The Somatechnics of Cognition, Memory and Desire in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and Fury

Abstract

The accelerated use of technical prostheses as assistive devices has resulted in an externalisation of the site of cognition outside the sensory-motor neural apparatus. This has in turn problematised the notion of embodied cognition and corporeal integrity. Bernard Stiegler in For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010a) states that human beings not only evolve and mature genetically but ‘extragenetically’ and ‘epiphylogenetically’, that is through artificial prostheses or means which are not organic. The ‘exosomatization’ ( Stiegler 2019 ) of the cognitive processes of memory and desire through tools, language, artifacts and technical memory banks has resulted in the formation of hybrid milieus of cognition arising out of an enjambment of soma, that is the body with its neural circuits, and external technics or prostheses that are designed to augment neural receptivity through an amplification of sensory-motor experiences. If the act of memory entails a recapitulation and retention of the past, desire as protention involves a transmission of this past into the future. Such anticipations of the future are increasingly mediated through analogue and digital modes of transmission resulting in the emergence of trans-corporeal sites of cognition. As we adapt to the grammar of analogue broadcasting and navigate through grammes of computational data, we experience a heightened discretisation or fragmentation of the organic plane of consciousness into bits of information. This accelerated discretisation of our cognitive abilities results in a breakdown of the accretive nuances of memory and desire as embodied/somatic processes. Through a close reading of Salman Rushdie’s novels Quichotte (2019) and Fury (2001), this article explores synaptic connections between the human and the non-human as parts of multi-componential apparatuses of memory and desire. It puts forward the thesis that the welding together of an artificial digital memory and the organic biochemistry of cognition alters the preconditions of desire and intelligibility as somatic processes.