The prosthetic self technology and human experience in contemporary speculative fiction

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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)
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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
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1
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.’
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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,
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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
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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 technologies
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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
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I use the phrase ‘new technology’ to refer to recent advancements in information and communication
technologies, biotechnology, genetic engineering, nanotechnologies, and other digital technologies.
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her place in the world. This new subjectivity
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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, self-
contained, interior essence that is independent of its body and of the objects around it
in the world.

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‘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).
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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
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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").
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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
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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).
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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)
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. 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

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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)
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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
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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
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15) and suggests that there is ‘no gender identity behind the expressions of gender…
identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its
results’ (25). That is to say, gender is constructed through one’s repetitive
performance of gender. She argues that these performances affect the person in
corporeal ways such that even biological sex is not a ‘bodily given on which the
construct of gender is artificially imposed, but… a cultural norm which governs the
materialization of bodies’ an ‘ideal construct forcibly materialized through time’
(Butler, Bodies 2-3) and that there is no distinction between the material and
discursive body.

We can see that from Heidegger onwards (Heidegger’s work is a huge influence on
later views about subjectivity [Mansfield, 22]), there is a pervasive recognition that
the Enlightenment model of self, the understanding that we live in world that is
separate from us, is inadequate. This recognition is more acute today when our
entanglement with technology has become a defining issue. Today, it seems more
than ever, technology is remapping the limits of the human being. Not only are
technologies reshaping our ‘external’ bodies, but they are also transforming what is
‘inside’ (how we remember, how we perceive the world, our ethnic and sexual
identities for instance) such that the boundaries between inside and outside, mind and
body are completely dissolved.

The writers of my chosen texts recognize that human identity and subjectivity are
always in question when we consider technology. They examine how technologies
that have emerged in recent years—from genetic engineering to human enhancement
technologies to various cybernetic and information-communication technologies—
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impact not just our bodies but the way we receive the world, our consciousness of
things, and therefore our subjectivities. These writers offer models of subjectivity that
are constituted by the interplay between mind, body and the external world, and

reflect on the various ways technology has become embodied by users, extensions of
the human body. They highlight an emerging understanding that technology is not
simply passive, an understanding held by Heidegger (1977),
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but rather, it possesses a
kind of ‘intentionality’ or agency, as suggested by some of the later philosophers, a
quality previously only accorded to the human being. As such, technologies can
mediate or interact with our consciousness of the world, and even interpret the world
for us. More than this, these writers assert an ontological shift: the human being and
technology (in the broadest sense of the word, including technical objects as well as
artificial, discursive entities) are co-constitutive to the extent that various aspects of
the ‘human’ and the ‘technological’ are displaced or replaced by the other within a
framework of interaction, feedback and production. This is a view of subjectivity in
which the human being is re-conceptualized as de-centred, heterogeneous,
simultaneously dependent and autonomous, and whose understanding of self is
continuously shifting. The writers use the SF trope of prosthesis to explore how
different aspects of human experience (embodiment, memory and our relationships
with others) are transformed by this interplay, and thus can be seen as engaging with a
range of theories of subjectivity and embodiment, as I will demonstrate.
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Heidegger draws attention to how technology constricts our experience of things, and transforms how
we see nature and other human. This technological ‘enframing’ (Ge-stell) reveals the world as only raw
material for technical operations, what Heidegger describes as a ‘standing-reserve.’ This denies man
from ‘enter[ing] into a more original revealing…to experience the call of a more primal truth,’
ultimately reducing the human being (Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology 28). However, for
Heidegger technological domination is still the imposition of human domination through technology, a
‘technological exercise of his will’ (Heidegger, Poetry Language and Thought 114). In this sense
Heidegger maintains the ontological distinction between humans and non-human technological entities,
the former being active and the latter, passive.

