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 coincidence, 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. Haraway’s aims, while prophetically admirable, get a bit scrambled when she depends too heavily on theological metaphors. On the one hand, she holds that any myth of an originally blissful, perfect past, carrying with it a longing to return to such an innocent state, is a terribly dangerous myth upon which to feed. Cyborgs are not babies, needing to be looked after constantly and basically incapable of doing anything or anyone any harm. No, cyborgs are instead quite dangerous entities, and we ignore this fact at our peril. We have proven to be capable of doing great, great harm to each other, to the more muddy creatures of the earth, and to the earth itself. In short, we are anything but innocent. (Oddly, Haraway seems at times to forget, but I think it is necessary to remember, that all humans do start out as babies, as touchingly and defencelessly innocent creatures.) On the other hand, for Haraway this earth is the only garden there is. Cyborgs seem to be quite stubbornly attached to it, perhaps even more stubbornly attached to this particular rubbish-strewn garden than those who dream of ‘the Second Coming and their being raptured out of the Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 55

final destruction of the world’.23 Cyborgs care, indeed care lovingly24 about the world, a world ‘that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness’.25 But again, Haraway stresses that a ‘cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the “West’s” escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space’.26 There is nothing wrong with both/and logic, but. Here I would like to pause and, rather than continue to ply you with a relentless barrage of Haraway quotes, reflect a bit upon the theological concepts she uses so often, in particular the notions of salvation history, the apocalypse, and a transcendent God – all of which Haraway seems to associate with Christianity-since-its-inception. To begin with, ‘salvation history’ is the English translation of the German term Heilsgeschichte, a uniquely Christian theological term which, unlike cyborgs-according-to- Haraway, does have an origin story. It became ‘a prominent technical term’ in the 19th century through the work of the German theologian J.C. von Hofmann, and has come to mean, basically, that God both has acted and will act again in history to save the elect (O’Neill, 1983: 248). From the perspective of Heilsgeschichte, the whole of history is read as a progressive movement toward the realization of God’s ends. For example, the historical fact of the Israelites is read as providing the necessary ground and context for the birth, life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. (Let me stress that salvation history is Christian history – and this fact matters.) However, Heilsgeschichte is not only concerned with reading God’s actions in the past, but also with assuring the chosen ones of God’s actions in the future, albeit at the end of the future. There is thus a strongly eschato- logical dimension to Heilsgeschichte, or a concern with last or end times. Here, theologically, ‘apocalypse’ (technically meaning revelation or unveiling) fits in as a subcategory of eschatology – the study of end times or last things. And here it is vital to be aware of the fact that the first time the term ‘eschatology’ was used was in 1844, ‘where it was used in a disparaging sense’ (Hanson, 1983: 183; emphasis added). Although we in the West seem to take it for granted that ‘thoughts about The End’ are somehow transhistorical, perhaps even an eternal and unchanging element in humans’ lives, they do not seem to be, or at least they did not require their own theological concept until the middle of the 19th century. Even then, its initial reception was one of ridicule. My point is that salvation history is, theologically, a recent notion. So too is eschatology, so too is western culture’s fixation on the topic of ‘the End’. I do not believe it is a coincidence that Heilsgeschichte first appeared in Germany, in the middle of the 19th century, as a theological term conveying an assurance of the progressive movement of history toward God’s ends. The Industrial Revolution was occurring at about the same 56 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1) time, in and around the same place. Among the well-educated, well-fed, bourgeois elements of society, at least, the ‘truth’ of historical progress toward something ‘nicer’, something ‘better’, was certainly beginning to be felt. Machines were making life easier, or at least more profitable, for the privileged few. But then, there were others who did not feel that things were progressing smoothly at all. I believe it was Karl Marx (1818–83) who mentioned something about there needing to be a different sort of revolution, and a rather cataclysmic one at that, in order to clear away all that constrains the ‘free development and movement of individuals’ (Marx, 1978: 198). It’s an astonishing coincidence, of course, but in the late 1830s, when Marx was studying law and philosophy at the University of Berlin, he attended the lectures of the theologian Bruno Bauer, who, apparently, ‘taught that a new social catastrophe “more tremendous” than that of the advent of Christianity was in the making’.27 But to return to those machines which were to play such an important role in spreading prosperity and enabling the free development of all: those machines were, I suspect, fairly frightening to many people. They were loud, and huge, and heavy, and many of