This essay won prizes in both the Eve Festival and After Festival of Rags Drum 2020, organized by Lab on Roof.
I. Introduction
Prey takes place in an alternate history of the near future. In this timeline, humanity discovers and makes contact with an extraterrestrial life-form from space, the Typhon. The space station Kletka is built alongside research into the Typhon. After the station and its research rights change hands several times, TranStar Industries purchases and privatizes it in 2025. TranStar then takes over Typhon research, rebuilding Kletka and renaming it Talos I in 2030. With that, the story’s setting is largely in place.
The protagonist, Morgan Yu, is a child of TranStar founders Catherine and William Yu. Morgan naturally joins the company in 2027 and begins research on an experimental device called the Neuromod. Transferred to Talos I in 2032, Morgan volunteers over the next three years to serve as the Neuromod’s principal clinical-test subject. This technology plays a crucial part in the construction of Prey’s world. How does Prey use the representation of an imaginary technology to construct and articulate a posthuman subject? That is where this essay begins.
II. The Neuromod’s Posthuman Technological Prototypes
The Neuromod—short for Neural Modifier—is a gun-shaped injector. It consists of an emitter aimed at the center of the eye and two long needles trained on its edge; when used, the needles seem to enter along the eye socket. Serum injected through them reaches the optic nerve (or visual cortex), triggering a reconfiguration of the brain. In the process, the Neuromod generates a “map” of the user’s brain, compares it with a stored synaptic pattern, and infers the changes required to produce a match. The initial sampling creates a scan of a brain possessing the desired knowledge or mastery of the desired skill; later use partly reconstructs the user’s brain to match the stored pattern.[1]
Because this technology can capture and reshape the structure of the human brain, knowledge and skill cease to be unquantifiable abstractions and become concrete, datafied, accessible entities. The game offers a simple example: a Neuromod created by scanning a pianist gives its user all the pianist’s skill, as though they had always known how to play. Information can even be collected from people whose physical condition no longer permits them to act—for instance, the critically ill or people disabled by injury. A brain scan and Neuromod built under those conditions allow their knowledge and skills to endure and develop.
Disassembled as a technology, the Neuromod proves to be a composite built on prototypes of existing posthuman technologies. Its existence concentrates the ethical questions those technologies raise. It grants Morgan a longer life, a stronger body, and specialized combat skills. This enhancement of the human body through neural modification and reconstruction is unmistakably an emblem of real-world genetic engineering. Their most conspicuous common feature is that both may be understood as transhumanist-tinged violations and usurpations of the “natural order.”[2] This outlook descends from Darwinism’s challenge to Aristotle’s eternity of species. Yet Darwin denied that evolution possessed a guiding force: everything was the abrupt and provisional product of random processes. Abstracted, that randomness becomes a kind of “natural order,” and genetic engineering, as artificial intervention in natural contingency, becomes an act that violates it. At a deeper level, the central issue in disputes over natural order is the struggle over who holds humanity’s power to “choose evolution.” Here, “natural order” becomes a boundary limiting the extent of human “self-transcendence.” The effects of genetic engineering on the body reach far beyond the progressive significance traditionally assigned to technology. They pose a series of political and philosophical questions to be developed below.
In its depiction of side effects, the Neuromod also suggests another technology: neuropharmacology. The removal procedures performed on Morgan cause unavoidable memory confusion and partial loss, while repeated Neuromod use profoundly affects Morgan’s personality. These effects closely resemble specific adverse effects of real neuropharmacology: unexplained convulsions, amnesia, suicide, violence, and brain injury. Beyond side effects, the Neuromod’s instantaneous yet limited action and the political and affective consequences projected through alterations to the material body also connect it to neuropharmacology. In constructing self-worth, both drugs and Neuromods offer a similar shortcut. Such a route raises not only the same problem of “cosmetic pharmacology” found in genetic engineering,[3] but also a comparable threat to subjectivity.
This analysis shows that suspending the discussion at the level of technology itself yields no affirmative answer; it only raises further questions. An account of how the posthuman body is constructed and represented must therefore go further and seek more theoretical assistance.
III. Dividing and Constructing the Body
Inquiry into the body is hardly rare. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, it has grown into a broad interdisciplinary field encompassing the body and culture, the body and sexuality, the body and power, and much else. Extending into the philosophy of technology, this inquiry turns its attention to the relation between bodies and technologies.
