The prosthetic self technology and human experience in contemporary speculative fiction

1 Introduction: Prosthetic Transformation and Speculative Visions In November 2000, Sony released a print advertisement for their product, the ‘Memory Stick,’ a digital storage medium that records information as digital data and enables the transference of this digital information from one electronic accessory to another. The image used to advertise the product centres on the back of a man’s head, which signifies the chamber of human memory. The Sony memory device is inserted into the middle of the head as an electronic substitution for the organic. Across the top of the image are the words ‘Imagine it.’ The image chosen to market the product is a striking example of a tendency in contemporary culture, that is, a widespread use of elements from speculative fiction (SF)1 in everyday forms of expression. These models and tropes now commonly permeate commercial art, popular film and television, indicating a normalization of SF modes for understanding our highly technological present. The Sony advertisement is an example of how SF is no longer simply a formula for a literary genre but in fact a pertinent mode of awareness, a mode that SF scholar Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. calls ‘science-fictionality’, which ‘frames and tests experience as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction’ (Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Seven Beauties 2). This progressive view suggests that SF has given us an apt language with which to                                                                                                                 The term ‘speculative fiction’ is term that arose in the 1960s to articulate a broadening aesthetic domain of science fiction, which, at the time was saddled by arguments about the defining limits of the genre (Luckhurst 147-148). My preference for this term indicates my view of a constantly-evolving form of the genre, acknowledging the shifting stylistics and genre-blending that continues to occur; however, I use the term more or less interchangeably with ‘science fiction.’     articulate the convergence of technology and human experience, at a time of unabated technological change and the infiltration of new technologies into the most intimate spheres of life. From this example of commercial art we can see how SF is able to frame the very abstract idea that technology preserves fallible human memory, and allows for a more efficient retrieval and transfer of the information obscurely embedded in the human mind. SF’s system of signs allows us to map out and make concrete unseen or abstruse relations. While the ad’s non-mimetic image of technological enhancement represents a discontinuity with our actual experience, it is not completely inconceivable as it extrapolates from current human-machine interfaces, and exemplifies SF’s rootedness in empirical reality. As I will elaborate on later, SF, unlike other non-naturalistic modes like fantasy or Symbolism, tends to reposition its signs and symbols as objects and occurrences of the material world, thus giving us materialist rather than metaphysical accounts of human experience (see Suvin, Metamorphoses 80; Roberts 15). Of specific interest to my discussion is the way Sony’s image delineates man’s relationship with technology. The digital stick is represented as prosthesis, a mnemonic device that attaches to the head and augments the individual’s memory. This image communicates a particular idea about Man’s relationship with technology: aspects of the human being once thought confined to the domain of the organic are now being replaced by technology. This implies the externalization and enhancement of biological processes through technology, which supplements Man’s natural abilities and allows him to engage in more complex endeavours. At the same time,     this supplementation has fundamentally changed Man, transforming the way his body essentially functions, creating an opening or rupture into which the technology may enter. I am interested in this double movement of prostheticization, the simultaneous exteriorization of the human and interiorizing of technology, the simultaneous extension and absence of self brought about by our increasingly intimate interactions with technology, and the consequences of this on humanity. The inspiration for this dissertation comes from a recognition that this technologically-enabled extension and absence is as a contemporary condition of postindustrial human subjectivity. Cultural discourse today articulates that the contemporary world is being shaped by an increasing interactivity with various forms of technology, and that our personal and social lives are now characterized by technological substitution. From corporeal substitutions, such as limb replacements and cosmetic implants, to virtual substitutions, such as intelligent machines taking over administration in large corporations and the increasing number of virtual social platforms that are replacing face-to-face interactions, contemporary society has reached a point of significant dependence upon the machine, and we are virtually unable to function in basic ways without computers or even our telephones. So while technological innovation is meant to extend our abilities, and help us to reach farther with all our senses, we have also become more dependent on technology, adapting to its presence to the extent that removing these technologies from our lives would completely disorient or incapacitate us. As such we have allowed our tools to replace our more authentic responses to the world and each other. Our everyday lives, the way we experience the world, and even our identities and subjectivities have been irrevocably transformed by technology. The dual movement of prostheticization, the     transfer between human and technology, is not then confined to actual prosthetic limbs and devices, but can be observed in broader human-technology contexts. I am interested in the occurrence of prostheticization in SF, a genre primarily concerned with the impact of science and technology on humanity. In this dissertation, I analyse representations of prostheticization in contemporary SF works, and explore what writers suggest about the ways human subjectivity