Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (review)

In the third volume of his Technics and Time series (which has five volumes in total, with two yet to be translated into English), Bernard Stiegler arrives at two major insights. First, he reveals the limitations of Kant's notion of temporal synthesis from the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the limitations of Heidegger's famous critique of Kant's second version of the transcendental deduction of the categories of experience. Second, he identifies a fundamental shift in the status of science, which now concerns the exploration of the possible rather than the description of the real. Technics and Time, 3 manages to bring these insights together through the articulation of a political project that is distinct in its own right. The book represents a significant achievement in both contemporary critical theory and political thought.

Within the overall power of Technics and Time, 3, Stiegler is at his best in the early part of the book during his discussion of Husserl's On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893) and Kant's Transcendental Deduction. To Husserl's distinction between primary retention and secondary retention that are at work in our individual consciousness of time, Stiegler adds a tertiary retention. While this may at first seem a terminological quibble, its philosophical significance quickly becomes apparent. For Husserl, the primary retention connects the now to the just-past, while the secondary connects a present experience to a former experience of the same object (as when we hear a melody a second time). The tertiary retention is the sociocultural background or heritage that makes a temporal flux possible; it provides the foundation from which primary and secondary retentions can take place.

Stiegler sees that Husserl's failure to conceive of this tertiary retention marks not just a philosophical blind spot but also a political one, a blind spot that he inherits from Kant. For both Kant and Husserl, the syntheses of perception, imagination, and understanding that constitute our experience of a temporal flux are only individual and thus not implicitly political. Stiegler's book contends, on the contrary, that these syntheses are impossible without the synthesis of tertiary retention which, through its basis in the control and orientation of cultural memory, is necessarily political. With the development of technology, media objects begin to monopolize the tertiary retention and to eliminate the possibility of the formation of what Stiegler calls a "We." Instead, contemporary is left with Heidegger's anonymous and impersonal Das Mann, or "One." Confronted with the power of technological objects, the cultural heritage that could form a We has no chance.

Here is where Technics and Time, 3 transitions from philosophical exploration to cultural critique. In the last chapters of the book, Stiegler explores the ramifications of a world in which technology governs our capacity for tertiary retention and thus for cultural memory. In the process, he sees that the rise of technology in modernity radically transforms the status of science in ways that earlier philosophers could not register. By registering this change, the book aims at a political intervention in the domain of biotechnology.

As Stiegler recounts it, neither Aristotle nor Kant could anticipate that science would break free from the realm of necessity and become the vehicle for the exploration of possibilities. Whereas for earlier epochs technology was the handmaiden of science, in modernity this relationship becomes reversed. As a result, science, especially biology, serves as a space where industry pays for the opportunity to go beyond necessity and reality in order to create the new. In doing so, science abandons its former territory and becomes a thoroughly political site where we determine what counts as our heritage—or where our tertiary retention is forged. The new possibilities that science discovers create a new inheritance that replaces even the natural world, as we see in the case of bioengineered agricultural products. The movement from the analysis of Kant's Transcendental Deduction and Husserl's account...