On Bodies and Organs: Scales of Affectability

Abstract

Starting from the Deleuzo-Spinozist question “what can a body do”, this essay traces a theoretical background from which some of the main questions regarding Artificial Intelligence as a possible extension of the human body may be addressed. After considering the capacity of affecting and being affected of any kind of body, such a background is built thanks to Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technics and his point of view on technogenesis, anthropogenesis and organogenesis as a threefold movement in the same tendency. Stiegler also shows that humans are characterised by the tendency to store memory in external devices, that he sees as “exosomatic organs”, and it is in this sense that he proposes to study the co-constitutive relationship among organs as a “general (ex)organology”. Relying on this, the last section of the essay presents several speculative questions about Artificial Intelligence and its possible compositions with other bodies and calls for an “exorganological ethics” to study relations between organs and understand how such relations increase or decrease the power of bodies to act.