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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 defining characteristics of SF is its
fundamental attentiveness to how technology transforms societies and everyday lives.
SF writings reflect the hopes and anxieties about technology that permeate modern
societies. Examining a diverse range of depictions of prostheticization in a selection
of contemporary SF texts, I aim to throw light on some of these hopes and anxieties
felt in the present phase of this postindustrial era. These fictions have been chosen for
their sustained engagement with the issues surrounding the various ways being
‘human’ is modified by the range of phenomena constituted under the broad idea of
prostheticization. They were selected specifically because their prosthetic objects and
processes are what Darko Suvin calls nova, which means ‘new things’ or fictional
innovations that diverge from ‘reality,’ and not simply mimetic reproductions of
reality. These nova (the singular is novum), crucial to all SF, are often plausible
projections of present trends, or invented impossibilities rationalized into the world of
the text, and often a combination of both (Suvin, Metamorphoses 63-84). These
divergences estrange the reader from reality, and by working through the
discontinuities between the fictional world and his or her reality, the reader gains
fresh insights about the world (I comment more on this in chapter two). In analysing
these prosthetic nova, my focus will be on drawing out the historical-logical, ethical
and symbolic meanings suggested by the discontinuities so as to come to new
understandings about our present technological existence.

Defining ‘prosthesis’
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A discussion of what ‘prosthesis’ entails is crucial at this point as it helps to draw out
these complex issues of human-technological convergence. Defining ‘prosthesis’ is a
task complicated by the fact that our understanding of this phenomenon continues to
evolve. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the etymology of the word
‘prosthesis’ is rooted in the idea of ‘addition,’ and was first introduced into the
English language 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)
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. The word ‘prosthesis’ was subsequently adopted into
the medical vernacular, appearing in the French language in 1695, and then in English
in 1704, and first published in John Kersey’s revision of Phillip’s Dictionary, which
ascribed to it the idea of the ‘replacement of a missing part of the body with an
artificial one’ (Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, as qtd in Wills 218). This idea is
itself based on a ‘mechanical conception of the body that was to be systematised by
Descartes in the next century’ (Tajiri 10). The OED also notes that it was in 1900 that
the more general idea of ‘artificial replacement for a part of the body’ came into use
in medical contexts (“Prosthesis”). Once again, I want to highlight the doubled nature
of the prosthesis. From these definitions we can see that ‘prosthesis’ simultaneously
indicates an addition to the original as well as an ‘absence’ in the ‘original.’ The
prosthetic leg, for example, is an addition to a leg-less body, it augments the body in a
way that it increases or restores mobility. Yet as a substitute, it replaces what has been
lost. It indicates an absence in the body while at the same time compensating for it.
The same goes for other prosthetic enhancements that do not compensate for
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David Wills explains that this is the moment when ‘the human hand is superseded by the machine in
the service of truth’ raising questions about authenticity, transcription and translation (221).

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impairment, such as the cyborg implants of performance artist Stelarc,
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endowing one
with additional capacities not originally present in the human body. These two
examples fit into a conventional understanding of prosthesis, in that they concur with
a medical model focused on the literal replacements of parts of the physical body with
artificial devices that attach permanently, or for a substantial period, to the body.
However, what constitutes literal replacement continues to change as medical science
today continues to find new facets of the human being to intervene upon. With the
advent of genetic and nano-technologies, artificial substitution takes place at the
molecular level, involving processes that we cannot see nor are we likely to
completely understand. Moreover, it is argued that other technologies, such as
computers and data networks and even simpler tools like walking sticks and
eyeglasses, also fundamentally transform the body in similar ways, without perpetual
physical attachment to the body. I describe these tools as virtual prosthetics. These
items are the subject of more contentious claims about prostheticization, which have
come up against criticisms about the overly figural and thus watered-down use of the
word ‘prosthesis’ in cultural discourse (see Jain, 1999; Sobchack, 2006, for example).
However, there are assertions that these technologies do actually physically alter the
body even though these changes aren’t so easily measured or seen (see Carr 2010, for
example).

