T ECHNICS AND TECHNOLOGICAL MEMORY

In order to read contemporary social media practices and platforms as a phenomenon of consumption I pay particular attention to the notions of

‘exteriorization’ and ‘tertiary retention’ and the role they attain in Stiegler’s seminal work Technics and Time 1,2, and 3 (Stiegler 1998, 2009, 2011c).

Technics as an originary process of organizing

In the introduction to Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998), Stiegler announces: ‘(...) that between the inorganic beings of the physical sciences and the organized beings of biology, there does indeed exist a third genre of “being”:

“inorganic organized beings,” or technical objects’ (Stiegler, 1998, p. 17). This third type of beings – technical objects – emerges in the process of ‘technics’. Technics is a process of exteriorization. In the work of Stiegler, technics accounts for the general process by which human beings exteriorize themselves making experiences and knowledge external to the individual. This is a process of retaining individual experiences and knowledge beyond the individual from which a material and symbolic milieu emerges. In this sense of technics, the surrounding environment of

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objects, tools, books, and images are the material expression of previous lived experiences; they are an effect of a process of exteriorization. No longer merely lived experiences retained as individual memory inside a consciousness but something that has been made exterior, the process of exteriorization is one where lived experiences become what Stiegler calls ‘epiphylogenetic memory’ or ‘tertiary retentions’. This produces a new genre of technical beings – that is tertiary retentions – that are neither to be reduced to a living substance nor to dead matter;

it is ‘inorganic organized’ the result of an organization of human experience and dead matter crafted in the process of exteriorization.

(…) we must mark as tertiary retentions all forms of “objective” memory:

cinematogram, photogram, phonogram, writing, paintings, sculptures – but also monuments and objects in general, since they bear witness, for me, say, of a past that I enforcedly did not myself live. (Stiegler 2011c:28).

Exteriorization as the general process through which technical objects come into being, the materialization of lived experiences, marks a specific moment in history.

Stiegler writes that ‘(...) “exteriorization”, (...) must not be understood as a rupture with nature but rather as a new organization of life—life organizing the inorganic and organizing itself therein by that very fact’ (Stiegler, 1998, p. 163). Thus, the process of exteriorization is not secondary or ephemeral to human existence but is a constitutive moment of human existence itself; it is the historical event where biologically organized life, that is, life without any transmission of cultural knowledge, enters into a stage where life is technically constituted and mediated.

Technics understood as a material process of exteriorization by which life is retained technically and thus beyond an individual is for Stiegler that which constitutes and is the possibility of a new form of organization of life transgressing a strictly biological organization of life (Colony, 2017, p. 67). It is in this sense that we can understand Stiegler’s proposition that ‘[a]s a “process of exteriorization”, technics

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is the pursuit of life by other means than life’ (Stiegler 1998, p. 17). Technology and tools, as the outcome of a general work of exteriorization, is not opposed to some kind of pre-technical human nature. Rather, with the notion of technics as exteriorization, Stiegler designates the beginning of a specific form of organized life. In The Thought of Bernard Stiegler (2018) Ross Abbinnett writes:

What Stiegler refers to as ‘technics’ is woven into the development of humanity; it is the organization of life not just as a defensive and productive modes of cooperation, but also as the singular forms of culture and spiritual sensibility that arise from the elevation of human being beyond a state of mere subsistence. (Abbinnett 2018:11).

What I want to stress is that, with technically mediated life as the transgression of a purely biological organization of life, human life is essentially to be understood as a historical process of organizing and disorganizing lived experiences into technical memory or tertiary retention. Human life unfolds as a continuous process of technical exteriorization of lived experiences forming ‘inorganic organized’ beings.

According to Stiegler, the pre-condition for culture and intergenerational knowledge becomes exactly this process of exteriorization by which human experiences and knowledge are retained and materialized outside and beyond the finitude of individual beings why ‘tool use predates every other ‘origin’’ (Abbinnett 2018:38).

As such, technics coincide with the invention of the human and vice versa why exteriorization attains a quasi-transcendental character in Stiegler’s philosophy. By asserting the centrality of technicity for human life and culture Stiegler not only puts into question any technical understanding of human culture but also any pre-technical conception of human subjectivity. Stiegler writes: ‘Tertiary retention is in the most general sense the prosthesis of consciousness without which there would be no mind, no recall, no memory of a past that one has not personally lived, no culture’ (Stiegler 2011c:39). If technical exteriorization is what opens up a certain

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form of organization of life beyond that of a solely biological form, the human qua its originary technicity is essentially also viewed as a technically organized being.

Thus, Stiegler writes:

If the individual is organic organized matter, then its relation to its environment (to matter in general, organic or inorganic), when it is a question of a who, is mediated by the organized but inorganic matter of the organon, the tool with its instructive role (its role qua instrument), the what. It is in this sense that the what invents the who just as much as it is invented by it. (Stiegler 1998:177).

The human being that Stiegler, in the above passage, refers to as the who is essentially organized by the what as it takes shape in each period of time. So, the exterior milieu of organs is an outcome of a process of organizing lived experiences that are then interiorized (individually and collectively). Yet, this interiority of the who ‘is nothing outside of its exteriorization’ but is composed with the what ‘in a single stroke, in a single movement’ (Stiegler, 1998, p. 152). This means that what is specific to the human being, Stiegler argues, is not only the fact that it invents these technical organs through a process of exteriorization but that the technological environment constitutes an organizational condition for human life.

