Ruth Irwin - Acceleration of Technology in the Anthropocene: Stiegler, Maori and Exosomatic Memory

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Ruth Irwin   Abstract: Knowledge and memory are closely entwined. The advent of technologies such as the written word, clay tablets, paper, and the printing press, have transformed knowledge transmission from the oral tradition. Technologies have been highlighted as crucial to the formation of exosomatic memory and increasingly sophisticated human knowledge by Leroi-Gourhan, Derrida, Stiegler and others. Technologies interrupt the need for immediate experience or direct transmission from elders to youth. This positions technologies such as writing, art, and more recently, cinema, and computers at the forefront of cultural transmission, knowledge production, and education. Stiegler follows Leroi-Gourhan (1945) and Martin Heidegger (1927) to examine technology and exosomatic memory from the Palaeolithic to the modern. Heidegger’s critique of technology as the enframing of modern thought is at play. Heidegger argues that people have become alienated from the natural environment, as everything, from human subjectivity to the historical and ecological context are understood as consumable resources, waiting in standing reserve. The presumptions of technology as a moderator and catalyst of exosomatic memory has failed to understand how the natural environment was incorporated into indigenous modes of knowledge and epistemology as an exosomatic tool. Stiegler argues that technology is accelerating beyond the capacity of brain synapses to keep up. Consequently, the human mind has become passively receptive rather than dynamic and creative. Artificial Intelligence directs research pathways and creates community ‘bubbles’ where alternative viewpoints are uninteresting and excluded. With an increasing lack of exposure to alternative viewpoints, people are participating less in their wider community and this has impacts on democratic participation and the ability to forge compromise and new understanding. Diversity is still present but its exposure is less prolific. The apathy and passivity generated by the screen is cultivating an avoidance of engagement, like a late modern ‘opiate of the masses’ that allows the capitalist forces producing climate change to continue. Perhaps reevaluating how indigenous exosomatic memory engages with the environment rather than alienating it, may help us to creatively overcome the acceleration of technology and its consequences in consumerism.   Paper part of pre-constituted panel with Joff P.N. Bradley:   ‘Interrogating Stiegler on Determinism and the Anthropocene’ – Stiegler's work on technology and the Anthropocene takes in Heidegger's critical account of modern determinism, the enframing of epistemology as consumer demand. Stiegler follows Heidegger's lead by seeking a more originating approach to technology, in the earliest palaeolithic record, right up to the contemporary technology of quantum computing and robotics. Paleaolithic techne evolved devices such as cave art that shape knowledge with exosomatic memory. Stiegler's route traverses the thermodynamic economics of Georgescu-Roegen from which he develops his important concept of neganthropy. Stiegler's compelling work signals searching for a diluted 'phamakon' for emerging from the eschatological Anthropocene and forging a possible future. The enframing of the technological Gestell is maintained and exacerbated with accelerated technology. Both Kropotkin and Maori philosophy, in vastly different ways, create a foil to this determinism, throwing up alternatives that counter the modernist epistemological framework. Futures cannot abandon the savvy technological innovation of late modernity when there is 7.7 billion people to nourish, but indigenous and literary modes of knowing merge wild ecologies and anarchic concepts to global culture, opening up modernity beyond its consumerist framework.   Biography: Ruth Irwin is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT and writing climate change policy for local government in Sydney. She is working on a new book, called Economic Futures, which will come out with Routledge shortly. Her earlier books include Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, (2008) Bloomsbury, and Climate Change and Philosophy (2010), Bloomsbury, amongst others   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/