In Bodies in Technology,[4] Don Ihde distinguishes two “bodies,” which he calls “body one” and “body two.” Body one is the Merleau-Pontian phenomenological body: an active, perceptual, affective being-in-the-world. It is the phenomenological body, the ground of our fleshly existence—“first-person” and “active.” Body two is the Foucauldian body of postmodern discourse, constructed by society and culture; its materiality is obscured by psychological, political, and cultural inscriptions and reconstructions imposed upon it. This body is “third-person” and “passive.” Running through body one and body two is a “third dimension,” the technological dimension, which completes the first two.
Prey makes ingenious use of this deconstruction of the body through the technology of the Neuromod. As the plot unfolds, multiple bodies emerge one by one and accumulate upon the preceding image; together they constitute the fundamental elements of Morgan. At the opening of the game, Morgan is placed in a series of test environments and asked to perform simple actions. At this moment, Morgan remains in the “blank state” of amnesia following the last removal and has undergone no further Neuromod procedure. Tasks can therefore be completed only through the basic, worldly body. Pressing a button requires Morgan’s “real” body to advance, stop before the console, raise an arm, and press it. The materiality and agency of movement are inescapable in this test, mobilizing body one within the tripartite deconstruction. In another test, crouching behind a chair prompts a researcher to exclaim, “She’s really hiding behind the chair.” The astonished remark implies that the test is not meant simply to mobilize body one; it cuts that body out of the field of discussion and brackets it. This foreshadows the many valences of the bodily sign that the game will reveal in turn.
Body two first appears soon after the opening and generally persists throughout the game, all the way to its end. Its signs are dispersed and multidimensional, but most concentrated in the Operators January and December. During the Neuromod experiments, TranStar researchers exploit the memory loss described above, trapping Morgan in a loop of the same day to conduct controlled trials of different Neuromod models. Morgan gradually becomes aware of the situation and takes measures to resist. January and December are Operators secretly built during this period. They serve principally as backups of Morgan’s memory, helping Morgan escape the existing semicoercive and inhumane experiment and ultimately put an end to the problems that have arisen in Typhon research.
The game never clearly depicts how January and December were constructed. Judging by the result, however, these Operators inherited not only the memories Morgan had when each was made but, to some degree, a similar personality. One possible explanation is that their decision trees were built from the memory-scanning component of Neuromod technology, so that their behavior can be read as the response that Morgan at that moment would have made to the present situation. Each such Operator is necessarily bound to the moment in which it was made. Faced with the same circumstances, January and December assume radically different moral positions and methods; at one point January even kills December to ensure the completion of January’s own plan. Morgan, appearing in the form of these Operators, is sliced out of a complete timeline and marked by conspicuous discontinuity. These figures constitute a body shaped by the peculiar field surrounding Morgan. Combining a second-person character with passivity, they perfectly embody body two. Other forms of body two are likewise scattered across Talos I: Morgan’s old voice recordings, emails and documents, and exchanges with survivors. Objectified by a delayed and disembodied observer, this is Ihde’s “virtual body.” Within it, fractured “experience” becomes the principal site for the construction of a new subjectivity.
IV. Disembodiment, Embodiment, and “Body Three”
What Ihde’s division of the body explores is how technology and sociocultural factors affect embodiment and disembodiment. In David R. Koukal’s reading, Ihde is really distinguishing an “embodied phenomenology” from a “disembodied phenomenology.”[5] Embodied phenomenology asks how technology modifies or enhances the body’s perceptual capacities. Disembodied phenomenology asks how technology “scripts” and thereby objectifies the body. Ihde writes: “Embodied and disembodied phenomenologies analyze the ways in which we experience becoming a body or a virtual body. What I have tried to show is that these two experiences differ, and that their difference manifests in distinct ways within a lifeworld woven through with technologies.”
