1 Knowledge and Mimesis in the Age of the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene, often understood as an age of posthuman technological proliferation, is also an age of disorienting knowledge of how to live, work, and think due to the automation that technologies produce. This situation creates a panic in the face of technologies surpassing humans, while at the same time opening the way to the discovery of new ways of translation. I use “translation” in the sense that this English word derives from the Latin word translato: trans, “across” + ferre, “to carry” or “to bring” (latio, derived from latus, is the past participle of ferre). Thus, translato is “a carrying across” or “a bringing across,” which assumes translations occur in time and place. What Jacobson calls “rewording”—an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs in the same language—is in my work understood as a decomposition of meaningless signs into meaningful ones.¹⁴ These meaningless signs, as will be made clearer below, are technical objects preceding the emergence of meaning that give rise to newer technical objects.

The notion that technics precedes thought and the human is the product of technics, as theorized by Bernard Stiegler, is also the starting point of my argument for posthumanism being a condition of any existence. Following Stiegler, I use the term “technics” in the plural, which includes the triad of technique, technicality, and technology. Although technics also includes technology, they are not synonymous. Technics refers to the meaning of technology, while technology refers to domains of technical action, such as industry or cyberspace, to give but two examples. If technics precedes thought, which in its turn produces humanity, then becoming human is the result of the contingency of technics, of the chance encounter, and therefore becoming human means overcoming this contingency by translation. It is possible only by the understanding (bearing in mind that the “understanding” is also technique) of meaningless signs and assembling them according to understanding.

In his work, Stiegler makes two interrelated claims: that “technics” is the main question of all futures to come, and that “technics” is what philosophy has repressed or excluded throughout its history. Understanding technics therefore is primarily to gain an understanding of all futures to come and the question of “the return of the repressed.”¹⁵ Philosophy’s exclusion of technics is the denial of the human as the product of technics, whereas science more convincingly demonstrates that the human is the product of technics. For example, according to the paleontological theory of Leroi-Gourhan, the shift from quadrupedalism to bipedalism constituted the human as technique, the constitution which also includes the mimetic faculty.¹⁶ Bipedalism freed the hands and face, where the hands allow techniques of gesture, i.e. language, and the face allows the technique of seeing and exteriorization, i.e. image-making.¹⁷ From this point, for primary societies, the most important thing was to remember this mimetic relationship between the gestures created by the use of hands and eyes as contact with the outside world: hands were used for gesticulation to communicate and the open face made it possible to look in different directions.

The formation of humans through the process of exteriorization always already demands a “return” to this primal impulse, to this mimetic relationship, therefore there is always the demand for the new mimesis. The “always already” is not present as a memory, but effective as temporal potentiality, something to come or to be set forward. The new mimesis emerges from the possibility of memory as a default of forgetting. It should also be noted that the role of technics here is twofold. These technics preceding humans constitute subjects unconsciously, both logically and pathologically, as Nidesh Lawtoo explains following Nietzsche’s notion of “the phantom of the ego. ”¹⁸ It is also at the core of biomimesis, which means technics constitutes subjects pathologically, yet technics also constitutes humans noetically, like in Aristotle’s notion of the noetic soul.¹⁹ So, becoming human is on the one hand biological and on the other hand noological; it is biomimesis on the one hand and noomimesis on the other.

In these circumstances, the task of philosophy is to think of a good imitation that overcomes the difficulties and challenges imposed by posthumanist theories. One of the difficulties is the ongoing struggle created by the so-called object-subject relationship, with the crucial question of memory. In order to overcome this challenge, which is cardinally changing our view of time and subjectivity, we also need to think of good imitation, which brings together images and thought, art and philosophy in the world of hyperchaos and contingency. Although the world exists independently from humans and technics precede humans, the question of “time after” persists.²⁰ The time after is the point of the irreversible separation of the world from its image, yet it is also a reminder and a record of the memory of this separation, which contains traces of “the transient, the fleeting and the contingent.”²¹

