Exosomatisation

RELATED TERMS: Endosomatisation; [Of] Grammatography; Hypomnesis, Hypermnesis and Anamnesis; Remembering: Mnemotechne, Mnemonics and Memory

Exosomatisation is the process of technical exteriorisation of cognition and memory. Nevertheless, Agamben (Agamben and Pensotti, 2021) warns, in relation to the progressive digitisation and robotisation of life, “every exosomatic technical progress corresponds to a regression of the endosomatic functions. But if this regression goes beyond a certain limit, then the very survival of the species is called into question.”

Lemmens (2013: 6) argues that humanity has always been the object of technological change. Most of the time this is not conscious or explicit. However, the French paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan demonstrates in a number of books, especially Gesture and Speech (Leroi-Gourhan 1993), that human evolution is technological through and through.

For Stiegler (1998: 45), anthropogenesis as a process must be understood in terms of technogenesis. In this view, humanity and technicity are co-extensive: the human condition is a technical condition. Leroi-Gourhan theorizes that anthropogenesis, or the process of hominization, results from a progressive technicisation of the living. In other words, it arises from a process of technical exteriorisation, a process in which Leroi-Gourhan distinguished four consecutive phases, as noted by Stiegler (2009, 70):

• the exteriorisation of the skeleton in (initially stone) tools; 
• the exteriorisation of the muscular-energetic system in motors and machines; 
• the exteriorisation of the central nervous system in computers and network technologies; and 
• the exteriorisation of the sensorium and the imagination in audiovisual technologies . 

In sum, for Lemmens (2013: 6), humanity and technology have co-evolved. Homo sapiens is a technical life-form, endowed with an extra-biological, artefactual technical inheritance system, which supplements its genetic inheritance system and provides for the possibility of bypassing it. The radical novelty of human enhancement technologies, as transformational biotechnologies, is that they initiate a process of technical interiorisation. This represents a genuine epochal mutation in technology, that puts into question even the ‘homo’ and ‘zoe’ dimensions of ‘the human’.

Stiegler has himself recently acknowledged that the new biotechnologies amount to a new age of exosomatization, raising the question of a new regime of individuation. This is not just a matter of rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Stiegler has recently argued that potential developments in neurotechnology raise the question, and the problem, of a new endosomatisation, giving rise to new interfaces of the relationship between interiorisation and exteriorisation (Ross, 2017: 141, n51)

References

Agamben, G. and Pensotti, A. (2021) Where is Science Going? An Interview with Professor Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, (17 February). Available at: https://www.quodlibet.it/recensione/4594 (Accessed: 23 September 2023).

Lemmens, P. (2013) The posthuman condition as the misapprehended concretization of the danger of technology? A Heideggerian-Stieglerian critique of posthumanism, in The Posthuman – Rome, 11-14 September 2013: 5th Beyond Humanism Conference. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/6674204/The_posthuman_condition_as_the_misapprehended_concretization_of_the_danger_of_technology_A_Heideggerian_Stieglerian_critique_of_posthumanism?email_work_card=view-paper (Accessed: 26 August 2021).

Ross, D. (2017) ‘Protential finitude and infinitude in the Anthropocene’, Azimuth, (9), pp. 127–142.

Stiegler, B. (2015) Power, powerlessness, thinking, and future, Los Angeles Review of Books (18 October 2015), available at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/power-powerlessness-thinking-and-future/.

Stiegler, B. (2016) Elements of neganthropology: For an imagining of the future of neurotechnology, unpublished lecture, Nijmegen (2016)