In order to produce a definition that accommodates our still-evolving understanding
of ‘prosthesis’ it is necessary to distil the essential processes of ‘prosthesis.’ To do
this I look to conventional medical prostheses, devices that physically replace parts of
the body, in order to illustrate the basic workings of the prosthetic device. I will state
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The Cypriot-Australian performance artist, Stelarc, has amplified his body with various prosthetics
such as a third hand, a prosthetic head, and an extra ear on his arm, in order to explore alternative and
involuntary interfaces with technology (Lustig).
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here that one criterion for text selection is that representations of prostheticization
involve actual corporeal transformations occurring as a result of technological
substitution, no matter how much or how little these technological substitutions
resemble what is conventionally recognized as prosthesis. This restriction prevents the
potential dilution of ideas that might come with selecting texts based on too loose a
definition of ‘prosthesis,’ yet also accommodates the elasticity of the concept, as well
as the creative re-imagining of ‘prosthesis’ in emergent SF. It is therefore important to
note that the circumstances and discussions surrounding virtual prostheticization are
very relevant to my discussion, and I will later argue that SF writing is a non-mimetic
mode that often re-imagines these virtual prosthetic relationships as actual bodily
prosthetic supplementation. I will elaborate on this in the next chapter.

The prosthetic limb is a fascinating object with critics commenting on its ‘semiotic
ambiguity’ (Cartwright and Goldfarb 149). If we look at the prosthetic leg, for
example, we understand that it is an object of mass production, modelled upon an
‘average’ that materializes and perpetuates a certain ‘norm,’ forcing the subject to
adapt to it (Jain 42-43). The subject must change the way he walks, which, in the
process, alters the way he functions physically and the way his muscles develop and
body aligns. At the same time, the pain and discomfort felt may be accommodated,
normalized, and over time the subject may begin to see his prosthesis as not just an
external object, but as subject. Interestingly, amputees testify that their artificial
prostheses are ‘animated’ by the ‘phantom limbs’ they replace, and envisage their
prosthesis as both ‘subject’ and ‘object’ (Fisher 31-32). We can see how the
prosthesis involves simultaneous outward and inward movements, which I
highlighted earlier.

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On the one hand, there is the exteriorization of human ability, because a once-
biological function is now performed by an external, non-organic technology. There is
also an internal transformation of the human body that takes place as a result of this—
one might say the body interiorizes the technological replacement. This is because the
body goes through a process of adaptation and assimilation, both physical and
psychological, through which the technology becomes an essential part of the body’s
functioning.

The prosthesis, perceived as taking on qualities of the human subject,
can also be seen as adapting to the body. Added to this is the fact that the prosthesis is
an object that is shaped within a specific cultural context that imbues it with
properties or principles particular to that context. Subjectivity then becomes
enmeshed with the principles embedded in the prosthesis, whether this is a particular
standard of beauty, a lifestyle ethos, or even a concept of human evolution (I will
discuss this again, in greater detail, in chapter two). As the individual shapes his body
in accordance to these ideological codes, he alters his experience of 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 processes: 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
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transference having corporeal impact. What arises from these processes is the
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 are giving way to
an understanding that, at least in theoretical terms, the human subject can be shaped
by or reconstituted by the union with prosthetic technologies. The self is recognized
as existing in a ‘ghostly space,’ a state that acknowledges that ‘the whole never was
anywhere… because the parts were always already detachable, replaceable’ (Wills 12,
15). The ‘integrated, fused, reciprocal and parasitic’ relationship we have with our
prosthesis (Smith and Morra, “Introduction” 5) paradoxically implies that we are as
much free agents as we are functionaries of the medium, constituted by ‘both [its]
physical and the auratic properties’ (Jain 32), dismantling any presumptions of unique
interiority and individual agency.
9
Our prosthetic relationships with our tools leads
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9
Jacques Derrida’s idea of the supplément serves as a natural analogue to “prosthesis.” Writers David
Wills (1995), Will Fisher (2006) and Yoshiki Tajiri (2007) have all called upon the Derridean
supplément to explain the workings of the material prosthesis. Referencing Derrida’s Monolingualism
of the Other; or the Prosthesis of Origin (1996), Tajiri notes that Derrida himself uses the word
‘prosthesis’ to indicate the supplément, here, the linguistic ‘supplement of origin’ necessitated by the
origin’s ‘constitutive lack’ (7). According to Derrida, a supplément is conventionally understood to be
an auxiliary to what is ‘original.’ It is thus thought to be non-essential and only adding to what was
originally present. Writing in the context of language and in response to the logocentrism of Western
thought, Derrida argued that writing is often considered the non-required external supplément to the
presence of speech. Logocentrism, noted by Derrida to regulate language and philosophy (Powell 33),