them caused black smoke to belch forth into the sky, and they ‘ate’ people who got to close to them, didn’t treat them with respect. Keep those machines in the back of your minds . . . The curious thing about Heilsgeschichte/salvation history is that it can accommodate, conceptually, both a smooth sort of man-made (but God- willed) sense of historical progress, and a more irruptive, even violent sort of ‘progress’. It can do so because, theologically, its roots reach back more than 2000 years, all the way back to the Jewish notion of apocalypse, or revelation. From a theological perspective, it is important to understand that the Jewish apocalyptic tradition is a little odd (as is the Christian one), and only flourished for, relatively speaking, a short time (both like and unlike the Christian one) – a time encompassing that particular time before, during and after which Jesus lived. There are several curious things about ‘apocalypse’. First, apocalyptic literature is, as a genre, strange. Characterized by richly symbolic language, including a great deal of cataclysmic ‘natural’ upheaval and bloody confrontations between good and evil, such texts are not meant to be taken literally, but are meant to be taken as a/the truth revealed by God Above to a specific, and always somehow special, group. ‘Apocalypses’ are at least as much about revelations of usually hidden divine mysteries as they are about any ‘end’. That is, they are not only teleological, but also epistemological tales. Haraway appreciates the fact that they are about The End, but not the fact that they are also about knowledge, knowledge that does not end when the story does, if it does. Importantly, in their religious contexts, they seem always to begin their lives as stories by and for the underdogs, the militarily and religiously oppressed and persecuted. They promise a happy ending for the Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 57 oppressed, and a miserable, never-ending comeuppance for those who had been behaving nastily to others. However, part of what makes apocalyptic literature such hopeful literature (for some) is that these texts were often written as a prophecy about an event (or series of events) that had just recently already occurred. Accordingly, in their contexts, at least their Jewish contexts, the ‘end’ promised by all manner of revelations was never in fact a final or ultimate end. Rather, it was simultaneously the end to and knowledge about a specific period of injustice. The writers of such texts were able to say, in effect, ‘Yes, things are (were) awful, but look, the bad guys will get (got) what is (was) coming to them.’ The authors also stressed, simultaneously, the need for believers to keep behaving in the ways they ought to be behaving, for, it is strongly implied, a future end could always be otherwise. To oversimplify things, before Jesus’ time, when the Israelites as a people and nation were doing fairly well, they attributed their success to the fact that they were keeping their covenant with God, and that, in return, God was keeping up God’s covenant with them – which meant that God was on their side when they went to war (and thus they won), and that the earth itself (because it had been created by God) was yielding up to them abundant harvests. When, however, things were not going so well, the reason was that they were not keeping to their covenant with God, who was thus allowing them to suffer the consequences. Eventually (approximately 250 years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and during a time of political and military defeat) it occurred to some that no matter how well they kept their covenant with God, they were still being badly oppressed by their enemies/conquerors. What was needed, they felt, was an awfully powerful God to swoop in and set things right again, prefer- ably in a flashy, crashy manner that would leave their enemies very, very dead, and the Righteous very well-off indeed. Unfortunately, this did not happen. What did happen was the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (in 70 of the Common Era), and, with time, more Jewish diasporas. To reinject some Haraway here, it is awfully curious to me that she writes that, for cyborgs, ‘the task is to survive in the diaspora’.28 I return to this later. The issue at hand, however, is that Christianity inherited (or borrowed, or perhaps stole) the notion of the apocalypse as a solution to times of turmoil and crisis on earth – as the last word concerning earthly matters. And, not surprisingly, whenever there have been times more turbulent or crisis-ridden than usual, the spectre of the apocalypse appears, hovers over and within the fringes of the western Christian symbolic universe, pervading the unconscious if not the consciousness of all who inhabit such a universe. The interesting thing, I think, is that after Jesus did not come again in a timely fashion, apocalyptic imagery and rhetoric were shelved by the guardians of mainstream Christian doctrine. They 58 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1) promoted instead a focus on the state of one’s individual soul, and stressed the need to obey the Church. Thus, historically, apocalyptic thoughts have been a regular occurrence primarily within ‘fringe’ elements of Christianity. It has only been since the mid-19th century that thoughts about a ‘final’ apocalypse (i.e. how it might be brought about or avoided) have been becoming a much more central preoccupation. Today, to quote feminist theologian Catherine Keller, ‘if apocalypse cannot be situated within most people’s belief systems, neither does it lie outside