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.

---

[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.

Inglourious Basterds: The Best (Not a) Shoah Movie of 2009

Quentin Tarantino’s recent film Inglourious Basterds is cinema embedded in cinema. The film takes multiple focuses but centers chiefly on a film theater in German-occupied Paris run by Shosanna Dreyfus, a young Jewish woman living under an assumed identity after escaping the mass execution of her family. Shosanna is romantically pursued by a young German soldier named Frederick Zoller who had become a war hero after saving his unit through his expert marksmanship and who had subsequently become the subject of Nazi propaganda film. The young soldier, enamored with the young theater owner, convinces her to allow the premiere of the film about him to take place in her theater which Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler will attend. Although, Tarantino has been quick to point out that Inglorious Basterds is not a film about the Shoah but more of a “guys-on-a-mission movie” it is difficult to see how the film can escape representing the Shoah given the central role that Nazi ideology, propaganda, and state sanctioned violence against Jews plays (Horn, Jordana, “Glorious Bastard: Tarantino Talks About His Not-A-Holocaust-Movie,” The Jewish Daily Forward, August 21, 2009) Tarantino is his attempt not to represent the Shoah, has represented it. But how has he represented it?

Tarantino places “killing Nazis” at the center of his filmic discourse. Through the use of cinematic techniques such as montage and “breaking the fourth wall”, Tarantino blurs the lines between “killing Nazis” and “Nazis killing” in two central scenes. In the central scene of the movie where Hitler and his high command have gathered in Shosanna’s Paris theater to the view the premiere of the new propaganda film featuring Frederick Zoller, Tarantino takes a surrealistic turn and uses cinematic montage to turn the tables on the audience. While the doors of the theater are being locked, the building set ablaze, hidden explosives are ticking towards ignition, and the weapons of Tarantino’s Basterds are trained on Hitler’s high command, the Nazi propaganda film depicting similar acts by Nazi soldiers plays in the background. The cinematic frames alternate between the eruption of gunfire in the theater and in the propaganda film. The delight on the faces of Nazis in the propaganda film while they are killing and the delight on the faces of those killing Nazis in the theater becomes difficult to separate as the speed of the frames increases. The propaganda film then becomes the vengeful and mocking face of Shosanna reveling in the deaths of her persecutors.In the final scene of the movie Lt. Aldo Raine carves a swastika into the forehead of the captured SS Col. Hans Landa. While he works his grisly craft the camera focus shifts and breaks the fourth wall so that the audience perspective become the perspective of the Nazi. Tarantino catches the audience on the horns of these images in order to bring into relief the human taste for revenge and the natural proclivity for violence. In this way, the film serves as a surrealistic attempt to represent the un-representable. Instead of spelling out the horror of the Shoah in narrative discourse and images, Tarantino creates a cinematographic experience in which the audience is able to experience the sensuous phenomenon of hatred, revenge and violence that serve as visceral cues to the essence of the historical experience in a more acute way than narrative does. In the end, the hands of the audience and the hands of the Nazis look the same – bloody.

Perverts and Prosthetics: Alison Landsberg on Memory, Imagination and Cinema

Historically, film theory has understood cinema as a kind of pervert art that, in the words of Slavoj Zizek in his moderately successful The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, “doesn’t give you what you desire [but]  tells you how to desire (The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema, directed by Sophie Fiennes, P Guide Ltd., 2006, opening scene.)” Understood in this way, cinema functions as an ideological apparatus exerting a shaping force upon culture through imagistic discourse. More recent scholarship has pushed this analysis in an ethical direction by suggesting that cinema functions as a prosthetic memory where previously unknown experiences of others become part of the viewer’s experiential archive. However, memory, at its most fundamental level, is image-dependent and therefore cinema can also be understood as a prosthetic imagination. Cinema is after all, a technology of representation where the camera inserts itself between reality and our gaze.

Alison Landsberg has highlighted the way modern technologies of mass culture, like film, function as prosthetic memories (Landsberg, Alison, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 1.) According to Landsberg, “the unprecedented movement of peoples brought about by modernity” and “the emergence of mass culture” provided the foundations for the commodification of mass culture through technologies like film (Ibid., 2.) As a consequence, memory became transportable through the “circulation of images and narratives about the past (Ibid., 2.)” This emerging form of memory prostheticized in cinematic technology offered the possibility of an “interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site (Ibid., 2.)” This new form of memory challenges the notion of memory as historically or culturally specific and gives rise to a transcultural and transhistorical understanding of memory. For Landsberg, the emergence of prosthetic memory, far from being simply a vehicle of ideology, bears the ethical, social and political potential for “unexpected alliances across chasms of difference (Ibid., 3.)”

