Compared to(nostalgia), the scope of“memory”inCritical massis vastly
condensed and enclosed upon itself: thus, rather than a past event or descrip-
tion, the memory of the content of former experiences, what is remembered here
is quite literallythe sequence of framesor“photograms”(following the terminol-
ogy of Garrett Stewart) immediately preceding the now of perception. Precisely
because of its back-and-forth play with the linear flux of cinema,Critical
Massforegrounds the texture of what philosopher Jean-Michel Salanskis, com-
menting on Husserl, has called“adherent”time (or adherent temporal inten-
tionality). Differentiated from“referential”(temporal) intentionality, which re-
members or“recollects”at the time-scale of lived experiences (contents of
consciousness), adherent intentionalityretainsthe just-past (andprotendsthe
just-to-come) at a time-scale that lies beneath the threshold of representation.
Even more starkly: whereas referential intentionality intends the time of the ex-
perience of a consciousness experiencing objects in the world, adherent inten-
tionality intends nothing but the passage of time itself. Accordingly, if referen-
tial intentionality supports the time of consciousness as lived experience,
adherent intentionality produces the time of life, the basal continuity that un-
derlies and energizes all events in time, including the events of consciousness
that constitute lived experience. In normal circumstances, the experience of ad-
herent intentionality remains outside of the scope of awareness; it is more or
less akin to the“preacceleration”or incipiency that Manning positions as the
virtuality of perception.
Yet because it interferes with this normally nonconscious production of ad-
herent intentionality,Critical Massbrings the structure of retentionality (and
protentionality) into the scope of viewer awareness, though certainly not with-
out continuing to stimulate the viewer’s ongoing production of temporal adher-
ence. More specifically,Critical Massintroduces a disjunction into the process
of temporal intentionality that has the effect of separating what is normally in-
tertwined and putatively inseparable: namely, adherent intentionality and the
external“content”that is its necessary manifold and stimulus.
WithCritical Mass, then, Frampton would seem to add a new element–a
third stage–to the ongoing contemporary critical project of revealing the tech-
nical basis of time-consciousness. If Husserl’s foundational work in phenomen-
ology emphasized the necessity for time-consciousness to externalize its opera-
tion via a“temporal object”(paradigmatically, the melody), and if Bernard
Stiegler has recently demonstrated that such an object must be a technical object
with temporalizing power of its own (paradigmatically, the real-time televisual
flux of global cinema), Frampton underscores the productive dimension of the
correlation between the technical synthesis of consciousness and the adherent
intentionality of the living. As Frampton configures it, this productive dimen-
sion emerges out of the interference that is always, as it were, virtually present
66 Mark B.N. Hansen