The time after demands the imitation of technics, which are embedded in human memory. The time after is the point of irreversible separation of the world and its signs. These signs are storage spaces of the contingent, transient, and temporal. The time after is not a copy of the contingent or its signs, but a delicate image that forms the exterior space of the memory of separation that is recorded in these signs. This memory does not reside in the human, but is exteriorized and exists outside the human with the potential to produce meaning. The human is a fiction that produces its own fictional existence out of these meaningless signs by giving them a new meaning. Stiegler calls this exteriority “the third retention,” which I find very convincing and will refer to as the posthuman memory with the potential to create a model of post-artistic mimesis.

The third, or tertiary retention, means that memory is recorded by technologies and separated from the human; it exists as a reminder and at the same time as a potential assistance as a support for remembering. In Stiegler’s definition, tertiary retention (third memory) is the hidden condition of possibility, of the play between what Husserl called primary retention and secondary retention.²² Throughout his work, Stiegler (drawing on Husserl) speaks of retentions, whereby primary retentions are sense perceptions, secondary retentions are memories, and tertiary retentions are media (cultural mnemonics). The third memory is the technology that records memory and makes it “accessible” to us. The tertiary retention precedes our understanding of time, and it is the condition of the primary and secondary retentions.

Becoming human is the internalization of the exterior, with understanding playing a crucial role in this. It is worth adding here that signs exist only in technologies of memory, that is mnemo-technologies, and signs are memories of time. Any technique is the absence of the imitation and time after is imitation that reconstructs by translating the time that is absent in the technics. Although technics already contain memory, that memory does not necessarily correspond to time, whereas time comes into existence by remembering but also equally by forgetting. The time after is also the time of the retention, which either excludes or includes the missing dimension of time embodied in memory. It is what I call “time which is lost,” and this loss is the condition of the gain. Like the time before, the time after also exists independently as the carrier of the trace of contingency.

According to recent theories, time does not exist, and any contingency is explained by the persistence of “the ancestral” or before thought,²³ but other theories, such as Derrida’s deconstruction followed by Stiegler, hold that there are traces of time.²⁴ These traces are memory and history, and they are translational technics. Traces of time give rise to the recognition of the human subject that produces technics. The challenge created by most posthumanist theories is an attempt to dispose of the “subject” altogether in order to create a “perfect” world of objects.²⁵ I think that when it comes to humanism or posthumanism, they are not products either of the subject or of the object as creation or as the “thing in itself,”²⁶ but only of language imitating “reality.” Yet on the political level, the recognition of contingency is a necessary condition for making excluded subjects present and becoming “a part of those who are not part of.”²⁷ In this sense, I accept the term “posthuman” only if we understand that we have never been human and from the inception of humanity, because the human is a product of technics. We have always been posthumans, albeit not always aware of it in phenomenological terms, as we consider ourselves more in control of our hominization and humanism. The term that conflicts with posthumanism is transhumanism: If posthumanism means that we were always already posthuman, then transhumanism means that this posthuman condition is also the condition of translation and alterity; it is both imitation and understanding. For this text, I will use the term “posthuman,” and use “transhuman” only where it is appropriate in that specific sense.

Becoming human, from its inception, has been a matter of imitation and the human can make its own image by extending itself into something else, into another technique. The other word for imitation is the persistence of the abovementioned question of memory (imitation as remembering), where forgotten or lost time is embodied. To imitate is to remember, but it also entails oblivion. To speak of the “origin” of the human already means speaking of the imitation, which also means that the human born by such imitation is always already a fiction. Analogously, we can speak of “cyborgs” as imitations. Hence, there is a need to understand imitation as the pharmacological effect, which is a double-edged act of producing good and evil, or pathologies and patho-logies simultaneously.²⁸ Stiegler’s theory of technics and time introduces humans merely as fiction and the product of technics.²⁹ Humans are always in default and the fault, or imperfection, is at the same time the condition of “correcting” the fault. But because of the pharmacological nature of this act, there is the danger of becoming adapted by the imitation. Yet, at the same time, there is the possibility of adopting from the imitation to change one’s perspective.