She compares the use of prosthetic memories to the practice of memorizing texts in the Middle Ages where a person “was to digest, ruminate on, and ultimately incorporate the text’s meanings into his or her own archive of experience (Ibid., 4.)” Texts became a source for ethical development. In a similar way, prosthetic memory, in technologies of mass culture like film have the ethical potential “to encourage people to feel connected to, while recognizing the alterity, of the ‘other (Ibid., 9.)” How is this possible given the obvious physical, historical, social, and cultural disengagements? Landsberg explains her understanding of the way prosthetic memories function in the following way:

With prosthetic memory, as with earlier forms of remembrance, people are invited to take on memories of a past through which they did not live. Some of the strategies and techniques for acquiring memories are similar, too. Memory remains sensuous phenomenon experienced by the body, and it continues to derive much of its power through affect. But unlike its precursors, prosthetic memory has the ability to challenge the essentialist logic of many group identities. Mass culture makes particular memories more widely available, so that people who have no “natural” claim to them might nevertheless incorporate them into their own archive of experience (Ibid., 8-9.)

Memories, prostheticized in the cinematic apparatus and mediated through images, are experienced bodily through sight and sound. As such, it is possible to conceive of cinema as “a site in which people experience a bodily, mimetic encounter with a past that was not actually theirs” and where “spectators suture themselves to history, to develop prosthetic memories (Ibid., 14.)” The process of suturing an audience to historical experiences suggests the ethical dangers and potentials of cinematic representations. What aspects of the historical experience will be concealed and what aspects will be preserved? What impact will these representational decisions have on the audience?

Landsberg’s construal of film as a prosthetic memory recognizes that there is an imagistic grammar in the filmic discourse operating in the cinematic apparatus, which as a determinative technology,  shapes culture and positions the spectator ideologically. But Landsberg also views the spectator as an individual, communally situated within the cinematic apparatus and is therefore able to argue that films function as prosthetic memories at the intersection of the individual and the community. She explains:

Prosthetic memories are neither purely individual nor entirely collective but emerge at the interface of individual and collective experience. They are privately felt public memories that develop after an encounter with a mass cultural representation of the past, when new images and ideas come into contact with a person’s own archive of experience (Ibid., 19.)”

Understood in this way, films are not “capsules of meaning that spectators swallow wholesale but are the grounds on which social meanings are negotiated, contested and sometimes constructed (Ibid., 21.)” Cinema is not a pervert art but rather a mimetic art that functions prosthetically. Films as prosthetic memories can therefore become the “basis for mediated collective identification and the production of potentially counter hegemonic public spheres,” which serves as “a powerful corrective to identity politics (Ibid., 21.)”

Landsberg does extend her analysis in an interesting direction by characterizing cinema as a prosthetic imagination; however, her treatment of this characterization is minimal. She argues that American cinema has functioned as a prosthetic imagination for immigrants by allowing them to imagine themselves as “typical Americans” by suturing themselves to the representations of America’s past represented in film (Ibid., 56.) While Landsberg recognizes how film can function as a medium for imagining new social identities, she fails to note the connection between memory and imagination. Memory is after all, image-dependent at its most fundamental level and therefore can be understood as a re-presentation, involving a reimaging of the past and therefore imagination. Cinema as a prosthetic apparatus is primarily imaginative and only secondarily mimetic.

Facing Janus: Reframing the Question Concerning Technology – Part 3 of 3

Bernard Stiegler: What Will We Become

Bernard Stiegler has reframed the question concerning technology around the concept of human becoming. Stiegler sees an intrinsic relationship between the evolution of human beings (anthropogenesis) and technology (technogenesis). Stiegler makes two central claims: (1) that human beings are inherently technological and (2) that they develop through the evolution of technology. For Stiegler, the question concerning technology is not “How shall we act?” or even “How shall we live?” but rather “What shall we become?”

Stielger claims that human beings are intrinsically technological. His claim rests on the connection between technics and time as he explains:

There is today a conjunction between the question of technics and the question of time, one made evident by the speed of technical evolution, by the ruptures in temporalization (event-ization) that this evolution provokes, and by the processes of deterritorialization accompanying it. It is a conjunction that calls for a new consideration of technicity. The following work aims to establish that organized inorganic beings are originarily and as marks of the de-fault of origin out of which there is [es gibt] time—constitutive (in the strict phenomenological sense) of temporality as well as spatiality, in quest of a speed “older” than time and space, which are the derivative decompositions of speed. Life is the conquest of mobility. As a “process of exteriorization,” technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life (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, 17.)

While Stiegler agrees with Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is a temporal being, who is thrown into existence and stretched along between birth and death which constitutes the historical temporality of Dasein (Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1962. Originally published as Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Neomarius Verlag, 1926. Ibid., 174, 425, 427.) he questions whether this temporality is a intratemporality and criticizes Heidegger for overlooking the fact that human temporality is externalized in technics. As such, Dasein is essentially “prosthetic,” that is, Dasein is always seeking to temporalize itself externally through artefacts (Gaston, Sean, “Technics of Decision: An Interview,” Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 8, no. 2 (August 2003): 156.) Stiegler explains:

Mortals are prosthetic, that is to say they are endowed with artefacts and are capable of altering the artefacts which they adopt. In this sense, they are not doomed to a predestination, they “have to be” what they are, they are destined to decision, that is, to time understood in this sense, which is not that of life (Ibid., 156.)

