Memoroxin as a Metaphor for Agentic AI: Perceptions on Memory and Autonomy in Meredith Westgate’s The Shimmering State

Drishya K^1* & K Reshmi^{2  
1}Research Scholar, Department of English, Pondicherry University, Puducherry, India. Corresponding author.
²Professor, Department of English, Pondicherry University, Puducherry, India.

^{Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 18, Issue 2, 2026. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v18n2.07
Full-Text PDF Issue Access}

Abstract

This paper examines Meredith Westgate’s The Shimmering State (2021) to explore the reconfiguration of memory and cognitive autonomy in the digital age. As memory constitutes a fundamental basis of human consciousness, identity, and selfhood, its increasing mediation through technological systems raises critical questions for posthumanist inquiry. The study analyses Memoroxin, a speculative memory-enhancing pharmaceutical, as an analogue of agentic artificial intelligence that operates through neurotechnological intervention. Drawing on N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of cognitive assemblages, Bernard Stiegler’s theory of pharmacology, and Andrew Hoskins’s notion of grey memory, the paper investigates how memory becomes externalized, technologically regulated, and subject to capitalist appropriation. The novel problematizes the boundaries between human cognition and technological agency. The paper argues that Memoroxin functions simultaneously as a cognitive aid and a mechanism of control, transforming memory from an internal repository of experience into a consumable, networked, and compulsive phenomenon. In doing so, The Shimmering State offers a critical reflection on the ontological, ethical, and affective consequences of AI-mediated cognition and the growing entanglement of human memory with technological systems.

Keywords: Autonomy, Non-Conscious Cognition, Posthumanism, AI-driven Neurotechnology, Pharmakon, Grey Memory, Cognitive Capitalism.