Good imitation, in this sense, is understood as changing the perspective of the self by becoming the other through the assistance of technics. It should also be noted here that mimesis is a highly politicized process because of the repressed artistic dimension, and posthumanism must be understood as the inclusion of what is excluded from the history of humanization. What is excluded and controlled is the aesthetic potential of subjects, with Plato’s banishment of poets from the state being only one, but possibly the most famous, example of this.³⁰ My aim is not to defend artists but to make prominent the ignored notion that artistic potential resides in any individual.³¹ This is what I mean by considering mimesis to be a highly political process that opens the way to the symbolic gain of the repressed, or lost dimension.

It is worth mentioning here, albeit briefly, that becoming is also to be understood as “acting out,” which takes place during the encounter with the repressed in the realm of mnemo-technologies.³² Acting out may be understood as the gain of the loss and rediscovery of lost knowledge through understanding and having an intention for acting. This kind of mimesis as a re-contextualizing of the existing signs, for translating them into the subject’s personal repertoire is crucial to noomimesis. It is a term for knowing and mimicking as a matter of becoming a part of the collective consciousness through the use of signs. These signs provide technological conditions for translations. The technical condition precedes the realization of thought, such as the use of, for example, alphabetic writing: in order to write, one needs to first learn letters of the alphabet. Writing is the exteriorization of one’s thought by the use of meaningless signs, such as letters of the alphabet; taken separately they are just signs, but combined together they become words, sentences, and finally meanings.

We become human and invent the missing dimension of time with the assistance of technics. As is well known, techne as art was also the industrial model for ancient philosophy, which assumed the complicated nonlinear relationship with the primary model. This is also true for our highly technologized age of the Anthropocene. This nonlinear relationship concerns, first and foremost, the temporality of technics and aggregates produced/imitated by them. What is produced by technics are meaningless signs. These signs are the main context of technics: They precede humans by becoming but also overcome humans by changing the perspective; they are called “meaningless” because the human is not determined, but either predetermined or overdetermined. Therefore, it is possible to say that humans are always in a state of becoming by appropriating meaningless signs by temporarily giving meaning to them. Becoming itself is always a matter of becoming other than human, and this process is supported by technics. This is because becoming is a process of assembling meaningless signs as appropriate for personal use and meaning comes into existence in this appropriation, albeit temporarily. These meaningless signs are incomplete evidences of the contingent world that took place before thought. They are often excluded from the established form of thought because of their imperfection. This exclusion represses the very fact of the impossibility of perfection. The recognition of contingency is necessary precisely because human reason is not capable of comprehending the world fully and this impossibility poses the question of these signs existing as incomplete evidences.³³ Hume also proposed connecting ideas with images, which could help provide a model for possible completeness despite the skepticism evidenced in incompleteness.

Trying to discover a model of connectivity immediately points to the loss, which resides in signs of this incomplete evidence. It gives rise to the possibility of assembling these signs in order to discover their meaning and to gain the lost dimension of time. This, in turn, gives rise to a temporal formation of subjects and this formation is not due to the human’s “original experience.” Instead, it is the ability to assemble inhuman, contingent meaningless signs.³⁴ The human is not a cause of this event of assembling or its final goal: the human is the quasi-cause of this event rather than the negotiator of the original experience. Deleuze and later Stiegler paid attention to this aspect of experiencing.³⁵ It is also in this sense that the human is a fiction, which depends upon the possibility of such becoming by the assistance of meaningless signs produced by imitation. In turn, these signs become models for further imitation. This mimesis is the condition of understanding of living, which is the rediscovery of the lost knowledge of time. The loss took place due to the primary separation of the human from the outside world, and this separation is recorded in primary techniques such as writing, speaking, and images. In this process, the only thing remembered is the recording, the technics; the recording suspends the meaning. Meaningless signs are therefore signs that have lost their meaning irreversibly during their separation from the outside world, while being remembered by the technics of speaking, writing, and imaging. These technics themselves are temporal elaborations of this separation, whereas the knowledge of this loss during separation provides a minimal gain. This knowledge is for one to realize that we cannot create the world, which is contingent, but we can reproduce it out of the signs of the world that are available contingently.³⁶