Additionally, Dasein temporlizes itself technically as Stiegler points out.

Dasein is outside itself, in ec-stasis, temporal: its past lies outside it, yet it is nothing but this past, in the form of not yet. By being actually its past, it can do nothing but put itself outside itself, “ek-sist.” But how does Dasein eksist in this  way? Prosthetically, through pro-posing and pro-jecting itself outside itself, in front of itself. And this means that it can only test its improbability programmatically (Stiegler, Technics and Time, 234.)

The temporality of Dasein is constituted prosthetically which also means that time is constituted through technology or what Stiegler prefers to call “technics”. Time is therefore inscribed in technics which leads Stiegler to conclude that human becoming, that is its temporality, is through technology. He calls the mode of human becoming “epiphylogenesis” which involves “the evolution of the living by other means than life (Ibid., 135.)” Whereas, Heidegger saw being and time as constitutive of Dasein’s facticity, Stiegler argues that it is constituted in an “epigenetic layer of life” which is an “epigenetic sedimentation, a memorization of what has come to pass, is what is called the past, what we shall name the epiphylogenesis of man, meaning the conservation, accumulation, and sedimentation of successive epigeneses, mutually articulated (Ibid., 140.)” At a very primitive and basic level, language can be seen as an epigenetic layer and therefore a technic through which human beings temporalize themselves. If we now return to Heidegger’s notion of technology as a mode of disclosure we can see the implications of Stiegler’s claim.  If Dasein is temporal, and time is constituted through technics as Stiegler claims, then technology becomes the mode of human becoming.

The contrast between Heidegger and Stiegler could not be more stark. Whereas Heidegger sees an ontological distinction between Dasein and the tools it takes up, Stiegler sees both as intertwined. This intertwining is a process of externalization which he refers to as instrumental maieutics. Instrumental maieutics is the process whereby human temporality is externalized through the use of instruments and simultaneously given back to the human being. Stiegler puts it this way, “the cortex is determined by the tool just as much as that of the tool by the cortex: a mirror effect whereby one, looking at itself in the other, is both deformed and formed in the process (Ibid., 158.)” This claim is similar to Marx’s claim that “man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and his social life (Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Stanley Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 241.)” Human becoming is intrinsically linked with technological development.

Stiegler’s anthropology gets its metaphysical bearings by returning to the myth of Prometheus retold by Plato in the Protagoras (Plato, “Protagoras,” in Plato: Complete Works, eds. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchison (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 320d-322d.) In Plato’s retelling of this myth the gods assigned Prometheus (forethought) and his brother Epimetheus (afterthought) the task of assigning powers and abilities to mortals. Epimetheus begged Prometheus to let him have the exclusive responsibility of assigning powers and abilities to the mortals. Prometheus agreed, and Epimetheus began assigning powers and abilities in such a way as to bring harmony and balance to the natural world. But, by the time Epimetheus came to the human being he was out of powers and abilities and Prometheus had to steal the art of fire (empuron technen) (Plato, “Protagoras,” 321e.) from Hephaestus in order for the human being to have a power and ability. Stiegler sees this myth as pointing to a fundamental “lack”  or “de-fault” (défaut ) in the metaphysical origins of the human being which is overcome through technics; that is to say the art of fire compensates for the human beings lack of power and ability. Human beings are metaphysically undetermined and contingent; that is, human beings are finite. This leads Stiegler to claim that “discovery, insight, invention, imagination are all, according to the narrative of the myth, characteristic of a default.” The origins of human technology are therefore bound up with the origins and finitude of humanity. Thus, for Stiegler, the question concerning technology is not “How shall we act?” or “How shall we live?” but rather “What shall we become?” As Sean Gaston, has put it:

For Stiegler, the technical is more than the tool, more than the machine: it involves the invention of the human. Life is already reliant on technics. Technics makes the transmission of the past and the anticipation of the future possible.     Without technics there can be no memory, no heritage, no adoption, no invention.  Technics give us time (Gaston, Sean, “Technics of Decision: An Interview,” Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 8, no. 2 (August 2003): 151.)”

Stiegler views technics as “the horizon of all possibility to come and of all possibility of a future” which philosophy has “repressed as an object of thought (Stiegler, Technics and Time, ix.)” In response to this repressive approach Stiegler has argued that “the modern age is essentially that of modern technics (Ibid., 7.)”

