her role in the selection of prisoners for the gas chambers and whether or not she knew that she was sending them to their deaths; she admits that Auschwitz was an extermination camp and, quite matter-of-factly, admits that it was their job to select certain weaker and sickly prisoners for extermination in order to make room for new prisoners. Hanna, lives a Dasein-centric life embedded in synchronic time. There is no room for the otherness of the human beings to break into Hannah’s world. The human beings under her charge are interpreted in reference to her. They are prisoners because she is their guard. In, Hanna’s world there is only the referential totality of the prison camp.

Hanna’s embeddedness in a synchronic temporality is revealed when she asks the judge, “What would you have done?” The question ruptures the synchrony of the film. The questioner becomes the questioned. The judge appears to not even understand the question. He is shocked that Hanna is unaware of how she could have acted differently. She was only doing her job, she says. They were prisoners and she was a guard, she says. She had to make room for others. Her question to the judge exceeds the frame of the film and spills out into the audience. The echo of the Other resounds in the question as the one for whom we are responsible. The question provokes us to ask ourselves what we would have done in Hanna’s position. Redemption stands at the nexus of our vulnerability and our responsibility for the Other.

Michael, lives a Other-centered life overwhelmed by diachronic time. Michael is stunned to witness Hanna’s lack of remorse and the apparent banality of evil. How could this woman who had shown him such kindness, compassion and love, have committed such a heinous act without any remorse? Michael looks at the faces of survivors in the courtroom. He is overwhelmed by a temporal disjunction that cuts across his previous life with Hannah, his role as a student, and his own naive perspectives. Human beings were murdered. He cannot reduce them to prisoners. He is responsible for them and, ironically, he is responsible for Hannah. Michael can answer Hannah’s question, “What would you have done?” because he is vulnerable to the Other echoing in the question.

When Michael visits Auschwitz and plunges into a moral crisis. Michael is faced with a moral dilemma. He can notify the court that she is a functioning illiterate which would humiliate Hanna and absolve her of primary responsibility or he can remain silent and preserve her from shame and allow her to be convicted. Michael chooses not to disclose her secret and to let justice work itself out. Hanna receives a life sentence and is sent to prison. Michael goes on to begin his career, marry, and have children, leaving his past with Hanna behind.

[1] Hare, David. “Truth and Reconciliation,” The Guardian, December 13, 20008.

The Ethical Frame, Part 2: The Reader and Synchronic Time

Time is a crucial theme in the work of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Lévinas. It stands as a point of divergence between these two thinkers. For Heidegger, time is a product of a solitary subject in the world. For Lévinas, time is a relationship between a subject and the Other. In this essay, I will compare and contrast each of these thinker’s notions of time and argue that Heidegger’s notion of time is Dasein-centric[1] and leaves no room for the other, while Lévinas’ notion of time is Other-centric and creates space for difference. The point of these distinctions will be to demonstrate that Heidegger’s notion of time makes justice impossible and Lévinas’ notion of time makes justice possible. I will then apply this analysis to the two principle characters in the film The Reader. Assuming our previous characterization of film as an ethical frame and The Reader as an example of the Cinema of Redemption I will argue that the character Hannah Schmitz lives a Dasein-centric life embedded in synchronic time; whereas, the character Michael Berg lives an Other-centric life overwhelmed by diachronic time. By employing these two characters in this way, The Reader can be characterized as confronting the audience with an ethical dilemma by employing the element of temporal disjunction.

For Martin Heidegger time is the horizon for the understanding of Being and temporality is the Being of Dasein, which understands Being.[2] In a certain sense, Heidegger sees being and time as synonymous terms. Dasein is a temporal being, which Heidegger calls Being-in-the-world, who is thrown into existence and stretched along between birth and death.[3] The stretching along between birth and death constitutes the historical temporality of Dasein.[4] Dasein is a historical being in time. Time is therefore Dasein-centric.

Heidegger observes that birth is the beginning of dying for Dasein and that its existence is a Being-towards-death.[5] Death, Heidegger says, is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.[6] Death confronts Dasein with its finitude. Additionally, death reveals the possibility of Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being.[7] Dasein responds to death by either fleeing from it (falling) or anticipating it (resoluteness) both of which constitute an existential structure that Heidegger calls care.[8] Birth and Death are connected in the between of Dasein’s care. [9] Heidegger describes the structure of care as a primordial structural totality of Being-ahead-of-itself (future), Being-already-in (past), and Being-alongside-entities-within-the-world (present).[10] Unlike things which simply persist through time, Dasein is aware of the past, present and future as a meaningful integrated whole. However, Heidegger is adamant that Dasein is first and foremost a furtural being in that Dasein, in its own most potentiality-for-Being, comes toward itself.[11] The essence of Dasein’s existence is therefore the temporalization of its temporality.
[12]

In The Reader, Hannah Schmitz, lives a Dasein-centric life embedded in synchronic time. When Hannah is asked at her trial why she did not release prisoners from a burning barn she responded that she was a guard and her it was her job to prevent the prisoners from escaping. There is no room for the otherness of the human beings burning to death in the barn to break into Hannah’s world. The people inside the barn are interpreted in reference to her. They are prisoners because she is their guard. In, Hannah’s world there is only the referential totality of the prison camp. Her embeddedness in a synchronic temporality is revealed when she asks the judge “what would you have done?” She is clearly not blind to other options. The prisoners must die because her role as guard does not allow any other option.

[1] Dr. Charles Bambach (University of Texas at Dallas) and Dr. Gilbert Garza (University of Dallas) recently made me aware that this characterization of Heidegger only represents the early-Heidegger and does not take into account the onto-centric shift in the later Heidegger.
[2] Heidegger, Being and Time, 39.
[3] Ibid., 174, 425.
[4] Ibid., 427.
[5] Ibid., 426.
[6] Ibid., 294.
[7] Ibid., 307.
[8] Ibid., 84.
[9] Ibid., 426-427.
[10] Ibid., 237, 238.
[11] Ibid., 373.
[12] Ibid., 378.