of our subjectivities: it metabolizes both within us and outside of ourselves. I don’t even believe we can step outside of it if we want to’ (Keller, 1996: xi–xii). I appreciate Keller’s point, and I believe that cyborgs in particular are apocalyptic creatures – not by choice, but by birthright. Even though Haraway dismisses the notion that cyborgs have an origin story, I think they do. I think that cyborgs are not nearly as illegitimate as Haraway wishes they were. And I believe that the more we reflect upon cyborgs (our) admittedly recent origins, the better the possibility (though never the certainty) that we might be able ‘to subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust’ – or environmental ruin, or death by NATO missiles or cluster bombs, or even simple animal starvation. I suggest that cyborgs were born in the middle of the 19th century, the curious but legitimate (if a little perverse) product of the trinitarian union of salvation history, the Industrial Revolution and Marxist thought. Nour- ished in equal parts by a growing belief in progress (whether smooth or violent, God-less or God-willed) combined with hope in and a fear and loathing of the machinery supposed to be making such ‘progress’ possible – fear on the part of those who did and who did not work with the machines, loathing on the part of those who had to, hope shared unequally by all – the cyborgs’ genesis story isn’t pretty, but it is a genesis story nonetheless. A genesis story already written in, of all places, The New Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In the course of [the Industrial Revolution’s] dynamic development between 1750 and 1900, important things happened to technology itself. In the ﬁrst place, it became self-conscious. . . . Second, by becoming self- conscious, technology attracted attention in a way it had never done before, and vociferous factions grew up to praise it as the mainspring of social progress and the development of democracy or to criticise it as the bane of modern man, responsible for the harsh discipline of the ‘dark Satanic mills’ and the tyranny of the machine and the squalor of urban life.29

Although I believe Haraway is wrong to say that cyborgs have no origin story, I think she is absolutely right when she states that the issue confronting cyborgs is how ‘to survive in the diaspora’. For although cyborgs have a time of birth, we have no one speciﬁc place of birth. Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 59

Cyborgs do not have a homeland. At this time our only permanent address is our email address, and we usually have several of those. Cyborgs are diasporic creatures. What’s more, cyborgs do not have, and have never had, the promise of a homeland. No God ever spoke to any cyborg, ever made a covenant with any cyborg, or ever lived and died for any cyborg. Cyborgs know full well that the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition has proven, especially throughout the 20th century, to be particularly ineffectual, whereas cyborgs have accomplished all sorts of things, many of them flashy, crashy and awe-inspiringly destructive of their enemies. However, the image of a transcendent God floating in space (proclaiming to see and thus to know everything – like a spy satellite?), everywhere yet nowhere in particular, a God feared and loathed and simultaneously hoped for, this is, for a cyborg, an image as familiar as its/her/his own face in the mirror. It is simply no big deal. Cyborgs are made (at least partially) in the image of God, and know this even better, perhaps, than the most fervent Christ- ian fundamentalist. It is here, I believe, that Haraway’s playful and ironic rhetorical strategy, that is, her usually oppositional or negative epistemic reliance upon Christian theological metaphors and models, reveals a positive ontological relationship between cyborgs and the transcendent, omniscient, omnipotent God whose ‘nature’ she writes against. What is more, Haraway knows this, even though as soon as she confesses this ‘truth’ – that ‘modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality’ (emphasis added)30 – she writes, for just a moment, as though there is a difference, a distance, even a dichotomy between people and machines. Stressing this difference, she writes, ‘our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves. . . . People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.’31 But to begin from the premise that ‘we are cyborgs [and] the cyborg is our ontology’ requires Haraway, I think, to take much more seriously that which, on the page following her ‘modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god’ comment, she once again affirms: ‘our joint kinship with animals and machines’.32 I suggest that it is precisely as our machines/ourselves that we cyborgs do make incarnate irreverent, upstart Gods. Or, cyborgs are related to the transcendent omni-God of the Christian tradition, related just as closely as we are related to any machine, any technological gadget, just as closely as we are related to chimpanzees. After all, cyborgs do have the capacity to see from space; there is no escaping our presence, for they, we, can Netscape ourselves practically anywhere while being nowhere in particular (or in seat 24B of Lufthansa flight 516, for instance); and although most of us are scared by what we 60 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1) can do, we harbour the hope that cyborgs will somehow save us from ourselves, will come up with a miraculous technological solution that will restore the Garden of Eden we (some of us) have been polluting and destroying at such an