Conclusion

In this article, I have attempted to present three ways the question concerning technology has been re-framed in order to bring into relief what is really at stake in the question. I began with Hannah Arendt’s reframing of the question around human activity. Arendt’s analysis of the question concerning technology pointed to a Janus-faced problem. On the one hand technology makes us masters of our world through machinery. On the other hand, it also puts the capability of destroying the world in our hands. Next, I presented Martin Heidegger’s reframing of the question around the human being. Heidegger recognized both the danger and the possibilities for human life in its relationship with technology and highlighted art is a way of coming closer to the dangerous power of modern technology so that its saving power may shine forth. Finally, I presented the view of the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler who reframes the question around human becoming. Stiegler’s insight into the interrelationship between technics and time and his conclusion that human temporality is constituted technologically helped to bring into relief what is really at stake in the question concerning technology, namely, that the future of humanity will be determined through technology.

Technology has been part of human life since the dawn of consciousness and it will not fade from the mortal horizon. Human beings are inherently technological, in fact we are human because we are technological, and therefore our destiny is bound up with a Janus-faced system full of threats and promises. To face Janus we must learn to act and live in a free and reflective relationship with technology, mindful of the dangers and hopeful of the promises so that who we become will remain human and not monstrous.

Facing Janus: Reframing the Question Concerning Technology – Part 2 of 3

Martin Heidegger: How Shall We Live?

Martin Heidegger reframed the question concerning technology around the concept of human being. Heidegger’s 1953 essay “The Question Concerning Technology” approaches the question of modern technology as a pervasive and Janus-faced fact of modern human life. Drawing on Rousseau he captures the problem in his opening statement: “everywhere we remain free and chained to technology (Heidegger, Martin, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Ferrell Krell, 1977, repr. New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 1993, 311.)” Technology cannot be approached uncritically, according to Heidegger. Instead, it must be approached freely and reflectively because the essence of technology, as a way of revealing the totality of being, is enframing which both endangers and saves being.

Heidegger argues that “technology is a way of revealing (Ibid., 318.)” To ground this claim he recovers the Greek understanding of technology (techne) as revelatory (aletheia) and suggests the natural triadic process of physis-poesis-aletheia for understanding how technology can be revelatory (Ibid., 317-319.) Heidegger points out that for the Greeks; physis (Nature) was the “arising of something out of itself,” as such it was a disclosure or unconcealment (aletheia) of being (Ibid., 317.) This process of this unconcealment was understood as a “bringing-forth (poesis)” of being. The same was true for crafts or works of art (techne). The craftsman or artist brings forth or reveals what is concealed in nature (Ibid., 318.) Thus, Heidegger concludes, technology is a way of revealing, a way of bringing forth the totality of being. The problem, of course, is that not all revealing is poetic. Heidegger claims that the essence of modern technology is enframing (Gestell) (Ibid., 325.) As such, modern technology is a type of revealing that orders and determines. As Heidegger puts it, “enframing means the gathering together of the setting upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve (Ibid., 325.)” Heidegger contrasts this type of revealing with the Greek notion of techne as a poesis of aletheia. Although both the Greek understanding of techne and modern technology are both forms of aletheia, they reveal the totality of being in vastly different ways (Ibid., 326.) Techne as poesis allows nature to “come forth in unconcealment,” whereas modern technology as Gestell, challenges nature to come forth as a “standing reserve.” Nature is therefore set upon, ordered and determined in a way that leads to a concealment of its truth instead of a revealing of it. Modern technology in this mode of revealing is therefore dangerous (Gefahr) both to Nature and to humanity (Ibid., 331.)

In order to illustrate the distinction between poesis and Gestell Heidegger offers the example of a hydroelectric power plant that sets upon the Rhine River as a source of power (standing reserve) and an old wooden bridge “joined bank with bank for hundreds of years (Ibid., 321.)” The power plant enframes the river in such a way that it can no longer be a river but must be a power source. The bridge on the other hand, while equally technological, allows the river to be what it is: a river. But Heidegger does not leave the issue separated into categories of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” technology. Instead he turns to face the Janus-faced question concerning technology and reframes it.

Heidegger recognizes that technology is ambiguous (Ibid., 338.) Given that the essence of modern technology is enframing, it “blocks every view into the propriative event of revealing” and therefore endangers the truth of being (Ibid., 338.) But enframing also “lets man endure… that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth (Ibid., 338.)” Thus, the essence of modern technology as enframing both conceals and reveals the truth of being and therefore contains both a danger and a saving power (Ibid., 338.) But, as Heidegger points out, while “we can look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power” we are nevertheless “not yet saved (Ibid., 338.)” We must find a way of living in a “free relationship” with technology (Ibid., 311.) The question is not “Do we accept or reject technology?” but rather “How do we live with it?” Heidegger’s answer to the question concerning technology reframed in this way is: art. Art is essentially poetical and therefore contains the potential for “the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful (Ibid., 339.)” Heidegger does not say that art will poetically reveal the truth of being; only that it is possible (Ibid., 340.) But art is a way of coming closer to the dangerous power of modern technology so that its saving power may shine forth.