All in all, noomimesis addresses these questions by combining two terms, noesis and mimesis, both of which are understood as techniques exemplified here as speaking, writing, and imaging. Although these technics have been designed in many respects to imitate our senses, they do not share the limits of our senses. It is our senses that are limited and in need of assistance. Technics extend human senses, yet they also expand the range of our senses in some way through exposure to a technical way of seeing, thinking, and imaging. Images are not imitative of natural perception, they imitate technics. Technics liberate perception from its natural settings and offer us means to exceed our habits and gain access to the flow of signs. As such, technics become a technology of new perceptive and political possibilities. These possibilities reside in “places of memory”³⁷ such as archives, libraries, and what are now called databases—or what I call recorded memory. A recorded memory is what exteriorizes memory, like a written text or a recorded video. It is knowledge embedded within technology or knowledge understood as the pre-exteriorized characteristic of technology.

Knowledge is embedded in technologies as the collection of meaningless signs that give rise to (post)humans. They exist as an embodiment and form of hybridity between humans and other imitators, and between meaninglessness and meanings. It is possible to say that techno-logy (techne and logos) is knowledge, which consists of the economy of the loss and gain articulated by meaninglessness and meaningfulness. Meaning, made from meaningless signs, is a gain made from the loss. Therefore, reality is always without the real, the human is always without the being and in a constant state of becoming by searching for the real. The human has no basis: It is always about becoming as a result of the discovery of the lost knowledge and this knowledge always resides in meaningless signs. These signs are produced by contingency, and yet the human is a quasi-cause of any becoming, which is always the posthuman as it comes after the loss and by the discovery. The recorded memory is a meaningless sign, separated from its original meaningful context by exteriorization, and temporarily has no meaning or has meaning that has been produced through contingency. The meaningless sign recursively informs us, as a reminder, how to process the meaning into the meaningless sign. In this sense, imitation is not blindly copying the recorded memory as a meaningless sign, but bringing understanding and imitation together in the process of acting out. It turns the information received during the encounter with the exteriorized memory into one’s own knowledge and the condition of knowing. In this sense, imitation is also an ontological constitution that connects people with other beings, such as inhumans, including technologies.

Noomimesis brings thought to existence; otherwise thought does not exist. Thought is brought into existence as a method of grasping knowledge of the “great outdoors,” as mimicking the exterior that resides in the meaningless sign.³⁸ Signs of the “great outdoors” exist as signs of the remainder of the exterior that exists independently of our existence. These meaningless signs are inscribed in every recorded memory and memorized while existing by themselves, from fossils, as reminders of natural geological formations, to the emojis used in electronic communication as reminders of this communication.

These signs have no meaning in the sense that they exist independently of thought and only receive a specific meaning when thinking takes place in relation to them. In other words, although these signs are meaningless, they are given meaning by the “end user” in the time after. In this act, noomimesis leads to the artificial fabrication of the model of the world, which is not the world itself, but its imitated image. This imitated image stands against the meaningless sign of the “great outdoors” as the encounter of the interior with the exterior, while constantly reminding us about the condition of existence as a matter of temporality open to the influences from the outside. The meaningless sign becomes the condition of bringing forward and projecting to the exterior the internal possibilities—also called augmentation. This augmentation is the projection to the future decomposing by reproducing the meaningless sign by giving a meaning to it, the meaning that is unique to the context.

