I'd Rather Be a Sinner Than a Cyborg

I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg Lucy Tatman LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA ABSTRACT Upon which Christian theological metaphors and models is Donna Haraway’s understanding of ‘cyborg’ ontologically dependent, and how and why might it matter? This article explores the possibility that Haraway’s cyborg is a saviour-figure, made partially in the image of a transcendent God. It suggests that cyborgs do have an origin story, and that their story is inseparably linked to the theological development of Heilsgeschichte, or salvation history, which is itself linked, arguably, to the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution. Taking Haraway at her word, or at least her Christian theological words, reveals a disturbingly indifferent cyborg-God, one perfectly at ease with apocalyptic imagery and feats, but one who does not comprehend that apocalyptic rhetoric was never meant to be taken literally. KEY WORDS apocalypse ◆ cyborg ◆ ontology ◆ salvation ◆ second coming ◆ sin What do you get when you combine three biotech companies, a handful of patents, and a Noah’s Ark full of cloned animals? . Farmers are already cloning prized cows and pigs, a practice that will balloon if, as expected, the Food & Drug Administration approves the marketing of milk and meat from clones later this year. (Weintraub and Keenan, 2002: 94) Is this what has become of the dream of a land flowing with milk and honey? Two years ago I finally wrote a first draft of this article – ‘finally’ because I had been deeply intrigued for at least 10 years by Donna Haraway’s curious and consistent use of Christian theological metaphors and models. ‘Incarnation’, ‘salvation history’, ‘apocalypse’, ‘the Garden of Eden’, ‘the God of monotheism’, ‘the god-trick’, ‘crown of thorns’, ‘the suffering servant’; these terms appear, repeatedly, in her work (Haraway, 1991a: 150–1, 154; 1991b: 189, 193, 195; 1992: 88–9; 1997: 10). Although not a typical practice, it is quite possible to read Haraway’s texts as meaningful primarily in relation to the theological concepts she uses. Or, to take her at her word when she writes that hers is ‘an imagination of a feminist The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 10(1): 51–64 [1350-5068(200302)10:1;51–64;030796] 52 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1) speaking in tongues’.1 It is odd. Two years ago there were still some people who were fascinated, shocked and excited and concerned by Haraway’s bold claim that ‘we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology’;2 that we humans are ‘creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted’.3 Today such a claim no longer seems to shock or fascinate. Cyborgs are becoming, or perhaps already have become, passé, a matter of indifference. It is odd. Two years ago it did not occur to me that I might one day, unknowingly, be drinking the milk of a cloned cow, or pouring gravy upon a clone-chop. But it seems that some sort of flood has indeed subsided only recently, that the Ark is aground once more, and that all the creatures coming forth are cyborgish to an extreme. Which is to say, I would like to argue that Donna Haraway is even more of a prophet than she usually is acknowledged to be, and that her offering of a cyborg soteriology (or her vision of salvation by cyborg) is, from a feminist theological perspective, abundantly problematic. As problematic, in fact, as the notion of salvation by Jesus Christ.4 No Christian fundamentalist, still Haraway is a deeply faithful author, and one who acknowledges her Irish Catholic background.5 Is it a coinci- dence, I wonder, that cyborgs as she writes of them not only attempt to ‘subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust’6 but also seem to have a particular affinity for the outcast, the despised: women and other ‘others’? To whom, exactly, are the cyborgs’ blasphemous words and deeds most welcome? Is it by those who are perceived as relatively powerless, marginal, disposable – the very subjects usually interpreted to be most in need of some sort of revelation, liberation and salvation? What familiar story is echoed here? Is Haraway offering cyborgs as the saviours of the 21st century? I believe she is. Although Haraway writes that ‘the cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history,’7 lacking an ‘origin story in the Western sense,’8 and ‘completely without innocence’,9 she nonetheless situates cyborgs in ‘the Garden’,10 albeit a Garden lacking the omniscient gaze of a transcendent God. (She is particularly disdainful of the all-seeing god-trick in ‘Situated Knowledges’.)11 I suspect that such epistemic reliance upon the concepts of a Garden, a transcendent God, and especially the notions of salvation history and apocalypse signals, to slightly misquote Haraway, ‘a disturbingly . tight coupling’12 between cyborgs and the very funda- mental assumptions embedded in the western Christian symbolic universe against which she writes. To put it another way, it may well be the case that the ‘cyborg incarnation’ is not and cannot be situated ‘outside’ salvation history, ‘outside’ a story that includes, in one way or another, an omniscient, transcendent God, that includes the threat (or the promise) of an apocalypse, and that, perhaps most importantly, includes a yearning for salvation. The notion of ‘salvation by cyborg’ is of course rather different from that of ‘salvation by God’, but it seems to me that Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 53 both sorts of salvation assume (a) a human need for it, and (b) that salvation must (or has, or will, or just possibly might) happen in history. But now I am writing ahead of myself. Upon what theological metaphors and models is Haraway epistemically dependent, particularly in her essays ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ and ‘Situated Knowledges’? This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. Blasphemy protects one from the Moral Majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.13 With these words Donna Haraway begins ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. She concludes the second paragraph of the same essay with the following claim: Liberation rests on the construction of consciousness, the imaginative apprehension of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.14 Faith, blasphemy, reverent worship, the Moral Majority, community, liberation, oppression, a struggle over life and death . take away these theological/religious concepts, and I suggest one is left with practically no meaningful content whatsoever. While it could be argued, of course, that community, liberation, oppression, and a struggle over life and death are not, by themselves, inherently or necessarily theological terms or notions, when they are used as key concepts within a self-consciously ‘faithful’ myth, as components of an irreverent but deeply held commit- ment to the liberation of various communities from various, intersecting and overlapping forms of oppression, when they are used to affirm, explicitly, faithful life rather than senseless death-through-apocalypse, then I think that the text supports a reading of them as theological concepts. Moreover, Haraway’s generous use of theological terms and concepts is not a playful or ironic introductory strategy, although it is both playful and ironic. Throughout both essays, she consistently depends on theological metaphors and models to help illumine or make clear what it is that she is writing for, what it is that she values. For example, in ‘Situated Know- ledges’ she repeatedly writes for ‘faithful knowledge’,15 and in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, when asserting ‘the noninnocence of the category “woman” ’, Haraway affirms such ‘noninnocence’ precisely because: ‘In the fraying of 54 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1) identities and in the reflexive strategies for constructing them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history.’16 Later, she suggests that ‘perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos’.17 Instead of being the Word made flesh, Haraway suggests that we are, and need to reflect seriously upon what it means to be, part organism and part technology – both monstrous and illegitimate.18 Furthermore, being illegitimate, there is, according to Haraway, no reason to ‘expect [our] father to save [us] through a restoration of the garden. [A] cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.’19 But here Haraway’s use of theological concepts becomes rather para- doxical. It is clear that she is not advocating faith in a transcendent, omnipotent and very masculine Father God. However, as I mentioned earlier, she does situate cyborgs in the Garden; in fact, she notes that cyborgs have never been expelled from it – that they, meaning we, were never originally innocent, and thus never incurred the punishment (or the guilt) that comes with original sin.20 Nevertheless, I would suggest that unless a cyborg can imagine, and can imagine in horrifying detail, ‘returning to [silicon] dust’, then there is no sense in Haraway’s desire ‘to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust’,21 no sense to her affirmation that cyborgs might weave something other than ‘a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history’.22 And if cyborgs really are part animal, then ‘mud’ is as good a metaphor as any for expressing our intimate connection to the physical, material stuff of the earth, including other earth creatures.

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