Faculty Colloquium with Pieter Lemmens: The Question Concerning the Technosphere

One of the more interesting concepts that have emerged within the debate on the Anthropocene is that of the technosphere, an attempt to think technology as a planetary phenomenon, decisive for its future as a life support system. Mainstream philosophy of technology so far has hardly taken notice of this powerful and fertile concept. Having abandoned interest in ‘large scale’ and ‘high altitude’ conceptualizations of technology since the so-called ‘empirical turn’, it has failed to address the profound planetary impact of technology and engage with the technosphere concept. Starting from the assumption that the technosphere represents the concretion of what Heidegger called enframing, Lemmens will offer a Stieglerian critique of the naturalist if not physicalist technosphere concept in Earth system science by showing that the latter does not understand, somewhat surprisingly, the true nature and implications of the human-technology relationship as it is constitutive of the technosphere.

Consequently it fails to properly address what is truly specific about this artificial geosphere, and that is its ‘noetic’ as well as its ‘libidinal’ character. It is only by focusing on the Earth-systemic impact and specificity of precisely these noetic and libidinal dimensions of the technosphere or rather techno-noosphere that we can properly start to think about how to reconstruct it from a destructive and careless runaway dynamic into a constructive and caring constituent of the anthropized Earth system, as Lemmens will show with Stiegler, in dialogue with the so-called geo-thermodynamic ‘gradient theory’ of Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan as well as with Heidegger’s non-operative understanding of technology as enframing.

We will have a free drink following the lecture in the Erasmus Paviljoen.