Gadget Consciousness by Joss Hands;

Author:Joss Hands;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

GADGETS AS MNEMOTECHNOLOGY

The concept of gadget consciousness can be deepened by way of Bernard Stiegler’s theory of grammatisation, which he defines as ‘the history of the exteriorization of memory in all its forms: nervous and cerebral memory, corporeal and muscular memory, biogenetic memory’ (2010: 33). Grammatisation in Stiegler’s account tends to the solidifying extension of expression and ideas into material forms of greater duration. John Tinnell describes the overarching process of grammatisation as one wherein ‘a continuous flux (e.g., speech, the body, the genome) becomes broken down into a system of discrete elements’ (2015: 136). This includes writing, which generates a form of artificial memory, what Stiegler calls tertiary retention – a device which stores such retention becomes a mnemotechnology. By definition, everything digital fits into this description of grammatisation. Almost all digital communications are also stored, somewhere or other, and thus also contribute to tertiary retention. As a result, whenever we communicate via gadgets we also lay down a digital memory and extend the life span of that moment into the technology and beyond.

Stiegler’s account of grammatisation is helpful in thinking further about the ambiguity of gadgets. The material forms shaped by grammatisation are referred to by Stiegler as the pharmakon. Pharmakon is a term taken from Greek and means something which is both poison and cure. Stiegler employs Donald Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object as the first pharmakon on the path to adulthood – the object (blanket, teddy, etc.) that allows the transition from total dependency on a parent to separation and autonomy. The object is what allows for the transition to adulthood, but within it lies the danger of excessive attachment, dependency and the destruction ‘of autonomy and trust’ (Stiegler 2013: 3). This is the double-sided nature of the pharmakon: we get very attached to and invested in such things, which absorb our desires and support our sense of security and worth, but which also undermine and cause the self-same need.

Writing as artificial memory is also such a pharmakon, in as much as it operates as a salve; it allows cultural memory to be extended and shared, but also, according to Plato, it decays autonomy of thought. Taking his lead from Derrida, Stiegler tells us that ‘while Plato opposes autonomy and heteronomy, they in fact constantly compose’ (2). The digital pharmakon, according to Stiegler, is the extension of this logic to the entire field of the human body, including in cognitive capitalism wherein ‘those economic actors who are without knowledge [are so] because they are without memory’ (2010: 35). Memory loss is the essence of contemporary proletarianisation, extended into the realm of consumption in which our ‘savoir vivre’, knowledge of how to live, is forgotten. We are no longer able to remember how to think because our lexicon is proscribed by the absorption and pre-emption of social networks.

In many ways we can see our relation to gadgets as objects as a clear example of such a proletarianisation process, as ‘hypomnesis’ (derived from hypnosis, referring to an empty circulation).

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