Foucault and Media

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exteriority

Since the publication of Bernard Stieglers Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of

Epimetheus and subsequent Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (1998;

2009), exteriorization has become a widely discussed buzzword within

media studies. Stieglers assertion that human existence entails the

exteriorization ofmemoryinto matter finds easy consonance with McLuhans

notion of mans extensions intoprosthetics. Stieglers analysis of

exteriorization, furthermore, branches into phenomenological questions

raised in Merleau-Ponty and the textualquestionof exteriority discussed in

Derrida and Foucault.

The term exteriorization finds its root in the word exterior, which the

Oxford EnglishDictionarydefines both in the general sense of being situated

or lying outsideas pertaining to the outside or outer portion of anything and

in the particular anatomical sense of lying outside the surface of thebody.

Comprised of the prefix ex, meaning out of and ter, associated with

territory, terrain, terror, and even terminal, exteriorization might be

thought of as the act or process of placing something into the outer territory

orlandscapeor of altering somethings internal status into an external one.

The phonetic commonality of ter in external, exterior, territory, and

term cannot be overstated. Term develops from the Latin word terminus

meaning end, or boundary line. The term exists where the chain of

signification terminates. The term is placed at the external end of the outer

territory (i.e. the place where the chain terminates) in such a way that

maximizes the capacity of the signifier to produce meaningful difference with

what remains interior to the exteriorizingagent.

For Stiegler, the placing of the term into the exterior creates the metaphysical

function of memory since memory retrieves the term to its interior referent;

for Derrida the terms location at the extremity of the signifying chain gives

language its representative status. For Stiegler, the exterior exists outside the

human performing the exteriorization but the exteriorizing impulse plays an

essential interior function. Since an ontology of human nature, for Steigler,
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mustaccountfor the sense in which technics and humanity, the artificial and

the human, are inseparable and fundamentally co-dependent (Lebedeva, 81),

to exteriorize must imply that the externalization of cognitive functions is

indeed a kind of mediation of these functionsthat in some sense they remaininternal to the externalizer.

Interpreting Rousseau, Derrida argues that thestatusof interiority itself

entails reference to an exterior. He explains that the experience of

understanding oneself speaking [sentendre-parler] lives and proclaims itself

as the exclusion of writing , that is to say of the invoking of an exterior,

sensible, spatial signifier interrupting self-presence (98). Like Stiegler,

Derrida approaches subjectivity through the interior/exterior binary inasserting that language is born out of the process of its own degeneration

(242). It is only in mediating mental processes in reference to an absent

exteriority thatlanguagecomes to attain interior status, and therefore, being.

Language comes into being only when what language signifies can be held

exterior to it. Exteriority of the linguistic content to language underlies its

representative function. Without this possibility to represent, to stand in for

the exterior, language has no interior identity as language.As aprocess, exteriorization cannot be separated from its role in individuation

and identity formation. In this sense, Lebedeva is right to emphasize the

territorial aspect of externalization in her review of Stieglers Technics and

Time, 2. She explains, The question here is thus ultimately about the

technically orchestrated territorialization of the pulsation of human life.

(Lebedeva 82). Exteriorize can designate, according to its entry in the OED,

not only to blandly make exterior but also to realize (a conception) inoutward form or to attribute an external existence to (e.g. states of

consciousness). Exteriorization, then, constitutes both a process and an

ontology since in the process of pushing something into the outer territory, of

placing a term in its terminal position, the extent of the interior, its limits,

become transparent and constitutive of being. To understand that

exteriorization into the unknown outer territory involves a process that

becomes a pursuit, therefore, suffices as a schematization of it as an action,but leaves undefined the nature of the exteriorized content. Does the
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exteriorized object constitute, for example, the unspoken symbolic and

linguistic content of the psyche, or does it involve content-lessprocessor

pattern, or, better yet, the interchange of content and process which can be

mediated only in exteriorization? It would be wrong to argue that the union ofcontent and process could have an exclusively interior or exterior location. The

concept of exteriorization, in other words, invites us to consider how the

binary of interior and exterior exists as a medium in which content becomes

process and process becomes content.

Media theory has turned to the concept of exteriorization to argue against the

reductionists definition of media as a series of discrete mechanical operations.

W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen emphasize, It is important that westress just how much this conceptualization of media as an environment

differs from the conceptions of medium/media as a narrowly technical entity

orsystem. Before it becomes available to designate any technically specific

form of mediation, linked to a concrete medium, media names an ontological

condition of humanizationthe constitutive operation of exteriorization and

invention (xiii). To the extent that exteriorization names the ontological

condition of humanization, the term connects media studies withphenomenology in its attempt to interpret the necessary conditions for a

certainmode(namely, human) of existence and the subjectivity implicit in this

mode. In the preface of Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

establishes a link between phenomenology and the exterior. He writes, I must

be the exterior that I present to others, and the body of the other must be the

other himself (xiii). Exteriorization has figured into debates within

phenomenology in which the author wishes to dispute the notion of thesovereign self, defined without relation to an external world of meaning. A

notion of the exterior allows Merleau-Ponty to assertperceptionmay be

primary even to a notion of the body as the starting point for phenomenology.

