Blockbusters and the Arthouse Cinema of Consciousness

Abstract

Bernard Stiegler’s theory of consciousness claims: consciousness is cinema. The invention of the technological dispositifs of photography, phonograph, and cinema, have made this structure visible. He develops the thesis of the cinema of consciousness in Technics and Time, where it leads to a deconstruction of Husserlian consciousness and of the Kantian I. This theory also orients Stiegler’s large-scale criticism of contemporary cinematic capitalism that engages with the works of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Debord. This article presents and critically examines Stiegler’s theory of consciousness as a nonconscious power of dreaming that is not based on the imagination hidden in the the unconsciousness but on collective technical image-objects. While Stiegler criticizes the colonisation of the imagination by the cinematic industry, this article looks for its creative potential. The article also presents a theory of mimesis that is presupposed but ignored by Stiegler and that explains the pharmacological nature of cinematic consciousness.