Technics and Time ─ Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise

Having worked carefully through Heidegger's and Husserl's relationship with technics and technology in Volumes 1 and 2, in the third volume of Technics and Time Bernard Stiegler looks at the problematic relationship to technics he finds in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, particularly in the (two versions of the) Transcendental Deduction. Stiegler relates this problematic to the "cinematic nature" of time, preceding cinema itself but reaching an apotheosis in it as the exteriorization process of schema, through tertiary retentions and their mechanisms. The volume focuses on the relationship between these themes and the "culture industry," as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer, that has supplanted the educational institutions on which genuine cultural participation depends. This displacement, Stiegler says, has produced a malaise from which current global culture suffers. The result is potentially catastrophic.