asserts that speech is the true conduit of thought (the signified), and that writing, as representation of
speech, is merely a signifier of another signifier. Speech is therefore considered to be ‘presence’ while
writing is considered as if it were the ‘absence’ of the original utterance as speech. However, Derrida
explains that despite its status as mere ancillary, the supplément functions in a thorough and ambiguous
way. On the one hand, it extends the natural. Yet in doing this it also indicates that the original is
lacking. Derrida writes that the supplément ‘adds only to replace… its place is assigned in the structure
by the mark of an emptiness’ (Of Grammatology 145). While writing is considered mere derivative, a
substitute for speech that draws meaning from speech, without writing thought cannot be expressed or
made known. In addition to this, writing is capable of influencing thought in a way that replaces or
displaces the sovereignty of the original idea. This implies that the supplément is necessary, and that
meaning is contingent on the supplément, which upsets the implicit hierarchy in the subject/ object
opposition that prevails in Western thought.

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not only to questions about identity and subjectivity, but also to questions about the
soundness of an evolutionary model built on a basically unchallenged notion of
modernity. In the next section, I argue that SF is an important way of discussing these
complex encounters with increasingly intimate technology.

Speculative fiction and the prosthesis: the evolution of an SF icon
SF is a genre centrally concerned with the impact of scientific theory and
technological practice upon the social and the individual dimensions of human
experience, and it is an important discourse that directly participates in contemporary
cultural discussions about the impact of technology. In his recent book, The Seven
Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. considers SF, and science-
fictionality, to be characterised by ‘a pair of gaps.’ The first lies between ‘the
conceivability of [imagined] future transformations’ and ‘the possibility of their
actualization,’ and the second lies between ‘the immanent possibility… of those
transformations’ and ‘reflection about their possible ethical, social, and spiritual

consequences.’ These gaps are the ‘black box in which technoscientific conceptions…
are transformed into the rational recognition of their possible realization and
implications’ (3). In this way contemporary concerns about the impact of science and
technology on society can be played out on an imaginary platform, in alternative or
fantastic spaces that are governed by the logic of cause-and-effect and a common
understanding of the material world. As I have mentioned, this makes SF distinct
from other forms of the fantastic, as it is rooted in empirical reality, adhering for the
most part to the limits of realistic writing, and commenting on the actual conditions of
the time in which it is written.

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The prosthesis as a speculative construction is an established SF icon,
10
appearing at
the time of the genre’s emergence and recurring as the genre has developed. It is
recognized, at the most basic level, as a symbol of how scientific and technological
advancement is changing the human being. Over the years, and in different contexts,
the different nuances SF writers ascribe to this icon reflect the changing attitudes
towards secular progress and human-technological interaction. In order to assess the
distinct qualities of contemporary visions of SF prosthetics, it is useful to look at older
iterations of the icon. A brief survey of science-fictional prosthetics over the years
will help to establish a sense of how this icon has evolved over time.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) has been considered
by some critics as SF’s ur-text, the ‘first real science fiction novel’ (Aldiss 12). It is a
novel that presents readers with early concerns regarding the impact of technology
and science on humanity. Frankenstein was written on the cusp of the industrial
revolution, reflecting scientific inquiry that had settled its gaze on the human body,
regarding it as a machine, to be disassembled and reassembled. The monster is a

striking image of life reconstructed from various materials, including limbs taken
from cadavers, given life by a scientist using recently developed electric technology.
That the monster is a grotesque assemblage of prosthetic limbs indicates a deep fear
and remorse about the human transgression of the boundary between humanity and
divinity, the perceived heinousness of which is projected onto the created monster.
However, the monster is also a complex being, strikingly eloquent and sympathetic,
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10
Critic Gary K. Wolfe first used the term SF ‘icon’ in his book The Known and the Unknown: The
Iconography of Science Fiction (1979), in which he argued that certain recurrent icons (he focuses on
the robot, the alien, the spaceship, the city and the wasteland) are the most dependable gauge of a text’s
affiliation to the SF genre.