alarming speed. Put metaphorically (and in saying this I mean that it is literally true and literally false, at one and the same time), as cyborgs we make incarnate the Second Coming. Once again God is present on earth, in our midst, and we, collectively, are that unrecognized God. On the one hand, we have proven to be sadly impotent when it comes to alleviating needless suffering: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, providing shelter for the homeless. On the other hand, possessing the know-how and the devices to destroy all life on earth several times over, we are already overly omnipotent. Multi- national genetic engineering companies are racing each other to make belief in immortality – through the sequencing of an individual’s genetic code – a marketable commodity, in the not too distant future, for the unbelievably wealthy. The unbelievably eccentric are already freezing their bodies in order that they might be resurrected in the future. And it will happen. It will happen. Cyborgs are the new way, truth, and above all else, life; whosoever does not believe in them will be pressured, their conversion forced. And like some of the more unpleasant Christian missionaries, there are cyborgs who are quite, quite ruthless. (Bill Gates springs to mind.) But regardless of how ruthless or how kind are the cyborgs in question, it behoves us to remember, I think, that missionary work is the right hand of colonization. I might be a little more sceptical than Haraway is about the liberatory potential of cyborgs for precisely this reason. There was, I believe, absolutely nothing wrong with the message that we should love our neighbours as ourselves, but look at what all has happened in the name of the messenger. But then, I think that Haraway too is worried about cyborgs’ relations to God and Christianity. Her worry is revealed through her constant repetition and rejection of those theological concepts she (and I) keep inflicting upon you. As this point is crucial, I restate it. According to Haraway, ‘the cyborg is our ontology’.33 She also writes that ‘the cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history’.34 ‘Immortality and omnipotence are not our goals’;35 ‘the god-trick is forbidden’.36 ‘Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall’.37 The cyborg ‘was not born in a garden’.38 But, again, and to quote a pre-cyborg English fellow, ‘The lady protests too much, methinks.’ The very terms of her protest reveal, I suggest, the very non-innocence of cyborgs – a non-innocence she so rightly insists upon. The cyborg incarnation – the merging together of flesh and machine, the dependence of flesh upon technology for life, and the dependence of technology upon flesh in order to be animated – the cyborg incarnation begun in the 19th century is as inseparable from God and salvation history as it is inseparable from the Industrial Revolution and the thought of Karl Marx; Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 61

Heilsgeschichte spoke to some large, loud machines, to the animals who profited from them and suffered beside them, and in response the cyborg said, ‘Hey, look what I can do.’ ‘It’s God’s will,’ replied Heilsgeschichte. ‘No,’ interjected Marx, ‘it’s the inevitable outcome of the collective efforts of the people working for the people.’ ‘The end is coming’, proclaimed Marx and Heilsgeschichte, accidentally in unison. ‘What are you talking about?’ said the cyborg, ‘I’ve only just begun.’ ‘Save us’, cried Heils- geschichte and Marx, again, coincidentally, in unison. And Haraway knows, I think, that the cyborg is a soteriological device, a ‘saviour-myth’ addressed to us in all our woundedness, dare I say it, in our fallenness. ‘We have all been injured, profoundly’, notes Haraway.39 And in response to the fact of our injuries she suggests that cyborg imagery might help to bring about ‘regeneration’ if not ‘rebirth’, and that ‘the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender’,40 and, just possibly, without end. A world that, in some ways, is now as it was in the beginning and will be forever. Yet she knows as well that cyborgs commit god-tricks on a daily basis, and are tempted, continually, by the goals of immortality and omnipotence. She knows that we fall prey to these temptations, and daily enact our prayer to ourselves: let it be done according to my will, for I am a God. In short, I suggest that rather than being situated (miraculously) outside salvation history, salvation history, including all manner of god- tricks and never-ending stories of endings apocalyptic, is the only history cyborgs have ever known. However, the end to salvation history does indeed rest in our hands, which is a terrifying, if potentially liberating, thought. As cyborgs we have proven to be awfully curious creatures; we seem to like to do, to realize, everything we can imagine. We seem to be obsessed with turning potentiality into actuality – and then watching what happens when we do. Unfortunately what happens is usually far more destructive and messy than we had anticipated, and we don’t seem to like cleaning up our messes. We are young, for Gods, and can’t be bothered with such mundane chores. And anyway, that is what mothers and maids are for – cleaning up other people’s messes. (And here let me note that many cyborgs may not be as genderless as Haraway wishes.) On the other hand, precisely because cyborgs can and do imagine in exquisite detail all sorts of apocalyptic endings to this world, we are growing comfortable with such thoughts. Why is this, possibly, good news? Because it may be the case that the more familiar and comfortable we