But have Arendt and Heidegger missed something in their analysis of modern technology? Is it possible that Arendt in her ardent concern for the human condition has missed a vital aspect of it that changes our understanding of the relationship between humanity and technology? Is it possible that in Heidegger’s characterization of technology as separate from nature he has missed a common foundation for both? Bernard Stiegler thinks this is the case.

Facing Janus: Reframing the Question Concerning Technology: Part 1 of 3

Introduction

The question concerning technology is a perpetually human question that arises from a Janus-faced technology that holds within it both threats and promises. The technological progress of human history is a testament to this fact with its advances in science and medicine that gave birth to both cures and curses, like polio vaccines and the atom bomb. It is therefore necessary to continually reframe the question concerning technology in order remain in a free and reflective relationship with it. In this article, I will attempt to present three ways the question has been re-framed in order to bring into relief what is really at stake in the question. I will begin with the approach of Hannah Arendt in her book The Human Condition where she reframed the question around human activity.  Next, I will present the approach of Martin Heidegger who reframed the question around the concept of human being in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” Although Arendt’s work appeared after Heidegger’s essay it provides an effective historical framework within which to situate Heidegger’s approach . Finally, I will present the view of the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler who reframes the question around human becoming. Each of these attempts to reframe the question concerning technology will point us in the direction of what is at stake in our relationship to technology and allow us to face Janus in a free and reflective way.

Hannah Arendt: How Shall We Act?

Hannah Arendt has reframed the question concerning technology around human activity. More specifically, she has distinguished between three types of human activity; namely, labor, work and action. For Arendt, labor “corresponds to the biological process of the human body,” work is “the unnaturalness of human activity… that provides an ‘artificial’ world of things,” and action is “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter (Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), 7.)” Labor assures the survival of both the individual and the species (Ibid., 8.) Work assures the permanence and durability of our fragile human existence through the manufacture of artifacts (techne)(Ibid., 8.) Action creates history through founding and preserving political bodies (Ibid., 9.) For Arendt the realm of human activity is constitutive of the human condition. What is interesting about Arendt’s account of human activity is the conclusion she draws about the human condition. She writes:

The human condition comprehends more than the conditions under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers (Ibid., 9.)

The “things produced by human activities” conditions their producers. The made becomes the maker. This is the problem of technology which leads Arendt to ask “How shall we then act?”

For Arendt, the modern advent of automated technology begins with a transition from tools to machinery which ceases to involve an adjustment of the tool to the man and instead requires the adjustment of the man to the machine (Ibid., 147.) She sees it developing in two distinct stages. She marks the first stage with the invention of the steam engine which led to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century (Ibid., 148.) Arendt characterizes this stage as relatively banal in that it “was still characterized by an imitation of natural processes and the use of natural forces for human purposes (Ibid., 148.)” However, in the next stage Nature was no longer imitated, it was “denaturalized” and separated from the artificial world of human fabrication (Ibid., 148.) This stage arose through the use of electricity and came to condition the use of all future technology(Ibid., 148.) It is during this stage that the Arendt sees the loss of the categories of homo faber (the tool maker) for whom ends were achieved through the use of instruments. The end result is the assembly line of manufacturing (Ibid., 149.) Arendt calls this stage: automation. It involves “channeling natural forces into the human world” so that they become mechanized and artificial(Ibid., 149, n.12.) One obvious example of this type of “channeling of natural forces” is atomic energy which brought with it the threat of global annihilation. As Ann Chapman has pointed out, the stability of the earth is threatened by automation because the new elements, chemicals and organisms that develop as a result of automation are incorporated into the “processes of the earth [and] are in effect the starting of new natural processes. These new processes mean that nature can no longer be relied upon to behave in the same way as it did in the past (Chapman, Ann, “Technology as World Building,” Ethics, Place and Environment, Vol. 7, no. 1-2 (March/June 2004), 68.)” The consequences of this transition raise the question of technology. If our actions, namely automated manufacturing through machines, are changing the earth so that life itself is transformed and even jeopardized, how should we act? Arendt concludes by saying:

….. homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not—at least, not primarily—to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the      slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things,  or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things (Arendt, The Human Condition 151.)

Arendt’s analysis of the question concerning technology points to a Janus-faced problem. On the one hand technology makes us masters of our world through machinery. On the other hand, it puts the capability of destroying the world in our hands also. No philosopher has reframed this aspect of the question more cogently than Arendt’s former teacher Martin Heidegger.

The Horse YouTube Rode in On: Part 4 of 4 – Between Frankenstein and Metropolis

In order to formulate a response to technology that is both responsible and thoughtful it might be helpful to consider Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. The character Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein represents an enthusiastic response to technology and the worker class in Metropolis can be seen as representing Luddite rejection of technology. Both Frankenstein and Metropolis; however, point towards a more critical response that is both thoughtful and responsible.