This composition of the interior and the exterior of the subject is theorized as a process of mutual organization. The organon or the what, becomes both that which is organized (i.e. infusion of dead matter and lived experiences) and an organizational force itself as human aesthetics are shaped and condition by the formation of a technical environment. Thus, we find in Stiegler’s philosophy of technology an aporetic (re)organizational relation between the human being and its technical organs. In Stiegler’s techno-anthropological conception, the human is essentially viewed as an organizational being insofar that; it enters the stage of history at the moment when technical exteriorization begins; and that this originary

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technicity of human life confines the human being to a never-ending process of being organized and reorganized by its technical environment. In other words, human aesthetics and subjectivity are, in Stiegler, intrinsically bound to a specific organizational process: the technical organization of lived experiences outside the individual which in the course of history produce ‘tertiary retentions’ of various forms (tools, painting, writing etc). Thus, Stiegler’s thematization of technology, culture and human experience is thoroughly permeated by an organizational thinking as the organon is a mediating and constitutive force – clearly reverberating with the argument of an ‘organizational a priori’ (Beyes 2020) and that ‘media organize’ (Martin 2019) here formulated as processes of organizing and materializing, in a broad sense, lived experiences as technology memory. It is on the basis of this perception of an aporetic organizational relation between human aesthetics and technology that Stiegler theorizes the consumer and the consumer society as a specific ‘aesthetic programme’ (Abbinnett, 2018, p. 123) which we turn to at the end the chapter.

Exteriorization as a contemporary organizational force

Technics as a process of exteriorization attains a quasi-transcendental character in Stiegler’s philosophy. Technics is what opens up and continuously conditions human life, and, it is a historical process in which a material environment of objects continuously reconfigures human experience, perception and attention. To explore social media platforms as organizational technologies of consumption entails re-framing the concept of exteriorization within a social-theoretical setting. First, this implies a generalization of various kinds of media activities and functions:

‘uploading’, ‘sharing’, ‘liking’, ‘tracking’, ‘commenting’, ‘tagging’, and so forth.

Despite their variety in nature, I argue, that 1) these can be conceptualized as an exteriorization process of lived human experiences and 2) that the digital objects produced through such activities – for example photos, videos, data, likes, and so

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forth – are a reproduction of lived experiences and considered to be what Stiegler refer to as ‘tertiary retentions’.¹⁰ Thus, while we must be alive to the philosophical discussions (and problems) that arise from the assertion of an originary technicity of human aesthetics and social organizing – grounded in and continuously unfolds as a process of technical exteriorization of lived experiences – in this context the novelty of the concept of technics as exteriorization re-asserts itself in its ability to reveal how contemporary social media platforms and activities is a profound phenomenon and process of exteriorization and circulation of lived experiences as tertiary retention. Platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram are in this sense media technologies that organize this process of exteriorization of lived experiences in different ways.

Such a conception of a diverse set of media platforms and activities – bringing in both memory and time – reverberates with the perspectives on contemporary digital media culture found in for example Wendy Chun’s book Updating to Remain the Same (2016). In Chun’s account of the experiential relation between new media platforms and subjectivity is equally theorized in terms of memory. With new media platforms comes new habits, which Chun theorizes in terms of memory – meaning that media practices continue despite the specific media in which they have emerge have disappeared. Habits are an activation of memory through which the present is enacted and thus memory is not simple a past separated from the present. Habits involves an activation of memory that foster repetition (Chun 2016:85–89) and, thus similar to Stiegler, Chun conceives memory beyond recollection. Framing these media platforms in terms of exteriorization and tertiary retention I suggest that the relation between platform activities (of updating, liking, etc.) and human experiences involves not only the activation of memory, but that in these activities memory (in the sense of experience) itself is in a process of

10 As I have argued for in (Nielsen 2016)

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becoming technological and this is what is repeatedly produced and organized as an effect of the habits that emerges with social media platforms. Sharing, liking, updating, and so forth becomes habits but they are also technological mediated activities in which the individual is producing itself as memory – it is tertiarizing itself – and this is a process in which individual and social experiences are turned into objects of consumption.

In the repeated use of platforms human experiences takes a tertiary form that, in the words of Zuboff, transforms ‘human experience’ into data that becomes an asset and a source of economic profit (Zuboff 2019:98–100). Yet, with the notion of exteriorization and tertiary retention the focus is beyond the processes and operations of a totalizing system of surveillance and exchange value that renders human experience productive. With the conception of social media platforms as a distinct form and phenomenon of organizing technical exteriorization I emphasize the systematic and material configuration and reproduction of social relations and human experiences as it continuously being organized by and towards different forms of tertiarizing. With Instagram for example we will see that Stories and Archive are tertiary forms that in different ways organizes this process of exteriorization and the circulation of individual and social experiences as tertiary retentions. Social media consumption is, I argue, to be theorised in relation to this process of tertiarizing; it is profoundly bound to the tertiarizing process by which individual and social life is organized as technological memory. And it is in light of this perspective that I suggest to reconceptualize consumption and to argue for something like a system of social media consumption.

Finally, I suggest that this tertiarizing of oneself is not only to be analysed as a function of communication, information, and documentation. While Baudrillard theorized consumption as a system of communication in the present context of social media consumption the idea of platforms being tools of communication is too functional, to close to use value, and reverberates with the

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medium’s own discourse (as I will show in Chapter 6). Clearly these are an important aspect of how social media platforms are used and are part of the intentions, goals, and aims when people share, like, and filter images and videos.

But with the concept of tertiary retention and the concept of consumption as an organizational and circulatory process I suggest a perspective on these platforms, features, and function beyond such means. Furthermore, the concept of tertiary retentions means that I do not take ‘digital content’ on Instagram as isolated objects of communication or information but as objects through which human experiences have been and continuous to be technologically organized. Framing social media platforms as a distinct phenomenon of tertiarizing, the latter is conceived as a process that mediate, constitutes, and shapes human relations and experiences in the process by which they are being organized by social media platforms.