Jean Hyppolites critique of Hegels idealization constitutes another

appearance of exteriorization in phenomenology: Language is the house [la

demeure] of being as sense. The Logos is the primordial,

originaryvoice[verbe] that is truly an exteriorization, and exteriorizationwhich, as such, disappears as soon as it appears (215). Like Steigler and
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Hayles, Hyppolite sees the moment of exteriorization as originary in that it

constitutes the beginnings of our world of outer meaning by which we

individuate and establish, against this exterior, our most rudimentary notions

of identity.Jurgen Habermas examines this issue of exteriorization and individuation in

terms of political acculturation, explaining, In the process of growing up, the

child is able to form the interior of a consciously experienced life only through

simultaneous externalization vis--vis other participants in communication

and interaction (4). In Habermas, we see how the role of exteriority in the

formation of identity can indeed be a social function. The exteriority of ones

community to oneself provides the social condition for individuation. WhereasHyppolite emphasizes the spectral appearance and disappearance of the

exteriorized content, Habermas emphasizes the exchange of interior and

exterior proscribed in the act. In this sense, Habermas understands the role of

exteriorization in individuation reciprocally whereas Hyppolite anticipates the

dissolution of exteriorized language and McLuhan emphasizes that Self

amputation forbids self recognition (43). Hyppolites description of language

[as] the house of being as sense is much like the inevitability of narcissisticman in McLuhan.

If we can see the co-origination of identity and exteriorization in Hegel, we can

understand the inevitability and inescapability of exteriority in Derrida and

Foucault. In The Order Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences,

Foucault sifts out the relationship between exteriority and the interpretive act:

the analysis of statements treats them in the systematic form of exteriority.

Usually, the historical description of things said is shot through with theopposition of interior and exterior; and wholly directed by a move from the

exterior (120-21). Whereas Foucault, like Stiegler, embraces the idea that

human existence requires an exterior field, Foucault says less about the act of

exteriorization itself. For Foucault the tension between interior and exterior

drives the signification process, but it is not the case that interpretation

constitutes an exteriorization so much as that the act of interpretation

assumes the existence of a stable interior space. This assumption deservesscrutiny. Jeffrey T. Nealon, in his article Exteriority and Appropriation


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argues, in fact, that Derrida and Foucaults essential compatibility rests on

their common impulse to scrutinize this assumed interior field of criticism. He

writes, Derridas notion of text, then, seems to have at least this much in

common with Foucaults notion of the exteriority of a network of statements:both posit a discursive field or network in which no term can rule from a

privileged place of interiority (103). Derrida and Foucault make evident that

interiority and exteriority are always intertwined.

Stiegler argues that man has always been a prosthetic being and has always

differed from the animal world in his use of technics: the use of tools to make

other tools. The use of technics requires the exteriorization of certain aspects

of the memory and consciousness. Stiegler explains this prosthetic origin ofman in the first volume of Technics and Time: The prosthesis is not a mere

extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua human

(152-153). Like Stiegler, Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman,

asserts that something in the origins of man explains his exteriorizing impulse.

She writes, The posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis

we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other

prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the bodywith other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before

we were born (3). In their notion of exteriorization as prosthetic enactment,

Stiegler and Hayles follow in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan, Hans Selye,

and Adolphe Jonas in regarding the extension of the human sensory apparatus

as a simultaneous autoamputation in which the ratios of perception are

recalibrated. Exteriorization refers to the act that forms technics, and

therefore to the act that constitutes the moment in which man becomes man,but also to the act that creates the necessary condition for a particular kind of

experience that we understand to be human. Within this human mode of

experience, individuation itself relies on reciprocity between exteriorization

and interiorization. Lebedeva explains, Thought, insofar as it is reflexive or

able to return to itself, is grounded in the worldly materiality around it, in the

sense that it recoils from something other than itself, and it is in this recoil

that it is constituted as what it is (83). Stiegler and Hayles suggest that thehuman mode of existence necessary entails the exteriorizing act, but from this


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suggestion it does not follow that the formations of technics cannot come to

constitute a threat to this very mode of existence entailing it.

On this issue, Stiegler and Hayles point our attention to the industrial

revolutions effect of maximizing the rate and extent of exteriorization. Iftechnics were once the source of our human experience, the industrial

revolution has created a splinter between life and technics forcing a

reconsideration, or new praxis, by which we navigate a means of preserving

our exteriorizing nature without allowing it to bring about our obsolescence.

Mark Hansen articulates the challenge of this praxis:

The very hope for a viable future, the hope of keeping open the future, requires

a struggle with todays culture industries and with the media artifacts that theyproduce; and this struggle is a struggle for control over the source that is living

singularity, which is to say, the source of the very transductive dialective

between the living and technicsthat constitutes the being of the human

(Media Theory, 305).

Jay Jensen

Works CitedDerrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human

Sciences. (1970). New York: Vintage, 1994.

Habermas, Jurgen. Public space and political public spherethe biographical

roots of two motifs in my thought. Kyoto, Japan. 11 Nov. 2004.

Commemorative Lecture.

Hansen, Mark B.N. Media Theory.Theory Culture Society No. 23 (2006):297-306.

Hayles, Katherine.How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in

Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1999.

Hyppolite, Jean. Logic and Existence. Albany: State University of Albany

Press, 1997.

Lebedeva, Kristina. Review Article: Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2:Disorientation. Parrhesia No. 7 (2009): 81-85.


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McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964.

Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1994.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.Phenomenology of Perception. (1945). New York:Routledge, 2002.

Mitchell, W.J.T. and Hansen, Mark B. N. (ed.). Critical Terms for Media

Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Morra, Joanne and Smith, Marquard (ed.). The Prosthetic Impulse: From a

Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

Nealon, Jeffrey T. Exteriority and Appropriation: Foucault, Derrida, and the

Discipline of Literary Criticism.Cultural Critique No. 21 (1992): 97-119.Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford:

Stanford UP, 1998.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Stanford: Stanford

UP, 2009.

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