Bernard Stiegler, "The Organology of Dreams and Arche Cinema" (Summary)

Arche-cinema is the projection of consciousness, with dreams being the primary form. This projection is a montage, with tertiary retentions forming the fabric and supporting the cutting room. The transindividual is formed through circuits of transindividuation, which compromise between diachronic traumatypes and synchronic stereotypes. The transindividual can metastabilize itself only through tertiary retentions, technical supports of various kinds. Technical objects, such as cave paintings, form the third memory of technical and noetic life, beyond the common genetic memory of the human species and the epigenetic memory belonging to each individual human.

The appearance of hypomnesic tertiary retentions results in new regimes of individuation through the play of primary and secondary retentions and protentions in which attention consists. This leads to new attentional forms, such as the analogue tertiary retention in music and cinema. Tertiary retentions play a role in the selection of primary retentions and protentions, and this play is overdetermined by tertiary retentions as organological conditions of repetition.

The author discusses the concept of tertiary retention, which is irreducibly pharmacological and can lead to short-circuits in the play of psychic secondary retentions. Literal tertiary retention, analogue tertiary retention, and digital tertiary retention all constitute positive pharmacological possibilities, generating new attentional forms and forming therapeutic practices from those pharmaka.

The author distinguishes between epochs, particularly the epoch of grammatization, which allowed mental temporal contents into spatial forms. This possibility appeared during the Upper Palaeolithic and led to the emergence of cinema, as described by archaeologist Marc Azéma.

Arche-cinema, the omnitemporal conditions in which the technical form of life, which is also the noetic and oneiric form of life, rests on processes of projection through montages of primary, secondary, and tertiary retention and protention, was concretized in the form of retentional systems projecting and spatializing movement in prehistoric caves. This led to the development of movie theatres and movie screens as we know them today.

The advent of digital tertiary retention in the history of cinema is at stake with the advent of digital tertiary retention. The history of the supplement, which implements this arche-cinema, is what is concretized during the course of organo-genesis, and notably as what we now refer to as "cinema." In 2012, we find ourselves living in the epoch of digital tertiary retention, which makes possible a cinema without film.

In all these cases, re-temporalization constitutes a projection in the course of which readers, listeners, and spectators project their own secondary protentions and retentions into the textual, musical, or cinematic flux, and select primary retentions, which then generate primary protentions. Cinema is seen as a pharmakon, acting as a disease that can either reinforce stereotypes held by the public or put to work its traumatypes.

Cinema is viewed by Adorno and Horkheimer as a functional element of a system aiming to disseminate ideology and stimulate consumer behavior. This view is similar to the French New Wave, which saw cinema as a pharmakon rather than a poison. Cinematic art struggles against the disease of cinema with the means of cinema, which is that of desire or dreams. A film is a kind of dream with a common daytime dream, manifesting a desire that we imagine to be that of a public, not just that of a filmmaker.

Adorno and Horkheimer argue that cinema is this process of disindividuation, which is the drama of cinema and confronted by great directors like Federico Fellini. Fellini's work examines the relation between cinema and dream, drawing parallels between the dream and the nightmare brought by Berlusconi to Italy and Italian cinema. The age of digital tertiary retention has significantly changed the relationship between moving images and sound, making them an everyday practice for everyone. This transformation is comparable to the transition from hieroglyphic writing to alphabetical writing. Dreams are now a part of this transformation, as they are a moment within a noetic sensorimotor loop that internalizes an artefactual retentional organization. This structure generates stereotypes and destroys the libido, which decomposes into the drives.

The consumerist capitalist economy, initially cinematic and then televisual, destroys the libido, leading to cinematic dreams becoming drive-based nightmares, such as horror movies. This transformation affects our psychological, political, economic, and industrial dreams, as YouTube creates open studios for learning, sharing, and creating.

The film industry has been a capitalist stage of the libidinal economy and the organology of dreams, which are the workshops or studios of this libidinal economy. Digital tertiary retention establishes a new industrial organology that poses these problems in new terms, making possible new dreams. The New Wave of cinema emerged in the late 1950s, with filmmakers and audiences becoming amateurs and film-lovers.

Intervista explores the concept of dream-taking and the organological conditions of dreams, arguing that dreams are a kind of waking dream, shaped by transitional objects and influenced by the organological powers and impotencies of the individual. The invention of the digital system occurred not because the analogue system had reached its limits, but because the oneiric being that we are, which is also the noetic being, is essentially constituted by the co-evolution of its dreams and technics.