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thereby complicating the question of what it means for a human to give life to its
creation. The prosthetic monster in Shelley’s tale can be seen as a means through
which the disastrous implications of unbridled scientific and technological
advancement, and the fine line between progress and destruction can be explored.
Although the novel does not strictly deal with artificial prosthetic devices, the
constructedness of the human-like monster provides a paradigm for exploring
questions of subjectivity and identity as they appertain to scientific invention and the
blurring of boundary between ‘human’ and ‘machine,’ associated with prosthetics.

A short time later, American writer Edgar Allan Poe published a short story called
The Man That Was Used Up (1839). Poe presents readers with a satire, which centres
on a General with a reputation of exceeding physical perfection, who is also regarded
as having a strange ‘rectangular precision,’ an odd and unsavoury characteristic that

isolates him from the rest of society. At the end of the tale the narrator discovers the
disconcerting fact that the General’s body, severely damaged in war, has essentially
been replaced by numerous prostheses. Without the guise of his devices the General is
revealed as a travesty, with no natural form or autonomy, a mere ‘bundle’ with a
‘funn[y] little voice.’ He is, literally, a man replaced by technology, and it is a process
that has depersonalized him. The context of Poe’s story is a ‘wonderfully inventive
age,’ reflecting the considerable technological entrepreneurship occurring in America
at that time. Poe speculates on the intrusion of mechanical invention into private
spaces through the figure of a man whose body has been replaced with artificial parts.
His loss of identity and autonomy is concealed by the mask of technological majesty,
revealing anxieties about the effacement of humanity in this ‘rapid march of
mechanical invention.’ Along with Shelley’s text, Poe’s story exemplifies how earlier
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writers, influenced by Romanticism and its concern with man’s self-destructiveness,
use speculative representations of prosthetics to create frightening visions of
technology (see Willis 106-108).

These frightening visions can be contrasted to the more clearly optimistic
representations found in modern SF texts published in the early half of the twentieth
century, particularly those written during the Golden Age of SF in America. These
Golden Age conceptions share a distinct tendency: they celebrate the incredible
augmentation of natural human ability through technological innovation. The
Clockwork Man (1923), by E.V. Odle, is a good example of this. Odle’s tale explores
the power and potential of technology-aided human evolution. At the centre of the
tale is a man with a mechanical device implanted into his head, which enables him to
move through time and space with enhanced speed and strength. The text was written
during a time of enormous expansion in technology, when existing systems (like
railroads and telegraph systems) extended their reach and crucial new systems (such
as electric networks) emerged. Not only does the text manifest the radical shifts in the

perception of time and space that occurred with these technological developments, it
also demonstrates a mapping of human evolution onto technoscientific progress. The
text reflects a discourse of civilization and history that is built upon progressive,
technologized modernity, a riposte to pronouncements of mechanical dehumanization.
The prosthesis signals how the merging of man and machine can move man beyond
his biological limits. Examples of other texts that adopt similar ideas are L.A.
Eshbach's "The Time Conqueror" (1932) and C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born”
(1944). While these texts do question technology’s threat to human identity and
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autonomy, on the whole the vision of technology-aided evolution is presented
favourably.