has been altered by the various technological substitutions available to us in our contemporary world. Looking at a wide range of SF texts from within and outside the Anglo-American sphere, I attend to the diverse ways prostheticization can be represented, given the elasticity of the word ‘prosthesis,’ as I will show. The intensification of technological substitution in this current era has important implications for notions of what it signifies to be human. In the past, the human has to a large degree been regarded as an autonomous and rational being, separate from the world of objects, and master of his tools. This is an idea that we inherit from the Enlightenment, which marked the rise of modern empirical science, particularly from philosopher Rene Descartes. It is a belief that continues to underprop our understandings of self, particularly in the West. However, there is a discernible sense that our very intimate relationships with new technologies2 are destabilizing this. The ‘prosthetic self’ that is the title of this dissertation indicates a new subjectivity recognized in this present moment by the writers of my chosen texts. It is a self that can no longer be regarded as separate from its technological objects, a self that is, in various and complex ways, bound up with these objects, a binding or imbrication that has radical consequences for the subject’s sense of self and understanding of his or                                                                                                                 I use the phrase ‘new technology’ to refer to recent advancements in information and communication technologies, biotechnology, genetic engineering, nanotechnologies, and other digital technologies.     her place in the world. This new subjectivity3 moves further away from the Cartesian model of self. And in order to discern how far it diverges from the Cartesian self it is worth discussing key shifts in understandings of subjectivity, in relation to the world of objects, as proposed by key theorists. Descartes’ (1631) conception of the subject can be summed up by his famous formulation Cogito ergo sum-- ‘I think therefore I am.’ For Descartes, the subject is the ‘thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions,’ a conscious self that is the source of all experience and knowledge (Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy 30). He identifies consciousness with the ‘mind, a soul (animus), an intellect, a reason’ (Descartes, Philosophical Writings 69). Here, the conscious processes of rational and reflective thought, as opposed to other sensations, are privileged and indubitable. Indeed, the modern tradition of Western thought since has privileged the rational processes of analysis and observation in the search for objective truth. For later Enlightenment thinkers, reason becomes the necessary quality distinguishing human from non-human (Mansfield 15). Further, Descartes writes that the subject is ‘a thinking and unextended thing,’ who possesses a body that is ‘an extended and unthinking thing,’ such that the self or ‘soul’ is ‘entirely and absolutely distinct from [the] body, and can exist without it’ (Descartes, Discourse on Method 156). For Descartes then, and for later Enlightenment thinkers, the subject is an immutable, selfcontained, interior essence that is independent of its body and of the objects around it in the world.                                                                                                                 ‘Subjectivity,’ etymologically, means to be ‘placed (or even thrown) under’ and therefore indicates a sense of self that is inevitably linked to something outside of it, be it a concept or other subjects and society in general. It thus reflects the idea that the self is not a separate, distinct entity (Mansfield 3).     Immanuel Kant (1781) developed his own version of the conscious self. For Kant, subjectivity would be impossible without the reality of objects, which induce thought and experience. These thoughts or mental representations of the world merge with our sense of self, ‘unite[d]… in one self-consciousness’ (Kant 154), and thus connect us with things (Mansfield 19). Kant therefore moves to an understanding of subjectivity in terms of subject-object relations. However, he argues that our knowledge of objects is not real but ideal. The human being can only know of the appearances or representations of things, and not have direct access to the things themselves, which maintains the division between subject and object. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1807) radicalizes this view, attempting to historically ground it by dealing with the actual experience of first-personal awareness. Hegel suggests that consciousness ‘possesses two moments: that of knowledge, and that of objectivity which is the negative with regard to this knowledge. When the spirit [or mind] develops itself in this element of consciousness and displays its moments, this opposition occurs at each particular moment, and they all therefore appear as faces of consciousness. The science of this path is the science of the experience had by consciousness’ (Hegel 96). For Hegel, consciousness is always consciousness of an object, and all objects are objects for consciousness. The subject’s consciousness reflects what it encounters in the world but in doing so it therefore reflects an objective reality, which itself is the product of subjective activity. Subjective consciousness is thus a reciprocal activity between the individual and the material world that the individual builds around itself. In this way, the self-governing, rational subject is inseparable from objective reality necessarily bound to the cultural-historical world in which he or she lives (Redding, "Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel"). Hegel rejects Kant’s claim that reality is unknowable arguing that everything has an intelligible structure that human reason     can apprehend, and that everything is knowable through this underlying structure (Lavine 209). Edmund Husserl (1900/ 1901) proceeds from Hegel’s effort to delineate the structure of first-person experience (Thomson 197), establishing phenomenology as a philosophical movement. Phenomenology is, literally, the study of ‘phenomena,’ or, more specifically, the