Cyborg Selves

A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman

Jeanine Thweatt-Bates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317155164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

What is the 'posthuman'? Is becoming posthuman inevitable-something which will happen to us, or something we will do to ourselves? Why do some long for it, while others fearfully reject it? These questions underscore the fact that the posthuman is a name for the unknown future, and therefore, not a single idea but a jumble of competing visions - some of which may be exciting, some of which may be frightening, and which is which depends on who you are, and what you desire to be. This book aims to clarify current theological and philosophical dialogue on the posthuman by arguing that theologians must pay attention to which form of the posthuman they are engaging, and to demonstrate that a 'posthuman theology' is not only possible, but desirable, when the vision of the posthuman is one which coincides with a theological vision of the human.

Chapter 1
The Cyborg Manifesto

Posthuman discourse has crystallized around two very different possibilities: Donna Haraway’s cyborg, and transhumanist “uploads.” These two visions mark a bifurcation of posthuman possibility and employ radically differing philosophical and ethical commitments. Mapping the contrast between these two competing posthuman visions provides both an entry into the posthuman discourse as well as illuminating the issues at stake.

The image of the cyborg comes to the fore in discussion of the posthuman because it is such a potent symbol of the difference effected by technology between the human and the posthuman. In the figure of the cyborg, the human is physically intertwined with the nonhuman, the organic with the mechanical. The cyborg, therefore, has become the symbol of the posthuman par excellence, for it wears its differences visibly, literally engrafted into the skin.

Feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s work on the symbol of the cyborg has proved (to use a doubly ironic term) seminal, as Haraway’s landmark essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” has become a reference point for discussions of the posthuman.1 Even as she herself has moved on from the figure of the cyborg and distanced herself from the term posthuman, the philosophical and ethical issues she identifies in the “Manifesto” have been taken up by other scholars, making this essay indispensable for entry into the posthuman discussion.

In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway builds on a critique of feminist essentialism, in which the identity of woman qua woman is assumed to be naturally given, self-evident, and unchanging. She points out that challenging patriarchal and colonial essentializing tendencies eventually leads to the conclusion that all claims of identity based on a natural or organic standpoint are suspect. This is her reason for choosing the cyborg as a feminist symbol; identifying herself as “cyborg” is Haraway’s symbolic shorthand for the rejection of any attempt to define human identity on the basis of “nature.” This basic stance is the key critique of Haraway’s posthuman discourse on human nature, a deliberate breakdown of the dichotomy between nature and technology.

Neither Fish nor Fowl

A cyborg is a hybrid figure: neither wholly organic nor solely mechanical, the cyborg is both simultaneously, straddling these taken-for-granted ontological and social categories. It is this hybrid aspect of cyborg existence that holds simultaneously so much threat and promise. Human beings construct social categories as a way of ordering our coexistence, and often experience the transgression of the boundaries of those categories as the threat of primordial chaos unleashing itself into our lives. And yet, those who find themselves outside the clean definitions of those social categories experience the transgression of them as a promise of liberation.

Haraway identifies three “breached boundaries” represented by the cyborg: human/animal, organism/machine, and (as subset of the second) physical/nonphysical. These identified boundaries constitute the defining content of “human nature,” and therefore the breaching of them constitutes the challenge of posthuman to the concept of human nature.

Haraway states matter-of-factly that “by the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached.”2 Yet, as her brief remarks make clear, it is not so much the advent of the cyborg, or even the science and technologies which make it possible, which has initiated this breach. Rather, it is simply the cumulative result of continuing biological research into evolutionary theory over the last 200 years. Haraway remarks that “the last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks—language, tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal.”3 Many people, she claims, are no longer invested in such a stark separation of human and nonhuman animal, and yet, of course, there is also a strong resistance to evolutionary theory. This is particularly evident within U.S. culture, with its recurrent legal battles over the inclusion of creationism alongside evolutionary theory in standard biology textbooks, prompting an acerbic line from Haraway that “teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.”4 The human/nonhuman animal boundary is as actively defended as it is breached, and the policing of it, of course, is the direct result of the tacit realization of its fragility.