This opposition of embodiment and disembodiment is expressed chiefly through the relation between body one and body two. As Ihde puts it: “The acting here-body supplies my body’s central norm. It is the real-life body, unlike the more passive, peripheral virtual bodies that enable quasi-disembodied points of view.” For Ihde, a technology becomes embodied when it acts upon the body to transform or enhance perception. It becomes disembodying when it objectifies, marginalizes, and turns the body into an image. This analytic method is often applied to the virtual–real body problem of cyberspace, yet it cannot accommodate every case raised by the problem of technology and the body. Critics argue that its binary decomposition merely transforms and patches the Cartesian subject–object structure without escaping it. In response, Melissa Clarke recasts Ihde’s “third dimension” as “body three,” the technological body: “Body three is interactive with technology, and thereby both constitutes and is constituted.”[6]
Body three truly breaks with a one-dimensional interpretation of the body. Andrew Feenberg also proposes an “extended body,” which “acts through a technical mediation” and “signifies itself through that mediation.”[7] This signifying extension more closely fits the ontological features of posthuman existence. As N. Katherine Hayles writes in How We Became Posthuman, the posthuman view treats “the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate”; extending or replacing it by other prosthetic means continues a process that began before we were born.[8]
In Prey, body three is presented precisely through the agency of body one and body two. To see this, Morgan must return to the testing environment discussed under body one. An email explains that Morgan once used powers acquired through Neuromods to pass the entire sequence perfectly. After acquiring the corresponding Neuromod upgrades, Morgan can return to that space, repeat the tests, and try to reproduce the feats described in the email. This arrangement guides the technologically informed Morgan to reverse-engineer the tests. For the same desired action, a body-one solution is rejected, while a solution using Neuromod abilities passes. The whole test finally comes together: it marks a division between the eras before and after body three. This body three, constituted through technology’s internalization and embodiment, appears elsewhere in the game as well. After Morgan learns too many Typhon abilities through Neuromods, Talos I’s automated security system identifies Morgan as a hostile target and attacks. Its criterion of judgment shifts from the human–nonhuman relation to a relation between low and high levels of Typhon technology. This change likewise symbolizes a shift from body-one to body-three orientation.
V. Constructing Morgan Yu
Analyses of conventional cyborg figures often place disembodiment at the center of signification after dividing the body. The divergence between virtual space and the material world generally culminates in giving concrete form to a transhumanist virtual existence. Body one, as physical existence, becomes merely something to be replaced by a more efficient machine or another virtual representation. The material body is demeaned as fetter, burden, and superfluous flesh, while virtual will attains immortality in cyberspace.
Yet Prey’s construction of Morgan Yu breaks precisely with this conventional claim. At the beginning of the game, Morgan as body one, without any a priori knowledge, is inserted into Talos I. The “original” virtual Morgan—or Morgans—as body two then begin to appear around the real Morgan. The course of the game is, in fact, an unceasing technological practice: Morgan acquires different abilities by installing different Neuromods, internalizes technology through interaction with the surrounding environment, and in turn expresses that internalization through the same interactions. Body three is gradually constructed in this process. Within this progressive and sequential construction, the split presentation of body one and body two shows that different bodies can exist in different spaces while undergoing the same reality and possessing independent subjectivities of their own. To some extent, this already dissolves the opposition between disembodiment and embodiment in bodily construction. The eventual construction of body three completes the blurring of boundaries and the dissolution of binary signs. Veronica Hollinger argues that such cybernetic human–machine couplings fundamentally decenter the human body and “the sacred icon of the essential self,” thereby thoroughly deconstructing the modern, humanist binary between body and technology.[9]
Morgan’s construction thus escapes the binary patterns of disembodiment–embodiment and phenomenal–cultural body. Just as Morgan’s figure suggests, the philosophy of technology may also need to approach the relation between body and technology from a broader, multidimensional perspective: the study of somatechnologies and body politics. Like the extended body discussed under body three, every technology implies the intentionality of a body using it. In Morgan’s construction, every technology appears through the learning of a Neuromod “skill”—a technē.[10] Viewing technology from the perspective of what is not itself a technical object can, paradoxically, make the internal co-constitution of technology and body more legible. The body can be understood as the site where all technologies arise and develop: it produces not only technologies within the body, or somatechnologies, but technologies that accompany the body, including external technical systems and artifacts. This perspective avoids both an either–or dualism and the narrowness of research confined to a particular technology, while offering new ways to reconsider both the relation between body and technology and the body itself.
References
- https://prey.fandom.com/wiki/Neuromod
- Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World (New York: Avon, 1998), 256–257.
- Armin Grunwald, ed., Handbuch Technikethik, 290–292.
- Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
- David R. Koukal, “Book Review: Bodies in Technology,” Technology and Culture 43, no. 4 (2002): 837–838.
- Melissa Clarke, “Philosophy and Technology Session on Bodies in Technology,” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 7, no. 2 (2003): 120–124.
- Andrew Feenberg, “Active and Passive Bodies: Comments on Don Ihde’s Bodies in Technology,” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 7, no. 2 (2003): 125–130.
- N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3.
- Veronica Hollinger, “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism,” Mosaic 23, no. 2 (1990): 29–44.
- Susanne Lettow, “Somatechnologies: Rethinking the Body in the Philosophy of Technology,” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 15, no. 2 (2011): 110–117.