study of the appearance of things, or how things manifest themselves in our experience (rather than what), as experienced from the first-person perspective. Phenomenology studies how consciousness is constituted in order to receive these phenomena (Smith, D.W, "Phenomenology").4 Husserl accepts the Cartesian premise of the thinking and knowing subject, and builds upon it, adding that it is only through one’s participation with the world that one becomes aware of and understands oneself. In other words, the subject’s consciousness is ‘intentional,’ that is, it is always directed towards something, or ‘about’ something, that is external to its own existence. These are the objects of our consciousness (Husserl 89). For Husserl, the body is the centre of experience, and determines how we encounter the material world, and thus an essential part of all knowing. However, while Husserl offers an alternative to mind-body dualism, the transcendental turn in his philosophy— ‘bracketing’ the question of whether the material world around us actually exists, and reflecting only on the structure of one’s own conscious experience—arguably reinforces an abstract conception of subjectivity that is independent of the world (Smith, D.W, "Phenomenology"). The idea of the self as separate from the rest of the world is an idea that is important to the humanist and liberal traditions. Both                                                                                                                 The term ‘phenomenology’ is first used by Hegel in his text Phenomenology of Mind (1807) originally titled “The Science of the Experience of Consciousness,” signaling a focus on the experience of first-personal awareness. But Husserl is the first philosopher to call himself a ‘phenomenologist,’ and is the founder of its philosophical movement, reinitiating Hegel’s effort to delineate the structure of first-person experience (Thomson 197).     humanism and liberalism are based on the assumption that the human being has dominion over the world around it, able to know and therefore to control it (Kate Soper 14-15)5. This has given rise to a notion of the individual as being separate from the wider community. A number of philosophers, working within the phenomenological tradition, later challenged this bracketing of the question of being, giving the phenomenological account an ontological rather than an epistemological interpretation. Notably, Martin Heidegger (1927), a student of Husserl, rejects the idea that the subject reflects on experience by bracketing the world, and asserts that the subject’s primordial experience is, rather, ‘being there’ in the world. Heidegger uses the term Dasein— literally ‘being there’ in German—to indicate a new conception of self that cannot be considered except as immersed in the world (West 109). Heidegger sees Dasein and the world as a unified phenomenon. We are first and foremost engaged with the material world, instead of spectators or knowers of the world, and so our objects function as a means of engaging rather than as things to be looked at or analysed. For Heidegger phenomenology is a matter of ‘fundamental ontology’ (Heidegger 34) Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) takes this concept of subjectivity further by specifically addressing the question of the body, asserting that consciousness is the embodied awareness of the primordial experience. Merleau-Ponty radically reassesses the Cartesian division between inner conscious experience and the external domain of objects, arguing that consciousness can only occur in the context of perception that is always already in bodily terms, and that, equally, consciousness or cognition of the                                                                                                                 This idea of human domination over nature has continued to be an ascendant belief, present in the Enlightenment faith in reason and in contemporary science’s projects of ‘social engineering’ (Kate Soper 14-15)     world pervades the body (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception 231). Merleau-Ponty explores bodies as knowing subjects always already entangled in a world of meaning, such that ‘the distinction between subject and object is blurred in [the] body’ (Merleau-Ponty “The Philosopher and His Shadow” 167.). Emmanuel Levinas (1961), who takes a phenomenological approach to ethics, affirms this unity between the self and the body, insisting that the body is not separate from the subject like an external object but in fact ‘closer and more familiar to us that the rest of the world, and controls our psychological life, our temperament, and our activities’ and so ‘all dualism between the self and the body must disappear’ (Levinas, “Reflections” 68). For Levinas, the subject is necessarily chained to materiality (he talks about history and other kinds of materiality, of which the body is the primary example), and interacts with the world around it and, by extension, with others. Levinas argues that this embodied experience of self ensures that the individual is situated in the broader context of concrete reality, and ethically binds the subject to the other (Levinas, Totality 230). The intersection between embodiment and subjectivity has also been explored considerably in feminist theory and gender theory. Theorists like Simone De Beauvoir (1949), Elisabeth Grosz (1994), and Rosi Braidotti (1994) draw from the above phenomenological theories of embodiment to put forward theories of feminism that stress the complex materiality of bodies that exist in relations of power, and which affirm women’s differences and specificities. Grosz, for instance, insists on ‘the irreducible specificity of women's bodies, the bodies of all women, independent of class, race and history’ and argues that biological materialities make sexed identities     possible, although female subjective experience varies with historical and social contexts (Grosz 207). Other feminist theorists draw on Michel Foucault’s post-structuralist understandings of subjectivity, which provide a different understanding of embodied subjectivity. Instead of examining the phenomenological experiences of embodied subjectivity (such as kinesthesis and empathy), Foucault considers how historical and social