The human/animal boundary breach is symbolized by the cyborg’s posthuman cousin, the chimera. A classic Greek mythical ontological category, the chimera is now redefined as a genetic mixture of two animal species, and represents the ultimate blurring of classificatory species boundaries. Beginning with the human/animal boundary may seem tangential, but it is important, because it sets the stage conceptually for the erasure of boundaries more obviously represented by the cyborg. Haraway sees technology as effecting the same breach as evolutionary theory, though in perhaps a more spectacular and emotionally forceful way, in genetic engineering as well as more obviously mechanical cyborg technologies.5

Haraway’s terminology in fact slips a bit at this point: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”6 Chimera and cyborg, as representatives of the posthuman, seem to be used in a roughly equivalent manner, thus explaining why Haraway places the cyborg at the human/animal boundary. In later works, in fact, cyborgs are treated as a subset of transspecies crossing, and characterized as “junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species.”7 What is significant in these figures, the cyborg included, is the “trans”: whether between organisms, or between organism and machine, or between genders, the boundaries that we commonly use to mark human identity and human nature have been crossed.

The second breached boundary identified by Haraway is organism and machine.8 As the chimera symbolizes the transgression of the human/animal boundary, here, the cyborg is the result of the breached human/machine boundary, a (con)fusion of organic life and mechanical object. Despite our instinct to classify the cyborg an inhabitant of the imaginative worlds of science fiction, literal cyborgs abound: simple medical devices such as pacemakers, and more complicated medical devices such as prostheses or the ECMO, join the organic human body to create an integrated system in which organic functions are regulated, restored, or replaced.9 These integrations may not be quite the “seamless” ones we envision for the future, but they nonetheless meet the basic criterion of melding together, in some sense, the organic human body with mechanical devices. “Modern medicine,” Haraway writes, “is full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices.”10

This conception of both the organic and the mechanical as “coded devices” is the gateway through which the merging of the mechanical and the organic is accomplished. The term “cyborg” was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, to refer to their concept of a mechanically enhanced or altered human being who could survive extraterrestrial environments. Their proposal, presented first at the Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight Symposium and later published in the journal Astronautics, defined cyborgs simply as “self-regulating man-machine systems.”11 This cybernetic description of both mechanical and organic entities as self-regulating systems of information is the crucial conceptual move which enables the envisioning of a system which is part organic and part mechanical, functioning smoothly as one unit. The example given of such a system, the original cyborg, is a mouse attached to a Rose osmotic pump.

The inherited Western philosophical, social, and legal emphasis on the centrality of individual autonomy and freedom for distinctive human identity means that the boundary between “Man and Machine” marks out the difference between human beings as determiners and machines as determined; that is, human beings as agents and machines as acted upon. N.K. Hayles argues that the notion of an autonomous self, with a will clearly distinguishable from the wills of others, is subverted in the posthuman.12 She offers the narrative example of the film Robocop: “We have only to recall Robocop’s memory flashes that interfere with his programmed directives to understand how the distributed cognition of the posthuman complicates individual agency.”13 Thus to blur this boundary casts doubt on one important articulation of human uniqueness, free will. In Haraway’s descriptive summation, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”14

Yet, as philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark observes, the original 1960 vision of the cyborg was formulated precisely to liberate the human agent by allowing machine control to create additional layers of homeostatic functioning. Clynes and Kline write, “If man [sic] in space, in addition to flying his vehicle, must continuously be checking on things and making adjustments merely to keep himself alive, he becomes a slave to the machine. The purpose of the Cyborg … is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems were taken care of automatically, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think and to feel.”15 Thus, ironically, though the goal of Clynes and Kline’s cyborg proposal was actually an enhanced freedom for the human person, the means by which they sought to secure the freedom from bodily distractions now seems to potentially threaten the autonomy of will which they presume.

This ironic contradiction at the heart of the original cyborg proposal is traced out in Chris H. Gray’s analysis of the coping mechanisms of “medical cyborgs,” individuals either temporarily or permanently dependent on machines to perform bodily functions for their survival, which explores the ways that this confusion of ontological and bodily boundaries affects the psyche. For individuals whose personal...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Foreword by Wes Sherman
• Preface
• Introduction: Theology and the Posthuman
• 1 The Cyborg Manifesto
• 2 The Transhumanist Manifesto
• 3 Post-Anthropologies
• 4 Theological Anthropologies
• 5 Constructing a Theological Post-Anthropology
• 6 Christology and the Posthuman
• Bibliography
• Index