Abstract:

(School of Art, Beijing University, Beijing  100871, China)Abstract： The paper analyzes Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy on cinema. Stiegler proposed the concept of “tertiary retention” based on Husserl’s two forms of memory: primary retention (perception) and secondary retention (recollection). Stiegler holds that audiovisual recording technologies create in a film “a container of consciousness” which becomes a memorylike “time object”, which can unfold itself only in time, or in other words, a copy of consciousness that can bring the past into the present as needed. “Tertiary retention”, depending on external material storage, however, is being industrialized rapidly, which has resulted in two consequences. Firstly, cinema and human consciousness are highly assimilated, leading to the collapse of the economy of desire; Secondly, man’s general aesthetic experiences have been transformed, and modulated by refined digital technologies, causing the loss of man’s primitive capability of selflove and image destruction due to blindness, a phenomenon called “symbolic misery” by Stiegler.

Key words: memory techniques, cinema as consciousness, industrialization of memory, Stiegler, tertiary memory, materialized consciousness