2 Noomimesis and Transhuman Translations

In the context of posthumanism, transhumanism is understood as the augmentation of humans by their own knowledge. It is the technique that extends the human by bringing forward their “technics”—constantly translating.³⁹ It also means two things: first, the translation of sensibility into the technics of reproduction; and second, the augmentation or bringing forward of one’s intelligibility in the technics. This double-edged activity is alternated intermittently and introduces indeterminacy into an otherwise “deterministic” system and unexpectedly swerves away from its initial destination. It brings together noesis and mimesis on the one hand, and underlies their irreversible separation on the other. This separation is crucial as it is the condition of contextualization and translation. The question that I would like to accentuate is this translation’s automation: the automatic adaptation of the individual on the one hand, and the possible autonomy of changing one’s perspective by adapting on the other. In this process, translation plays the role of the orientation of the recorded memory, of the meaningless sign, which exists as anamnesis and the support for knowing.

The notion that post/transhumanism is the augmentation of humans by knowledge also implies that it may increase the awareness of humans about their own technics. It is both the condition of one’s own making and knowledge of one’s own invention. It is the possibility to act according to this knowledge and avoid the control that automation imposes. It can also allow translating one’s own knowledge into technologies. Since technologies are the results of the exteriorization by signs and this exteriorization is made by, for example, writing, it is also a memory of the lost time, the loss that takes place during automation. This loss is symbolized in images that are signs outside of the meaning. The world consists of these signs as technical objects and this consistency is also the insistence on the third retention or memory, which constitutes the exterior world.

The sign (imitation) is meaningless and free of any decision-making (translation, which is also knowledge). Although I agree with Meillassoux that the sign can exist without meaning after it has been reproduced, I absolutely disagree that the sign comes into existence without meaning. It comes into existence as a meaning, but the sign irreversibly loses its meaning after coming into existence. Conversely, the sign that can exist without meaning can also exist with meaning. Even if to understand contingency as the event that is both something that may or may not occur, it is reasonable to say that knowledge is never made according to contingency; knowledge is the internalization of a hypothesis. This hypothesis is fuzzy and never determined; it is either predetermined or overdetermined and only temporarily terminated in a particular context, and shortly after this termination the meaning is lost again while being translated from one context into another. The inscription left behind is the image of translation and it is true to say that images are opening the indirect access to the outside world. Philosophy is questioning this indirect relation by undertaking and realizing what is undertaken. Realization takes place at the boundaries, where limits play a role rather than access or directness. Limits and transgression of limits amount to techno-genesis that also generates a new world by engineering and engendering.

Like any new turn, the mimetic turn of posthumanism creates new conditions for resistance and translation. Technics has always been, at least since bipedalism, the projection forward, bringing forth the human through skills and now the technologies of augmentation and virtualization, such as augmented reality or virtual reality, continue this project. Noomimesis as the production of new signs is the possibility of the expansion of the semiosphere. This is also the possibility of restoring the lost knowledge of how to live, work, and think, however contingent our lives may be. Stiegler’s philosophy reminds us that in today’s highly technologized world of automatism, which is defined by biomimesis, there is a possible autonomy, which is a conscious imitation of thought, which helps to find the orientation in this world of constant disorientation. Last, but not least, I would like to stress the importance of further research into the notion of noomimesis, which I developed partly from my interest in the work of Stiegler and Vernadsky. It is crucial to our “post-humanist” age of technodiversity, accompanied by automation, which demands noodiversity, that will challenge recent theories by assembling notions of contingency and technics as a way of increasing capacities of thought in the noosphere. My project also includes finding the answer to the question posed by Vernadsky in 1944, following Alfred Lotka: If thought is not a form of energy, how can the act of thinking influence material processes?⁴¹ And to what degree are these material processes materialistic? I see noomimesis as a technique for starting to grasp these questions, which is also the subject of my forthcoming book, Realism [Without] the Real: Imitation of Thought.

November 2021–June 2022, London