In the later half of the twentieth century, the theme of improving or enhancing the
body through technology continues in Anglo-American SF. Anne McCaffrey’s The
Ship Who Sang (1961), for instance, depicts severely handicapped children who are
enabled and empowered through prostheticization. Martin Caidin’s Cyborg (1972),
the inspiration for television’s very popular The Six Million Dollar Man (1974-1978),
similarly offers the reconstruction of a shattered body through the substitution of
mechanical limbs that magnificently augment ability. These visions are reflective of
the discourses surrounding technology during this time, which include Marshall
McLuhan’s conception of technologies as ‘extensions of man’ that open mankind up
to ‘ecstatic new experiences, but also to as well as to traumatic invasion’ (Luckhurst,
Science Fiction 142). The name of Caidin’s novel alerts us to a new idea that emerges
in SF in the 1960s: the conquest of outer space. Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S.
Kline officially coined the word ‘cyborg’ in 1960 to describe how man may be
‘amalgamated with machine’ so as to ‘survive the adverse conditions of space travel’
(Cornea 276). The word reveals a mechanistic view of the human founded on Norbert
Weiner’s (1948) discipline of cybernetics, which regards all animals, machines and
human beings in like manner, as ‘information processors’ (Hayles, as qtd in Cornea

276). Cyborg reiterates and develops these principles, illustrating the rationalized
understanding of embodiment that underlies dreams of human-technological co-
evolution. Science-fictional prosthetics, such as those in Frederik Pohl's Man Plus
(1976) and Barrington J. Bayley's The Garments of Caean (1976), provide men with
the capabilities of inhabiting and conquering outer space, reflecting the space race of
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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 technology
man will be able command the universe.

This very brief look at notable examples of the SF prosthesis, from the early twentieth
century to the 1970s, is by no means exhaustive. However, we can surmise that the
shape of SF prosthetics, and the kinds of responses these representations evoke from
readers, are influenced by changes in society and developments in techno-scientific
thought, registering the evolution of human subjectivity in a continually changing,
technologically-permeated modern society. They are objects that reveal the concerns
of their specific historical moment. They are marked by history but also act to change
history by diagnosing present technological practices, warning readers about the
possible ramifications, and mapping alternative futures. If I were to generalize, I
would say that by and large, in the mainstream modern works of SF listed above, the
conception of technology is neutral: technology can help alleviate hardship and
prolong life, but its misapplication, which originates in human weakness, can cause
harm and oppress people. In other words, technology is perceived as not inherently
‘bad’ or ‘good’ but used to these ends by human beings.

This dissertation seeks to establish the concerns of SF writers of this present historical
moment and to assess if the prevailing attitudes towards technology today are distinct

from earlier eras. In The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science
Fiction (1979), Gary K. Wolfe argues that SF iconography evolves in meaning over
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time, returning to familiar icons in order to renew or deconstruct them. They provide
the writer with ‘a structural pivot’ that allows a response to central philosophical
positions inherent in SF, including the principal idea (pertinent to the period of
Wolfe’s study) that ‘problems can be overcome by the rational application of science
and technology’ (Samuelson).

The present moment can be described as the age of ‘artificial immanence,’ in which
‘every value that previous cultures considered transcendental or naturally given is at
least theoretically capable of artificial replication or simulation’ (Csicsey-Ronay, Jr.,
“SF of Theory”). We have entered the postindustrial phase (estimated to have begun
around 1980 and continuing to the present), which has been marked by major socio-
economic and technological shifts. Firstly, there have been considerable
advancements in technology. The development of ‘intellectual technology,’ or
technology based upon mathematics and linguistics, and which uses ‘algorithms…
programming… models and simulations’ (D. Bell 116-117), denotes a clear
movement away from mechanical-industrial contexts. In this era, the computer has
become the new dominant technology. The computer, along with other information
and communication technologies, has profoundly transformed the way we work and
communicate with each other, with virtual interactions taking the place of physical
encounters. There is an acute sense that our technologies have become dematerialized,
a feeling reinforced by the biotechnological advancements made in this era. Medical
interventions now occur at the level of the gene, invisible to us, and thoroughly
transform possibilities for our well-being. These developments have radically
broadened the scope of what we can consider to be prosthetic intervention. Jean
Baudrillard (1994) has argued that the gene is ‘the prosthesis par excellence’ because