discourse shapes the body-subject. This can refer to the fact that we understand and experience our bodies by way of culturally constructed representations. It also refers to how our experience is shaped materially, through social norms and practices (Oksala 119-120). Foucault introduces the concept of biopower to describe how the social regulation and manipulation of bodies produces historically specific types of subjectivity within that body (Foucault, History of Sexuality 139). Biopower inscribes the limits of normal and culturally intelligible experience, producing a hegemonic discursive order. This discursive order influences non-discursive practices and creates material changes. Social control occurs at the level of material bodies and so subjectivity is materially constituted, implying that there is no separation between body and subject (Foucault, Power 97). Following Foucault, feminist theorists such as Joan Scott (1988) and Judith Butler (1990, 1993) argue that women’s experiences are always already discursively constituted and that appealing to an ‘authentic’ female experience that exceeds discourse only serves to reify an image of femininity that has oppressed women by binding women to nature. Judith Butler instead understands gender as a ‘relation among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts’ (Butler, Gender Trouble   10   Ettorre, Elizabeth. “Reproductive Genetics, Gender and the Body: ‘Please Doctor, may I have a Normal Baby?’” Sociology. 34.3(2000): 403-420. Web. 17 July 2013. 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Web. 26 Oct 2013.   312   [...]... troubling (or perhaps disintegration) of the distinctions between ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ ‘organic’ and ‘non-organic.’ It is perhaps not surprising then that today, with the proliferation of prosthetic technology and the broadening of the types of prosthetic interventions that can occur, that we are experiencing an increasing sense of inner fragmentation Any assumptions of a self- governing, ‘natural’ self. .. displacement, and the simultaneous outward and inward movements that constitute this displacement; rupture in the (unified) human being resulting from this displacement; the paradoxical extension and making absent of the human; and the transference between two unlike bodies, the human being and the technological other, this   17   transference having corporeal impact What arises from these processes is the. .. the capabilities of inhabiting and conquering outer space, reflecting the space race of   23   that era that culminated in the Apollo landing on the moon in 1969, the ‘apotheosis of Golden Age SF dreams’ (Luckhurst, Science Fiction 143) A grand narrative of science is delivered with the cyborg, and it is one that has been sustained in many recent and popular images of the cyborg, namely, that by incorporating... in 1553 to indicate, in the rhetorical sense, the addition of a syllable to the beginning of a word’ (“Prosthesis”) David Wills writes that the idea of disruption in relation to ‘prosthesis’ only appeared with the advent of print technology and the ‘technologization of knowledge’ when the continuity of the word was perceived to be broken (222)7 The word ‘prosthesis’ was subsequently adopted into the. .. 114) In this sense Heidegger maintains the ontological distinction between humans and non -human technological entities, the former being active and the latter, passive   12   Speculative fiction is a powerful form of cultural expression that brings into focus our relationship with technology, and can, in its unique ways, provide us with important insights into issues of prostheticization One of the. .. technologies that find their way ‘under our skin’ and ‘inside our minds’ (xii-xiii) In Neuromancer, these intimate technologies allow characters to transcend the prison of their flesh Gibson’s novel has proven to be hugely influential, helping to thrust cyberpunk into the foreground of SF, and changing the field significantly With Neuromancer, tropes such as the computer cowboy and brain-altering prosthetics... values and norms These writers ask questions about the nature of technology s autonomy, and the extent to which technology influences economic, political and social structures They understand that prostheticity is not about simple replacement or substitution, and they focus, instead, on the simultaneous, bi-directional, interconstitutive transference between human beings and technology These contemporary. .. irrecoverable, and often painful, loss of an ‘original,’ elusive human experience of the world Second, the prosthesis dramatizes the paradoxical co-occurrence of increased rationality and the repetition and proliferation of violence in a highly technological postindustrial world The prosthesis represents the desire to liberate the self through technoscience and rational means However, in these texts the authority... Looking at SF from the 1980s, we can see that these changes have been registered and explored by SF writers through their depictions of prosthetics While the prosthesis of earlier texts tended towards the external and the expansive (from remarkable new limbs and augmented strength and speed, to expanded human capacity and the conquest of outer space), the prosthetics of postindustrial SF focus inwards,... life, and the prosthesis becomes ‘integral to the subject’s sense of identity or self (Fisher 26) The reciprocal shaping of human and prosthesis implies that the distinctions between subject and object become obscured The boundaries of the subject are porous Prostheticization can therefore be defined as a technological intervention (rather than simply an object) characterized by the following essential . on experience by bracketing the world, and asserts that the subject’s primordial experience is, rather, ‘being there’ in the world. Heidegger uses the term Dasein— literally ‘being there’ in. opening or rupture into which the technology may enter. I am interested in this double movement of prostheticization, the simultaneous exteriorization of the human and interiorizing of technology, . prosthetic technology and the broadening of the types of prosthetic interventions that can occur, that we are experiencing an increasing sense of inner fragmentation. Any assumptions of a self- governing,