become with a virtual apocalypse, the less likely it is that we’ll feel a need to enact a real-life apocalypse. Cyborgs just possibly might not be bothered with distinguishing between virtual reality and non-virtual reality – that sort of reality which is not only felt and experienced but which also leaves its marks on animal flesh. The feel and experience of 62 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1) apocalypses without end (and without mark), apocalypses which can be programmed to play themselves out over and over again, this may just satisfy a cyborg’s curiosity. More possibly good news: as diasporic creatures who hold out no hope for deliverance into a promised land, cyborgs are used to making and remaking temporary homes – and delighting in them, here and now, wherever and whenever here and now happen to be. Cyborgs may just have the capacity to perceive, and to cultivate, any ‘where’ as a garden. Afew final words. Haraway repeatedly acknowledges, and rightly so, cyborgs’ non-innocence. Of God, she notes, ‘No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference.’41 What scares me the most about cyborgs is not our non-innocence, or our animal/technological/Godly capacity to harm one another, but precisely our Godly and technological capacity for indifference. Back when people were people, the notion that humans were never innocent was conveyed by describing them as ‘sinners’. The nice thing about the metaphors ‘sin’ and ‘sinner’ is that they include, implicitly, an understanding of humans as fleshy, passionate, and as capable of acting on their passion, their desire. The deeply troubling thing about cyborgs (to me) is our seeming disembodi- ment, our lack of passion, our ability to remain indifferent in the face of situations that cry out for passionate response. If it is true that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, then we need to take seriously Our Father’s sin of indifference. To be blunt, we need to take seriously cyborgs’ inherited/inherent capacity to not give a damn about anything. It may be neither the God nor the machine but the passionate, pleasure- and-knowledge-seeking human animal in us we need to nurture for our survival. Or, it may be the sinner, not the cyborg, that saves us in the end.

NOTES

1. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 181. 2. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150. 3. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 149. 4. For a particularly good introduction to the problems with certain Christian understandings of salvation, see Carlson Brown and Bohn (1989). 5. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 173. 6. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 151. 7. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150. 8. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150. 9. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 151. 10. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 157. 11. ‘Situated Knowledges’; 189, 193, 195. 12. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 152. 13. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 149. 14. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 149. Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 63

15. ‘Situated Knowledges’: 187, 190, 197, 199. 16. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 157–8. 17. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 173. 18. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 151. 19. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 151. 20 ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 157. 21. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 151. 22. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 158. 23. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 185. 24. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 190. 25. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 187. 26. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150–1. 27. ‘Marx and Marxism’, in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (1997: 531). 28. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 170. 29. ‘Technology’, in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (1997: 460). 30. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 153. 31. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 153. 32. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 154. 33. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150. 34. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150. 35. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 188. 36. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 195. 37. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 175. 38. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 180. 39. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 181. 40. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 181. 41. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 193.

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Lucy Tatman is a feminist theologian/philosopher, currently researching the connections between western cultural images of the sacred and different women’s epistemic, moral and political agency. She has taught in the Programme on Gender and Culture at the Central European University, Budapest, and is now continuing her search for that elusive tenure-track position. Her book, Knowledge That Matters: A Feminist Theological Paradigm and Epistemology, was published in 2001 by Shefﬁeld Academic Press, UK. Address: 9246 Regents Rd., Apt. G, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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