“The world was a secret” that Victor Frankenstein “desired to discover.”[1] He “pursued nature to her hiding places” until, to his horror, he gave life to inanimate matter.[2] Commenting on this aspect of the novel Langdon Winner has written that “Victor Frankenstein is a person who discovers, but refuses to ponder, the implications of his discovery” and “Victor’s problems have now become those of a whole culture.”[3] Winner’s comments suggest that enthusiasm for technology must be tempered by critical thinking.

Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1926) depicts “man’s schizophrenic love-hate relationship with the Brave New World of Technology.”[4] The futuristic world of Metropolis is divided between the ruling class who reside in The Eternal Gardens and the workers who reside in the Worker’s City. When the worker’s realize that they are being oppressed by the ruling-class through the technological manipulation of the proto-mad-scientist Rotwang and his Machine Man, they revolt and declare “Death to the Machines!” The workers destroy the machines that support The Eternal Gardens and therefore jeopardize the lives of the ruling class and themselves. But again, as with Victor Frankenstein, their actions are rash and unreflective. Their actions are reminiscent of the Luddites who destroyed the mechanized looms during the Industrial Revolution of the 19^th century because it threatened their jobs.  The truth is: change is inevitable and it happens through technology. What is required is a more thoughtful and responsible engagement with technology.

YouTube rode into the modern world on the back of Leland Stanford’s horse “Occident” that Eadward Muybridge captured on film with all four feet off the ground. As strange as it sounds, this is the how technology works. The manifest purposes of innovators like Eadward Muybridge, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley are eventually replaced by more latent purposes through reverse adaptation that occurs in increasingly more complex technological systems. It is unlikely that technological progress will stop and even more unlikely that any human attempts to stop it would be successful or beneficial. What is required is a more thoughtful and responsible engagement with technology. We must not rush to embrace every new and emerging technology with a blind enthusiasm like modern Victor Frankensteins. Nor should we become neo-Luddites and declare “Death to the Machines!” Instead we should we should develop a more reflective response that takes the form of questioning that Martin Heidegger suggested at the conclusion of his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” where he wrote, “The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become.”[5] The most human response to technology is the one that makes use of our most human capacity: the ability to think.

---

[1] Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter, 1818,  Reprint (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1996), 20.

[2] Ibid., 34.

[3] Winner, Autonomous Technology, 313.

[4] Webster, Chris, “Film and Technology,” in An Introduction to Film Studies. ed. Jill Nelmes, 1996. Reprint (New York: Routledge, 2001), 73

[5] Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 341.

The Horse YouTube Rode in On: Part 3 of 4 – The Complexity of Manifest and Latent Purposes

By placing the stories of Eadward Muybridge and YouTube side by side it becomes easy to see how the origins of technology are often strangely dissimilar from their later manifestations. The possibility of a common citizen asking a Presidential candidate a question through the medium of video and receiving a response through that same medium that is simultaneously broadcast around the world most likely did not occur to Muybridge when he first  developed his rapid-shutter camera to capture “Occident” in motion. Indeed the manifest purposes of Leland Stanford and Eadward Muybridge to determine whether a horse galloping at full speed has all four feet off the ground concealed a more latent purpose: to go beyond the limits of the human visual capacities and arrest motion in a technical apparatus. This latent purpose eventually became a form of entertainment. Muybridge became a trapper of sorts; capturing bodies in their intermediate stages of motion and entertaining audiences with the “frenzy of the visible.”[1] This form of entertainment became a multi-billion dollar film industry.

YouTube’s later attempts to democratize this industry by giving the individual consumer the power to produce, publish and disseminate films in a free and public interface was an example of a manifest purpose, but perhaps a more latent purpose was to capture, control and commodify an emerging genre of film. The controversial issues of censorship, copyright, privacy, and even public access to the democratic process have all emerged from wanting to democratize the entertainment industry. It has even given rise to more advanced technologies such as video fingerprinting in an effort to control video commodities.  Muybridge’s “frenzy of the visible” is now enframed[2] in a complex technical apparatus.

Why does this occur? What are the conditions that give rise to manifest purposes expressed at the origin of a technology being replaced by more latent purposes that eventually develop the technology in ways unforeseen at its creation? Langdon Winner has suggested that the process of reverse adaptation as a possible reason for this phenomena. His thesis, simply stated is, “that beyond a certain level of technological development, the rule of freely articulated, strongly asserted purposes is a luxury that can no longer be permitted.”[3] At the core of this process is a reversal of the means-end logic in which the “ends are adapted to the means available.”[4] Latent purposes emerge as new ends are adapted to new means.[5]

Winner identifies five patterns of reverse adaptation that occur in technological systems.[6] The operative purpose in each of these patterns is control extended and executed through planning.[7] (1) Technological systems can control the markets relative to its operations through vertical integration, market control, and contracts.[8] (2) Technological systems can control or influence the political processes that attempt to regulate its production and operating conditions.[9] (3) Technological systems seek a “mission” that corresponds to its technological capacities in order to avoid extinction.[10] (4) Technological systems propagate or manipulate the needs it serves by tying consumption to a meaningful and happy life through advertising.[11] (5) Technological systems can discover or create crises such as an external threat or a resource shortage that justify their expansion.[12] Within each of these patterns manifest purposes are replaced by latent purposes through the inversion of the means-ends logic.

Given the complexity of technological systems, the reality of reverse adaptation inherent in these systems, and the possibility of “unfortunate consequences in the world at large”[13] we are faced with a response dilemma. How are we to respond to technology given the apparent risks? Should we reject it completely or embrace it enthusiastically? I want to suggest that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis offer insights into a possible response.

---

[1] Williams, Linda. Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 37-38.

[2] Heidegger, Martin, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, 1977 (Reprint, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), 325.

[3] Winner, Autonomous Technology, 238.

[4] Ibid., 238.

[5] A current example of this phenomena is Apple’s iPhone. Until the technology was available to synchronize online email servers, contacts, calendars, and tasks lists there was not a demand for an integrated application that would synchronize these various functions in a single iPhone application.

[6] Winner defines system as “large sociotechnical aggregates with human beings fully present, acting, and thinking.” Winner, Autonomous Technology, 242.

[7] Ibid., 239.

[8] Ibid., 242.

[9] Ibid., 243.

[10] Ibid., 244.

[11] Ibid., 246-247.

[12] Ibid., 248-250.

[13] Winner, Autonomous Technology, 3.

The Horse YouTube Rode in On: Part 2 of 4 – The Story of YouTube

Fast-forward 116 years to February 2005. Four technologies have reached a point of convergence: the camera, the phone, film, and computers. The cameras of Muybridge, Marey and Edison are now digital and fit in the palm of your hand. The phone is also handheld and wireless by 1978 and digital by the 1990s.[1] Film has escaped the hands of the syndicated specialists and leaped into the arms of a waiting public in the form of video. The ability of individual consumers to create their own home movies with hand held 16mm video cameras is available by the 1960s.[2] Sony and Matsushita produce the first Betamax and VHS formatted video cassettes in 1975 and the DVD follows in its footsteps, debuting in 1996.[3] Finally, with the release of the Mosaic browser by the National Center of Supercomputing Applications in 1993, the World Wide Web becomes accessible to everyone and dawn of the Internet, a global communications network of networks, revolutionizes the way human beings access and disseminate information, and consequently how they communicate.[4] By 2005, the need for integrating these various technologies into a single and easily manageable interface that is publically accessible becomes a pressing need and two former employees of Pay Pal who have an idea.

When Steve Chen and Chad Hurley created YouTube they wanted to develop “an easy interface for storing, sorting and sharing the kinds of digital videos, that thanks to cell-phone cameras and Webcams, [had] become more prevalent.”[5] Hurley, who is now the CEO of YouTube said his initial motivation was to “democratize the entertainment process.”[6] What has occurred is anything but democracy. In a recent deal with Warner Music Group, You Tube agreed to “provide fingerprinting technology that will help locate its copyrighted material on the site.”[7] The freedom to record and post videos on YouTube is not without limits and sometimes decisions are made about videos without consulting the author. Videos are sometimes pulled from the site due to Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations such as adding copyrighted songs or video clips to an amateur video.[8] The dreams of a free and democratic YouTube did however, have some glimmer of hope in 2008 when CNN and YouTube co-sponsored “video-questions” for the Presidential election debates during the campaign. Over 3,000 Americans posted video questions.[9] Some of these questions were answered by the Presidential candidates.

---

[1] Zheng, Pei and Lionel M. Ni, Smart Phone and Next Generation Mobile Computing (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2006), 32.

[2] Williams, Mathew, Making Real-Life Videos: Great Projects for the Classroom and Home (New York: Allworth Press, 2006), 26.

[3] Kochberg, Searle, “Institutions, Audiences and Technology,” in An Introduction to Film Studies. ed. Jill Nelmes, 1996. Reprint (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30-31 and Taylor, Jim, Mark R. Johnson, Charles G. Crawford, DVD Demystified (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 2006),  2-2.

[4] Gilles, James and Robert Cailliau. How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 236.

[5] McGrath, Ben, “It Should Happen to You,” The Best of Technology Writing, ed. by Steven Levy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 354.

[6] Ibid., 354.

[7]Ibid., 356.

[8] Ibid., 365.

[9] Schoen, Douglas E, Declaring Independenc: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System (New York: Random House, 2008), 136.

The Horse YouTube Rode in On: Part 1 of 4 – A Story About a Horse

What do horses have to do with YouTube? The origins of technology are often strangely dissimilar from their later manifestations. Often the initial motivations and purposes that give rise to technological innovation conceal motives and purposes that even the innovator is unaware of. Indeed, as Langdon Winner has been keen to point out technology can often “have profound and often unfortunate consequences in the world at large.”[1]

This article will focus on the technology of film in order to identify and explain the principle levels of manifest and latent purposes in the genesis of film technology in general and in its more recent manifestation in YouTube. By examining the earlier and later manifestations of the technology of film I hope to show that technology in general is complex and requires a response that mediates between complete rejection and uncritical acceptance; a response, therefore, that is both thoughtful and responsible.

The technology of film emerged from the technology of photography near the end of the nineteenth century. The genesis of cinema begins curiously with a horse named “Occident”. Leland Stanford, former U.S. Senator, California governor and founder of Stanford University, owned a horse named “Occident” who had a peculiarly long stride. This peculiarity, along with Stanford’s penchant for horse racing and his considerable wealth, led him to search for a means to investigate more precisely the movement of horses.[2] His search led him to Eadweard Muybridge, a still photographer working in San Francisco in 1872 who he hired to conduct a series of photographic experiments on galloping horses to determine whether artist depictions of animals in motion with all four feet off the ground were correct.[3] This characterization however, may mollify the real motivations that led Stanford to conduct the experiments.

Horse racing was a popular spectator sport in the 1870’s and large sums of money could be won and lost at these races.[4] One of the controversies surrounding this sport centered on “whether a horse trotting at top speed ever had all for feet off the ground at once.”[5]A legend surrounding the experiments (corroborated by local newspapers) suggests that Stanford might have conducted the experiments to settle a $25,000 wager, a legend which Muybridge substantiates but experts on Stanford disavow.[6] Nevertheless, the controversy led to questions about animal locomotion, and this was a topic of great interest to Muybridge who had pioneered the use of a spring-activated shutter which had allowed him to vastly improve the quality of still photographs of bodies in motion.[7]

Muybridge began his photographic experiments for Stanford between April and December of 1872 although his now famous photographs of a horse galloping with all four feet suspended in the air were not published in The Scientific American until 1877.[8] The experiment was conducted at the Union Park race track in Sacramento, California.[9] The five-mile track was lined with 12, then 18, and finally 24 side-by-side rapid shutter cameras which were triggered by trip wires installed on the track.[10] As the horse ran the track and broke one of the trip wires the camera shutter fired and captured the image of the horse in motion. These photographs could then be lined up next to each other to simulate the horse in the motion. One of the chief reasons for the delay in publication was that the first attempts at photographing a horse galloping at full speed were unsuccessful because the photographic technology was not adequate to capture rapidly moving objects. Frank Beavers explains:

The unusually rapid movement of a horse caused the arrested images to blur. In 1872 the wet plate photographic materials on which exposures were made were not yet “fast” enough to produce sharp, clearly defined images of rapidly moving objects. (A fast photographic material is one which has a high sensitivity to light. The combination of a fast film and a rapid shutter aid in the acceptable photographing of rapidly moving objects.)[11]

Eventually, Muybridge collaborated with an engineer named John Isaacs and developed a rapid shutter that had an exposure time of 2/1000 of a second and was able to demonstrate through a single negative that “Stanford’s horse did indeed have all four feet off the ground simultaneously when galloping.”[12] It is important to note; however, that newspaper reports of Muybridge’s success were never verified; that is, the newspapers who reported the story had never actually seen the successful negative but had only been informed about its existence by Muybridge.[13]

Muybridge’s photographs of bodies in motion were widely published and he eventually developed a projector called the Zoogyroscope which allowed him to project his photographic sequences on to a screen.[14] Muybridge conducted entertaining demonstrations of his work around the world eventually capturing the attention of the physiologist Eitienne-Jules Marey who was inspired by Muybridge to invent a “photographic gun” that “made twelve rapid exposures on a circular glass plate which revolved like a bullet cylinder.” Marey later substituted paper film for glass and added a motor to advance the film.[15] By 1889 Thomas Edison had been inspired to combine his invention of the phonograph with a camera. The result was the Kinetograph which used 35mm film and the birth of what we now know as the modern motion picture.[16]

---

[1][1] Winner, Langdon, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 3.

[2] Hendricks, Gordon, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975), 46.

[3] Beaver, Frank. On Film: A History of the Motion Picture (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1983), 9-10.

[4] Haas, Robert Bartlett, Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 46.

[5] Ibid., 46.

[6] Hendricks Eadweard Muybridge, 46. See also Beaver,  On Film, 46.

[7] Beaver, On Film, 10.

[8] Hendricks, Muybridge, 46.

[9] Haas, Muybridge, 47.

[10] Beaver, On Film, 10.

[11] Beavers, On Film, 10.

[12] Ibid., 10, 11.

[13] Hendricks, Muybridge, 47.

[14] Beavers, On Film, 11.

[15] Beavers, On Film, 11.

[16] Ibid., 12.